025 | I just polished an essay. I threw it out and wrote this instead.

Hi.

I always write my essays on Tuesdays. I did the same thing this week.

I drafted and refined the essay on Tuesday. I polished it on Wednesday. It took me about six hours to write.

I decided to throw it in the trash.

It’s not that the essay was bad - I actually thought it was purty darn good. But something about it didn’t sit right with me. The essay didn’t capture how I really felt. It felt like a performance, scripted by someone else.

So instead, I’m going to spend an hour of my Saturday morning writing something that actually captures what I’m thinking about.

Here it goes.

I’ve built a destructive habit of tying my self-worth to the success of my business. After spending 9 months doing virtually nothing but building it, I’ve started to tie an identity to its success in a way that had become unhealthy.

Every incomplete sale started to feel like a personal slight. When I have a week of zero sales, I’d let it affect my mood for the whole weekend. A lost client could send me spiraling into dark places I never needed to visit.

I think there’s a piece of my brain that decided this was a useful tactic in achieving my goals. As if I wouldn’t have the drive to keep going unless I tied it to my own survival. Maybe this strategy, while somewhat toxic, might’ve been useful if my survival truly did depend on it. But it doesn’t.. It’s simply an illusion I wouldn’t let myself unsee.

What makes it useless is what I’m channeling these feelings into: creativity and novelty as a substrate for human connection.

Creation, at its best, comes from a state of abundance. It comes from patience, care, and allowing something to be as it currently is. Creation gets squashed when it’s churned out on an arbitrary timeframe, or becomes the purpose for meeting so-and-so metric.

We don’t criticize a seedling for not becoming a full grown oak tree within the self-made timeframe we assign it. And the seedling doesn’t beat itself up for not yet being an oak tree either.

The seedling is perfect as it is.

It would be silly to drown it with water simply because we know plants need water. It would be foolish to burn it with excess sunlight because we know it won’t thrive in darkness.

But that’s what we do to our projects all too often.

It’s what I’ve mistakenly done to my own business, and I’ve finally become conscious enough to push back.

Luckily, you all have made it easy for me to prevent that feeling from carrying into my writing. I still don’t have a formal offer on my Substack - not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because it just felt too early. I started writing at a New Year’s Resolution. To understand what I really think, and how to communicate it with others.

I love writing. The moment I view it as a chore is when I’m afraid I will begin to resent it. I never want that to happen.

On Tuesday, I wrote an interesting piece, but there was no love behind it. It was the first essay that felt like I was checking off a box. Doing for the sake of getting it done.

It had no heart. So it ended up in the trash bin.

Completing creative tasks to be done with them is a spiritually disconnected way of imagining the world, especially considering I don’t actually need to create anything. Nobody is showing up at my door with a pitchfork and torch because I didn’t break down the definitions of success and failure this week. The only pressure I’m under is the pressure I create for myself.

So I’m writing this article, directly from my brain to the page, in the span of an hour, simply because I wanted to. I already had an article, but I felt compelled to write this instead. My true thoughts , from the heart, no pressure added. No filter to distort it. No AI-revisions to pour the wet concrete of hollow buzzword language over the blossoming garden of my psyche.

For that reason, this essay is scrappy. My apologies.

This post is mine, and I wrote it simply because it was what I wanted to do.

Next week will be no different.

Thank you for being here. See you next Sunday.

-KPG