Useful Ideas for Your Life

You’re driving down the road, things are just great. Sun is shining and it’s pre-covid times so everything is just better.
Suddenly some guy who isn’t looking pulls out in front of you and you have to slam on your breaks.
Your $5 tall Starbucks mint jazz tea refresher spills into your cupholder, your shopping bags tip over, and your heart beats too fast for comfort.

You have the right to be angry. But...is it smart to let yourself get angry even just a little bit? How much do we let anger control the way our days, weeks, and months play out?

It might be a lot more than you realize.

Today we are going to talk about anger on the road no matter how small and how it affects your life.

Whether it's emotions, difficult things or big life decisions, using your ability to imagine what future-you will care about will help you make sense of the now. The next time you are overcome with anger, embarrassment or fear imagine what you will feel and think about whatever it is that's bothering you in...10 hours...10 days...10 years. This rapidly defuses what otherwise might consume you. The next time you're struggling to complete something physically or mentally difficult, imagine how grateful your future self will be about pushing through and completing that thing. When making life decisions, imagine what your future self might think and allow that to influence your decision. Try utilizing your future self! 

I once gave a book to a friend with high recommendations. They gave the book back a few weeks later and said "sorry, nothing really jumped out at me...I didn't like it." This caused me to stop and think about how much of life one is missing if they are forever fixated on sensational things as opposed to choosing to realize that most of this world and most of life are made up of non-sensational things. If you go through life expecting all important things to jump out at you, you will miss most of what life consists of. 

We are all young one way or another. There will always be someone wiser, more experienced, and more articulate than each of us. Therefore, we cannot wait our entire lives until we "have enough experience" or "have gained the necessary wisdom" to speak about the important ideas in life. We have to dive in now while we are still "young" and risk being wrong before our lives slip away and we never took any action. We must speak with courage mixed with humility and curiosity in order to be bold now while remaining respectful of the fact that we do not know all there is to know. 

Most of us try to plan our lives as best we can. We attend schools to prepare us for a certain job. We work certain jobs to prepare us for a certain career. We live in certain cities in order to begin to prepare to settle down and create a family. There are many opportunities for us to fall into the trap of believing that we have eliminated the unknown in our lives as a product of great planning. The truth of the matter is that the unknown will always be a part of a life and therefore it should be counted on and not strangled. Some of the most important moments in peoples' lives have come out of the unknown; have come out of nowhere and completely surprised the planner. Consider how you can count on the unknown in your own life. 

Most of us live life counting on the fact that there is a "right" time for doing something. Whatever that thing may be, we often wait and wait until we feel like the right time has arrived to act. I challenge you to think about the possibility that there are many things in life that have no "right" time. Sometimes the right time is simply the time at which you act. Don't spend your life waiting for the right time only to arrive at the end with no time left having never acted. 

When I first made reading a consistent part of my life, I read everything and anything because I did not know what I wanted to read or what I valued. Now, after a few years of reading widely and heavily, I have begun to skip pages in books when I don't see them as useful, close books after only a few pages when it becomes clear the book is not for me, and skip reading some books entirely because I know that they are not valuable to what I want. There are too many pages in this world for us to read everything. Therefore, we must choose and be picky with what we feed our minds.  

No single person can give you the all-encompassing manual to solve whatever problem stands before you. Listening to the advice and reflections of a mentor and attempting to act on that advice without first mixing and melding it with the realities of your life as well as thoughts and ideas of your own is a wasteful mistake. To fully take advantage of the mentor's time and advice as well as to make the best decision possible, you must wrestle with and attempt to hybridize the information the mentor delivers to you. 

By default, we are given a foundation upon which we stand. A foundation that is made up of values and perspectives on the world. This determines how you live, what decisions you will make/not make, who you will have in your life and the list goes on. Many people never stop to question the foundation on which they stand. Did they create it themselves or did they blindly accept whatever was given to them over the course of their life never questioning anything? If you want a level of autonomy and strength in the face of the systems and pressures around us, analyzing and assuring that your foundations are true to what you believe is the first place to start. 

I ate a bag of Doritos after my workout sometime last week. I felt like crap doing so. My body needed fuel on which to operate and with which to build up my muscles and I was shoveling in powdery chips of processed who knows what. We are all well-aware of this dynamic of healthy/unhealthy food and healthy/unhealthy body. But how much do we pay attention to the equally as important dynamic of healthy/unhealthy food for our mind? Are we taking care of our minds as well as we strive to take care of our bodies?