🟢 The gross thought that helps me every day

And might help you on your journey too

Ryan Walsh 🟢

Feb 03, 2024

(3 min read)

painting of lots of loose trash and a large old TV and a green portapotty on green grass of an abandoned lot on a city block between fancy, well-kept highrise apartment buildings. — Bing AI did a decent job illustrating what I’ve been imagining.

This scene has been on my mind for years.

Kyle Cease once described a meditation habit as:

You walk over to the trashed abandoned lot next door and want to clean it up.

You can only do it one short visit at a time.

It’s daunting.

It’s usually gross and uncomfortable.

But it’s doable.

Keep showing up.

Clean out what doesn’t belong.

Believe that it can be cleaner.

Eventually, you will feel comfortable hanging out there longer.

This image feels so powerful to me because it represents not just meditation but also:

🟢 writing

🟢 your work

🟢 what you choose to put on your schedule

🟢 how you can help people (and earn money for it)

Writing / other work

For example, I sat down today to write a newsletter post, and I started a stopwatch.

The first 55 minutes consisted of many false-starts that I ended up shelving / trashing.

That’s okay.

Writing requires clear thinking.

Clear thinking is progress.1

It can feel a frustrating in the moment.

Like some form of constipation.

But I’m not going to beat myself up over the fact that my thoughts start as a mess and require some refinement.

Here in this text editor, I was sort of bagging up a bunch of junk and tying it off and getting rid of it.

Today, trashing what I’d written reminded me of the mental image of this abandoned lot.

Then I described it to Bing AI, which created this image, which inspired this post, which now streams out of me so much faster.

Maybe it will even land and help you.

Maybe you’ll think it’s trash, too. You have your own subjective experience.

But at least from my perspective, I showed up and cleaned out the gunk in my brain and arrived at something coherent.

If you do non-writing work, such as building a website, this idea applies too.

Keep showing up, work iteratively, and celebrate progress.

Cleanup counts.

Little progress counts, even when the majority of the lot is still a mess.

There is no other way.

Trash on your calendar

Legendary investor Bob Prince once told me while laughing at himself:

It seems obvious in retrospect, but I finally realized that Hell for me is not Hell for everyone else.
In fact, sometimes it’s Heaven for someone else.
It’s so liberating to lean into this.
I can focus on doing what I enjoy, and I can rely on other people who do what they enjoy.

He was in his late 40s, which at the time seemed pretty old, since the average age of the hedge fund’s employees was so young.

I was gaining 20+ years of wisdom in one conversation.

But here I am 40 years old now, and I can’t say I’ve fully lived his 💡 realization.

I’m trying, though.

“If you can hold yourself in a ‘I’m on the right track’ attitude and ease up on the demands you’re making of yourself and not try so hard to make everything be a certain way and make it your singular intention to relax and allow the revelation of your [future] to surprise and delight you, you’re on the path for a wonderful life.” - Abraham-Hicks

You don’t need to immediately outsource everything other than your highest joy activities.

But you can think of recurring obligations on your calendar as the littered abandoned lot.

One by one, you can clean those up.

Like what you read? This post is public, so feel free to share it. 🙂

🙌 Do you want to get featured in a future issue? See details below.

Getting paid to collect “garbage”

The trashed lot also comes to mind because I frequently think of Paul Graham’s article about “schleps” (which I always misremember as “garbage-collection”).

For over a decade, every hacker who’d ever had to process payments online knew how painful the experience was.
Thousands of people must have known about this problem.
And yet when they started startups, they decided to build recipe sites, or aggregators for local events. Why?
Why work on problems few care much about and no one will pay for, when you could fix one of the most important components of the world's infrastructure?
Because schlep blindness prevented people from even considering the idea of fixing payments.

Businesses are all about solving problems.

We need to:

Learn that there is trash somewhere that someone doesn’t want to deal with
Remove it for them

Look again at the image above.

Countless people walk by “trash” each day, failing to acknowledge its potential.

Ripe business opportunities surround us all the time. They tend not to look sexy though.

The key is to identify where someone has a Hell that you could help transform to a Heaven for them and enjoy doing it.

My hope is that this newsletter will help bring us there (you and me both).

🕙 What we learned in recent posts:

🟢 “Impossible” transformations I needed to experience for myself

🟢 To never have to work a day in your life

🟢 Life’s forbidden pleasures

🟢 7 days into my new life and I'm freaking out

🟢 [See all posts]

👀 Caught my eye this week:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recommends children in 2024 should prioritize:

Resilience, adaptability, high rate of learning, creativity, familiarity with tools.

Plus maybe coding as a way to learn how to think.

To that I’ll add:

Recognizing your own emotions, expressing your emotions, connecting with others, identifying what is fulfilling for you.

That’s right—

If Katie and I become parents, what I’ll want our kids to learn has nearly 0% overlap with what is taught in US schools.

Even more importantly, this advice applies to all people (including adults).

🔜 Coming up in the next issue:

What hasn’t worked in this new business of mine, what looks like it’s working, and what I’m excited about

💬 Question for you:

Reply or leave a comment!

I’ll be so excited to write back to you.

Fulfillment and Financial Freedom by Ryan Walsh 🟢

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