#136: energy over everything

👋 Welcome to the 136th issue of Open Loops, a weekly newsletter on clarity, growth, and building a life that feels like yours.

My name is Reza and each week, I sift through 100+ books, articles, podcasts, and (way too many) tweets to bring you the best in this newsletter.

You don't lack ambition. You lack alignment.

You feel it every day.

The work that pays but drains.
The meetings that look important but feel empty.
The days packed with tasks no one remembers.

Careers break when they stop reflecting who you are.

You keep pushing through the emptiness.
Optimizing for things that don't matter to you.

The solution isn't another pivot.
It's getting honest about what gives you energy.

Some come alive when they build.
Some when they teach.
Some when they connect ideas.

Listen closely to figure out yours.

Alignment isn't a leap.
It's a shift from performing a role to expressing who you already are.

That’s where your best work lives.

(1) You will receive a body. You may like it or not but it is yours for the entire time you’re on Earth.

(2) You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time, informal school called “life.” Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant or stupid.

(3) There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much as the process as the experiment that ultimately works.

(4) A lesson is repeated until it is learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. Then you can go on to the next lesson.

(5) Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.

(6) “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that is, again, better than “here.”

(7) Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.

(8) What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need – what you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.

(9) The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.

(10) You will forget all this. You can remember whenever you want.

A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with time is much the same as with money. The most dangerous way to lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake work.

When you spend time having fun, you know you're being self-indulgent. Alarms start to go off fairly quickly. If I woke up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd feel like something was terribly wrong. Just thinking about it makes me wince. I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day. And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically, nothing. I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV.

If I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into perdition. But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially, like real work. Dealing with email, for example. You do it sitting at a desk. It's not fun. So it must be work.

Every difficult experience has taught me that there are two ways you can deal with hardship. You can either feel sorry for yourself, or you can orient towards the idea that life is a set of experiences that train you for the next one.

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“Do you know the biggest mistake most musicians make?” he said. “Their first album comes from love, heartbreak, passion, or depression. They have no expectation of how the world will respond. They write it from the heart, and if it catches on, they’re validated by the world. But then they start writing their second album, and they don’t necessarily write it based on love, heartbreak, or passion. They write the album they think the world will want.”

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I was very lucky at Apple, because Steve [Jobs] showed me there was a way to articulate things like sensibility, intuition, taste, which all start with a feeling. But first I had to make friends with this frustrating part of myself, which was the inability to articulate what I feel.

Perfectionism taught me I'd rather excel at something I was good at than be mediocre at something I loved.