Winter Walk

It started to snow over here in Germany.

Snow, ice, and cold, yet sunny, it’s just beautiful to look at - those conditions make it FAR one of the best weathers to take walks in.

Winter stays one of my favorite seasons (thinking about it I don’t even have seasons I particularly dislike, as long as the sun isn’t burning the flesh of my bones at 40+ degrees celsius in the summer).

Add doing this on Saturday morning where literally not a single soul is on the streets - a few cute doggos being the exception - yeah.

Make for a few of the best moments of my day.

And so I went for a walk this morning, desperately trying to come up with a half-decent email idea, since I’m once again running low on love stories to share (turns out they’re by far the most popular with you judging by the responses I’m getting lol).

Because you know those moments when 12 different ideas randomly hit you at once? That’s what sometimes happens to me some afternoons - yet the next day I discard them all as crap.

Happens, genius ideas can’t be forced.

Anyway, I’m running low on email ideas, and walks are (according to various internet specialists) one of the best ways to generate ideas.

But not necessarily in the way you might think.

Instead of ruminating, obsessing about and trying to force ideas, I try to stay more present. Let ‘brilliance’ strike me in a way. Sounds unreliable, it is, but my best ideas come to me in the most random situations - situations where I’m present.

Not thinking.

So I was watching my own breath form smoke clouds in the cold, and played one of the coolest games you could play (as an 8-year-old at least):

Pretending to smoke.

And that’s when it hit me: Smoking is so useless.

True, but the next thought that came was completely unrelated and had absolutely nothing to do with anything of the above - which is why I’m saying brilliance takes time to form:

Clarity is everything.

Wow.

Very controversial take I know - but irony aside, in the past days I struggled with clarity more than I cared to admit to myself.

Launching a giveaway that essentially flopped metric-wise (but I got some amazing positive responses from you guys <3), not even being able to figure out my own highest priority tasks and worst of all?

Not even my long-term vision or goals seemed to make sense anymore.

A big reason, probably even the biggest reason why you set goals, make plans, determine a priority, or decide on lever-moving tasks every day - they serve one purpose:

Clarity.

Without clarity, you’re lost. And this slight feeling of lostness, of unknowingness surely won’t be a stranger to anyone reading this.

What I realized was this:

If anything from long-term plans to daily actions feels unclear, or even just slightly unaligned, the entire clarity tower topples.

Inaction kicks in. Procrastination starts. Performance plummets.

Your mind starts worrying about things that aren’t even relevant to you in the slightest.

It’s why I decided to start to patch up any unclarity I could - in my case, my long-term vision was simply out of whack and outdated.

This isn’t the easiest thing to do. Since goals, plans and priorities can change at every turn you make in life, the best thing to hope for is to sustain the clarity you create every once in a while for as long as possible.

Here’s your reminder for today:

When you feel like everything around you is starting to crumble, sometimes the most productive thing to do is to create clarity again. Often you don’t need to make entirely new plans, you need to remind yourself where you’re heading.

Remind yourself of your goals.

Remind yourself of your priority.

Remind yourself of all your plans.

And figure out where exactly the “lostness” stems from. Patch it up. Set clear targets again.

Execution is flawed when you don’t know where you’re going or why you’re executing in the first place.

Just promise me not to fall into a constant procrastination trap of endless planning and overthinking - in the end, action creates the most clarity.

If you’re struggling to find enough clarity or direction to get your best work done, reply to this email with a bit about your current situation.

I always find it helps the most to talk about it with somebody :)

Thanks for reading

See you soon,

Henri