What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? | SHW #12

Hey friends,

I hope you had an amazing week and are having a restful weekend.

This week, I noticed a thought buzzing around in my head that was extremely unhelpful and stressing me out. The thought was always some flavor of, “It must be done in this way in order for it to work.”

I have this thought about pretty much anything that I’ve never successfully done before. I have the tendency to look around at what everyone else is doing, notice what works for them, and then assume that I need to do it in that same exact way in order to see results.

The problem I run into is that I force myself to do things in a way that does not align with my personal desires and values. I quickly burn out, give up, and therefore never achieve the result.

I’ve found this happening a lot with Instagram in particular. If Instagram is a part of your strategy for getting eyes on your work, you’re probably familiar with the cycle of posting super consistently for a few weeks, only to ghost the platform entirely for a few weeks. Repeat.

Everyone has an opinion on how social media should be properly done. There’s a documented “winning” strategy. But if you’re never able to consistently implement that strategy, then what’s the point?

I see this a lot in fitness and weight loss as well. Sure, if you eat 1200 calories and run a 5k every day, you’ll lose weight, but can you really keep that up for 3 months straight? Let alone the rest of your life.

To break this pattern of thinking that everything needs to be done in one particular way, I’ve started to ask myself, “If I knew I couldn’t fail, if literally any reasonable strategy could work, what would I choose to do?”

The most important factor in achieving our goals is that we’re working towards them. It doesn’t really matter how. We just need to do something. So we might as well choose the easy thing. The thing that comes naturally to us. The thing that’s fun for us to do. We’ll get much better results doing the easy thing than doing nothing at all.

I’m planning to apply this to many areas of my life, specifically when it comes to creating and sharing my art. I’ll be doing things my way, even if it’s undocumented and unconventional.

What about you? What’s something in your life you’ve been making unnecessarily difficult?

Just let it be easy.

~Rachel