Make your own opinions

"Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it."

Buddha

Everyone has an opinion, and most people are going to share their opinions with you.  This whole blog is meant for you to hear my experiences, my beliefs, what I have learned.  However, I purposely try to leave things open to your interpretation, trying not to prescribe a point of view for you, rather providing you perspectives to inform how you think of the world.

I have tried to live my life with openness to what anyone has to say.  As I wrote about in this post, whether or not I agree with it, or even if I wholeheartedly disagree with it, I want to hear what they have to say.

I want to take this idea one step further, to talk about the need to think deeply and intentionally when you are forming your opinions.  From the day you were born you will have myself and mom shaping your life, and by the time you read this, you will have come across thousands of personalities that can and possibly will have shaped the way you see the world.  My ask to you: Question me. Question mom.  Question yourself. Question everything and everyone.

Why? Because many people will tell you what they believe but few will tell you why they believe it and even more importantly, how they came to believe it.  Peel back the layers of that onion. Understand what drove people to think the way they do.  Sometimes you will find  extensively thought-out rationale or deep life-changing experiences.  Sometimes you will find agendas or possibly absolutely nothing.

Question everything. Ask the hard questions.  Have the deep conversations. Set aside time in your life to take it all in and think.  Revisit your conclusions as you continue to experience new things.  Never allow yourself to blindly believe something. Ultimately it is on you to understand and evaluate why you believe what you believe as those beliefs will shape your entire life.

I will end this with a something that I hope will never be the case for you, but was for me.   It is important to have someone in your life that will serve as a sounding board for you to think through some of life's questions -- illuminating where we might not have as good of an understanding as we might hope and without giving advice when we aren't seeking advice.  I probably had people throughout my life that could help me with this but sometimes thinking through things are just so personal that I was afraid someone would judge me, think differently of me, or something worse -- and as a result sometimes felt like I was on my own to figure life out.  Until I met your mom, I don't think I was ever truly comfortable really talking through my true beliefs and feelings and her being that for me is one of the many reasons that I love her.  

But I want you to know, if you ever need someone to simply listen to and help you think through some of life's tougher questions, know that you are never alone to figure out this crazy world by yourself.  I am here for you and always will be.

Pursuing happiness

"Life is indeed difficult, partly because of the real difficulties we must overcome in order to survive, and partly because of our own innate desire to always do better, to overcome new challenges, to self-actualize. Happiness is experienced largely in striving towards a goal, not in having attained things, because our nature is always to want to go on to the next endeavor."

Albert Ellis, Michael Abrams, Lidia Dengelegi

The premise of this post is based on a quote from the movie The Pursuit of Happyness:

“It was right then that I started thinking about Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of Independence and the part about our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I remember thinking how did he know to put the pursuit part in there? That maybe happiness is something that we can only pursue and maybe we can actually never have it. No matter what. How did he know that?”

Personally, I don’t believe that happiness is something that we can never actually have but I do believe that, however happy we currently are, we can always be happier.

To me, I look at my life as a series of moments. I can consider myself “happy” one moment and 15 minutes later can be crushed, but what makes life great for me is that there is always that pursuit. If someone asked me if I was content with my life, I would say “no” without hesitation. To me, I know there are better things out there; I know there is more than what I have. There is always another perspective to view from, there is always something new I can learn and there is always a future experience that will shape me into a better person.

Everyday I learn things that I don’t enjoy and every day I learn things that I love. Even if it means that I didn’t like a movie or loved a new kind of food, I learned something that I will take forward with me. I wrote about the small things a while back and I will repeat what I said then: they get me through my day. When I learn new things that contribute to who I am and have a better understanding of what I want, it is exciting. They might seem small, but when they all work together, it is quite remarkable the impact they have on your life.
What I have found most challenging is working toward some of my long term goals.

I’m a sports guy, so I am going to use a sports example. In any sport, when a reporter asks an athlete where their mind is and how they feel about their chances at a championship the response is something along the lines of: “Our focus is on the next game, we aren’t looking at the championship right now, 100% of our efforts will be to come out and play our best for the next game.” Obviously, this is the coach speaking through their players, instilling a mindset that will put them in the best possible position to get to a championship one day. Until recently, I always just looked at this as a way for coaches and teams to make sure that they give every last piece of effort they can in each and every game. Essentially, to make sure that no other team can come in and steal a game from them because they were looking down the line. But recently, I think the rationale is a little different. Granted, it is to win that game, but mentally, it is deeper than that.

I have been working at my job for around 2 ½ years now. When I started, it was all about getting promoted.  I knew what I wanted. I knew what I was working for. I knew what it took to get there and I had a time table in my head for when I was going to be promoted. And 2 years later, only 1 month after I had planned from the day that I started (hey, nobody’s perfect!), I received my promotion. In that moment, I was happy.  I was extremely happy.

Momentum and confidence. Before my promotion, this is what I had and this is what coaches are instilling in their players. Every game they win they feel better about themselves, they feel better about the program and they gain a momentum of invincibility and confidence. At work, to me, every project was a game and every time I “won,” it boosted my confidence of what I was capable of, what I could do and what I could take on.  It is amazing what the human body can accomplish with a certain mindset. I live with a chip on my shoulder; I dare you to tell me that I can’t do something. Doubt me and by God, I will prove you wrong. I live for those moments.

Those moments gave me a mental mindset that I could do anything, and with that mindset, I took on projects that I probably never should have touched, cranked out work that pushed me past what I had ever thought was possible and worked so hard that I could barely see the whites of my eyes. And I loved it, honestly. Every time I saw a happy client, every time I saw someone’s eyes light up with the final product, it made it all worth it. It made me want to take on another project; it made me want to raise the bar even further because I could see the pride in the people around me.

I soon realized something though, all of my drive at work, all of my motivation, was used to pursue that time date in an effort to feel the happiness that I felt the day they told me I was being promoted. But what I never realized was, without each one of those projects, without all those “wins,” I am honestly not sure if I would have been able to do all of what I was able to accomplish. If I took a step back, yes, I was happy with my promotion but it was every moment along the way that kept me moving towards it and the little wins that I have had over the past 2 years mean so much to me and shaped how I look at this world. After I was promoted, I was no different a person than the day before I was promoted. I admit that mentally, I am more confident and now I feel like I can accomplish and do even more, but that is just mental – I was always able to do it, all I received was assurance from another person. And while this outside assurance is great and it helped, I didn’t need it. Everything that I am striving for in life is at my own finger tips. I know I am destined for great things and please, I dare you to doubt me.

In the Declaration of Independence, I think Thomas Jefferson knew it is actually the pursuit of happiness that leads us to great things. We all have goals that we want to accomplish in life and we are all at different places along the spectrum of happiness. But know this – no matter how happy you are right now, you can be happier. As you pursue this happiness, make sure that you start to look at the journey that leads you closer because you only have one life and you only have so many moments within that life. Make the most of them, understand how they are what make your dreams possible and how ultimately, that all of these moments of happiness are what allow for you to become everything you want to be.

Cherish the small things

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."

Vincent van Gogh

I believe that 22 hours of the day are just the motions necessary to fill the time, 1 hour is filled with things that can break you and 1 hour provides the motivation necessary make it through the rest of the day.

I am going to concentrate on just the 2 latter hours: 1 hour of obstacles and 1 hour of “pick me ups.” These 2 hours don’t come in 1 hour blocks; they are broken into chunks of small minutes that are sprinkled throughout the day, creating a roller coaster of highs and lows. Granted, we are so accustomed to these peaks and valleys that it just seems like our day goes on without them, but in reality, they are there.

These are what I call “the small things,” and for simplicity sake, I am going to break them into positive small things (PST) and negative small things (NST).

I consider myself a big picture thinker. There isn’t a ton of stuff that will get me down or throw me for a loop because I constantly try to take a step back and think about what something means to my future. Constantly managing my time and emotions and deciding if things are worth the effort. I have always evaluated life situations by how they impact the expectations I have for my future and reacted accordingly.

In years past, I feel like I have not accurately assessed these situations and over-compensated by dismissing almost all of the small things as NST. I limited my opportunities and experiences simply because I didn’t feel like the emotional/physical effort necessary was not justified by the best possible outcome.

About a year ago, I started to come up with a theory to change this. I decided I would start “balancing the small things” better and started concentrating my life around PST. I wanted to surround myself with those small things that pick you up when you need motivation, which allow you to continue on when you have nothing left. My personal goal was to change that 1 hour of PST into 4 hours each day. I joined personal training sessions, I changed my eating habits, I started taking vocal lessons, I started running, and I started reading more, etc.

Essentially, what I had attempted to do was increase the number of hours I had vested into PST, therefore shifting the balance of positive energy in my life. And it worked! I was feeling great about myself, my life and where it was heading.

But here is the thing: all of these things were no longer small parts of my life, they were no longer “small things” and eventually, concentrating on them wasn’t giving me the same joy that it was when I first started this little project of mine. Now, I have made some life changes that I hope I never lose, but somehow my experiment went wrong.

So here is what I learned: There will always be NST and PST and you cannot increase time to a certain PST in an attempt to become happier, because it will naturally no longer be a small thing and will turn into one of the thousands of motions throughout your day.

Instead, focus your energy on those PST. Appreciate them. Really. Take the time to recognize those things and concentrate your emotions on them. Your frame of mind can be more powerful than you can imagine.

I am going to give you guys a very simple, silly example of exactly what I mean.

I work on the 22nd floor of a 48 floor building which houses 3 different elevator banks. My elevator bank goes from 21 to 36 so, when I get on the elevator, there is only one possible stop prior to me getting to my floor when going up or to the lobby when going down. Since 21 is the reception desk, more often than not, someone goes to 21, so I always have to wait an extra 5 seconds in the elevator to get to my floor. BUT, sometimes, just sometimes, no one pushes 21. Amazing, I go straight to my destination! (I told you this is a silly example.) But let’s think, if one day the 21st floor went under construction and no one was allowed on that floor, I would be guaranteed to never have to waste my 5 precious seconds waiting for people to get on and off the elevator. And sure, it would be nice, but it wouldn’t be anything special, it would just become another motion in my day.

The point is, I can appreciate the times that I do get to go straight to 22 but if I increased that frequency, it would ruin the experience. Not to say it wouldn’t make my life easier or better, it just would no longer be a PST that I can turn to to give me little sparks of comfort and joy.

From all that I have learned, happiness is not something we can buy or force, it is simply a positive mindset reinforced by the great idiosyncrasies in our life.