I am a long time listener, and reader of anything and everything Michael Blevins (Instagram) and Mark Twight put out. From Gym Jones, through their joint stint at Nonprophet (now defunct). While I have no idea what happened and why, I am glad Michael is doing a new podcast because it's been silent for a while on the Nonprophet pod, even though I go back a lot and listen to the old episodes over and over again.
I listened to the first episode and it felt really weird because I've pretty much went through the same exercise of quitting the cynicism, and playing the let's-find-a-fault-in-everything role some 5-6 years ago.
Much like Michael, I was just fed up with my instinctual initial reaction to everything being “let's see what we can find wrong with this”.
This behavior was applicable towards anything someone else made, but also towards things I myself have made which made me as a creator a really difficult person. The bar was always being raised. Nothing was ever good enough. Even if it was yesterday, it isn't today.
I just stopped liking being that person, and wanted more positivity in my life and around me. Much more, I wanted to encourage and initiate the positive mental attitude, and outlook for people around me. I more than anything wanted to normalize it.
As soon as I started with this change, I got the first evidence of the laws of attraction (like attracts like). By thinking about my behavior I've noticed that most of my friends were the same way. This was our thing. This was the behavior which obviously held our social group together. It was in our humor, in our shared interests, and in the choices we made about the things we decided to like and not like.
Instead of having conversations about things we can learn from, we were too eager to point at their faults, almost as if we were making sure that it was not good enough.
Once I've realized that it is very infantile and naïve behavior and decided that I'm out, I've witnessed the connections with my friends started to fade a little. There were even fallouts which I'm not going to go into, but at the time I was completely dumbfounded with the way things were turning out.
How could what I saw was a positive change in me cause other people to pull back?
This is when I realized that people sometimes grow away from each other, and it is a part of life. Maybe we're not meant to hang around the same people for so long. Maybe I'm just the type of person who changes a lot, while other people see staying the same and holding on to old beliefs as a virtue. Maybe it's all true, and we just need to find our place in the world.
I don't know, but I have decided that I am embracing change, and while I still see it as a challenge, I am choosing to see it as one in search of growth.