Hey guys,

Welcome to my first ever weekly email. Feels a bit weird to be writing one of these, but I’ve heard that anything that’s worth doing feels weird initially, so it’s fine. Of course, even stuff that isn’t worth doing feels weird initially - guess we’ll just treat this as an experiment.

I want to talk to you this week about Happiness. Almost a month and a half ago, when I started writing my book TL;DR - a book about productivity by a procrastination master as a personal challenge. I thought it was going to be solely about productivity as the title might suggest. The more I dive into the subject the more I get to know myself and experience new levels of emotional state awareness.​

Before, when I used to work on any project, I was mostly driven by the excitement about the future and how big this thing I'm working on might be. And you probably know from experience that this excitement doesn't last forever. Once it fades away, we either quit or we pull the self-discipline card and try to (miserably) push through.​

In his amazing TED Talk, Harvard professor Dan Gilbert describes what he calls The Impact Bias—our “tendency to overestimate the length or the intensity of future emotional states”. This explains why we -or most of us- think that all the happiness lies in the future. Once I finish this book, launch that project or make X dollars in MRR, I will finally be happy forever.

If you are working on a business, trying to bootstrap one, or just starting, stop attaching your happiness to the future outcomes. The best time to be happy is now, in the process. Building a business is hard and challenging but that's what makes it fun, and if you don't enjoy it now, you probably won't later.

Keep shipping, be happy, and have a great week!

Jamal

Quote of the Week

“To write a great book, you must first become the book.” — Naval Ravikant

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PS: Please do reply to this email if you have anything to add / any questions. I quite enjoy replying to comments/emails and get to know you personally. Please hit the <reply> button and let me know what you thought of this email. if you have a spare few seconds, I’d love to hear your thoughts on what was useful about it and what could be changed. Thanks <3