Lessons to change your life
Based on learnings from the life of Steve Jobs, Morrie Schwartz, Runyard Kipling, Viktor Frankl and more.
A bunch of advice I noted from a few books I read over the last few months including 30 Days: Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying and Tuesdays with Morrie
Disclaimer: All advice is autobiographical. This advice is advice I would have given myself at some point of time, it may not always apply to you. Your Mileage May Vary, Take what you like best and leave the rest.
“One day you will wake up and there won't be any more time to do the things you've always wanted to do. Do it now.” - Paulo Coelho
Do yourself a favor and START LIVING NOW: not after the kids are out of the house, after you have finished the next project, after you have got the new car, after you have moved to the new house, or after you have got a better job. Don’t be one of those people who say they don’t have time, but spend 30 hours a week in front of the TV, playing video games, or going out drinking.
“Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” - Pablo Picasso
“Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
By Steve Jobs
A lot of people never discover the meaning of life until it’s too late and they are just about to die. Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who accompanied the dying wrote down their top five regrets:
1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn't work so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.
Do you want to die with any of these regrets? If not, then don’t wait any longer, live your life fully NOW!
IF- Runyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!The victim says: Every bad thing in my life is others’ fault, but if you are not part of the problem, then you also can’t be a part of the solution or - in other words - if the problem is caused by the outside, the solution is also on the outside. If you’re coming in late to work because of “traffic”, what has to happen so that you can get to work on time? Traffic has to disappear magically! Because as long as there is traffic - you will always be late. Or you can act like a protagonist and leave home on time. Then it depends on you.
“Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Victor Frankl was a Jewish psychologist imprisoned in Germany’s concentration camps during the Second World War. He lost his entire family except his sister. Under these terrible circumstances, he became aware of what he named “the ultimate human freedom”, which not even the Nazi prison wards could take away from him: they could control his external circumstances, but in the last instance it was him who CHOSE HOW these circumstances were going to affect him!
He found out that between STIMULUS and RESPONSE there was a small space in time in which he had the freedom to CHOOSE his RESPONSE! This means that even if you may not be able to control the circumstances that life presents to you, you can always choose your response in facing those circumstances, and by doing so have a huge impact on your life.
In other words, what hurts us is not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us. The most important thing is how we RESPOND to what happens to us in our lives. And that is a CHOICE
And do forgive me if I make the assumption that your life situation is not worse than Victor Frankl’s. For me being a Jew in a German concentration camp in WW2 is as bad as it gets.
“You are today where your thoughts have brought you; you will be tomorrow where your thoughts take you.” - James Allen
Think positive! A positively thinking person is not a dreamer, who thinks there are no problems in life. Instead he or she recognizes that problems are opportunities to grow, and knows that they only have the meaning that they are given. Positive thinking is to see reality as it is, accept it, and make the best of it.
Beliefs are like a self-fulfilling prophecy. They work like this: your beliefs influence your emotions, your emotions influence your actions and your actions influence your RESULTS! Depending on your belief-system you live your life one way or another.
For many decades it was thought impossible that man could run a mile under four minutes. There were even scientific papers and studies on the subject. These studies could all be shredded on May 6th 1954, when Roger Bannister proved everybody wrong at a race in Oxford. From then on over a 1000 people have done it.
The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.” - Oscar Wilde
“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” - Winston Churchill
If your plans don’t work out see it as a temporary defeat, and not as a permanent failure. Come up with a new plan and try again. If the new plan doesn’t work out either, change it, adapt it until it works. This is the point at which most people give up: They lack patience and persistence in working out new plans! Remember: Perseverance is more important than talent, intelligence, and strategy.
Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time” - Thomas Alva Edison
Accept your mistakes as feedback and learn from them.
As kids we didn’t have the mentality which many of us have adapted as adults – because if we did then many of us wouldn’t know how to walk! How did you learn walking? By falling many times and always getting up again. Unfortunately, somewhere along the road you picked up the idea that failure is something terrible. And as a result of this nowadays we fail once and then stop doing things simply because it didn’t work out the first time, because we got rejected, because our business venture didn’t work out right away.
Success is the result of right decisions. Right decisions are the result of experience, and experience is the result of wrong decisions.
“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.” - Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist
Michael Jordan: cut from his high school basketball team.
Steven Spielberg: rejected from film school three times.
Walt Disney: fired by the editor of a newspaper for lacking ideas and imagination.
Albert Einstein: He learned to speak at a late age and performed poorly in school.
John Grisham: first novel was rejected by sixteen agents and twelve publishing houses.
J.K. Rowling: was a divorced, single mother on welfare while writing Harry Potter.
Stephen King: his first book “Carrie” was rejected 30 times. He threw it in the trash. His wife retrieved it from the trash and encouraged him to try again.
Oprah Winfrey: fired from her television reporting job as “not suitable for television.”
The Beatles: told by a record company that they have “no future in show business”.
Had these people allowed failure to affect them we would not have Mickey Mouse, Indiana Jones, IT, Harry Potter, The Oprah Winfrey Show, The Theory of Relativity or the absolute hell of a song I Am the Walrus.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” - Aristotle
David Joseph Schwartz puts it this way: “Do what you fear and your fear disappears” and Mark Twain already knew over a hundred years ago that "20 years from now you will be more disappointed with the things you didn't do than with the ones that you did." Or as an old sayings goes: "Never regret the things you did; only those you never tried!" So face these fears!
Ninety percent of them are pure imagination anyway. Illusions! Incredible stories of drama and disaster that will probably never happen and are made up by your mind - “the world’s greatest director of soap operas”, as T. Harv Eker says - to keep you in your comfort zone. The only problem is that great things like development, growth and success happen outside of the comfort zone.
“The purest form of insanity is doing the same things over and over, expecting a different result” - Albert Einstein
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” - Mark Twain
The state of the American Workplace report states that up to 70% of people are not happy at their work! 50% are not engaged, not inspired, and just kind of present and around 20% have resigned internally and are actively disengaged. These people spend all their life dreaming about what they could achieve if…
Don’t be one of them. Find your drive and chase it like crazy, i.e. “What would you do if success was guaranteed?” or “What would you do if you had ten million dollars, seven houses, and have traveled to all of your favorite destinations?”
“Follow your passion, be prepared to work hard and sacrifice, and, above all, don’t let anyone limit your dreams.” - Donovan Bailey
Be thankful for what you have; you'll end up having more. If you concentrate on what you don't have, you will never, ever have enough." Oprah Winfrey
Don’t say: “I’ll be grateful when…” like many of us do. Take the shortcut: Be grateful NOW - no matter what - and make gratitude a daily habit: Start the day by saying thank you for what you have (instead of complaining about what you don't have). This will have an immediate effect on your life. Focus on the good things that you can find every day.
"There is always something to be thankful for. Somedays it will be hard to find but it will surely be there.” - Anonymous
“The only thing standing between you and your goal is the bullshit story you keep telling yourself as to why you can't achieve it.”
Jordan Belfort
Always expect the best! Life doesn’t always give you what you want, but it sure gives you what you expect! Do you expect success? Or do you spend most of your time worrying about failure? Our expectations about ourselves and others come from our subconscious beliefs and they have an enormous impact on our achievements. Your expectations influence your attitude and your attitude has a lot to do with your success.
You can be happy right here, right now! Don’t miss out on the small pleasures of life, while you go after the big ones. Enjoy the beauty around you! Enjoy the small things! Don’t postpone life until you win the lottery or retire. Do the fun things now with what you have. Live each day fully as if it were your last! Start by being happy now. Smile as much as you can - even if you are not in the mood, because by smiling you're sending positive signals to your brain. Fun and humor are essential for a good, long life, job satisfaction, personal fulfillment, personal relationships, and life balance. So laugh lots and have lots of fun!
On your way forward to changing your life and reaching your goals it’s also important to be aware of your progress! Stop every now and then and celebrate your wins! Celebrate that you are better than you were last week! Don’t let your small victories go unnoticed!
“The man who doesn’t read has no advantage over the man that can’t read.” - Mark Twain
If you read for half an hour a day that’s three and a half hours a week and 182 hours a year! Most books take only 4 hours to read, that is 45 books an year. Basically why I never made a how to read 50 books an year kind off post. While many will argue that they don’t have time, let me ask you something: How many hours a week do you watch TV? If that doesn’t provide you enough time, why don’t you try waking up an hour earlier? If you already sleep 6 hours or less and still don’t have time then how much time are you spending every day in the car or public transport on your way to work? Statistics say it’s between 60 and 90 minutes per working day! That means in a month we are talking between 20 to 30 hours. Who said, “I don’t have enough time.”? We just found you another 20 to 30 hours to read (when on a bus or train), or listen to audio books in your car.
Their is no excuse not to read other the fact you want to read or not. Make it a habit to read at least one book a week, buy a new course every two months, and sign up for at least two seminars or trainings a year.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” - Benjamin Franklin
“Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.” - Master Yoda, Star Wars
You can do yourself a huge favor if you stop using the word “try”. Throw it out of your vocabulary! Trying implies failure. What would you rather have a person say to you if you put them in charge of a task: “I’ll try to get it done” or “I’ll get right on it”? Do or do not!
There is no try! It’s as Nike says, “Just do it!” If you do it and it works…great! Well done! If you do it and it doesn’t work. Ok. Let’s have a look at it. What went wrong? Did you learn something from the experience? What can you change to get the result you want? Go again!
“Those who do not find time for exercise will have to find time for illness.” - Edward Smith Stanley
Everyone knows exercise is good for them. Still, no one seems to find any time for it.
The best excuse is always: “I have no time”. But what if somebody were to tell you that your life depends on it? And if you don’t start exercising right know you will be dead in a month? You will surely find time, wouldn’t you?
Research has shown that exercise makes you happier, can reduce the symptoms of depression, reduces the risk of disease (heart, diabetes, osteoporosis, high cholesterol, etc.), lowers the risk of a premature death, and improves your memory, and many more.
Don’t force yourself to exercise. Enjoy it. Look for a recreational activity that fits you and that you enjoy doing such as swimming, for example. Even walking an hour a day can make a difference.
"Whatever you do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic in it." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.” - Edward Everett Hale
“You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.” - Henry Ford
Without action, there are no results. Without results, there is no feedback. Without feedback, there is no learning. Without Learning, we can’t improve. Without improving, we can’t develop our full potential.
You are what you do, not what you say you'll do. There are too many people who want to change the world yet never picked up a pen to start writing a book or an article or did anything about it.
“It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness.” - Confucius
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it,
Then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying.
There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” - Dalai Lama XIV
Many people are constantly worrying. They worry about things that happened in the past that they can’t change, things in the future that they have no influence over, or about economy, wars, and politics which they have no control over. Even funnier is that most of the catastrophes that you are worrying about turn out to be a lot less horrible in reality or just never happen.
Keep in mind: it doesn’t matter how much you worry, it will change neither the past not the future! Also, worrying usually doesn’t make things any better, does it? Instead, it will drag you down and you will lose the present moment.
And that’s all I have to offer. If you liked the post, click the heart and if you are interested in more such content; Please consider subscribing.
Thanks for Reading,
Warm Regards,
Arjun Agarwal.
Loved this issue so much, Arjun. It was jam-packed with value. 👏 Well done!
Thank you! I needed this.