Something Good #3
Hello to friends both old and new!
These past two weeks have been all about simple pleasures for me.
Reading good books. Cleaning my house. Doing good work.
And thinking how much sweetness can be found in small things done well.
This caught my eye
👩💻 Build your personal website using Notion.If you've been thinking of building a personal website but keep putting it off because it's too complicated, here's a scrappy way to do it this weekend! It costs $12/month and doesn't need any coding or design skills to put something simple together - just build it in Notion!
💏 People's words and actions can actually shape your brain. Here's how."Your family, friends and even strangers contribute to the structure and function of your brain and help it keep your body humming along. Part of being a social species, it turns out, is that we regulate one another’s body budgets — the ways in which our brains manage the bodily resources we use every day. For your whole life, outside of your awareness, you make deposits into other people’s body budgets, as well as withdrawals, and others do the same for you. This has pros and cons, as well as profound implications for how we live our lives."
🎧 Why it's so damn important to heal your relationship with money. This is a 33-minute podcast with Melyssa Griffin (a business and mindset coach I LOVE) and Allyson Bird (also known as the “Profit Accelerator™”). I first listened to this podcast last summer, with a heck of a lot of resistance to even starting it. I thought it would be silly, fluffy, and focus on the made-up problems of people who didn't want to solve their actual business problems (ouch). Instead it ended up being the catalyst that started me down the long and jarring path to understanding and shifting my relationship with money.
📗 Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing. As I continue to try and understand my beliefs about money, I thought it would be helpful to understand what money itself is as a thing. How did it get started and where? What purpose did it serve and how was it adopted? This has been a great read - informative and light-hearted, and the audiobook version is a very engaging read.
👀 What are some books written from a unique perspective? A Reddit thread with almost 2k comments. If you're looking to change up not just the stories you're reading, but the way those stories are told.
Your turn
Niloo and I are launching a new video series called... "Ask Niloo and Nina"! 👯♀️
We've spent SO many years thinking about community, friendships, and relationships of all kinds. With this series, we'll be taking YOUR questions and digging into them.
Whether it's personal challenges or general questions, email me back with a question you'd like us to cover.
Niloo and I will choose a couple to feature, sharing our two candid perspectives in a series of videos coming out later this month!
And if you missed our first video about how our friendship started and grew, here's Niloo & Nina: The Origin Story 😉
Things my mother taught me
When I moved into my new place in January, I was obsessed with finding the perfect teapot.
Tea plays such a huge part in my everyday life - it's how I start my morning and how I wind down my day. It's how I get energy, comfort, and what I do to keep my hands busy when I need a little time to think.
So I wanted a teapot that I would look at and feel happy each time I used it. Something that was not only functional but beautiful.
Anyway, between all the stress of moving and my inability to decide what the perfect teapot looked like, I ended up not getting one at all.
My mother insisted that I would need something, and that I should bring a little old pot (not teapot, cooking pot) that I've had since the first time I moved out after university. It's old, it's crooked, it's small, the lid leaks water, and it was the very opposite of what I wanted from a teapot.
I rolled my eyes but brought it anyway(because sometimes it's just easier to give in then to argue with your mother about all the reasons why you don't need this tiny pot).
I started out by begrudgingly using it to boil water for my morning cup of tea. Then, when my grandmother sent me linden leaves from Bulgaria, I realized it was the perfect size to steep them in. And when you shared your recipes for chai with me, I started using it to make those too.
And through all this time, I grew to love using this weird little pot.
All the things that I saw as flaws became things I could easily overlook, then turned into quirks I love. They became part of my relationship and my experience with it.
It makes me think of how the rituals we create for ourselves can start with special objects... but how time and attention can make even ordinary things feel special.
That anything can become special through our commitment to it.
Nothing's changed about the pot. It's still a little weird, it's definitely still ugly, but now it holds a special place in my heart.
I'd been annoyed when my mom pushed me to pack something I saw as being small and junky. I saw it as another one of her, "You don't need anything nicer, just make do with what you have" approaches to life, when I wanted something special.
So when she asked me last week if I wanted to get a new teapot, it was a revelation to realize I didn't need anything different.
That the one I had was perfect.
Closing thoughts
-- Stephen King, Wolves of the Calla [shared by Niloo]
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Thanks for reading and I'll see you in two weeks! 👋