Why I'm Pausing Empty Your Cup (Again)

The 2 paths to inner peace

Kung Fu Panda 3 opens with Master Oogway meditating in the spirit realm. “Inner peace,” he repeats his mantra. When a leaf from a cherry tree lands on his nose, he sneezes the disturbance away, then returns to calm.

Suddenly, the sound of glass and steel whizzing through the air. “Now what?” the master sighs and, without even opening his eyes, catches the jade sword thrown right at him.

By the time he deflects the second blade speeding his way, he spots his longtime adversary, and he knows what he must do. “I’m ready for a rematch,” his nemesis claims. As if he had only been waiting for it, Master Oogway simply responds: “Took you long enough!”

I, too, have had a jade sword flying towards me. I’m not proud that it took me four months to catch, but today, it’s time to finally address it — and if I want to deal with my challenge head on, I must once again hit pause on Empty Your Cup.

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I’m very fortunate: I’ve been making a living from writing ever since graduating from college. And while many platforms and products and projects have come and gone, Four Minute Books is the one that remains.

Since starting as a side project in late 2015, it has now grown into a collection of over 1,000 book summaries providing the bulk of my income via ads, affiliate marketing, and a few digital products. It’s my day job, if you will. I write the summaries. I send out the newsletter. I try to find sponsors, schedule the Youtube videos, and answer the support tickets.

For the first time in a while, I fully dedicated myself to this little business in 2023. I worked hard, the income came back up after a massive post-pandemic drop, and after eight months of publishing tons of new pieces, traffic was finally trending up again as well. I was very ready for “Readcember,” where I intended to only read books after 4 PM each day. Ready to use the last quarter to plan the next year and carve out time to work on Empty Your Cup.

Then, Google updated its algorithm, and my traffic dropped 30% overnight. Uh-oh. Can you hear the sound of steel and jade zooming through the air? SEO can be unpredictable. Better yet, once an update ripples through the industry, it takes weeks, sometimes months, to figure out what happened why, and which knobs to turn in order to get back on track.

For the next eight weeks, I watched my traffic continue to drop like a rock, and while I wrote down more ideas than I could execute in a year, no clear solution or path forward emerged — so I simply stuck to the path that I was on. I relaunched Empty Your Cup, worked on the book in the mornings, and spent my afternoons on Four Minute Books.

Two months later, I must admit: It is not working. The situation has changed, and if the plan doesn’t follow, Four Minute Books, too, might soon be meditating in the spirit realm — and I’m not quite ready for it to retire just yet.

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The World Weightlifting Champion Jerzy Gregorek has a saying:

“Easy choices, hard life. Hard choices, easy life.”

I don’t want to write this email. I don’t want to stop sending out daily messages in hopes of inspiring you, learning from you, and gathering feedback. I don’t want to send my book draft back to the digital shelf where it’s already been gathering dust for years. I don’t want to spend all my writing energy on creating book summaries and other content that, while fun and interesting, often lacks the depth and challenge of working on something bigger, like a book. Most of all, I don’t want to look like a quitter, or inconsistent, or unprofessional.

But there is one thing I do want: sleep. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a while, and this week, I finally realized why: I have a business that, right now, is asking for 100% of my effort, care, and attention — and I have been ignoring it. The fix is as obvious as it is painful: drop everything else and get back to work.

For every day I’ve made the easy choice, my life has gotten a little harder. It’s time to reverse that cycle. To make the hard choice today so that tomorrow will be a little easier. So as of tomorrow, Empty Your Cup will go on indefinite holiday.

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There are two paths to inner peace.

The first is letting noise be noise and continuing to meditate. Sneeze away the petal blocking your nose, and return right back to calm! Often, this path is wide open to us, and the only reason we don’t take it is that we allow our minds to get lost in petty distractions when we could just tune them out.

Every now and then, however, only the second of the two paths will give us back any inner peace at all: Opening our eyes, facing our biggest challenge, and giving ourselves fully to the situation at hand. That, too, requires mindfulness. To shift our mindset quickly, adjust to a new reality, and even daringly invite it: “Took you long enough!”

Just like Master Oogway as he begins his fight, I don’t know if I’ll succeed. I don’t know if another year of focus will lead to the results the last one couldn’t provide. All I know is that this is what life is asking me to do, and it is the right choice to say, “Yes. Okay. Let’s walk this path for a while. If this is the road to inner peace, then so be it.”

Thank you for reading. Thank you for voting. Thank you for liking, sharing, and commenting. It was an honor to serve you these last two months, and we shall meet again sooner rather than later. Until then, you can find me at Four Minute Books.

When life throws an interruption your way, know which kind of disturbance you’re facing: Is this a hair in my soup or a bowl of soup in my face? Don’t be afraid to do a 180, and remember that giving up is also giving.

Your last fight may not yet be behind you, but you’re a master — so no matter what it takes, you’ll always find your way back to inner peace.

-Nik

“I have to leave now, my friend. You have a long journey ahead of you, and you must travel light. From now on drop all your burden of preconceived conclusions behind, and ‘open’ yourself to everything and everyone ahead. Remember, my friend, the usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness.”

— Bruce Lee