Sunday scribbles #2: Thank you Michael Pylarczyk

After having launched my website last week, I started both my Instagram and TikTok this week. Besides interacting with friends, and following the life of a small number of interesting people on Instagram, I have no experience with how to build a strong online network. Through the regular use of Instagram and a small taste of the modelling industry in the past, I do feel slightly familiar with the app. TikTok is a different story. Let’s say this week is the first time I ever installed it on my phone. If I have to be happy that I am no longer a TikTok virgin, I don’t know, but the additional effort of using the platform after Instagram is quite low. And in engineering we learned that we have to be ‘intelligently lazy’. This does not mean you can be lazy. It means that you have to aim on the biggest outputs with the smallest inputs. Optimizing this ratio often is quite the battle. Even though I like wandering off the chosen track, especially when I’m writing, let’s get back to the main story.

Thank you Michael Pylarczyk. If you want to know who he is: google is your best friend. But very briefly: he is someone who helps people work towards living their best life. For me he is someone who appears in my own mastermind group, just as Batman. Yes, it is possible to have fictional characters, or people who have already died, in your mastermind group. After having listened to a lot of podcasts where he shares his insights, I bought his books. Though podcasts are one of my favorite revelations in recent years, I still prefer reading a book about certain subjects. With books I personally feel more invested, and thus also engaged. I am not the fastest reader, which I actually tend to see as a good thing (tip: always try to see the good in situations). It’s not about the number of pages you read per day, or the amount of books you’ve read, but about the amount of times you sat down to indulge in knowledge and ideas. Unless I am reading for pleasure, I don’t have long reading sessions. I try to increase the amount of reading sessions, instead of increasing the duration. It’s a bit like hanging a post-it on your fridge which helps you not to forget certain stuff. Repeated interaction with books like these, helps you keep your focus.

For the past weeks the focus has been: move before you’re ready. Something Michael often repeats. It is true though. If we wait to start a thing when everything feels perfect, chances are we will never start. We are constantly changing, constantly growing, so we will also keep tweaking parameters here and there. Time probably is one of most precious good we have, if not the most. We shouldn’t waste it trying to aim for perfection before we even started. We’ll miss a lot of opportunities if we do so, and failure is probably one of the best teachers in the world. So move before you’re ready, just remember Rocky Balboa’s wise words:

“It's not about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward. How much you can take and keep moving forward.”

So be ready to take some hits, cause like death and taxes they are a certainty in life, especially when you try out new things.