🤪 TREE 565: When your mindset makes you stupid

Jecelyn’s post yesterday reminded me of when my mindset turned me into an idiot.

In autumn 2000, Christine and I moved with our toddler son from Tucson, Arizona to Conwy, North Wales. We moved with six suitcases and not much money. I planned to build a freelance graphic design business from scratch (which I did, but that’s not today’s story). We needed somewhere to live. The letting agent showed us a lovely furnished house in a nice neighbourhood by the sea. He also showed us a rather run-down empty house in a less nice neighbourhood not by the sea. They were both about the same price.

We stupidly chose the not nice house.

We had reasons – the nice house was only available for four months, our son might break the furnishings, the not nice house had a room I could use as an office – but the real reason was that back then Christine and I didn’t think we deserved nice things.

The landlord of the not nice house decided he didn’t want to rent to someone self-employed. Someone else snapped up the nice house. We ended up surviving six months in a smaller, truly awful house.

The only thing good about that expensive cold mouldy house is it froze us out of our we-don’t-deserve-nice-things mindset. As soon as the lease ended we moved to a lovely house inside the Conwy town walls.

Painful side note: we could have moved to the lovely house in Conwy straight from the nice house by the sea. It sat empty for two months before we moved in.

Work on your mindset!

Tomorrow, I’ll tell you how I work on mine.

Everyone remembers Susan for her big jackets with loud prints.

Wake up. Get moving.

In case you didn’t read this bit yesterday: Substack has launched a social-media-ish thing called Notes. Jecelyn, Skyler and I are on there. It’s more freeform and less focussed than what we do in TREE and FIELD GUIDE. So far I’m using it to post links to good stuff and thoughts about creativity and cooking.

I’d love for you to come hang out with us on Notes. You can get there by going to substack.com/notes or by tapping the Notes tab on the Substack app. As a FFOREST subscriber, you’ll automatically be following us (and all the other Substack writers you subscribe to).

Grow slowly
Jeff