You Either Go Up Or Down
“Yeah, just let me order that pizza and watch a couple of new episodes of Big Mouth on Netflix. Man, I love that show! It’s so witty and amusing. I wish I could do that every single day for the rest of my life.”
We might say this after a hard day at work, a week of studying, or even a month of hustling on our purpose. Something that could be either heavy or our calling, doesn’t matter. We still want from time to time to kick back, relax, and passively absorb some non-serious stuff.
That is great, it really is. Until we do it for 8 days in a row, and we have eaten so many pizzas that our DNA starts to turn into two juicy mozzarella sticks that wrap around each other, and our hands turn into two giants red pomodori pelati.
That… that is not that great. But why does this keep happening to us? Why do we always go from GaryVee-level hustling to Homer Simpson-level chugging 2lt of Coca-Cola all at once?
JUST GIMME THAT PIZZA ALREADY
The answer is that every choice we make, we either go up or down. There’s no horizontal action. Every time we make a decision, we move either towards what brings us to a new level of ourselves, or we get back to our old habits. It’s not black and white, of course. We don’t have to (it’s not even healthy) always do what Gandhi would have done.
Gimme one of those Milano chocolate chip cookies! (Gandhi)
Sometimes choosing to get that Caramel Biscuit & Cream Häagen-Dazs is the right choice. We really have to slow down and enjoy that little cheat in our healthy life. But it’s good because there’s the contrast with the habit, which is to eat food that nourishes your body, rather than distract your mind and pierce through your numbness with the super strong flavours.
Eating ice-cream brings us up when done once, but in excess brings us down. We make the mistake of associating the action with the result, taking it out of context and considering it as a universal truth. So we repeat that activity twice, three times, and more. Every time we repeat it, we feel worse, and we think that the next time we do it, will be the time it will feel better again. But it’s not.
But this doesn’t just include what we do. It also includes what we don’t do.
We are walking down the street, and we see a beautiful girl. She is stunning. Just the type of girl you have always considered perfect for you. She is there, laughing with her friends, 6 meters away from you. All you have to do is walk up and say hi.
So scary, right? They’ll probably kill you
“What should I say?”, “Her friends will make fun of me”, “Everyone will start watching”, “What if I fall or embarrass myself?”. By the time you are done, she might as well be in Thailand (Unless you live there; in that case she reached France). You start rationalizing. “Next time I’ll meet her I’ll talk to her, I just need the right moment”. And then it never comes. You think that it doesn’t matter. Overall, you just acted as you would have everyday. Talking to her would have been an addition, right?
No.
You didn’t trust yourself. You didn’t follow what your heart told you. You disappointed a little part of you.
Do you still think that it didn’t have consequences? Imagine if you were holding an ice-cream, and while you were saying hi you tripped over and threw the ice-cream to her face. She gets angry and screams at you.
Do you know what you have got? A cool story to tell your friends. I laugh my ass off whenever I tell the stories of how I embarrassed myself in certain situations.
If you drop these they’ll explode into a rainbow of confetti
Drop a bit of ego, and step a bit more into yourself. Life is better when you do things that at first seem heavy, but give you energy right after having done them.
And remember that it’s okay to distract yourself from time to time, just don’t stay on the couch so much that you have to marry it.