Keep One Thing You’re Not Trying to Monetize
Years ago I enjoyed woodworking. Small things, boxes and shelves, nothing ambitious. People liked them. Someone suggested I sell them. I did, briefly, and within six months I’d stopped making boxes for the pleasure of it, because every box was now a product with a margin and a customer and a deadline. I was good at the business side. The woodworking died of it. It took me years to understand what I’d done.
Everything becomes a project
Ambitious people have a particular disease: the inability to do anything without optimising it. The walk becomes training. The reading becomes research. The hobby becomes a side hustle. Each one makes sense in isolation. Together, they leave you with a life in which nothing is done for its own sake, and that life, however productive, is exhausting in a way that no holiday fixes.
What the unmonetized thing does
It gives you one place where the standard is enjoyment, not output. Where being bad at it is fine. Where nobody’s watching and no number goes up. The mind needs that the way the body needs sleep, and for the same reason: it’s where the repair happens. I’ve noticed that my best ideas for the work arrive during the thing that isn’t work, and they arrive precisely because I wasn’t trying to have them.
How to protect it
Decide in advance that this one thing is off-limits. Say it out loud if you have to. When someone suggests you sell it, teach it, post about it, or turn it into content, you have a ready answer: no, this one’s mine. The suggestion will come, repeatedly, from people who mean well. It’s a compliment. Decline it anyway.
Don’t track it. No logs, no streaks, no progress charts. The instant you measure it, it becomes a goal, and goals have a way of becoming jobs. The woodworking was fine until I started counting boxes.
Let yourself be mediocre. The point isn’t to improve, though you probably will. The point is that improving doesn’t matter. Playing a instrument badly for your own ears is a complete activity. It needs no audience and no arc.
What mine is now
I’m not going to say, because saying it in public is the first step toward it becoming something. That’s partly the point. It’s a small thing, done alone, with no result anyone will ever see, and it’s the most reliably restorative hour of my week.
If you’ve lost yours
Think back to what you did before you were ambitious. Before everything had to earn its place. There was probably something. It’s probably still available, and it’s probably been waiting, slightly offended, for you to come back without a spreadsheet.
This week
Pick one thing. Declare it off the books. Do it badly, privately, and without counting. Then notice what it does to everything else.
Launch list
Be there on day one.
One email when the book opens on Kickstarter. Nothing else. Already reading the book? Your Cheat Sheet is at wisdomdeck.com/free.
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The book itself — 40 laws in ten parts, 320 pages, each ending with The Work — is funded first on Kickstarter.