It’s amazing how much we physically have to do to feel normal. 

It’s like a second job. 

From exercise to meditation to journaling to positive affirmation, all of this staying grounded, feeling okay and practicing mindfulness is surprisingly labor intensive. 

Who knew that living in peace required us to exert almost as much effort as to govern the world? Who knew that we would actually need time to recover from the exhausting goddamn experience of being a human? 

Apparently in the race of life, just getting to the starting line is an effort. 

But as my grandpa loves to say, the first hundred years are always the hardest. 

And so, resentment isn’t the answer. Getting pissed at people for whom normality appears to be effortless won’t help. And burdening ourselves with a deep sense of shame about the ways in which we are not normal doesn’t move our story forward. 

Each of us is constantly readjusting our ideas of what is normal and possible in the world anyway. It’s a moving target if there ever was one. 

Keen’s book on authentic masculinity reminds us that the disillusioning awareness that what we have agreed to call normal is a façade covering a great deal of alienation. 

Maisel’s book on the future of mental health assures us that normal and abnormal are opinion words that have multiple meanings and countless usages that are typically regularly employed to persuade and manipulate. 

Let those words give us peace. 

Because, yes, being normal is more work for some than it is for others. 

That’s okay. We can’t bemoan that reality any more than we can beg the rose to unfold faster. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What if there is no magic day when you will feel normal?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

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Some people respond to small, irrelevant changes with all grace and agility, while others have trouble accommodating on short notice. 

Camus famously wrote that there are people who suffer flexibly and others who suffer stiffly. The former are acrobats; the latter are virtuosos of sorrow. 

Think of someone you know from each category. Next, pretend your plans with that person have slightly changed in the eleventh hour. 

One friend immediately allows the flow of the current take them where it will. They say a hearty yes to life, even though they know that it will devour them. 

The second friend, however, resists the rushing river of change. They stick their fingers in their ears like a petulant child frozen in the face of an uncertain future. 

Whom would you rather spend the weekend with? 

Odds are, not the person who tries to manipulate the world to coincide as nearly as possible with their desires. You want the acrobat. The one who suffers flexibly. Because the other guy is bloody exhausting to be around. 

Software companies are masters of this process. They named it agile development, which focuses on adapting quickly to changing realities. Rather than make massive iterations every twelve months, the product evolves a little bit every two weeks. The feedback loop is small and tight and light, and that allows the technology to grow incrementally better without a large investment of resources. 

Having worked at a tech startup myself, it’s quite an elegant process. Even as someone who worked in marketing and not in development, the ethos of that process was transformational in my own development as a human. 

It introduced me to an unsuspected well of agility inside myself. It helped me learn to get comfortable with small changes. It taught me that it’s better to make small consistent gains, than it is to make large ones that disappear quickly. 

And it showed me that life’s little, irrelevant changes don’t actually mean that I have consented to the annihilation of a part of myself. 

Just because the meeting got moved to next week doesn’t mean my identity will evaporate.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What zaps your commitment to your priorities?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

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Our problem is, we have zero sense of proportion. 

When it comes to major life decisions like preserving our health and doing our work and falling in love, we say yes or no to things without even thinking them through. 

Meanwhile, when it comes to inconsequential matters like a typo in an email sent right before going to bed, we fall down the rabbit hole of useless rumination until we have stomach cramps. 

It’s a terrible misuse of energy. 

And understandably, daydreaming and brainstorming thinking about the future can all be pleasurable activities. But just because each day presents us the chance to overthink things, doesn’t mean all of our decisions benefit from such complete analysis. 

Camus once wrote that we should just act and do not preoccupy ourselves with verifying whether or not history has been mistaken. 

Nearly a century later, his words still ring true. Especially now. If we don’t release the grip of neurons on all our small thoughts, if we don’t stop the dispensing of our limited budget of attention to trivial pursuits, we are going to let all of these little mediocre things fill our lives. 

And when that white whale comes along, we won’t have the bandwidth to give that choice the attention it deserves. 

Like my father once told me:

The reason we don’t sweat the small stuff isn’t because it’s all small stuff, but because the longer you’re around, the more big stuff there is, and you need to conserve your energy. 

Something worth remembering next time those ruminative thoughts start roaring inside of your head like a perpetually accelerating engine over some bullshit time vampire. 

LET ME ASK YA THIS…

What zaps your commitment to your priorities?

* * * *

Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Inventor. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.  

[email protected]

www.nametagscott.com

It’s the world’s first, best and only product development and innovation gameshow!

Tune in and subscribe for a little execution in public.

Join our community of innovators, artists and entrepreneurs