Ep 6: Lessons from RBG

Hello and welcome to the No Complaining Project, the podcast that tries to help you move from feeling stuck to taking action away from complaining and feeling powerless and towards owning your life and your choices. I call this “Going NoCo” - “NoCo” for No Complaining.” And you can find more at my website. Go noco.com. I'm Cianna Stewart.

Welcome to the reboot of the podcast, a kind of season two, if you will. I'm going to be trying out a new format. Before, I was trying to make it really perfect. And perfect is the enemy of done, for sure. But I'm going to try this. Since I last recorded, I have moved and I'm still figuring everything out over here in my new setup. So things are gonna be changing a little bit shifting a little bit, and I hope that you'll just stick around for the ride and that it still stays useful.

Also, before, I was trying to ignore what was happening in the world. And ultimately I think that that wasn't actually useful in my mind, it was an effort to be more evergreen or to have every one of the episodes actually be useful forever. But ultimately it's not very useful for me, or it's not very realistic for me to ignore what's going on in the world. And that was, frankly, one of the things that was kind of getting in my way for recording something new. So this is a change. I'm going to know that you are listening to it in a particular time and I'm recording it in a particular time and the world doesn't stop, it just keeps rolling along. So, that's the big shift that's going to be happening in this season.

I also asked the folks on the mailing list for input on what they'd like to know about anything that I could possibly help them with. And I want to thank everyone for sending me those responses and I will definitely get to them. There were some definite themes coming out and I thought it was pretty fascinating. As well, I do have some ideas on what could potentially be useful to you. So I am putting those episodes together.

But first: I'm recording this on Saturday, September 19th. And last night, the great Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

And it's really hard for me to think about anything else. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the Notorious RBG had some lessons for us here at the No Complaining Project. She was certainly someone who took action. She saw how women were discriminated against and she didn't just complain about it, she challenged it. Again and again and again. Sometimes losing and more often winning.

She also had personal struggles. You know, she was a young mother when she entered the overwhelmingly male dominated Harvard law school. Her husband got ill not long after that, so that she was caring for him as well as her daughter while she was still pursuing her work. She battled cancer herself multiple times. And then, you know, this is all not to mention that she was of course, swimming upstream against over a hundred years of discriminatory case law, both as a lawyer and then later as a judge. And through it all, she kept going. More than that, she kept doing. 

And that's really what I want to think about today and how we can turn to the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a source of inspiration for all of us. I mean, we can't all be RBG I'd offer that she was actually a singular human and no one will ever truly be like her, but the lesson from her and from her model, Thurgood Marshall, as well as so many others who have worked so hard in pursuit of something, is that you have to identify that something, whatever it is, something that makes the struggle worth it for you. For some it's fighting a particular form of injustice in the world. For others, it's raising a family or a garden. Still others live to create beauty or explore the cosmos or learn everything they can about ancient Mesopotamia. (And yeah, I put that in just because Mesopotamia is really fun to say.)

I mean, it's not like the honorable justice Ginsburg didn't experience hardship. She did. And she felt it. She just didn't let it stop her. And she didn't focus on that. She focused on what she had to do. She focused on her something, her sense of purpose.

So what is your greater purpose? What will make it worth it to fight through the internal and external obstacles in your way? What will make your today worth it? 

My greater purpose is to promote curiosity in service of creating a kinder and more just world. So even though I'm distressed, even though the past few months have been leaving me feeling exhausted, I thought about RBG this morning and I revisited my purpose today, and I recorded this episode for you. 

I would love to hear from you about how I can help you and what you think of this new format. Send an email to [email protected]. That's the letter “c” at gonoco.com. Or visit the No Complaining Project website, GoNoCo.com. 

Until next time: Be well, find your purpose, and Go NoCo.

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Recorded and edited by Cianna Stewart

Music by Daniel Berkman