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- 🏴 Mission JOMO
Thank you for reading Mission Dominate, the weekly newsletter that helps creators achieve their greatest potential. Each Monday, I share actionable tips, insights, and advice on ways you can become the creator you’ve been called to be.
Today, we’re talking about the joy of missing out.
Background
Most of us have heard of FOMO, or the fear of missing out.
It’s this feeling you get when you’re not in a specific place at a specific time and, consequently, you feel you’re missing out on some unique occurrence, joke, important point in history, etc.
Maybe your friends go out one night and for whatever reason you can’t join them so you impulsively check all their Instagram stories because you want to be there but you can’t.
That’s FOMO.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkemann explores a unique idea called the joy of missing out (“JOMO”). It’s the idea that in life you are going to miss out on just about everything and in that you can find joy.
After all…
you can only be in one place at a time
you can only marry one person (in most countries)
you can only direct your energy and efforts in one direction
Today I want to explore a few practices we can adopt to experience JOMO rather than FOMO.
Let’s go! 🚀
Practice
First, accept the fact you’re a limited human being and the places where you choose to be present are the ones you truly and deeply care about.
You can only be in one place at a time!
… you can embrace the fact that you’re forgoing certain pleasures, or neglecting certain obligations, because whatever you’ve decided to do instead—earn money to support your family, write your novel, bathe the toddler, pause on a hiking trail to watch a pale winter sun sink below the horizon at dusk—is how you’ve chosen to spend a portion of that time you never had any right to expect.
To Burkemann’s point, when we are doing whatever it is we have chosen to do, instead of placing our thoughts or desires in a different place, we can find joy in the thing we’re doing because it’s what we have chosen to do.
And that comes by embracing the fact that we’re letting other opportunities fall by the wayside.
Wherever you are, be there.
Second, acknowledge the reality that social media, e-mail, and other apps that exist to help us stay on top of things… they actually set us up for FOMO.
Never before in history have we been able to spread our social wings in so many directions.
The number of people we can connect with through the internet is, quite possibly, a curse in disguise.
Think about it…
In the 1950’s, your social network was your friends in the community, from church, and at school.
That was about all.
But, in 2023, if you’re active on Twitter or LinkedIn, you probably have friends on every single continent.
There will always be someone you can call, DM, or whose content you can reply to.
More possibilities equals more FOMO.
This FOMO can be turned into JOMO by taking one simple action: Be intentional about the people who you connect with, and forget the rest.
There are thousands of people you can connect with all across the globe, and you can’t connect with them all—it’s simply impossible.
Find joy in the meaningful friendships you foster with a few people.
Third and finally, realize if you had the ability to do everything, there would be less value in each of those things.
Burkemann looks at this within the context of marriage:
… it’s precisely the fact that getting married forecloses the possibility of meeting someone else—someone who might genuinely have been a better marriage partner; who could ever say?—that makes marriage meaningful.
The choice of one thing—and thereby foregoing all the others—is the choice that ascribes value to the thing we’ve chosen.
I’m a married man, and my wife is one of one.
But let’s look at a different person… King Solomon.
According to the Bible, he had 700 wives.
That’s a lot of wives!
Even with his level of wealth and wisdom, he was still a human being.
Each of those wives was one of 700.
Mathematically, each wife represents 0.14% of King Solomon’s marriages.
But my wife, on the other hand, represents 100%.
Is more better? Maybe I’m biased, but I think not.
There’s value in one thing… anything more than that reduces value.
Find joy in the one thing… and let all the other possibilities remain possibilities.
Conclusion
The joy of missing out is the “thrilling recognition that you wouldn’t even really want to be able to do everything, since if you didn’t have to decide what to miss out on, you choices couldn’t truly mean anything” (Burkemann 69).
In the social media age, given we are constantly presented with a slew of possibilities, it’s easy to feel FOMO.
To transform FOMO into JOMO:
accept your limitations
recognize tech sets us up for FOMO
embrace the choices you make… because those choices bring value to the thing itself
These are just a few actions you can take to experience JOMO… but there are many other ways to transform FOMO into JOMO!
Do you experience FOMO? JOMO? Both?
Reply to this e-mail and let me know!
Until next time,
Neil
P.S. If you haven’t already connected with me on LinkedIn, head over to my page and connect with me. I built an audience of 1,100+ on X and now I’m on a mission to build my personal brand on LinkedIn. Join me on the journey!