Author: Andrea Grassi

Recently, I started getting into meditation again. One of the surprising things about meditating is the number of failures you can have during a meditation.

Basically, even if your goal is to only stay still and not think, you’ll fail.

It’s a never-ending failure, yet it’s the practice that you need.

Usually when we fail we get burned up, but the whole point here is to start again and continue. What we do want is to learn how to get back on track.

Even if we fail, even if we didn’t achieve more than 1 minute focus.

Becoming angry is undoubtedly the opposite of what we need, and there’s no shame in failing. Failure, in this case, is healthy, and is part of the progress you need to endure to move forward.

Lately I’m wondering if, by any chance, I have ADD or not. I realized I find hard to focus in some moments and I got to this conclusion also thanks to some people that I know that are affected and greatly benefitted from medication.

But I’m, wondering: Is this also a result of our lifestyle? Of our constant context switch thanks to smartphones?

One of the advices you see online is to do more meditation, which has a whole set of benefits.

If you look a it, doing meditation, aside from the spiritual part, also means training again your mind to focus, to learn the joy of staying instead of moving. 

Which, in turn, is the opposite of our current lifestyle of notification, switching apps, etc.

Are we increasingly becoming distracted by how our world is evolving?

When we talk about growth we might instinctively think of “another thing to learn”. That happened to me quite a few times. 

It would also be true, but adding things to our todo list isn’t a very efficient way to grow because, what usually happens, is that we tend to never reach the end, or reach it with minimal learnings.

We should, instead, prioritize making space for it.

Making space might happen in two ways.

Time. The most obvious. No time, no space. Time is needed to learn anything, it’s the currency we need to have.

Mind. I’m not talking about having the right approach, but having enough space in the mind to allow new information to flow. 

Even by using the todo list, we’re adding stress and taking space in our mind. 

It’s really hard to not think about how long that todo list is, how we’d like to get to the end, what’s next etc.

These thoughts take space, which in turn limit our ability to learn new topics and experiment.

We should constantly strive to iterate, to make a small step in front of the other, to change. Slowly but profoundly.

Change would happen anyway, after all. 

Our environment changes us every day, making us more sick or more happy. 

A stressing work might change you, making you harsher, more reactive to news than you’ve ever been.

Change will happen, so better be leading some of it.

When we look at change, we always think about big transformations.

Think about losing weight for example. If we think about change we link it to being lean.

That, though, is the outcome. Not the change.

The change is incremental, step by step. We may lose a big chunk of weight in the beginning, but then it gets harder and you lose it in smaller amounts.

But those amounts do sum up and in the end allow you to reach the outcome.

Yet, those amounts are small and if you look at them individually they don’t feel like a big change. What’s a 1% change? Is it worth it?

If I do a 1% change today nobody will care, nobody will notice, right?

But, if you consistently do a 1% change every time (day, year, month), they add up.

With 10 changes, it’s a 10% change, is that worth it?

A change is nothing without being consistent and going through all the depressing phases where each change seems so small it’s useless.

But they are not, as long as we are consistent with them.

I’ve recently finished listening to 4000 weeks by Oliver Burkeman and it’s hard to shake off the feeling I got from the book.

First off: I didn’t expect to actually like the book. It felt like the classic book with information on how to live/manage time that I could’ve gotten already.

That wasn’t the case though. 

It made me think a lot. Mostly about how I approach the world, what anxiety comes from some of my choices, how I handle expectations and, in the end, how I handle time.
One of the things that was striking to me was the idea that we cannot fake it.

We don’t have enough time to do it all.
We will fail to do some of our tasks/goals.
Not only that, but we will fail inevitably, and this is a good thing. 

Even if you look at this concept through the lenses of the workplace, the result might be interesting.

From time to time, I get the classical imposter syndrome. As a result of this I try to do more, even better, often pushing my limits (and guess what? My stress levels).

But in the end, and unless there’s a big error somewhere, we only have two roads ahead: 
1. Either you’re already fit for the job and you need to accept what you can already do and just do it.
2. Or you’re not fit, and sooner or later the time will come.

You might say that option 2 can be, in fact, changed. We can all improve, and I agree with that concept, but there’s a limit to that. You cannot change instantly, so it’s useless to worry in the short term. 

It’s absolutely ok and precious to work on improving your skills in the medium/long term, but if your imposter syndrome is hitting you hard, the problem you feel belongs to the now. And now there’s little you can do.

You can take a breath, wait a couple of seconds, and accepting where you are now.