Understand These 3 Concepts And Move On From Anything
Sometimes you just take a beating.
It’s not always because of anything you can control—it’s just part of operating in a world with other sentient beings and physical forces.
Pretending it didn’t hurt or avoiding the process of understanding where the pain comes from just makes it worse later on.
What’s difficult is spending your whole life converting the operations around you into processes you can control, being successful at it, and then facing something painful and uncontrollable.
Learning to let things go and move on is just one of those things that takes a lifetime to which to adjust.
Sure there are some skills we can master while we’re here, but there’s really no end point.
The only "point of arrival" is the end of life, really.
- You can get in shape, but you can’t ever finish eating healthily.
- You can work nights to pay for college, but you can’t ever spend enough on your kid’s education.
- You can become a race car driver, but you can still get rear-ended at a stop sign.
The goal then, shouldn’t just be to take control of everything, but to understand what we can and can’t achieve—and then spend our resources moving toward those achievable goals.
In the meantime, while we’re moving, it’s good to remember that we sometimes take a beating regardless of how reasonable the goal is.
In fact, we might get beat up just sitting at home where we thought it was safe.
So, it’s not useful to drop out when it hurts. Pain just doesn’t have a good enough correlation with circumstance to be the only factor in our decision.
It also helps, while we’re moving, to remember that adjusting to pain isn’t like flipping a light switch. It takes time and the amount of time it takes varies based on circumstance, personal experience, and predisposition.
Some lessons to take away from this:
- Pain feels like an indication that we should change direction or hide but that’s not always the case.
- Staying at home or avoiding risk can still lead to pain, so you might as well work hard to achieve what you want.
- Being at peace with an imperfect world doesn’t mean you are eternally and outwardly happy, it just means you accept the often unfair pains of life.
2 Minute Action
Reach out to someone who is in pain and let them know you’re on their team.
Take a risk (it can be a small one) that you have been considering or avoiding.
Execute a small and possibly random act of kindness.
I promise you don’t need more than 2 minutes to do any of these.
That part is all in your head.
Today is up to you and you can completely transform your outlook and chances of success in 2 minutes or less.
A Common Reason Resolutions Are Ineffective
It's a fresh start.A clean slate.The funny thing is that you can make a clean slate whenever you want.The sun comes up every day.That's the most high-frequency slate-wiper I know of.
So why do we wait until January to make a resolution?
You're in control.You can decide whenever you want.The new year is just a good excuse.It's up to you to invent more good excuses--because this one only comes around every 365 days.It's the waiting for some arbitrary, made-up mile-marker that can slow so many people down.It's the other 364 days on your revolution around the sun that actually matter.Today is just one of them.
More than 2 Minute Action:
You've probably got more than 2 minutes to reflect, today.Take some extra time to sit by yourself and compare last year's goals and resolutions to this year's behaviors.What matches?Comment here and let me know what you will be doing differently this year to achieve new results.
How To Turn 200 Words Into A Book
Almost every one of these is around 200 words.Every post is small, readable, and only focuses on one thing.Every post is fine by itself, but together they are a track record of intention and action.I'm somewhere around a few hundred blog posts.Together, that's a book.
It didn't happen all at once, that's impossible.
It happened every day.Principle: Big hairy, audacious goals are actually made up of lots of small, achievable goals.
2 Minute Action
What's your book?How will you break it down into blog posts?Reply/Comment and let me know what you're working on.I'd love to help break it down into actionable pieces with you.