Greetings from Charlotte 👋
Hey, It’s been a long time since we talked here.
Life’s been pretty busy. We had our best sales month and I took 235 sales calls in Q1. Still having fun but quickly learning lifestyle inflation is real. It’s easy to spend more when you earn more.
A lot of people warned me of this but I didn’t really take it seriously. Now, the new goal for Q2 is to save 60-75% of each paycheck.
Hope you had a great start to the year.
Start:
Today I wanna share with you why I decided to stop smoking cigarettes.
Sorry mom if you’re reading this. I promise I don’t really smoke cigarettes. But it’s been a back and forth habit ever since I went to Europe. Mostly like 10 months off, 1 month on.
But recently I had an incident that made me decide to go cold turkey for good.
Here it goes:
This one time I went with my little sister to a bar on Long Island.
We had no expectations but our plan was to hang with her friend Joe and enjoy my weekend in town. So we went to town, turned a corner and bumped into this group of girls from our high school.
It was great to see them but soon we left because I was tired. On the way home, my sister and Joe pointed out that this girl I was talking to seemed interested in me.
Well I was interested in her too, but the idea of pursing anything left me a little scared. So that seemed like a good reason to go back and test the waters. We ended up going to another bar, and she and I danced together until the bouncer made us all leave. It was really great.
But then something happened that gave me an epiphany about petty vices like cigarettes.
In short, I drove everyone home at the end of the night. But instead of dropping my little sister off before the girl (sorry Kirsten) I dropped the other girl off without having a moment to say goodbye by ourselves. Look, it wasn’t that serious but I was flying back to Charlotte the next day and it would’ve been nice to speak alone.
Anyways, I got home to a text kinda like “you should’ve dropped me off last.”
She was right. How did I overlook that? I couldn’t really understand how obvious that seemed in hindsight, until it hit me.
The only reason I didn’t drop her off last was because I was fixated on having a cigarette! I know that sounds crazy. But in the car, the only thing on my mind was having a cigarette in the rain under the gazebo. Pretty much nothing else.
It was a stupid little vice but it had blinded me to the real opportunity in front of me.
The lesson I took away from this is that vice blinds.
It blinds you from seeing reality clearly. Maybe it’s a personality thing or genetics, but I’ve found they trick me into momentarily valuing the vice above all else. Ever since I realized this, I can’t unsee it in my life.
The cool thing is this frame also lends itself to acceptance and improvement.
Because when you desire an obviously stupid vice like cigarettes or instagram, you can just assume your mind is blind. And then you can use this simple framework that a coach once gave me to repattern the blindness:
Notice
Accept
Reframe
Notice: I desire a cigarette.
Accept: I accept that I’m probably blind to reality right now because this compulsion has captured my mind.
Reframe: I choose to do myself a favor and view my compulsion as a cue to overcome my blindness.
So now the thing I’m working on is removing little vices. The most consuming in my life right now seem to be nicotine (Zyns are deadly!) and screentime so that’s the priority.
I’ll update you how it goes.
Thank you for reading I hope this inspired you to remove stupid little vices so you can see reality more clearly.
Have a great week.
Your honesty and insight are not only refreshing but useful and helpful!
Great read…I also have a similar relationship with cigarettes that I’m learning to navigate. Thanks for the insight!