#001: Square One

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Welcome to my first weekly newsletter! I wrote about 58 drafts until I had to suck it up and just hit send. There’s no way around the discomfort. I shall embrace discomfort. Comfort = bad. Discomfort = good. Let’s punch fear in the face shall we?

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what 2020 did.

It’s probably safe to say many of us had a rough few years in one way or another since that infamous day, March 11, 2020. The pandemic was declared official and the domino effect that followed hit every aspect of life imaginable. For me, COVID was the catalyst that sent me down a path of introspection. This path included months of stress-eating, a severe depletion of energy, a year of quiet quitting my job, and a couple of years of my wife, Erin, talking me off the employment ledge (all while figuring out life with a newborn and a 3-year-old).

Quarantine held a mirror up to me and I didn’t like who I saw. I was well into my 30s and felt like I had wasted so many years. I was nowhere close to where I wanted to be spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and physically. In all my people-pleasing efforts I left myself behind, and found myself overwhelmed with all the work needed to be done within me.

So I did what any man-child would do in the face of such a challenge: I sulked in hopelessness…

…But not for too long, thankfully. I started filling my mind with podcasts and YouTube videos on anything and everything I thought could possibly get me out of this rut. A self-help smorgasbord. I would have bouts of motivation to just “get better,” in the broadest sense of the term. But if felt like a crawl on the spectrum of progress, so I’d sink back to emotional oblivion. Some evenings, I would efficiently clean and tidy our place, but I wouldn’t sleep. Other nights, I would sleep plenty, but the morning would be a rushed stumble getting the girls out the door for school. Everything about bettering my life felt like spinning plates I couldn’t keep up all at once.

I didn’t understand why my striving wasn’t enough for me to change. My life perpetually fell back to square one.

Then I came across Atomic Habits by James Clear. I was a bit jaded with all the self-help material out here, but I still gave this book a shot and its foundational quote hit me like a bag of books.

The level of my systems. It’s a concept so simple, yet I needed James to hit me between the eyes with it during a pandemic. Herein lies my first solution to my Pandora’s box of tribulations. Desire alone could not pull me up to where I wanted to be. The key was in the small habits and systems that made up my day-to-day. This changed my approach to self-improvement: focus on the process, not the result.

This was the game-changer in finally moving the needle of progress in my personal life. Insert victory man-grunts here.

And it has been especially enlightening in regards to raising children. There have been times of frustration and discouragement at the seemingly distant milestones: first steps, potty, reading, etc. But now that they’ve been reached, it feels like I missed delighting in every baby step.

That’s my encouragement for us all. Let’s not miss the process. It’s easy for social media, peers, and internal dialogue to discourage us with a faraway finish line. But let’s not forget what life is truly about: Appreciating the journey to the peaks and through the valleys.

Have an enjoyable week!

-Omar X x O o x o

🎧 Podcast Episode Of The Week

🎤 Dad’s Got Jokes

My all-time favorite comic strip with some commentary on the self-help industry.