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Deep Dive

This newsletter was supposed to be about getting more traffic, but yesterday my Grammy died.

I don’t say that to be flippant. She was 85, lived a good, long (relatively healthy) life and passed peacefully surrounded by family. Honestly, you can’t ask for much more than that.

But as I was working on the draft for today’s email, my heart just wasn’t into talking about online eyeballs.

So forgive me, but instead I want to tell a short story about something my grandmother taught me early on that all of us can benefit from.

You didn’t know her, but my Grammy was the least competitive person you’d ever meet. She never played sports, never owned a business, and was never a “one-upper” (you know the kind).

But she was someone who always had a quiet confidence about them.

One day I asked her, “Grammy, how do you know what you want?”. 

She looked me square in the eye and said:

“Well Sweets (her nickname for me), do you think that you’re someone who is afraid to lose or loves to win?”.

I was probably 16-17 at the time. So I answered with what I thought was the right response: “Both I guess.”

“The answer should be neither.”

Crickets.

“I don’t understand.”, I said.

“I love to design.” she said. “But I don’t care if anyone else likes my designs. I just love being able to create something that wasn’t there before.”

Ok, I thought. Sounds great.

“I still don’t get it.”

“You love riding horses. The fact that a judge measures you against your abilities that particular day - their opinion could be right or wrong. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you measure your success on the fact that you’re able to ride and that you enjoy doing it. As long as you keep doing what you love, you win by default. That’s how you know what you want.”

Mic drop Grammy.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to unpack this. But I finally came to this conclusion:

You’re not accepting the world’s rules for winning, you’re making your own.

Naval Ravikant’s analogy might bring this point home. He said:

“What looks like work to others should feel like play to you.”

If you take an artist who paints and you say to them, “hey, how long to you think it’ll take you to finish that?”  

They’ll finish one piece and start the next one. But the process of painting is the thing they enjoy.

The point for the artist is to paint.

They don’t care how long it takes to finish.

If you can commit, and the broader you can generalize what you’re committing to, the easier it’ll be to stick with it.

My Grammy taught me that the only asset we get to keep with us is our character, and that’s the only thing we get to keep building.

Hope this helps, and hug your loved ones extra tight for me today. You never know when the last time is the last time.

Until next time,
Charlie