Loosen your grip (life, business, and writing)

`1:26:53`

achieved and do some of the things that you've done. Like it's that's very aligned with the vision that I want for my life. And when I think of that, my fingers clench, I get tight. I'm like you need to do this. You know what I mean? And this this inversion that we're talking about here, it it requires a kind of just like surrender, a release, a relaxation that I think a lot of people and I know myself struggle with. Well, let me give you a little drum analogy because I'm When I first started, I gripped the sticks too hard. And when you grip the sticks really hard, you don't play as well for a lot of reasons. You can't get the same tone, um you don't have as much movements, there's no ghost note. It's like there's a lot of things that become harder and your hand cramps up so you can't play as

`1:27:40`

And by by relaxing your grip, you get I think that people have too tight a grip on business and think what they need to do is all these other things. And if you just lighten up a little bit and part of that is not paying So, I don't read industry news. I don't pay attention to the com I mean I know who the com competition is or whatever this, but I I don't pay attention. I don't want to pay attention because then you begin to inhabit other people's thoughts too much and you feel like I got to do it this way. And I I it's like if I've always like admired It's a weird like I've always like to visit islands where they just like evolved on their own in a sense. Yeah. Cuz it's just more interesting. Yeah. Everything's more interesting there. Because it it just didn't It wasn't influenced by other things and it

`1:28:26`

like had to find its own way and um I feel like if if you grew up that way, like we founded our business in Chicago outside of Silicon Valley. Had we been in Silicon Valley, we would have been a very different business and I think we would have been out of business. Right. Because we were all far away and weren't at the parties and weren't in the scene and didn't do all the VC stuff and we bootstrapped and did our own way and didn't pay much attention to that world, we benefited handsomely from it and greatly from it. Because we just had to find what worked for us. And if you pay too much attention, you end up doing what you think other people what you think you should do because other people are here's the seven ways to do this and the 10 ways to do this and everything's lists these days and all these success stories. Most of these people including like everybody Every Everything's held together by duct tape. Right. Every business is kind of a crazy