Self-Mastery. Nº6

The truth about stress.

Jul 5, 2020

Hi,

Welcome to your weekly issue of the JXN Newsletter — a timeless signal to create yourself, starting from the inside out.

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Your centre is the balance between doing what matters most to you, and doing what matters for the world.

Life is about meaning. But, finding what it is that gives you meaning can be both very easy and seriously hard.

Connecting your world to the world, I found, is to be at your centre. And as you know, that is about fulfilling a purpose of great importance both to you, and to the world around you.

People often go decades without finding this. Some find it instantaneously. You could be either. But the sooner you discover what it is that gets you to your centre, the better. So here’s what you should do.

Build on three qualities. They are confidence, self-belief, and discipline.
Write down at least one idea, every day, for a week on a line of work you may like that the world could also need. It could be coding, design, writing, or photography.
Spend at least one-week learning and practising each idea. Do it in the easiest (most enjoyable) way possible. Then rank it out of 10.
Choose your highest-ranked idea. Start there.

This is not saying your highest-ranked idea will be “the one”. It’s about finding your starting point. You may want to change what you do, be it now or later, but if you want to find your purpose, you need to find what you love, and you need to develop a habit to work damn hard on it.

“No one can compete with you on being you.
Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most.”
Naval.

Learn

What I’ve learned this week

Stress is not created by the problems you face, it’s created by your reaction to those problems.

Recent training rides with my close friend have turned into a clash between heart-throbbing interval blocks, and heart-to-heart conversations. But one of the most profound things, which I said, that struck me recently was about remembering that stress and “problems” are humanmade only.

I quote the word “problems” because it’s not called a problem by default. It’s just a label. It’s called that depending on our perception of what we believe it is.

And even though I had said it, it shut me up before I could say anything else.

To live a good life, reimagine what you think about your problems and stress. Remember that stress is created by you, labelled by you, and controlled by you.

Stress can help you to grow, or to stagnate and curl. Your problems can help you to evolve, or to give up entirely.

But the only person who chooses what happens next is you.