Welcome to V1LLAG3 Voice, the V13 Media Newsletter. Every Friday you’ll get our best music, entertainment, culture, and literature pieces: features, news, reviews, and more. C’est La V13.

The worst sentence I said to myself this week was "I should be able to do all of this."

I missed two newsletters.
I missed the gym for the second week running.
I hadn’t written anything on the new book(s) in just as long.
By Wednesday I was sitting in a parking lot staring at nothing, so run down I'd stopped being useful to anyone, including myself.
When I got honest about why, it wasn't because I'd been lazy. It was because I'd been running a schedule built for a person who doesn't live my life.

And any energy I had left went into justifying.

Why this didn't happen.
Why that slipped.
Why I'm still not there.

Somewhere around Thursday I watched myself doing it and thought: the justifying is the thing that's draining me, not the work.

When you're already running at 110 percent, the solution to “work harder” is a laughable proposition.

But (and this is a big but) every minute spent explaining to yourself why you fell short is a minute you could've spent doing the next thing, badly, on purpose.

There’s a saying I come back to, when my perfectionism is looking at the absolute shitshow of a week I’ve had and starting to start its bullshit and I need it to shut up and move on:

I keep that one on rotation. Because every week, I have to do things even when it’s poorly.

You know the feeling. You build a perfect schedule that hits every routine, checks every box, delivers on every goal.

Then life shows up.
Your kid melts down.
Your relationship nosedives through the floor.
The tool you paid for stops working.
And instead of adjusting the plan, you adjust your self-worth. Every failure feels like a character flaw.

It isn't, though. The failure is information. It's telling you the plan was too big, or the season is too hard, or both. Or you stuck to the plan and it didn’t end up working. There’s a line that the heartdea13r himself, my brother from another mother, Christopher Gonda, likes to share, a line from The Bronx:

If you're getting crushed right now, do this: pick the two or three things you're actually going to move this week, write them down, and then let everything else go with dignity.
No explanations.
No justifying, no bullshit.

The people you're doing it for don't need all that. They need you.

Let's get into it.

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