The lost penguin and you
Oh, hi friends!
Antarctic penguin turns up in New Zealand after swimming nearly 2,000 miles off course
What a story.
Because sometimes you just keep swimming, you know? As you waddle along and continue pushing you start to think, “I’ve already gone this far, I guess I should…keep going in this direction?”
Maybe that’s what Pingu the penguin thought a few hundred miles into his adventure.
Or maybe his trip was deliberate. He wanted to see the world. He wanted to try something new. (He wanted to try New Zealand.)
We all go on weird trips sometimes.
But you can always change your course, no matter how far you traveled. You can turn around or turn left or slow down or speed up.
Or, like Pingu, you can get rescued, be given a fish smoothie, and sent back into the waves knowing that you have a choice — endless choices — about where to go next.
“Track the things you do actually do instead of race to an arbitrary goal sitting far off in the distance.”
Kate McKean’s excellent newsletter always sucks me in with her subject lines (“Don’t Make Any Goals Next Year” was particularly appealing!) and I can see this one-sentence piece of advice making a big difference in my life — maybe yours, too?
The idea isn’t to obsess over hitting benchmarks, but rather tracking your effort. Words written, books read, submissions sent. So this weekend you might track “ate three pieces of pie.” Next week you might track "wrote 80 words. It all adds up.
Here is Jurassic Park but with a cat. Please feel free to show it to your loved ones as you gather around the table. See you next week my friends!
Do you like these daily emails? Please share with a friend!
You can also support my work by checking out my motivational journal, Do It For Yourself, designed to guide you through your creative and work projects.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Love, Kara