Welcome back to the 1st Law Newsletter - Friday Edition.

In this email:

• We are what we pretend to be

• Life is pain

• Potential and efficiency

We are what we pretend to be

Why do I even write this newsletter? Many reasons. One, I promised myself I was going to write and release 2 newsletters a week for all of 2024. We are in week 38, thus I should have released 76 so far… I have actually done 74/76. That’s 97.4%, its not 100%, but I am satisfied, and it’s 74 more than I would have released otherwise. Reason two is personal development. To improve my writing and communication, and to force myself to be constantly learning and identifying interesting topics to elaborate on. This has been the biggest challenge: 74 newsletters with an average of 1.5 topics on each one is ~110 topics. This has forced me to be constantly read, listen and research new topics. The last reason, and one that I have understood better as time goes on, is to trick myself into being a better person.

This quote pretty much sums up my life. This is how I feel about this newsletter, about my relationships, and about my internal state. I write about all these stoic ideas. I tell you to reflect on certain aspects of your life. I may recommend actions… have I done them? Yes… some of them. Definitely not all. I know you are thinking: “If you cant even do the things you say to do, how can you expect me to?” Valid point. I guess my hope is that you are a better person than I. Also, even if only one person takes action from my newsletter, or gets something out of it, or even reads it, it’s all worth it. My hope is that by constantly writing about all these positive things to do or to ponder, they will eventually - by osmosis or some other ethereal process - become part of my being. I will not just be preaching these ideas, but living them. Slowly but surely.

Life is pain

Growth is painful. Being stagnant is painful. Decline is painful. Life is painful. Pain means you’re alive, its a signal that you’re breathing. Pain is necessary to improve your life, but it will also come if you are falling behind. Personal judgements on pain (whether pain is good or pain is bad) will determine your performance during times of stress. You need to believe that feeling bad is irrelevant and there is no correlation to performance. Be resilient and ignore simply ‘feeling bad’. Get up and get after it no matter how you feel. The highest form of resilience will come when you do not even give a split-seconds thought to your state. You simply act as the moment requires.

Quote I Want To Share

This makes me think of the power to weight ratio. You could have a 300 horsepower motor, but have the heaviest car ever - you will not be moving very fast. Or you could have 300 horsepower in a little motorcycle and be breaking speed records. The power is your potential and your focus and drive. The weight is your distractions. Eliminate distractions and follow one course until success.

Thanks for reading!

Lucas