Get Over Yourself and Do the Work

“He said ‘Bye’. It wasn’t the word, but the way he said it. It sounded kind of snide and dismissive. Or maybe he was simply tired or mad at something else. Was he saying he was sick of talking to me or thinking I was annoying? What was it he meant by, ‘Bye’?”, it was moments after I’d been picked up from the train and I needed to unleash this story to someone I trusted.

“Are you listening to yourself?”, my husband asked, “I think he was just saying goodbye to you. Honey, you overthink everything and you have to start letting go and go keep going on with your life.”

He was right. The time I spent analyzing a farewell could have been time I spent writing, or working on a new idea, or going to my “Zen place” of analyzing ticket buying patterns. But in the end, what I was doing was totally human.

The majority of us spend far too much time in our own heads. We can have entire “made up” conversations with someone based on one thing they said or did. My friends who are dating now tell me stories about this all this time, “When he texted me back, he just wrote “cool”. What does that mean? Was he truly getting what I was saying or writing me off?”. And then we discuss it for ten minutes.

When you work on your own, interactions with the outside world mean a lot. It could be the difference between landing a deal or…