Have you ever asked yourself this question: Am I living or just existing? And what did that tiny voice behind your mind tell you?
That you’re stuck in a rut? Well, don’t despair. You’re not alone – so are thousands of people you meet in the street every day. Though they may wear smiling faces, they are burdened inside by aching minds and are merely stumbling on without any sense of direction.
But how do you get yourself a life?
That is easy. All you’ve got to do is kill self-pity, sit up and rewrite your own destiny. Here are some actionable tips that will help you start living your best life.
1. Value and appreciate who you are and what you’ve got
Living is not a product of riches! On the contrary, many rich people are just existing, going through life accumulating wealth as a form of trophy.
To enjoy life, you don’t need millions of dollars but you need to be alive. Your life is a key factor, so why not appreciate whom you’ve come to know yourself to be, and place a high value on whatever you’ve got – even if it’s just a comb of maize.
Look, you don’t get others to value you until you appropriately price yourself.
2. Consciously find your fire
There are many things you won’t be taught in the university or at college.
So, no matter the number of certificates you’ve had or the number of professional trainings, workshops and seminars you’ve attended, you may still discover, albeit with disappointment, that you don’t really know what your passion is.
Meanwhile, there is no way you can really ‘live’ without discovering your passion. If you’re yet to discover yours, it’s not too late to get it right. Just make a list of what you enjoy doing in order of importance.
Look, no one can do this for you. You alone know how you really feel about what you do and can do. By this, I mean you need to be sincere to yourself and not jeopardise this process by going for what just catches your fancy to the detriment of what you really enjoy.
Frankly, not many things that you so much fancy will particularly make you happy. Cut down your list to only a few stuff and make sure only very important things make the list.
3. Accept failure as a normal part of living
Just as living needs success, success needs some level of failure; failures train your mind to be strong and formidable. Trust me, you cannot always get everything you want, and you don’t want to gloomily muse over what you cannot help. In fact, every cloud has a silver lining. When you bump your head against a brick wall and get bruised, your hibernating superhero personae miraculously gets activated. But this only happens when you take on failures holding up your head high.
4. Always make the best out of every situation
Some situations make us happy while others make us sad. What you get out of either situation depends vastly on how you handle it. An event that starts out positive does not necessarily end that same way, and vice versa. Just like in fictions, life is full of twists. This is where your intuition comes in: you must always look for the good side of every occasion and downplay the bad side, or what choice have you?
5. Live for yourself
No, don’t get me wrong. You don’t have to be selfish, just as you don’t have to die for people who won’t have your back. All you need to do is to draw the line between selfless sacrifice and stupidity. People that bring you nothing but sadness are not worthy of being in your life. Neither do they deserve your time. Your giving them preference over your joy is unjustifiable, to say the least. The only people you ever want to be with are those that make you happy. Prioritize them without hesitating. Remember, every other person can get out of your life alive, but not you.
6. Don’t fake it
Leading a fake life is the greatest evidence of just existing. It shows you aren’t cool with your real life. Making the best out of every situation isn’t the same thing as faking it. It means training your mind to genuinely see situations from the positive angles. And that is really whom you are once you can do that. But faking it is wearing a façade over weeping eyes. It does not stop the pains. It merely camouflages it. People who keep faking it are not far away from depression and ultimately suicide.