Stop running from difficult tasks

Hey 1,240+ friends, it’s Hannah here from Quoted Visually!

Welcome to Issue 15 of Floating Thoughts. Let’s get stuck in 👇🏻

Most of us live in relative comfort and find ourselves avoiding discomfort.

It’s a survival instinct to keep us safe.

But it's an illusion.

Too much comfort is not in our best interest, because if everything is easy, then we're not being challenged.

Easy tasks don’t demand our mental attention like difficult ones. We can start to disengage from the things that make us feel alive.

But doing hard things becomes an opportunity for us to grow.

It is through challenges that we can thrive and feel a sense of meaning and purpose. It pays to avoid wrapping ourselves up in layers of bubble wrap and to actively seek out new challenges.

In the vein of my collab with Sonal Bhaskaran, maybe we will see that the thing we are running from is not so scary at all?

How to do hard things

The easiest way to do hard things is to change our attitude towards them.

“Starting a business is hard” - said entrepreneur, Jodie Cook, on Ali Abdaal's podcast.

Sometimes when faced with something we find hard, we can start to tell ourselves that it is just us that finds it hard.

And so *duh* we should “take the hit” and quit while we are ahead!

*Reality check*, as Jodie shares, business is hard. We should acknowledge that the tasks we’re facing are hard. 

❌ Becoming successful isn’t about finding everything easy.

✅ It is about not quitting when things get hard!!

✅ It is about getting better at dealing with hard things.

We can’t eliminate problems. Once we figure out how to solve one problem, sure enough, another will pop up.

But we can believe in our own ability to get through!

Avoiding procrastination

Dr Andrew Huberman shared something very powerful in this podcast.

For example, if you find cold showers the worst, take one in these moments!

Then when we sit down to do the not-so-hard but still hard task, it will be easier. The friction will have been removed and it will be a downhill cruise from there.

🗞️ Update

Is it me or have these last two weeks come around fast?

I enjoyed a long weekend in Barcelona with my mum, which was needed.

But I killed two birds with one stone and FINALLY got to meet my first-ever creator friend in person and it felt awesome!! 🦆

I realised a few things meeting Ash Lamb:

• It pays to make the effort to see people in real life.

• One conversation in person can carry more weight and insight than multiple conversations over messages.

• Social media is a means to an end, it is not the final goal.

• It can be tempting to live too much in the ‘2-dimensional world’ and forget that everything happens out there in the ‘3-dimensional world’.

I think we all doom scroll and spend more time than we'd like online, and I can feel all this screen time impacting my eyesight *eeeek*

Ash has even ditched his smartphone for one that doesn’t distract him, and while many of us are not willing to do this, I do think it pays to carve out no-phone time, limiting the time window that we use our phones.

Finally, THE SHOP…

Guess what, the portrait calendar had a production error and the 2nd batch did too!! But after much stress, batch 3 was perfect 🫠

But as of now, all of my outstanding pre-orders have been shipped. Thank goodness for that 🎉

I received this kind comment and could not have felt more seen:

Honestly, it’s a crazy ride, but the calendars are arriving in your hands now and posts like the ones below are really giving me life:

🔔 If you are planning on getting one, get one now, there is limited stock❗️

To say thank you for being here, I have a code: Closefriends10 🤍

I also made an accessible PDF version with 2023 spreads that you can print at home and start using right away.

That’s a wrap. Thanks for being here!

Feel free to reply to this email if you have any questions, requests or feedback. I will respond at my earliest opportunity.

Big love,

Hannah aka Quoted Visually x

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