For those who still believe writing is the reason they suffer from mental health issues, I’m afraid you are getting it in reverse. You are depressed because you’re not writing enough, because you are still too far away from financial freedom. Writing isn’t the problem. It’s the cure.

Every step takes you to the other. You live one step at a time. Anything else means you are not growing.

Write one word at a time. One step at a time. One day at a time. It’s not just a strategy for success. It’s a strategy for continuous growth, productivity, learning, creativity, expansion, and improvement as well.

It’s not just for stressful periods of your life. It’s for all time.

Deploy compassion toward yourself. Like empathy. Understand yourself more. And appreciate your effort instead of beating yourself up. You know, when we get reward after doing something great, parts of our mind that have been asleep for years start waking up and attacking us vigorously, because they hate us, and our frontal lobe is still too busy to fight back, because it’s still processing what has transpired (in order to come up with new ideas and not repeat itself next time you attempt to write). Just hang in there until this period is over. Euphoria kicks in eventually after it passes.

You get reward from what happened. How can you get reward if you have no idea what took place today?

That’s why you have to process everything in order to feel like you haven’t wasted your time or energy for having spent all this time and energy writing something huge.

That processing might take time. Expect to be miserable during which because you still have nothing to celebrate, with your artwork or masterpiece that you’ve just written still pending investigation, trial, judgement, analysis, memory consolidation, scanning, digestion, and processing.

After that, euphoria kicks in.

You cannot outrun the inevitable.

Success is more important than happiness. Nevertheless, there’s no true happiness without success, and success always leads to the most happiness possible.

Fatigue wasn’t part of the plan. It never is. It is an obstacle. I’m not telling you to burn yourself out or to never rest adequately. I’m not telling you to never be concerned by your fatigue. I’m not telling you to ignore how tired you really are. I’m only trying to shift your focus toward the fact that your aspirations aren’t arbitrary and they don’t feel better when not met in case you were too tired to try to reach them.

Your ambition doesn’t care. Self-care is king. I know. But self-care in and of itself is not an accomplishment. I know this hurts, but it’s the ugly truth. Self-care and rest may not be a total waste of time, but they are not an achievement. They do not satisfy the achievement need and hunger of the Genius Human. Even though they are needs in and of themselves. That is, you need to rest, but that is no big accomplishment, that does not give you the sense of achievement that you need to stay sane.

Please don’t design or plan your life around rest and entertainment or having fun. Please don’t decide everything based upon how fatigued you are or you’ll become after a certain amount of work.

Your north star, your perpetual goal, is achievement, not having fun or resting. Meditation is solitary confinement in case of absence of accomplishment in your life. It’s like torture or a death sentence.

Please don’t be phobic toward exerting yourself and becoming fatigued, especially mentally, from working for too long on stuff that you believe in, passionate about, is worth it, meets your needs, and you feel is the purpose of your life. Work in this case, in case you love what you do and it is the right thing for you, is the purpose of your life, is the main thing, should be the only thing that you ever care about.

Believe me, there’s nothing that compares to the amount of happiness that you get to feel or experience after having exhausted yourself entirely beyond reasonable limits of burnout doing something that falls under the category of satisfying the never ending need of the Genius Human for achievement and accomplishment.

This is true happiness. Having achieved enough. Not having rested enough.

This will only be the case if you do what you really believe your life should be about doing.

Fun fact. No one checks out testimonials. They barely check out your posts. They decide based upon how professional and all-knowing you seem to be when you address their problem. Then they check out the freebie webinar. If it’s spam they leave. If it makes it look like you might talk about their real complaints, they make the leap of faith and try your course. Don’t waste your time gathering testimonials. They care about your number of followers more than the number of testimonials. The moment you think the proof that you’re good is testimonials, the moment you walk the pathway of you have no way to prove to anybody how good you really are except through the words of random unknown people. If your work does not speak for itself, then you are really not that good. Still I believe testimonials have zero effect. It’s just placebo. People follow it because it’s strategy they believe it’ll work. They haven’t tried to do the job without resorting to testimonials. The only reason testimonials exist is because of insecurity about your work. If your work itself is not proof of how good you really are, then you’d have no option but to resort to testimonials. You know that these are curated and there are definitely people who have a negative opinion of you. Why aren’t these part of the testimonials? Of course the quality of your content is crucial. It was so basic that I didn’t need to mention it. No one will come if the content is bad. And even if they do come, it will be for the wrong reasons. I meant to answer why you’re still struggling and stuck despite there being nothing wrong with your content. To further clarify that, check out my content here for example. There’s no explanation for the low engagement except the decreased reach, which in turn is due to the low number of followers. No controversy about that.

Yes, they are not nothing, but they are massively overrated, and they mean that your business model is short term and of high turnover. Testimonials from 4 years ago for example don’t indicate that your course is still relevant in 2021. Just don’t waste your time gathering them and making the entirety of your business contingent upon them. Instead, build your personal brand, and keep growing and adding to both your paid and free pillar or main content.

If you don’t need testimonials, you wouldn’t try to amass them. You will only need them if there’s no way one can form a positive opinion about you except through them.

Creativity isn’t screwing up your life. Resisting it is.

Does creativity increase your depression? Or does depression increase your creativity?

Neither. It’s just that after you create something huge, your mind gets into a state of not wanting to think about what you have accomplished recently. Also it stays occupied with processing the new material and everything you’ve done and have been through during the creation time. This makes you too occupied to be able to focus on anything, even entertainment. After the processing is done you start feeling you’re above the clouds. Creativity isn’t a pathway for depression. It’s the cure. Learn to rest, not to quit.

I seem to be the only one on earth who is pushing the narrative of embracing perfectionism to the fullest, because perfectionism is synonymous with the authentic self’s passion and desires.

What other people demonize by calling the number one obstacle that is holding them back from starting before they’re ready or one of the major causes of their procrastination tendencies or habits, is in fact just their innate desires, impulses, aspirations, and urges to get maximum, full, or at least most of the reward that could be received or reached from accomplishing a certain outcome or objective.

Perfectionism is not something we induce. It comes to us. If we ignore, bypass, or suppress it, we will only be overriding or opposing our own true nature in favor of finishing stuff faster even at the expense of its quality, just because they told us to do so.

Never has perfectionism ever decreased anyone’s progress.

This is just them hesitating, making excuses, lowering their standards, having no problem with embracing their own incompetence instead of being ambitious enough to want to improve enough to have what it takes to meet the qualifications of succeeding at such goal, achievement, or type of work.

Everything is good the way it is. You just need to be more grateful. Why change anything. A few seconds later they turn around and tell you it’s all your fault, and you need to take one hundred percent responsibility for everything in your life. Conflicting information is what renders you paralyzed. And then they call this analysis paralysis, and recommend that you just start before you’re ready. No qualifications required. No questions asked. Everybody can do it. So can you. After that they warm you up a little bit by throwing a stunning notion that everything is just mindset. And that you need to alter the way you think in order to be happier, because who cares about success now when the definition has been rewritten into being all about happiness.

You think aiming for some degree of excellence is better than succumbing to perfectionism?

On the contrary, there could always be something else that could’ve been done to enhance the quality of your work. Your work could always have been better if you did this or that. Aiming for a certain level of excellence will make you unable to leave now anyway regardless of the quality. That is why everybody hates perfectionism. When you aim for perfect from the start, you don’t keep trying to increase the quality to meet a certain standard. You aim for everything to be epic from the start to the best of your ability. In this case you will never have a hard time leaving the piece of art, content, or your work, because even though it’s not the best, or perfect by any standard, you did everything in your power from the start to make it not suck. You went all in. And now you can leave it without feeling bad about it. Being at peace with your work is priceless, and is always worth the effort.

Stop denying yourself reward. Don’t turn your creative endeavor into labor.

Fix your limiting beliefs concerning money and being rich.

There’s something you should really know.

The number one reason you might be – not definitely are – stuck in life is the small amount of money you have in your bank account.

You gotta understand that it’s not your job, not your marriage, not the government, …etc.

If you had a bigger amount of money in the bank, none of that would be an obstacle.

You’d take your time to complete the training that would make your resume look good enough to qualify you for the job.

You’d have no problem with getting a divorce, if no other peaceful method can keep your marriage intact.

You’d move to another country.

You’d have no problem taking years to understand the concept of following your passion, and how could you monetize your passion in the end, instead of rushing your business through the cliff and quitting prematurely.

It’s not about money being the answer to all your problems aside from health.

It’s about the fact that any excuse that you virtually can give as to why you’re trapped where you are right now, if you dig deep enough, you’d find the lack of money at the bottom of it all, staring at you with an evil smile.