Weekly Snapshot: Loss. Recovery. Expectations.

Hi friends.

Loss or potential loss is a terrible feeling. Loss is formless, like water. It can be in the form of losing a friend, losing a loved one, losing a client, or losing yourself. Whatever it may be, it hurts.

What hurts even more is the impending loss: loss you know will come, but when, is what you don’t know. And I believe Seneca said it right, “We suffer more in our imagination than in reality”. I guess it’s the wait, the imagination, or a face-off with your weakness as a human. It’s unpleasant.

I don’t have a universal remedy for dealing with loss, but I know that “it too shall pass”. I think it’s not the loss (itself) that hurts, but the impact on life and a forced change of behavior are the real killers.

Our lives are weird and cyclical. We don’t explicitly learn how to deal with loss, but with over thousands of years of evolution, our DNA now comes with instructions to help us recover. Although every time we experience a loss, it hurts us as if we’re going through it for the first time, but as with every time, we recover from the loss.

Time, our villain leading up to a loss, suddenly becomes our friend. And with each passing day, dealing with loss becomes easy.

Let me confess that the scar of a loss never truly goes away. It’s always there, lurking in the background, reminding us of the time we lost, but what else would make us more human than our ability to hurt and remember it?

Poetic.

💪 Wins of the week

1. I demonstrated commitment. This week brought many challenges, but when you commit and have the will to get shit done, you deliver!
2. I published my article and YouTube video (watch the video at the end of this newsletter)

🧐 Challenges & Learnings

1. > 3 Cigarettes - stressful week calls for extreme stress-relief methods. 🚬 kinda works.
2. I need to improve my teamwork skills. I can get stuff done alone, but I’m missing out on achieving more by engaging key stakeholders early in the process and building a win-win.
3. I’m proscrasting - lack of clarity? motivation? I don’t know, but I felt it creeping into my week quite frequently.

🎯 Goals for Next Week

Next week is all about increasing teamwork and income:

1. Work on building another income stream: bringing in another $3,000 per month.
2. Engage key stakeholders at work early in the process. Remove assumptions and build collectively.
3. Publish 1 article and 1 YouTube video.
4. Eat well and take care of my mental health.
5. Gym: 4 days.

📖 My Readings

(Same as last week) Just a few chapters left for Influence by Robert B Cialdini. Next up is Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb!

🎬 My Latest Video

How to Turn Risk into Reward | Lessons from Bezos & Munger: This video is your guide to becoming a master risk-taker, turning fear and uncertainty into pathways for unparalleled rewards!

✍️ Quote of the Week

"A majority of life's errors are caused by forgetting what one is really trying to do."
— Charlie Munger

Till next time.

Raheel Ahmad