I subscribe to an email thread called Prsuit, and I found today’s email to be particularly interesting. You can find it here – https://prsuit.substack.com/p/say-what?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email&utm_source=copy.
The email talked about the difference between what your brain tells you and what your soul tells you, and how each entity is conditioned to tell you different things. Your brain is often rational and optimistic, whereas your soul has large dreams and aspirations.
This entire blog really resonated with me, and I realized that I may listen to my brain more than my soul. Think about when you are considering taking on a new hobby. Your brain is telling you “It’s too hard” or “I’ll never figure this out”; whereas, your soul may be dreaming of the day that you succeed at this new hobby and are able to take it to a professional level.
As humans we often listen to what our brains are telling us, in comparison to our soul, because we are afraid of failure and don’t want to put in the work that it takes to succeed. We don’t want to go through 100 failures to reach one success. We would rather take the easy way out and admire someone else’s successes, looking at how well they do something without considering how many times they had to fail before they got there. Today I encourage you to finally take that leap of faith and try something that you have always dreamed of doing, but that you have always put off.
For the longest time, I thought it would be really cool to learn music production, specifically EDM. I had fantasies deep down of being able to make really cool music and learn to DJ, but I always told myself how hard it was, and how many other people have the same dreams or try to do the same things. Besides being discouraged because of this, my extreme lack of any music knowledge (playing or creating) made me extremely hesitant to try. One day, I finally decided to just download FL studio (a music production software), open up youtube, and start learning. It’s been about six months, but I’m so glad I did it. It’s a fun side hobby to do when I am bored, there’s no pressure, it’s on my own time, and I’m really starting to get the hang of it.
If you decide to try something new for the first time, go in with minimal expectations, and realize that it will take a very long time to reach a professional level. I get discouraged sometimes when I compare the songs that I make to professional songs that I listen to; but, then I remind myself that these songs are professional songs for a reason, and if mine sounded that good, I would be professional too.
The moral of what I am trying to say is that knowledge is power. Trying something new often provides a really large confidence boost, especially if it is something that you have been putting off for a long time. Learning something new is a lot more mentally stimulating and productive compared to bingeing the same Netflix series for the fourth time, and there is nothing more exhilarating than finally succeeding after failing so many times!
Matt Morrow 