JETS JOURNAL - #069
February 18, 2025
Hi All!
Here is your weekly round up of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along to a friend if you think they might enjoy.
The small moments matter too
I’m always looking for the next big moment in my life, and often forget about all the little moments in between. It’s always whats next, and never what’s right here in front of me. However, as of late, I’ve come to appreciate more of the small things, which has led to an overwhelmingly amount of satisfaction to my everyday life.
Things as simple sunset bike rides to the beach, or swimming laps at a harbour side pool become moments of pure joy. It’s this simple noticing of how good each moment is, regardless of how mundane it might seem, that has made each day feel so much more expansive.
I wrote a blog post last week, about what it’s like living with your parents at twenty-four. Writing the post was very cathartic way of appreciating this in-between moment, before things inevitably change. You can check it out here.
The joy of making things with your hands
You all know me as someone who is very digitally native. I grew up on the internet, and have spent a large portion of my life in front of screen. I’ve learned to make things happen by clicking a couple keys and pushing a few buttons.
Lately though, I’ve been getting back into building things with my hands. The other day I bought some wood, screws, and a couple other little tools from Bunnings and built a lockbox for my phone. It’s a silly little idea, but it’s in-line with my new intentional living principles I’m putting into practice in my life. It was a good, project to brush up on my carpentry skills.
After building the lockbox I wanted to make something much bigger. So I built a bookshelf for the hundreds of books overflowing my bedroom. Originally, I was just going to buy one from Ikea, but I liked the idea of building it myself more. At least this way there’s more of an appreciation for the thing itself. I cut the timber myself, drilled holes into the metal, and assembled the entire thing with my own two hands.
And were my first two projects perfect? Fuck no. There’s drip marks from the glue everywhere, I’ve screwed hole in the wrong places, some legs are longer then the others, but none of this matters, because it still works, and it shows that I was there. I touched this, and brought it to life.
Something to get you excited for my book
I’m currently reaching out to literary agents and have sent out a dozen emails to potential collaborators. For anyone who doesn’t know a literary agent is like a manager who interacts with the publisher to negotiate your contracts etc. I’ve had only one get back to me so far, but that’s okay. I am in no rush to have this published immediately, as I’m still editing the book.
I’ve given a couple couple out to a very select group of people who will provide me feedback before my next round of revisions. If you want to see how some people are feeling so far, check out this message below from one of the beta readers.
The shift from external to internal
Although I just shared two extracts above related to things I’ve created, I’ve hardly shared any of the other projects I’ve been working on over the past few months. This has been very creatively freeing, because typically, how I would work is, make something, and whether that was a video, a song, or an artwork, I’d feel the instant need to want to share that with the world. I would want people to look at what I did and say, good job. I wanted the approval and validation from some entity outside of myself.
And bear in mind, I still want these things, because at the end of the day I am a human. However, lately this desire, has seemed to fade. I’ve now been making things solely for me and me first. I don’t care how they would be perceived on social media, because that’s not the point. The point is I’m bringing ideas from my head into physical and digital reality.
Instead of wanting to impress others, I’ve shifted to wanting to impress myself. Because at the end of the day, at least to me, I realised that what I’m seeking externally can be found right here, inside of me. And this isn’t to say that I’m never going to share the things I create with the world. It just means I’ll be more selective about it.
Logging my consumption habits
I’ve started logging down the movies I watch and the books I read in a simple plain text file on my computer. I’ll speak more on the power of plain text in a later week, but for now I wanted to talk about how logging my consumption habits has made me a more intentional consumer.
My digital logbooks, consist of the date I consumed the piece of media, and a brief comment on what I thought. In the past I’d finish a book, or a movie, and be done with it. There was no afterthought, it was in and out. Whereas now after I started logging my viewing, it’s forced me to think to myself, about what I genuinely thought. Also in retrospect its cool being able to go back and see the movies you were watching, or the books you were reading during a certain period of your life.
Hope everyone enjoys their week.
Love,
Jet Williams