On the outside looking in

[00:00:00] You are listening to the Daily Five, an experimental podcast by Aurooba, where I talk about something for five minutes. So let's get to it, shall we? A lot of the times I consider the lives of some of my favorite creatives and just shake my head. So many of them are whip smart. Some older than me, some younger than me, and they seem to be doing so many things and doing them so well.

[00:00:37] Cal Newport, for example, who I've talked about a lot on this podcast, is a professor at a university and he teaches and does research and then publishes papers about his research. He also has a productivity blog that's pretty popular, consistently keeps publishing mainstream productivity books, writes for the New Yorker and other publications and you know, if that wasn't enough, he also has a podcast, a spouse. and children, and I consider all of that in just pure awe.

[00:01:16] Then there's Ali Abdaal, a British doctor turned YouTuber, turned entrepreneur, who is younger than me and now runs a multi-million dollar business that I watched evolve right in front of my eyes for the last few years. Seriously, it was nuts. Then there's Lily Singh, who is basically the same age I am. I first started watching her YouTube videos in maybe 2008 or 2009?

[00:01:44] And now she's this multimillionaire who has written multiple books, hosted a late night TV show, at one point had both a regular YouTube channel, as well as a daily vlog channel, runs a popular online book club, a nonprofit, and probably 7 million other things that I can't think about. Sometimes I even consider the output of prolific WordPress contributors, and I'm just baffled at how much they do with the same 24 hours a day that I get, and I wonder, jeez, how?

[00:02:21] How do they do it and how can I do it? Their lives just seem so much less complicated than mine. Until, of course, In this past week when four different people said the same thing to me about me. It was always along the lines of, "oh, I'm so amazed at the number of things you do and I don't know how you do it."

[00:02:49] And all I could do was stare, maybe laugh, and then say, "I don't know", because I don't actually think I do a lot. And I personally deal with constant feelings of failure on a daily basis because I never seem to get everything I want done. So, you know, let's fast forward to maybe a few minutes before I started recording this.

[00:03:16] I was sitting on my couch reading a profile on Cal Newport, of course, where you learn a little bit about his early struggles with success in the publishing world. And I realized that this was such an intense case of, you know, being on the outside looking in. A lot of people know that what you see on social media isn't always a reality, and that we shouldn't take what we see about someone's life as the complete truth.

[00:03:47] What you see online is a far more curated version, and I guess I forgot for a bit that that's just not only on social media – it's all the time, everywhere, and everyone, unless you live with the person, you don't really know what's going on in their life, you're a bit on the outside seeing things through some polish, or at least without all the details.

[00:04:10] For most of us, life is far more complicated than it seems, and yes, we do all get the same 24 hours every day, and some people do get more done than others. But maybe you are getting way more done in some area of your life that the other person you admire isn't. Maybe you're a far better spouse than the person you admire for having so much professional output.

[00:04:31] You don't really know because you're comparing your full and entire life with someone else's partial life, and that's not really fair. Not to yourself and aybe not to the person you admire either, you know?

[00:04:48] Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.