A Significant Life

• The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts. Mastering your mind means seeing setbacks as opportunities. 
• Occupy your mind with uplifting thoughts, because they will give you the energy you'll need to attain the success you desire.

• Visualize your goal.
• Keep yourself positively motivated.
• Make a deadline.
• Take steps daily.
• Laugh along the way.

Find out what characteristics or ways of behaving makes you feel good. Answer the following questions:

• What's important to you in life?
• If you could have any career, without worrying about money or other practical constraints, what would you do?
• When you’re reading news stories, what sort of story or behaviour tends to inspire you?
• What type of story or behaviour makes you angry?
• What do you want to change about the world or about yourself?
• What are you most proud of?
• When were you the happiest?

Once you’ve come up with a list, it's important to prioritise your values.

It can help you get even closer to defining what’s important to you. Prioritising helps you to ensure that you’re spending them on the most important things that'll have the biggest payoff in your life.

From comparing our lives to others. Why do you think you look at things as a sacrifice? Compared to what? “Well, so and so is having an avocado salad at a rooftop bar in SoHo.” Who gives a shit. ⚠️

"Science is what you know. Philosophy is what you don’t know."

Philosophy is examining our understanding of reality and knowledge. Philosophy consists of three major branches:

1. Metaphysics - What is true about existence.
2. Epistemology - How we can know that it is true. Epistemology has given us science, logic/reason, economics, psychology, and other theories of knowledge.
3. Ethics - What actions we should take as a result of this knowledge. Ethics contains concepts such as democracy, human rights, the treatment of animals, and the environment.

When you order your thoughts into a coherent belief system, you are engaging in philosophy. To criticize philosophy, you must rely on philosophy.

“Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do. It’s true for companies, and it’s true for products."

• Find out if the problem really exists, and why. This will open a path to alternative ways of solving it.
• Some problems, which seem complex, often have simple solutions.
• What is the surest thing in that complex problem? That becomes your First Principle, your starting point.
• List out the possible solutions
• Focus on one good solution while removing the rest.

Procrastination, or the way we let pending tasks linger on, just avoiding them, is one of the main reasons our goals don't materialize.

The longer any work is avoided the harder it becomes to eventually do it.

Like dishes piling up in the kitchen sink, they get harder and harder to do as the load increases.

Fear causes us to procrastinate. It can be:

• Fear of change
• Fear of leaving our comfort zone
• Fear of the unknown
• Fear of failure
• Fear of what other people would think of us

We justify these fears by imaginary different reasons, but the root cause is not related to our invented reasons, it is our inherent fear.

Being in Lockdown or in a quarantine complicates dating in unexpected ways, raises some previously unheard questions (like who’s got a more ‘apocalypse’ friendly place) and makes partners feel as if they are already in the boring part of a relationship without any of the initial romance or spark.

• Constantly sharing updates about the pandemic with your new partner is not a good idea.
• Social distancing etiquette (hello elbow bumps) may feel awkward, and FaceTime video chats can feel a bit too intimate and over-the-top after a while, as the other person is still a practical stranger.

Being so hyper-fixed on our own stress and schedule is, in a way, selfish. It’s a way to be caught up in our own little world.

Instead, we should be encouraging ourselves and others to find a better balance in our lives and in our experiences. 

We convince ourselves that everything we do now, will pay off when we are successful and achieve that next milestone. But, as soon as we reach that goal, we rarely bask in that success because we must be in pursuit of the next one.

Analyze the reasons as to why you are doing the things you do, and why you are reaching for the goals you are trying to achieve.

Making space to take on risk is all about the journey. You have to unlearn what no longer serves you. For example, unlearning other peoples quick fixes and schemes. 

Playing it safe prevents you from leaping into the opportunities along your path.

If you wait until you are ready you might not follow the path you want to choose. Trust yourself to do your best.

Being able to achieve a success metric is hard, but knowing which metric to achieve is even more important. Discover what you value and choose your own metrics for success, otherwise, your environment will dictate it for you, which could be unfulfilling for you.

Work towards your own idea of success and don’t let “FOMO” make you feel like a failure because you’re not meeting someone else’s metrics for success.