This week, I could feel the weight of everything I am trying to build.
Some of it comes from the work in front of me. Some of it has been with me for much longer.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
I Am Actually Tired
Too Many Things at Once
Four Things I Am Learning
Your Progress Still Counts
The Only Way Out Is Through
When Pleasing Others Becomes a Reflex
What We Carry From Home
1. I Am Actually Tired
I'm actually tired, friends.
I don't have any big wisdom to drop in this one.
I just want to be honest with you and with myself.
I'm tired of sitting behind the computer all day. I'm tired of the same cycle repeating. I'm tired of the fact that I have no idea how my life is going to turn out over the next few weeks, and I'm tired of the fact that I have a lot on my shoulders right now.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to complain.
I just don't know what I should do.
I don't want to choose between money and friends.
I want to afford both. I want to be with my friends when I want to, without overthinking whether my budget allows me to visit them.
I'm sure I can do it.
I'm not doing what I'm doing just for fun.
I'm doing all of this to live a better life.
I'm going to make it there. Maybe not next month, maybe not even in six months, but I'll make it there.
Beginnings are always tough. Things are going to get better afterward.
I just need to endure this.
It doesn't matter if all the disadvantages are stacked against me. I'm not going to give up.
I'll finish what I started.
One step at a time.
Don’t give up neither.
2. Too Many Things at Once
Are you juggling too many things at once?
This is not only a question I'm asking you. I ask myself this all the time.
Unfortunately, I have a tendency to take on too many projects at once.
It all feels exciting at first, but once the initial fire slows down, it starts to feel like a burden.
For a very simple reason: I'm just juggling too many things at once.
At the time of writing this, I have at least three projects going on in my life.
All of them are equally exciting, and all of them are long-term projects.
So how do I juggle this situation?
Well, the worst thing I can do is try to invest the same amount of time and energy into all of them at once.
My strategy is to define one key project that needs the most attention and make sure it is growing.
The other two are lower priorities, but I still care about them just as much.
My business idea is project number one. It needs my attention and energy first.
This newsletter, my aspirations as a writer, and the personal brand connected to them make up my second long-term project, which I really care about and want to grow.
The third project is my marathon training, which is going kind of slowly right now because I'm still dealing with a knee issue that has been bothering me for almost a year.
Race day is in October, so I still have some time. But putting together the entire training plan, going through physio sessions and doctor checkups, and sorting out supplements and my diet takes time and effort if I don't want to half-ass this.
Each project is different and needs a different level of attention and effort.
I'm not going to lie. It is challenging, especially because ideas about the newsletter or marathon preparation sometimes start to flow while I'm working on the business, and I suddenly find myself caught in a triangle between all three.
But I'm learning how to manage this without going insane or burning out.
If you have any advice for me this time, please let me know. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
3. Four Things I Am Learning
Here is something I realized during the last two weeks.
Rushing things is probably never a good idea.
For me to succeed, I need to balance my time across different parts of my life. Even when I am working on my own business, working from morning until evening is not satisfying enough to ignore everything else.
I don't want to exchange short-term pleasures for long-term happiness. I will be thankful that I didn't turn my mind or body into a mess.
Despite all the optimism, good things take time and are usually harder to get or build than you initially thought.
We all want to be successful in a certain way, but we often overlook what it takes to get there.
Back to work now.
4. Your Progress Still Counts
Do you tap yourself on the shoulder?
It seems like almost everyone is running marathons, running businesses, traveling, or living their best life these days.
Or maybe the opposite is true.
Social media plays tricks on us every day with highly curated content shaped around our interests.
What's left for people who might be going through tough times, changing careers, going through a breakup, recovering from an injury, or dealing with something else?
They start thinking they should be like everyone else.
They ask themselves why their lives suck when the outside world is all vanilla and rainbows.
I don't want you to forget that outside motivation to change your life is not always bad, but you might not want to get addicted to it.
It is about the slow progress you make every day.
You might not want to get drawn into the rat race and compete with everyone else to have the most picturesque life.
Just because it seems like everyone is running marathons does not mean your 5K runs are dismissible.
You can hold your course and pace to get where you want to go.
You can tap yourself on the shoulder for everything you are doing because none of it is small.
If you read my newsletter regularly, you already know that going after something meaningful is what we are trying to do here.
5. The Only Way Out Is Through
Are you okay with failure?
I often try to emphasize that life is full of roadblocks.
But not in a pessimistic way that focuses only on the bad things. I mean it in a way that shows you it is simply part of the process.
I have a recent example from my life that gave me the idea for this.
I was building a website for my new business.
It was roadblock after roadblock.
I was staring at the screen at 11 p.m., thinking, "How the f*ck am I going to launch my business when I have already been stuck on this website for so long?"
Fear, disappointment, and frustration all started creeping in.
As I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, two things became clear to me.
First, no one ever promised me it was going to be easy.
Second, I decided to take this path fully aware that things might often not go as planned.
Now I need to go through this phase so the next one can begin afterward.
It does not matter whether these are small failures that are more like frustrations and roadblocks or something bigger.
The only way out is through.
6. When Pleasing Others Becomes a Reflex
How often do you make everyone else happy except yourself?
I was often guilty of this myself.
Pleasing other people has been my defense mechanism since I was a kid.
The reason I'm saying this is that you don't start pleasing others out of nowhere.
At some point in the past, you learned that the only way to survive in certain kinds of environments was to kneel and please others.
Unconsciously and unwillingly, this shaped your behavior.
It taught your brain to surrender to others and put them before yourself.
School might have been a tough period, and maybe your first work experiences were too.
Eventually, you understood what you were carrying on your shoulders and started working on letting it go.
From my own experience, I can say that it is not an easy burden to let go of.
Learning to let this guard down and openly express yourself and your opinion, without needing approval or wanting to please or agree with others, is not easy.
As much as I try to control this and get better for my own sake, it is still very deeply coded in me.
When I think about it, this is probably something I could work through in therapy, but this newsletter is not about that.
I just wanted to tell anyone out there who might be dealing with the same struggle that you are not alone.
Reach out to me at any point if you would like to talk.
7. What We Carry From Home
How is your relationship with your family?
I think many people avoid this topic on purpose.
We could not decide where we were born.
Some of us were luckier than others, and I don't mean only financially.
Imagine you were born in a part of Somalia affected by conflict.
Your circumstances could put your life at risk from the moment you were born.
But that is just one part of the equation.
The other part is your parents.
We could not choose them either.
Each of us had a slightly different upbringing with different challenges.
We dealt with whatever we needed to survive and make it through.
Now, when you look back on your childhood, you might notice certain patterns, remember certain situations, or find out truths you didn't know before.
Your own life shifts a little because you understand more than you did before.
In these moments, you might realize that your behavior was heavily influenced by your caretakers.
That can lead to the discovery that the parts you don't like about yourself were not built by you, and they are not simply bad habits. They were passed on to you by someone else.
You might find this frustrating and unfair.
You might want to hear an apology from someone because they made you this way or because you feel hurt.
Let me tell you this.
I had a lot of anger in me as well. There was so much I wanted to yell at someone.
I didn’t do that.
I took the time to understand the situation and tried to look at it from the other person's perspective.
It helped me understand my anger and fear.
Maybe it did not solve everything, but at least it eased the urge to take my anger out on someone.
It is not a universal rule.
It might not apply to you.
You might already know what your situation requires.
Relationships are tough, especially with family.
Have you uncovered truths from your past that you didn't know before?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade.
As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
Lukáš