Never compromise your standards in the name of practicality.

There’s nothing more important than your happiness.

If you are one of those who are crushing it with Reels or on TikTok right now or since 2020, and you think this is why you’re winning, you seem to be ignoring one factor that helped you. Truly. I’m not saying it’s luck at all. But it’s not reels only. It’s your exceptional talent and awesome personality and vibe. Please don’t take that for granted. You are unique. To understand this further, it is fascinating to note that I get more engagement with picture posts than with reels. Way more. If reels were so special, I wouldn’t be getting 10% engagement on them, even though everybody wants me to show up more often on video.

(To clarify context, this was from a response I gave Monique from Rise with Reels on Instagram on one of her posts).

Quadruple down on what you’re good at.

The details of every step of what you do might not be enjoyable or a source of pleasure for you, but still, make sure that the overall career of yours is something that you’re truly passionate about. Again, even if there are moments during it that make you hate yourself.

You don’t have to love the entire process. Just that this is the type of career that you’d prefer over anything else in the world, and you’d even want to do it even if you cannot monetize it.

Just because it’s not sun shine and bunnies every step of the way doesn’t mean that this is not the career of choice for you, or that you don’t love or are not truly passionate about this type of career. If you weren’t, even the easy days would feel like torture or hell. You wouldn’t be able to tolerate anything about its entirety. You’d be trying to convince yourself that you should just keep doing it despite hating everything about it just for the money. It will be like hating your spouse or resenting them but staying just for the kids. You will end up waiting for time to pass quickly without you feeling it took long to pass every day or every moment you spend on this type of work so that you can get the next paycheck or earn money from this boring task, project, or business model.

Be flexible enough to be able to lower your standards when that becomes necessary.

Sometimes it makes sense to lower your standards to be able to decrease your stress levels by telling yourself it’s okay to aspire for nothing at the moment but to survive.

If you always have insane ambition you’ll not be able to chill and not stress yourself out while trying to take it easy and have fun for a while.

Still this isn’t about demonizing working all the time, or recommending giving up on your big goals, in order to avoid burnout. You just don’t have to think about work or your goals all the time, even when you’re trying to rest. You cannot accomplish that objective if you insisted upon considering lowering your standards even when you’re trying to chill for a while to be one of the deadly sins. You really have to not give a damn about your work, your goals, the betterment of the quality of your life, or success at all in order to be able to fully embrace a resting session.

Stop attacking yourself.

Think in terms of: I should add this or that to my work or creative output, instead of subtracting from them.

When you expand your work, your mind, including your mood and mental state, expands.

And when you eliminate, you tend to shrink, even in terms of feeling good.

Stop canceling stuff.

There are privileged people who have it all even if they do nothing at all all the time.

I bet you’re not one of them.

Please don’t ever think that less is more.

There’s no emptiness in you or void that you’re trying to fill.

Everything the establishment says is wrong with you is actually what’s right with you.

You need to work and be super productive to feel sane, to not be miserable, to just be normal.

Ain’t no shame in that.

Keep working every day until fatigued.

Yeah, but that’s a recipe for burnout, isn’t it?

No. Because you seem to not notice the disclaimer I’ve put up here. Until fatigued.

If you are fatigued, you shouldn’t work. Even if you woke up like that. Even if you were like that for days on end.