The art of digging your heels in

Not giving up at the first sign of turbulence

Hello! Some quick updates before we dive in:

Those of you reading each week are watching this newsletter evolve in real time, and I’m having a lot of fun experimenting with it! I have 3 updates for you:

1. Instead of doing 3 free newsletters a month, I’m committing to weekly.

2. I messed up with the link to ask questions for the advice column (oops), so I’m releasing that one in a few days, and you can ask (or resubmit) questions here.

3. After getting your input on last week’s post, I am adding a monthly recommendations newsletter for paid subscribers, with things I enjoyed watching, listening to, learning about and looking at. That’ll come out later this month.

Norway, 2023

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Recently, I’ve found myself having to learn how to do a lot of new things on a daily basis. Learning is fun in manageable doses when you can stop when you’re tired and go at whatever pace you choose. Learning is less fun when there is time pressure, when you don’t see results right away, when there are negative consequences to doing something poorly, and when there are a thousand other things demanding your attention as well.

Few people willingly or consciously put themselves in the latter situation. Nobody says to themselves, “I want to feel overwhelmed!” It’s just that in life, sometimes taking the next step is not a step, it’s a leap. Moving to a new country or into a new home, getting a new job or changing career path, learning to speak a new language, or starting a family – it’s not like you can just learn 1 or 2 new things until you’re up to speed. Part of what you’re signing up for, consciously or not, is a period of discomfort.

There should be a disclaimer that says something like: “If you take this next step, you may feel like an idiot for a long time!! You’re not gonna be good at this for a while.”

Of course, we don’t go through life receiving disclaimers. You realize you’re in deeper than you thought only when suddenly you can’t touch the ocean floor anymore. Uh oh. Can I go back now? No? Oh boy.

I guess I’m thinking a lot about this recently because I’m now in my late 20s and being an adult suddenly seems more difficult. I’m in the middle of one of those leaps if you will.

When we see people succeed, we see the outside, we see the result of a lot of effort, preparation and patience and we don’t usually see what kind of headwinds and turbulence they experienced on the way there… I’m way more interested in that second part, in what happens on the inside. That decision you and I have to make every time things start falling apart, way before there are any visible signs of “success”, way before there are any results to show. That’s the part I’m interested in.

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Last week, I tried power washing the two floor mats I have, which go to the front and back entrances of my house.

I’ve never power-washed anything before, it’s one of about a thousand things I’m doing for the first time since moving to the countryside.

So naturally I had to learn how to set up the machine and hook it up to the water. Once I did that – and it took me an embarrassing amount of time I might add – I thought the actual power-washing itself was going to take about 5 minutes. 10 minutes max. (I don’t know where these pie in the sky time estimates keep coming from but one day I’ll learn to stop doing this.)

Well, I came to discover just how much dirt gets absorbed by these mats, and let me tell you, it’s an almost incomprehensible amount. It’s like they’ve been imbued with the same magical energy of Hermione’s bag once she put the Undetectable Extension Charm on it.

10 minutes in, the water was still coming out dark brown like the Seine pre-Olympics. I thought to myself, “why can’t anything be quick and easy out here?” and I have this feeling of wanting to give up. I’m tired, I don’t wanna deal with this right now.

So I was left with a decision:

1. Give up (accept these filthy mats or buy replacements) OR

2. Roll up my sleeves and wrestle this bitch.

I was freezing, so I went inside, grabbed a proper winter coat, and proceeded to spend the next 45 minutes doing battle, and another 45 to put everything away, shower and thaw. I’m relatively happy with how they turned out, even though I think it’s literally impossible to get all of the dirt out. They’re floor mats after all. And I’m pretty sure they had decades of dirt in them. Also I live in a place where there’s dirt everywhere, so my relationship with it is slowly changing.

What I’m really happy about however, was how I felt about the whole experience: I couldn’t stop thinking about that moment I decided to lock in and do whatever it took to clean the mats, despite it going way above and beyond what I thought I’d need to do. It felt good, it felt like I wasn’t acting like a victim to the situation anymore.

It’s like I enter a different mode when I actively decide to face a challenge instead of do the bare minimum (or nothing at all).

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I am convinced that it is in this mode that real change happens in life. I’ve had to enter that mode to do anything of value in my life, I have to go there almost every time I make one of my videos, I’ve had to go there whenever I’ve moved homes, I went there when I was actively running my podcast, every time I went on a run while training for a marathon.

I have a bizarre visual for this mode in my head: I can see myself gripping a thick rope, and I’m pulling it like I am in a game of tug of war (that metaphor again!). I dig my heels into the sand and most notably: I have the expression of a jester on my face: I’m relishing the challenge. The challenge doesn’t fatigue me, it energizes me.

In that mode, it’s suddenly a game, a game that can even sometimes be enjoyed (I cannot say that is always the case however…). In that mode, I’m able to tap into a massive reservoir of reserve energy that I was previously unaware of.

I don’t even fully understand how this works inside of myself, which is why I want to write about it. I’m just discovering that it’s an option. I can be dogged in my persistence, and even though I am wildly incompetent, by virtue of sticking with it, I can outlast the storm.

This is the art of digging your heels in and nothing in my 27 years of life has led me to believe that anyone doesn’t have access to this, whatever it is.

It’s a subtle position to be in: you’re not just bulldozing, you’ve gotta properly pace yourself, properly take breaks.

On big scary projects, like moving into and fixing up this house, and being confronted with the magnitude of the work in front of me, the visual in my mind is a little different: I’m still gripping the rope but now it’s pulling me through the mud.

Still, the one constant is that I don’t let go of that rope. I often feel worn down, but in that case, you get a good nights sleep and you tackle it all again tomorrow.

I don’t think giving up on something is bad, by the way. Sometimes it’s actually the best decision you can make in a particular situation. But even then, I believe it’s better to give up with the certainty you can only really have when you properly gave something a go, don’t you think?

More on this soon, I think I'd like to continue exploring this more deeply.

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I wrote this while listening to this.