Micromanaging Your Life: An Extracted Chapter from Unfussy Life

My first book, Unfussy Life: An Intuitive Approach to Navigating Change, turned THREE the the other day.

To celebrate, I’m sharing a few of the deleted files with you.

Psst… Read until the end, and I’ll share some insights on why I pulled this one out.

Originally written in 2018.

Micromanaging Your Life

Take a 10,000-foot view. Pretend you're a commercial airline pilot. Looking at the big picture is hard. It takes honesty and most of all, it takes patience. You need the patience to see ten failures in a row and a little bit of faith knowing that the eleventh attempt will be the winner.

If you're having trouble stopping the micromanagement of your life, take a step back and pretend you're observing a professional in your industry or another industry — someone you look up to. You can’t appreciate Michelangelo's work because you hate the way he painted the little leaf over private parts.

You're in there with a magnifying glass, judging tiny brushstrokes, the pressure, the color, the lines, the contrast — everything.

Without stepping back, we might never finish a single piece of work.

Imagine looking up at the sky. You're judging the dark gray cloud, worried about the rain in there. But if you take a few steps back and let your eyes wander around — you'll realize there are massive swaths of blue crystal-clear sky all around that one little cloud. Suddenly, that cloud no longer bothers you.

Sometimes, it's hard to take a step back without an objective opinion. And by objective, I don’t mean your husband or sister or aunt who doesn't have a business. Hire a coach. A really good business coach or strategist who will see things from a different angle. Someone who is paid to see things differently. Someone with the experience. Someone who has built a business you admire.

You’ve got a masterpiece to create.

You've got a life to make.

A creative piece, a life, a business, an empire. Pause, put it down, take a step back and you might actually impress yourself.

Happy painting.

💖 Why I removed this chapter

It needed a lot more details to make it feel whole. I could have worked it into an existing section, but some of these themes were already integrated into the book, mostly in the chapter titled “You’ve got a masterpiece to create.” Where I detailed the story of how I was micromanaging my life trying to start the “perfect business” and trying to think my way there.

And the most important question of all was when I asked myself, “Will this make the book better?” The answer was “no,” so out it came.

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