I started this newsletter with the intent of writing mostly about Marketing, and a little bit about psychology and pop culture and such. So far, it has mostly been the psychology of corporate life. By no means was this the plan, but it is a topic that comes naturally to me.

And, with the dearth of time I have been facing, delving deep into my own psyche and deriving from my experiences is easier than researching hot topics and writing about them. One day I will get there, but today is not that day.

Getting Back to Business

So, first things first. This edition was supposed to be out a month ago. To be more precise, I am writing after 5 weeks instead of the weekly cadence I started off with. I wanted it to be published every Tuesday, but I was still pretty proud of myself for at least getting these out each week, even if not on my designated day. But then one fine day, it all went downhill.

It happened, as it so often does, with one single miss.

Let me explain.

The Trip that Took Me Away from My Newsletter

My husband and I took an extended weekend trip in the middle of June with our friends. The weather was ridiculously hot in my city, and we desperately needed a break. We were supposed to leave on Friday morning but ended up deciding at the last minute to leave Thursday night. One of the perks of driving to your destination is that you are always up for impromptu plans!

So, Thursday was crazy because I rushed home from work, attended my 8 pm meeting, and then maniacally started packing and making sure that everything is a-okay! Friday morning, we were at our destination and for the first time ever, I was working from the hills. No, I never did that before. Yes, I took Covid-19 protocols and prevention measures very seriously. Anyway…

It wasn’t as cold in the hills as we expected it to be, but it was still quite pleasant. And the sight of tall deodar trees reaching out to the vast expanse of the deep blue sky is always a welcome sight. Working doesn’t feel much like working when you are in the lap of nature.

By the time I finished my daily tasks and meetings and what nots, our friends were already in complete vacay mode. It was Friday, and I hadn’t published my newsletter yet. Hell, it’s not like I write these out in advance, so a more accurate thing to say would be that I hadn’t written that week’s newsletter yet. Having already lost on a decent number of hours of fun that the rest of the group was indulging in, I decided to skip the newsletter for that week. “The last edition was anyway published on Friday, so if I publish the next one on coming Tuesday, then it’s practically on time,” I thought to myself.

And skip, I did.

Falling Deep into My Own Delusions

By the time I got back from my trip, there was so much piled up work waiting for me – the house needed cleaning, the bags needed to be unpacked, our August trip needed to be booked. And I came down with a cold and a mild fever (because we were back in the burning hot furnace of the capital city). You see, there was always a reason why not to get back to writing.

It’s not like my mind wouldn’t mindlessly look for excuses to skip a week before the trip. But until then, I had published a new edition every week without fail, and I didn’t want to lose my streak. However, once the streak was broken, it became increasingly difficult to tune out my own excuses.

And as the days went by, I slipped further and further away from my goal.

Just one mistake, and I stopped writing for 5 whole weeks.

Talk about a slippery slope!

It is such an innately human thing to do, you know. We justify making more mistakes after it happens once. We believe that if it happened once, it could happen again. And it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This is why missing one day of gym leads to skipping a few more sessions; this is why a cheat meal becomes a cheat week; this is why we keep falling deeper and deeper into our delusions, believing with all our heart that a mistake has been made and it cannot be undone. So might as well indulge in it.

Lifting Myself Up

It took everything in me to get back to my own passion, imagine. Well, Newton’s laws are certainly not limited to physics. The law of inertia governs everything that we do (or don’t).

But maybe we can use it to our advantage. As basic as it may sound, all we need to do it keep going. Don’t dwell on the mistake, know that it is okay to slip up every once in a while, and remind ourselves that a single miss is not an excuse to ease into a snowball effect of laziness.

All we need to do is keep going. And everything will turn out alright!