Category: Connection

Express Yo Self

“If I didn’t have my films as an outlet for all the different sides of me, I would probably be locked up.”

Angelina Jolie

“Training gives us an outlet for suppressed energies created by stress and thus tones the spirit just as exercise conditions the body.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

I’m sipping coffee out of a thick, off-white unassuming diner mug. I like these types of mugs because each sip is like a gentle kiss on your lips.

(You’re welcome for the lovely visual of me making out with a coffee mug ☕️💋 xoxo.)

My 1000th consecutive blog post is coming up and I’ve been thinking a lot about how grateful I am for having started a daily writing habit.

Having an outlet to channel ideas, observations, and work through life has been a worthwhile endeavor.

Ideas flow when you have an outlet to direct them to.

And it doesn’t have to be writing, any creative outlet can be rewarding—martial arts, dancing, electronics, comedy, singing, watercolor, etc.

Some days have been harder than others. But in many ways, it’s the hard days that make expressing yourself through something all the more rewarding. I’ve begun to feel better after I write. Perhaps it’s because I’m checking an important todo off my list, but I think it’s more than that.

I know I have a long way to go—I far from the master writer and storytelling fiend I want to be—but every day I hit publish I’m one step closer.

I would highly recommend expressing yourself creatively in some form or fashion. It starts with simply being about the work but quickly grows into something deeper.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #994

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To Feel Known

“Instead of being concerned that you have no office, be concerned to think how you may fit yourself for office. Instead of being concerned that you are not known, seek to be worthy of being known.”

Confucius

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

Mark Twain

I think one of the big reasons we are drawn to social media is the desire to be known, and all the associated feelings and desires that come along with it. At a fundamental level, to be known is to be heard. To be someone who matters.

When you are lonely, or in pain or different, the lie we tell ourselves is we don’t matter.

No one is seeing us, therefore we aren’t worth being seen. Some people collapse inward. Others lash out (which can be in a million different ways). But we all tend to be drawn to groups, tribes, communities where we feel heard, or at least feel useful and valuable. People like us. Whatever that looks like for you. Navy SEALs. Entrepreneurs. Artists. Athletes. Dog lovers. Weirdos. Zoom yoga chats. People you just met who like the same jokes you like. We all want to belong and feel a part of something.

Making someone feel like they belong is one of the greatest gifts you can give anyone.

It doesn’t take much. Just let them speak and give your complete attention and interest. Be curious about what they like and don’t like. Don’t worry about what you are going to say. Listen to what they are saying.

But what about yourself? What about me?

To be known is to be yourself. Forget what everyone else is telling you to be.

Forget the 20 habits I find helpful and enjoy doing. Forget the habits and routines of the people you respect and look up to. Instead, build the habits that work for you. Maybe they are similar, but the key is they don’t have to be. It’s up to you to experiment and figure out what works for you and discard the rest. Maybe reading and drawing is what gets me in the right mind space but for you its a morning run. That’s good. Stick to it. Be open and try out mine and see if they work for you too. (The same goes for me with yours) But if drawing or writing every day turns out not to be your thing, that’s perfectly reasonable.

To be yourself when everyone wants you to be them is true strength.

To be known is also to care about yourself. Finding friends and family to share life with is what’s life is about. But you don’t need the approval of others to be known and the be someone who matters. You already are. You matter to yourself. That’s all that matters. Once you realize that, it doesn’t matter if you are alone on a desert island—you love who you are and what your dreams are. And then you have the power to share that with someone else.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #907

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To Feel Known

“Instead of being concerned that you have no office, be concerned to think how you may fit yourself for office. Instead of being concerned that you are not known, seek to be worthy of being known.”

Confucius

“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.”

Mark Twain

I think one of the big reasons we are drawn to social media is the desire to be known, and all the associated feelings and desires that come along with it. At a fundamental level, to be known is to be heard. To be someone who matters.

When you are lonely, or in pain or different, the lie we tell ourselves is we don’t matter.

No one is seeing us, therefore we aren’t worth being seen. Some people collapse inward. Others lash out (which can be in a million different ways). But we all tend to be drawn to groups, tribes, communities where we feel heard, or at least feel useful and valuable. People like us. Whatever that looks like for you. Navy SEALs. Entrepreneurs. Artists. Athletes. Dog lovers. Weirdos. Zoom yoga chats. People you just met who like the same jokes you like. We all want to belong and feel a part of something.

Making someone feel like they belong is one of the greatest gifts you can give anyone.

It doesn’t take much. Just let them speak and give your complete attention and interest. Be curious about what they like and don’t like. Don’t worry about what you are going to say. Listen to what they are saying.

But what about yourself? What about me?

To be known is to be yourself. Forget what everyone else is telling you to be.

Forget the 20 habits I find helpful and enjoy doing. Forget the habits and routines of the people you respect and look up to. Instead, build the habits that work for you. Maybe they are similar, but the key is they don’t have to be. It’s up to you to experiment and figure out what works for you and discard the rest. Maybe reading and drawing is what gets me in the right mind space but for you its a morning run. That’s good. Stick to it. Be open and try out mine and see if they work for you too. (The same goes for me with yours) But if drawing or writing every day turns out not to be your thing, that’s perfectly reasonable.

To be yourself when everyone wants you to be them is true strength.

To be known is also to care about yourself. Finding friends and family to share life with is what’s life is about. But you don’t need the approval of others to be known and the be someone who matters. You already are. You matter to yourself. That’s all that matters. Once you realize that, it doesn’t matter if you are alone on a desert island—you love who you are and what your dreams are. And then you have the power to share that with someone else.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #907

If you enjoyed this post, consider buying me a coffee or supporting the Renaissance.

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Telling vs. Showing Ideas

“Words may show a man’s wit but actions his meaning.”

Benjamin Franklin

Do you remember the practice of show & tell in grade school? I can’t recall any personal experiences of doing it, but essentially the idea is to bring in something to show the class and then talk about it. I’m guessing it helps a child practice their public speaking skills and also gives the class a chance to get to know each other. What I find most interesting about it is the practice’s name and subsequently order:

It’s show, then tell.
Not tell then show.

I’m torn about sharing ideas. On one hand, you get to share part of who you are and what you dream about doing. And you have the potential to connect with others who have similar dreams as you. But, on the other hand, sharing ideas fizzles your moment. By sharing an idea, we feel as though we have already created it, and therefore never actually do it. It also leaves you vulnerable for someone to steal your idea for their own.

As you can see, there’s a fine line for us to walk as creatives and entrepreneurs. We want to get our ideas out there — but not too much.

One thing that potentially muddled the conversation is when you mix in different levels of success.

At a certain point of relative success, (where you have a large following of people who know you and enjoy your work) sharing is beneficial. Your audience becomes a great way to validate ideas. You take a poll and receive valuable insights. You’re also slightly protected by your clout, because if anyone who’s is “not as known” copies your idea, then it’s less stealing and more like they look up to you and want to live as you do. And if someone tries to steal from you, your core audience has got your back.

But if you are an individual artist and you make something, there’s not much they can do if a big box store decides to copy it. You also reach as many people, so someone else can come to the same idea (honestly or not) and potentially do it better.

Fame brings it’s own problems, of course. Regardless, in my book—at least where I am know—telling your ideas before you do them is usually a bad move. We’ll either lose our motivation to do it or send it up for someone else to slam dunk it.

(Side note: it depends on your intentions. If you want to give ideas away, then sharing them with friends, clients or potential customers is a great idea.)

Here’s my rule of thumb —

Share what you are doing, not what you want to do.

If you haven’t started yet, then don’t share until you start.

Of course, this doesn’t assure someone else won’t do the idea before you do. A secret idea never executed is even less beneficial than a shared idea stolen.

Show us what you can do. Then tell.

It’s better to be a person of action than be someone who only talks.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #886

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Smile It Away

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”

Phyllis Diller

“Be thou the rainbow in the storms of life. The evening beam that smiles the clouds away, and tints tomorrow with prophetic ray.”

Lord Byron

I knew the day wasn’t going to be easy when at around 6 am I was unable to check-in and board my flight because I had missed the check-in window by mere minutes. Actually, I knew it wasn’t going to be my day when I spilled coffee on my notebook and new book I was reading (and loving no less). Scratch that. The night before I had a feeling it was going to be a bumpy ride when my weeks worth of luggage wasn’t fitting and was getting the zipper caught. (Probably because I was trying to lug my entire bulletproof coffee kit — kettle, butter and all — on a flight across the world to Thailand)

Regardless, sitting there in the airport, coffee stains all over me, waiting for the next flight, I had a feeling today wasn’t going to be my day. And oh what a day it was. Flight cancellation in New York. My small-town bank froze me out of my account. And when I finally arrived in Beijing, as I was wandering the airport at Lord knows what time or how long this godforsaken day has been, as I was wondering the empty airport, my belt broke.

Even my belt broke. And you know what I did?

Hold that thought.

When things don’t go our way, our usual reaction is to brute force it.

Brute force essential means trying to accomplish something with pure strength without any strategy or tactics behind it. It’s pure muscle power.

Okay, maybe you aren’t holding your pants up with one hand while pushing your luggage around a foreign airport like I was four years ago. Nevertheless, there are many occasions where brute force seems like a good idea.

Maybe something breaks at work and you spend hours and hours gritting your teeth and trying to push a square peg into that round hole.

Or maybe you have kids and for no reason at all they have decided to completely meltdown today and refuse to do anything you say.

Or maybe a bird craps on your favorite shirt, or the parking authority gives you a ticket or your fun gets rained out or you trip on a broken sidewalk or you choke in front of an audience or you fail completely today.

There’s only two choices we make:

  1. We can give into the friction and wallow away the entire day. Or —
  2. We can ground ourselves in the insignificance of a little moment of failure and bad luck, and smile it away.

Because time is short and every second wasted adds up.

Because anger’s half-life is short* and nothing is permanent except change.

Because life is bigger than us.

And because one day in the future, if we’re lucky, we’ll be laughing it off and telling the story as if the memory was an old friend.

You know what I did as I was standing in an airport, holding my pants up?

I laughed. I smiled it away. I realized how silly and unlikely this story sounded. And I took a deep breath and went on to enjoy my week in Thailand with some friends.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #856

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Fooling Ourselves

“A degree of self-awareness is extremely valuable… I hope I have that going forward.”

Nick McDonell

It’s refreshing to have at least one person around you tell it like it is. When everyone around you agrees or compliments what you are doing, you start to believe your own hype (aka BS).

This is a dangerous position to be in, because you don’t know if what you doing is working in your favor or against you.

Ideally we would be self-aware enough to watch assess ourselves and “pick up what we’re putting down” as they say, and call ourselves out when we notice ourselves cutting corners or making bad choices. But as the American physicist and brilliant thinker Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Self-awareness is all the rage nowadays. But if you strip away the woo-woo and boil the idea down to its essence, self-awareness essential means knowing yourself. Knowing what you like, dislike. Knowing your goals and desires. And more importantly, knowing where your blindspots are, what your bad habits are, and where you tend to get upset (and how you cope with those emotions).

It might sound silly to say, but it’s difficult to know what you don’t know. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible. If we have a rough idea where our blindspots are, we can try to prepare for them in advance or avoid the triggers that lead to them so we can completely go around them.

Having a friend that’s honest and realistic, but is doing so because they want to see you be better and succeed is a great way to avoid unforeseen problems.

It can’t just be any person that can be our smart decision thermometer. Respect is essential to that kind of relationship. If there’s isn’t mutual appreciation or if you don’t look up to the person who is giving you honest feedback, then you’ll never actually listen to them and take their advice for truth. Without mutual respect and appreciation, they are the equivalent to the random Youtube comment troll who’s only goal is to criticize and take you down. Authority is also essential. If your friend is giving you advice on things they don’t do themselves (or never have done) then the advice will fall flat. If your words don’t align with your actions or experience, no amount of brutal honesty will convince you to change course.

These types of friendships are hard to come by, so when you do find one, do your best to cultivate the relationship and keep it strong.

Seek out groups of likeminded individuals or create a group yourself. Look for people who are lifelong learners and who are always doing new things and trying to be the best version of themselves.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #855

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Convincing Others to Change

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Mahatma Gandhi

It’s easy to suggest or recommended change, but it’s massively harder to convince someone to do it. Just like it’s hard for us to make a change in our own life.

It takes work to change. Particularly if you’re going 80 mph in the wrong/opposite direction and are trying to turn around. It’s work and then some. A cherry on top, if you will.

Think about how hard it is to get yourself to do something. Be it going off gluten for a month, or exercising consistently every week, or getting up early. Remind yourself the feeling of difficulty it is to make change happen. Now apply it to people you’re suggesting a change to, or wishing they would break a bad habit or do what they say they want to do. It’s tough, right?

I think one of the best ways to enable change in other people’s lives is to live by example yourself. Let your enthusiasm and success influence and rub off on them. When a friend, loved one or colleague see’s your results, they’ll want it too.

Of course, don’t hide the hard parts either. Nothing turns people off of doing something then seeing others succeed in some form and thinking they are invincible or a machine.

Change is difficult, but it can look easy (emphasis on ‘look’) after a lot of intentional practice and routine.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #845

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Magic Pill

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

Anne Lamott

I think we are all, in some shape or form, looking for a magic pill that will finally fix us. A quick releasing capsule washed down with a glass of water to fix our skin problems. Or to fix our confidence (or lack thereof). Or to fix our gut. Or to fix our financial meltdown.

We feel as though something — something we can’t quite put our finger on — is holding us back from a better life, a better version of ourselves. It’s likely we are not even looking for a quick dose of magic. (Although if you can do it by 5pm that would be splendid thanks.) What we want is certainty. We want to know it’s possible to change. We want to know if we are doing the right thing at the right time.

But is there a right thing? Sure, we have a good sense of what’s right and wrong. But what about when something that’s right for me ends up bad for you (or vice versa)? What happens when someone else gets the job you wanted? They’re in a good place, but are you?

It’s often the case that bad things that happen to us eventually become good over time with a little more perspective. For example, you’re lost in heartache and pain over a breakup, but a few years later you meet the love of your life. Or maybe you are in pain over a breakup and you channel that pain into a work of art, like an emotionally moving song. Would you have come up with that idea if you hadn’t been through that stressful period? Who’s to say.

Hard moments can be soul-crushing. But they can also be a positive forcing function to becoming better versions of ourselves. Good things — things we think are good for us — can just as easily become un-beneficial. In, the end even the best of us are still just figuring things out as we go.

All we can really do is life. We can love like we want to be loved. We can learn from dumb things we inevitably do and grow from our decisions. We can surround ourselves with knowledge and people who are looking out for us. We can think bigger than ourselves. And as long as we get back up when we fall, we can find a way forward. It might not be quick, but it is forward.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #815

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Giving and Taking Advice

“The best advice comes from people who don’t give advice.”

Matthew McConaughey

Unsolicited advice always shoots through one ear and out the other without the slightest remorse.

The best advice given is the advice asked for.

The problem is we are too stubborn and obvious to ask for it. We’d rather go down with the ship then tell others our ship is leaking.

Some days I feel like half my problems would dissipate if I asked the right person for some advice. (The right person being the one who has experience a similar problem or knows someone who has)

So how do we give advice to someone too stubborn to take it? and how do we ask for advice when we really need it instead of holding our breath trying to solve our problems ourselves?

We do it subtly and from a place of honesty and trust.

When it comes to giving advice, we have to meet people where they are. Sometimes, that means being there for them when they need help and they are struggling. We have to wait for them to be ready for help. This starts by simply saying that you are there them if they need any help or guidance. Open up the kimono first — show them what you are struggling with. Vulnerability is relatability. And don’t forget to lead by example.

How do we ask advice when we need it ourselves?

First, find someone who has been through something similar to what you are going through. And if you can’t find that, then the next best thing is to seek advice from someone you know that you admire.

There’s no shame in asking for help. In fact, being vulnerable and seeking council will make the person like you and want to help you even more. Again, vulnerability is relatability.

If you feel like you’ve got no one around you that can help, hit the books. Seek the wisdom and insights from people of today and from history who’ve experienced life in its fullest spectrum. Books, videos, courses, podcast… half the battle is being aware of that fact that you could use some advice, from there, finding the advice will come much more easily. If that doesn’t work, maybe you’re the one who will find an answer and help others from your insights.

And when in doubt, seek a professional. (Verses some random person like me, with a blog.)

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #718

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How is Just a Phone Call Away

‘How’ comes from doing. We never know how until we try it for ourselves. We might have an idea of what it means to do something, but until we get our hands dirty, so to speak, we don’t really know first hand.

This goes for a lot of things — starting a company, asking someone out, traveling abroad, being poor / rich, pretty much everything.

Creativity is usually an individualistic act. But collaboration is not too far behind (and sometimes is far ahead). Let’s not forget, at the end of the day, we are creating for someone. Often, that someone we are creating for ourselves — creating just to create and express our voice. But even so, our work is for others as well. Connections like, buy and celebrate your work.

Luckily, we don’t have to learn ‘how’ always on our own. We can learn from other’s example and experiences, through stories (books, talks, conversations, etc) We can build a tight-knit community around us, and gather closer to people who care about us and what we are going through.

If we surround ourselves with generosity (helping others, letting others help us), then ‘how’ becomes a whole lot easier.

STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner

Daily Blog #639

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