I write 1-minute insights daily. Below are my latest. Like? Enter your email to get updates.
Helping busy people do inner work.
I write 1-minute insights daily. Below are my latest. Like? Enter your email to get updates.
“If you get on the wrong train, get off at the nearest station, the longer it takes you to get off, the more expensive the return trip will be.”
Japanese Proverb
It’s pretty easy to see how this relates to life.
Once you realize you’re on the wrong path—with a person, a behavior, an educational or career path etc.—take action as soon as possible to get off and adjust.
…Duh.
The harder to understand piece to this advice is the “once you realize” part.
…Because it isn’t always immediately obvious that we’re on the wrong train in life. Or what starts out feeling like the right train, slowly and so subtly that we don’t even realize it, becomes the wrong train. Or we miss the station we’re supposed to exit at and board a different train and find ourselves several stations in the wrong direction.
The real key to properly applying this analogy to your life is in understanding how you can stay on top of your realizing.
An excellent place to start is to do your homework up front: Are you sure this train is heading in a direction you want to head? Are you sure this is the best train to get you there? How sure are you that you can trust the sources that are giving you this information?
And an excellent ongoing practice to have once you’ve boarded a train is to do checkpoints along the way: Am I still heading in my ideal direction? Am I sure there isn’t another train that can get me where I want to go faster? Do these landmarks match what the direction of this train promised?
While playing football this morning, one of the quarterbacks commented on how upset he was that he threw a couple of interceptions.
While playing basketball shortly thereafter, guys would visibly and viscerally get upset when they missed a series of shots in a row.
And while talking to a friend, it became evident to me that I was still upset about a situation that happened days ago.
In each of these situations, the past was being carried into the present—and it was affecting all of our abilities to perform our best.
Learning how to leave these past moments in the past and enter each present moment as its own refreshed opportunity—is nothing short of a superpower.
And the best way to do this is to learn how to stay calm when mistakes are made, clearly take from them the lessons you’re able to extract, and breathe yourself confidently back into the present.
What’s done is done. What’s now can either be a darker night or a rising sun.
P.s. In case you missed it, you can read the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week here.
“Just this morning. Over the past few weeks I’ve had a sudden onset of health things; insane poison parsnip huge blister on my foot, Basal skin cell cancer successfully removed from my temple twice, emergency root canal, two crowns on my teeth, and finally this morning (and last night’s prep for) a colonoscopy. ‘You’re falling apart,’ was the comment from my younger workmate. ‘We’ve a lot to be grateful for,’ was the comment from my mother in law. Why is that an accomplishment? At 30 you start to feel aches and pains. At 40 you realize you have to fight just to not atrophy. And a 50 you keep at it and kind of just cross your fingers that you’ve sufficiently shifted the bell curve of health fortune in your favour.”
Peter A.B. Marshall
Sheesh. What a mindset shift.
From “I’m falling apart…” to “I have so much to be grateful for” in a single comment.
Because what is “falling apart,” but a couldn’t-be-more-real-statement of what it means to be alive.
Life is always moving towards chaos; towards disorder; towards ‘falling apart’—it’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And while this may be wildly frustrating and messy… it’s a reminder of one thing that couldn’t be more comforting and clear: that we’re alive.
…And what a wildly humbling and beautiful gift that is.
You at your absolute best isn’t something that just happens.
It’s something you need to reverse engineer your way to.
And step 1 isn’t to start a new diet or hit an insane workout.
Step 1 is to figure out what you at your absolute best looks and feels like.
Most people have a vague idea that’s painted abstractly in the back of their mind that’s clouded over by unrelated, distractionary, impeding monkey-mind thoughts. And upon closer inspection, most people just have a cut and pasted montage of other people from across the internet who appear to be living their best life that looks good enough for them.
…And what I think is this isn’t good enough for you.
In fact, I’m of the mindset that you can’t even begin to sculpt the image or feel of your absolute best self until you’ve traversed the landscape of your mind from the forefront—where it’s clouded and filled with unrelenting monkey mind thoughts—to the back… where the unfinished sculpture stands.
Once you understand this, you realize it takes 10, 20, maybe even 30 minutes of undistracted inner travel before you can even begin to work on the look and feel of your absolute best self.
Cutting magazine pictures, saving social media images, and watching short form videos can be helpful—but it’s superficial. And the idea of them goes away when they go away (and you’re back to monkey mind).
Sculpting takes quality time—and sculpting is exactly what the process of realizing your absolute best self should look and feel like. Lengthy mental commutes, tough chiseling decisions, an ongoing/ hard-to-finish project… that becomes more meaningful and real every visit.
I finished paying my car off last month.
This is my first month without a car payment in years.
And, like clockwork, I downloaded the cars app and started browsing new cars.
I don’t need a new car. I’m in an excellent position with my current car. It’s an excellent brand in excellent condition and is expected to continue running excellently for years and years to come.
…And yet, I still had that urge to search for upgrades.
To get something newer, with fewer miles, that’s all electric…
Something that might not even cost me that much if I get a good enough price for my car and a good enough deal on a new one…
…Isn’t it interesting how that works?
How excited and thrilled and fully satisfied we feel at the outset…
And then how all of a sudden, once we own that thing or have used it for a while, something changes inside…
Because it isn’t the thing that changes—not really at least.
It’s something else that changes that’s actually completely within our control…
And that thing is… our perspective.
And my current thought to myself is, if I can do some inner work to change my perspective back… to appreciate my car like it was my first month with it once again, it’ll be as though I’m taking out a whole new lease on my car—without taking on any kind of new lease at all (which is my favorite kind of lease).
…Which is how it works for taking out a whole new lease on life, too.
A woman once came to Gandhi with her child, concerned about her child’s habit of eating too much sugar.
Knowing how much her child respected Gandhi, she asked him, ‘Could you please tell my daughter to stop eating sugar?’
Gandhi listened and then replied, ‘Please come back in two weeks.’
The woman and her child returned two weeks later.
This time, Gandhi simply told the child, ‘Please do not eat sugar.’
Grateful, the mother thanked him, but she couldn’t help asking, ‘Why did we need to wait two weeks for you to say that?’
Gandhi said, ‘Two weeks ago, I was eating sugar.’“
Inner work prompt: What are you asking others to do that you aren’t doing yourself? Ask yourself: how can I get to a place where I can say what I want others to do without saying a word.
Your meditations, mantras, principles, ideals, self-improvement practices, etc. are only as good as what they’re able to get you to actually do.
In other words:
Said differently yet again, whatever works—in their ability to help you deal with life challenges—is what you should keep working.
…Not what the most popular influencer says you should do; not what the world’s best athlete recommends; not what your bff swears by… what works.
Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t try what you’re inspired to try.
It’s merely to say, trust what has a history of getting done—not just once or for a short sprint of time… but time and again over a longer period of time… a period of time that matches the amount of time you’ll be met with challenges from life…