Most of the time, “What should I do with my life?” is a terrible question.
I believe that life exists to be enjoyed, and that the most important thing is to feel good about yourself.
To enjoy life, you don’t need fancy nonsense, but you do need to control your time and realize that most things just aren’t as serious as you make them out to be.
To feel more at peace and more successful, you don’t need genius-level brain power, access to some secret society, or to his a moving target of “just” and additional X dollars. Those are all distractions.
If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun. And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.
If you want confusion and heartache, ask vague questions. If you want uncommon clarity and results, ask uncommonly clear questions.
Service isn’t limited to saving lives or the environment. It can also improve life. If you are a musician and put a smile on the faces of thousands or millions, I view that as service. If you are a mentor and change the life of one child for the better, the world has been improved.
To dramitically change your life, you don’t need to run a 100-mile race, get a PhD, or completely reinvest yourself. It’s the small things, done consistently, that are the big things.
Does your life have a purpose? Are you contributing anything useful to this world, or just shuffling papers, banging on a keyboard, and coming home to a drunken existence on the weekends?
If we’re serious all the time, we’ll wear out before we get the truly serious stuff done.
This is something that is – being true to oneself – I think that most people struggle with. (Conversation with Josh Waitzkin)
To have an uncommon lifestyle you need to develop the uncommon habit of making decisions, both for yourself and for others.
The tricky thing about life is, on the one hand having the courage to enter into things that are unfamiliar, but also having the wisdom to stop exploring when you’ve found something worth sticking around for. That is true of a place, of a person, of a vocation. Balancing those two things—the courage of exploring and the commitment to staying – and getting the ratio right is very hard. I think my 70-year-old self would say: ‘Be careful that you don’t err on one side or the other, because you have an ill-conceived idea of who you are.
For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect.
If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.
Learn to be difficult when it counts. In school as in life, having a reputation for being assertive will help you receive preferential treatment without having to beg or fight for it every time.
It’s far more lucrative and fun to leverage your strengths instead of attempting to fix all the chinks in your armor.
To the pregnant void of infinite possibilities, only possible with a lack of obligation, or at least, no compulsive reactivity. Perhaps this is only possible with the negative space to – as Kurt Vonnegut put it – “fart around”? To do things for the hell of it? For no damn good reason at all?
You don’t need to go through life huffing and puffing, straining and red-faced. You can get 95% of the results you want by calmly putting one foot in front of the other.
For all their bitching about what’s holding them back, most people have a lot of trouble coming up with the defined dreams they’re being held from.
Often, all that stands between you and what you want is a better set of questions.
