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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
25. It’s okay to wait. Sometimes it’s okay to wait a little longer for something. Why rush if you don’t have to? Why not enjoy the journey?
26. Honesty is important. Honesty, at the most simple level, is telling the truth—not lying. It’s supremely important to be honest, and it’s hurtful when you’re not, but…
27. Openness is just as important as honesty. Openness is more complicated than honesty: openness involves being honest while painting an accurate picture, shooting straight, not misleading other people, and being real. Openness is far more subjective, and you must be honest with yourself before you can be open with others. This doesn’t mean you must put your entire life on display: some things are private, and that’s okay, too.
28. Getting people’s buy-in. Adding value to other people is the only way to get their buy-in. When I managed a large team of people, I constantly asked them questions like, “How did you add value this week?” I also asked that question of myself, and I would share with my team how I added value that week. That’s how I got their buy-in.
29. Hype is cancerous. So often we fall for the hype (“Buy More, Save More!” and “Three Day Sale!”), and we are suckered into rash buying decisions because of scarcity and a false sense of urgency. We can train ourselves, however, to not only resist such hype, but to have a vitriolic reaction to the hype—to elicit a response so off-putting that we avoid anything that’s hyped. When we’re aware of the world around us, we can willfully develop a hype allergy.
30. I’m still trying to figure it all out. I don’t intend to promulgate my views and opinions as some sort of maxims by which you should live your life. What works for me, may not work for you. Hell, sometimes it doesn’t even work for me.
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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
20. Change is growth. We all want a different outcome, and yet most of us don’t want any change in our lives. Change equals uncertainty, and uncertainty equals discomfort, and discomfort isn’t fun. But when we learn to enjoy the process of change—when we chose to look at uncertainty as variety—then we get to reap all the rewards of change. That is how we grow.
21. Pretending to be perfect doesn’t make us perfect. I am not perfect, and I never will be. I make mistakes and bad decisions, and I fail at times. I stumble, I fall. I am human—a mixed bag, nuanced, the darkness and the light—as are you. And you are beautiful.
22. The past does not equal the future. My words are my words, and I can’t take them back. You can’t change the past, so it’s important to focus on the present. If the past equaled the future, then your windshield would be of no use to you: you would simply drive with your eyes glued to the rearview mirror. But driving this way—looking only behind you—is a sure-fire way to crash.
23. Pain can be useful, but not suffering. Pain lets us know something is wrong: it indicates we must change what we’re doing. Suffering, though, is a choice, and we can choose to stop suffering, to learn a lesson from the pain and move on with our lives.
24. Doubt kills. The person who stops you from doing everything you want to do, who stops you from being completely free, who stops you from being healthy, happy, and passionate—is you.
25. It’s okay to wait. Sometimes it’s okay to wait a little longer for something. Why rush if you don’t have to? Why not enjoy the journey?
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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
15. Everybody worships something. In his This Is Water commencement speech, my favorite fiction writer, David Foster Wallace, said it best: “There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.”
16. I am not the center of the universe. It’s difficult to think about the world from a perspective other than our own. We are always worried about what’s going on in our lives. What does my schedule look like today? What if I lose my job during the next round of layoffs? Why can’t I stop smoking? Why am I overweight? Why am I not happy with my life? We are strongly aware of everything connected to our lives, but we are only one ingredient in a much larger recipe.
17. Awareness is the most precious freedom. Minimalism is a tool to rid ourselves of excess in favor of a deliberate life: it is a tool to take a seemingly intricate and convoluted world, cluttered with its endless embellishments, and make it simpler, easier, realer. It is unimaginably hard to remain conscious, attentive, and aware. It is difficult not to fall back into a trance-like state, surrounded by the trappings and obstructions of the tiring world around us—but it is crucial to do so, for this is real freedom.
18. Be on the mountain. I use this term as a metaphor for living in the moment. When you climb to the peak, don’t immediately plan your descent. Enjoy the view. Be on the mountain. Just be.
19. We are scared for no reason. Just ask yourself, “What am I afraid of?” We are often scared of things that don’t have a real effect on our lives (or that we can’t control, so we’re worrying for no reason).
20. Change is growth. We all want a different outcome, and yet most of us don’t want any change in our lives. Change equals uncertainty, and uncertainty equals discomfort, and discomfort isn’t fun. But when we learn to enjoy the process of change—when we chose to look at uncertainty as variety—then we get to reap all the rewards of change. That is how we grow.
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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
9. Your job is not your mission. At least it wasn’t for me, although I treated it like it was for the longest time. I worked so much that the rest of my life suffered. There’s nothing wrong with hard work, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of life’s more important areas: health, relationships, passion.
10. Finding your passion is important. Passion is not preexisting, which means you can cultivate a passion as long as you find something that aligns with your principles and desires.
11. Relationships matter. Every relationship—friendship, romantic, or otherwise—is a series of gives and takes. Every relationship has an Us box. For the relationship to work, both people must contribute to—and get something from—that Us box. If you just give but don’t get, you’ll feel used, exploited, taken advantage of; if you only take but don’t give, you’re a parasite, a freeloader, a bottom-feeder.
12. You don’t need everyone to like you. We all want to be loved—it’s a mammalian instinct—but you can’t value every relationship the same, and thus you can’t expect everyone to love you the same. Life doesn’t work that way. My friend Julien Smith articulates this sentiment very well in his popular essay The Complete Guide to Not Giving a Fuck: “When people don’t like you, nothing actually happens. The world does not end. You don’t feel them breathing down your neck. In fact, the more you ignore them and just go about your business, the better off you are.”
13. Status is a misnomer. Similar to “success,” our culture places an extraordinary emphasis on material wealth as a sign of true wealth, and yet I know too many people of supposed “status” who are miserable. They don’t seem wealthy to me. One’s true worth is not determined by his or her net worth.
14. Jealousy is a wasted emotion. Competition breeds jealousy, although we often give it prettier labels like “competitive spirit,” “stick-to-itiveness,” or “ambition.” Jealousy is ugly, though: it is never a way to express that we care—it’s only a channel through which we broadcast our insecurities.
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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
3. Happiness is not for sale. We can’t buy happiness, yet we search the aisles, shelves, and pages of eBay in search of something more, of something to fill the void. The stuff won’t make us happy, though—not in the long run, anyway. At best, material things will temporarily pacify us. At worst, they will ruin our lives: they will leave us empty, they will leave us depressed, and they will leave us even more alone—alone among a sea of trinkets. The truth is we are all going to die, and heaping our tombs with treasure will not save us from this fate.
4. Success is perspectival. I used to think I was successful because I had a six-figure job my friends and family could be proud of. I thought the house with too many bedrooms would make me look even more successful, as would the luxury car, the tailored suit, the expensive watch, the big screen TV, and all the trappings of the material world. I got it all, and I sure as hell didn’t feel successful. Instead, I felt successfool.
5. Make change a must. For the longest time, I knew I wanted to change: unhappy, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled, I knew I didn’t have freedom—not real freedom. The problem was I knew this intellectually, but not emotionally: I didn’t have the feeling in my gut that things must change. I knew they shouldchange, but the change wasn’t a must for me, and thus it didn’t happen. A decision is not a real decision until it is a must, until you feel it on your nerve-endings, until you are compelled to take action. Once your shoulds have turned into musts, then you are ready for change.
6. The meaning of life. Giving is living. The best way to live a worthwhile life is simple: continuously grow as an individual and contribute to other people in a meaningful way. Growth and contribution: that’s the meaning of life.
7. Health is underestimated. Our well-being is more important than most of us treat it: without health, nothing else matters.
8. Sentimental items are less important. My mother died when I was 28. It was a difficult time in my life, but it helped me realize our memories aren’t in our things: our memories are inside us.
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30 Life Lessons From 30 Years
1. We must love. You know the saying, “It’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” right? I know, we often dismiss cliches with a wave of the hand, but maybe it’s a truth so profound we can discuss it only with aphorisms. Yes, we must love, even if it breaks our hearts—because, unless we love, our lives will flash by.
2. Love isn’t enough. Although we must love, love is not enough to survive: we must take action to show others we care, to show them we love. Yes, love is a verb.
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Know More About Vitamin E
Vitamin E is a fat soluble vitamin, essential for health. It refers to a group of related compounds which includes tocopherols and tocotrienols. Good source of Vitamin E are vegetable oils, nuts and nut oil seeds, egg yolk, margarine, cheese, soya beans, wheat germ, oatmeal, avocados, olives, green leafy vegetables etc. Tocopherols are predominantly found in olive, sunflower, corn, soya beans oils, and tocotrienols are the major Vitamin E components of palm oil, barley and rice bran. In humans, only alpha-tocopherol is specifically selected and enriched by the liver and is therefore the most abundant in the human body.
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Take Vitamin C before exercise to aid recovery
New research is suggesting that women who take vitamin C before performing half an hour of moderate intensity cycling showed increased antioxidant capacity post exercise.
Vitamin C increases the antioxidant power of the blood
Ingesting Vitamin C (also known as ascorbic acid) before exercises increases the antioxidant power of the blood and appears to lessen exercise induced oxidative stress in the body.
The researches, from Chiang Mai University in Thailand, looked at a marker of stress in the body called superoxide dismutase - they found that it's activity was elevated after exercise when paired with a placebo pill. But when exercise was paired with ascorbic acid, activity of the stress marker was suppressed.
Vitamin C is a powerful antioxidant, as has already been well established, however the efficacy of
vitamin C supplementation
on exercise-induced oxidative stress remains unclear. The objective of this latest study was two-fold, firstly it was to see if ascorbic acid supplementation would support antioxidant defenses and glucose metabolism and secondly if it would prevent muscle damage after a single bout of exercise by an untrained healthy adult. Regarding the second objective, no link was found. They wrote:
"Supplementation with ascorbic acid prior to exercise improves antioxidant power by does not prevent muscle damage."
The study, published in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition, looked at 19 healthy women between 22 and 25 years of age. They were sedentary in lifestyle and had not participated in any regular exercise program for at least a year. Blood tests were used before and 30 minutes after exercise to determine oxidative stress and muscle damage markers.
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A Guide to Habit Resilience
I’ve coached thousands of people who want to change habits, in my Sea Change Program, and I’ve found there’s a key difference between those who actually make changes and those who don’t.
That key difference is what I like to call “habit resilience.”
Habit resilience is the ability to bounce back when things don’t go as you planned, to stay positive, to encourage yourself, to forgive yourself, to be loving and compassionate with yourself, to shake it off and start again afresh. To learn and grow from struggles.
The opposite of habit resilience is getting discouraged when things don’t go as planned, beating yourself up, trying not to think about it when you mess up, ignoring problems, complaining, blaming others, deciding you can’t change, hardening your low or harsh opinion of yourself.
Let’s look at one example:
I want to change my eating habits, which is pretty tough to do … so I set myself a plan to eat oats for breakfast, a salad for lunch, and scrambled tofu with veggies for dinner. Great! But then during the week, I have to go to a work get-together, a family party, a 3-day trip to New York, and then my daughter’s birthday party. All the plans went out the window on those days.
So at this point, I can give up, beat myself up, ignore the problem … or, if I’ve developed habit resilience, I can shake myself off, make some adjustments to the plan, give myself some love, encourage myself, and start again, keeping a positive attitude the whole time. The second way of doing it will result in long-term change — if you can stick with it, there’s no change you can’t create.
That’s just one version of habit resilience, but you can see the difference between the first option and the second one is huge.
So how do we develop habit resilience? Let’s take a look.
Developing Habit Resilience
The good news is that you can develop this marvelous quality or skill of habit resilience. Actually, it’s a set of skills, but they can be developed with some practice.
Here’s how to develop habit resilience:
Loosen your hold on expectations. When we start to make changes in our lives, we often have unrealistic expectations. Six-pack abs in four weeks! But when we actually try to hit those expectations, we usually fall short. At least, at first. Over the long run, we can often make greater changes than we think we can. But over the short term, the changes are small, and not very orderly either. Change is messy. So just expect things to go less than ideally. Don’t be too attached to how you expect things to go, so that when your expectations aren’t met, you can just take it in stride.
Learn the skill of adjusting. If your diet plan doesn’t go as planned, it’s not necessarily a fault of yours — it’s the fault of the method or plan. How can you make it better to accommodate your life? Maybe you can get some accountability, set up some reminders, get rid of junk food from you house, and so on. There are a thousand ways to adjust a plan or method. When things go wrong, look for a way to adjust, don’t just give up.
Practice self-compassion and forgiveness. This is so important, but most people have the opposite habit — when things go wrong, we often beat ourselves up, are critical and harsh. Those kinds of reactions are unhelpful and can keep us stuck in old habits for years. Instead, we need to learn to be kinder to ourselves when we don’t measure up to what we hope we’ll be. When we let ourselves down, it’s important to forgive ourselves. Be compassionate, seeing our own suffering and wishing for relief from that suffering. Wishing for peace for ourselves. Being loving to ourselves, no matter what we do.
Don’t ignore problems, face them with kindness. That said, being forgiving is very different than just pretending it didn’t happen. If we’ve gone off our exercise plan, or stopped meditating … don’t just ignore the problem, not wanting to face it. Instead, turn towards the problem, and look at it with kindness. It’s like if you have a crying child — is it better to ignore the child and just hope that they’ll shut up? That will just lead to more pain for both of you. Instead, give them a hug. Acknowledge their pain. Give them love. Be there for them. And do the same for yourself when you’re having difficulties.
Learn to encourage yourself. I wrote recently about the importance of encouragement vs. discouragement … we need to practice this regularly. When you falter, can you be encouraging to yourself? Can you stay positive in the face of failure? Can you look at it as another step in your growth, instead of failure?
Find encouragement from others. In the same way, we can get encouragement from other people. Being in a program like Sea Change, with other people who are there to encourage you, is a good way to find that support. Ask for help from friends and family. Find a good friend who will help you get back on track, with love. We are not alone — lots of others know what it’s like to struggle, and are willing to support us when we’re struggling.
Learn perseverance — keep coming back. Stay positive when things go astray, and just keep coming back to the habit you want to change. Want to quit smoking but you backtracked when your father died? Get back on it as soon as you’re able. Come back with even more resolve. Commit yourself even deeper.
Can you feel that if you practice these skills, you’ll handle any difficulty that comes your way? That your path to change might be bumpy, filled with obstacles, but nothing will stop you if you keep a positive attitude, keep coming back, keep being loving and compassionate with yourself?
This is habit resilience. And it will change your entire life, if you practice.
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