You Can Only Wear One Dress at a Time 😕
Life isn't fair
I don’t know what it’s like to have a period, to be able to create a child, to be regularly judged on appearance, or often worry about my safety.
And I’ll never know what it’s like to be able to multi-task.
But I do know what it’s like to choose the right dress.
Picture these occasions: New Year’s Eve, a cocktail party, a wedding, or another day at work.
A guy could turn up to all these occasions in the same suit and you wouldn’t notice a thing.
A woman has different dresses that say different things about her.
They also empower her to be the person she is dressed as.
You can consider them different shades of your personality you want to amplify. Your appearance is part of selecting who you are for the day.
It’s not just a dress that they are choosing it is a personality (you could say mood).
Do I go as fun and bubbly, or classy and sexy?
Summery and free, or caring and motherly?
Or as recent trends suggest - Brat or demure….
The dress, I’m wearing impacts my personality in ways I have never experienced in guys’ clothes. The experience is incomparable.
Note
Talking to a friend about this concept and they thought I was saying that women are dependant on their clothes for their personality.
I'm not saying that in the slightest.
Clothes are not a replacement for personality. But they are a form of self-expresssion.
In the same way that a mega change in your haircut makes you feel different.
Or wearing fancy dress gives you a strange sense of adventure into a different lens of yourself.
Equally, you feel weird wearing something formal when you're supposed to be relaxing.
Clothes empower a feeling.
I would say clothing can be a little like seasoning for food.
Seasoning doesn't replace the contents of a dish but it helps amplify it in different ways.
Following this, I’m actually a Giant Cupcake.
Decisions
The issue is, at any one moment you can only wear one dress (or outfit in general).
These different outfits resonate with corresponding elements of your personality.
That is why it is so damn hard to decide on a dress before you go out.
Possibly a factor in why not buying a dress is so painful.
It is like killing a part of your personality that can’t be let out.
A hard reality of life is that you can’t have and be everything, all at the same time.
We can learn a lot from this.
(Firstly men can be more sensitive to the fact that it’s not just some clothes women are deciding on but a fundamental part of their persona.)
Secondly, this expands into all our lives…
You can only be one person at a time
I struggle with my overwhelming number of ideas.
Currently, this revolves mostly around what I want to do with my creative work and who I want to be as a creator.
I’m wrestling with several podcast ideas, as well as 5 more newsletter ideas, at least 10 book ideas and probably 40 YouTube channels I’d happily run...
I want to break world records, climb mountains, do lots of stupid things in dresses, and generally be a philosophical weirdo contemplating our existence while comforting people with positivity.
Let’s say I currently have 20 pages full of ideas for different series I would enjoy making.
The thing is.
These ALL represent very important parts of my personality (at least to me) and so far I’ve only covered some of my ideas for YouTube.
I’m of course doing none of them…
Running the Growth Mindset Psychology podcast for 7 years has defined me, what I do each day and how I think.
It directly made me who I am right now.
All these other ideas are potential options for the person I will become.
Obviously, as a silly human, I don’t want to have to choose….
One life experiences a thousand deaths
Choosing a single project and neglecting the others is like killing many parts of me.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ll never know what it’s like to be able to multi-task.
Trying to do a small new side-project on top of my main project makes things fall apart. It’s the same when I travel or decide to let myself get into trading. Progress grinds to a halt everywhere.
I will never be successful if I try to put all of my personalities out there at once. I can’t wear 16 dresses in one day.
(I could change dresses every hour but then I’d spend more time getting changed than doing anything).
Ultimately, we must put one foot in front of the other and walk one path.
Once we are successful enough we can recruit others to manage projects for us to free up time.
Seeking Shortcuts
Getting mentally ahead of ourselves is a hindrance. It stops us from making progress in real life.
Having your head 2 years in the future is a recipe for failure.
I’ve known entrepreneurs planning out their global office plans and contemplating hiring charts when they haven’t even sold a single product. They get fundamentally frustrated when a VC won’t give them $10 million to build an idea that has no proof. Inside they’ve already convinced themself it would work at a grand fantastical level so they don’t know how to do the real task of building something from nothing.
They aren’t being open-minded about how to get there.
Having your head down and building one thing and growing it steadily and reliably is actually very open-minded.
It means you can put your creativity into defining the path.
It means you get there.
Some Rules can be Bent, Others Can be Broken
Taylor wears 16 dresses a night on her record-breaking Eras tour.
This might seem like a bit much for one night.
However, it’s a very appropriate way of sharing as many of her personalities (eras) with her audience, who want as much as they can get.
Taylor has a lot of help with her dress changes.
The amount of dress changes one can handle is merely an indicator of the giant machine of help she has operating her entire brand (and many personalities).
Maybe she dreamed of being the star of the craziest record-breaking tour ever, but she had her head down and focused on building her brand one step at a time.
Ultimately this led to being able to wear an outrageous amount of dresses but she never got mentally ahead of herself.
Who knows, this might even have been her goal all along. After all who wants to choose what dress to wear when you can wear all of them?
Intrigued by the odd stuff I share? Here are some ways I can help you:
☎️ Book a 25-minute free no-pitch call here. (we could discuss dress decisions)
🎙️ The Growth Mindset Psychology podcast is twice a week.
Bonus Reflections
As far as lessons and take-homes go, this newsletter is over.
The second Appendix section is my current status on project(s) considering the above. If you’re interested in reading about podcasting, being a creator, and me… forge ahead.
My current focus
This year my only focus is the podcast. It was a side project for its first 7 years.
Despite it being semi-successful it had started to grow old and growth had stalled with the waves of new podcasts. I’d had enough of having a constant side project and was ready to kill it to finally just do one thing for once in my life.
Before killing it for good I had last summer free since my last project. So I recorded 6 months’ worth of content and scheduled it. I then ran off to Nepal for 3 months. (You can only do one thing at once but you can plan ahead.)
I came back and the test had worked. The podcast was growing. Not a lot but considering a month of focus gave 6 months moderate growth maybe 12 months of focus would a lot more dramatic.
so before starting anything else, I now had to take the podcast seriously.
So this year I doubled down as a writer, and podcaster to raise the bar on content quality. Also, the idea of being a full-time podcaster sounded quite nice if I can actually grow it to be a serious income…
I’d taken a lot of quick wins off the table in 2023 by recording a lot of this newsletter as episodes and had to create new content from scratch.
During the first 6 months of this year, I didn’t have a free moment. I was overwhelmed simply by making content. In July, I finally started to have enough headspace to work on building a business. Mostly marketing but also sales and community.
(I’ve also realised that I can totally republish old episodes and give myself more of a break)
I’m now revising the show concept and getting way more focused on content, brand and quality. Over the next 6 months, my main projects are going to be marketing and community-focused.
I lost money Jan - June 2024 and just started making slightly more than my monthly outgoings. But the podcast is net 5x bigger than it was this time last year and I have terrible systems and make about 40% of the potential revenue I could be making.
So if the podcast grows another 5x by next summer and I double monetisation to 80% then that’s earning roughly 10x my personal costs.
People always want to start new things. What they need to work out is how to solve the difficult part of making their current project grow to the next level.
Alex Hormozi
Rather than starting several other podcasts, my next projects are all extensions of the current podcast.
Here’s where I’m at with that.
If I’m lucky, each week I manage to nudge a task or two under a bigger section in the right direction. No single action jumps the needle but each one is another brick in the wall.
Compounding is the 8th Wonder of the World
Slow progress that compounds is where it’s at.
Take this newsletter. No single article makes a difference. Showing up regularly provides a process for me to get to the bottom of my ideas, on a regular basis.
2 years ago I had no subscribers and no archive of content to refer to.
I’ve now published over 70 instalments and grown as a writer and thinker because of it.
With zero marketing from me, SubStack has helped over 700 people discover and connect with my ideas
The newsletter also gave me a bank of content I was able to pull out of my arse last summer and save my podcast. It is 100% the reason I have a growing podcast today.
(so I should probably pay the newsletter more attention again...)
Community
I spent the last 2 months having calls with my listeners.
I made a Calendly available to book a meeting with me on Wednesday afternoons.
It’s been so much fun to chat with new and long-time listeners. After 7 years, I finally understand who is listening, as well as how, why, and when.
Hearing the excitement and love from these wonderful people has been a huge boost to my motivation and confidence.
I always thought it would be a waste of time to launch a premium community to some odd people who are accidentally listening to me. Now it seems like an obvious choice when I know people asking for it.
It also feels way less difficult than I’d thought:
It’s easy to offer ad-free listening and a Discord
Bonus I can regularly connect with my audienceAMAs are a motivating push to make different content each month
I’ve wanted to do them for a while anyway.I often only release 50% of a recorded interview
Can give private access to some of the extra details
Yes, it’s admin to get it going, but it’s feeling sustainable.
I also plan to offer a higher tier with a book club and monthly live calls. I need NO excuse to dig deeper into a book.
If you’re interested you can join the premium community here
Beyond?
If things carry on I have some ideas for repurposing segments of the show into new podcasts and looking for book deals.
I also might use some of my random qualifications like my captain’s license or mountain guide to run retreats.
But for now. Some good old focus.
Wish me luck and I hope this reminds you of the power of sticking with something.
Go do the thing 🔥🤪