How to Turn Your Life Around
May 30, 2024
Life is about competition, but not in the way everyone thinks...
Nor in the way we act or strive.
To compete against other people, other businesses, other 'teams', is futile. We're not running a race against anyone but who we were.
This brings up a few important points.
1. We start a new competition every single day. So it really doesn't matter who you've been up to this point. You could have failed miserably or succeeded wildly, you're still competing against who you were yesterday.
Every day you get a fresh start, but also a new challenge.
Past victories remain in the past, they no longer exist, as do past failures.
You get to start anew, light and free, unencumbered by who you've been. This should be liberating and inspiring, but we burden ourselves by holding onto who we've been, what we've done, even how we've thought.
Sure, habits aren't easy to break, and yet they are. You stop them. Change them. It can happen in an instant. You just have to want it bad enough, and you have to release who you were in order to become who you can be.
2. We can be happy for others without feeling bad about what we've done. We're each in our own race, trying to make today better than it was yesterday.
It's awesome to see others improve. It shows us we can, too. It proves that if it can be done, we can do it. Time and consistency are all that stands between us and improvement.
It's a much lighter, freer way to exist. You're happy for your own improvements, and for those of others. You're just happy, which gives more energy, less stress, and clearer thinking.
3. The race isn't results-focused, but habit-focused.
This is possibly the most important point. It's not what you get, but how you live. This, in turn, gets you more, because what you get is dependent on how you live... but you have to forget about what you want to get.
You're trying, in this race called life, to become a little better every day.
Over time, that yields greatness. If you improve incrementally on a daily basis, every day, there are no bounds to how great you can become, and if there are no bounds to how great you can become, nothing limits what you can get.
This is how we become legendary, the ending to every newsletter I send out. This is how we turn bad habits into good ones, and eventually, lacklustre results into great ones.
We 'be legendary' through releasing our bad habits, and adopting new ones.
We become legendary, it's not something we 'get'.
The nitty gritty of how to actually do this...
You know what to do.
That is, you know what the bad habits are, and you know what the good habits are. We all know. Sometimes we don't know exactly what to do, but that's easy enough to find out through research or trial and error.
Identify them, both good and bad, and commit, right now, to doing the good and avoiding the bad. Remove the bad from your life, they no longer exist, and do the good, regardless of how you feel.
Track your day.
Write down what you do, the habits you have. Highlight the good, and the bad ones you have to change to improve.
Review your day.
Grade yourself. Are you getting better? Are you changing the bad habits and adopting newer, better ones?
Live a life within a day.
We're too focused on the macro, when the macro depends on the micro.
How do you want to live your life? How do you want to be remembered?
Live your day as if it's the only one in your life. Live it that well.
I get that this is super simple and doesn't deal with internal thoughts and struggles that we all have, but do we really need to struggle in this process?
We all will. I will. I do. But it's not entirely necessary. If we have a day where we struggle, we get to start anew the following day and simply do the good and avoid the bad.
It's being good over time that leads to being great.
