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Types of blogs

So I think there’s two types of blogs out there.

I think the most prevalent one is the type we like to make fun of. I think this holds not only for blogs but also for ‘instagram types’ and spirituality and all these things that are typically more associated with women (although there is an unhealthy dose of sexism as well of course).

Type 1 blogs are the blogs that show you what you want. The life you want to live, the habits you want to acquire, the body you’d like to have. It inspires change in the form of motvation that comes from not-being-good-enough, also known as TBP (the bad place, yeah I’m good with names, I know). They can have a thousand ‘tips and tricks’ that you can find on any other type 1 blog and that seem like they might improve your progress, but they’ll actually slow you’re down. These blogs are often owned by well-intentioned people that probably are also reading a lot of type 1 blogs.

But you’re not gonna get anywhere with these blogs. You need to create momentum for change. Because motivation is fickle, motivation is basically just an emotion and like with all emotions, if you aren’t practicing and learning than you’ve got very little control over them. Furthermore, this motivation comes at the cost of self-esteem. You want that ‘other, better life’ because your life isn’t good enough. If something is better, then something else is always worse and in this case if the thing that you want is better, than the thing you have is worse. Inspiring change from a place of lack does not work efficiently or effectively and even if it does work it often does not last (you might lose 10 pounds, but in two years they’ll be back. With friends) or you might accidentally step into the good place and your mindset changes to ‘good change’. But why take that gamble if you can just go for the good change in the first place?

(yes I realise the following analogy doesn’t work in terms of physics, but at this stage this blog isn’t about actual good stuff yet, it’s about writing as much as possible in whichever creative direction my brain takes me)

So how do we create this momentum? Imagine yourself as an object that hurling in a direction. As we all know your momentum is the product of mass times speed. Now if your mass is your brain and your habits that you have formed over literal years then your speed is the direction in which you are heading. When you want to completely change your life, you will try to drastically change the direction of the speed. As you can imagine, this does not work. You are going to need an enormous amount of force to move this object. One big kick isn’t gonna make it move, you’ll think you are making progress but in a couple of days you are still heading in the same direction.

You should change the direction of the mass. And how do you do that? If the speed is determined by motivation and is therefor fickle, your mass consists of your habits, your mindset, the way you see life and the way you see yourself. You cannot change all that at once. You can’t change the way you see yourself or others in a heartbeat. It takes patience, self-love and self-forgiveness. But once you make those changes, they’re lasting changes. Because mass is not fickle. Mass is sturfy and reliable (reliable as in you can count on it to do the same thing, regardless of whether that thing is good or bad). Even better: it will be harder to change back, since now you can see the positive influence of the change and why would you leave that for hollow short-term pleasure?

Speed will follow mass. Your weight will adapt to your lifestyle. Your productivity will adapt to your good habits.

Your weight might change because of the direction of speed, but if you don’t change your lifestyle, it will simply go back to where the rest of the mass is heading. Your productivity might find a bump if you focus really really hard for a while, but it’ll go back to the productivity you had before if you dont implement some habitual changes.

As a rule of thumb:

If you are making immediate progress, you are doing something wrong.

There. I said it. Now you can let go of those expectations too. We’re not here for the end-results. We are here for a better quality of life.

Right back to the blogs. So type 1 blogs inspire a change in the direction of speed, they inspire motivation. They are useful when you have that one test to pass in less than 5 hours and you really need to study. They are not useful if you want to know how to get your degree cum laude, while feeling more relaxed than you do now.

I want to be a type 2 blog. I want to be a blog that inspires deep change. The change that you superficially won’t notice until suddenly you find yourself saying things that would have scared you before. Until you find yourself setting bounderies that you now can’t imagine not setting. It’s the type of change that is easy, because you’re putting all the effort and focus into changing your mindset and change is simply a natural consequence of this.

And guess what! There is incresaing returns! Once you are changing in one area of your life, you’ll get better at change itself. You get more in touch with who you are. You create more awareness. You learn.

This is why you’ll see a lot of people leading relatively succesfull life and then talking a lot about diet and exercise. This if often the first area of their life that they’ve changed and after that the rest seemed to go easier.

#change blogs