You Get What You Don’t Pay For

“You get what you don’t pay for.” My theory is, if you’re going to use an online dating service, fork over the money. Pay a hundred bucks and make it official. Otherwise you’ll never fully commit to finding someone special. That’s how commitment works. We need something that’s bigger than any excuse. Halfway will be the end of us. Otherwise we’ll just keep complaining about how there’s nobody out there, how hard it is to be single, and that it’s impossible to find the right person, meanwhile, organizing ourselves as living proof of our own argument, creating a self-feeding cycle of loneliness and ice cream.

“Ensured that one day I’d be well
equipped to live my dream.” At the end of Questlove’s new book, he thanks his parents. I teared up when I read this passage. Probably because I feel the same about my folks. They knew that when I graduated college, moved across the country and started my own business, all they could do was trust that their twenty years of parental labor laid a strong enough foundation to turn my dream into a reality. They were right. This is all their fault.

“I didn’t break her, I can’t fix her.” Years ago, I made a small career out of trying to fix the person I was dating. Turns out, I can’t make you just like me, no matter how many books I read. Painful realization, but possibly the best thing I learned from that relationship. The other realization was, we are strongest in our broken places. And once we learn to accept, understand, love and leverage those cracks, amazing things are possible. Inspired by Dennis Prager’slecture.

“I trust my behavior more when everyone
else is sleeping.” Fascinating line of thinking from Tim Ferris. It’s amazing how our behavior changes when there’s no audience, no peer pressure and no immediately feedback. I used to get up very early in the morning to write for very the same reason. It was cold, dark and quiet. No voices weighing down on the work. Even my own brain wasn’t really awake yet. Just the heart doing its thing. Good times.