Responsibility & Critical Thought

Detoxifying Success

Rockstar of the week:

Southern California: General Homebuilding Superintendent: 10+ years of leadership experience running teams on single and multifamily new builds. Experience with building but also strong offsite background, working with utility and energy companies very closely from the beginning of the project.

If you have a need for this individual please email me at rob@zarrellco.com. 

We’re switching it up this week! In an effort to support Sami and her talents, I wanted to feature her first. She has been benefiting a lot of people with her free habit-breaking services already and I want to support her in that. Sami started a Substack where you can read this article in full here along with her future pieces of writing that features wellness and hypnosis.

If you don’t know what hypnosis is or if you have a habit you’re trying to break, check her out!

Sami’s Take

I am grateful to find myself in a position where people are looking to me to help them rewire their subconscious and to tune into their inner worlds. It’s deeply rewarding after spending so many years criticizing myself for not being able to “just go along with it” to get paid like everyone else.

I didn’t think a time would come that my highly criticized way of existing would cause me to stand out as a leader in a wellness field either, but here we are. I’m now a Hypnotist (certification in process) using my knowledge and understanding of the subconscious, inner worlds, critical thinking, art, and music to help people learn what I learned as lost a little girl to impoverished parents. The tides have turned.

So, how am I leading people in this new era? I’m teaching you to rewire yourself. It is very possible- please do some Googling and reading on it. Don’t just take my word on this. And, fyi, I’ve always added dashes to my writing lol long before Chat GPT came around. This was solely written by me and you won’t catch me using Chat GPT to do one of my favorite things in the world (writing).

I bring this up, not just to brag (but a little to brag), because doing our own work is how we rewire ourselves. Chat GPT can be a great tool for exploring concepts and finding fast answers to questions, but if you find yourself asking it to interpret things for you, to tell you what something means, to give you a synopsis on a piece of literature or a study- you are doing it wrong. You are absolutely doing it wrong. I promise you, AI does not know how to critically think and it certainly cannot and will not discern anything with your best interests in mind.

All those things are what you need to be doing for you. You need to be reading the long essay, the book, the complex research article. You need to be pondering its meaning. You need to decide how it should be interpreted using your inner world for discernment. Anytime we pass up our opportunity to do that we are also handing over our power and self-control.

Please understand this: if you let something or someone else do your thinking for you, they will also do your voting, life-planning, and major decision making too. That is your life to live. Why are you handing it over to someone else?

And if you find yourself lost as to how to begin reclaiming your thinking, good. That’s where I started too and it’s how you get to developing critical thought. Get lost. Stay lost. Learn to be okay with being lost. Lost is a good place to be in a world that wants to put you in a location that doesn’t serve you and likely wants to harm you. Leave that place and wander in the darkness of your inner world until you start to know your way around.

Let me help guide you through it. I will guide with my writing (like this) with my social media content, with my guided meditation videos and podcast on YouTube, with my music (go stream it and really listen to the lyrics), and with my subconscious and hypnosis services on my website. I'll teach you everything I’ve been learning about how the brain and body works and give you my real-life examples for how I’ve dealt with certain challenges.

I want people to have better lives, to think critically and deeply often, and to know how to live fully in their bodies for a richer human experience. And I’m not being altruistic- you are all wayyyyyyyyy less obnoxious and much kinder when you learn how to do this work. I want to be around happier and more functional people so I can enjoy my life and world more. I deserve that. So do you.

Rob’s Take:

I don’t like being told what to do. I don’t think a lot of people do, actually. After some reflection from reading Sami’s Substack, I think the main reason is because we’re an individualistic society. Everyone has their own house, their own car, their own stuff, but really their own money or lack thereof. 

I’m guilty of being too focused on individualism and how I can continue to “make it” here. I get grumpy when I don’t show up to work by a certain time. I feel behind. I scroll through LinkedIn and see some people crushing it and feel discouraged. But it’s also sitting there thinking about why I’m feeling that way as an individual that helps me see the bigger picture and have a different mindset. Individualism makes me think about what I want out of life, but seeing myself as an individual in a larger community makes me think about what I’m responsible for: my role in that community. 

LinkedIn feels like it’s turning into a cesspool of artificial garbage. People are afraid to be honest with themselves and especially with other people. I rarely see things that are truly real and offer an influential and beneficial environment for people to better develop. And if I see another one of these — (ChatGPT dashes) I’m going to throw my computer into the harbor. 

Since I can remember, I’ve always thought I had to impress people to feel okay. To fit in. To make money. To be successful. Rules that are made up in my head that have never been said but are still very much real and powerful because I’ve decided to let them be. I’m not alone in this.

That spills out everywhere. LinkedIn. Real life. Other places.

I’ve been afraid to be myself for the longest time. To have an opinion, to put myself out there, to be loud sometimes. To be an individual. My bad habit is pleasing other people or thinking too much about what other people think about my work and methods. I sat behind a screen for more than five years feeling this way before I did something about it and started ZARRELLCO.

Now that I have my own business, I can say and do just about anything I want. No one is telling me what to do and now I’m starting to break my habit of thinking about what other people think about me and my work. People will either like me or they won’t. That’s starting to feel okay. I started regularly posting on LinkedIn to get the word out about my business, but to also help people and their thoughts about work and life. It was scary at first, but slowly I’m getting used to it and feel it’s part of my responsibility to my community to use who I am as an individual to make it better. 

If you don’t know this already, I really don’t buy the hustle culture online. People have failures, make mistakes, and go through down periods. Especially this year. It’s okay to talk about those, it’s good to, and I’d rather not read another post about how waking up at 5AM for an ice bath is the key to success or how working late at night and missing family events is the price to pay for financial freedom.

People are afraid to let others know about their mistakes and failures and work harder at trying to hide them than they do improving them. We can’t be authentic as individuals that way when we keep trying to hide who we really are and where we’re at in life. I feel that’s why so many ultimately turn to chatGPT to look better. But people can tell when you’re actually using chatgpt and people hate on it because it doesn’t seem genuine; we can feel that. It always seems like using ChatGPT to do a big chunk of our work is really smart and gets us closer to the top of whatever success hill we’re climbing where our one percenter idols are, but does it really?

We put these people with a lot of money on pedestals and then we feel bad about ourselves for not getting to that point. We need to find a sense of happiness with what we have, who we are, and be comfortable with ourselves. But more importantly, put the focus more on community rather than individualism or getting on an algorithm's good side. 

Who are you as an individual and what responsibility does being you have to your greater community?

I encourage everyone to think deeply and critically about what we have written about today. If you’d like to message or call me to have a further discussion, you know where to reach me.

And if you want to talk to Sami about this stuff, you can reach her at soundslikesami.com. 

Rob + Sami

ZARRELLCO

*The SoundsLikeSami brand is NOT affiliated with ZARRELLCO. Working with Sami (Samara) DiMouro is NOT a replacement for therapy or other mental and/or medical services. Sami is not a psychologist or medical doctor. All information given is taken based on the judgement and discretion of the client. Sami and the SoundsLikeSami brand are not responsible for negative outcomes to a client's situation, life, and/or actions related or unrelated to the information given. Sami and the SoundsLikeSami brand will never suggest or condone harmful actions (physical, mental, emotional) as a solution to a problem/situation. Any advice acted or not acted on is done on the sole volition of the client. Sami and the SoundsLikeSami brand are not liable for any outcomes, positive or negative, or lack-thereof.