This week:

• Musings: Following our intuition
• Questions: Impactful content
• Resources: Jay Acunzo
• Personal Updates: Procrastinating hard things

Musings

This week, a clip of a T-Pain livestream found its way into my YouTube recommendations.

Someone in chat asks Mr. Pain what advice he has for aspiring artists, and without even taking a breath, he responds with:

Stop asking artists for advice.

T-Pain talks about the other artists he looked up to, and the responses they had to his music. If he would have listened to their critiques, their recommendations, their "advice," he wouldn't be where he is today.

The key point here is to own our path and personal intuition.

There's two aspects, almost a double meaning, to this use of the word "own":

1. It's personal
2. It's a possession

No one else has what you have, yet we're so quick to ask for advice from others that have gotten to a place we think we want to be.

There is no perfect model out there for the life you want to lead because you’re a unique and unrepeatable person, and the stamp you leave on this world will be your own.

-Luke Burgis

Luke Burgis is one of the leaders in the modernization of "mimetic desire," a theory that all desires come from the things we see other people doing, buying, using, etc. This was spearheaded originally by René Girard, but I've heard roots of this go back to ancient yogis, who said that all desires originate from our indriyas, or sense organs.

So what's the thread here?

Externalization.

When it comes to choosing what to work on, what to value, what to buy, what decision to make, we rely on others to make it for us. If we don't directly ask the people we look up to for help or advice, we have countless blog posts and videos to reference. Even without searching online, we get values from those we see on social media downloaded right into our subconscious.

And what can we do about it?

Perhaps the most anti-mimetic attitude of all is an openness to wonder and a desire to let reality surprise you.

Luke Burgis

Be more true to the little voice on the inside.

We want to let things bubble up from inside of us, rather than be controlled by what we see on the outside.

It's in forging our own path that we're able to get to the success that we so desperately want when we see others achieving it. Like we talked about with discipline in Passion is fire, if we try to just emulate the emergent properties that we see on the outside, we're going to miserably fail.

Following our own intuition takes strength. It takes courage.

Will you show up for yourself today?

Questions

This newsletter almost devolved to tripling in length because of how today’s musings feed into content creation, so a bit related to that:

What type of advice or content has had the most impact on your life?

Would love to hear from you in the comments!

Resources

Jay Acunzo

Jay is killing it when it comes to content for creators that isn’t just tips and hacks, but legitimate strategies to make what matters. Here’s some content that I’ve loved from him this week:

• Content Creator Secrets with Jay Acunzo and Nathan Barry
• Beware this Storytelling Advice
• How to Differentiate Your ideas: The XY Premise Pitch
• Pick Your Audience, Pick Your Future: How to Define Quality Content

Personal Updates

I'd like to share a bit on what I'm working on each week, more from a productivity & business development perspective. Slight bit of accountability, as well as just be able to update people who would like to follow along!

Didn’t make much of any progress on the following this week, was pretty wrapped up in the consuming content world, procrastinating the hard things. Figuring out pricing, getting started on website builds, they’re tough. Sure does sound like I need to implement some of these procrastination fixes.

I was able to make a bit of “intellectual progress” on my Notion setup, nothing physical to show for, but starting to get an understanding of what I want to do with it.

I have a long weekend coming up, so hopefully I’ll be able to make a bit more progress come this time next week!

Still on the to-do list:

• Finish most of the site build
• Build SEO/PPC proposal
• Work on Notion setup

Thanks for reading!

The coolest thing you could do (if you're already subscribed, if not, subscribing would be the absolute coolest) is to leave a comment or reply to this email. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this week, if you have any thoughts on this week's musings, or responses to this week's questions.

Much love! - Joe