The Frog and The Soup(s) đ¸
Greetings and welcome to Permission Granted, a little corner of the internet carved out to work through some things and think about what âwellnessâ means in each of our lives. I want you to feel healthy. I want you to feel free. And this week, I want you to make soup. Stick around and consider upgrading from the monthly to the weekly edition ($5/month) for more recommendations, links, and insight into how this all gets made.
Hi, hello.
I just took a quick count. There are at least 19 apps on my phone designed to compare myself to others. There are far more where it isnât the first objective, but itâs up there (Iâm looking at you, Zillow). I upload my movement stats to three different competitive social fitness apps every single day. The motivation is useful until itâs not.
Take a minute to look. How many of those little icons are nudging you to do more?
These conflicting messages bombard us:
Spend a substantial amount of your time looking at other peopleâs lives. Read everything you can about success and how other people achieved it â in careers, in love, in personal finance, in exercise, in parenting. When you have a break in the day, pick up your mini screen and let other peopleâs every move wash over you. Look. Look. Look.
Donât you dare get wrapped up in comparison. Keep your blinders on like a horse in a race. Donât compare your step 2 to someone elseâs step 25. Ideas are easy; focus on your own execution. Smile and say you admire what theyâre doing. Donât get distracted with anyone elseâs timeline. Donât. Donât. Donât.
Pay attention to everything, but never let it get to you. Itâs exhausting and unrealistic. Itâs not going anywhere.
A question about this has been sitting in my inbox since October (sorry!!) because I didnât want to mess it up by sounding like every other broken record in my response. No matter how many times the world tells us to get out of the comparison game, our little lizard brains just go right back to it. As always, Iâll share what works for me â this is going to be about business a bit, because thatâs the question, but please insert any and all aspects of life. Itâs a work in progress (see: the three daily fitness apps*). So, on we go.
Dear Molly, What do you do with feelings that you're not good enough? When people compare your brand to other brands in the space? When someone copies elements of your work you've spent years breaking your back over and succeeds with it (at least on the face of itâŚ)? How do you get past those feelings of inadequacy and go back to focusing on your customers, your team, and the community you're building? xo, A Founder
First: I hear you. These feelings youâre having are real and valid. They can suck the life out of your day, week, month. The big four â fear, anger, insecurity, shame â all come into play.
When it comes to the impact this comparison game has on our mental health, we are the parable of the frog in the soup, not realizing the broth is coming to a boil around us. The temperature rises and we sit still. As an outsider to your situation, A Founder, I can hear the pain and anxiety. I hear specific and acute circumstances, but between your questions, I hear something else â will this ever end? It is getting too hot.
We have to get you out of the soup to catch your breath. Help can look a lot like getting the perspective of standing on the edge, saying, hey, that soup is boiling.
For the entirety of The Assemblyâs life, I smiled my way through questions about a *very well known* and *very well funded* and *very similar* business to mine (actually a few businesses!). While I meant the things I said in response:Â competition shows that youâre in the right place; when people have options, they are more inclined to find whatâs right for them; rising tides do raise all ships. I also wanted to scream about what made us different and ALL of the ideas that we had done first. I heard: you are small.
I canât tell you how many fundraising rejections I got because someone had either looked at, invested in, or passed on a business they deemed âcompetitiveâ (all too often that just meant âfocused on womenâ). If youâve seen one, youâve seen them all. I heard: you are inadequate.
It started to feel like the only thing that people saw when they looked at me was the others. But of course, that wasnât true. Humans love to fill space with words! Itâs their favorite thing! When people asked those questions they didnât hang on every word of my answer. The only person who noticed and carried it around for days was me.
This past year, these other companies that lived in my head have gone through their own troubles. When that happened, it didnât make me feel better or satisfied. In the end, the comparison didnât matter at all. My only regrets are the things I wasnât able to finish or do to live up to the potential I saw for The Assembly. The rest of it melted away. I know it sounds sappy, but the answers were there for me all along. The only thing that mattered was the heart of it.
I hope it doesnât happen like this for you, A Founder. I donât think it will. But you also know that the answers to your questions are buried in there already.
When I have felt in over my head, I come back to this:
In my experience, accomplishments do not align with fulfillment. (AKA: I donât want their life.)
In my experience, I am happiest in my life/business when it feels like I am living up to my own potential. (AKA: My goals for myself include, but are not limited to this work.)
In my experience, everyone else is distracted with their own situation. (AKA: No one cares.)
In my experience, I am the only one holding me to these standards. (AKA: Really, no one else cares.)
In my experience, I am more gentle with past me than current me. (AKA: Give yourself a break, love.)
So I can probably hop out of this soup.
Of course itâs painful when your ideas are stollen, packaged up, and announced to the world by someone with better funding and sexier PR. The bigger you get, the more this will happen. Hell, look at the biggest businesses out there. All they do is steal each otherâs features and announce them as if they were invented out of thin air (a 24 hour disappearing story? How novel!). Remember, ideas are living organisms that thrive when you nurture them in your world with your customer, your team, and your community. If itâs a killer one, it will work so well it doesnât matter what anyone else does. If they execute it better because they have more resources (ugh), youâll already be onto the next. Iâm sure you already are. (Plus, you can probably also do a better job of tooting your own horn, girl!)
Almost nothing in life is a zero sum game. You are not competing for one top spot, or one way to âwinâat this.
There is no big, singular aha moment that will unlock happiness in this journey. Itâs a series of tiny realizations that each take you one more step forward. For me, it usually starts by remembering this â you (human person) are not your business (outside entity). Your work is what you have chosen to do and create (fun! scary!) with your very precious time but it does not have a bearing on how âgoodâ you are.
Good Enough is a story we make up based on what we think the world wants or needs from us. Good Enough doesnât exist because we will continue to nudge the bar higher. Good Enough is the part of our ego we need to hold at an arms-length distance to fully examine.
Not Good Enough is a designation you have only ever assigned to yourself. This should tell you something about how true it is.
Feeling not sure â not Good Enough â and continuing anyway is an incredible muscle to develop.
This is the phase in your life that you choose risks and responsibilities that will shape your next few acts. While all of this swirls around, you are still in motion. This email doesnât take the place of sitting down and making the lists: what I think is happening vs what is actually happening. You are doing more than you think simply by continuing. Your team, and community, and customers all got to make this choice and they choose to be here. So choose them right back.
In my experience, this part of the struggle will make you especially good at whatever chapters come after this one â traveler, advisor, friend, coach, mentor, entrepreneur, employee. Take breaks to check the water temperature. Check in with the people around you? Is it getting to be too much? Take true breaks when the answer is yes. Let that shit melt away and know that soon enough, something will change yet again.
Until then, you are so much more than Good Enough.
Thank you for starting this conversation. Weâre getting there together. Iâm working on it and Iâm right here with you, my friend.
And now for some thoughts and tips on soup, because once we started talking about soupâŚI had to. And itâs soup season, baby.
Have I mentioned Iâve been making a lot of soup? Iâve spent hours tinkering and adjusting and melding together recipes. Itâs the sort of inexact cooking that pleases me. You can taste it along the way, stare at it, poke it, and throw things in on a whim.
This has also led to a journey of broth.
I canât tell you how many containers of broth or stock Iâve reluctantly bought (the fanciest ones I can find, of course), knowing full well that they are a poor substitution for the âreal thing.â Iâm here to tell you that you can free yourself from these cardboard prisons.
While you may not have 8 hours and a chicken carcass just laying around, do you have 2 hours and a few sad vegetables in your life? Yes, yes you do. You can make your own very easy broth and use it anytime a recipe calls for anything broth/stock. I am not a chef, so donât come at me (or do! Whatever!) but this has worked for every substitution Iâve tried.
A Very Simple, Purposefully Vague âRecipeâ for Vegetable Broth (to be used in soup)
Roughly chop your vegetables. Donât skin, peel, dice, massage, or overthink them. This may include: carrots, celery, onions, a whole head of garlic cleaved in half, fresh herbs, mushrooms, bell peppers, fennel, parsley, cilantro. These can be scraps, limp, sad, frozen, or annoying you by their presence in some other way.
Put them in the bottom of a large pot. Add in some bay leaves (one of lifeâs great mysteries and yet I continue to add them to things), whole peppercorns, and whatever else is speaking to you from the spice arena. Dried chilis? Sure. Coriander seeds? Go for it. Parmesan rinds/chunks youâve been saving? Definitely do this.
I do not add salt because I would rather season the eventual soup depending on what else I put in it.
Cover with water. Bring to a boil. Return to the kitchen when you hear the distinct sound of the pot boiling over. Reduce the heat to as low, cover, and let simmer for more than one hour, less than 4 hours. I usually let it go for however long my patience can last, which probably should be longer considering I do not have anywhere to go!
Let it cool down. Run it through a few strainers to get all the little pieces out. This will be annoying and get a bunch of things dirty. I am sorry.
Ultimately, pour it into some large mason jars. Put it in the fridge. Make a soup with it at some point 1-14 days later. Or freeze it if youâd like to wait.
Here is a non-comprehensive list of *good soups* I have made with some version of this broth. I stuck to none of these recipes exactly. My strategy usually involves reading the comments, looking at several different recipes for similar soups elsewhere, and then sort of seeing what happens:
West African Peanut Soup with Chicken (def 2-3x garlic, ginger, and peanuts)
Every which way of Whatever You Want Soup (always with beans)
And one soup using frozen dumplings from Yummy Dumpling in the Sunset and a broth I made from the remains of a Christmas Eve Peking duck from Mister Juis, so, honestly, talking about it is just cruel.
In making this list, I realize I need a better system of recording recipes Iâve made and love. There is one that I am trying to find and just canât. Anyway, there are so many good soups! As every recipe will tell you, they taste better the next day.
Final tip: For any soup that includes pasta, make and save the pasta separately or else it will drink up all the liquid. I learned this the hard way too many times. If you have a strainer that fits into your pot/one of those pots with a strainer insert you can cook the pasta in the broth to save water/cleaning and then remove it (only if there is not a bunch of other stuff already in the soup). I have faith that you will figure this out.
Final, final tip: Pair ALL soups with a nice bread (if you are able to do that). Do not get mad at the bread for existing. Let the bread be your ally in this soup and in life.
I hope you enjoy soup.
Itâs the Lunar New Year, and we are entering the year of the Ox. Amid this yearâs curtailed celebrations, itâs important to raise awareness about the sharp rise in anti-Asian hate crimes across the country, especially in the Bay Area. Local designer Eda Yu created this shareable piece to raise money for local organizations (through tomorrow!). Stop AAPI Hate is another Bay-based organization whose work is critical to support.
My lines are open, so email me: askaway@theassembly.com. Tactical things, clarifications, suggestions, advice? Iâm all ears.
Thank you for being here. Take good care. See you soon.
xo,
Molly
P.S. Our next book club selection is Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted by Suleika Jaouad. Weâre meeting on March 14, which marks one year of virtual book club. Register and join us here!
P.P.S. Yes, I am available for side conversations about Britney Spears, but this email is getting long and, frankly, as someone who was deep in the entertainment media world through this period Iâve spent too many years trying to convince people (often aggressively!) that we are ALL complicit in what happened to her. I am glad this new documentary is doing a good job of shedding light on all of that. Also, JT has always been trash to women. I have a multi-point argument to support this thesis for anyone interested.
*Ok, since I know youâre curious. Itâs my Apple Watch, Strava, and Peloton. I am more than happy to break down my weekly movement in a future email if anyone wants. đ¤¸ââď¸