(We are back!): Don’t stop trying and be All-in
Hi there,
That was a long break from this publication. Since I started this newsletter, I’ve not gone away for this long before: 27 months (more than 2 years) since the last post. I have missed sharing my thoughts with you all, and I know you have missed them as well. Some of you messaged me about missing it; thank you. I’m very happy to be back, so please leave your notes in the comments below or reply to this email if you’re as excited as I am.
Over the last two years that I’ve been away, I’ve added two new philosophies to my list of things that could help one build a mind without boundaries. One could argue they aren’t new considering you will find snippets of them here and there in the archive of this newsletter or on my website. However, because they’ve been my guiding light for more than 2 years they feel new and I am sharing them with you at the start of this new year because they will forever be relevant once you internalise them.
The first is the idea of All in. In the next paragraph, I have written a complete article on this.
The second is a forewarning and some thoughts about guiding against that.
Now let’s start with the forewarning.
Don’t stop trying, no matter what!
“It is a puzzle why some men and women go to seed, while others remain vital to the very end of their days. And why some people stop learning and growing.
One must be compassionate in assessing the reasons: Perhaps life just presented them with tougher problems than they could solve.
Perhaps something inflicted a major wound on their confidence or their self-esteem. Perhaps they were pulled down by the hidden resentments and grievances that grow in adult life, sometimes so luxuriantly that, like tangled vines, they immobilize the victim.
I’m talking about people who – no matter how busy they seem to be – have stopped learning or trying. Many of them are just going through the motions.
I don’t deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on going is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women at whatever age functioning below the level of their potential.”
See, more tangled vines will come your way as you age. Don’t let any of them immobilise you. Don’t stop trying. Don’t stop learning. Don’t stop reaching for your full potential.
With that said, let’s now go back to the philosophy of All-in for that is how you push yourself to try one more time, learn one more thing and try to reach your full potential.
All-in
Reflecting on the year 2025 has prompted me to write this post. And since it is unusual for me to write a themed message whose relevance and resonance ends with a year, I hope that the point of this post will last beyond January, certainly hope it lasts beyond 2025. Actually, my wish is that it stays relevant and resonating for longer than my blog could be available on the internet. With that said, I want to share about All-in now.
All-in is a mindset.
Here’s how it works: confronted with a piece of information, the mindset always prompts you to ask yourself, “If I followed everything to the letter as mentioned in this information, what would that look like for me?”
The information could be a new way of living, a new way to solve a problem you confront daily or a new way of doing something you didn’t know how to do before. It could also be a piece of information that you have read before without any attempt to practice it or you practised it halfheartedly. Whatever it is, the All-in mindset question remains intact; what would it look like if I just did it as this says?
Upfront, let me say while this mindset is an incredibly useful one, you will also find it as a great filter and as a result, realise only a few things are worth doing by being All-in.
Now, if you ask yourself the All-in question, and you eventually find a thing or two that you decided to go all in on, your life might just be about to make a total turnaround for greater heights, unparalleled progress and accelerated self-confidence.
Most of us, and that includes me, are readers of information only and rarely are we doers. Understandably so, in an age where we are overloaded and arguably overwhelmed by too much information. However, the only way to make marked progress in a definite time is to embrace the All-in mindset in as few or as many areas of your life as possible. Find a piece of useful information, go All-in and act on it. It could be about your health, career, relationship, faith, could be anything at any time, a combination of things, doesn’t matter.
Note that some All-in efforts are executable in a very short time frame while others can take a longer time. Some, as I have found with my commitment to the Christian faith, could even be for a lifetime.
Let me bring a few examples to further drive home the point.
In this article, on becoming a victim of exposure, I shared what that means and how it manifests. You could just start immediately after reading it and decide to start exposing yourself to as much information as the article suggests. And watch your life change overnight (or not). In any case, it would be clear you have gone All-in. Hopefully, you could also infer clearly from that last statement that All-in doesn’t guarantee success but only gives you a greater chance.
Another beautiful example is the idea of 100 rejections per year popularised on my Twitter TL by Imade. You could read that, toggle a like on it, as nearly 800 people did on the post, you may even bookmark it, also as nearly 700 people did on the post, all relishing the idea. Or you could decide not to even interact with the post at all (of course I am not encouraging this) but just go and get your 100 rejections and then watch your life transformed all in one year. That’s All-in. And its application is endless from a single sentence that feels right to All-in on for you, to a whole blog and from a simple conversation to a whole book.
There is a strong resistance in us to just do things and to go All-in. Fight that resistance. Pick one thing, and then two and then three and more to go All-in on and watch your life take a new direction, not overnight, but it certainly will.
I hope that just like me, All-in becomes a daily mentality for you and not just a 2025 resolution.
I also hope that you have the sense of urgency to determine what is worth going All-in on and the courage to go All-in on those from today, yes today not tomorrow.
The All-in article was originally published on my website.