This morning I was doing my morning walk in Oulu, Finland, and it’s dark and wet.
And it’s great!
On my way back to this wonderful little cafe I’m now sitting at, where they casually forgot to bring my coffee (Hey, that’s the Finnish customer service for you!) I was thinking that so many academics optimize things that are downstream.
But you can’t really optimize the downstream if the river is polluted upstream.
Imagine if, instead of building complicated Notion setups and three-tiered to-do lists and orchestrating the best possible machinery around your work… so much so that just maintaining it becomes more work than what it helps you get done.
What if…
You simply optimize for joy, energy, and metacognition (which is just a fancy way of learning to think about what you think).
And yes, I know that there is no better morning habit than writing, but what if you anchored that into a moment of gifting yourself a good morning? A morning that gives you energy and makes you happy.
A morning that makes you grateful because, chances are, you are in a position where, some time ago, you wanted to be.
You said it would make you happy. Did it? (This question alone hits that sweet metacognition spot by the way.)
If it did, great!
If it didn’t, it’s probably not the fault of the position but your misaligned expectations. And that’s good news, because expectations are a thing fully in your control.
You can’t change the job market.
Yet you can change what you expect from it.
Starting tomorrow morning.
Simo
(PS. energy and joy are habits you can learn, which is the craziest part of all of this)