We don’t realize how often we hold ourselves back by holding on to everything.

Letting go is not giving up. Letting go is surrendering any needless attachments to particular outcomes and situations. Surrender means showing up in your life with the intention to be your best, and to do the best you know how, without expecting life to be ideal. Have goals, have dreams, take purposeful action, and build solid relationships, but detach from what life must look like every step of the way.

The energy of someone aspiring to create something wonderful today, teamed with a healthy balance of surrender, is far more effective than someone determined to create outcomes with a desperate must-have mentality. Surrender brings inner calmness, awareness, and understanding. And lest we forget that our outer lives are a reflection of our inner state of being.

Thus, take a moment to remind yourself of some heavy things most of us attach to long after it’s time to let go, so you can loosen your grip on them as you move forward…

1. The expectation of how things “should” be.

Try to use frustration and inconvenience to motivate you rather than annoy you today. You are in control of the way you look at life. Instead of getting angry, find the lesson. In place of envy, feel admiration. In place of worry, take action. In place of doubt, have faith. Remember that your response is always more powerful than your present circumstance. A small part of your life is decided by completely uncontrollable circumstances, while the vast majority of your life is decided by your responses. Where you ultimately end up is heavily dependent on how you play the hands you’ve been dealt.

2. The way things once were.

You’re not the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even a week ago. You’re always learning and growing, and life is always evolving. Even though you can’t control everything that happens, you can control your attitude about what happens. And in doing so, you will gradually master change rather than allowing it to master you. So be humble today. Be teachable. The world is bigger than your view of the world. There’s always room for a fresh idea or a next step. But first you must accept the fact that things may never go back to how they used to be, and that this ending is really a new beginning.

3. Old mistakes and errors in judgment.

Forgive yourself for the bad decisions you’ve made in the past, for the times you lacked understanding, for the choices that accidentally hurt others and yourself. Forgive yourself, for being young and reckless. These are all vital lessons. And what matters most right now is your willingness to grow from them.

4. The need to control everything.

Be selective with your energy today. If you can fix a problem, fix it. If you can’t, then accept it and change your thoughts about it. Whatever you do, don’t attempt to invest more energy than you have, tripping over something behind you or something that only exists inside your head. Truth be told, some of the most powerful moments in life happen when you find the courage to let go of what can’t be changed. Because when you are no longer able to change a situation, you are challenged to change yourself — to grow beyond the unchangeable. And that changes everything.

5. Fantasies of a perfect path, or time to begin.

Too often we waste our time waiting for a path to appear, but it never does. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting. And we forget that there’s absolutely nothing about our present circumstances that prevents us from making progress again, one tiny step at a time.

6. The desire for quick and easy results.

Everything gets a bit hard and uncomfortable when it’s time to change. That’s just a part of the growth process. Things will get better, one step at a time. And keep in mind that your effort is never wasted, even when it leads to disappointing results. For it always makes you stronger, more educated, and more experienced. So when the going gets tough, be patient and keep going. Just because you are struggling does not mean you are failing. Every great success requires some kind of worthy struggle to get there.

7. Self-doubt.

Every difficult life situation can be an excuse for hopelessness or an opportunity for growth, depending on what you choose to do with it in the present. And in the midst of particularly hard days when I feel that I can’t endure, I try to remind myself that my track record for getting through hard days is 100% so far. The same is true for YOU. We have what it takes! (Note: Angel and I discuss this further in the Adversity chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

8. Daily relationships that make us feel less like ourselves.

Let others take you as you are, or not at all. Speak your truth even if your voice shakes. By being yourself you put something beautiful into the world that was not there before. And in the long run it’s wiser to lose someone over being who you are, than it is to keep them by being someone you’re not. Because it’s easier to fill an empty space in your life where someone else used to be, than it is to fill the empty space inside yourself where YOU used to be.

9. Old life chapters that are still lingering half-open.

You’re going to mingle with a lot of people in your lifetime. You’re going to have first kisses you feel all the way down to your toes and think “Oh my gosh, I love him,” but really you just loved the kiss. You’re going to meet a friend you think you will know forever, but then something will change and you two will go your separate ways. You’re going to explore different parts of your life with different people who aren’t in it for the long haul, and that isn’t a bad thing. Life is a series of stories, and the way our stories intersect is remarkable. Sometimes people are in our lives for the whole story. Sometimes they are just a short chapter or two. It takes a brave person to know when that chapter is over, and then to turn the page. Be brave! Embrace your goodbyes, because almost every “goodbye” you receive in life sets you up for the next “hello.”

10. The belief that we always need more than we have.

We don’t always need more — we need appreciation. Because we often take for granted the very things that most deserve our attention and gratitude. How often do you pause to appreciate your life just the way it is? Look around right now, and be thankful… for your health, your family, your work, your comforts, your home. Nothing lasts forever. (Note: “The Good Morning Journal: Powerful Prompts & Reflections to Start Every Day” is a great tool for this kind of perspective shift.)

How to practice letting go if life tests you today.

Reflecting on the reminders above can be incredibly grounding, but what can you actively do to let go when the immediate tension inside you is spiraling?

Here’s a brief outline of some initial steps Angel and I personally take (and often recommend to our coaching clients and event attendees) to cope with the immediate tension that arises from disappointing outcomes in our lives:

• Acknowledge the tension inside you. — If you notice yourself getting angry and flustered, it’s a sign that you need to pause, take a deep breath, and practice the remaining steps.
• Resist the urge to act in haste. — The greatest harm comes whenever you act out of anger — actions that might include giving up too soon, consuming unhealthy substances, or even attacking someone else. So whenever you notice anger building up inside you, try not to take any form of destructive action. Instead, turn inward and mindfully assess whatever it is that’s arising.
• Sit with your feelings, and give them space. — Turn directly towards the tension you feel, and just be a witness. See it as something that’s passing through you, but is NOT YOU. It’s a feeling, a dark cloud passing across a vast sky, not a permanent fixture. Treat it that way. Instead of obsessing yourself with the dark cloud’s presence, try to broaden your perspective — give it the space it needs to pass. Sometimes you need a little distance to see things clearly again.
• Be OK with not knowing. — Now that you’ve given yourself some necessary space, tell yourself, “I don’t know why things are this way.” And be OK with this unknowing. Give yourself full permission to not have concrete answers in this moment. What would it be like to allow this moment to unfold without knowing? What is it like to not know what’s going on in the hearts and minds of others? What is it like to not know how to respond to life’s chaos? What is it like to be here right now, without jumping to conclusions?

The bottom line is that when life dishes you a harsh dose of reality, the best first steps involve sitting silently and witnessing the thoughts passing through you. Just witnessing at first, not interfering and not even judging, because by judging too rapidly you have lost the pure witness. The moment you rush to say, “this is absolutely terrible” or “things should be different,” you have already jumped head first into the chaos.

It takes practice to create a gap between the witnessing of thoughts and your response to them. Once the gap is there though, you are in for a great surprise — it becomes evident that you are not the thoughts themselves, nor the tension and chaos influencing them. You are the witness, a watcher, who’s capable of letting go, changing your mindset, and rising above the turmoil.

Now it’s your turn!

Yes it’s your turn to breathe deep, to be present, and to remind yourself that every day is a series of a million tiny miracles. So just do your best to see them today. See how inner peace comes with letting go of what you assume your journey is supposed to be like, and sincerely accepting it for everything that it is…

But before you go, please leave Angel and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

You have come a long way, and you’re still learning and growing. Be thankful for the lessons. Take them and make the best of things today.

For my 18th birthday, many moons ago, my grandfather on my mom’s side gave me four lightly-used flannel shirts that he no longer needed. The shirts were barely worn and in great shape; my grandfather said he thought they would look great on me. Unfortunately, I thought they were odd gifts at the time and I wasn’t thankful. I looked at him skeptically, gave him a crooked half-smile, and moved on to the other gifts sitting in front of me. My grandfather died two days later from a sudden heart attack. The flannel shirts were the last gifts he ever gave me, and that crooked half-smile was the last time I directly acknowledged him. Today, I still regret the little thing I didn’t say when I had the chance: “Thank you Grandpa. I appreciate you.”

That was a huge wake-up call for me — one that has served me well for over two decades now.

And here are eight wake-up calls for all of us to reflect on today — some important lessons worth learning and living by, before it’s too late:

1. We might not have tomorrow to say, “I love you.”

About 15 years ago a coworker of mine died in a car accident on the way to work. During his funeral several people from the office were in tears, saying kind things like: “I loved him. We all loved him so much. He was such a wonderful person.” I started crying too, and I wondered if these people had told him that they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this powerful word, love, had been used without question or hesitation.

I vowed to myself then and there that I would never again hesitate to speak up to the people I love and remind them of how much I appreciate them. They deserve to know they give meaning to my life. They deserve to know I think the world of them.

Bottom line: If you love someone today, tell them. If you appreciate someone today, tell them. There might not be a tomorrow. Today is the day to express your love and admiration. (Note: Angel and I discuss this in detail in the Relationships chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

2. Our judgments of others are often inaccurate.

You will never know exactly what another person is going through or what their whole story is. When you believe you do, realize that your assumptions about their life are in direct relation to your own limited perspective.

Many people you believe to be successful are extremely unhappy. Many people you think have it easy have worked their tail off to achieve their status. Many people who appear to be wealthy are in debt because of their extravagant tastes for material possessions. Many people who appear to be too old and uncool were once every bit as young, hip, and inexperienced as you are right now.

3. Not trying is why most people fail in the long run.

It’s not the mistakes and failures you have to worry about the most, it’s the opportunities you miss when you don’t even try that hurt the worst. Trying — truly trying — always leads to some level of success, regardless of the outcome. Even mistakes and failures teach you what not to do next time. Every outcome, good or bad, is a lesson that makes you stronger and wiser over time.

So keep reminding yourself that in the end there’s only one thing that makes a goal or dream impossible to achieve: the failure to try. Because the results you achieve in life are not based on what you plan to do or what you say you’ll do. Your results come from what you actually try and do consistently!

Yes, your life will get better when YOU get better. Start investing in yourself mentally and physically. Make it a priority to learn and grow a little bit every day by building positive daily habits and sticking to them. The stronger you grow and become, the better your life will feel in the long run.

4. Patience doesn’t mean waiting and doing nothing.

Patience involves productive activity. It means doing your very best with the resources available to you, while understanding that the results you seek are worth the required time and effort, and not available elsewhere for any less time and effort.

Patience is the realization that the quality of your life in the long run is much more significant than the quantity of things you fill it with today. Patience is your willingness to accept and appreciate what you have right now, while you gradually work hard for the dreams and goals that matter most to you.

5. Most of us don’t need to buy anything more to be happy.

Intuitively, you already know that the best stuff in life isn’t stuff at all, and that relationships, experiences, and meaningful work are the staples of a happy life. Yet you live in a consumer driven society where your mind is incessantly subjected to clever advertising ploys that drive you, against your better judgment, to buy material goods you don’t need or even want.

And at a certain point, the excessive material objects you buy end up hurting the emotional needs advertisers would like you to believe they are meant to support. So next time you’re getting ready to make an impulsive purchase, ask yourself if this thing is really better than the things you already have. Or have you been momentarily tricked into believing that you’re dissatisfied with what you already have? (Read “Soulful Simplicity”.)

6. None of us are perfect.

All humans are imperfect. We make mistakes, we lose our tempers, and we get caught off guard. We stumble, we slip, and we spin out of control sometimes. Yes, sometimes the confident lose confidence, the patient misplace their patience, the generous act selfish, and the knowledgeable second guess what they know.

But that’s honestly the worst of it — we all have our moments. Most of the time we are remarkable! So stand beside the people you love through their trying times of imperfection, and offer yourself the same courtesy; if you aren’t willing to, you don’t deserve to be around for the remarkable moments either.

7. All the little things make a big difference in the end.

Life isn’t about a single moment of great triumph and attainment. It’s about the trials and errors that get you there — the blood, sweat, and tears — the small, inconsequential things you do every day. It all matters in the end — every step, every regret, every decision, and every little affliction.

Yes, the seemingly useless happenings add up to something. The minimum wage job you had in high school. The evenings you spent laughing and socializing with coworkers you never see anymore. The hours you spent writing down your thoughts on social media posts no one ever read. Contemplations about elaborate future plans that never came to be. All those lonely nights spent reading novels and news columns and Twitter threads and fashion tips and questioning your own principles on life and sex and religion and whether or not you’re good enough just the way you are…

All of this has strengthened you! All of this has led you to every success you’ve ever had. All of this has made you who you are today.

Truth be told, you’ve been broken down dozens of times and put yourself back together again. Think about how remarkable that is, and how far you have come. You’re not the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or even yesterday. You’re always growing… stronger!

8. Excuses are mostly just lies.

Just because someone else can, doesn’t mean you can, right? Because you’re not good enough, or you’ve already missed your chance, or it’s just not in the cards for you. You look for reasons they can do it but you can’t…

• “Maybe he’s an internet entrepreneur and freelance writer because he has no kids.”
• “Maybe she’s way fitter than I am because she doesn’t have all the work and family obligations I have, or has a more supportive spouse, or doesn’t have bad knees.”

OK fine, it’s easy to find excuses: but look at all the other people who also have considerable obstacles and have done it anyway. Angel and I have a family, and have coped with significant loss in our lives, and still managed to make meaningful progress in our lives. And just as we’ve turned things around for ourselves, we know hundreds of other people who’ve done the same. Through 15 years of work with our coaching clients and live event attendees, we’ve witnessed people reinventing themselves at all ages — 48-year olds starting healthy families, 57-year-olds graduating from college for the first time, 71-year-olds starting successful businesses, and so forth. And stories abound of people with disabilities or illnesses who overcame their obstacles to achieve incredible outcomes.

No one else can succeed for you on your behalf. The life you live is the life you build for yourself. There are so many possibilities to choose from, and so many opportunities for you to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be. NOW is the moment to actually step forward!

It’s your turn…

Starting now, I sincerely hope you will have an inspired rest of your day today, that you will dream boldly and dangerously, that you will make some progress that didn’t exist before you took action, that you will love and be loved in return, and that you will find the strength to accept and grow from the troubles you can’t change. And, most importantly (because Angel and I think there should be more kindness and wisdom in this world), that you will, when you must, be wise with your decisions, and that you will always be extra kind to yourself and others.

And before you go, please leave Angel and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this post. Your feedback is important to us. 

(Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.)

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”
— Margaret Mead

Our children grow up so fast. Before we know it they’re out there somewhere in the real world, and we’re left hoping that we’ve done enough to prepare them for everything they’ll encounter. Marc and I talk to course students and coaching clients on a daily basis — mothers and fathers alike — who share these sentiments. They worry about their children. They wonder if they’ve done a good enough job parenting up to this point. And Marc and I can relate too, because oftentimes we feel the same way. We’re concerned about our son Mac’s well-being and education, and we discuss it frequently just like most parents do.

In fact, from what we’ve researched and studied, the well-being and education of their children is more important to most parents than just about anything else — more important than health care, cost of living, public safety, and even their own well-being. And believe it or not, most non-parents say they’re concerned about the well-being and intellectual growth of society’s youth as a whole too; this concern seems to cut cleanly across gender, ethnicity, age, income, and political affiliation. So the reality is, to a great extent, we all collectively care about our children. And that’s a truly beautiful thing when you think about it.

So I’m writing this post as a reminder to myself, and to all parents, guardians, and mentors who care about today’s youth…

Here are 20 simple yet powerful truths you can add to your daily conversations with today’s youth that will gradually change how they think about themselves and their place in the world, and ultimately transform how they live their life. Please remember, also, that it’s never too late to discuss these truths — in most cases they are equally relevant to youngsters, adolescents, and young adults alike.

1. Learning how to think is infinitely more useful than learning what to think.

A big part of your life is a direct result of the decisions you make; if you don’t like your life for some reason, it’s time to start making changes and better decisions. And the same is true for all of us, including our children. It’s crucial that our children gradually grow to understand that they must learn to make good decisions for themselves, without us.

Parents and guardians can only guide by example and put their youth on the right path, but the final forming of a person’s character and life story lies in their own hands. You can walk beside a child most of the time, but not in their shoes. And someday, when you’re not around, they’ll come to a fork in the road that forces them to think for themselves. Which is why it’s important to teach a child how to think, not what to think. (The remaining points in this article will help you do just that.)

2. Everything is hard before it’s easy, and we get stronger as we go.

One of the best things you can do for a child as they grow is to let go and allow them to do things for themselves, allow them to be strong and responsible, allow them the freedom to experience things on their own terms, allow them to take the bus or the train and learn from life firsthand… allow them to be better people, allow them to believe more in themselves and do more by themselves. Journeying through life on your own two feet is a learning process — you become stronger as you go. It’s like a young teenager who struggles to find his way home from school for the first time without his parent’s help — doing it the first few times feels daunting and scary, but in the long run he’s safer and better off having learned the way.

3. The biggest disappointments in life are often the result of misplaced expectations.

When we are really young our expectations are few, but as we age our expectations tend to balloon with each passing year. The key is to help your child understand that tempering unrealistic expectations of how something “should be” can greatly reduce unnecessary stress and frustration. With a positive attitude and an open mind, we often find that life isn’t necessarily any easier or harder than we thought it was going to be; it’s just that “the easy” and “the hard” aren’t exactly the way we had anticipated, and don’t always occur when we expect them to. This isn’t a bad thing — it makes life interesting, if we’re willing to see it that way.

4. Worry is the cruelest enemy of personal growth.

On the average day worrying does nothing but steal your joy and keep you very busy doing absolutely nothing at all. When you spend time worrying, you’re simply using your imagination to create things you don’t want. And as every child knows deep down, there are much better ways to use an imagination. Do your best to remind them of this.

5. Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.

If you want to be effective in life, you can’t base your attitude solely on how things are. Instead, you have to choose your attitude so it also supports and expresses the way you wish life to be. It’s not about expecting the best to always happen, but instead accepting whatever happens and then making the very best of it. Truly, much of our long-term frustration and stress comes from the way we respond and react to circumstances, not the circumstances themselves. Learn to adjust your attitude, and all that extra frustration and stress is gone. Practice this in your own life, so today’s youth can witness the results firsthand.

6. Reflecting on what we’re grateful for can make us happier.

In “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”, Marc and I discuss the powerful benefits of keeping a gratitude journal, and the really good news is it works for children too. In one celebrated example by Dr. Robert Emmons of UC Davis, teenage students were asked to keep a gratitude journal — over ten weeks, the young undergrads listed five things that had happened in the past week which they were grateful for. The results were astoundingly powerful — the students who kept the gratitude journal were up to 25% happier, more optimistic about their future, and got sick less often during the controlled study. They even got more exercise than usual. The bottom line is that children who keep a gratitude journal are statistically happier, more optimistic, and healthier. As soon as a child you care for is old enough, help them start one.

7. The lifelong pursuit of happiness is about finding meaning.

Pursuing happiness is not at all the same as feeling happy, which is a fleeting emotion dependent on momentary circumstances. This is something that tends to confuse us when we’re young. Happy moments feel great and are often fun-filled. And if the sun is shining, by all means we should bask in it. But happy moments always pass, because time passes…

The lifelong pursuit of happiness, on the other hand, is far more elusive; it’s not based on a particular momentary circumstance. What you are really pursuing is meaning — living a meaningful life filled with daily progress. It starts with your “why.” Why are you doing what you’re doing every day? When your “why” has significance, you are living your life on your own terms, which makes the inevitable obstacles that arise on your path that much easier and more fulfilling to overcome. In essence, you are putting forth effort and pushing forward because doing so brings meaning into your life. (Do your best to help children find their “why,” and let them know that it’s OK if it changes over time.)

8. The journey is the destination.

The most prolific and beneficial experience is not in actually achieving something you want, but in seeking it. It’s the journey towards an endless horizon that matters — goals and rituals that move forward with you as you chase them. It’s all about meaningful pursuits — the “moving” — and what you learn along the way. Truly, the most important reason for moving from one place to another is to see what’s in between. In between is where lessons are realized, love is found, strength is gained, and memories are made. You can’t get any of that without firsthand living. In other words, the journey is the destination. Remember this truth, live by it, and set an example for the youth around you.

9. The most effective way to move away from something you don’t want, is to move toward something you DO want.

“Don’t think about eating that chocolate donut!” What are you thinking about now? Eating that chocolate donut, right? When we focus on not doing something, we end up thinking more about it. The same philosophy holds true in all walks of life, regardless of our age. By persistently trying to move away from what we don’t want, we are inadvertently forced to think about it so much that we end up carrying it’s weight along with us. But if we instead choose to focus our energy on moving toward something we DO want, we naturally leave the negative weight behind as we move forward with our lives.

10. Actions always speak louder than words in the long run.

Children have never been perfect at listening to their parents, but they have never failed to imitate them. Keep this in mind. Let the children in your life watch you set an example every day in all that you do, and then reinforce your actions with verbal guidance. Ultimately, all of us — young and old alike — need to remember that what we really want in life comes from what we really do in life, consistently.

11. The willingness to do hard things opens significant doors of opportunity.

One of the most important abilities you can help a child develop in life is being OK with some level of discomfort. Because the best things are often hard to come by, and if you shy away from difficulty and discomfort, you’ll miss out on them. Mastering a new skill is hard. Building a business is hard. Writing a book is hard. A marriage is hard. Parenting is hard. Staying in shape is hard. And yet all of these things are amazing and worth every bit of effort you can muster. If you get good at doing hard things, you can do almost anything you put your mind to.

12. Uncertainty is inevitable and must be embraced to achieve anything worthwhile.

When we act with some level of uncertainty, this uncertainty often chases us out into the open where opportunity awaits. Truth be told, if we need to know exactly how every little thing will turn out, we’ll avoid many life-changing projects, career moves, relationships, etc. Starting a business could be a very worthwhile thing to do, but if you’re scared of uncertainty you’ll skip it. Continually cowering in the face of uncertainty like this means you will never know anything for sure, and in many ways this unknowing will be worse than finding out your hunch was wrong. For if you were wrong, you could make adjustments and carry on with your life without constantly looking back and wondering what might have been. Thus, learning to embrace uncertainty relatively early in life is a must.

13. Lack of effort is what holds most people back (not lack of intelligence).

It doesn’t matter if you have a genius IQ and a PhD in Quantum Physics, you can’t change anything or make any sort of real-world progress without putting forth diligent effort. There’s a huge difference between knowing how to do something and actually doing it. Knowledge and intelligence are both useless to a person who’s unwilling to put in the effort and take action. Remember this, and do your best to praise children for their effort, not their intelligence.

When you praise a child’s efforts you are bringing attention to something they can control — the amount of time and energy they put into their work. This is immensely important because it teaches them to persist, and that progress through hard work is possible. They come to see themselves as “in control” of their success in life. Conversely, emphasizing God-given intelligence takes progress out of a child’s control, and it provides no good formula for responding to failure. In turn, that child may begin to think that innate intelligence is always going to be a missing element for them, and thus disregard the importance of their effort to learn and grow.

14. Not everything will go as planned, but we can still be prepared.

For every youngster that succeeds in doing exactly what they set out to do in the exact time frame they set out to do it in, there are dozens of others who start strong and get derailed. Help today’s youth understand that if this happens to them, it isn’t a bad thing. Unexpected obstacles may come along to shift their perspective, to strengthen their resolve, or to change their direction for the better. And the destination they fall in love with someday may not even exist now. For example, just a few short years ago the esteemed career paths of working at TikTok or SpaceX didn’t exist. Neither did the possibility of being a professional coach and blogger at Marc & Angel Hack Life.

So if a child can’t plan out their future in its entirety, what should they do? Focus a little less on the future and focus more on what they can do now that will benefit them no matter what the future brings. Read inspiring books. Learn and practice useful skills. Write in your journal. Build things. Be adventurous and seek real-world experiences. Help people. Cultivate healthy relationships. These efforts will assist in any future circumstances that come their way.

15. Significant, life-changing journeys can be traveled gradually with tiny steps.

Most people squander their free time away on things that don’t matter, like Netflix, social media scrolling, Candy Crush, etc. A year of that and you have absolutely zero to show for it. But if you painted every day, or practiced a skill, or or trained for a sport (even an esport), or updated and perfected a video channel on YouTube, or started building a side business/passion project, or spent more time networking with the right people… at the end of a year you’ll have built something interesting. And you’ll have some great life experiences too — experiences you can point to and say, “I built that, and I learned this,” which again, many people can’t do. And of course, the younger you are when you start, the more these great life experiences compound.

16. Goals don’t make positive changes happen, daily rituals do.

What’s the difference between goals and rituals? As a parent, your goal is to be a great role model, while your ritual is the time and energy you commit to setting a great example for your child each day. If you’re an entrepreneur, your goal is to grow a successful business, while your ritual is your daily work ethic combined with your management, marketing, and sales processes. If you’re a fiction writer, your goal is to write a novel, while your ritual is the writing schedule you follow each day.

Now think about this: If you ignored your goals for a while and focused solely on your daily rituals, would you still get positive results? For example, if you were trying to lose weight and you ignored your goal to lose 20 pounds, and instead focused only on eating healthy and exercising each day, would you still get results? Yes, you would. Gradually, you would get closer and closer to your goal without even thinking about it again. The earlier we learn this in life, the longer we have to make our positive daily rituals work in our favor. But it’s never too late either.

17. Trustworthiness is at the foundation of a person’s long-term potential.

The underlying key for all of us is to be trustworthy in our relationships. When someone gives someone an employment or business opportunity, the biggest fear is that this person is not trustworthy — that they’ll slack off and try to cheat the system. Someone who has established a positive reputation over the years will likely be more trusted, and more likely to be recommended. So do you best to teach today’s youth to be trustworthy by being honest, admitting mistakes and fixing them, and generally going above and beyond the call of duty in personal and professional commitments. When we adhere to this philosophy, we end up building a good reputation and people appreciate and endorse us more openly, which is the best way to get a job, a business investor, or another good friend.

18. Life is filled with good and evil, and good can always triumph over evil.

Walt Disney said it best, so I won’t try to reinvent the wheel here: “Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. But it’s also important to admit that life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows in the world. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him or her from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.”

19. Who we choose to be around matters.

Spend time with nice people who are smart, driven and open-minded. Relationships should help you, not hurt you in the long run. Surround yourself with people who reflect the person you want to be. Choose friends who you are proud to know, people you admire, who love and respect you — people who make your day a little brighter simply by being in it. Ultimately environment is everything, so the people surrounding you on a daily basis make a big difference in the person you are capable of being. Life is just too short to spend time with people who suck the happiness and potential out of you. And of course, all of the same is true for a child’s life and relationships.

20. Some people will judge us unfairly, no matter how wonderful we are.

A beautiful life is about spending your time meaningfully, being a peace with who you are inside, giving back, and not worrying about people’s petty judgments. We simply do not need everyone’s approval to be happy or to live a good life. Challenge today’s youth to make this their lifelong motto: “I respectfully do not care.” Encourage them to be respectful, but also to stand up for themselves and speak their motto to anyone who passes unfair judgment on something they strongly believe in or something that makes them who they are. Truth be told, there will always be someone in each and every one of our lives who decides to judge us unfairly at some point, and that’s OK. We affected their life; let’s not let them affect ours in the long run.

Afterthoughts… On Being a Good Parent

All details aside, no one is ever quite ready for true parenthood — every parent is caught off guard, again and again. Parenthood is a role that chooses you every day, not the other way around. And perhaps a week in, a month in, or even a few years in, you open your eyes to look at the precious child in your arms, and suddenly awake to the realization that of all the things there ever were to juggle, this is the one you should not drop.

But of course it’s a far cry from easy. The nature of being a parent seems incredibly thankless sometimes, until you fully embrace the fact that you are choosing to love your child far more than you have ever loved anyone before them — perhaps even more than you love your own parents. And, within this realization that your own child can’t possibly understand the depth of your love, you come to understand the stressful, and yet immensely beautiful, unrequited, unconditional love your own parents have (or had) for you.

So when times are tough and the stress levels are high, just do your best to be mindful. Give it time. Take it one day at a time.

Remind yourself that being a parent is a daily ritual, not a biological relation. To be in your child’s memories tomorrow, you have to make time to be in their lives today, even if it’s a bit stressful and inconvenient. Every day of our lives we make deposits in the memory banks of our children. The more present we are, the more deposits we get to make. Be with them, and teach them to have faith in themselves by being a person they can have faith in — a person who listens — a person they can trust without question. When you are old, nothing else you’ve done will have mattered as much.

And no matter how great of a job you do at parenting, especially if you truly do it right, your precious child won’t stay with you. They will eventually break away. It’s the one job in life where the better you do, the more rapidly and surely you won’t be needed as often down the road…

That’s the bittersweet reality of being a great parent.

Let’s appreciate it today, together.

But before you go…

Marc and I would love to hear from YOU.

Please leave us a comment below to let us know what you think of this essay and its advice.

Did you have a favorite point? Anything else to share?

Your feedback is truly important to us.

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“You only live once, but if you do it right once is enough.”
— Mae West

Twenty years ago, I was lucky enough to witness the humble, elegant, peaceful passing of my 89-year-old grandfather. As I sat quietly in his hospice room alongside my grandma and other family members, his nurse smiled softly and said, “I can see he lived well. People his age often pass just the way they lived.”

And as I drove home that evening a couple questions kept cycling through my mind…

“Am I living well?”

“What do I want to be able to smile about on the inside when I’m close to the end?”

These questions are tough, especially the second one. At the time, I struggled to fully accept my own mortality — just thinking about it stressed me out. So I simply avoided the question and the soul-searching it demanded of me. I distracted myself for a few more years until I found myself back in a hospice room with my grandma on her 90th birthday (she was the most amazing human being I’ve ever met, by the way).

On what would become one of the last days of her life, I sat with my grandma for the entire day, in silence, in laughter, in tears, and in awe of a woman who was still smiling and sharing stories despite incredible weakness and exhaustion. Her mind was amazingly strong even just a short time before her death. So I gave her my undivided attention — I soaked up her wisdom one last time.

And I was all ears until she asked me a version of that question I had avoided a few years earlier. “Do you know why I’m happy right now?” she asked me.

“Because you’ve lived well,” I said.

She smiled even wider, and then she spent the next hour speaking softly and passionately about her life and the things she did along the way that opened doors to her present happiness. It was without a doubt one of the most enlightening and unforgettable hours of my life. Immediately afterward, she took a nap — one of her final naps — and I wrote a journal entry about everything told me.

Although I’ve shared many of her insights and quotes with readers and clients in the past, today is the anniversary of my grandma’s passing, so I’d like to honor her once more. To do so, I’m going to share an expanded version of the notes from that specific journal entry I wrote in her hospice room just over a decade ago. It’s her wisdom with my twist. I’ve done my best to convey what she told me in five inspiring points — the habits and ways of living that allowed my 90-year-old grandma to sustain genuine happiness all her life:

1. My grandma kept her negative self-judgment in check, and gave every day her best.

One of my grandma’s favorite quotes was by Walt Disney: “Around here, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we’re curious — and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”

It inspired my grandma for decades, and it still inspires me every day to write and create — to move on to my next piece of work, even when I catch myself judging my last piece of work as “not good enough.”

For example, it’s been almost 19 years now that Angel and I have been publishing new articles every week on Marc & Angel Hack Life. Sometimes the ideas and words come easier than others, and there have been plenty of times when I’ve felt like my writing and work was sub-par.

“I thought this was a great article. Why aren’t people reading and sharing it?” Or I’ll feel like I fumbled through an article only to watch it receive thousands of shares on social media. Regardless of which outcome I’m dealing with, my grandma’s wisdom always reminds me of one key point: As human beings, we are often terrible judges of our own work. We are just too self-critical to see the truth most of the time.

And not only that, it’s not our job to judge our own work. It’s not our job to compare it to everyone else’s work, or to how we thought others would perceive it. There’s no use in doing that.

Instead, it’s our job to create. Our job is to share what we have right now in this moment. Our job is to come as we are and give it our best shot, every single day. That’s how my grandma lived her life. She was a true artist in that way.

Realize that there are people in nearly every career field who make each day a work of art simply by the way they have mastered their craft. Yes, almost everyone is an artist in some way. And every artist will have the tendency to judge their own work. The important thing is to not let your self-judgment talk you out of doing your thing and sharing your creative and unique gifts with the world.

Just like Walt said, the key is to “keep moving forward.”

2. My grandma consistently did hard things.

Sadly, most people give up on their life stories far too early. They come out of school or college wanting to change the world, wanting to build an enterprise, wanting to make lots of money, wanting to start a family and live happily ever after. But they get into the middle of it all and discover it’s way harder than they anticipated. They encounter many setbacks, and they can’t see anything over the distant horizon anymore. So they wonder if their efforts are moving them forward. None of the trees behind them are getting smaller and none of the ones ahead are getting larger, at least not fast enough. So they take it out on their family and friends, or themselves, and they go aimlessly looking for an easier path that doesn’t fulfill them.

Don’t be one of these people.

My grandma had a Winston Churchill quote hanging in her home office that said, “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

And she strongly believed that good things don’t come easy. “True strength consists of what you do on the third, fourth and fifth tries,” she told me. Take this to heart!

Never give up on your journey. Never stop trying. Never sell out or sell yourself short. Life is tough, but you are tougher. Your journey isn’t supposed to be easy, it’s supposed to be worth it. To never struggle is to never grow. It doesn’t matter what’s happened or what you’ve done; what matters is what you choose to do from here. Accept the circumstances, learn from them, and take another step forward.

3. My grandma focused on the present, and appreciated the little things.

“Remember, you don’t know what the future will bring. So your best bet for living is to make the best and most positive use of the present,” my grandma said.

The universe is always talking to us — sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipitous events, reminding us to stop, to look around, and to believe in something special, something more.

But this special something isn’t somewhere else. It’s right where you are.

Sometimes you have to stop searching, and just BE. You aren’t missing anything anywhere else. You’re only missing the goodness in front of you.

Let me assure you, you could run around trying to do everything, and travel around the world, and always stay connected, and work and party all night long without sleep, but you could never do it all. You will always be missing something, and thus it will always seem like something amazing might be happening elsewhere. Focusing on this is obviously futile.

Hustle, work hard, and seek adventure, but do it with your eyes wide open and focused on your present step.

You have everything right now. The best in life isn’t somewhere else — it’s right where you are at this moment. Notice it, and make it memorable.

4. My grandma honed the peace of mind that comes with letting things go.

This point is a perfect successor to the previous one. Letting go isn’t about having the ability to forget the past, it’s about having the wisdom to embrace the present.

Truth be told, the more you talk about it, debate it, rethink it, rehash it, cross-analyze it, get paranoid about it, track it, respond to it, contend with it, complain about it, immortalize it, cry over it, kick it, insult it, gossip about it, pray over it, put it down or dissect its motives… it continues to fester and rot in your mind.

It’s time to accept that it’s over! It’s dead! It’s gone. It’s done. It’s time to bury it because it’s stinking up your life, and no one wants to be near your rotted corpse of bad memories, or your decaying attitude. Be the funeral director of your past life and bury that thing once and for all!

“Every difficult life situation can be an excuse for hopelessness or an opportunity for growth, depending on what you choose to do with it right now,” my grandma told me. “We have to let go of the ideas, outcomes, and expectations that aren’t serving us.”

Take pause when you must. Realize that holding on is being brave, but letting go and moving forward is often what makes us stronger and happier in the end. (Note: Angel and I discuss this practice in more detail in the Happiness and Adversity chapters of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

5. My grandma read a lot and was incredibly generous with her knowledge.

My grandma’s personal heroes were educated visionaries and dreamers — those beautiful people among us who invest in themselves and then use what they’ve learned to make the world a better place than when they found it, whether in tiny ways or enormous ones. Some succeed, some fail, most have mixed results, but it’s the effort itself that’s heroic, as she saw it. Win or lose, my grandma admired those who intelligently fight for the greater good. And I couldn’t agree more with her sentiment.

Don’t stop learning. Don’t stop investing in yourself. Study. Read. Devour books. Engage with people, including those who think differently. Ask questions. Listen closely. And don’t just grow in knowledge. Be a person who gives back. Use what you’re learning to make a difference.

As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to simply be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

Closing Thoughts: A Benediction

I want to leave you with a paraphrased version of a poem by Bessie Anderson Stanley that my grandma used to have hanging on the side of her refrigerator when I was growing up. I think it perfectly embodies the overall message of this essay, and the overall reason my grandma was genuinely happy for the majority of her life:

“She has achieved success who has lived well, laughed often, and loved much;

Who has enjoyed the trust of good women, the respect of good men, and the love of children;

Who has filled her niche and accomplished her task;

Who has never lacked appreciation of life’s beauty or failed to express it;

Who has left the world better than she found it,

Whether an improved poppy, a perfect poem, or a rescued soul;

Who has always looked for the best in others and given them the best she had;

Whose life was an inspiration;

Whose memory a benediction.”

Now it’s your turn…

Angel and I would love to hear from YOU. Your feedback is important to us.

Please leave us a comment below and let us know:

Which point mentioned above resonates with you the most today?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

The truth does not cease to exist when it is forgotten or ignored.

You know how you can hear or read something dozens of times in various ways before it finally sinks in? The truths listed below fall firmly into that category — timeless lessons that many of us probably learned years ago, and have been reminded of ever since, yet for whatever reason we tend to forget in the heat of the moment.

This, my friends, is my attempt at helping all of us, myself included, “get it” and “remember it” once and for all…

1. Life is relatively short and nothing is guaranteed.

We know deep down that life is short, and that death will happen to all of us eventually, and yet we are infinitely surprised when it happens to someone we know. It’s like walking up a flight of stairs with a distracted mind, and misjudging the final step. You expected there to be one more stair than there is, and so you find yourself off balance for a moment, before your mind shifts back to reality and how the world really is.

So let that reminder be a wake-up call to truly live your life today! Don’t ignore death, but don’t be afraid of life either. Be afraid of a life you never lived because you were too afraid to take positive action. Death is not the greatest loss in life, and neither is injury. The greatest loss is what dies inside you while you’re still alive and capable.

Even when life gets messy, be bold, be courageous, be a scared to death, and then take the next step anyway. Invest your heart and soul into whatever you have right in front of you. Bring passion into otherwise ordinary moments… Love what you do, until you can do what you love. Love where you are, until you can be where you love. Love the people you’re with, until you can be with the people you love most. This is the way we find more happiness, opportunity, and peace on the average day.

2. Everything will change again soon.

Embrace change and realize that it’s necessary. It won’t always be obvious at first, but in the end most forms of change are worthwhile because they force us to grow. So keep yourself in check right now…

What you have today may become what you had by tomorrow. You never know. Things change, often spontaneously. People and circumstances come and go. Life doesn’t stop for anybody. It moves rapidly and rushes from calm to chaos in a matter of seconds, and happens like this to people every day. It’s likely happening to someone nearby right now.

Sometimes the shortest split second in time changes the direction of our lives. A seemingly innocuous decision rattles our whole world like a meteorite striking Earth. Entire lives have been swiveled and flipped upside down, for better or worse, on the strength of an unpredictable event. And these events are always happening — like all the senseless violence and drama we see in our world today.

So just remember, however good or bad a situation is now, it will change. That’s the one thing you can count on. Accept it. Breathe. Be where you are. You’re where you need to be right now. There’s a time and place for everything, and every hard step is necessary. Just keep doing your best, and don’t force what’s not yet supposed to fit into your life. When it’s meant to be, it will be.

3. Changing your response is what puts you back in control.

Have patience with everything that remains imperfect or unfinished in your head and heart. And realize that patience is not about waiting, but the ability to keep a good attitude while working hard for what you believe in. This is your life and it’s governed by your daily decisions. May your actions speak louder than your words. May your results preach louder than your lips. May your inner sense of satisfaction be your noise in the end.

Remind yourself that taking a meaningful step forward right now is worth it. Even if the road ahead seems long and rough — even if there are lots of unknowns — be brave enough to stand up for yourself and control the direction of your momentum. And remember that the most powerful moments in life happen when you find the courage to let go of what can’t be changed. Because as Viktor Frankl said, when you are no longer able to change a situation, you are challenged to change yourself — to grow beyond the unchangeable. And that changes everything! (Note: Marc and I discuss this in more detail in the Passion & Growth chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

4. Life’s storms can be a source of long-term strength.

Hard times are like strong storms that blow against you. And it’s not just that these storms hold you back from places you are trying to go. They also tear away from you all but the essential parts of your ego that cannot be torn, so that you are left only with the foundation of who you really are.

Ultimately you realize you are here to endure these storms, to sacrifice your time and risk your heart. You are here to be bruised by life. And when it happens that you are hurt, or betrayed, or rejected, let yourself sit quietly with your eyes closed and remember all the good times you had, and all the sweetness you tasted, and everything you learned. Tell yourself how amazing it was to live, and then open your eyes and live some more.

Because to never struggle would be to never grow. You must let go of who you were so you can become who you are. Again, it is within the depths of the strongest and darkest storms that you often discover within you an inextinguishable light, and it is this light that illuminates the path forward.

5. You don’t need all the answers right now.

Accept the feeling of not knowing exactly where you are going, and train yourself to love and appreciate this sensation of freedom. Because it is only when you are suspended in the air, with no destination in sight, that you force your wings to open fully so you can fly. And as you soar around you still may not know where you’re traveling to. But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is the opening of your wings. You may not know where you’re going, but you know that so long as your wings are spread, the winds will carry you forward.

Truth be told, some of the greatest outcomes that transpire in your life will be the ones you never even knew you wanted. As long as you keep your mind open to new perspectives while you’re moving forward, there really are no totally wrong turns in life, only paths you didn’t know you were meant to travel. And you never can be certain what’s around the corner.  It could be everything, or it could be nothing. You keep gliding steadily forward, and then one day you realize you’ve come a long way from where you started.

All details aside, someday all the pieces will come together. Unimaginably good outcomes will likely transpire in your life, even if everything doesn’t turn out exactly the way you had anticipated. And you will look back at the messy times that have passed, smile, and ask yourself…

“How in the world did I get through all of that?”

Now it’s your turn…

Yes, it’s your turn to give yourself grace for the times when you’ve lacked clarity, and for the poor choices that accidentally hurt others or yourself. Give yourself grace for being young and reckless. We’ve all made mistakes and been foolish at times. These are vital lessons, and what matters most right now is the willingness to learn and grow from them.

But before you go, please leave Marc and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

“In elementary school my parents told me it didn’t matter what I did when I grew up, so long as it made me happy. ‘Happiness is the whole point of life,’ my father said. ‘But it doesn’t always come easy. Your mother loves to help people in need, so she became a psychiatric nurse. I love reading, writing and poetry, so I became an English teacher. We both find happiness in the hard work we do each day.’

A few years later when I was in junior high, my sixth-grade homeroom teacher put me in detention for ‘being difficult.’ She went around the classroom and asked each student what they wanted to be when they grew up. When she got to me, I told her I wanted to be happy. She told me I was missing the whole point of the question. I told her she was missing the whole point of life.”

That’s an old parable my grandmother recited to me countless times when I was a kid. I’ve since seen a shortened version of it circulate on social media, oftentimes being falsely attributed to John Lennon, Goldie Hawn, and others. While the internet sleuths seem conflicted over who penned the very first version of the parable, it’s a story that has always stuck with me. Sure it oversimplifies the complexities of happiness, but it makes some good points too. And my grandma’s version has that line about “finding happiness in hard work,” which is a fundamental concept that still resonates deeply with me today.

As adults, Angel and I have spent nearly two decades working one-on-one with hundreds of our coaching clients, book readers, and live event attendees who struggle with variations of that very concept — finding happiness when life demands that we work hard for it. So many of us attach to the expectation that life should be easier than it is. Regardless of what we choose to do “when we grow up,” we subconsciously fantasize that our chosen path will have very few detours, interruptions, or inconveniences. And then we wait around day after day for things to get easier, as countless good opportunities pass us by.

Whenever you catch yourself stuck in this kind of unproductive cycle, remind yourself…

1. You need to do some hard things to be happy in life (and you can).

Yes, you need to do the things most people would rather avoid — the things that make you uncomfortable, that are far easier to run from, that others can’t possibly do for you… the things that make you stronger but also make you question how you’re going to find the strength to push forward.

Why?

Because those hard things ultimately build you up and change your life. They make the difference between existing and living, between knowing the path and walking it, between a lifetime of empty promises to yourself and one filled with purpose, progress, and fulfillment.

The key?

Consistent and passionate daily action!

Learn to believe in your heart that you’re meant to live each day full of passion and purpose — that each and every moment is worthy in its own way. And remind yourself that passion is not something you find in life; it’s something you do. When you want to find the passion and inner strength needed to change your situation, you have to push yourself to step forward.

Many of us are still hopelessly trying to “find our passion” — something that we believe will lead us closer to happiness, success, or the life situation we ultimately want. And I say “hopelessly” primarily because passion can’t really be found. When we say we’re trying to find our passion, it implies that our passion is somehow hiding behind a tree or under a rock somewhere. But that’s far from the truth. The truth is, our passion comes from doing things right. If you’re waiting to somehow “find your passion” somewhere outside yourself, so you finally have a reason to put your whole heart and soul into your life and the changes you need to make, you’ll likely be waiting around for an eternity.

On the other hand, if you’re tired of waiting, and you’d rather live more passionately starting today and experience small positive changes, it’s time to proactively inject passion into the very next thing you do. Think about it:

• When was the last time you sat down and had a conversation with someone nearby, with zero distractions and 100 percent focus?
• When was the last time you exercised and put every bit of effort you could muster into it?
• When was the last time you truly tried — truly tried — to do your very best?

Like most of us, you’re likely putting a halfhearted effort into most of the things you do on a daily basis. Because you’re still waiting. You’re still waiting to “find” something to be passionate about — some magical reason to step into the life you want to create for yourself. But you need to do the exact opposite!

2. Putting your whole heart and soul into ordinary moments is what creates life’s magic.

Going back to when I was a kid again, my grandmother used to tell me, “Stop waiting for better opportunities. The one you have in front of you is the best opportunity.” She also said, “Too often we spend too much time making it perfect in our heads before we ever even do it. Stop waiting for perfection and just do your best with what you have today, and then improve it tomorrow.”

Believe it or not, recent psychological research indirectly reinforces my grandmother’s sentiments. For many years, psychologists believed our minds could directly affect our physical state of being, but never the other way around. Nowadays, however, it is widely documented that our bodies — for example, our momentary facial expressions and body posture — can directly affect our mental state of being too. So while it’s true that we change from the inside out, we also change from the outside in.  And you can make this reality work for you. If you want more passion and happiness in your life right now, act accordingly right now.

Put your heart and soul into something!

Not into tomorrow’s opportunities, but into the opportunity right in front of you.

Not into tomorrow’s tasks, but into today’s tasks.

Not into tomorrow’s run, but into today’s run.

Not into tomorrow’s relationships, but into today’s relationships.

Angel and I are certain you have plenty in your life right now that’s worth your time and energy. You have people and circumstances in your life that need you as much as you need them. You have a massive reservoir of potential passion within you, just waiting…

3. Stop waiting — that’s the real lesson here!

It’s not too late, but you do have to get started sooner rather than later. In other words, you don’t need to have it all figured out to take the next step. But you do need to take the next step to figure it out. And as you struggle forward, remember, it is far better to be exhausted from taking small steps forward, than it is to be tired of waiting around doing absolutely nothing.

Truth be told, if you wait for “the right time” — if you wait until you feel 100% ready — you will be waiting the rest of your life. Take this to heart right now. Most people wait too long to live their best lives. They wait all day for 5pm, all week for Friday, all year for the holidays, all their lives for passion and happiness. Don’t be one of them!

Just keep reminding yourself that new paths are made by walking, not waiting. And no, you shouldn’t feel any more confident before you take the next step. Taking the next step is what gradually builds your confidence, and creates progress in life.

Today is the day, now is the time — it’s your turn…

Just put your heart and soul into what you’ve got right in front of you today.

But before you go, please leave Angel and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Also, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

“If only…” Those two words paired together create one of the saddest phrases in the English language.

Today is my late grandfather’s birthday. He was a great man and he would have been 101. So I want to acknowledge him right now by re-sharing a bittersweet story with you — a story that continues to remind me to acknowledge myself, and what matters most in life.

In the final decade of his life, my grandfather woke up every single day at 7am, picked a fresh wild flower on his morning walk, and took it to my grandmother. One morning I decided to go with him to see her. And as he placed the flower on her gravestone, he looked up at me and said, “I just wish I had picked her a fresh flower every morning when she was alive. She really would have loved that.”

As you can imagine, my grandfather’s words touched a nerve in me. And over the years I’ve often reflected on what he said that morning, and how his sentiment relates to everyone and everything I care about. God willing, in 20 years when I’m nearing 70, I don’t want to sit with unnecessary regrets. I don’t want to wish I had done things differently, especially something as simple and meaningful as picking wild flowers for the love of my life. Don’t you agree?

Regardless of your age or where you are in your life right now, perhaps you will generally resonate with my thoughts here – some key things I don’t want to regret later in life…

1. Spending too little time with the right people. – Sooner or later you just want to be around the people who make you smile. So today, spend time with those who help you love yourself more. And remember, the people you take for granted today may be the only ones you need tomorrow. Never be too busy to make time for those who matter most (even if it’s just a quick phone call or a text).
2. Not making your loved ones smile more often. – One of the most beautiful things is to see a person you love smile, and even more beautiful is knowing that you are the reason behind it.
3. Not saying what you need to say. – Don’t hide your kind thoughts and feelings, especially when you can make a difference. Say what needs to be said. If you care about someone, tell them. Hearts are sometimes broken by the words we leave unspoken.
4. Constantly comparing yourself to everyone else. – Don’t compare your progress in life with that of others. We all need our own time to travel our own distance. It’s great to be different. The only person you should try to be better than right now, is the person you were yesterday. Prove yourself to yourself, not others.
5. Ignoring your intuition for too long. – Sometimes your mind needs more time to accept what your heart already knows. Breathe. Be a witness, not a judge. Listen to your intuition.
6. Letting others talk you out of your dreams. – Can you remember who you were before the world told you who you should be? Let that question sink in deep. Be true to yourself.
7. Collecting more excuses than you can count. – If you really want to do something, you’ll find a way. If you don’t, you’ll find an excuse. Truly, some people wait all day for 5pm, all week for Friday, all year for the holidays, all their lives for happiness. Don’t be one of them. Life is too short. Time is flying. Don’t wait until your life is almost over to realize how good it has been, or how much potential is within you. (Note: Marc and I discuss this in more detail within the Success chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently“.)
8. Not taking on enough calculated risks. – Don’t be afraid to move out of your comfort zone. My grandfather told me that some of his best life experiences and opportunities came to him only after he dared to lose.
9. Letting certain people walk all over you, again and again. – Never allow someone to be your daily priority while allowing yourself to be their option. Set boundaries, and distance yourself from anyone who continually robs you of peace and joy. Life is too short to waste on people who abuse and bully you.
10. Not helping others enough. – If you have a lot, give your wealth. If you have a little, give your heart. Just give what you can when you are able. No one has ever become poor by giving and lifting others up.
11. Letting your health go. – Your body is the only place you will truly ever live. If you’re lucky enough to have a body that’s in good health, be wise enough to keep it that way.
12. Not appreciating what you have when you have it. – When life is good, enjoy it. Don’t go looking for something better. Happiness never comes to those who don’t appreciate what they have. You must be willing to loosen your grip on the life you have planned so you can enjoy the life that is waiting for you now. Remind yourself: You did not go to sleep hungry last night. You had a choice of what to wear today. You have access to clean drinking water. You have access to the internet. You can read. The secret to being grateful is no secret. You choose to be grateful, for the little things.
13. Never admitting and growing beyond your mistakes. – You can learn great things from your mistakes when you aren’t busy denying them.
14. Time spent on impressing the wrong people. – Be kind to everyone, yes, but realize that not everyone will appreciate what you do for them. You have to figure out who’s worth your daily attention and who’s just taking advantage of you. Spend more time with those who make you smile and less time with those who you constantly feel pressured to impress.
15. Lots of drama and needless arguments. – Life is too short to argue and fight. Count your blessings, value the people who matter and move on from the drama with your head held high.
16. Letting a grudge hurt your inner peace. – Let it go. Grudges are a waste of peace and happiness. Holding one tightly is like letting unwanted company live rent free in your head.
17. Getting stuck in the trap of consumerism. – Too many people spend money they haven’t earned, to buy things they don’t need, to impress folks they don’t even know. Don’t be one of them. (Read “The Total Money Makeover”.)
18. Forcing what’s not meant to be. – Never force anything. Do your best, then let it go. Don’t hold yourself down with things you can’t control. Sometimes you have to stop worrying, wondering, and doubting. Have faith that things will work out, maybe not how you planned, but just how it’s meant to be.
19. Resisting change instead of rolling with it. – You’re not the same person you were a year ago, a month ago, or a week ago. You’re always growing. Life is evolving. Flow with it.
20. Talking the talk, but never walking the walk. – When it’s all said and done, be sure you haven’t said more than you’ve done. Remind yourself, again and again, that your daily actions always speak louder than your words. So work hard in silence today, and let your success be your noise in the end.

But what if you already have regrets?

Marc and I have mentioned this in previous articles, but I figured it was worth reiterating here because regrets sometimes sneak up on us. As alluring as the idea of living a regret-free life sounds, it’s rarely an easy feat. Oftentimes before we even realize it, our minds are dwelling on missed opportunities and mistakes.

Yes, even when we know better we regret things. And we do so simply because we worry that we should have made different decisions in the past. We should have done a better job, but didn’t. We should have given a relationship another chance, but didn’t. We should have started that business, but didn’t. We compare the real outcomes of our past decisions to an ideal fantasy of how things “should” be.

The problem of course is that we can’t change our past decisions, because we can’t change the past. Yet we resist this truth to no end — we keep over-analyzing and comparing the unchangeable past reality to our ideal fantasy until we’ve wasted days of our lives in utter misery.

But why?

If we logically know better, why can’t we just let all our ideals and fantasies GO?

Because we identify personally with these ideals and fantasies. We all have this vision in our minds of who we are — our great intentions, our intelligence, our social impact, etc. Even if you struggle with certain self-esteem issues, you probably still identify with yourself as being a decent and respectful human being. And so when someone says something about us that contradicts the vision of ourselves that we identify with — when they insult our intentions, our intelligence, our status, etc. — we take offense. We feel personally attacked and we have a hard time letting it go.

Something very similar happens when we believe we did something — made a mistake for example — that contradicts that same vision of ourselves that we identify with. We take offense! And in some cases we implode on ourselves — we berate ourselves for making the mistake. “How could I have done this?” we think. “Why couldn’t I have been smarter and made a better decision?” And again, we have a hard time letting it go — we have a hard time coming to grips with the fact that we aren’t always as good as the vision we have of ourselves.

So in a nutshell, our ideals and fantasies about ourselves tend to cause us lots of misery.

The key is to gradually practice letting go of these ideals and fantasies, and focus instead on making the best of your present reality. The truth must be embraced…

• Every bad decision we made in the past is done — none of them can be changed. And in fact there’s some good in every one of those bad decisions too, if we choose to see it. Just being able to make a decision at all is a gift, as is being able to wake up in the morning, and being able to learn and grow from our wide-ranging life experiences.
• We are not actually what we envision ourselves to be, at least not always. We are human and therefore we are multi-layered and imperfect. We do great things, and we make mistakes. We give back, and we are selfish sometimes. Even when we are doing our absolute best, we are prone to errors in judgment. And once we embrace this and get comfortable with our humanness, making a bad decision tends to conflict a lot less with our new, more flexible (and more accurate) vision of ourselves.

Of course, all of this is easier said than done, but whenever you find yourself regretting a past decision, you can 1) acknowledge that you’re falling into this pattern, 2) realize that there’s some ideal or fantasy you’re comparing your decisions or yourself to, and 3) gradually let go of this ideal or fantasy by making peace with what’s behind you, so you can focus more on what’s directly in front of you.

Now it’s your turn…

I challenge you to put the reminders in this article to good use. And I challenge you to give yourself some credit right now for the fact that you’re already doing a pretty good job with at least some of the 20 points above…

Yes, let’s flip the concept of this article around for a second, and instead of sharing something you don’t want to regret down the road, tell me this:

What have you done lately that you know you will NOT regret down the road?

Please leave a comment below.

We are not just what we know, but what we are willing to learn.

When my Grandma Zelda passed away a decade ago at the age of 90, she left me with a box of miscellaneous items from her house that she knew I had grown to appreciate over the years. Among these items was an old leather-bound journal that she aptly named her Inspiration Journal.

Throughout the second half of her life, Grandma Zelda used this journal to jot down ideas, thoughts, quotes, song lyrics, and anything else that moved her. She would read excerpts from her journal to me when I was growing up, and I would listen and ask questions. I honestly credit a part of who I am now to the wisdom she bestowed on me when I was young.

Although I’ve shared some of her wisdom in the past here on the blog and with our newsletter subscribers, today is the day she became an angel ten years ago. So to honor her, I want to share some of my favorite excerpts from her journal that I actually remember her sharing with me before she died. I’ve done my best to sort, copyedit, and reorganize her thoughts into twelve inspiring bullet points. I hope you find value in them…

1. Breathe in the future, breathe out the past.

No matter where you are or what you’re going through, always believe that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Never expect, assume, or demand. Just do your best, control the elements you can control, and then let it be. Because once you have done what you can, if it is meant to be, it will happen, or it will show you the next step that needs to be taken.

2. Life CAN be simple again.

Just choose to focus on one thing at a time. You don’t have to do it all, and you don’t have to do it all right now. Breathe, be present, and do your best with what’s in front of you. What you put into life, life will often give you back many times over. (Read “The Power of Now” — a book that once sat on my grandma’s nightstand.)

3. Let others take you as you are, or not at all.

Speak and walk your truth even if your voice and legs shake. By being yourself you put something beautiful into the world that was not there before. So walk your path confidently and don’t expect anyone else to understand your journey, especially if they have not been exactly where you are going.

4. You are not who you used to be, and that’s OK.

You’ve been hurt; you’ve gone through numerous ups and downs that have made you who you are today. Over the years, so many things have happened — things that have changed your perspective, taught you lessons, and forced your spirit to grow. As time passes, nobody stays the same, but some people will still tell you that you have changed. Respond to them by saying, “Of course I’ve changed. That’s what life is all about. But I’m still the same person, just a little stronger now than I ever was before.”

5. Everything that happens helps you grow, even if it’s hard to see right now.

Circumstances will direct you, correct you, and perfect you over time. So whatever you do, hold on to hope. The tiniest thread will twist into an unbreakable cord. Let hope anchor you in the possibility that this is not the end of your story – that the change in the tides will eventually bring you to peaceful shores.

6. Happiness is a priceless asset.

Don’t just educate yourself to be rich, educate yourself to be happy. That way when you get older you’ll know the true value of things, not the price. You will come to realize that the best days are the days when you don’t need anything extreme or special to happen to make you smile. You simply appreciate the moments and feel gratitude, seeking nothing else, nothing more. That is what true happiness is all about in the end. (Note: Angel and I discuss this in more detail in the Happiness and Growth chapters of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

7. Be determined to be positive on the average day.

Understand that the greater part of your misery or unhappiness is determined not by your circumstances, but by your attitude. So give yourself a break today. Instead of dwelling on people who have let you down, refocus your time and energy on appreciating those who lift you up. Remember, you can’t control the impolite things some people say and do to you, but you can decide not to be distracted by them.

8. Pay close attention to people you care about.

Sometimes when a loved one says, “I’m okay,” they need you to look them in the eyes, hug them tight, and reply, “I know you’re not.” And don’t be too upset if some people only seem to remember you when they need you. Feel privileged that you are like a beacon of light that comes to their minds when there is darkness in their lives.

9. Autonomy is a gift you can give.

Sometimes you have to let a person go so they can grow. Because, over the course of their lives, it is not what you do for them, but what you have taught them to do for themselves that will make them a successful human being.

10. You will outgrow some relationships.

Sometimes getting the results you crave means distancing yourself from people that don’t serve your best interests. This allows you to make space for those who support you in being the absolute best version of yourself. It happens gradually as you grow. You find out who you are and what you need, and then you realize that people you’ve known for awhile don’t see things the way you do. So you keep the wonderful memories, but find yourself moving on.

11. You don’t need anyone else’s permission to listen to your intuition.

It’s usually better to look back on life and say, “I can’t believe I did that,” than to look back and say, “I wish I did that.” In the end people will judge you in some way anyway. So don’t live your life trying to impress others. Instead live your life impressing yourself. Love yourself enough to never lower your standards for anyone.

12. Endings often create beginnings to wonderful journeys.

If you’re looking for a happy ending and can’t seem to find one, maybe it’s time to start looking for a new beginning. Brush yourself off and accept that you have to fail from time to time — that’s how you learn. The strongest people out there — the ones with a genuine smile — are often the same people who have fought the toughest battles. They’re smiling because they’ve decided that they’re not going to let anything hold them down. They’re letting go and moving forward, one step at a time.

Promise yourself…

As I’m wrapping up this short tribute to my grandma, I’m also reminded of a poem excerpt by Christian D. Larson that she used to have hanging on her refrigerator when I was a kid. As soon as I was old enough to understand the poem, my grandma made a photocopy of it for me, and over 30 years later I still have that same photocopy laminated and hanging on my office bulletin board. These are words my grandma said she strived to live by:

Promise Yourself…

To think only the best, to work only for the best, and to do the best you can.

To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

To forgive the mistakes of the past and press on to greater achievements in the present.

To wear a friendly countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too focused for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear, and too at peace to permit the presence of trouble.

To think well of yourself and to proclaim this fact to the world, not in loud words but great deeds.

To live in faith that the whole world is on your side so long as you are true to the best that is in you.

Now it’s your turn!

Before you go, please leave Angel and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of my grandma’s points resonated the most today?

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

The truth does not vanish when it is forgotten or ignored.

You know how you can hear something a hundred times in a bunch of different ways before it finally gets through to you? The ten facts discussed here fall firmly into that category — timeless truths and lessons most of us likely learned years ago, and have been reminded of since, but for whatever reason we haven’t fully grasped them yet.

This, my friends, is my attempt at helping all of us, myself included, “get it” and “remember it” once and for all…

1. The average human life is relatively short.

We know deep down that life is short, and that death will happen to all of us eventually, and yet we are infinitely surprised when it happens to someone we know. It’s like walking up a flight of stairs with a distracted mind, and misjudging the final step. You expected there to be one more stair than there is, and so you find yourself off balance for a moment, before your mind shifts back to the present moment and how the world really is.

Let that reminder be your wake-up call to live your life today! Don’t ignore death, but don’t be afraid of it either. Be afraid of a life you never lived because you were too afraid to take action. Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside you while you’re still alive. And in life you can be comfortable or courageous, but not both at once. So be bold, be courageous… be scared to death, and then give yourself a chance to take the next step anyway.

2. To a great extent, you live the life you create for yourself.

Your life is yours alone. Others can try to persuade you, but they can’t decide for you. They can walk with you, but not in your shoes. So make sure the path you decide to walk aligns with your own intuition and desires, and don’t be scared to switch paths or pave a new one when it makes sense.

Remember, it’s always better to be at the bottom of the ladder you want to climb than the top of the one you don’t. Be productive and patient. And realize that patience is not about waiting; it’s the ability to keep a good attitude while working hard for what you believe in.

Yes, at the end of the day this is your life, and to a great extent it’s made up of your little recurring habits and choices. May your daily actions speak louder than your words. May your life preach louder than your lips. May your success be your noise in the end. 

3. Being busy doesn’t mean being productive.

Busyness isn’t a virtue, nor is it something to respect. Though we all have seasons of crazy schedules, very few of us have a legitimate need to be busy all the time. We simply don’t know how to set boundaries, prioritize properly, and say no when we should.

Being busy rarely equates to productivity these days. Just take a quick look around. Busy people outnumber productive people by a wide margin. Busy people are rushing all over the place, and running late half of the time. They’re heading to work, conferences, meetings, social engagements, looking at their phones, creating TikToks, etc. They barely have enough free time for exercise and they rarely get enough sleep. Yet, text messages, emails, and social media updates are blasting out of their smart phones like rockets, and their day planners are jammed to the brim with obligations. Their busy schedule gives them an elevated sense of importance. But it’s all an illusion. They’re like hamsters running on a wheel.

Though being busy can make us feel more alive than anything else for a moment, the sensation is not sustainable long term. We will inevitably, whether tomorrow or on our deathbed, come to wish that we spent less time in the buzz of busyness and more time actually living a purposeful life.

4. Some kind of failure always occurs before success.

Most mistakes are unavoidable. Learn to forgive yourself. It’s not a problem to make them; it’s only a problem if you never learn from them.

If you’re too afraid of failure, you can’t possibly do what needs to be done to be successful. The solution to this problem is making friends with failure. You want to know the difference between a master and a beginner? The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried. Behind every great piece of art there are dozens of failed attempts to make it, but these attempts are simply never shown to us.

Bottom line: Just because it’s not happening now, doesn’t mean it never will. Learning the way on the way is key. Sometimes things have to go very wrong before they can be right. (Read “The Success Principles”.)

5. Thinking and doing are two very different things.

Success never comes to look for you while you wait around thinking about it.

You are what you do, not what you say you will do. Knowledge is basically useless without action. Good things don’t come to those who wait; they come to those who work on meaningful goals. Ask yourself what’s really important and then have the courage and determination to build your daily life around your answer.

And remember, if you wait until you feel 100% ready to begin, you will likely be waiting the rest of your life.

6. You don’t have to wait for an apology to forgive.

Life gets much easier when you learn to accept the apologies you never received. The key is find some level of peace with every experience — positive or negative. In a way, it’s like taking a step back, letting go a little, and navigating each life experience with a open mind. It’s realizing that grudges from the past are a perfect waste of today’s growth and potential, and that holding one is like letting unwanted company live rent-free in your head.

Ultimately, forgiveness is a promise — one you want to keep. When you forgive you are making a promise not to hold the unchangeable past against your present self. It has nothing to do with freeing a past criminal of his or her crime, and everything to do with freeing yourself of the burden of being an eternal victim.

7. Some people are simply the wrong match for you.

You will only ever be as great as the people you surround yourself with, so be brave enough to let go of those who keep bringing you down.  You shouldn’t force connections with people who constantly make you feel less than worthy.

If someone makes you feel uncomfortable and insecure every time you’re with them, for whatever reason, they’re probably not close friend material. If they make you feel like you can’t be yourself, or if they make you “less than” in any way, don’t pursue a daily connection with them. If you feel emotionally drained after hanging out with them or get a small hit of anxiety when you are reminded of them, listen to your intuition. You don’t have to exile them from your life, but you can give yourself space.

Set boundaries. Make yourself a priority. There are so many “right people” for you — those who energize you and inspire you to be your best self. It makes no sense to constantly force it with people who are the wrong match for you. (Note: Marc and I discuss this in more detail in the Relationships chapter of “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently”.)

8. It’s not other people’s job to love and respect you, it’s yours.

It’s important to be nice to others, but it’s even more important to be nice to yourself. You really have to love and respect yourself to get anything done in the long run. So make sure you don’t start seeing yourself through the eyes of those who don’t value you. Know your worth, even if they don’t.

Today, let someone love you just the way you are — as flawed as you might be, as unattractive as you sometimes feel, and as incomplete as you think you are. Yes, let someone love you despite all of this, and let that someone be YOU.

9. What you own is not who you are.

Stuff really is just stuff, and it has absolutely no bearing on who you are as a person. Most of us can make a great life with much less than we think we need. That’s a valuable reminder, especially in a hugely consumer-driven culture that focuses more on material things than meaningful connections and experiences.

To paraphrase Terence McKenna, you have to create your own culture. Don’t watch too much TV or YouTube, don’t read every fashion tip online, and don’t consume too much of the evening news. Find the strength to fill your time with meaningful experiences. The space and time you are occupying at this very moment is LIFE, and if you’re worrying about Drake or Selena Gomez or some other famous face, then you are disempowered. You’re giving your life away to marketing and media trickery, which is created by big companies to ultimately motivate you to want to dress a certain way, look a certain way, and be a certain way. This is tragic, this kind of thinking. It’s all just Hollywood brainwashing. What is real is YOU and your friends and your family, your loves, your highs, your hopes, your plans, your fears, etc.

Too often we’re told that we’re not important, we’re just peripheral to what is. “Get a degree, get a job, get a car, get a house, and keep on getting.” And it’s sad, because someday you’ll wake up and realize you’ve been tricked. And all you’ll want then is to reclaim your mind by getting it out of the hands of the brainwashers who want to turn you into a drone that buys everything that isn’t needed to impress everybody that isn’t important.

10. Everything changes, every day.

Embrace change, and realize it happens naturally and it can be managed. It won’t always be easy at first, but in the end it will be worth it. Acceptance is the first step forward.

What you have today may become what you had by tomorrow. You never know. Things change fast, often spontaneously. People and circumstances come and go. Life doesn’t stop for anybody. It moves rapidly and rushes from calm to chaos in a matter of seconds, and happens like this to people every day. It’s likely happening to someone relatively nearby right now.

Sometimes the shortest split second in time changes the direction of our lives. A seemingly innocuous decision rattles our whole world like a meteorite striking Earth. Entire lives have been swiveled and flipped upside down, for better or worse, on the strength of an unpredictable event. And these events are always happening.

However good or bad a situation is now, it will change. That’s the one thing you can count on. So when life is good, enjoy it. Don’t go looking for something better every second. Happiness never comes to those who don’t appreciate what they have while they have it.

Now it’s your turn…

Yes, it’s your turn to forgive yourself if you’ve recently mishandled or forgotten one or more of the points above. Forgive yourself for the mistakes you’ve made, for the times you lacked clarity, for the missteps that created needless stress. Forgive yourself now, for being human. These are all vital lessons, and what matters most right now is your willingness to start growing from them.

But before you go, please leave Marc and me a comment below and let us know what you think of this essay. Your feedback is important to us.

Which one of the points above resonated the most today?

Finally, if you have not done so already, be sure to sign-up for our free newsletter to receive new articles like this in your inbox each week.

“One day you will look back and see that all along you were blooming.”
— MHN

Twenty-nine years ago, when I was a freshman in high school, my English teacher gave my class a homework assignment entitled, “Advice for a Younger Generation.” The concept of the assignment was simple: Each student had to interview a person who was over the age of 25, gather enough information to write a basic biography of their life, and find out what their top tips are for a younger generation. I chose to interview my dad. He was 53 at the time and he gave me 18 pieces of advice.

I had completely forgotten about all of this until recently when I was visiting my parents house. My mom had me clean out a few old boxes stored in the attic. In one of these boxes I found the original “Advice for a Younger Generation” assignment dated April 22nd, 1996.

I read through it and was admittedly blown away — there’s lots of solid wisdom within. Even though my dad’s advice is generally relevant to a person of any age, my 43-year-old self can relate to it in a way my 14-year-old self didn’t quite grasp at the time. In fact, the first thought that went through my head was, “Wow, my dad was right the whole time!”

Here are my dad’s original 18 pieces of advice for a younger generation, transcribed and copyedited with his permission, along with a couple new (and significant) additions — bringing the list to 20 in total. He literally sent me numbers 19 and 20 yesterday and told me to “update the list.” (Haha. I’m not joking.) And note that my now 82-year-old dad was inspired to expand on his original list after a previous version of this article was published here on the blog last year:

1. Your 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s won’t feel like your 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s.

Adults are just older children. When you get older you won’t feel as old as you imagine you will. For the most part, you still feel exactly the way you feel right now, just a little wiser and more confident. You’ve had time to establish your place in the world and figure out what’s important to you. Don’t fear growing up. Look forward to it. It’s awesome!

2. Bad things will happen to you and your friends.

Part of living and growing up is experiencing unexpected troubles in life. People lose jobs, get in car accidents, and sometimes die. When you are younger, and things are going pretty well, this harsh reality can be hard to visualize. The smartest and oftentimes hardest thing we can do in these kinds of situations is to be tempered in our reactions. To want to scream obscenities, but to be wiser and more disciplined than that. To remember that emotional rage only makes matters worse. And to remember that tragedies are rarely as bad as they seem, and even when they are, they give us an opportunity to grow stronger.

3. Everyone can make a significant difference.

Making one person smile can change the world. Maybe not the whole world, but their world. So start small and start now. Be patient. Be present. Be kind. Compliment people. Magnify their strengths, not their weaknesses. This is how to make a difference, in your own life above all, and in all the lives you touch.

4. First impressions aren’t all they’re cracked up to be.

Everyone and everything seems normal from a distance, or at a glance. The 10th, 20th, or even the 50th impression is when you start to truly understand someone else for who they truly are. Be patient and present. Pay attention to their habits and rituals. We are what we habitually do.

5. Big results come when you narrow your focus.

Concentrate your efforts on smaller and smaller areas. Specialize. When your efforts are diffused over a wide area they won’t have much of an impact. So focus on smaller areas and your efforts will be felt more fully. It could take time for growth to happen, but keep that focus narrow and the results will come in time.

6. Love yourself. Become the best version of you.

Strive to be the “you” you want to be. Nourish your mind and body. Don’t stop learning. Educate yourself every day until you die. Study. Read. Devour new ideas. Engage with people, including those who think differently. Ask questions. Listen. And don’t just grow in knowledge. Be a person who gives back too.

7. Most of the time you just have to go for it, again and again.

Put your uncertainty and fears aside for a second and ask yourself this: “If I try and I don’t get it right the first time, what will I have lost and what will I have gained?” The answer is: You will have lost nothing but a little bit of your time while gaining an important lesson that will help you get it right the second or third time. People rarely get it right the first time. In fact, usually the only people who ever get it right are those who continue going for it even when they’ve come up short numerous times before.

8. We tend to get more when we give.

Supporting, guiding, and making contributions to other people is one of life’s greatest rewards. Almost everything you do comes back around in some way. Let your actions create positive ripples in your life.

9. Not much is worth fighting about today.

If you can avoid it, don’t fight. Step back from arguments with your spouse, family members, or neighbors. When you feel anger surging up and you want to yell that vulgar remark on the tip of your tongue, just close your mouth and take a break. Sleep on it. Give yourself space. Let calmness be your superpower, and then revisit the situation if you must. You don’t have to be right or win an argument immediately.

10. Don’t try to impress everyone.

Purposely impressing people is an act that brings nothing but a momentary ego boost. Be real with people instead. Connect with fewer people on a level that is deeper and more profound.

11. Keep having fun.

Fun is way underrated! With all of life’s responsibilities, fun will sometimes seem like an indulgence. It shouldn’t be. It should be a requirement. Make time for fun and casual play. Schedule it in until the day you die!

12. Keep it simple.

There is a world of magnificence hidden in simplicity. Identify the five most important things in your life now and focus on those things in your free time. Let the other stuff go. Stop the senseless busyness most people fill their lives with, so you can enjoy what’s truly important to you.

13. Little things stick with you.

So pay attention to them. Like watching your child sleep. Preparing a good meal with your family. Sharing a great laugh with an old friend. This is the real stuff life is made of. Tune in.

14. Less advice is often the best advice.

Most people don’t need lots of advice, they need to live. I’ve seen young, rocky relationships develop into wonderful marriages, and I’ve seen fleeting inspirations ignite a lifetime of passion and happiness. Our life stories, like the answers we give to long essay questions, are uniquely ours. What people want to know is already somewhere inside of them. We all just need time to think, be, and continue to explore the imperfect journeys that will eventually help us find our long-term direction.

15. Manage your time wisely.

Your situation and environment is ever changing, so be careful not to confuse things that are urgent with things that are important. Evaluate your obligations on a monthly basis and be willing to make necessary shifts. And remember that good, admirable obligations, like volunteering at church, will sometimes need to be put on hold temporarily for something else. And that’s OK. You can’t do it all.

16. Manage your money wisely.

Don’t buy stuff you don’t need.  Don’t spend more than you make.  Don’t spend to impress people. Don’t let your money manage you in the long run. Financial stability is peace of mind when you get older.

17. What you learn in school does matter.

While you may not use the specifics of every classroom lesson, every lesson does expand the core thought process of your mind. Over time you will develop problem-solving skills that are universally applicable. No single classroom lesson can teach this, and no single classroom lesson is more important.

18. Dreams will remain dreams forever if you don’t take action.

Don’t dream about it anymore. Start doing it a little bit every day. In 30 years from now, what is it that you will regret not having accomplished, appreciated, or attempted? Do it, appreciate it, and attempt it starting NOW!

19. If you truly want something, you also have to want its costs.

When it comes to achieving the dreams just mentioned in point #18, it’s important to realize that most people want the reward without the risk — the shine without the grind. But you can’t get to a destination in life without a journey. And a journey always has costs. At the very least you have to invest your time and energy into taking consistent steps forward.

So instead of only thinking about what you want — a dream or goal — also ask yourself: “What am I willing to invest (or give up) to get it?”

Or for those inevitably hard days: “What is worth struggling for?”

Seriously, think about it: If you want the strong and athletic body, you have to want the sore muscles, the sweaty clothes, the mornings or afternoons of exercise, and the healthy meals. If you want the successful business, you have to also want the longer days, the stressful business deals and decisions, and the likelihood of failing many times to learn what you need to know to succeed in the long run. But if you catch yourself wanting something day in and day out, month after month, yet you never take consistent action and thus you never make progress, then maybe it’s time to let that goal go, because you don’t actually want to struggle through the steps required to achieve it — the costs seem too high to you. And that’s OK — it’s OK to change your mind or dream a new dream. The key is to be honest with yourself along the way.

20. Life is incredibly limited, and there’s beauty in this truth.

Let’s end this list right by bringing it full-circle to the underlying themes we started out with in points #1 and #2 — time flies and life is short. Because the truth is, you can never read all the books you want to read. You can never train yourself in all the skill sets you want to have. You can never be all the things you want to be and live all the lives you want to live. You can never spend all the time you want with the people you love. You can never feel every possible temperature, tone, and variation of emotion in a given situation. You are incredibly limited, just like everyone else.

In the game of life, we all receive a unique set of unexpected limitations and variables in the field of play. The question is: How will you respond to the hand you’ve been dealt? You can either focus on the lack thereof or empower yourself to play the game sensibly and resourcefully, making the very best of every outcome as it arises, even when it’s heartbreaking and hard to accept.

In the end, what matters most is to focus on what matters most. By doing so you get to truly experience the various sources of beauty and opportunity in your life while each of them lasts. Let’s take a moment and revisit the notion of being limited by the reality of not being able to spend all the time you want with someone you love. When someone you love passes away too soon, that’s undoubtedly one of the most heartbreaking limitations to cope with (and the general principles for coping with this kind of tragic limitation are also applicable to less severe situations too)…

Imagine a person who gave meaning to your life is suddenly no longer in your life (at least not in the flesh), and you’re not the same person without them. You have to change who you are — you’re now a best friend who sits alone, a widow instead of a wife, a father without a daughter, or a next-door neighbor to someone new. You want life to be the way it was before death, but it never will be.

I have personally dealt with the loss of siblings, parents, and best friends to illness and accidents over the years, so I know from experience that when you lose someone you can’t imagine living without, your heart breaks wide open. And the bad news is you never completely get over the loss — you will never forget them. However, in a backwards way this is also the good news…

You see, death is an ending, which is a necessary part of living. And endings are necessary for beauty too — otherwise it’s impossible to appreciate someone or something, because they are unlimited. Limits illuminate beauty, and death is the definitive limit — a reminder that you need to be aware of this beautiful person or situation, and appreciate this beautiful thing called life. Death is also a beginning, because while you’ve lost someone special, this ending, like every loss, is a moment of reinvention. Although deeply sad, their passing forces you to reinvent your life, and in this reinvention is an opportunity to experience beauty in new, unseen ways and places. And finally, of course, death is an opportunity to celebrate a person’s life, and to be grateful for the priceless beauty they showed you.

Bottom line: There’s always progress and beauty to be found in accepting and respecting life’s inherent limitations, and then making the very best of what’s in front of you.

Closing thoughts and next steps…

My dad is 82-years-old now, and although he generally agrees with his younger self’s advice, he also admits he’s learned some new tricks over the past 30 years. “That’s why I wanted to add numbers 19 and 20 — just to flesh things out a bit,” he told me. And he intends to share some more life advice with us in the near future too, so sign up for our email updates and stand by for a new article from him. In the mean time though, he told me to tell you to read his three favorite personal development books: “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, “The Millionaire Next Door”, and “1,000 Little Things Happy, Successful People Do Differently” (Yes, he shamelessly plugged our book, but he actually re-reads it for daily self-reflection, so it’s legit).

Finally, before you go, please leave my dad (and Angel and me) a comment below to let us know what you think of this article and its advice. Your feedback is truly important to us — it inspires us to continue writing and sharing here on the blog. Thank you!