Gratitude is usually about appreciating all that we have.
What if, to take gratitude further, we appreciated all that we didn’t have, too?
Things like:
This exercise will 100x your gratitude list at least.
Thinking love is not the same as expressing love.
Thinking kindness is not the same as expressing kindness.
Thinking gratitude is not the same as expressing gratitude.
When you move your most beautiful thoughts into reality, the byproduct is a more beautiful reality.
Beautiful thoughts left unexpressed are quickly buried beneath the forever churning soils of the mind and the result is a forgotten about seed and unchanged reality.
Help flower our shared reality by intentionally nurturing, harvesting, and sharing all of what’s beautiful inside of you. However and whenever you can. Our reality needs it.
Your current reality doesn’t have to be your forever reality.
Or you can not do any of those things and continue to live your current reality on repeat.
The question you should reflect on carefully is: if I copied and pasted the general trends in all areas of my life (i.e. health, wealth, relationships) from the past year into this next upcoming year, would the results leave me feeling disappointed or thrilled?
Anything short of thrilled should raise an eyebrow in your mind.
If you want to change your reality then you’re going to have to change something in your reality. And the best way to do that is quickly—before your comfort zone can even process what’s happening. Here’s the plan: take an inertia-breaking action (the hardest part) and then keep the momentum going forward for as long as you can possibly manage it.
Inertia is the better-reality-killer.
Quick:
Don’t complicate the first step. Just take it. Break the inertia that has been boxing you into your reality re-run for too damn long.
Make the decision to live today for the tomorrow you can be thrilled about.
Oftentimes, taking care of others looks a lot like taking care of yourself.
You either win or you lose.
—Eh, we can do better…
You either win or you learn.
—Better. But, not as good as it could be…
You either learn or you don’t learn.
—That feels pretty solid.
Because if you don’t learn when you win you’re doing it wrong.
And learning from failures is talked about so much it’s essentially cliché at this point.
It’s worth remembering that what’s required to maximally squeeze the sweet learning juice from every experience isn’t what’s natural. Reacting emotionally to wins and losses is what’s natural.
Wins lead to celebration parties and losses lead to pity parties—and both tend to distract us from our work (and its improvement).
If maximally learning from every experience is important to us then we need to consistently prioritize a dedicated chunk of time to “juicing” each one.
Time when we can carefully reflect on what went well, what we could’ve done better, and how we can promptly implement our learnings into our lives.
Because the reality is this: experience is not the best teacher—learned from experience is.
If you’re winning and losing and not learning—you’re losing.
If you’re learning and learning and not letting winning and losing discourage or distract you from continuing to try—you’re winning.
Experiences are investments.
Don’t put them in the same category as material purchases.
Material items (that aren’t investments) should be purchased scarcely and with heed—for they often weigh us down and limit our ability to invest.
Experiential investments should be made generously and often—for they become the very foundation of the story of our lives.