Howdy folks,

Gong Hei Fat Choy - Happy Chinese New Year! 🥳🐲 It’s the green wooden dragon this year. How cool is that? What does that mean? I’m not into Chinese astrology but let’s just agree that it just means it will be an awesome year for you & me shall we?

What I love about Chinese New Year is that it gives me a great excuse to go out and eat my favourite type of food - Chinese food. Vaidile and I went to our favourite restaurant here in Bali where they had a traditional lion dance, dancers & even some fireworks. It was such a lovely experience and I got to eat my favourite meal of all time dim sum - like look at the little dessert bear baos filled with Nutella we got (last image in IG carousel)!

Well apart from the food and celebrations what else has been going on? Well, I’ve been working a lot on Start Designing Life and during that time I’ve been getting lots of great questions that I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on here.

The 3 questions I got that I got last week came from the Start Designing Life community & also over on Linkedin (where I’ve recently started to become more active). Here are the topics that we will be going over in today's write up and then at the end, I’ll share some of the dope things I found last week as always along with some ideas from the books I’m reading.

1. Who else is feeling pretty tired right now?

2. Who else feels like they’re stuck in a slump?

3. Can e-commerce be eco friendly?

I love getting questions sent over as it gives me a chance to think and then hopefully give back some honest thoughts. As I say and will keep saying. I’m no guru, I am not a life coach, I am just a dude Matt Lok. Any thoughts I share are just my own personal experiences and reflections. We’re all just figuring out this thing called life. If anything that I say is interesting or feels true explore it more! If not toss it away :)

Now with that out of the way let’s get stuck into these topics shall we?

Who else is feeling pretty tired right now? 😪

Hands up if it feels like you are more exhausted than you were a few years ago? Alright cool, so it’s not just me. In fact I’m hearing this more and more in the circles I hang out. More than that I see it around me too. If I look at photos from me or people I know a few years ago and compare it to photos from today you can really see how we’ve all aged.

So what’s the deal and what can we do to find that energy of the past come back again?

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room that not many people seem to be acknowledging.

That global pandemic that rocked the entire world. It happened, it wasn’t normal and yet we’re trying to get back to the lives we had pre-covid. And let’s just take a minute to be thankful we are out of the crazy times and mess.

But that’s the thing isn’t it. We all went through this thing and now we’re just trying to get back to normal but at the same time forget that what we experienced wasn’t normal. And I think this is the 1st step to reclaiming that energy from all our exhaustion.

I’m sure you’d agree that by experiencing something as wild as that has left it’s mark on you, me and the rest of the world. The stress, fear and anxiety that came with it was consistent for years.

But if you agree with the above statement do you really think you shouldn’t be exhausted right now? Your mind and body has been through a lot. Mine has, friends, family, you name it. We’re all human after all.

So if the 1st thing was acknowledging the madness of the past few years. The 2nd thing is to give yourself a break!

It’s okay that you’re not your 100% best. You’re not as productive, efficient, motivated or whatever. You’re tired, exhausted and just getting by. It’s okay - you’ve been through a lot, we’ve all been through a lot.

What isn’t helpful is adding more pressure on ourselves by making ourselves feel bad for not being able to turn up to life at our 100% best. It’s okay that our 100% best right now is maybe 70/100 of where we used to be. But let’s take a minute to give ourselves some breathing space.

Even though it’s 70/100 from where you used to be. It is still the 100% best you can do right now, and that’s the best you can possibly do or hope for right now.

So if you’re more tired than usual, it’s okay me too. But let’s try not to add to our pressures by making ourselves feel bad about it. Because I think most of us are all feeling it too.

The last point we can chat about is how to we get out of this? That’s what we all want at the end of the day isn’t it. We don’t want to be stuck in the exhausted state of being. That isn’t good for you, me or anyone is it.

Well, my challenge to you is to be more selfish.

Yes, I want you to be unapologetically selfish in your life right now. And I genuinely believe that the more you’re selfish and the more selfish I am the better off we all will be long term. So let me explain a bit more about why I think selfishness is the key to reclaiming our energy back.

When I say selfish how does it make you feel? Does that make you feel guilt, shame or as if that is an awful thing to say? Being selfish is a bad thing. That’s what we have been told is a bad quality and trait to have is it not?

Well like anything in life - yes and no. Let’s me explain how I see selfishness and then you can decide if this is something you would like to take the challenge on.

Being selfish for me is ensuring to put my own needs first before prioritising the needs for others. Wow - that sounds bad doesn’t it. But stay with me a little bit more.

When I say this it doesn’t mean that I will intentionally step on someone else to prioritise my needs or that I won’t actively won’t try to help someone.

But it is just the intention of being mindful to hear what I need right now and taking the steps to prioritise whatever those needs are right now. Let’s give some examples.

1. Selfish with Sleep

You’re tired, I’m tired a lot of people are tired. But how many people are selfish enough to prioritise their sleep? Getting a full nights sleep can be the difference between a sucky day and a great day. It recovers not only the body, rests the mind and is our bodies natural healing engine. Just by being selfish enough to prioritise your need for sleep could help. Be selfish of your bodies need for sleep, especially after the past few years. Don’t guilt yourself for not having enough energy.

2. Selfish with Breaks

Your head is all over the place with all the work and life responsibilities. We’re all playing a collective catch-up for the missed time we experienced over the past few years. But this can lead to overworking our already tired brain & body. Being selfish here is allowing yourself to take time off - ‘being on’. What that looks like is personal but maybe think back to what you liked to do pre-pandemic. Walking around in nature, painting, gardening, reading. It should feel restful though for your head.

3. Selfish with Commitments

It’s okay to say no to things that take your energy. Let me give an example from my life from last week. The more I grow my presence on social media the more random dm’s I get for people wanting to schedule a call with me for a chat. I’m not against talking to people or wanting to connect with people - but getting on video calls with people I don’t know with no real reason to talk apart from ‘networking’ doesn’t spark joy in me or give me energy. That takes away my energy.

So instead of going ahead with these calls I’ve been politely turning them down in favour of written communication first. I know that my time in the day is limited. I’m balancing my mind, body, love, friends & family in a day.

Ending Thoughts

Hopefully, the above examples give you some ideas on what I mean about being selfish and why I don’t think it’s a bad thing. In fact, I would love more people to be more selfish too. Because I believe the more that people filled up their own cups the better you would feel and in turn the better person you would be for other people too.

Right now it feels like a lot of cups are at 30% full. But instead of filling the cup with more energy (by sleep, rest, commitments) we try to fill it with other people's energy or things that don’t actually fill up our cup or we give from our cup when we don’t have much in there to start with. So we give other people 20% of our energy but that only leaves 10% for ourselves to fit in everything we’d want to do in life.

So you best believe I want you to be more unapologetically selfish. It’s what I’m trying to do more and I would encourage everyone to do it.

Because counter-intuitively:

Wow okay, that was longer than expected. I’m going to share the other 2 ideas as separate blog posts so as not to make this too long.

If you’re interested in the ideas feel free to read more on my website.

But thanks for checking in and I hope there were some ideas in there which was interesting for you!

But that's it for this week - here’s wishing you a badass week ahead.

Stay awesome

Matt

🫶

🔥 Dope stuff from this week

1. Beehiiv vs Convertkit: What's Better for New Creators?

Last week I did a comparison between these 2 email service providers. I've been looking for a way to send emails, automate email sequences & possibly offer up digital downloads for both Start Designing Life and also future plans with metalabs.

In my previous newsletter I mentioned I found these 2 providers to be the best in this area - but wanted to deep dive into both looking at features, benefits, price and offers etc.The video above is the complete walkthrough and initial thoughts which end in final scoring for each of the platforms. Okay, so it's over 2 hours long! So I don't expect many people to watch the full way through so here's the final result.Beehiiv = 21/25

• although this was my winner in terms of overall score it doesn't have e-commerce features such as digital downloads. (this can be done by using external services like Gumroad or Lemonsqueasy)

• but overall I loved the using Beehiiv the look and feel of it was a dream to use while the pricing and features make it an incredible service especially if you already have a big email list.

Convertkit = 20/25

• Convertkit dropped some points due to some of the onboarding issues. But don't get me wrong it is still an awesome service which might even be better than Beehiiv for certain people.

• If you're starting out and want key features like email sequencing then you'll actually save money with Convertkit

• If you want to offer digital products and monetise more then Convertkit has this straight out the box. So it's also an amazing choice.

Whatever platform you choose for email delivery out of these 2 you won't go wrong I'd say. Compared to Mailerlite which I've used in the past these 2 feel miles ahead in terms of what creators would actually find useful.

📚 The Book Club

Bringing in this new section to the newsletter. I'm usually reading 1 or 2 books at a time so I'll just update them here & leave any little nuggets I got from them as I got along.

📖 Mastery: Robert Greene

💬

You must understand the following: In order to master a field, you must love the subject and feel a profound connection to it. Your interest must transcend the field itself and border on the religious.

• I just started listening to this book and it's been in my library for a while now. I just finished the Feel Good Productivity book and was ready for something new and this one felt exciting.

• I'm only a few chapters in but I already can tell this is exactly the book I want to be listening to right now. I even created a post about it that I shared across the socials

📖 Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock

💬

Pulling together the myths, legends and stories handed down from generation to generation, all around the world, Graham Hancock presents his own, unique interpretation of history in this fascinating audiobook.

• This is what I like to listen to before I sleep. I don't know why but listening about Ancient Egyptians always puts me to sleep.

and that is it for this week's newsletter folks

wishing you a great week ahead as always

let's chat soon

Matt

🫶

Stay awesome ❤️P.s I booked some tickets out to Bangkok for next month. I can't wait! The food, shopping & being in a big Asia city for while. Looking forward to sharing some cool things from my finds there 🔥