Hello everyone!! 👋🏻👋🏻👋🏻
I hope you’ve had an amazing week and an incredible beginning to your autumn. I suspect you can relate, but mine has been incredibly busy. Note that I am not saying this to complain; being busy is a good thing. If I compare it to being bored, I know I’d prefer to be busy. You can re-frame the term ‘busy’ to mean ‘a lot of interesting stuff happening in your life’, which is how I try to look at it. (And no, I am certainly not always successful at doing that!) 😁
But of course, we still need to ensure that we take time to care for ourselves, especially during periods of life when we are busy.
Please share this email if you found it useful; the more people expose themselves to these ideas, the greater the positive impact they have. As always, please reach out to me directly at tim@timparkins.com if you’ve got feedback, comments, or content that you’d love to see me cover.
Anyway, on to this week’s content!
Tim
Turning a New Leaf: The Maple Tree’s Guide to Life and Work
I use the Headspace app to help me with my meditation practice, which is an integral part of my morning routine. As part of this routine, I go through the ‘Today’ tab and watch the daily video related to meditation and mindfulness.
When I did this about a week ago, they had a video that described the natural cycle of the maple tree. Given the season, I imagine the vivid red, orange, and yellow coloured leaves inspired them to share the video now. That video inspired this short post.
One of the main ideas in the video was the concept of ‘impermanence’, which is the idea that everything is always changing.
Change is a part of nature, yet we often resist it. We establish habits, patterns, and routines as they “lower the cost” of doing repetitive tasks, allowing us to focus on higher-value tasks. So there is value in these habits and patterns.
But there is a tension at play here, as these same habits can keep us trapped, stuck in ruts which we find difficult to escape from. A routine can be the same as a rut; one feels positive, and looking at it from the other perspective feels negative. Both perspectives are 100% correct! That is one of the many challenges of life; there is rarely a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer, as so much depends on the perspective you are looking at it from.
We constantly need to seek a balance between stability and change. Stability allows us (or the mighty maple) to establish deep roots that will allow us to sustain ourselves. But like nature, our environments are not static. Our situations are ever-changing, requiring us to change and adapt in order to thrive. Like nature, our lives (and careers) have seasons. Sometimes we need to shed who we are, to transform, to let our old selves fall off like leaves in the crisp autumn wind. And other times we need to hold fast, to establish roots, to dig deep into who we are.
These transitions can be scary, but they are an inevitable part of life, “a feature rather than a bug”. Instead of refusing to adapt, we should be more like the mighty maple tree, standing strong yet flexible and willing to shed our leaves.
The need to find this balance is one reason I have a multi-coloured tree as my logo; it is an ideal representation of the balance I seek to bring to the world.
Quotation that I have been pondering
Several years ago, I read the book ‘The Millionaire Fast Lane’ by MJ DeMarco. I quite enjoyed the read, and I suspect it was one of several books that inspired me to lean into entrepreneurship. Part of my morning ritual is to revisit notes and highlights from books I’ve read in the past using the amazing Readwise app, which is how I came across this passage from the book I’d highlighted.
BTW, Sign up for Readwise using my referral link to get 2 months FREE! (And, it is a really reasonable price for the value it adds).
While reading my Readwise highlights, I came across this passage from the quote from the book that I’d previously highlighted, and couldn’t help feeling this was a good one to share with you all.
Fear is the number one reason people remain in jobs they hate. No one wants to be left without the ability to earn, and the stability and security that affords.
But as this quote from MJ reminds us, there is no such thing as a “guaranteed job”. Companies downsize and layoff people. Sometimes organizations fire people. A job is nothing more than one income stream, and as the old saying goes, “you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket”. Many people forget this principle regarding work, choosing to rely on a single source of income for survival.
Diversify in any way that you can, as that provides true resilience and security.
Journal Prompt
This is not the first time that I’ve pointed my readers to this journal prompt, but I wanted to share it again as it has been on my mind. It is one of the most important things you can reflect on, as the power of the idea can change your world – if you reflect on it, and then act upon what you realize.
That prompt is:
“How can I be of service to others today?”
Ponder that question and record your thoughts. Then do the one thing that most resonated with you when you were considering your responses.
There is so much power in doing this exercise, and you’ve nothing to lose by at least trying it.
