Love, respect, and forgiveness

Remember to treat yourself and others with love, respect, and forgiveness every single day.

When you start with love, you will always want the best for yourself and for others. You’ll try to help them as much as you can. But help doesn’t mean giving them handouts and spoon feeding them. There needs to be a healthy balance between short-term help and long-term help. Always “helping” someone get what they want, for example, may not be helping them in the long run. Making sure nobody ever feels struggle is not helping them. It’s weakening them, giving them less ability to overcome adversity, and giving them less resolve. The best help is by teaching them how to get what they want, not having you go out and getting them whatever they want.

Next, you need to treat yourself and others with respect. The moment you start disrespecting others is the moment that you begin to lose credibility for yourself. Treat others how you would want to be treated. Don’t talk down to others, don’t berate them, but also don’t treat them with pity. If you see someone who needs your help, try to walk alongside them. You may think that the other person can’t do anything for you, but you never know how your actions can affect them, where they’ll end up, or what connections they might have as well. Don’t forget you must also respect yourself. That means setting boundaries with people or saying no sometimes. You need to respect yourself enough to not let yourself be walked all over by others.

Lastly, you need to practice forgiveness with yourself and others. You don’t have to forget how you made a mistake or how others might have wronged you. But you should forgive them. Everyone makes mistakes, yourself included. Try to learn from them and move on. Make sure you don’t hold grudges or else you will live a long, miserable life.

Being curious leads to better results

Ask more questions, but ask better questions too. You already know what you think you know. Your goal should be to understand what other people know (or think they know). What can you learn from them? But don’t pester them with annoying questions.

Be curious. The more curious you are, the faster you’ll learn and grow as a person. And, hey, some additional perks are you’ll probably have some great conversations and grow stronger friendships too.

Power, choice, and feelings

Don’t let others’ words control how you feel or react. ​
Don’t let others’ words control how you feel or react.

I saw this quote on LinkedIn and decided that I wanted to talk about it a little more. I completely agree with this sentiment…

If you allow other people’s words or actions determine if you are happy, sad, mad, or anything in between, you’re in for a roller coaster of emotions in life. You can’t control what they say or do, and if you react to everything, you’re giving them the power to “make” you feel a certain way.

But the truth is, only you get to decide whether or not you feel happy or not. Keep that power for yourself – do not give it away to others who may or may not be thinking about how their actions might affect you physically or psychologically.

Practice what Viktor Frankl (Holocaust survivor, neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, and author) called SPR – Stimulus, Pause, Response. He said, “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.” Be free. Choose to be happy or choose to be mad. But make sure it is you who is making that choice, and not someone else choosing for you.

Make taking action your default tendency

When you face uncertainty, do you take action or do you pause? There’s fight, flight, or freeze.

There’s not a “one size fits all” answer for every situation. You can deal with each scenario differently, and depending on the urgency of what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, your previous history with that person/scenario, and the risk/reward balance, you may choose differently.

But we all have a default action or inaction that we take.

I tend to lean towards taking action. Instead of thinking about doing things, just do them. You’ll make mistakes along the way, but you’ll also end up getting much more done than those who default to pausing/talking things over.

Default towards taking action. Be aggressive. Don’t be passive.

Strategy is the determining factor for dreams and nightmares

Without hard work, a great strategy remains a dream. Without a great strategy, hard work becomes a nightmare.
“Without hard work, a great strategy remains a dream. Without a great strategy, hard work becomes a nightmare.” – James Clear

Nothing will get done without someone rolling up their sleeves and making it happen.

Reading about ideas isn’t very difficult, although not nearly as many people read as they should.

Thinking about ideas is a little harder, as you have to give yourself time to think and permission to think of ideas that may fail on the first several iterations.

Actually working to complete an idea is the hardest. A lot of people read about ideas or talk about ideas, but never act on them. Taking action is the hardest of the three and usually requires the most effort.

But, while I agree that working hard will help take you far, what if you’re working towards the wrong thing?

If you don’t have the right strategy, your work ethic can only take you so far. You are only as good as your strategy.

For example, say you want to build a business. You can work really hard at building your website, making a logo, looking into forming an LLC, and interviewing an assistant, but if you haven’t come up with a strategy to find customers, you’re going to fail. In this scenario, you can easily put in 40, 60, or even 80 hours per week and not see any results that are helping to keep your startup in business.

Figure out what is important to you (what your goals are) and then come up with a relevant strategy to help support those goals. Otherwise all of your hard work will become a nightmare.