A life that looks good or feels good?
Inertia — Nº189
Some of the best people to be around and learn from are those who excel at showing initiative. Crisp communicators, desensitised from the worries of their honesty. People who can do or say what’s needed without much force or thought.
American culture has long celebrated this spirit—the drive to achieve and acquire and advance. Like practised sculptors, they chisel themselves into the shapes that society admires: the overachiever, the entrepreneur, the perpetual optimiser. Through them, we learn the difference between a life that looks good and one that shoots ardent vibrations through your bones and entire nervous system.
Picture the next ten years. You don’t get to work on a lot in that time, so you have to assign your focus wisely. “Save your persistence for what’s truly close to your heart”, as Ava says. And accomplish without gritting your teeth or brute forcing your way through everything because you think it’s what you should do. It works, until it doesn’t.
You can strong-arm your way into some things for a while—a prestigious job or the relationship you assume you want—and from the outside, it might look like you’re crushing it and earning plenty of meaning. But there’s a special type of exhaustion that comes from pushing yourself towards things that hold no meaning for you—like the hobby or belief you picked up just because it looks good when you tell others about it.
Life isn’t just about what you can achieve—it’s about what you can feel. We don’t earn money or train hard solely for the physical essence of it; we do it to release certain feelings and open doors that foster even more of those feelings. Whereby finding out everything in life that makes you feel good requires a different kind of work than just pushing harder. However, over the years, I’ve met more people who often blur the lines between them because they can’t notice the difference.
From someone who found the work he loves after weeks of sitting in silence to figure it out, it’s about being honest enough to stop and say you can’t keep forcing yourself one way or another or betting on naturally figuring things out over time. It’s up to you to know when to admit it and be brave enough to change direction.
There’s something amazing in ministering yourself as an artist who can do and say exactly what you want, making space for anything that moves you. You don’t give up when things get hard because every path has its challenges—even the right one. You use time to align yourself with the idea that difficulty is a stepping stone rather than a wall you must break through.
The hardest part is not always the doing—it’s the stopping. It’s stopping to ask yourself whether your actions are lighting you up or forcing a problem deeper in you. It’s stopping to notice when you’re pushing yourself through the motions instead of cruising with purpose. And sometimes, it’s stopping just long enough to realise that the most ambitious thing you can do isn’t push harder—it’s choosing better.