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When I Am under Pressure, I Bend

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 07:43:08 GMT

NOTES FROM LIFE

Some people thrive under deadlines, pressure and hard-set goals. I have learned that I move differently: I need to turn routines into rituals and effort into something I can devote myself to.

· 4-minute read

When I am under pressure, I bend.

I do not break. I start looking for ways to ease the pressure, question it, rub against it and try out its boundaries. I am similar to water: when you place a stone in a river, the water does not necessarily push it away. It flows around it until the sharp edges of the stone round off and both can coexist in harmony.

That is me under pressure.

Hard-set goals, deadlines and strength - at least the pushy sort of strength - do not work particularly well for me. When I decide to achieve something and push myself towards it, I find ways to flow around it when I cannot flow through.

In order to thrive, I need something different. Instead of placing myself above a goal and trying to master it through pressure and control, I dedicate myself to it. I enter the process and work with it. The goal becomes something I am creating rather than something I must conquer.

My routines become rituals, and I romanticize the hell out of them. The morning walk necessary to keep my figure becomes Awakening in the Sunrise. Building NOVALISM becomes The Search for My Tribe. Exercise stops being a task I have to complete and becomes part of something I am creating.

This worked incredibly well for me when I was pursuing weight loss. At some point, during a Neurographica drawing I wrote in my notes: My body is my art piece.

I thought, well, I am an artist. I can work with that.

Instead of pushing myself, I create. Exercises become brushstrokes on my canvas, forming it towards the beautiful ideal in my mind. The action may look exactly the same from the outside, but my relationship with it is completely different. One version asks me to obey. Another asks me to conquer. Mine gives me something to love.

I know this is not the only right way. My husband, for example, thrives under pressure. Give him a deadline, and he will prove that it was far too generous. Give me one, and I will prove that nothing terrible happens when I am a week late.

Neither of us needs to become more like the other. We need different conditions in order to do our best work.

This is where the question becomes larger than productivity. Results tell only half the story. The other half is what those results cost us and whether the way we achieved them allows us to continue. Pressure can produce impressive results. It can also produce exhaustion, resistance or a life spent fighting against oneself. Devotion works for me because it gives meaning and beauty to repetition. Someone else may come alive through accountability, precision, play or a clear deadline.

The difficulty begins when we borrow another person’s way and then interpret our resistance as laziness, weakness or lack of discipline.

The principle had been on my mind for a while, but it was not completely clear until I saw the cosmetic line Devotion from Dolce & Gabbana at the airport. I heated my credit card that day... While my card was suffering, my mind was doing something much more useful. The name, the colors and the entire world created around the line gave my mind somewhere to wander. Suddenly, two ideas that had been living separately met: the way I approached my goals and the meaning of devotion.

That is one of the quiet powers of art in our lives. It shows us perspectives we might not reach through reasoning alone. A word, a color, an image or an atmosphere can loosen a thought, move it in a new direction and create an unexpected connection. The principle was already present in the way I lived; the cosmetic line allowed me to recognize it and give it a name.

I do not need more pressure. I need a reason to devote myself.

Neurochange begins with seeking your own path: the conditions under which you move, continue and come alive. I can show you how to look. You do the rest.

Join the Novalism Circle and let me know how you thrive.

Everything Starts With a Notebook

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 01:35:56 GMT

NOVALISM IN PRACTICE

Every project starts with a notebook because an idea needs a physical place before it can become a clear direction. Handwriting gathers fragments, questions, images and decisions on pages that can be revisited. The notebook creates the conditions in which unfinished thought can develop, patterns can become visible and a project can begin to belong to the person making it.

· 6-minute read

An idea becomes real when it has somewhere to live

When I begin a project, I rarely begin with a polished plan. I begin with a notebook.

At first, the pages may hold only a phrase, a color, a question or a shape I cannot yet explain. One thought appears in the morning. Another arrives after a conversation. A third becomes visible while I draw. Each fragment may seem too small to matter on its own, but the notebook gives them a place to meet and begin to exist. The notebook is the first step of my project that actually exists.

I have used notebooks this way long before NOVALISM had a name. I spent my very first allowance on notebooks, and to this day I trust paper with my deepest thoughts. Notebooks are where I collect what has not yet become orderly enough for a document, presentation or finished plan. A notebook can hold uncertainty without demanding an immediate answer. It keeps an idea close while I learn what the idea is asking to become.

Every project starts with a notebook because the notebook marks the beginning of participation. The project is no longer only something I might do. I have made a place for it in my life.

I think with my hands

In NOVALISM, thinking is an embodied process. The hand thinks. The eyes think. Movement thinks. Language gives form to what is becoming visible, and reflection connects the parts.

I often understand something through my hands before I can explain it in words. Handwriting slows me enough to notice which sentence carries energy, which question returns and which idea looks important only because it is loud. A handwritten page preserves hesitation, emphasis, arrows, circles and changes of mind. These marks are part of the thought.

Typing is useful when information is ready to be organized. A notebook serves an earlier stage, when several forms of thought still need to share the same surface. A sentence can sit beside a sketch. A practical list can meet a memory. A question written weeks ago can suddenly explain a decision I am facing now.

The page allows the eye to travel. I can see what I crossed out, what I underlined and what keeps appearing in the margins. Thought leaves evidence, and that evidence becomes available for reflection.

A notebook creates the conditions in which ideas can emerge

An empty notebook does not contain a plan, yet it already changes the relationship with a project. It offers continuity.

Ideas often arrive in pieces. Without a place to collect them, every piece must compete for attention. We try to remember everything at once, and urgency begins to decide what receives our energy. A dedicated notebook removes that pressure. The thought can wait on the page until the next fragment arrives.

Over time, repetition becomes visible. The same concern may appear in several forms. One image may return without explanation. A goal may continue to receive words but no action. Another idea may quietly gather detail, clarity and momentum. The notebook shows the difference between a passing impulse and a direction that keeps asking for participation.

This is one reason handwriting deserves a place beside digital tools. The notebook preserves the development of thought rather than only its final version. It records the path by which a decision became possible.

Making the notebook changes the thinking

Sometimes the process begins even earlier. I make the notebook itself.

I choose the paper, fold the pages and sew them together. A shopping bag, a piece of packaging or another material from an earlier use can become a cover. The object begins with a previous life and takes on a new function.

Nothing essential is wasted.

This is deliberate reconstruction in physical form. Deliberate reconstruction is the central process of NOVALISM: deciding what still belongs, what must change and what form an authentic direction can take under present conditions. Making a notebook gives that principle a material expression. The old material remains visible, while its purpose changes.

The making also changes my attention. A notebook I have assembled for a particular project already contains intention before I write the first sentence. I know its weight, its texture and the effort required to create it. The project has entered the physical world through an act of care.

Perfection is unnecessary. A simple bound stack of pages can carry the same commitment. The value comes from giving the idea a form you can return to.

What belongs in a project notebook

A project notebook can contain anything that helps the thought develop:

observations that feel important before you know why
questions you are not ready to answer
handwritten plans and changing priorities
sketches, diagrams, symbols and visual associations
quotations with their sources
decisions and the reasons behind them
evidence of what creates energy and what creates resistance
notes about what has changed since the project began

The notebook can be untidy. Its role is to make thought visible, not to present a finished identity.

Order usually emerges after enough material exists. You may discover natural sections, repeated themes or a sequence of decisions. At that point, some parts can move into a digital system. The notebook remains the record of how the project learned its direction.

Begin with one notebook

Choose one project, question or area of life that currently feels crowded with possibilities. Give it its own notebook.

On the first page, write:

What am I trying to understand, choose or build?

Then let the early pages remain open and imperfect. Record fragments as they arrive. Add dates so you can see movement over time.

Once a week, read backward and mark:

what keeps returning
what has become clearer
what has lost importance
what now asks for action

End the review with one sentence:

What matters now is…

This sentence can change from week to week. The purpose is to create an honest relationship with the project as it develops.

The first object of a future life

A notebook is small enough to begin before the entire path is clear. It asks for no performance and no perfect answer. It asks for presence.

Everything starts with a notebook because the notebook lets an idea accumulate a history. The hand gives thought a physical form. The eye returns and recognizes patterns. Reflection turns those patterns into direction.

The notebook becomes the first object of the life or project you are choosing to build.

BEGIN WITH ONE HONEST QUESTION

The free Priority Honesty Practice helps you examine the relationship between your stated goals, your actual priorities and the way you currently use your time.

TRY THE PRIORITY HONESTY PRACTICE

The Opposite of Passive Consumption Is Participation

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:02:10 GMT

THE PHILOSOPHY OF NOVALISM

A CEO told a young employee that he could continue playing PlayStation or grow into a better position, but probably not both. The internet defended the employee’s private life. My own years inside computer games led me toward the less comfortable side of the argument.

· 8-minute read

A few days ago, I read a discussion on LinkedIn that stayed with me much longer than I expected.

A young employee had been given a choice by his CEO: stop playing PlayStation if you want to grow into a better position, or continue playing and accept that your career will probably stop where it is.

The comments were predictably outraged. People argued that an employer has no right to decide what someone does after work, and I understand the objection. Private life belongs to the employee.

Yet the CEO had not taken away the controller or forbidden the employee from playing. He had connected a private habit with a professional consequence and left the choice with him.

I know nothing about the employee’s performance, how many hours he played or what the CEO had observed before saying this. Still, I could not dismiss it as easily as most people in the comments did.

Instead, I kept wondering why almost nobody proposed the simplest experiment imaginable.

If gaming has no influence on your attention, motivation or ability to engage with life, putting the controller away for one month should be easy. You lose nothing by observing what happens.

I say this as someone who has spent almost twenty-five years watching the internet evolve and allowing it to change the way I think.

I had already performed the experiment without giving it a name

When I first discovered the internet around 2001, it was through AOL chat rooms. I spent entire nights talking to people from different countries. Looking back, I was certainly escaping reality to some extent, but the internet demanded something from me. If I wanted to remain in the conversation, I had to think, write, listen, respond, joke, disagree and build relationships.

My attention was active.

Then Facebook arrived and solved a real problem for me. I was living between several countries, and instead of calling everyone individually to announce where I was, I could write, “I just landed in Germany. Who has time to meet?”

The internet extended my life and helped me bring people into it.

Then came FarmVille.

Many of us started there. We planted virtual crops, waited for them to grow and returned to harvest them as if something terrible might happen if imaginary strawberries remained in an imaginary field for too long. It sounds absurd now, but millions of us understood the urgency perfectly.

Over the following years, I explored many virtual worlds. When my real life collapsed in 2018, those worlds became a refuge.

There is something comforting about a place where every problem has a solution, effort produces a predictable reward and the rules remain the same from one day to the next. Reality rarely offers such reliability. You can work hard and still lose. You can make the right decision and receive the wrong result. You can do everything possible and discover that some things were never under your control.

Inside a game, I knew what to do. Complete the task, collect the reward and begin the next one.

For a while, this helped me. Then it began taking more than it gave.

My awakening came around 2022, when I asked myself one question:

Among all the people I had met through gaming over the years, whose life did I actually want for myself?

The answer was no one’s.

I deleted every game, sold my gaming computer and returned to my real life. What surprised me afterward was how much of myself I had quietly surrendered.

I had become slower in conversations. Concentrating was difficult. I reacted more slowly to ordinary situations and observed less of what was happening around me. At the same time, I had become exceptionally good at clicking, waiting and collecting rewards.

Of course I had. Those were the abilities I had been practicing.

A few days were enough for the game to occupy my mind again

The LinkedIn discussion made me curious, so I downloaded one of my former favorite games to see what had changed.

It frightened me.

Years ago, games depended much more on people. We talked constantly, negotiated, planned, helped one another and solved problems together. Communication was part of the experience, and sometimes the relationships continued outside the game.

This time, the conversations were almost gone.

The game asked me to wait. If I did not want to wait, I could pay. When the timer ended, I pressed a button, collected a reward and started another timer. The obstacles that once required cooperation or thought had gradually been replaced by buttons, delays and payments.

After only a few days, I noticed what this simple rhythm was doing to my attention.

When I lay in bed, I no longer reflected on my day or thought about tomorrow. My mind returned to a place that did not exist. When I woke up, my first thought was no longer an idea or curiosity about the day ahead. I wondered whether something inside the game had finished building.

The game had occupied mental space that had previously belonged to my own life.

So I deleted it again.

This experience is why I find myself taking the CEO’s side, although perhaps not for the reason people assume. I have no interest in telling another adult how to spend an evening. I do believe that the way we repeatedly use our attention changes what remains available for everything else.

A person can choose to play. A CEO can also decide who appears ready for greater responsibility. Neither choice exists without consequences.

Perhaps the CEO saw an ability in the young employee that the employee was not yet using. Perhaps he recognized a habit that was consuming the attention needed to develop it. We do not know. The employee could reject his opinion, continue playing and build his career elsewhere.

Before rejecting the connection completely, however, I would want to test whether it was true.

Returning to real life required real participation

When I stopped playing the first time, I did not replace games with productivity systems. I found my way back whenever I chose something that required my participation.

Cleaning a room made me look at my surroundings and decide what belonged where. Gardening demanded patience because nothing in nature grows faster when I press a button. Walking returned my attention to people, streets, weather and small changes I would otherwise miss. Making notebooks gave my hands a real material and left me with an object that continued to exist after I finished.

For me, Neurographica became the most effective tool for this purpose.

A drawing asks for my presence from beginning to end. I observe what appears, respond with my hand and make decisions that cannot be outsourced to an automatic reward system. The hand becomes part of the thinking process. Every line changes the surface and influences what I do next.

When I finish, the drawing exists in the same world I do.

My history with AOL chat rooms also prevents me from dividing life neatly into digital equals bad and physical equals good. A conversation through a screen can demand attention, humor, empathy and thought. A computer game can involve strategy, creativity and meaningful cooperation. An afternoon in the physical world can be spent avoiding everything that needs to be done.

The useful question is what an activity repeatedly asks from us and what abilities we are practicing while doing it.

Does it invite us to think, communicate, create and make decisions? Does it extend our relationship with life, as Facebook once did for me when I traveled? Or does it gradually reduce our role to waiting, clicking and collecting rewards designed by someone else?

The original LinkedIn discussion presented the choice as gaming or professional productivity. I think the distinction goes deeper.

Productivity can become another form of passive consumption when we chase tasks, numbers and achievements without deciding whether they belong to the life we want.

The real alternative is participation.

Participation means entering a relationship with what is happening around us. Something asks for our attention, and our response changes what happens next. A room becomes usable. A garden grows. A conversation develops. A notebook takes form. A drawing appears where an empty sheet had been.

These activities do not always feel as immediately rewarding as a game. Their results arrive unevenly, people behave unpredictably and real life refuses to provide a progress bar.

This uncertainty is also what makes our participation matter.

Try the experiment before deciding who was right

If you currently play computer games, stop completely for one month. Do not merely reduce the hours. Remove the game and give yourself enough distance to notice the space it occupied.

Observe what happens to your thoughts before sleep and immediately after waking. Notice whether ordinary tasks become easier or remain unbearably slow without constant rewards. Watch your concentration, your conversations and your patience. Pay attention to what you begin doing with the hours that return.

If you do not play games and are curious about their influence, try the opposite experiment. Download a simple game for one week and decide on the final day before you begin. Observe how quickly you start thinking about it when you are no longer playing. Notice what you postpone, how often you reach for the game and whether it changes the way you experience quieter parts of the day.

Do the experiment neither to prove the CEO right nor to defend gaming. Use it to observe yourself.

Perhaps you will discover that games bring genuine enjoyment and have no meaningful effect on the rest of your life. Perhaps you will see that they occupy more attention than the hours visible on the screen suggest.

Either result is more useful than another opinion.

Participation begins when we are willing to find out.

Compare what you notice

The free NOVALISM community is a place to examine your goals, habits and observations with other people who are actively working with their lives.

Try the experiment and bring us what you discover.

JOIN THE FREE NOVALISM COMMUNITY

How I Became Too Good at Adapting

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:48:38 GMT

NOTES FROM LIFE

For thirty years, travel taught me to adjust when plans changed without losing sight of what I wanted. After bankruptcy, I used the same ability differently: I adjusted to whatever felt safest, until a broken ankle gave me enough stillness to see the life I had accepted.

· 6-minute read

I broke my ankle on the first day of my first vacation in a very long time.

The holiday was supposed to be active. Instead, I needed surgery. I was in too much pain to manage the six-hour drive home, so we had to remain at the hotel.

Suddenly, there was nowhere to go.

I had books, drawings and long, quiet hours with myself. Somewhere inside those hours, I realized how much I had changed. I was functioning, taking care of my responsibilities and managing my life, yet I no longer felt as if I was truly living it.

I allowed myself to be lived.

It was a strange realization for someone who had spent most of her life going places.

Travel taught me to change the plan without losing the purpose.

One memory from Melbourne shows me the person I used to be.

We had arrived after a nine-hour flight from Hong Kong and needed to shower before an appointment with an Australian politician. Our hotel room would not be ready until noon, exactly when we had to leave.

The receptionist told us there was nothing they could do.

The room could remain unavailable; our need for a shower remained. So I continued asking what other possibilities the hotel could offer. Eventually, they arranged access to a shower in the spa. We prepared for the appointment and left on time.

It was a small incident, one of those practical travel problems that should disappear from memory as soon as they are solved. I remember it because accepting the first answer never occurred to me.

The receptionist had described the current situation. I did not hear it as the end of all possibilities.

Travel is full of such moments. Flights are delayed, connections are missed, reservations disappear and rules make sense only to the person explaining them. You can prepare carefully, but reality will edit your plans without asking permission.

Over thirty years of travel, I naturally responded to those edits. I knew when to insist, when to improvise and when to let the original plan go. A wrong turn could reveal something I would never have chosen deliberately. A delay could lead to an unexpected conversation. Often the alternative was even better than the idea I had arrived with.

THE ROUTE COULD CHANGE WITHOUT TAKING THE PURPOSE WITH IT.

I trusted myself in unfamiliar situations because adapting was simply one of my skills. I did not need to know every step before leaving. Whatever happened, I would look at the conditions and decide what to do with them.

At that time, this felt completely natural to me.

After bankruptcy, adaptation changed its direction

When I lost the life I had built, I adapted again.

From the outside, I was doing well. I made practical decisions, fulfilled my responsibilities and created stability. I knew how to survive a crisis and begin rebuilding afterward.

Fear entered the process quietly.

I became more cautious and accepted things I would once have questioned. I reduced my expectations and increasingly chose the option least likely to expose me to another loss. Each decision appeared reasonable on its own. Together, they built a life around protection.

Perhaps this is why I did not notice what was happening. Adaptation looked like competence from the outside and felt like responsibility from the inside.

There was no dramatic day on which I decided to stop wanting more from my life. I arrived there through a long sequence of sensible choices. I avoided unnecessary risks, adjusted to circumstances and learned to tolerate what I had.

The woman who kept questioning the receptionist in Melbourne was buried under experience, fear, maybe even aging.

During my years of traveling, I changed the plan to protect the purpose. After bankruptcy, I began changing the purpose to protect myself.

That is a very different use of the same strength.

Adaptability had helped me cross countries, solve problems and remain open when I did not know what would happen next. Now it helped me arrange almost any circumstance into something I could endure.

I became very good at managing a life I did not genuinely want.

My body finally stopped me

On vacation, there was no alternative worth negotiating. My ankle was broken and the active holiday was finished. For someone accustomed to finding another solution, my body had produced an unusually clear answer.

I had to stop.

At first, the pause was simply practical. I could not walk properly, continue with the planned activities or distract myself by moving on to the next thing. As the days passed, the stillness revealed its purpose.

I began to see how much of my life I had organized around avoiding disappointment. My plans were careful. My expectations were manageable. My deeper wishes remained somewhere in the distance, where they could neither fail nor ask too much of me.

I had called this stability.

The absence of another catastrophe had become enough.

What frightened me was how normal it all felt. I had not been obviously unhappy every day. I was working, thinking, drawing and taking care of what needed to be done. Life can become smaller without appearing empty. We become accustomed to its size.

The broken ankle did not create the problem or solve it. It interrupted me long enough to notice it.

I had spent years naturally adapting to almost anything. I had forgotten to ask why I was adapting, how long the situation was supposed to remain temporary and whether managing it well was a good enough reason to keep it.

Those questions changed my understanding of strength.

Adaptability is precious. It carried me through unfamiliar countries and helped me rebuild after enormous loss. It also allowed me to remain too long in circumstances that no longer belonged to me.

A strength does not always lead us in the right direction simply because it is a strength. We still decide what it serves.

I continue to believe in adjusting the route, releasing plans that no longer work and meeting reality as it is. Now I also watch what I am preserving through those adjustments.

Am I adapting so that I can continue toward something that matters, or am I using my ability to make an unwanted life tolerable?

Sometimes circumstances truly cannot change yet. Responsibilities, health, money and other people place real limits around our choices. Even then, I want to know whether I am living through a temporary condition or quietly turning it into my future.

My broken ankle gave me no grand answer about what to do next. It showed me that I had to begin choosing again.

I did not need to recover the exact person I had been before bankruptcy. Too much had happened, and much of what I had learned deserved to remain. I needed to use my ability to adapt in its original direction again: in service of a life I wanted, rather than a life I knew how to survive.

JOURNAL YOUR NEXT DIRECTION

Take a few quiet minutes and write honestly:

What do I currently dislike about my life?
What do I want instead?
What would my desired life look and feel like?
Which parts of my current situation can I change, influence or reinterpret?
What is one small step I can take to begin transforming my present circumstances toward what I want?
Where am I adapting to survive, when I could begin adapting to create?

You do not need to solve your entire life today. Start by naming what is no longer working and giving yourself permission to imagine something different.

If you want support as you reflect, rebuild and choose what comes next, you are invited to join the free NOVALISM community.