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Category: Direction Matters

Anything Will Do

The quality of your life is a byproduct of your standards and how well you hold yourself to them.

If you want to live your best life, you have to hold yourself to your best (realistic) standards.

This isn’t to say you can’t update and revise your standards as you grow, change, and mature.

It’s merely to say, if you don’t have standards set then anything will do.

And living your best life isn’t something that happens where anything will do.

What Now?

Always have something planned that you can look forward to.

It’ll act as a magnet that will pull you excitedly forward through your days.

Without it, the days will feel like all push.

Do Right By Your Past Self

After 20+ yrs of training, today is the day I got to test for my 5th Degree Black Belt in ITF Tae Kwon-Do.

As I was prepping for this day, I thought about what 11 year old me—the one who started Martial Arts all those years ago—would think if he watched me perform.

I imagined that overweight, self-conscious, always-hard-on-himself kid and I thought about everything he wanted to become: fit, confident, disciplined, looked up to, able to perform under pressure—and able to do cool moves, of course.

And it was an overwhelmingly emotional moment for me when I finished the test and thought to myself: I think he would’ve been proud.

Be On Purpose

What do all of the greats have in common?

They didn’t become great by accident—they became great on purpose.

From this point forward, don’t be accidental.

Be on purpose.

Discontent Is A Bad Guide

The byproduct of desire is discontentment.

You cannot be discontent AND happy.

But, you CAN be content and focused on growth.

Don’t let discontent guide your life—it’s miserable.

Focus on what fills you up instead.

And let your curiosity, enthusiasm, and generosity lead the way.

Nowhere In Particular

If this person/ place/ thing doesn’t serve your higher purpose why are you investing time/ energy/ effort into it/ them?

Built into this question is the assumption that you know what your higher purpose is.

If you don’t, all actions become arbitrary; all uses of time become fungible.

If you want to arrive at a certain type of destination, you need to point the GPS of your actions towards it.

And you need to know well enough not to get off every exit of the highway while you’re on your way.

Random wandering—random uses of time—can only get you, by definition, nowhere in particular.