Useful Ideas for Your Life

You're driving down the road, things are just great. Sun is shining and it's pre-covid times so everything is just better. Suddenly some guy who isn't looking pulls out in front of you and you have to slam on your breaks. Your $5 tall Starbucks mint jazz tea refresher spills into your cupholder, your shopping bags tip over, and your heart beats too fast for comfort. You have the right to be angry. But...is it smart to let yourself get angry even just a little bit? How much do we let anger control the way our days, weeks, and months play out? It might be a lot more than you realize. Today we are going to talk about anger on the road no matter how small and how it affects your life.

Whether it's emotions, difficult things or big life decisions, using your ability to imagine what future-you will care about will help you make sense of the now. The next time you are overcome with anger, embarrassment or fear imagine what you will feel and think about whatever it is that's bothering you in...10 hours...10 days...10 years. This rapidly defuses what otherwise might consume you. The next time you're struggling to complete something physically or mentally difficult, imagine how grateful your future self will be about pushing through and completing that thing. When making life decisions, imagine what your future self might think and allow that to influence your decision. Try utilizing your future self!

I once gave a book to a friend with high recommendations. They gave the book back a few weeks later and said "sorry, nothing really jumped out at me...I didn't like it." This caused me to stop and think about how much of life one is missing if they are forever fixated on sensational things as opposed to choosing to realize that most of this world and most of life are made up of non-sensational things. If you go through life expecting all important things to jump out at you, you will miss most of what life consists of.

We are all young one way or another. There will always be someone wiser, more experienced, and more articulate than each of us. Therefore, we cannot wait our entire lives until we "have enough experience" or "have gained the necessary wisdom" to speak about the important ideas in life. We have to dive in now while we are still "young" and risk being wrong before our lives slip away and we never took any action. We must speak with courage mixed with humility and curiosity in order to be bold now while remaining respectful of the fact that we do not know all there is to know.

Most of us try to plan our lives as best we can. We attend schools to prepare us for a certain job. We work certain jobs to prepare us for a certain career. We live in certain cities in order to begin to prepare to settle down and create a family. There are many opportunities for us to fall into the trap of believing that we have eliminated the unknown in our lives as a product of great planning. The truth of the matter is that the unknown will always be a part of a life and therefore it should be counted on and not strangled. Some of the most important moments in peoples' lives have come out of the unknown; have come out of nowhere and completely surprised the planner. Consider how you can count on the unknown in your own life.

Most of us live life counting on the fact that there is a "right" time for doing something. Whatever that thing may be, we often wait and wait until we feel like the right time has arrived to act. I challenge you to think about the possibility that there are many things in life that have no "right" time. Sometimes the right time is simply the time at which you act. Don't spend your life waiting for the right time only to arrive at the end with no time left having never acted.

When I first made reading a consistent part of my life, I read everything and anything because I did not know what I wanted to read or what I valued. Now, after a few years of reading widely and heavily, I have begun to skip pages in books when I don't see them as useful, close books after only a few pages when it becomes clear the book is not for me, and skip reading some books entirely because I know that they are not valuable to what I want. There are too many pages in this world for us to read everything. Therefore, we must choose and be picky with what we feed our minds.

No single person can give you the all-encompassing manual to solve whatever problem stands before you. Listening to the advice and reflections of a mentor and attempting to act on that advice without first mixing and melding it with the realities of your life as well as thoughts and ideas of your own is a wasteful mistake. To fully take advantage of the mentor's time and advice as well as to make the best decision possible, you must wrestle with and attempt to hybridize the information the mentor delivers to you.

By default, we are given a foundation upon which we stand. A foundation that is made up of values and perspectives on the world. This determines how you live, what decisions you will make/not make, who you will have in your life and the list goes on. Many people never stop to question the foundation on which they stand. Did they create it themselves or did they blindly accept whatever was given to them over the course of their life never questioning anything? If you want a level of autonomy and strength in the face of the systems and pressures around us, analyzing and assuring that your foundations are true to what you believe is the first place to start.

I ate a bag of Doritos after my workout sometime last week. I felt like crap doing so. My body needed fuel on which to operate and with which to build up my muscles and I was shoveling in powdery chips of processed who knows what. We are all well-aware of this dynamic of healthy/unhealthy food and healthy/unhealthy body. But how much do we pay attention to the equally as important dynamic of healthy/unhealthy food for our mind? Are we taking care of our minds as well as we strive to take care of our bodies?

Most people don't laugh after I tell a joke. I'm alright with that because most of the time the joke wasn't meant to make them laugh. I started focusing on making myself laugh before I tried making everyone else laugh and the result has been less awful sell-out jokes and more genuine laughter in my life as I am able to enjoy humor without having to force-feed it to everyone around me.

It is only in this brief period of breathing and thinking that we try to divide ourselves according to some arbitrary measures. Let death serve as the ultimate equalizer in what it means to be alive as a human. Love, laughter, tears, loss, joy, success, all these things comprise a human existence regardless of "who they are" according to the way we try to divide ourselves. Don't forget that.

Have you ever sat on one of those benches in a park that is dedicated to someone? You're sitting on a bench meant to mark someone's love and admiration for a life now gone. A life full of love, laughter, pain, success, joy, boredom, and discovery same as yours and yet lived and gone without you ever even realizing it existed in the first place. That is a sobering thought. But it is also a freeing one. Let death teach you yet another thing about what it means to experience life. Let the way death steals lives away before you even know they exist lift the burden off your shoulders and let you live your life more freely.

Remember, someday you will not be able to send that text message to your mother. One day, there will be no one on the other end to receive it. So, send it now. Act now in full appreciation for what it means to have someone in your life. Do not find yourself dealing with the gaping hole that someone dying leaves without having ever lived with them fully aware of how precious those moments truly were.

Sometimes remembering that I am going to die brings a big smile to my face. There are countless instances within a week of my life where I mess up, make a fool of myself, do or say the wrong thing and generally just have reason to berate myself. In those moments, when I am beating myself up over something, remembering that I am going to die eventually suddenly puts the thing that was bothering me into perspective and reminds me how trivial so much of what we let bother us really is. I challenge you to think about how death would affect your own daily failures and mental battles.

Suffering, pain, and death are of equal importance to joy, happiness and life.

Sometimes I am unable to get off my bed and go out into the world because I am afraid. I am taken by this dreadful feeling that tells me all the reasons I shouldn't do something. Even though I know I want to do something, like ride my motorcycle somewhere new, shoot a video that is difficult and might not turn out, drive a long distance to find a new hike, wake up early to see the sunrise, I will get stuck under the weight of that fear we all know. The thing is, we can chip away at that controlling fear. We can widdle it down until its strength is far lesser and our confidence and freedom is far greater. I wish I'd started intentionally chipping away at my fears sooner.

Where would your mind go if you took the headphones out and stopped the continuous flow of music or entertainment or podcasts for a little while? I know it's uncomfortable. But what would happen? Could you find beauty in things you didn't before? Could you find resolutions to issues you'd been wrestling with in the back of your mind? Could you find stillness and here-ness? Where would your mind go?

Last week I sent a very firm but humble "no" to someone asking for some of my time. I had never quite done that before. It felt strange at first but then I realized that I stood behind my reasoning. Saying no is not about keeping the goods scarce to increase demand or creating guardrails against the abuse of your time. Saying no is about coming to truly respect both your time and someone else's. I did not say no because I was tired, I said no because I am energized by the other ways I will be using that time. I did not say no because I did not want to do what was asked, I said no because I realized it would not have been the best use of both my time and the time of the other party involved. I challenge you to think about if you are saying no enough and also why you will be saying no at all.

For a while, the endless guru-talk about why everyone should keep little Barnes and Noble-style notebooks in their back pocket with a worn-out pen and thoughtful look to the worn pages really turned me off. I avoided notebooks because I thought they were a fad. After 3-years of keeping notebooks with me at almost all times, I cannot say that anything masterful or genius-like has taken place inside the pages I've filled. But I can tell you that my life has improved as a product of those pages. I don't know what the benefit would turn out to be for you, all I can say with confidence is that there will be a benefit if you make keeping a notebook a habit.

Couple of agenda items covered today as well as the first musing on this week's theme "Things I Wish I'd Started Sooner." I started keeping a list of people who've impacted my life and specifically how they have impacted my life. Now, when I make a decision or a change in my life that is influenced by what someone has taught me, I can find the person and the lesson they taught me on my list and send a thank you note all in a matter of minutes. I wish I had started this list a long time ago as it makes building and maintaining relationships a lot more reasonable.

It turns out that hand-feeding someone the advice you know they need is way less useful than asking the right questions to help them realize the very same thing you would have told them. I used to make this mistake with every interaction. I would give out all the advice I knew someone needed, and it was great advice too, but leave them no better off than where I found them. Once you realize that communication is about more than simply stating your ideas clearly, you can change someone's life.

Mhm, oh yes, yes and I agree, yup. How often do we fall into the rut of agreeing to everything people say even when what they are saying is not something we agree with? Are we doing it in order to quickly get back to "our turn" in the conversation? Are we doing it to avoid confrontation? Whatever the reason may be, the product of that behavior is damaging. Not only do you harm the person in front of you, but you also harm yourself.

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that some bridges are best when burned and some burning bridges can't be helped. The most important thing to grasp when burning bridges, both intentionally and accidentally, is that you must learn through it all to make it worthwhile.

I was so full of sh*t in undergrad that it makes me sick to remember. I owe an apology to every person who gave me their time and had it wasted by my delicate dances of conversational adeptness that lead us nowhere and kept me safe while sterilizing the conversation of anything potentially comprising to myself. I'm sorry I did not know how to be vulnerable.

I've ruined many romantic relationships with poor communication practices. One of the best ways I've found to improve communication practices is to get used to speaking frequently and with vulnerability when it comes to the ideas in your head. The better you get at this the better your ideas will become as you work through the bad ideas and discover the good ideas in the process.

When the day is long, when the week is hard, when no one is supportive, when you have to decide if you will stick to the commitment you've made, that is the moment that defines who you are. You get to decide what kind of human you will be. Will you buckle under the pressure? Or will you persevere and decide you are the type of person that pushes through the hard times?

The secrets to living life well.

There was a time when I would sleep as long as possible in order to remain unconscious for as long as I could manage. The mere idea of being awake made my stomach churn and left me feeling broken. I spent my hours wishing there was hope. Now, 3-years later, I have carved out space in my life for things I find to be important and I can see now that there was hope all along. I just didn't see it at my lowest. There's hope.

How do you climb a mountain? How do you travel a distance that seems too much to conquer? How do you make a goal in your mind that seems too big to even grasp into reality? One step at a time. That's how. Don't be impeded by the way we exist, rather, see the constraints of our existence as tools that support you in your own journey.

We so easily get caught up in the grand things in life. We focus on the expansive view instead of the small flower. We forget about the seconds exchanged between two humans because we are focused on some year-long plan we're worrying about. Yet, if we stop and consider the small things, we can come to see that they are equally as beautiful and important as the big things.

Who do you live for? Why do you make decisions? Is it to more closely align yourself with what someone else wants for your life? Or is it a sincere search within for purpose that comes from yourself and not from what other people tell you should be important to you?

How often do we let the voice inside keep us from reaching out and asking? If we silence the voice that tells us to be afraid of potential rejection and embarrassment, we can see that asking is not the terrible thing we make it out to be. By learning to fight that voice that tells you to be afraid and to be careful, we can unlock a whole area of life that previously was out of reach; that part of life that comes with asking.

Reacting to the world around us is the quickest way to make life less beautiful than it can be. Every time someone cuts me off on my motorcycle and puts my life in danger, I have a choice: will I react in a seemingly justifiable way with anger? Or, will I process, observe and decide how I want to behave in this world?

Trying to please everyone in life is to live a lie. Choosing to live authentically will ruin some relationships but clear the way for other stronger, better ones to come into your life. What does authenticity look like in your life?

Gratitude is more than just writing some nice things about your life in a notebook. Have you stopped and realized what gratitude means in your life?

What does it mean to make decisions that actually carry risk? Do we make risky decisions or do we just make decisions that carry the risk of less reward than full reward...there's a difference. If we tell ourselves that we are willing to take risks to get what we want, we should make sure we understand real risk. \ incredible music by Dyalla Swain http://soundcloud.com/dyallas