Taking control

What do you do if you wake up one day and realize that you hate your life?  Or if you just don’t find joy in living?  What if you’re so depressed, repressed, unfulfilled or apathetic that you just don’t see the point in living anymore?

If you don’t see the point in living, it’s because you’re missing it entirely.  I firmly believe the point of life is to enjoy it.  If you’re not enjoying it,  then you’re doing something wrong.   And that means you have the ability to stop doing the things that make you miserable and do the things that bring your life joy and meaning.

Your life is your creation.  It’s not something that happens to you, but something you construct.  You’re in charge of you life and the experience is under your control.  The fact is, if you feel your life is out of control, it’s because you’re refusing to take control.  It’s like being in the driver’s seat of the car, but refusing to take the wheel.   Abandoning responsibility for your own life is one of the greatest failures I can conceive.

Unfortunately, a lot of people in the world don’t agree with me on this.  This comes back in a variety of angles, all of them deeply flawed.

• Religions are often guilty of convincing you that you need to surrender control to a deity or his mouthpieces here on earth.  “Just give all your problems to Jesus” or “let God make the choices for you”.  Or from the more dogmatic end of things, “you’re messing up your life because you won’t surrender it to God”.   I don’t know what your perspective will be on religion; but I do know that the idea of “surrender” pushed by religions today isn’t the picture of their heritage.   Frankly, Jesus told his followers not to worry about tomorrow – not to fail to give it consideration.  And the heroes of the Christian faith were not noted for their faithfulness in sitting around waiting for God to change their world for them, but for getting out and making it happen.   The goal of religious surrender is aligning your will with a higher power, not by abandoning your responsibilities.  It’s merely a decision to cooperate with what you believe is the greater good – and you can do that as a Christian, Buddhist or even as an atheist.
• Our current social structure will often work to convince people that they’re persecuted, subjugated or hindered because of their sex, race, creed, color, religion, economic status, etc.   And in many cases, it’s true.  We don’t have an equal opportunity in the world.  It’s well proven that the best way to be a millionaire is to have parents who are. The social strata in America separates wider each passing year.   But frankly, achievement has little to do with happiness.  Plenty of people make fortunes and fame with little joy to show for it.  Satisfaction with life is something you choose to develop.
• America’s fascination with perfection often creates a fantasy lifestyle that everyone seeks, but few achieve.  Some people become convinced that if they don’t have a perfect body, or the right level of income, or the appropriate degree of popularity that life isn’t worth living. There’s nothing wrong with making your life all it can be, but convincing yourself that it’s worthless if you’re not at the top of the hill is a guaranteed ticket to depression.  Even those who make it to the top rarely stay there.  And meanwhile, plenty of people are living lives of joy and fulfillment with potbellies, 10 year old cars and permanent anonymity.

When you’re not enjoying life, that’s emotional feedback you need to listen to.  You don’t need to dull it with drugs or therapy or escapism – the feedback is not the problem!  That’s like blaming your car for running out of gas.  Emotional feedback is there to tell you there’s an impropriety to address somewhere. You need to fix the problem, not the feedback.

You are not powerless to change. It may be tough.  You may have greater obstacles than others.  You may be running so hard fulfilling your responsibilities that you don’t think you have time to make the change.  But you always have the power to change the things that are negative in your life:

•  If you feel negatively about your job, change it.  Talk to your superiors and get the situation where it becomes rewarding to you again.  Or quit and take a new job.  Or quit and work for yourself.
• If you feel negatively about your financial status, change it. Budget and save.  Get a better income.  Go back to school or train for a new career.
• If you feel negatively about your relationships, change them.  Work out the problems.  Or drop them and build others.

I know it doesn’t seem easy.  More than likely, if you’re in a bad place you’re thinking “I can’t change this because it would affect that”.  That you can’t quit your job because you depend on the income.  You can’t change your relationship because the other person’s not willing and you’re afraid of being alone.  You have so many responsibilities that you just can’t take on something new.

That’s kind of like the analogy of the man sawing fruitlessly with a dull blade – he can’t take time to sharpen the saw because he’s so busy sawing!  The fact is, you’ll make time for what’s important to you.  And when you reach the point that you realize you need to address the situation, you’ll find the means to do so.

Both of you are smart kids.  You’ll figure it out.

Just remember that you can do it.  You are not powerless to change.  In your mind, you’re probably making it more complicated than it actually will be.

Take control

 

Remember you’re going to be dead soon…

“Live every day as if it were your last, because one of these days, it will be.” – Jeremy Schwartz

I hope that title grabbed your eye.  Take a second to think about it.

No matter how strong, how healthy, how well prepared you may be, you’re eventually going to die someday.  And unfortunately, no one knows the time they will go.  People who are the picture of vitality and health wake up one day and are involved in a mortal accident or an act of violence. People with no history of poor health come back from a routine doctor’s visit with the news that they have an incurable disease.

My first death in the family was my maternal grandmother.  She was in the process of recovering from a stroke at our house and one morning, she was just gone.  She wasn’t in the best health, but there wasn’t any deathbead ritual – she simply died sitting at the breakfast table while my mom had a conversation with her.  I was only 10, so it wasn’t the biggest impact on me.

My paternal grandmother was next.  Again, she had been sickly, but it wasn’t at all expected.  My paternal grandfather was next, and he passed away during the night.  He’d never been to the hospital a day in his life and at 94 was still working hard outdoors every day.  I was beginning to get the picture that death just wasn’t that predictable.

My mother was diagnosed with lung cancer when I was just out of college.  She’d never smoked or had a family history of it.  Luckily for us, she pulled through surgery and radiation treatments like a trooper, but there were still a lot of anxious months and years involved before she was pronounced cancer-free definitively.

My father died in a routine operation to clear a blood vessel in his neck.  He’d never been in the hospital in all his years and had just breezed through a preliminary operation of exactly the same kind a couple of months before.  He went through surgery fine, then mysteriously died in the recovery room.

In 2005, I contracted West Nile disease and suffered meningitis,  encephalitis and about a weeklong coma.  When I woke, they were prepping us to expect brain damage and loss of function.  Thankfully I pulled through this and proved them all wrong with a full recovery, but it was a very sobering time.

At this point, your mother is halfway through chemotherapy to fight breast cancer.  We never expected this either and likely would not have found it if a bout with bronchitis had not caused her to find the lump early.  We were very lucky.

The point is, you never really know how much time you have left.  The older you get and the more close brushes with death you have, death becomes less of an intellectual exercise and more of an expectation.

No one wants to die.  Even people that think they’re headed to Heaven next don’t want to die to get there.  But it’s the destination we all share.  You won’t escape it.

Sorry to be so dramatic and melancholy, but it’s all quite true.

The lesson to learn is that your time is limited, so don’t waste it.  Don’t waste it living the life someone else wants you to live. Don’t let the noise of public opinion drown out your inner voice.  Have the courage to follow your heart and your dreams.

And look in the mirror every day and ask yourself that if today is the last day you have, would you still do what you planned to do today?  Are the goals you are pursuing worthy of the last day of your life?   In the grand scheme of your life, will today matter?   It might be the last day you have to matter.

Everything else is secondary.

 

The Secret of Success

It would be pretty bold to claim to give you the single secret to success in one step.  There are a lot of factors that lead to success, but there is a single step that will determine whether or not you succeed.

Know what success means.

Before you roll your eyes, think for a minute.  Why do so many celebrities with every hallmark of success take their own lives or succumb to substance abuse or some other self abuse born of depression?  Undeniably they made some material gains.  They may have achieved notoriety.  They may have gained power and influence.  But their gains didn’t satisfy them.  They didn’t achieve happiness.  They didn’t succeed.

And you don’t have to be a big splash to illustrate this, either.  Browse through the bookstores at any point and you’ll find stories of people who made drastic career changes in mid life because they didn’t find their old profession rewarding.  The high salaries, fringe benefits, fame and fortune looked good back at the bottom of the ladder, but once they had laid hold on it, it didn’t fulfill them like they anticipated.

You can likely see it in your peers as well.  Everyone knows at least a couple of people with intelligence, drive and means who are simply going nowhere.  They career hop, live for the weekend and never seem to really be satisfied with their lot.

You can’t travel without a destination.  You can move around and maybe even have a great time, but you won’t get anywhere.  And you’ll never really know when you’ve arrived.

Success works the same way.  You can put your full efforts into your career, relationships and pastimes, but if you don’t know what you want to achieve, you’re spinning your wheels.

When you don’t have a good picture of your goals, your focus is on activity.  Activity is good, but it can be wasteful and even counterproductive to a desired end result.  To move up, you need to focus on improvement, not activity.

I’d like to challenge you right now to evaluate your life goals and understand where you want to be.  Include career, finances, relationships, commitments.  Flesh it out as fully as you can.  Write them down and keep them in front of you and revisit them often.

Then, when you have a decision to make, you have a clear understanding of what outcome you desire.

It’s the first step, and really the most important.

 

Be rich

I want you to be rich.  Rich beyond your wildest dreams.  Because when you are rich, you will be happy.

And this wealth has absolutely no dependency on your bank account, investment portfolio or retirement plan.

We live in a materialistic society.  You are bombarded daily by messages from TV, movies, magazines, peers… most every source available with the idea that material gains bring happiness. And that’s easy to buy into when you’re young.  You think “if I could just have that car, or those clothes – I’d be happy”.  As you get a bit older, maybe it’s even more abstract.  “If I just had x amount of money, I’d be happy”.

You can validate this in your own life.  Think of the last thing you absolutely had to have in order to be happy.  Maybe it’s a piece of clothing, or a car.  It’s great when you first get it, but very soon the luster wears off.  Soon, it’s an everyday object and you’re looking lustfully at the next thrill.

That cycle doesn’t end.  As long as you convince yourself that material wealth is your key to happiness, you’ll keep looking for the next stage up.

But there are a lot of other ways to be rich.  Ways that are much more valuable than having a particular bank balance.

•  You can be rich in relationships.  A person who cultivates friendships and is great to be around can have many good friends.  Many people with lots of money often find themselves very lonely from the process of focusing on wealth and alienating people in order to get ahead.
• You can be rich in health.  A person who takes care of himself by eating right, exercising and keeping himself strong can have a wealth that the migraine-plagued, stress ridden, overweight executive would kill for.
• You  can be rich in family.  Devoting your time to spouse and children and building a healthy history together can enjoy those bonds to their dying day.
• You can be rich in knowledge. Devoting your time to reading, studying, practicing skills and growing as a person finds that the pursuit never gets old to them.
• You can be rich in character.  A person who is honest, truthful, loyal and shows integrity can build a reputation that people respect, trust and value

The funny thing about these kinds of investments are that most often, they lead to material wealth as a side effect.  When you are vital, knowledgeable, stable and well-liked, the doors are going to open for you to pursue whatever you want.

Be sensible.  We are all bitten by the materialism bug from time to time.  And it’s OK to indulge it occasionally.  It’s good to want a healthy financial future and to have the freedom to do what you want.  But if that’s your focus, you’re going to miss out on the wealth that life can really offer you.

Be rich.

 

Taking care of yourself

Life goes by quickly.  As you will age, the reality of this statement will strike you harder and harder.  The older you get, the more responsibilities you gain and the more experiences you have, the more it will ring true.

It’s hard to see that as a young person.  You feel invincible – like your whole life is ahead of you there on the horizon.  You revel in the strength and enthusiasm of youth.  And as a result, you often take risks with that life.  It’s so abundant and strong, you don’t really see the value of managing it properly.

Imagine with me for a moment.  Imagine that I set you down one day and tell  you that because of an unexpected windfall, I have opened a bank account in your name and deposited ten million dollars.  This is my gift to you, my legacy.  This will be enough money to sustain you the rest of your life.  At your age, when you earn maybe $5000 a year, this supply seems endless.  Even living on $100,000 a year would support you for your natural life and even past it.

You begin to live on the money and even spend a bit in extravagance.  Every day you draw out funds for your immediate desires, but it never seems like a lot is gone.  Even the purchase of a house doesn’t really put much of a dent in it. At this point, if a friend came up to you and asked to borrow $100, you’d probably agree easily.  After all, ten million dollars is going to be plenty of money for you.  You’d probably indulge yourself a bit with expensive cars, gifts for friends, the best clothes, the best restaurants – whatever your heart desires.

As time passes by, you notice the account is down to five million, then two, then one.  At age 50, the money is down to a few thousand, then nothing.  You’re over the hill with no job experience and no further savings to support you.

At this point, your perspective on that money changes.  You wish you still had the $100 you loaned to your friend.  Those expensive luxuries seem very foolish – you’d do anything to have that money at this point. You begin to look back in your life and wish.  “I didn’t realize the money would go so fast”.  “I wish I had saved”. “I wish I had invested”.  But the time’s past now, and you can’t have the opportunity back again.

That’s a lot like your life.  When you’re young, you don’t think a lot about the harm you do to your body, because it’s so strong. You can’t realistically picture it being weak and sickly.   You don’t think about the waste of your time because it’s so plentiful.  You don’t really think about preparing for the future because it’s so far away.

So you harm yourself.  Maybe you get involved with smoking, drinking or drugs, or you eat a diet full of fatty, caloric, sugar-filled junk food and soda.  You spend endless hours watching mindless TV or playing video games.  You spend the money as soon as you earn it on whatever happens to be in the front of your mind at the time. You risk life and health by driving poorly, doing reckless stunts or pushing the envelope in some way.

Those things can seem fun and harmless in your younger years.  But what you don’t understand is the toll they are taking on your body.  You don’t realize how unhealthy consumption habits are draining the vitality out of your immune system and building a body you will curse in your adult years and regularly trust to the care of a doctor.  You don’t realize how much you will kick yourself for wasting the energetic and optimistic heyday of your existence by wasting its efforts on trivia. You don’t realize that the expensive designer shirt you spent your money on today could probably purchase a car for you down the road, if you’d taken the money and invested it wisely.

You will realize it, of course – when you’re older.  And you will wish for the chance to go back and do things the right way. I can think of lots of things I would change if I could go back to those years again:

• I would have built a habit of a healthy diet so that I wouldn’t be fighting so hard at age 39 to get rid of excess weight and to reprogram myself away from gluttony.
• I would have kept physically fit and strong so I could enjoy playing the sports I enjoyed so much as a younger man.
• I would have saved and invested so that my first years out of college weren’t so hand to mouth.
• I would have spent less time being so cynical and noncommittal and taken  advantage of some fantastic opportunities I had to learn and grow.
• I wouldn’t have been as snobbish and spent some time getting to know some really remarkable people.
• I would have spent less time in front of the TV and more time in front of people.
• I wouldn’t have taken on some of the risky things I was involved in when I realize how closely I escaped death so many times.

I don’t expect you to read this advice and embrace it wholeheartedly – you honestly will not understand the value of life until you have less of it. But I do hope you can see some of the forethought in it and think about building a solid foundation to live on.

 

The Space

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Viktor E. Frankl

Human beings are highly reactionary creatures. When we receive a stimulus, we respond. That’s a highly useful reflex for us accident-prone creatures. When we put our hand on a hot stove, there’s no deliberation or analysis – we just jerk it back, instinctively. It’s a natural reaction.

Unfortunately, that reflex tends to spill over into situations where it’s not as valuable. Someone insults us and we want to strike back with equal or greater vitriol. We receive bad news and want to panic. We get news of a financial windfall and want to run out and spend our gains. We are faced with a challenge and want to flee. In some cases, going with an instinctive reaction without proper deliberation can be quite harmful for us.

Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor who endured unbelievable conditions with a strong mind and spirit. In his memoir of this time, “Man’s Search for Meaning”, he made the above comment about the power each of us has to exact control in our lives. Frankl was able to endure harsh circumstances by understanding that he alone exercised control over his reactions. While he could not control his situation, he could control the way he responded to it.

I hope you never have to endure such an extreme situation, but the advice is solid in your daily life. When you are met with a situation, you need to take the time to understand that you are in control of your response to the situation. You can respond well or poorly, positively or negatively. If you want to have a happy life, you have to determine that you will respond with joy. If you want to be successful, you have to determine that you will respond in a way that turns the situation to your advantage.

Let’s work with some simple examples:
Suppose someone insults you at school. You could respond instinctively by returning a harsher insult or with physical violence, but where does that response get you? What if the person returns greater violence upon you? What if they don’t and you are seen as a bully? What if your words happen to touch a sensitive point that causes them serious grief? What if you find mutual friends dividing their support between you. What if you “win” but begin to fear retaliation and spend the rest of the year looking over your shoulder? Now, suppose you took a moment in the space between stimulus and response and asked yourself the best way this could end. You could choose to ignore it and be free of the fear of the incident escalating. You could turn it into humor and end it on good terms with everyone. If the person is a good friend, you could choose to approach them later to help them understand why the insult bothered you. And though I don’t recommend it, you could take the time to put together a response that would leave theirs in the dust!

Suppose you just got word that you were going to be fired from your job. You could panic and rush out to get a job that isn’t a good fit for you. You could respond in anger and burn any remaining bridges with your employer. You could beg and plead and just end up embarrassing yourself and lowering others’ opinions of you. Or you could take the space to process the information before reacting. You might realize this was a change that you needed more than they. You could discuss it with your employer professionally and ask for their assistance with finding a job that is a good fit. And you might sit down with them to thoroughly understand the reason you weren’t a good fit there and make plans to correct those problems in your next position.

Suppose you’ve just been told that you have a dehabilitating disease and could expect to lose the use of your legs. Your instinctive reaction might be grief and rage. You might lose the will to continue on, or be tempted to sit and feel sorry for yourself, or deny the diagnosis. Taking time to determine how you will react might not offer you a way out of your problems, but it can allow you to deal with it on your own terms. You could choose that you will fight the disease and attempt to overcome it. You could resign yourself to the situation and meet it with dignity and strength of spirit. You could “count your blessings” and enjoy the quality of life you are handed with a greater enthusiasm than you did your former situation.

That space between stimulus and response may be an instant, or years and years. The time you take isn’t the issue. It’s what you decide to do with it. When you understand you have the power to control how you react to situations, you understand your freedom in a way you never dreamed possible. Frankl said he felt free because no matter how many personal freedoms were taken from him, the power to choose how he would respond was beyond his captor’s grasp. They could inflict any number of indignities on him, but they could not crush his spirit. It was this power that helped him to survive the Nazi death camps with strength of spirit.

You must understand that you are in control of your life. No matter what successes or hardships come your way, your greatest strength is your ability to choose how you will respond to the situation. And every time you use this power, your freedom is validated and you grow closer to the person you want to be.

This is the cornerstone of self discipline and the key to real personal growth.

 

In the Now

“When an archer is shooting for nothing
He has all his skills.
If he shoots for a brass knuckle,
He is already nervous.
The prize divides him.
He cares.
He think more of winning than of shooting.
And the need to win
Drains him of power”
Chuang Tzu

There’s a point in time in which your desires to reach you goal can overwhelm you. The drive to succeed can be a powerful motivational tool, but in some instances you can find yourself putting so much emphasis on the end result that it makes it difficult to actually move toward that goal.

Maybe it’s standing at the foul line at a crucial point in the game. Maybe it’s the presentation you hope will bag you a new client, or a promotion. Maybe it’s the first date that you hope is going to bloom into a lasting relationship.

The pressure to deliver can hamper you sometimes. The key is to focus on what you’re doing right now, at this moment in time. When you feel the pressure, focus on the moment.

Don’t worry about the game – just take a good shot. Maybe you’ve never been in such a close game at this level before, but you have made plenty of successful free throws. Don’t worry about the promotion, just make the best presentation you can. Don’t worry about marriage, just focus on not making a fool of yourself tonight.

The difference is subtle, but meaningful. It’s about keeping your mind in the moment where it can do some good. Dividing your attention between the task at hand and the probabilities of what may come in the future is reducing your capacity to handle the moment.

Some philosophers suggest that “the now” is everything – past and present are only illusion. I don’t know if I’d go that far, but I do know that the only part of that view you can affect is what’s happening this moment.

Stay in the now.

 

The Right Goals

What do you want out of life? What kind of goals are you setting for yourself?

Maybe you’re interested in being very wealthy, or obtaining a position of great recognition. Maybe you’d like to be a humanitarian, or cure some chronic disease. Maybe you’d like to have a political title – Mayor, Governor… even President? Or maybe it’s to settle down with the perfect spouse and raise a big family?

The goals you choose are not as important as making sure that it’s you doing the choosing.

As you grow and learn to interpret society and culture, you begin to develop a picture of what defines success. The heroes are published to you regularly, the values described in any number of terms. Chances are, you have a pretty good idea of what people in general consider desirable. A certain income level, a certain occupation, a certain caliber of house, clothing and vehicle, a certain degree of accomplishment. And it’s not unusual that you might set out to get a few of these things for yourself.

There’s nothing wrong with pursuing your goals. Just make sure they are indeed the things that you want, not what you think society demands of you. Insecure people (and we’re all a little insecure at times) guide themselves toward flashy goals intended to impress others rather than accomplishments that give meaning to their lives. And especially when you’re young, it can be a bit difficult to understand what exactly you really want out of life.

Here’s an exercise. Write down a short list of accomplishments – 10 things you’d like to have accomplished, acquired or achieved by the time you die. Then for each one, ask yourself “why”? What meaning does this bring to your life and why do you want to achieve it?

An easy example is wealth – most everyone will immediately respond that they’d like to be wealthy. But what exactly about wealth is attractive to you? You might seek wealth for the things it can allow you to purchase, but if you actually use that purchasing power, you give up the wealth! You might want the financial security that you would expect to possess, but you can have financial security without wealth by using your money wisely- and merely having wealth doesn’t ensure that you won’t find yourself financially insecure on a larger budget. You might desire the prestige that comes with wealth, but you must consider that such acclaim is fairly hollow – most people respect accomplishment, not wealth. Not to mention that such wealth would probably alienate your existing friends or inspire envy. Additionally, being wealthy requires extra work to maintain it. You have to protect it from taxes to keep the government from taking more and more of it. Because you have more possessions, you have to spend more time keeping them maintained and secure. You’re a greater target for crime. Your $100,000 car is more likely to be stolen or vandalized than a $20,000 one. If you have investments, you’ll need to stay on top of them. And so on.

Setting and pursuing goals is a great thing. Rushing into a preconceived notion of what you “should” want or be is disrespectful to yourself and ultimately unsatisfying. Better to understand and seek the things that YOU want than find yourself unfulfilled having achieved everyone else’s definition of success.

 

The Magic Age

Life seems pretty complicated as a young adult. You’re experiencing a wide variety of pressures that seem to be unique to your age group. Pressure to perform at school with seemingly endless homework and testing. Perhaps you feel pressure to perform from a sports team or academic club. You may have job responsibilities that are new to you. Peer pressure to look, act and think a certain way is tremendous. Maybe you’re looking to the future and wondering what you’re going to do with your life, or who you’re going to spend it with.

By contrast, the life of adults – particularly your parents – looks pretty easy. We already have a family. We have a career we’re chasing every day. We don’t seem to have the same problems with money that you do. Our friends seem to accept us as we are. We have a certain reputation that’s already built. We don’t have to impress others around us. But most of all, we have a grip on our direction in life. There’s no soul-searching about where we go next or how we’re going to get there. We seem to have it all together.

You’ll probably be amazed to know that adults have the same problems you do – and a lot more of them. While we’re not being tested academically or responsible for homework, we find the same needs to prove ourselves in the workplace. And we not only have to prove ourselves theoretically, but practically. It’s not enough to know the Four Principles of Marketing – we have to put them into practice on a regular basis. We may not be trying to prove to a coach that we can perform athletically, but our egos are working hard to prove it to our friends! I’ll admit that we do have the advantages of leaning on “I used to be able to…”, but at the same time we’re facing our own mortality and desperately trying to deny that we’re over the hump of life and on our way downhill. The same battles with material status are there to tempt us – but now it’s with bigger stakes and greater responsibilities. As a teen you can make the mistake of spending too much on yourself and only have to deny yourself a couple weeks of comforts – we can quite easily make life problematic for the whole family permanently. We may have “found the right person”, but we’re now working instead to keep that relationship positive. And we worry about the future, too. Not only our own, but our children’s. We’re not always sure about where we want to go next, either.

I’m sure it still seems easier on us from your vantage point. And the truth is, it is easier. Not because the pressures have been reduced, but because we’ve learned to deal with them. We’ve learned how to be decisive and how to deal with the bad choices we’ve made. We’ve learned what’s really valuable to us and how to prioritize our lives to focus on those things. We’ve learned to accept ourselves as less than perfect, but still pretty darn good. And when there’s uncertainty in life, we’ve learned to accept it and rely on our previous successes as evidence that we’ll probably pull the current problems out as well.

There wasn’t some magical age or point of transition when we suddenly became this way. It was a long process of learning that we’re still experiencing. We didn’t hit a magic point in which we became this capable. We grew little by little, success by success – and we’re still growing today.

The fact is, the “magic age” when you get things together is the time you choose to. When you understand your own potential, your goals in life, your skills and capabilities, you learn to deal with the pressures. You understand that you’ve beaten difficulties like these before, and likely will beat these. You learn that a little bit of the unknown is OK when you have the bigger picture of where you’re going. And the sooner you understand that you are the one responsible for what happens to you and where you go in life, the sooner you get a grip on the fact that you’re capable of living up to the challenges that accompany this journey. You accept that you’re the master of your own destiny and learn to move accordingly.

When’s the magic age? Whenever you choose.

 

Feeble Excuses

Excuses are deadly. There’s no easier way to distract you from the thinks you’d like to do or need to do than to find a convenient excuse. Excuses are about sitting still, maintaining the status quo and remaining below your potential.

Personal growth requires that you conquer the habit of making excuses and deal with the real challenges ahead. So let’s examine some classic excuses:

• I don’t have the time. You always find time to do what’s necessary. What you’re really saying is “That isn’t important to me”. Everyone is given the same amount of time to use in a day, and other people are accomplishing what you’re excusing yourself from. Do you have time for TV? Movies? Video games? Sleeping in? Determine how important your goal is to you and find something less important to rob the time.
• I don’t know how. Learn. You have more resources available to you than any generation before. There are libraries. Bookstores. Schools. People willing to share their expertise. Make use of them.
• I’ll start tomorrow. Why not today? Is there any advantage in getting to your goals later in life rather than earlier? How many people will make use of their time and step ahead of you because of your delays? If you wait for the moment when you’re completely prepared to move forward, you likely will never see the day – because you always begin unprepared, to a degree. Who decided you need to wait until New Years to make resolutions? Who said you have to wait until a test is announced to start preparing for it? What’s the advantage in waiting until you’re up for promotion to start over performing at your job? If you wait for the spotlight to point your way before you try to shine, it will probably be seeking out more interesting people in the crowd.
• I’m not good enough. Says who? If you don’t have the skills, you can get them. If you don’t have the talent, you can cultivate it. If you don’t have the background, you can build it. No one stuck you in a predetermined role. You’re not living in a caste system. Tom Dempsey kicked the longest field goal in NFL history to date, and he was born with only half his kicking foot. Do you think he may have considered on occasion that he wasn’t good enough to compete? The crippling limitations are in your mind; the physical ones are negotiable.
• Nobody has ever done this. Just keep in mind – at some point, this statement applied to everything that’s been accomplished.

Don’t let your ego sabotage your growth. Find the truth in your excuses, because that’s actionable. If you’re lazy, or unmotivated – you can work on that. If you don’t have the proper resources, you can work on getting them.

Don’t let excuses own you.