What do you need?

This is worth being curious about. But for starters, you need to be mindful and not distracted—sometimes, bored—in order to remember to ask yourself this question.

“Our changing moods and energy levels, and how inspired we’re feeling on any given day, are part of the hard reality we must accept in order to take effective action,” Oliver Burkeman writes. He elaborates, in parentheses, “That’s why I’m baffled by interpretations of Stoicism which suggest that while we can’t control external events, we can always control our internal responses: few things feel more outside my control than the mysterious arrival of a low mood.” 

I’ve written before, “Personal energy is the limiting constraint.” That means sometimes, so long as it doesn’t become an avoidance ritual, doing the thing that gives you energy—effectively, charging you up—is actually exactly what you need in order to do something difficult. 

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