|Shim Shiminey|⁷

Carpe diem.

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

"Sometimes life hides gifts in the darkest of places." --Anne Shirley

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

@LloydsBank After 14+ years with Lloyds, my Islamic account was closed suddenly in late 2024. I received a damaged cheque and, living overseas, can’t visit a branch. Calls/chats haven’t helped, and I can’t file a complaint without a UK postcode. Deeply disappointed—need support.

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

@oh_museum #오뮤지엄 #블리치전 #블리치전인증샷

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

@Noni_1022 شيماء

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

فَٱصۡبِرۡ عَلَىٰ مَا یَ��ُولُونَ وَسَبِّحۡ بِحَمۡدِ رَبِّكَ قَبۡلَ طُلُوعِ ٱلشَّمۡسِ وَقَبۡلَ غُرُوبِهَاۖ وَمِنۡ ءَانَاۤىِٕ ٱلَّیۡلِ فَسَبِّحۡ وَأَطۡرَافَ ٱلنَّهَارِ لَعَلَّكَ تَرۡضَىٰ﴿ ١٣٠ ﴾

Ṭā-Hā, Ayah 130

[Noura. @Noni_1022]

"هوّن عليك فإنّ الأمورَ بكفِّ الإله مقاديرُها"

[لبنى الخميس @lubnaAlkhamis]

مضيئون جداً .. من لا يلهثون خلف الضوء.

ملفتون جداً .. من لا يتعمّدون لفت الانتباه.

مقنعون جداً.. من لا يبالغون في إثبات رأيهم.

[Noura. @Noni_1022]

"وإذا أراد الله إتمام حاجةٍ
أتتك على سفرٍ وأنت مقيم"

[فيصل العنزي @ff3p_]

﴿ ولا تمدّن عينيك ﴾
الحسد سوء أدب مع الله؛ لا ترهق نفسك بالمقارنات؛ لأنه كلما اتسعت عيناك ضاق صدرك؛ وارض بما قسمه الله لك واشكره على نعمته، تكن أغنى الناس؛ وثق تماماً بأنه لا يوجد إنسان على هذه الدنيا أعطاه الله كل شيء.

[Noura. @Noni_1022]

و لعل الله أرادها أن تأتي مُتأخرة ، فتأتي أعظم وأكرم مما لو كانت قد أتت باكرة ❤️

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

The Oscar Winning writer & director Peter Farrelly was asked,

Do you get writer's block?

“Writer's block is my natural state,” he said. “Everyday I sit down and go, ‘I got nothing.’”

Then he forces himself to write.

“I always say, ‘I’d rather write shit than nothing.’ Because

with shit, you got something to work with. You can make it less shitty and then not horrible and then decent and then pretty good and then good and then very good and then excellent.

But you gotta start with shit.”

Everyone does, Farrelly continues.

“When you read a book or a screenplay and think, ‘Wow, I could never do this.’ Well don’t forget: that person didn’t start with that. They started with shit—that they fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed and fixed.”

Takeaway 1:

Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes in Creativity, Inc, “Early on, all of our movies suck…I choose that phrasing because saying it in a softer way fails to convey how bad the first versions of our films really are.”

Catmull repeats, “Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’”

It's true:

Everyone starts with shit—that they fix and fix and fix and fix and fix and fix and fix and fix and fix and fix.

Takeaway 2:

Farrelly says that everyday when he sits down to write, he initially feels blocked. Still, he forces himself to write and soon, “you start feeling good.”

I wrote recently about what I say to myself before I read or write:

“Accept the initial agitation.”

It comes from Dr. Andrew Huberman, who explains:

When you begin working on something, “the brain circuits that turn on first are of the stress system.”

Meaning:

“The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something is just a recognized gate...There is a gate of entry. You have to wade through some sewage before you can swim in clear water. That's the way I always think about it.”

The block is a “natural state,” as Farrelly said. It’s just a recognized gate. Force yourself to wade through it, and soon, you'll start feeling good.

- - -

“I always say, ‘I’d rather write shit than nothing.’ Because with shit, you got something to work with.” — Peter Farrelly

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

When he began writing The Lord of the Rings in the 1920s, J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford.

At the time, fantasy was not considered a “serious” genre.

So, one of his contemporaries explains, Tolkien was mocked by his Oxford colleagues.

They said

he was wasting his time “lavishing such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition.”

One of Tolkien's biographers writes, “He was regularly asked in a mocking manner, 'How is your hobbit?'”

Amidst a crowd of people who make fun of you, who tell you you're wasting your time, who encourage you to do something less trifling and more prestigious—sometimes, all it takes is one person's support.

For Tolkien, that person was the great writer C.S. Lewis.

“The unpayable debt that I owe to [Lewis] was not influence but sheer encouragement,” Tolkien said. “He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my 'stuff' could be more than a private hobby.”

Takeaway 1:

In his essay, How To Do What You Love, Paul Graham writes, “You shouldn't worry about prestige...Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like.”

Tolkien wasn't warped by his Oxford colleagues and their belief that what he was working on wasn't prestigious.
And after his works of fantasy went on to sell more than 600 million copies, Tolkien would eventually be widely called the “father of high fantasy.”
He is just one example to remind us that what is considered “prestigious” isn't stable in time, and that “if you do anything well enough,” to quote Graham again, “you’ll make it prestigious.”

Takeaway 2:

Tolkien, Lewis, and another writer named Charles Williams were part of an informal literary club known as The Inklings.

Shortly after Williams unexpectedly died, Lewis realized he stopped hearing the way Tolkien used to laugh at the way Williams used to tell a joke. Which made him then realize,

“In each of my friends,” Lewis wrote, “there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.”

If not for the encouragement of his friend, Tolkien said he would not have been large enough to call the whole of him into activity.

“But for [Lewis'] interest and unceasing eagerness for more,” Tolkien said, “I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”

- - -

“Just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself.” — Paul Graham

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[Billy Oppenheimer @bpoppenheimer]

When he was 19, Andre Agassi started losing his hair.

Deeply ashamed of his receding hairline, to hide it, Agassi started wearing a hairpiece.

Not long after, at the 1990 French Open, Agassi made it to his first Grand Slam final.

“The night before the final,” Agassi writes,

“Catastrophe strikes.”

As he was taking a shower, Agassi felt the hairpiece disintegrate in his hands. He summoned his brother, who was able to clip the hairpiece back together with 20 bobby pins.

The next morning, Agassi writes, “warming up before the match, I pray. Not for a win, but for my hairpiece to stay on…My tenuous hairpiece has me catatonic…With every lunge, every leap, I picture it landing on the clay. I can picture millions of people suddenly leaning closer to their TVs, turning to each other and in dozens of languages and dialects saying some version of: Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?”

At times, he looks into the stands and sees fans sporting hairdos just like his. This only exacerbates his sense of shame. “I can’t imagine all these people trying to be like Andre Agassi,” he writes, “since I don’t want to be Andre Agassi.”

Because of this fixation on his hairpiece, though he was the heavy favorite, Agassi lost three sets to one.

After, his girlfriend, aware of the hairpiece catastrophe, says, “I think you should just get rid of that hairpiece.”

“Impossible,” Agassi replies, “I’d feel naked.”

“You’d feel liberated,” she says.

He thought it over for a few days: “I thought about the pain my hair has caused me, the hypocrisy and the pretending and the lying.”

And then he went back to his girlfriend, “Let’s do it…Let’s cut it all off.”

His first tournament with a bald head was another Grand Slam, the Australian Open, and, “I come out like the Incredible Hulk. I don’t drop one set in a take-no-prisoners blitz to the final.”

You were right, he told his girlfriend before the final, “my hairpiece was a shackle.”

In the final, he won three sets to one. “Everyone says it’s my best performance yet, because it’s my first victory over Pete [Sampras]. But I think twenty years from now I’ll remember it as my first bald victory.”

Takeaway 1:

In his book, in interviews, and in the documentary “Stutz,” the psychiatrist Phil Stutz talks about the Shadow.

“The easiest way to say it,” Stutz explains, “is that the Shadow is the part of yourself that you’re ashamed of…It’s a flawed part of yourself that you feel you have to hide and once you start to hide things, you become very sensitive to whether other people can see them or not. It becomes an obsession—How do they see me, what do they think of me, do they like me, love me?”

The more you try to hide what you’re ashamed of, as Agassi said, the more ashamed you feel.

“But the beauty is,” Stutz continues, “once you stop hiding it, you can relax and then you get flow. If you stop hiding your Shadow, if you stop hiding, you get flow. And that’s what everybody wants.”

After he stopped hiding his Shadow, Agassi got flow. He went on to win back-to-back Grand Slams and ended 1995 as the number one ranked tennis player in the world, replacing Pete Sampras who held the spot for eighty-two straight weeks.

Takeaway 2:

Keeping in mind that Agassi was so worried about what others would think or say about his shaved head, I went searching for what others thought or said after he shaved his head.

All I could find was a passing mention in a 1995 Washington Post piece (“The wild mane of hair he sported at the tournament last season has been replaced with his new no-nonsense buzz cut.”)

It made me think of a line from the philosopher Seneca, who writes in a letter titled On Groundless Fears: “We suffer more in our imagination more often than in reality.”

In his head, Agassi thought people would think or say nasty things about him.

In reality, no one really cared.

- - -

“The most precious thing we have in life is time, so any time you spend worrying about something, get rid of it.” — Andre Agassi

Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

Forever technical difficulties.

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

Thank you to those who are not judgmental.

Thank you to those who are mindful before they speak.

Treat kindness with kindness.

[فيصل العنزي @ff3p_]

لدي قناعة راسخة أنّ الإنسان المحترم يبقى مُحترم
حتى وهو زعلان وماخذ بخاطره منك محترم ، وفي رحيله
و هجره محترم ، وفي خصومته محترم و طريقة عتابه محترمه ، وفي كرهه محترم !
الإحترام طبع و ليس تطبّع ، الإحترام أخلاقيات نابعة
من بيئه نظيفه .

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

Speech is silver but silence is golden.

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

Hell was the journey but it brought me heaven.

[|Shim Shiminey|⁷ @ShimmiOver]

All roads lead to you. Even those I took to forget you.