The Slingshot Effect
Day 48-54 / 1000
Some weeks you push hard and fall back.
Some friendships quietly fade.
Sleep gets ignored.
Rest starts to feel like laziness.
This week is about all of it. And why pulling back might be exactly the point.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
Excess or enough
A reason, a season, or a lifetime
More coffee, or more sleep?
There is always something more to do
Slingshot
Cheer for yourself
Be better for yourself
1. Excess or enough
What does freedom look like for you?
We all have different dreams and goals in life.
From business, to family, to cars, to adventures, all the way over to peace of mind.
But there is one common dream that we all want. Freedom.
Since we were kids and had to do chores at home instead of playing outside with friends, we were dreaming about it.
The space and time where the only rules that apply are our own, where we decide what comes next, where there is no limit to our potential.
People have always wanted to feel free to do whatever they want, whenever they want, with whoever they want and wherever they want.
It is in our nature.
How does one achieve such freedom?
Do you build it, or do you achieve it, or maybe you earn it?
These are some of the questions I’ve been asking myself.
Because as for many of you, this kind of freedom is also a dream of mine.
Especially the way they connect together.
Financial freedom opens doors for other things to come into your life.
It doesn’t mean you need to be a billionaire. You just need enough money to make all those other decisions completely free.
And look, this might be just my point of view.
There is a very thin line here between chasing money and building something with purpose.
I think people are often split into two camps.
The first sees money, and rich people of course, as something evil.
Something that is causing only problems in life.
It is also usually those people who are in financial need and, to defend themselves, they turn against money.
Then there is the second camp.
The opposite end of the spectrum. People who have put money on a pedestal as the only thing that matters in life.
These are the chasers who believe more money equals more happiness. The universal equation in life.
But there is a middle ground which people tend to overlook.
I think I understand why.
It’s not attractive to have just enough money.
Today’s society is obsessed with excess in everything.
That’s why so many people are fighting obesity. They consume food in excess because there is no shortage of it.
People think about money the same way.
There is either starvation or excess. Not just enough.
How does this connect to the freedom I was talking about?
It’s how I define freedom for myself.
It’s not about having excess money that would buy me a house in San Francisco, a yacht, and a private jet.
It’s about having enough money to afford the lifestyle I want to live.
I want to spend my life doing things I want to do, including work.
I don’t dream about a life where I don’t do anything and just lie around sipping mojitos.
So many people dream about a life where they never need to work. It’s because they hate the work they’re doing right now.
I can’t imagine a purposeless life like that.
We all need purpose and meaning in life.
What does freedom look like for you?
2. A reason, a season, or a lifetime
Something that money will never buy is true friendships.
You can’t force people to be your friends, and even if you could, those people wouldn’t be true friends.
From the beginning of our lives we connect with everything around us. We start forming relationships with family, but also with our first friends.
The first stages of our upbringing are usually full of friends from kindergarten, the neighborhood, or school. We feel constantly surrounded by people of the same age and most of the time with the same kind of interest. And that’s play.
We don’t even think about it because we play.
Things start to get different when we enter our teenage years.
We’ve gathered a lot from the world around us, our parents, ideas from movies.
We start experimenting with our own behaviour to see what happens when we treat others differently.
First tries of manipulation, negotiation, and persuasion teach us that things in life can be achieved in very different ways.
Relationships start to be transactional.
From this point onwards we know when our friendships are genuine versus when they exist because of some kind of barter. And we all value the genuine ones more.
As we enter adult life, start a job, move cities or countries, we realize how important it is to have friends.
True friends are there when we need them.
We went from tons of friends in childhood to a few in adulthood.
First, I wasn’t sure if that’s good or not. I was confused, as many of you probably are too.
I realised that even on Facebook you receive less and less birthday wishes than the year before, and the year before that.
Maybe you’ve even asked yourself: “Have I done something wrong?”
The answer is no. You haven’t done anything wrong, unless you actually did hurt someone.
But in most cases, it’s just natural selection.
We grow and mature, and other people do too. Our priorities and values change.
We stop being friends with some people because we’re heading in very different directions, or are in very different life stages, and suddenly there’s not much of a connection anymore.
There is this line from a poem that I particularly like:
“People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.”
It is a beautiful explanation of how to look at certain relationships when they end.
People who come into our lives for a reason are usually there to teach us something.
People who come for a season are there to be with us through a period of time. To make it through together, enjoy it fully, or learn something as well.
The last group, people who come into our lives for a lifetime, are the true gems.
They are there for all reasons and all seasons. For all the good times and bad times.
There is nothing more beautiful than a friend calling you out of nowhere, without any reason, just to ask how you’re doing.
The hard truth about friendships, which many of us forget sometimes, is that they need to be fostered and cared for.
Just because we are friends today doesn’t mean it will last forever, especially if neither of us puts any effort into this relationship.
I hope that serves as a reminder to call your friend today.
So go and do it, now.
3. More coffee, or more sleep?
This is one of those themes we talk about so often, from so many different angles, that a person would think everyone already knows everything about it.
Yet people are still ignoring the importance of it.
In the busy world, everything gets more priority than sleep.
Sleep is something that needs to happen, unfortunately.
Or there are people on the other side who are overdoing it. Sleeping 12-14 hours for no reason besides that they like to sleep.
When do they do stuff then?
How is your relationship with sleep?
Are you an early bird or a night owl?
Do you track your sleep or do you go with the feeling?
There is no correct answer because we are all different.
But the only correct way is to take sleep seriously.
I can feel sleep deprivation massively.
Not just as an energy dip, but in my mental resilience and performance.
If I have poor sleep for two or three nights, my mind turns into a negative thought-feeding machine that will not stop talking shit to me.
What a daymare.
I’m not even surprised that people so often get bitter and annoyed in the trams, or at waiters, or at the person at the bank.
If they ignore their sleep and try to fight it every day with just more coffee, it’s a downward spiral into daily hell.
And guess what. It’s not an excuse. At all.
Nothing excuses you being a dick to others.
It’s your fckn problem and responsibility to behave like a person should and not blame everything else for it.
Now imagine people doing this every single day.
Driving themselves into exhaustion because what is more important than work, right?
They do this for a couple of years, and then what.
Then the health problems start to creep up on them.
Until they hit a hard stop because they can’t anymore.
If they’re lucky, the hard stop leads to much less work and much more focus on health.
In the worst cases the hard stop is the last stop. They are not coming back.
All just because they couldn’t realize that sleep is not to be ignored, but rather nurtured and protected.
After COVID, a lot of people turned to healthier lifestyles. Probably the best lifestyle shift in society in a very long time.
Yet there are still individuals who believe that ignoring health is okay.
Don’t be one of them.
Take these things seriously and do your best to stay healthy and strong for decades to come.
4. There is always something more to do
Are you resting or being lazy?
This is a question I ask myself very often.
Most of the time it feels like I could do more.
My to-do list is a never-ending quest because there is always something more I can add to it.
But am I actually doing something more?
The hardest judge of you is always you.
Even when I’m sick and tired, I have an internal dialogue about whether I can play PlayStation for a bit, or watch a movie, or whether I should do laundry, clean my email inbox, work on stuff for my brand, and so on.
It is a real skill to know when to rest because you genuinely need it. And when rest is actually going to help your work in the end.
It is equally important to know when you are just slacking and being lazy, because that is not helping you get anywhere in the long run.
So how do you tell the difference?
What does rest look like for you right now? I’d love to know.
5. Slingshot
Have you ever felt that despite the effort you put in, you are not really moving forward?
It’s like one step forward and two steps back.
This describes how we all feel sometimes.
We are doing what we can to make progress and then something happens. Two steps back.
It feels like a rat race where you are only running but not moving forward.
What should we do when feelings like this show up? When everything feels heavier and the progress feels stagnant?
Slow down a bit.
Rushing and pushing even more is not going to get you anywhere.
Trust me. I’ve been there.
I was pushing on the gas pedal more and more trying to make things work.
But what I didn’t realise back then was that I was pushing so hard that my engine started to burn.
Why? Because I was trying to push a car that had no gas and was heading in the wrong direction.
Moments like these are extremely hard. But they are never for nothing.
This was an experience. A lesson you had a chance to learn.
Despite the fact that it might have been painful, or discouraging, that pain becomes your advantage in the future.
When you start a new project, you can always look back on these moments and take all the lessons with you.
Now you possess something you were missing the first time. And now you can do so much better.
Not all fallbacks are bad.
Think about it like a slingshot.
You need to pull it back first, and pull it hard, to be able to catapult the rock really far.
Let the experience be the slingshot and you the rock flying far right now because of all the previous lessons, and all the fallbacks.
Are you pushing on the pedal too much as well?
6. Cheer for yourself
Have you ever thought of yourself as the main character in a movie?
We all have goals and dreams for ourselves.
We wake up thinking about them.
We go through the day visualising ourselves there.
Then comes evening and we look back on our day asking ourselves how we contributed to that dream today.
Often we find we didn’t contribute as much as we thought. And that sends us down the spiral of thoughts and questions.
Suddenly we are standing in the shower staring at nothing, doubting ourselves, questioning the direction we chose, thinking we don’t like where we are right now.
It’s not easy.
But no one ever promised it was going to be easy to build the life you want for yourself.
Social media is pouring overnight success stories on us from every direction.
All we feel is that we are behind on something in our lives.
We don’t know why or what it is. We just feel we’re supposed to have more of something that everyone else keeps showing us on the internet.
In those moments, remember that this is not a sprint. It’s a marathon.
I really like the analogy of imagining yourself as the main character, the hero in the movie.
What would you want the hero to do when things get hard? When he gets beaten down, betrayed, when he loses everything?
You would understand him.
You would cheer for him.
You would wait with excitement for the great comeback. The fireworks, the explosions, the trophy, the reunion. Whatever you want your hero to achieve.
Do the same for yourself when things get hard. Cheer for yourself.
Remember that even when life is challenging, you are not alone.
Reach out to your family, friends, or even to me if you need support on your journey.
We are all in this together.
The path towards success happens one step at a time.
Take the first step today and let me know how it’s going.
7. Be better for yourself
How can you do more without burning out?
I’ve been asking myself this question for the past couple of months.
It feels like being constantly at the crossroads between wanting to achieve more and not wanting to burn myself to the point where I can’t do anything anymore.
I don’t have an answer to this question yet. I’m still trying to figure it out on my own too.
But here is my hypothesis on how I think it can be achieved.
It always starts with WHY.
If you don’t know why you are doing what you are doing, or why you want to achieve what you want to achieve, it’s extremely hard to move even one step forward at a time.
Once we have our why, we can focus on our WHAT.
What is the outcome we want to achieve? What is the destination where we want to arrive?
This makes it more real, something our mind can more easily grasp.
The next step is the PLAN.
We tend to create our plans chronologically from today’s standpoint. But in this case, we want to reverse engineer it.
Here is where your imagination comes into play, connecting your WHY and your WHAT into something that exists in 10 years’ time.
From there we break it down to 5 years, 3 years, 1 year, 6 months, 3 months, 4 weeks, this week, and today.
Now we are facing the last question.
What can I do today to get myself closer to where I want to be in 10 years’ time?
Think small. Think 1% better every day.
Put the bar of expectations lower than you originally wanted. Why? Because you are starting from zero.
Don’t compare yourself to others on the internet, in your work, or in your town.
Your journey is unique to you because only you know your WHY, your WHAT, and your PLAN.
Don’t try to compete with the world or impress anyone.
Compete only with yesterday’s version of yourself.
Be better for yourself.
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