002 - From problem to project

You put your head on the pillow at night and you close your eyes. Despite your eyes being closed, you're nowhere near sleep.

Your mind is racing, you open your eyes. You switch positions.

You might try some breathing exercises but it's futile. Your brain keeps going back to the problem that has been stressing you out.

Now, your heart is racing, instead of slowing down to the slumbering beat of sleep.

That, my Muse, is a mind that is simply too full to handle anything objectively and is now preventing you to go into restorative mode.

Ironically, the things you fret about are exactly the things you need to let go in order to solve them. Before you start cursing me or huffing and puffing while rolling your eyes, let me explain.

Consider being someone completely different for a second. A problem arises, it needs immediate solution but many of the aspects are not in your hands.

That person sits down with their Notion workspace opened, they open their "Personal Projects" database (shoutout to SolopreneurOS, and the under the "Misc" category they add a page for their current pressing problem.

For each part of the problem, they create a subproject, and one by one, they start thinking up what can be done now to get it solved. What can't be done they write down too, at least what could be delegated or done after another task is completed.

Once a pain, now a project to solve. They let go, knowing they have the steps to work on.

If you are alive in a reality that you're constantly hyper aware of the problem, you will only see problems. It's obvious but we do that all the time, because the opposite isn't necessarily a habit for most people.

It's a lot harder for people to see themselves in a reality that isn't their own. Having access to such realities is throughly possible through social media— at least in part and indirectly. Enough to imagine themselves living that alternate reality, in any case.

They look and think: this is not for me. My life is full of __ (something negative). 

Buddhists have a saying along the lines of "everyone appears as buddhas in the eyes of the Buddha and everyone appears as pigs in the eyes of a pig". In other words, you experience the world with your state of your mind, experience, and what you're used to dealing with.

If all you deal with is hate, it's likely you will learn to behave in a hateful way to others. If you are constantly in a state of stressful fretting, it's likely you will struggle turning that off unless you make a conscious effort.

There are many ways to (sub)consciously reprogram your brain and begin to see pain and stress as projects to be tackled. I like the Notion way (surprise surprise), but I urge you to find your own.

To me, the ability to seeing it on a screen, color coding things I can do now, later, or delegate, then closing the app and going to live my life is a powerful way to slow the fretting down.

Don't get yourself used to loving the stress. Don't get yourself used to glorifying being busy all the time, like Alice in wonderland's bunny. Running everywhere and not achieving anything.

It's in moments of slow thinking, boredom, meditation (hence why people do that), moments of detachment that the solution to a problem actually arises.

If all your stresses are now all contained in a digital workspace, ready to be tackled when the opportunity to do so arises, you don't have to fret about them.

Away from your mind, all the problems can have their space to "brew". In order words, you can actually use your cognitive power to notice things you weren't noticing before because you were stressing.

You can now, consciously, intentionally, responsively schedule a moment in your day or week to work on these catastrophic things.

Go to sleep after effectively hitting X on the Notion window or sliding the app up, and your mind will be ready to handle it fresh in the morning.

"What makes music beautiful is the distance between one note and another. What makes speech eloquent is the appropriate pause between words. From time to time we should take a breath and notice the silence between sounds." - Haemin Sumin (The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down)

It's in moments of detachment and silence that you find opportunities in problems you'd never before noticed, because all your energy was spent fretting and stressing and not on actual solutions.

When you have a workspace prepared to handle such things, you can capture ideas and see the project (not a problem anymore, a solution) in front of you, you will be taken over with euphoria, which I call Systemphoria.

That sensation that you are turning the mass of chaos into something digestible, doable, and positively productive. You can use your free will to turn that stress into just that: productivity.

Or you can choose to remain with that problem and feel bad, tired, remain sleepless, cranky, which might lead to other negative, physical things.

Problems lead to problems. A problem turned into a project, however, will lead you to the path that you chose for yourself in the first place.

Persistent problems lead to persistent thoughts of problems. Thoughts lead to habits. Habitualness creates mood. Mood slowly creates your personality. Problematic thoughts lead to problematic habits, and creates a problematic mood with a problematic personality.

Problems aren't problems. Someone called it that first and you believed it, so it persists that way because the mind (collective minds do that too) holds on to it.

Entrepreneurs know this: for every problem, a solution exists. You just need to find it and better it, or create the solution yourself. Learn to reframe a problem, and the "problem" vanishes.

A problem turned into a project doesn't necessarily need to turn into a monetary solution — this is actually a problem in itself for me, what a conundrum. A problem turned into a projects needs to become a space. That's all. Simply, a space. On a workspace, on a paper, on a bullet journal.

Choose the weapon, so to speak, and take the stress from the emotional level into the practical, productive level in order to let go.