Quick reminder: add steve@stevekamb.com to your email contacts, as this newsletter will start to come from that new address over the coming weeks!
Okay onto today’s newsletter...
I walked past my digital piano the other day and realized I hadn’t played in a while.
I then looked at my guitar, which I hadn’t picked up in a long time either.
(And don’t get me started on my ongoing struggle to get less awful at the violin!)
As I thought about music, a tiny voice in my head started to pass judgment:
“Steve, why aren’t you better at these instruments? You need to practice more.”
I had slipped back into the same pattern I spent most of my 20s and a lot of my 30s living with.
It was the cause of my unhappiness at that moment.
And a mindset shift was required to get back on track.
"If I only had..."
Spend any time on social media, and you’ll find somebody selling you “the dream”:
If you had this productivity system, you could be a killer parent and build your side business, have six-pack abs, and have time to read all the books and do all the things.
If you follow this morning routine for optimal productivity and use your free time wisely, then you can get it all done.
If you follow this eating and workout strategy, then you’ll reach all of your goals in record time.
As a nerd with infinite hobbies and life goals, who desperately wants to do ALL THE THINGS, I find this line of thinking so damn alluring.
For 15 years, I kept searching for the Holy Grail of organization:
I believed if I could just craft my schedule a certain way or focus on the right projects, it would solve this problem I have of constantly feeling behind!
I was just one hack away from being able to build Nerd Fitness, work on a secret project, and get better at playing music, and write this newsletter, and put on 15 pounds of muscle, and get enough sleep, and become a better cook, and spend lots of quality time with friends and family, and travel and have adventures, and become a scratch golfer, and maximize my enjoyment of my favorite nerd activities:
- ALL the video games on my “to play” list.
- ALL the books on my to-read list (300+).
- ALL the movies and shows on my wishlist.
- ALL the podcasts I’m subscribed to.
It wasn’t until I read Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks back in 2020 that I finally found relief:
Acceptance that I could NEVER have it all.
In the words of Gureni Tesij in Return of the Jedi:
“There’s too many of them.”
Great News: We'll Never Get it All Done!
If you devote your life to ONLY getting in ridiculously good shape, you will still have an infinite number of areas in your life that you will not have time to do or enjoy.
If you devote your life to ONLY consuming content, you’ll still never get to every book, game, or movie you want to experience.
If you devote your life to ONLY travel, you’ll still never get to visit “all the places.”
As Burkeman points out, life is simply too rich:
“The world has an effectively infinite number of experiences to offer, so getting a handful of them under your belt brings you no closer to a sense of having feasted on life's possibilities.
The more wonderful experiences you succeed in having, the more additional wonderful experiences you start to feel you could have, or ought to have, on top of the ones you've already had, with the result that the feeling of existential overwhelm gets worse.”
We can choose to either lament that we’ll never get to all that life has to offer or embrace that this is the very thing that gives life meaning: we must make choices.
Have Grace for Yourself
Burkeman points out the weird thing about making decisions:
“…a decision to do any given thing will automatically mean sacrificing an infinite number of potential alternative paths.
As I make hundreds of small choices throughout the day, I’m building a life—but at one and the same time, I’m closing off the possibility of countless others, forever.”
This isn’t necessarily a problem unless you decide to evaluate your happiness by the things you’re not able to prioritize, the things you believe you’re “behind on,” or the life not lived.
Whatever priorities you have for yourself, whatever goals you have, by definition that means you are NOT prioritizing other things.
This requires grace, acceptance, and understanding:
If you’re a single mom working 3 jobs, maybe it’s okay that you’re not as fit as the 25-year-old childless Instagram personal trainer.
If you’re currently hard at work on a dissertation or challenging work project, maybe it’s okay that you’ve had to set aside training for a marathon right now.
If you’re taking a new medication, recently moved, or just went through a breakup, maybe it’s okay that you’re not also crushing it at work right now.
We all have to make decisions, we all have responsibilities, and there’s no “life checklist” that eventually allows us to say “Okay I did it all, NOW I can relax.”
Perhaps more importantly, by trying to do all the things, we most likely end up not making much progress on any of them.
By having the courage to put things on the back burner, we can make meaningful progress on the stuff that’s important to us right now.
By resetting our expectations and developing patience in an impatient world, we can find ways to enjoy today instead of anxiously rushing through it to reach an unrealistic future tomorrow.
Get busy living today, or get busy anxiously living for tomorrow
Once I stopped treating life like a “to-do” list I HAD to get through before I could slow down and enjoy myself, I got back to just enjoying whatever it was I was doing.
Instead of lamenting that I wasn’t getting better at music, I gave myself grace - I was busy doing other things that were more important to me.
Instead of lamenting that I wasn’t further along with my strength training, I gave myself grace - I was prioritizing working on my golf swing for a golf event next month!
Instead of trying to speedread a book or rush through a game or bingewatch a TV show, just to get to the next one… I focused on enjoying the activity itself, without the anxiety-inducing expectation that I’m somehow behind on having fun.
I’ll never get to all of it, so might as well enjoy wherever I am right now!
I want to hear from you, so hit reply on this email and let me know:
What’s some aspect of your life that you’re willing to “let go of” trying to get through or get on top of?
Where can you adjust your expectations based on the real constraints you have right now in your life?
Where can you give yourself grace that you’re not farther ahead on something?
Where can you finally accept that you won’t be able to do it all?
-Steve
