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“Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of things.”
Epictetus
On a run, I heard a podcast where Owen Fitzpatrick talked about his depression.
He said the dark thoughts came without a voice he could argue with. “It didn’t feel like I had an inner critic,” he said. “It felt like this was reality.”
He calls it inner propaganda.
Fitzpatrick has been to North Korea and Afghanistan. In Rwanda he interviewed people about the genocide. He says the tricks used on people there work inside our heads too.
While he talked, I thought of my highlight reel.
It’s a list of wins, based on Tim Ferriss’s jar of awesome. Each night Ferriss wrote down something good from that day and dropped the slip in the jar. When he felt down, he read the slips.
If a low mood can sell me a bad story about myself, the list can sell me a good one. That’s personal positive propaganda.
I keep it in the same journal as my 100 Rules.
Each morning and most nights, I read it.
A blue belt in jiu-jitsu is in there.
So is building Trends.vc.
So is writing an essay each day for nearly 300 days.
Reading it puts me in a better mood right away. I close the journal more confident than I opened it.
Before you believe your inner propaganda, read a list of what you’ve done.
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What wins could you add to a list for hard days?
