98. Mindset Moment 03: Don’t hide your magic!

But you also mentioned social media, and in another context, you once said, “Don’t hide your magic.” Magic, yes. Exactly. Can you briefly explain that? Because I found that really interesting, since I think social media plays a part in that. Yes, that brings us back to the important point that everything has its pros and cons, because those were the nasty downsides of social media. On the other hand, it obviously gives you the opportunity to showcase your talents, if you have any.

A colleague of mine once told me, “Don’t hide your magic.” He really meant it like this: you have so many talents that the world simply doesn’t see because you’re not sharing them. But now you have the opportunity to share them through your platform, so you’d better do it. And that actually motivated me, it was definitely something in my head when I did that freestyle. Because I was thinking, when I look at what they’re doing here in the German music industry, it’s just so crap, so trashy, it probably sounds like that.

Aisha Vibes on the courage to have your own style

I like that you’re not a jerk, but that comes across so quickly, you know, so I was like, hey, yeah, just do it, show them how it’s really done. And that’s why I always try to advise everyone, like other newcomers or people who want to do something with music and stuff, I go on their Instagram and see great photos of them, where I think, yeah, great, but now what’s the point? If you’re an amazing singer, then show that you’re an amazing singer, then upload videos where you sing amazingly.

Done, and then continuously do that, and that applies to other talented people too. Now there’s the opportunity to showcase that talent. It’s just that there’s an overabundance of it, but I still believe it’s possible to stand out. Don’t hide your magic. Exactly. Hi everyone and welcome to Project Mindset. You just heard an excerpt from the podcast with Aisha Vibes. That was podcast number or episode number 95. I had a super interesting conversation with Aisha Vibes, and I personally find the quote or passage “Don’t hide your magic” very powerful.

Two thoughts behind the quote

I thought about it for a long time afterward, because I think the quote touches on several mindset themes. On the one hand, we have the issue of needing to know, or wanting to know, what one’s own magic actually is. In other words, where do my skills lie, or what do I particularly enjoy? What makes me happy when I do it?

That’s the issue on the one hand, and on the other hand, of course, when you’ve found this topic for yourself, or a magic has found its magic, you naturally then share it with the outside world, you take the steps, you take the individual steps, you also share it with the outside world, you leave shame behind, because you might think, oh no, it’s perhaps a little uncomfortable for me if I talk about this topic in public or with my friends.

So, there are several things you need to do to make the quote “Don’t hide your magic” actually work in reality. And in today’s podcast episode, I want to talk briefly about this quote and the possible steps you can take to discover your own magic and then, in the second step, share it with the world. Personally, I want to start with the point of discovery. It’s actually easier than you might think.

Find your own passion through experimentation

Many people think it’s incredibly difficult to find their calling, to do what they want to do in life, that you just know it after a while, once you reach a certain age, that you simply know what you want to do. And many are then incredibly disappointed when years have passed, they still don’t really know exactly what they want to do and are a bit disappointed with life for not having discovered their own magic. I really only have one piece of advice I can offer.

And this one tip is super simple. It’s about trying things out, doing things, putting them into practice, especially if I get the feeling that something’s right. For me, in my case, that’s podcasting. It could be my magic, or something I’d really like to do. I have to start with it and try it out for a while. Only then will I know if it’s for me or not. And at the same time, it shouldn’t be a big deal if, for example, after two or three years I realize that podcasting isn’t really for me.

Gain experience instead of waiting for certainty

Or I might have the idea that I’d like to make films, direct them, then make one, two, three films, for example, as short as they come, and then realize that it’s actually not for me at all, and then simply try something else. So in that case, there’s really no magic involved. I’ve noticed this for myself in my life because, even at a young age, I often asked myself the same question: What do I actually want to do? What do I actually enjoy, or where do I want to develop?

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And quite honestly, of course there are people who have tried something like that. It was exactly their thing, and they do it their whole lives. But I would say that for the vast majority of people, they first have to try a certain number of things, delve into topics, and work their way into the details before they can even realize and understand whether it’s something for them or not. I would say that’s actually the easy part of the quote “Don’t hide your magic”—finding the magic.

Simply in the sense that you have to try it out, and it might take a little longer, but you’ll find it after a while. I’m 100 percent sure of that. The other part, this “don’t hide,” could be a bit more interesting in this case, because this ” don’t hide” is, I think, very, very important in the mindset of many people, because they often—and I used to include myself in this—have often thought about what others will think of me if I go public with a certain topic, if, for example, I wanted to become a podcaster, to stick with this example.

The fear of the judgment of others

Before the first podcast episode, as I’ve mentioned several times on the podcast, I naturally thought about what other people think of me. I wondered if it was kind of strange, if they thought, “Yeah, yeah, Reza’s just trying to be a podcaster.” Ultimately, it’s about overcoming that initial awkwardness, about saying, “Okay, I really don’t care what other people think.” And this is a point in my life where, I’d say—not with all topics, but with many—I simply don’t care what others think of me, because they’re not in my shoes.

You don’t know what I went through to gain this experience. Perhaps it’s a story I’ve told here and there. I had a startup that started off very well, but after some bad decisions, I eventually had to give it up. And even at the very moment when I should have been thinking about various things, I was more concerned with, “Damn, what do other people think of me now, because my startup has essentially failed?”

Overcoming shame and finding time

And you really have to overcome that charm if you want to share your magic, Donalchi Magic, with the world. What I also find extremely important in this context, as I’ve said, is that you have to know what your magic is, and you can figure that out pretty well through experimentation. And then showing it to the world, not hiding it, is another important point. But you also have to understand that it doesn’t just come easily; you have to put in the work.

It starts with the fact that you have to differentiate for yourself. Many people in my circle, my friends, and so on, who are currently starting a family, naturally have a thousand things they have to deal with, whether it’s their job, their work, their business. Of course, everything they have to do is always incredibly important and urgent. And here I say again and again, you have to distinguish for yourself what is actually important and what is actually urgent.

Distinguish between importance and urgency

We actually talked about this in a podcast once. Importance isn’t automatically urgency, and vice versa, of course. A good example is the urgent need to file your income tax return by a certain date. Personally, that’s not important to me at all, but for the tax office, it’s extremely important, and they can tell me whether I have to do it or not. So, for me, it has a certain urgency; I have to do it. But in terms of importance, let’s be honest, family, podcasting, or whatever else is much more important to me than filing my income tax return.

But because of the external pressure, I naturally prioritize the things that are currently urgent. Filing my income tax return is just one example. Or, if I’m at work, what my employer tells me about deadlines for specific projects is obviously more urgent. But whether it’s truly more important for my life is another matter entirely. That’s why you need to be able to differentiate for yourselves. I do this all the time. What’s important and what’s urgent?

There are different systems for how to handle this. I didn’t invent this system. I’m just sharing what worked for me. If something is important to me, I allocate time to it. Even if it’s only a minimal amount of time, I do it. For example, I’m a native Iranian, I speak Farsi, or Persian. And I discovered, or rather observed, that my Persian deteriorated over time. Simply because I spoke it less.

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Since I moved out of my parents’ house, I simply have much less contact with them, for example, with my parents. Unfortunately, I try to maintain it, of course, but we’re just not living under the same roof anymore. We simply don’t talk to each other as much. We still talk on the phone and, of course, see each other on weekends and so on. But it’s definitely decreased. And since my parents, along with my grandparents, were practically the only people I spoke Persian with, that naturally diminished when I moved out.

And then, a few years ago, I realized, wow, the quality of my Farsi has suffered a bit. What can I do now? I don’t really feel like sitting down every Saturday for four hours practicing Persian, reading, and so on. So I decided to read a line or two every day, for example, from a children’s book. I mean, more complex books are difficult for me. And even from a children’s book, we have different characters and so on.

I read a line or two from the children’s book just to keep myself engaged with the topic, even if it’s not much. And I can’t just make excuses about not having enough time, because there’s always time for a line or two. So I keep my book next to the nightstand and glance over it, or I have a few books on my phone that I can read in short bursts. I’m not reading pages, just a few lines.

Regularly give space to one’s own passion

And that makes a difference, that I allocate time for it and then work on it consistently. Allocating time is important, extremely important for the magic you want to project outwards. No matter how little time you have, you have to organize your time for the magic you want to project, that’s one aspect. And the other is consistency, saying, okay, I’ll do this once a week, or once a day, or whenever. I’ll do that over a longer period.

And of course, perseverance plays a crucial role. One of my favorite podcasters in this context once said—I think he’s around episode 600 now—that for the first 500 episodes, statistically speaking, almost no one listened, but he had the perseverance to keep going and going and going. He said the first 500 episodes were practically unheard of because of streaming and so on. Hardly anyone listened, but then at some point it completely exploded, and now millions of people are listening.

Perseverance and clear priorities

And that’s obviously perseverance combined with consistency, and coupled with the fact that he really prioritized this podcast, as he himself said at one point, it was simply important to him to do. That’s why he sat down and worked on it weekly or twice a week, even though—and I know the feeling—no one pays you for it. You get a little feedback here and there, of course, but not enough feedback to make you say, “Wow, that’s amazing, this has a really good look and I can really make it big with this.”

You have to do this over a very long period of time, prioritizing this perseverance, this importance, this consistency, until you eventually achieve a certain level of success, depending on how you define success. But for me, that’s actually the key to “Don’t Hide Your Magic”: that you skip over that initial charm, that you work consistently, that you distinguish between what’s important and what’s merely urgent in life, that you’re consistent in what you do, that you also demonstrate perseverance.

What we can take away from Aisha Vibes

And that’s the only way I believe you can achieve success. And Aicha Vibes’ success proves her right; she’s really hitting her stride with her music right now. It was great that I took the time to talk about it with her on the podcast. And there’s one more point I want to mention that she made in that one section, namely that you should do exactly what you think is your magic. She said that if you’re a musician and you’re just posting photos on Instagram, for example, then you’re not contributing to the right kind of success.

If you’re a musician, then shoot music videos and release them. And that’s exactly one example, I have one in this context, with a friend of mine. I think I mentioned it in another podcast once. He works in IT and is quite successful. After a long conversation—because we were talking about exactly what he’d really like to do instead of his actual job—he said he’d actually like to make films. Short films, that is.

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And I found that incredibly interesting. It was only after a while that he realized it was actually important to him to do something like that. Because he’d already had a film failure and so on and so forth. But he wasn’t taking any concrete steps in that direction, to, let’s say, even test the waters and see how far he could go, what kind of output he could generate, and so on and so forth. And of course, it’s clear that at some point you get caught in a spiral of unhappiness and are only preoccupied with yourself, with your job, or whatever else you’re doing to earn money, but not doing what you actually want to do and using everything else as an excuse.

So, for example, my friend I was just talking about, he does other projects on the side, or rather, he did, but he just didn’t deposit the money into the right account. It was deposited into an account, but not the right one, if you know what I mean. Exactly, and that’s precisely what I wanted to talk to you about today: not overthinking what your own magic is, because you only discover that when you actually create something, when you take action, when you follow a certain path.

Sally’s world as an example of a long journey

I live near Heidelberg, and there’s a really big YouTuber nearby. Her YouTube channel is called SallysWelt. I find her incredibly inspiring. She started her channel 9, 10, or 11 years ago. She was a teacher and then started posting baking videos on YouTube. I imagine it was probably a big leap for her to start posting YouTube videos 10 years ago. It might be a bit easier now, but back then there was also the whole issue of shame and so on.

She then started posting baking videos here and there. After several years, she became incredibly successful. She has millions of followers today. She makes a living from it now. From what I’ve heard, half the town of Waghäusel, which is near us, belongs to her. She practically owns it. I find that fascinating, and it certainly contributes to something magical, like baking. You have to share that with the world. Perhaps one last point of my own experience.

I don’t want to romanticize it too much, to say, “Hey, magic and all that, you can keep up with it.” And it’s not all super fun and everything’s always great. Everything’s always hilarious and everything’s fantastic. So I have to let reality take over a bit too. Of course, in the context of podcasting, for example, I enjoy it immensely. But not every aspect of podcasting is fun for me. Like editing the files and so on. Adding descriptions and so forth.

Even the less popular tasks are included.

Of course, there are parts of it that I personally don’t enjoy that much. But I know it’s part of the final product. Podcasting is simply part of it. I do enjoy those parts, for example, reflecting on certain topics, sharing my experiences with you, and conducting interviews with incredibly inspiring people. That’s incredibly fun. But there are also many parts that I don’t enjoy as much. For example, when we’re somewhere conducting an interview. Of course, setting up and taking down equipment, and so on and so forth, is also part of it.

But you just have to get through it. And of course, it’s also a bit of a reality check, reminding you that if you have a hobby that you enjoy, you should consider turning it into a profession someday. Not every aspect of it is fun. And you even have to be careful that the hobby itself isn’t ruined. In the sense that you realize, hey, if it’s just a hobby, if I don’t have to or want to earn money with it, and so on, then I’m doing it because it’s genuinely fun.

But as soon as there’s a bit of pressure, financial pressure, the need to earn money with baking cakes—no matter what you’re doing—if you have to make money by baking cakes, then it’s no longer a hobby. You’re under a lot of stress trying to bake the cake properly, meeting a certain deadline, and so on and so forth, whatever else is involved. So you have to be careful that the fun, the enjoyment, isn’t taken out of the hobby. Okay, folks, that’s all for today.

To share one’s own magic with the world

I just wanted to briefly talk about the topic or quote from Aisha Vibes again. The phrase “Don’t hide your magic” feels incredibly powerful to me. I hope you’ve already listened to the podcast. If not, give it another listen. Episode 95 was extremely interesting. And I think we’ll be hearing more from Aisha Vibes in the future. I’m really looking forward to it. And that’s all for today. Talk to you again soon. And until then, remember, mindset is everything.