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Category: Living Well

Figuring It Out As You Go

Published on August 9, 2024

If your goal is to wander, get lost, find your way back around, lean into serendipity, and surrender to the universe—then by all means, figure it out as you go.

If your goal is to arrive at a specific destination, in a timely manner, following an optimized route—then, figuring it out as you go is a bad strategy. You would want to invest in research, planning, and coaching instead.

We all have goals in life.

And while you might think one of the above mentioned ways might be better for attaining any one of your life goals than the other… the reality is it’s probably better to approach all of your goal pursuits from more of a hybrid perspective.

All optimized and no wander leaves little room for serendipity, awe, or surprise.

All wander and no optimized leads to missed targets and wasted time, energy, and effort.

Take a look at some of your life goals. Where do you land on this spectrum?

Work Meetings

Published on August 7, 2024

Work meetings are to a business what GPS is to a traveler.

Each business has a direction and a target. The meetings keep us heading in the right direction to reach the target. Along the way, however, things change.

…People change, resources change, clients change, markets change, situations change, etc.

Without a meeting of the minds of those who run the businesses, it’s inevitable that their direction and ultimately, the target they hit, skew.

Work meetings discuss recent wins (so as to reinforce and double down on them), recent failures (so as to learn and adjust from them), upcoming events (so as to plan proactively for them), and overall strategy (so as to further improve and develop the actions taken by the team), amongst other things.

We’re all familiar, if not intimately so, with work meetings.

My question for you is: how familiar are you with family meetings? Spousal meetings? Muse meetings?

…Because just as work meetings are to a business what GPS is to the traveler, so too are family meetings to the family or spousal meetings to the spousal relationship or muse meetings to the art/creative gifts you share with the world.

Without them, deviations from the once clear direction and target become inevitable.

It’s nothing short of impressive how much time, energy, and resources we pour into work meetings.

…Maybe it’s time to appropriate some of that time, energy, and resource into other (assumingely equally if not more important) dimensions of our lives as well.

The Greater The Rush, The Greater The Regret

Published on August 6, 2024

To rush implies a present desire to get to a future moment as quickly as possible.

…Which happens at the expense of the present moment in proportion to how much you’re rushing.

In other words, big rushing = big dissociation from the present moment… little rushing = little dissociation.

Living only happens in the present.

And while, yes, it’s still possible (and common) to dissociate from the present moment even when you’re not rushing—it can’t be ignored that not rushing is a necessary precursor to presence.

The pickle so many of us find ourselves in is that modern society is built upon a foundation of rush.

We must hurry to learn—so we can get into a competitive, name-brand college.

We must hurry to earn—so we can impress our peers with our lifestyle.

We must hurry to settle—so we can cross house, spouse, kids, and dog off our life checklists.

And so on.

The problem with this is that the foundation of life is built upon a foundation of presence—moments where you truly feel the experience of being alive.

And when the foundation of society is built on a foundation in conflict with that of life… we can have problems—namely, ends filled with lots of regret.

But, if we can break away from this societal mold and create our own little foundation of presence in our lives… we can change the direction of our lives drastically.

P.s. I wrote a guide to help you live a life with less regret. More on that here.

Buying Life

Published on August 5, 2024

Money is not the currency of life—energy is.

The greater your energy levels, the more living you get to “buy.”

The lower your energy levels, the less you’ll be able to afford before crashing and disassociating from life altogether.

One of the unique modern day dilemmas we face is that screens can stimulate us awake for extended periods of time even though we’re exhausted and crave sleep.

I’ve been experiencing this first hand.

I’ll be absolutely exhausted at the end of a long day, crash on the couch, and stay up WAY past my normal bed time watching a show or YouTube series simply because the stimulant of the screen distracts me from noticing and acting on my exhaustion.

…Which causes me to borrow energy from the next day (because I don’t get a full and proper sleep), which leads to less life I’ll be able to “buy,” which hopefully doesn’t lead to more screen time but likely will, which perpetuates the problem.

If you want to get more out of life, don’t obsess over hoarding money, obsess over maximizing your energy levels each and every day.

We buy life in energy we can bring to present moments—not in money we’re going to spend “one day.”

P.s. Here’s the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week.

Time Waste

Published on August 3, 2024

Thirty minutes spent thinking… sitting… staring at a blank page… as much as it might feel like a time waste… especially when the goal is to fill that blank page with words…

…Isn’t time wasted.

The real time waste happens when we forget what the real goal is.

…Which, at a more fundamental level, isn’t to fill blank pages with words.

…It’s to reconnect with the present moment of life that we have now.

Too easy is it in today’s world to forget that we even exist. Too much time do we spend distracted, selling our attention, consuming the lives of countless others and comparing the countless ways in which we lack.

When really… all we need to do to start feeling better… is cut all that.

…And maybe spend significantly more time thinking… sitting… staring at blank pages… confronting what it is that’s going in our minds… these minds we’ve been gifted… as we trudge forward through the thick and thin of it all… this whole experienced wrapped as a miraculous gift… the gift of life.

Never Apologize For Feeling Joyful

Published on August 1, 2024

“It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Bruce Springsteen

In a world full of hate, violence, poverty, depression, hopelessness… it can be hard, even guilt-inducing, to feel the opposite.

I know I’ve had the thought run through my mind: “How can I feel joy when there are so many awful things happening in the world?”

But you know what? …It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.

To be clear, this is not to say that we should bury our heads in the sand and ignore the hate, violence, poverty, depression, and hopelessness of the world.

…It’s simply to say, sometimes the absolute best thing we can do for the world is find our joy and spread that into the world as an anecdotal, proactive response rather than becoming just another passive, infected part of the ever expanding, depressing problem.

P.s. There is a ton happening in the world that is joy-inducing, too.

Fill Your Head Wisely

Published on July 29, 2024

I played a strategy game yesterday for a few hours as I was intensely recharging.

Last night, I dreamt almost exclusively about the gameplay.

It was an isolated yet stark reminder that what you choose to fill your head with, acts as the raw materials with which your mindset and interpretation of life are formed.

It’s critically important to remember—now more than ever in the history of mankind—to choose what you fill you head up with wisely.

P.s. In case you missed it, you can see the best of what I posted to MoveMe Quotes last week, here.