Blog | Justin Mulvaney

I know, I’m back so soon! Life just threw quite the fun curveball my way, and I needed to share.

On around 7:30 on Sunday night a friend from college texted me. He was about to go on tour with a band and the drummer had pulled his shoulder. “Any chance you could learn a song or two and play it on camera within the next like day?”

Perhaps it wasn’t once in a lifetime, but it was big. I had heard of the band, and people I know had heard of them to.

I naturally did what anyone would: freaked the fuck out. Adrenaline coursed through my veins. I had to do it, but how could I pull it off? Did I even want to? It took me through every ounce of existential crises I had faced in the last year in a matter of minutes.

Attempting to calm myself down, I called a few friends who I knew would take care of me, i.e. first calm me down, then tell me to do it.

And so I got to work- pacing around while listening to the tunes, playing through one on the drums, and setting up the mics and camera when it got to be too late. In the end, I pulled the videos off.

This got me thinking a lot about challenges, constraints, and so much more. The way we react when put on the spot can make a huge difference in our lives, and this provided me with some much needed perspective. A few lessons:

In the end, the drummer’s shoulder is looking fine. They probably won’t need me. But they now know who I am, and my friend knows I’m good for this kind of things in the future. Plus, I haven’t grown so much and felt so alive in a while.

Oh, if you want to see the videos…..

Let me know what you think. Of the videos, the scenario, or of this grand thing we call life.

Hey there friend! This is a long one. I’ve decided to break our contract, and so won’t be showing up in your inbox every morning anymore. I take these things (i.e. my word) very seriously and refuse to give you a half-assed explanation why. Incoming essay.

This last year has undoubtedly been a trying and transformative one. I’ve heard from plenty of people that everyone’s early 20’s are. You’re living without guardrails for the first time, and what follows is often frustration, confusion, and loneliness.

I’m certainly no exception to the rule. In the last year I’ve lost myself and found myself countless times. While this growth has been positive, more than anything else I’ve learned about my weaknesses, shortcomings, and negative tendencies.

I’ve always been a future-oriented person. A daydreamer, even. While this has some positives, in the last year it’s manifested itself in an achievement and ambition mentality. Years of striving and “you’re something special” blew my ego out of proportion, and I could only see one path- forward, up, and quickly.

I managed to fool myself, though. I called it “growth”. And I certainly did grow. But if I’m being honest, it wasn’t about that. It was about achievement. It was about being better not than myself yesterday, but than the stranger I passed on the sidewalk.

Maybe the actions would have been the same either way, but the emotional experience was nothing like that. Intention matters. Brute force self-honesty- I don’t like who I’ve been over the past year. If I was another person I’d call myself an uptight bore, and more than a little pretentious. I’ve become more pessimistic. I’ve been less thoughtful, empathetic, and kind than I have ever been in my entire life. I’ve treated people poorly, and created distance in my most importance relationships. Without a doubt I am far less happy for it.

That’s not exactly what I’d call a move in the right direction.

The thing is, I see why. I see that I’m not investing in people. That I’m not managing my emotions well. That I’m not creating constructive emotional healths habits. I’m not honoring the process, that happiness begets fulfillment that perhaps begets success, not the other way around.

Say it however you like. Happiness is hard work. I personally dislike associating happiness with work, so I like to phrase it this way: Happiness is deliberate.

Belonging do not get you there, achievements do not get you there, no endpoint gets you there. It is a mentality, it is a respect and joy and love of life and growing with it.

And so I’m quitting my goals. It’s something I’ve said here before- goals hold value in that they move you toward where you want to be. And I’ve no fucking clue where that is right now.

So I’m not going to make 6 videos in 6 months and I’m not going to read 52 books and I’m not going to write 180 blog posts. Because I don’t know if I want that or what comes from it.

Instead, I’m going to focus on refinding the passion, joy, and optimism I used to have, not from obligation but from being alive.

Will I write somedays? Maybe. If I feel like it. I might shoot a video here or there too. But I’m not going to allow goals to act like blinders if I don’t know that’s the direction I want to move in. It’s my next 6-month project: 6 months without goals. Or perhaps one goal: fix where my head is at.

I’m almost certain I’ll write occasionally, and I hope you’re still here to read them when I do. I hope the posts are better, coming from a more sincere place and from a better person. Either way, thanks for sticking it through for so long.

I recently read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisis Coates. It was by far one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read, offering an eye-opening view of racism and race in America.

I won’t do it the injustice of offering a summary or notes, you simply need to read it. I will, however, provide some quotes of passages that brought me to a halt with the beauty of their dark truth.

Like this quote on how Slavery can’t be generalized to one blob of humanity:

“Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “slavery is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential text, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold he mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she can see if the enslaved.”

Or these on the insane material interest America had in Slavery:

“At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies-cotton-was America’s primary export.”

This literal quote from Mississippi during the civil war:

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery, the greatest material interest of the world.”

And this, on how racism translated into nearly every experience of his life, including a luxurious vacation to Paris:

“I had missed part of the experience because of my eyes, because my eyes were made in baltimore, because my eyes were blindfolded by fear.”

Read it. Go to your library and borrow a copy. Life hack: You can read e-books from almost any public library by creating an account with that library online, even if you don’t live in that city. Just read it.

One of the more frustrating realities of creative endeavors, or of building any kind of thing for that matter, is that making (and subsequently sharing) things that are below our standard and don’t meet our creative vision is a necessary part of the process.

You can look for a shortcut, but in the end you need to make shitty things.

More advice I recently heard that I really like:

In science, it’s best practice (in fact the only true scientific practice) to only alter one variable at a time when we test something.

In life, this is far less practical. Have a problem you’re not sure how to solve? Why not try 6 different things that week and see if it helps? If it does, isolate those 6 things to figure out what works.

Solving a problem is different than discovering truth. The method should match the desired outcome.

… is that they only cover the problem up. They don’t actually help with the healing.

My lawn mower has been broken for at least six months. Every time a new problem arose, my roommates and I performed another band-aid fix, getting it to function for just long enough to mow the lawn one more time.

Yesterday, sick and tired of the recurrent need to place band-aids on the lawn mower, I sat down and fixed the damn thing. All in all it took around an hour, far less time than the hours of anger and struggle spent previously, and followed by a much more psychologically rewarding moment “it’s actually fixed!”.

It’s so easy to put band-aids on our problems, especially those that are unpleasant. Yet when we finally take the time to truly fix the problem, things are infinitely better. Don’t have the time to fix it? That’s okay, but that doesn’t mean you need to put a band-aid on it. Some healing starts naturally, and the open wound is a reminder that you need a real fix for the problem.

I’ve recently found myself captivated by the cyclical nature of nearly everything. Stress and Recovery in athletics. Tension and Release in art. The water cycle, seasons, and more in nature.

With your ideas, there are times to be the Silent Executor and times to be the Spirited Collaborator. Knowing which to be in a given moment is discovered through self-awareness and reflection.

On that note, I find myself in a similar awe by the fact that living a good life is mostly a function of doing a few simple principles well. Things aren’t complicated, we merely need to be patient and focus on doing a few simple things well.

There’s a careful process that comes with having ideas and bringing them into the world. Initially born in the bedroom, we keep ideas in the privacy of our mind. We nurture and grow them until we feel they’re mature enough to expose. Once ready, we bring them into the town square. It’s here that we hope to find allies and collaborators and receive the feedback necessary for an idea to grow.

Deciding when to bring an idea out is by no means trivial. Hold onto it for too long and you risk sheltering it. The idea grows out of touch with reality and isn’t malleable enough to adapt to truth. It will be strong enough to handle the opponents in the square, yet too hardened for successful collaboration. The idea will live on, but have a hard time growing.

The town square is a ferocious arena, however. Populated by egos and competing perceptions, it’s certain to bludgeon any premature idea to it’s untimely death. There are allies in the square, potential collaborators moving about, but discerning them isn’t as easy as it seems. Ideas are subjective. Even those who are regularly allies may be enemies to a new idea, even unintentionally.

Before sharing an idea, it’s good to ask a couple questions:

A formula I’ve recently heard that I like very much:

The combination of the two allows for you to invest in joy and pleasure that comes from larger projects while also learning and growing in the short term. There’s also something magical in the thought “I’ll try it for two weeks, and if I don’t like it, I’ll stop.“

It’s built for the sprint and the marathon.

There’s a unique form of paradox that comes with being a narcissist. One becomes so obsessed with themselves that they’re incapable of seeing how others perceive them.

Think about that. A core component of who we are, lost in a delusional obsession with ourselves. Rather than trying to remedy any outside feedback with their image of themselves, narcissists dismiss it. Not a complete dismissal, they use it to weave a false narrative about the world outside.

It’s important that we give every piece of outside feedback a degree of weight. An image of ourselves that only considers are opinion captures half the picture at best.