How do you keep yourself motivated and well oriented over the long term?
We discussed this with the author of “Word of the Year: True Stories About Intentional Living Using the Power of a Single Word”.
The book suggests to pick a single word for the upcoming year or six months and try to embody that in various aspects of your life. It gives examples of how a single word chosen based on the values you want to cultivate and the desire for change you want to pursue can act like a north star, guiding you through ups and downs. It does recommend specific strategies for how your word can be integrated into your life to maximize the benefits of the focus it creates.
After we discussed the details of the framework, I realized that this was partly what has happened to me over the past year or so. I have been living my word: “antifragility”.
My journey to that word started from recognizing what I was running from. It came from a deeply rooted desire to avoid some bad consequences I was experiencing. I felt fragile, even though I didn’t have access to the vocabulary to articulate it. I was experiencing cognitive distortions, eg. poor memory or judgment, because of low quality sleep. I was dealing with physical pain because of weight gain and inactivity. I was allowing my relationships and friendships to suffer because I was so focused on my startup. I was descending in more and more financial debt. And I was at the mercy of my anxiety. And to top it off, I thought that was how founders lived.
Through a series of fortunate events I came to the realization that well-being was the first and foremost thing for me and there is no way to achieve that without addressing it simultaneously in all areas of health: physical, mental, social, cognitive, and financial.
In other words, where my journey started and the reason that I took it very seriously was that for the first time in my entrepreneurship journey I had realized and acknowledged what “I was running from”. I realized and acknowledged that I was falling for the silicon valley narrative of “moving fast and breaking things” without recognizing how much infrastructure is necessary for that to happen safely. I started to understand my insecurities better, even the ones that were driving my desire to be a founder in the first place. I started to take note of the root cause of my negative behavior like emotional eating, pushing people back, and sacrificing sleep in the name of hitting the next vanity metric. I started to understand how fragile I had become!
I’m not convinced, perhaps due to recency bias, that choosing a word can save you if you haven’t had the honest conversation with yourself about what you are running from, about what your deepest, darkest fears are. Choosing a word without having done the groundwork would be as empty as “positive affirmations” without doing the work. But if you do that foundational work, I’m guessing that you don’t even need to _choose_ a word, but rather, like it happened to me, it would just appear in front of you.
“Be open and curious to what your word will reveal to you in the coming months and year; much of it has has yet to be unfolded" - Dimple Mukherjee
When I was going through deconstructing what was happening to me, I was seeking information that helped me understand my emotions and actions. The common pattern in all things that I found most meaningful ended up being one word: resilience. Later I came across other variations and nuances of that like “mental agility”, “antifragility”, and “well being”. Once I was able to name what I was seeking, it became easier to see it and recognize it wherever and however it appeared, which is what the book advocates.
Having done, and continuing to do, the exercise of sitting intimately with my fears and listening to them has been a remarkable part of finding a direction to move forward. Without that, I think, I would have pursued a bunch of solutions without necessarily knowing what I was trying to fix.
“Allow yourself moments to just be with your word-to marinate and simmer in it, instead of taking action. Pay attention to what surfaces in this slowness” - Dimple Mukherjee
Thinking deeply about “what I was running from”, and investigating that with like-minded peers, was the “necessary” condition, and combining that with “where I wanted to go” gave me the “necessary and sufficient” one. The thing about “necessary conditions” is that they are necessary. They have to be there. Or otherwise you’re building a house of cards. Once you have that though, you can move fast and break things, safely.
“Share your word as often as you can to maximize its potency because energy flows where attention goes” - Dimple Mukherjee
