Hi First name / friend_
Exactly three years ago to the day, I lost my business to burnout and had a complete mental breakdown. I moved back in with my mom and had to start from scratch
I refused to let the cycle of burnout rob me of my health and my happiness. I felt like I was just working to become an “expert” at starting over, and if I wanted to avoid burnout, banality, and boredom, I had to start taking ALL of the responsibility, not just some of it.
Like many of you, I thought that if I did what I loved, I would never work a day in my life, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I had turned what I loved into work.
In New York City, when $5,000 of rent is due as soon as I had settled the last month, money became my main motivation — not the good kind of motivation, but the people-pleasing, over-achieving survival kind that got me really far, really fast, and completely gassed me out.
WHAT’S THE PROBLEM?
Money is a secondary motivator. It’s not the thing you want; it’s the thing that gets you what you want.
The real question is…
Why do you want the money? Is it for a house? A car? A camera? And why do you want that? Is it for Stability? Freedom? Creativity?
These are our real, primary motivators — our core values. They’re like the nucleus in an atom, the foundation upon which every decision is made.
I dare you to try defining your core values. At first, you’ll think you know what they are, then you’ll quickly realize that you don’t know them as well as you thought, and when you put pen to paper, you realize you’re like a fish out of water.
Maintaining a direct connection to my core values within every decision I make is the main design goal of my life operating system in Notion.
How did I do this?
I defined my core values. That’s it — well, not all of it.
It might have been simple, but it wasn’t easy. This was the culmination of eight years of operational expertise, bootstrapping a social enterprise in Brooklyn at 23 with no prior business experience, a global pandemic, and my obsessive interest in Notion.
Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing every single template that I have created to build my entire life in Notion.
This is the same system of templates I source for my coaching clients as a Certified Notion Consultant.
You’ll find them here first, exclusively on the Not Not Newsletter before their official release on the @not_not_studio Storefront.
How do you do this?
If you’re ready to get started, here are my templates. FREE or PAID (Collect them all to build your very own Operating System.)
And if you don’t think it’s worth it to define your core values — I DARE you to try.
And when you’ve had enough, come back to this newsletter and send me an email request for the values exercise, or you can just stay tuned for next week’s newsletter when I give it to you for free.
If you’re ready to start:
- the reviewer. — Last week’s addition to the family, this gives you weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual review templates.
- the compass. — This is the template I use with all my one-on-one clients to audit various areas of life and pinpoint the exact direction to focus our work.
- the habit tracker. — This is the only thing keeping me sane in the chaos of my life as of late. Ask me how to adapt it to this weekly and monthly practice.
- the podcast planner. — You already know I had to make something to plan the NOT NOT (PODCAST) in collaboration with my friend, Lexi Burt. She has her own podcast, The Quest for Wholeness — forgot to link my episode!
Our time together is making me show up better for myself – so I added some cool new features to our weekly hang-outs as a little thank you.
✌️until next week, Daryl Oh
