#74: Three Things that got me thinking

👁️ Hunter S. Thompson + ⛵going large + 🚧 progress & planning

¡Hola!

Here are Three Things that got me thinking about intrinsic motivation lately.

As I put these together, I realise they capture my mood in the past weeks: pondering directions and possibilities, in between caring for sick babies. Vamos por partes:

1. making the choice

2. going for aliveness

3. byproduct of values

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1. Deciding to look

I can’t believe author and proto-gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson was TWENTY YEARS OLD when he wrote the following life advice, as quoted by the consistently wonderful Letters of Note newsletter:

[B]eware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don't know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

Hunter S. Thompson
Letter to Hume Logan
22nd April 1958

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

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2. Feeling alive

Helpful questions to ask ourselves when we face a big decision, according to Oliver Burkeman (author of the very very good Four Thousand Weeks. Time Management for Mortals) in the 14 July issue of his newsletter The Imperfectionist:

• “Does this feel alive to me?” (or “does this make me feel alive?”)

• “Does this choice enlarge me or diminish me?” (courtesy of James Hollis, author of What Matters Most)

Photo by Lazarescu Alexandra on Unsplash

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3. Side-effect

I’ve just finished Una mansión propia. Feminismo terapéutico para crear abundancia (A mansion of one’s own. Therapeutic feminism to create abundance) by Spanish psychologist María Fornet. It’s a satisfying read if, like me, you’re frustrated by personal development discourses seeped in magical thinking (no ‘manifesting’ here!), that tend to emphasise individual responsibility and choices and ignore wider systemic constraints.

Fornet’s book invites us to view happiness as progress, rather than as reaching a particular goal, or as feeling good. She writes (the translation is mine):

I’m tremendously fond of the idea of conceiving of happiness as a side-effect, not something we pursue directly, as a consequence of cultivating in our lives certain values, as a product of living an existence aligned with what makes us feel good, what matters to us, what is valuable for us.

None of the components of happiness is hidden under the hyper-productivity and obsessive multitasking that falls onto women as a gendered mandate. Far from it. When I speak of progress, I talk about sustaining yourself in a constant state of growth, about staying connected to your Lighthouse, about walking in a systematic way towards the person you want to be and moving away from the world you want to leave behind; with your incongruities and inconsistencies, of course, but also with intention.

She urges us to plan. And to folks (like me) who claim that planning isn’t for them, she says:

If your thing is going with the flow… Great. Just answer yourself with complete sincerity: Is it working for you? […] if what makes you anxious about making plans is seeing that you don’t fulfil them… then there’s work to do.

Touché.

Photo by Evgeni Tcherkasski on Unsplash