2-3-4 Friday 4 Oct 2024

‘Seeking to spark the most potential within you per word of any online newsletter’

1 thought

3 more months before the end of the year.

Here’s a question,

Are you on track for what you set out in the year to do? 

(If you're facing a challenge, share it here. I will share something that might help.)

Over the past week, I’ve been in Thailand.

4 out of the 7 days were spent out of Bangkok, in a little town called Nakhon Pathom. It’s 40 minutes away, from Bangkok, by bus. It’s one of the oldest towns in Thailand, built nearly a thousand years ago.

But go there today, and you would notice little of the bustle one observes in a big city.

Things go by at leisurely pace. In the mornings when you wake, there’s little sound of traffic. At 11, there are people pushing pushcarts with random bits and bobs on them - cooked meals, papaya salad, and of course, the classic Thai milk tea.

When you roam the streets, you notice a surprising lack of young people in their 20s and 30s. You quickly realise that most of them have gone into the city to work.

It’s surprisingly rustic.

I’m not here to talk today about the idea of being rustic. Nor am I asking us to be sentimental and return to the suburbs.

Living in cities have done much for us.

If you’re reading this today, you’re probably living in a fairly large city.

But I’m talking about the idea of being invisible, unknown, unseen.

The most relaxing part of being there was having no responsibilities. For the first time in a long time, I didn’t have places to be, people to meet, processes to do.

You know the time when after working day after day, you simply want to disappear, and not have anyone need or want you?

Often we talk about holidays as being about

‘relaxing’,

not doing anything,

But I think what we are really asking for is the ability not to become anyone.

Part of this desire to escape on our holidays is because of what I’ve come to recently see as the

violence of cities.

Cities force us to become somebody.

Walk into a city, any ‘global city’ and you would be greeted with much of the same:

1. Underground subways
2. Cars blazing past
3. Tall, clinical towers

These infrastructures are there for us to produce more complex value-added products. If you paused to look at how fast we were moving today, you would marvel at how much we’ve gotten done in such a little amount of time.

In a city like Nakhon Pathom, the town’s main economic product are pigs and pomelos. The people on the streets sell a simple derivative of that.

They cut the pomelo and put it in a box.

They cut the pig, cook it, and give it to you.

Compare that to the services you provide today.

1. You may be counselling someone within a city
2. You might be selling a marketing service to someone else

What are the initial building blocks of these services? Your knowledge, a computer, and plenty of training.

Here’s a frame to think through:

1 talk

Rural areas reap the produce of the land,

Cities structure the produce of the mind.

1 tip

This is a vital concept because it explains a lot about why we are so wearied today.

In the past, when you could put down your spade and go to sleep, you now cannot put down the thinking tools in your mind and scoot off.

You’re always carrying those tools around. Cities continually structure the produce of your mind, and hardly let you pause.

One way is to skip into the suburbs of the city, where you won’t be disturbed. But I suspect you’d be like me too, checking your emails with the WIFI around you.

In cities, there’s always mobile data that’s on hand to check your emails, a subway journey that allows you to clear another Whatsapp work message, a quiet office to draft the document on that laptop in your backpack.

So the ways we find to ‘relax’ don’t end up working for long. What might work better?

One way is to have a tech fast. For 24 hours, use no phone, laptop, nothing. I often suggest a day like Sunday when you can intentionally connect with your family and loved ones.

You’re going to have a million excuses.

My card’s on it!

How do my family members contact me?

 

There’s your landline.

Every Sunday, I did this for 2 years. I left my phone at home, and scooted off. 

It saved my life from the onslaught of listening to people's problems from Monday to Friday, and centred me again. 

Come on. You lived a life before the advent of fast phones, and the Internet.

It’s time to live it again.

John

Live Young, Live Well - Work Your Love

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