Life is just consciousness and its contents. Try being less precious about moments of stillness. Try to be less cavalier about daily activities. Try to undermine the boundary between these two states.
Be aware of your thoughts in each moment.
Right now, in this moment, you have everything you need to experience the fullness of life. Isn’t everything enough? Look around you. Drink it in. Even moments of sadness, despair, anxiety, and fear should be fully experienced as a natural part of the human condition.
We are each here for only a short time. There isn’t an afterlife – a better place – that we depart to once this body is finished. This is all the time we have.
It’s our choice to make something of it. But when making choices about how you’re going to live, do it without regard for money. Remove it from the equation. It’s not the foundation of happiness.
Focus instead on what moves you, what draws you in. Choose based on what makes you come alive. The world needs more of this.
Be true to this and the money will come.
But more importantly, you will live a life with few regrets and you will experience more fully what it means to be human.
Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.
–Tony Robbins
Change is natural. It’s neither bad nor good.
Some people live with a fear of change. This fear doesn’t serve them. It’s better to understand the change that is happening and finds ways to embrace it so that progress can be made. Progress is how we live a good life.
There is always change. Progress is less certain. But you get to choose.
How much attention do you pay to the good opinion of others?
Next time you’re having a battle in your head, find a way to disrupt the conflict and let it go. You’ll find it tries to reignite inside your mind. Stop. And let it go, again.
This might take a while.
If you persist, the voices of other people will start to fade. You’ll start to hear your real voice come through. That’s the only voice you should listen to. Listen more intently. Heed its wisdom.
Listen more often to your own thoughts. Let go of the words of people who have been influencing you over the years. They mean well, but you have to have full agency over your thoughts and your path. The only way this happens is when you realize that your opinion of yourself is the only one that really matters.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
A wise man apportions his beliefs to the evidence.
– David Hume
It’s impossible to ignore the assault on truth that has become mainstream in the US. Alternative facts abound and too many people refuse to question the origin of these new facts.
Real investigative reporting is under existential pressure as news outlets compete for attention with clickbait-y content and popular “news”. Perhaps Idiocracy was more prescient than we could ever have imagined.
For those of us who care about truth, it’s our responsibility to believe only the facts. The real facts. This takes more work on our part. We must verify the source. We must examine loose claims before accepting them. We must promote the work of those who are resolute in their quest for facts and truth.
The Internet is a game-changer for spreading ideas. It can be a force for good or a tool for evil.
Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.
–Ralph Waldo Emerson
Every day is an opportunity to be the best version of yourself.
We can never know whether today will yield everything we’d like. But it is the only day we have, so we must make if it what we can.
The days before it are done. The opportunity is gone.
Tomorrow will bring another chance to improve. But that doesn’t matter. Because, right now, today is the only day you can influence.
Yes, you should have a plan for the future, but today is the only chance you have to get closer to that future.
Think about it. Where you are today is a direct result of every decision you have made throughout your life. Every single decision.
The thing is, when you were making those decisions, you probably couldn’t see where you’d end up. But you made the best decision you could each day. And here you are now.
The hack is to live with an intent for a good life. Then to make every effort to be present every day so that you can make good decisions along the way.
I was looking back at some things I wrote a while back, but never published. This one struck me. It’s as rich and real today as it was when Chris finally rested, after many years living with a brain tumor. He was an incredible person who I only knew for a short time. But he was always engaged and alive. These are the words I wrote after he passed in 2010.
What I learned from Chris
Love your wife. Let your kids express themselves freely so that they know authentic joy. It’s not because you have an incredible wife and children and career that you are a happy, kind, inspirational person. Rather, it’s because you are a happy, kind, inspirational person that you have an incredible wife, kids, and career. Say goodbye if you have the chance. Express yourself without ego. Learn how to be happy, daily.
You have an idea. Everyone has ideas. Ideas are easy.
What counts is when you take your idea and figure out how to bring it to life. Something small. Something real.
When it’s small and real, you learn.
You learn if you enjoy creating it. You learn if you can grow from it. You learn if you care.
When you care, and you’re doing good work, there’s a chance that you’ll make a difference for someone.
That’s a signal. It’s a signal that you might be onto something.
But you have to care. Because if you don’t care then no one else will care.
One thing is certain, you won’t know until you try.
So next time, don’t sit too long with your idea. Stand up and switch to experimentation mode. In experimentation mode you have to be creative, you have to be resourceful, you have to be agile.
Taking action on your idea is the only way to know. To know if it’s worthy of pursuit.
We live in interesting times. The data is indisputable, despite the cries of the regressive flock. We are perilously close to a dystopian future that will test our species in a way it’s never been tested. All species, for that matter.
In the absence of real leadership or the unity of nations, it will be up to technologists – as usual – to take humanity forward as best we can.
This week, NASA published a video that inspires.
It reminds us of the incredibly unifying quest of space exploration.
Now, we have another mission. To heal our planet and to find a way forward.
There will be a lot of really smart people working on this. There already are. Some will be undoing the damage already done. Some will be figuring out how we can adapt to this ugly future – it’ll be here soon – and we’ll need to adapt. Quickly.
And some are already thinking about humanity’s imminent and enormous quest. More than thinking about it. Some are trying to find out whether we can colonize the moon or Mars. It may be the only hope for humanity.
I hope NASA captures some hearts and minds with this video. We need all the minds we can muster to work on these solutions.
And we need all the hearts coming together, to go farther than humanity has ever been.
One of the reasons we’re immobilized by fear when we really want to take the leap is that we can measure what we’ll lose, but we can’t see what we’ll gain.
When you want to quit your job and start that business or when you follow your dream – or aroha – across the world, you know exactly what you’re giving up. You know what those things are worth to you.
What’s not obvious, what can’t be counted, is how much you’ll gain.
That’s how fear works.
What if I give up all this stuff? What if I give up what I know, everything that’s comfortable, in pursuit of something that is unknown.
What’s unknown can only become known by choosing to leap. By letting go of the stuff that’s satisfactory and doing the work to gain something better.
You can’t measure what you’ll gain. But you will gain something by taking the journey. What else is there to do?
