Your guide to a healthier perspective of life
You get what you look for in life. If you’re grouchy or mad or sad and you just want to be in a bad mood, you can find ways to reinforce those negative thoughts. But if you are positive and “happy go lucky,” if you are always looking for the silver lining, you’ll find that too. Your attitude shapes your perception of the world.
Change your attitude for the better and you’ll change your life for the better.
“You should know now that a man of knowledge lives by acting, not by thinking about acting, nor by thinking about what he will think when he has finished acting. A man of knowledge chooses a path with heart and follows it.” – Carlos Castaneda in “A Separate Reality”
Take action today. It’s great to read, listen to podcasts, and brainstorm ideas, but at the end of the day, if you don’t take action on all of that knowledge, you’re basically in the same place as someone who didn’t spend (waste?) that time learning. There will be no measurable difference between you and that person. The main differences will be that you might be able to offer some input to others who are looking to take action and also that you’ve wasted a lot of time not doing something actually productive.
Learn to listen. You can’t listen if you’re talking at the same time as the person who you’re supposedly conversing with. You can’t listen if you’re only thinking about what you’re going to say next. For conversation to be meaningful, you need to talk and listen.
Dr. Gary Chapman (author of The 5 Love Languages) writes that “Listening begins with attitude. If I choose to believe every person I encounter has inherent dignity and value, meaning their thoughts and feelings are important, then I am prepared to listen. If I think the world revolves around me, that my ideas are all that counts, then why should I listen to anyone else? Many people don’t have a communication problem; they have an attitude problem.”
We can all work on improving our attitude! Part of having a good attitude includes being generous (not just with money, but also your time), being optimistic (yet realistic), and loving/caring for others.
We should all try our best at whatever we do, but we need to realize that our best is not perfect, and will never be perfect, no matter how much time we spend on it. Instead, we should focus our time, energy, and money on a mix between creating the minimum viable product (MVP) as quickly as possible and making adjustments based on the results/data that comes in.
Just because we think something will go according to plan, doesn’t mean that it will. If we’re inexperienced, sometimes we just don’t know what we don’t know. And even when we are experienced, sometimes there are still unexpected surprises or we feel the butterfly effect from some other event outside of our control.
So, our goal should be to know what we’re aiming for (having an end result in mind), develop a plan to get there, and execute that plan as quickly as possible. Yes, you should check your work, you should look for errors and try to avoid pitfalls when you can, but if you wait for “perfect,” it will take you a year to do something you could have achieved in a month (and it still won’t be perfect).
Get moving. Get started. Don’t wait for perfect. Pay attention to the results. Modify your actions based on your new hypothesis. Repeat.
It can feel good being a big fish in a little pond. Everything you do is recognized. You’re respected and have the admiration of others. It’s a nice ego boost.
But if you really want to put things in perspective, you need to go to a bigger pond to see that there are other fish out there that a bigger, faster, etc.
Don’t limit yourself by staying comfortable. If you’re not willing to test the waters elsewhere, you’ll likely stay in your comfort zone and not grow to your full potential.
In the end, you’ll have to make a decision – do you want to stay where you’re on a pedestal or do you want to find new challenges?