blogga from another brotha

I just read this on my brother's blog, and it got me psyched:

On Being Glass Half Empty…

For some reason I’ve always been an early riser, ever since I was a kid. I’ve never been that kid that needs to sleep a lot but I’ve also never been that guy that pulls all-nighers studying for a test in school. I always struck a very pleasant balance in my approach to getting rest, but I also know now that my brain was telling me to wake up early to get started on the day. Looking back, I think that it started to get a bit out of balance right around the time that I started looking for more distractions in my life to deal with the stress I was going through with my family. It’s a long story and one that I’m not sure I want to go into on this blog out of respect for the others that lived through it more closely, but let’s just say that it’s not often you deal with a homicide within your own family.

This was right when I had just quit my full time job to try working on my own music blog, full-time for a few months “until I figure something else out” was the plan. And I started not sleeping as well. I would wake up at 6am on the dot every single day, regardless of when I’d actually go to sleep. I’d immediately make myself coffee and go work on my music blog, writing posts for the day or brainstorming on what big undertaking I would attempt for the site next. My ambition started to become palpable in the bags under my eyes, but I eventually started to crumble under the pressure of it all. I didn’t feel any cover from the onslaught of stress that I had signed up for and it affected me in a way that caused me to continue to focus on what I was not doing on the site, or what I had not finished yet, or what I had not thought of yet that someone else did…I could not see the bright side to this amazing choice I had made faced with such a fortunate combination of circumstances.

If there is one statement that could sum up how I’ve lived my life up until now, it was that last sentence. And I’m not super happy about that overall, because the paragraph above only explains about a three-month period in early 2006. But looking back, things continued to get progressively better for me in my career and the plan I had set out for my life. Everything just kept coming up roses for me. But that fact that I couldn’t approach my career and the problems I faced in that progressively better career path in a glass half-full sorta mentality is exactly why I got a huge kick in the ass over the past two years of my life. As you approach a certain age, and other people around you start to approach a certain age, people are allowed to make choices about who they want to associate themselves with. You have to decide who you want to create dreams with. You have to surround yourself that people that will motivate you and not stifle every idea you have with everything that’s wrong about it.

I guess I learned this the hard way when I lost my job and realized I had no great, true and close friends that I felt would understand this. Even in the suffering I caused for myself, I couldn’t see that it could be a lot worse. I truly let it get the best of me.

But that’s not the point of this post at all. I’m only writing some of this to just get it down on paper finally and be okay with admitting where I may have gone wrong from time to time. That’s okay. I’m totally human. Humans are stupid sometimes. Let’s move on…

The point is, something has changed for me in a big way. Over the past few months I’ve never felt so close to understanding the benefit of keeping a positive outlook on things and how people perceive “that guy” that just can’t shut the fuck up every once in a while. I’ve learned that it’s okay to not have an opinion on something. I’ve learned that it’s okay to stop analyzing stuff looking for the answers all the time, because there are some times you go down rabbit holes that lead to areas you don’t necessarily need to discover. I’ve learned that it’s okay to be ambitious and idealistic, but that it shouldn’t drive your view point of other people that think in a more concrete sense. I guess I felt the need to defend myself before and to project an sense of confidence through intelligence and severe judgments. And humor, too…kinda the way John Stewart has to perform on The Daily Show, not that we’d even rank in the lists for talented human beings. So that’s how I got away with it, and I let the best of my ambitious truly get the best of me until I went crazy out here in San Francisco and felt the need to make it known on my Twitter account.

I’m so happy I’m done with that. It feels good to stop focusing on what you’re doing wrong and focus on what you’re doing right. Self-improvement comes naturally by letting the best of you shine forward and drive the ship, not by focusing and nit-picking on everything that’s wrong about what you’re doing. The real problem is, if you have that mindset yourself, all you do is project it onto other people. And holy shit…let me just make this clear…nobody likes a Debbie Downer. I know I knew that for a time, but I just couldn’t seem to be in the state of mind that allowed me to rise above it. And man, I just wish I could go back and apologize to all the people I did this to relentlessly over the past couple years. I hope that I can find a way to repay those good people that let me get away with it for as long as I did. My goal is to just roll with the new attitude and hope that it rubs off on people going forward…

And I’m pretty happy about that…