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“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.” – Henry Ford

Life is all about your attitude. If you tell yourself that you’re not good at something, then guess what? You’ve given yourself permission to not try, to not give it an honest effort. You’ve planted the seed of doubt that you are unable to do something, so why give it your all? For if you give it everything you’ve got and somehow don’t succeed, you or others might view it as a failure.

Don’t think like that. First of all, you can do almost anything you want in the world, given enough focused time, money, and dedicated effort. There will be limitations on what you can do, but that is true for everyone. Why would you add self-imposed limitations (by telling yourself that you can’t do something, when it is a real possibility for you) to your real limitations (such as how tall you are). Instead, change your thinking. You can do this. It may be difficult, but this should be expected. If it were easy then everyone would do it. Embrace challenges. Embrace obstacles. Tell yourself that you can do something, develop a specific plan, take regular, focused action, and it will be so.

“If you think that hiring a $100/hour electrician is expensive, try hiring a $10/hour electrician.” The point here is that the amateur can cost you more money by damaging things or making it worse than if you would have just hired the qualified professional in the first place. Not only that, but you might hire the cheaper person first, pay them to do poor work, then still have to bring in a more expensive person to correct the mistakes from the first person (paying two contractors instead of one).

It’s ok to be frugal. I like being frugal. But don’t be cheap. Do things right the first time and don’t cut corners, otherwise you’ll eventually get burned.

Get comfortable being uncomfortable. The biggest or newest events in our lives will make us feel uncomfortable. If they seem unfamiliar to us, or if the outcome is uncertain, it can be challenging to continue moving forward. It can feel scary, uncomfortable, or even painful to continue. But you must keep pursuing the goal.

The most challenging decisions we make in life often move us forward the most. The first time you asked your significant other on a date (and if they said no the first time, maybe you asked them again), when you asked your father-in-law for his daughter’s hand in marriage, when you presented a big project, when you tried to figure out how to be a good parent…the list goes on and on. You were probably nervous or uncomfortable at some point leading up to those actions, but if you didn’t follow through, you wouldn’t be where you are today and you would be left wondering, “what if I had done _____…where would I be in life?”

Seeing results by staying in the discomfort zone can be applied to every aspect of your life. When you’re working out, if you’re not uncomfortable at some point then you’re probably not going to change your body much. With your finances, you not only need to live below your means to achieve certain financial goals, which can be uncomfortable, but sometimes you need to work overtime for months on end to get to where you want to be. The point is, the best things in life often come from a combination of hard work (discomfort) and luck. But as Samuel Goldwyn once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” So go out there, work hard, and be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Are you taking life too seriously? You can have fun, laugh, and enjoy life even while being productive and professional. Don’t take yourself so seriously. If you think about it, our life is but a blink of an eye in the grand scheme of this universe we live in. We are a spec of dust in this world. Don’t make yourself up to be more than what you really are.

That’s not to say that what you do in this life doesn’t matter. After all, you still should do the right things (provide for your family, be polite, etc), but if you can’t have fun, you need to reflect on what your life has become.

“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes I find myself daydreaming – wishing I was out west (maybe in Colorado or Utah) or on a beach somewhere. But the thing I’ve come to realize is that it doesn’t matter where you are geographically. My dad used to say that “happiness is a state of mind, not a state on the map.” He was right. Happiness has to come from within. There are sad or angry people living in a ski town or near beaches too. Only we can choose how we feel.