No person has the power to satisfy unlimited desire.
Everyone, however, has the power to not desire what they don’t have and thoroughly enjoy what they already do.
Want a shortcut to happiness?
This is it.
I help busy people do inner work.
No person has the power to satisfy unlimited desire.
Everyone, however, has the power to not desire what they don’t have and thoroughly enjoy what they already do.
Want a shortcut to happiness?
This is it.
When you lie down for bed and realize you have to go to the bathroom, you have 2 choices:
1. Do what’s immediately uncomfortable and get up to go.
2. Do what’s immediately comfortable and hold it in hope it won’t wake you up later.
Option 2 almost always is a bad idea.
And so it is for most other choices in life that are immediately comfortable.
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.
The work of living your best life is to set higher standards and then not compromise them.
Higher standards than who? Compared to what?
Compared to the standards you might hold yourself to when living your worst or mediocre life.
When you commit to a higher standard, you’re committing to a harder path.
And why would you want to do that?
Not because taking hard paths is fun, but because taking hard paths is meaningful.
And meaning is, ultimately, what most of us are after.
You don’t hear people asking: “What’s the fun of life?”
People ask: “What’s the meaning of life?”
And while I don’t think there’s a universal explicit answer to this question, what I do know is that always doing what’s easy won’t lead you there.
Doing what’s hard (more likely) will.
So long as it’s hard work that’s meaningful to you. Work that’s aligned with your priorities, strengths, aptitudes, and interests. Work that’s reflective of your higher 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 give yourself an easier option, that’s the one you’ll ultimately take.
Don’t allow yourself to fall into that trap. Set your standards and hold yourself to them.
Compromise at your own risk.
When the answers are given to you, the challenge of solving the questions is taken.
When money is given to you, the test of figuring out how to make it for yourself is taken.
When a privileged path to success is given to you, exploring/wandering/getting lost is taken.
Those who get it easy don’t get the depth that comes from overcoming the hard.
Most of us wish everything was just given to us. But, forget what gets taken as a result.
Equal actions often produce unequal results in different people.
Otherwise, everybody could copy precisely what their favorite fit person was doing and get precisely the same results.
As nice as that would be, it isn’t the reality.
Some people never lift a weight and appear fit. Others lift religiously and appear unfit.
While this is a hard truth to grasp, the secret to escaping this demoralizing thought process is actually quite easy: stop comparing yourself to others.
Because while equal actions may produce unequal results, positive actions always leads to positive results in the individual.
And so while your results may not look the same as the person whose lifestyle you’re copying, what also isn’t the same is the person you become after taking those positive actions.
No self-improvement effort is ever wasted. Not even the ones that fail miserably.
The biggest waste isn’t to have tried and failed—it’s to never have tried at all.
For what those initial efforts offer us is something that never trying never could: insight.
Remember this when others are:
What some people can do to stay fit isn’t what YOU might have to do to stay fit—keep taking positive actions anyway.