Two skills that I have found invaluable as I’ve matured and sought to achieve different goals in life are patience and discipline. Utilizing these two skills in concert with each other can yield amazing results. Yet they are often ignored as important traits, particularly in the context of traditional education. Patience and discipline end up being things that most people pick up via alternative forms of education or due to necessity. Real practice is critical to being able to utilize patience and discipline in a way that benefits your life. These are not things that you can merely talk or think about in order for them to have a positive impact on your life.

Life changes are often challenging and scary but also very necessary. If you’re a person like myself then stagnation in most areas of your life is not something you cherish. I often find myself thinking about what new things I can get into, what habits I can develop and what places I can go to help make my life a more rewarding one. Changing and growing in a positive way has a price that goes beyond nervousness and uncertaintly about the change. Change requires you to leave certain things behind.

Anyone who’s set a goal to engage in a discipline over the long haul knows how difficult it is to set yourself on a path and stick to that path religiously for a long time. I’m talking years. And so it goes with writing. Writing is important. I don’t care why a person writes or what audience (including themselves) they write for. Just the process of thinking about what to write is therapeutic, in my non-professional opinion. Writing also confers on a person appreciation for how hard an author has worked while reading a work that someone else has written. The result of that perhaps being a person who goes a bit easier when criticizing someone else’s writing. Those are some of the reasons that I enjoy writing, and why I set out to start writing here almost ten years ago. In fact, we’re in the tenth year of in the midst of a journey. But…

Please raise your hand if you have recently found yourself feeling unhappy about something. 🖐

That’s my hand raised above. I’d be shocked if most people, if not everyone, reading this post thought to raise their hand as well. If happiness is the ultimate goal in life I’ve also found it to be quite an elusive thing for almost anyone to achieve for any length of time. It seems as though there is always something that gets between us and happiness. Often we predicate happiness on some grande, life changing experience that we wish would happen. I’m talking about things like meeting the love of our lives, coming into significant financial wealth, taking the trip of a lifetime or finding our dream job. Although all of the things that I mentioned are possible it’s also likely that their occurrence will be infrequent and their effect on your happiness will be temporary. So what about all of that time in between those grande moments? Is it possible to be happy every single day? I say it is possible, but only if we learn to find happiness in the simple things in life.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned over the course of half a century it’s that how we use our time, intellect and energy greatly impacts our ability to get what we want out of life. Spending inordinate amounts of time on low value activities is basically a waste of time because it’s a misuse of our resources of time, intellect and energy. Low value activities include common distractions such as watching the news, scrolling through social media updates and binge watching TV shows. Of course we will always make some time for these activities but often people get too absorbed in them because they are easy, and give us the feeling of doing something without actually having to challenge ourselves. To put it another way I believe that most people spend way too much time, intellect and energy on things that won’t help them to make a major difference in their lives. How often in our lives have we heard the phrase, “What difference does it make?” Indeed. When doing just about anything we should be asking ourselves that question!

Recently I was having a conversation with a friend who’s been working on launching a website for what seems like forever. We’ve talked numerous times about the site and he has serious ambitions for what he’ll be able to achieve with the site. In fact, we’ve talked about it so many times over the past couple of years that I’m constantly asking him exactly when the site will be launched. Every time we talk his answer to that question is essentially the same. It’ll be launched once he can get just one or two more features exactly how he wants them. His idea is a wonderful one and I truly support what he wants to do but I also do believe that his insistence that every aspect of the site work perfectly as he envisions it is severely hurting his chances of ever getting the venture off the ground. With each feature added there are always multiple complications, many issues to be resolved, and since he’s working with outside help to build the site this often means months of additional effort. As a result, his idea remains just an idea and he’s not able to get the valuable feedback that he would gain if the idea was already unveiled to the world. 

Peace and happiness are paramount to leading a fulfilling life, and often we seek to find both of these things outside of us. We may seek out peace and happiness via work, relationships, exercise, substances, hobbies, travel and more. In fact, we often do. The truth that I keep coming back to is that while the aforementioned exploits are vehicles that may facilitate peace and happiness ultimately the feelings must arise from within. Because as much as meals, drinks, workouts, dates, flights and other diversions can help to keep good feelings on track they still only take up a fraction of our time. Feeling good and happy in the remaining time is often a challenge for active people.

Continue reading “You Won’t Find It Outside Of You” →