What is evidence based living?

I’m a big believer in practicing what I preach,

I just recorded a video on evidence-based living, which is my philosophy for using small, decisive, uncomfortable actions in order to determine your priorities and the way you’re gonna move forward and to gather evidence that substantiates making large life altering decisions instead of ever focusing on those and using thoughts.

The video was…

Not fantastic.

I sound nasally.

My hair was kind of weirdly tucked outta my beanie.

The audio wasn’t perfect.

There’s probably cars driving around in the background.

And posting it made me a bit uncomfortable.

(Honestly, the entire content process makes me uncomfortable.

All this is not really my jam.

But it’s a part of the process, so I will continue it.)

Not going back and wanting to rerecord this a hundred times to try and make it perfect is uncomfortable.

Because I want to put out a fantastic good product.

(I like doing things well)

But you know what?

I pressed end to the recording and I thought,”Yeah, not perfect, probably good enough.”

Because you know what I’ll learn from this process?:

How to make better audio on the fly when I’m recording a video,

Where to sit in the frame of the video

How to settle myself down when I have a thought in my head that I want to share but don’t want to come out too fast or with lots of filler words

Amongst many other things

Each time I iterate with an imperfect video,

I get more experience with all these insights.

The difference between this and the other philosophy, which is thinking and deriving the plan of action from thought, is that if I did that, I would spend the next month just thinking about making content.

Instead, I will get to the same place time-wise (say, a month from now) but instead of thoughts, I will have a bunch of content produced, I will have new clients because they came in from the things that I was saying that I was being vulnerable with, I will have new insight over how to write, produce, and publish better content.

I will have a month’s worth of imperfect actions that led me forward and likely got me more specific, more accurate, detailed results about ways I should be changing my behavior or my actions or my content as opposed to just fucking thinking and doing nothing.

Instead of just mental masturbation.

The point?

Use as many uncomfortable small actions as you can in order to drive yourself forward and identify what actions you actually should be taking and how you should be taking them.

You’ve probably done enough thinking already.

Stop.

Take more action.

Identify small actions that make you slightly uncomfortable and then do as many of them as possible.

As long as they’re aligned through your values, I believe that this philosophy will take you substantially further than trying to think through your problems.

And if you’re a systems minded engineering person like I am, that’s probably one of your biggest struggles.

You’re just not allowing yourself to take as many actions as you would like and then you end up overthinking because you haven’t taken action.

And then because you’re overthinking, you don’t take action.

And then because you don’t take actions, you get anxious about the lack of results you’re getting or the feeling of being behind that you have because you haven’t taken actions (you overthink more).

The answer is not more thought, it is more small, uncomfortable, decisive actions.

P.S. I am fully aware that this email has horrendous grammar and redundancy. I’m not going to correct it. I’m going to leave it imperfect.