“Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood”
~Helen Keller
I wasn’t born yesterday, but I have been around long enough to have taken some hard knocks from life and learned deeply from them.
In fact, if I had to summarize the most challenging lessons I’ve had to learn over the past four decades I’ve been alive, it would be these:
You create your own reality.
You have more control over your life than you think, so if you want certain things to happen, you have to make the wheels turn to create the momentum that’ll get you there.
Not doing this will just make you feel like life is happening to you, instead of for you.
Sometimes, life will suck….a lot.
There will be days, weeks months or even years where shit happens a little too frequently than you’d like.
Sometimes, it’ll be your fault, others not.
Take some time out to heal if you must, but know that regardless of why the sucky thing happened, you’re only human and there’s usually a lesson to be learned from it.
You’ll lose friends you thought would be with you forever.
People change. People move away. People betray the people they care about. People die.
There’s never a guarantee that the best friend whom you thought would always be by your side, will always be by your side.
You’ll feel anger, grief and loneliness from this unexpected absence, but acceptance will soon come around and you’ll realize that it’s time to get out there to make new meaningful connections.
It’s OK not to do what everyone else is doing.
Go to college, get a job, get married, have a bunch of kids, retire, die.
Most people you know will want to be on this path or just follow it anyway because it’s a lot easier than resisting and explaining why they’re not on it.
But here’s the thing: It’s OK to not want what everyone else wants.
It’s YOUR life and you get to choose how you want to live it.
Other people are too busy with their lives to care about yours.
If you’re holding yourself back from doing certain things because you’re afraid of what other people will think of you, it’s time to start doing them.
The truth and irony of it all is that everyone else is too busy worrying about their own lives and what other people think of them to care about what you’re doing.
It’s a vicious cycle of fear and self-consciousness that keeps us from living our lives.
Life’s not fair. It’s not meant to be.
Bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.
But here’s the thing about life: it doesn’t reward you just for being good.
It does sometimes, but mostly, it rewards you for being shrewd, smart, adaptive, quick and aggressive — none of which require a finely-tuned moral compass.
Not everyone will have your back.
Yes, there are lots of good people in this world, but there are also malevolent souls out there who will take advantage of you the minute the opportunity arises.
Always walk into a new situation with not just your heart, but eyes open.
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