Your guide to a healthier perspective of life
Prioritize relationships.
Don’t let your pride or ego get in the way. What’s more important? Always being right? Or maintaining a healthy relationship?
When you are on your deathbed, what is your more likely regret? Tarnishing your relationship with others over something so small that you may or may not even remember? Make sure that you are focusing on what is really important in life.
“The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up.” – Mark Twain
Joy, happiness, and laughter are contagious! Even if you are not happy, trying to make others happy can help improve your mood as well.
If you’re moping around, you may get attention in the short-term. Nice people or people who care about you will ask how you’re doing and try to offer encouragement or advice. But if you’re constantly down in the dumps, eventually people will not want to hang around you as much because you’ll drag their mood down too.
Be happy. Try to make others feel good. The more you can genuinely make others laugh or be happy, the more they’ll want to do the same for you. And you get the positive benefit of doing something nice for others, which will increase your happiness.
“Memento mori” means that “remember, you will die.” It helps to keep things in perspective. Some people hate the idea of death and try to avoid thinking about it (whether it’s their own death or others’)…but we should all contemplate death. It is inevitable. No matter how rich or poor you are, your life will eventually come to an end. When it does, how do you want to be remembered? Make sure that you act in accordance to this and don’t forget it.
One last thing – make sure that if others are depending on your salary that you set up a will and get life insurance. You never know if you’re going to get hit by a bus, get cancer, etc. When you do die (especially early or unexpectedly), it will already be an incredibly difficult time for your loved ones. Please don’t make it even harder for them by burdening them financially or not setting up a clear will, which often leads to infighting with those you love the most.
Instead of waiting, planning, preparing…just get started today. It’s easy hide procrastination by calling it planning, but you’ll come much closer to achieving your dreams if you just do it.
Get started today, not tomorrow. Then learn from what you did and make a change. Did your new action make the result better or worse? Did you take the right action and just get unlucky? Or did you take the wrong action and get lucky? Don’t necessarily attribute your specific action to the success or failure that day. Look at the trends. Are you consistently seeing positive results or negative?
No matter what, at least you are earning experience which you can learn from, good or bad. Use that to your advantage to propel you towards your goals for tomorrow and beyond.
Challenge and adversity sucks when you’re in the thick of it. It can seem like the hardship will never end. But just like all good things must come to an end, so too must all bad things. Life goes on – it stops for no one and nothing.
The great part about overcoming adversity is that it tests you and lets you know what you’re really made of. When life seems too easy and you’re completely comfortable, we often lack the intrinsic motivation to strive for self-improvement. But when we face difficulties and need to get something done, often times you will rise to the challenge. How will we know our limits if we never challenge ourselves (or are not challenged by outside circumstances)?
Think about how you can push yourself today – how you can test yourself. Have you been living a soft, cushy life for too long now? If so, do you feel that you’ve come close to reaching your full potential or is there more to go? And the other, more important, question…do you even care to reach your full potential? There’s no judgment if you don’t. You need to feel fulfilled and only you can determine that.