Detachment

(At work) a few rejections from the proposals I submitted to the customer irritated me.

I had to step back and ask myself, “Why? How come I’m reacting this way?”

When you care about the work you do, you put in the effort accomplish the task to the best of your abilities.

But when that effort is dismissed or misunderstood, you feel hurt. Again…why is that?

It’s because of the “emotion” we attach to the work.

We attach our actions to our egos.

But note that YOU ARE NOT your ego.

This must be why we get so stressed out at work – because we attach the rejection to our ego and we attach our identity to our ego.

But what if we detach our identity to our ego and our job?

What if treat “jobs” as “jobs”?

Your “job” does not define who you are as a person. Your “job” is NOT your identity – it’s a PART of your identity.

Focus on doing your best instead of focusing on the result (whether it’s good or bad).

The sooner I understood that the sooner I was able to free myself from expectations from other people at work.

The sooner you free yourself from expectations, the more likely you will work more efficiently.

Oh, you messed up? Instead of thinking about how your boss will have the grounds to fire you. Wouldn’t it be better to:

Get up, brush the dust off your shoulder and fix the problem. THEN find a way not to do the same mistake again.

Unnecessary mental stress drains your battery very quickly – making you more inefficient for the rest of the day.

I was allergic to failure back then, especially when I’m on probation. The goal was to make the best impression of myself. But who does that serve? My ego – not the job I’m hired for.

You focus more on “not messing up” instead of “doing your best”.

The difference is very subtle. But I hope you get the point.

This is similar to this small test I did this morning when I left a printout of my…

Magazine

Yup! I left the very first print of MSPAINT3D Issue 001 [preview here] at the salon yesterday…

Following through what I wrote last week [read here], I’m going to focus more on promotion.

So…why did I leave the print on the table? To see if people really cared about reading that kind of stuff or not.

That will give me the direction if I should either produce more of these magazines or focus on trying something else.

Much of our ideas only exist in our heads. We don’t really know how things will unfold until we actually do them.

This is my way of turning my ideas into reality.

It comes with the high expense of money, time and energy for something that is so uncertain.

When I left the salon, I checked if the magazine was still there.

But nope, it was gone. The salon lady might have mixed it with the stack of newspapers or threw it out.

Will I ever find out? Well, I’ll find out in the next few days. The goal was to increase traffic to this website.

Let’s say this strategy does not give me the traction I’m looking for. But you know what? I would still get them printed…FOR MYSELF.

I like to keep a collection of my personal projects and failures.

This is how I can tell myself “I TRIED. I failed. Now I can try something else that would take me closer to my goals”.

Aubrey Marcus’s words stuck with me while I was cooking dinner:

“..the only thing you’re responsible for is your best. You can’t do better than your best”

And to become the best version of myself, I need to invest in myself.

I recently purchased this course I’ve been meaning to buy for a long time but haven’t had the money to buy it.

But now it was on sale – so I took that opportunity to save a few bucks.

It’s to help me become better at…

Kopywriting

Copywriting is your ability to communicate exactly what you wanted to communicate with others.

Copywriting helps you become better at making your point across either with written words or images.

I often find myself thinking about complicated concepts and theories and I struggle at communicating them to others.

The goal is to stop using “confirmation questions” such as “You know what I mean?” or “You know? that thing?” or “that thingy” (fuck that’s annoying).

People say ‘Yes’ to be polite.

But I’m sure they have no clue as to what I’m really trying to say. I can tell. How?

I ask them to repeat exactly what I said…but they couldn’t.

However, I don’t blame them. I’m responsible for their dishonesty – because I wasn’t able to communicate things properly. That’s the cold harsh truth.

Speaking of cold, I found myself showering with hot water for about 10-minutes. It’s relaxing. Then another idea popped into my head – to create Youtube videos of how I create illustrations with MS Paint.

People who came across my artwork asked me the same questions: How did you do it?

I actually tried creating a video before as a test. It failed.

The first attempt was to show how easy it is to use MS Paint to edit the artwork.

The plan was to sell the design to sellers who needed designs for their crafts.

I wanted to provide a design they can easily edit and play around with using MS Paint (because MSPaint is free).

However, that’s not the kind of feedback I got. An honest friend said, “Not sure what you’re trying to pull with those turtles. But they aren’t going to take you anywhere”.

I agreed with him.

An honest well-thought-out feedback is worth a thousand fake/canned compliments.