How to Make Your
Life Worth Reading About
“If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or
none at all.” — Joseph Campbell
Usually,
anything heard on mainstream radio isn’t worth listening to, but today they
posed a thought-provoking question I liked.
It
was this, and I’m paraphrasing here:
If you picked up a book and discovered it was your
biography from birth to death. Knowing that you can’t rewrite the narrative,
would you read past your current point in life?
That’s
a great question! And when put to the public, the general response was “no,” people
didn’t want to read how their lives played out.
But
for me, perhaps oddly enough I’d happily read it.
What is it that’s gotten me to this point?
What do I think is essential to living out a life you’d
happily read about?
These
are the questions I will answer in this article and provide you with a guide
you can shape to write your own personal bestseller.
Here
we go.
Be the Author of Your Life, Not the Victim of it
“When life happens, you can be either the author of your
life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices — accountable or
unaccountable. This may sound harsh, but it’s true. Every day we choose one
approach or the other, and the consequences follow us
forever.” -Gary Keller
The
truth is, most people are not choosing to be the author of their life.
Rather,
life is just happening to them. Their daily
choices — both consciously and
unconsciously, have them acting as a mere character in a story
with no idea as to how it will unfold.
“Most people drift through life without devoting much
conscious energy to figuring out specifically what they want and what they need
to do to take themselves there.”
This
is why most people do not want to read the story of their life. Without any
real direction behind their daily activities, every new page beyond their
current point would simply be a complete and utter shock to them.
In short, it probably wouldn’t make for very good
reading.
Getting
away from this starts by asking 3 simple questions:
1. Where
am I now?
2. Where
do I want to be?
3. How
am I getting there?
Once
you know where you’re going and how you’re getting there, you’ll be bringing a
purpose to your everyday actions, you’ll be heading where you want to go, and
you’ll have more certainty in your future.
Live a Life of No Regrets
“A life worth living might be measured in many ways, but
the ONE way that stands above all others is living a life of no regrets” -Gary
Keller
A
while ago I spoke to a friend of mine who was on the fence about taking a year
off Med school to travel the world. I gave him one piece of advice,
“Whatever decision you make, ensure that it’s one you
can live with for the rest of your life.”
When
I spoke to him again, he told me he’d taken the leap and was going to do it. I
asked what pushed him over the edge:
“If not now, when?” he said, “I’m not going to be young
forever, I can’t put a guarantee on the future. If I don’t do it now, I might
never do it and I couldn’t live with that regret.”
To
me, that’s a great reason to do anything. I’ve said in the past, “A good decision is one that leaves you
saying, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”
But too often, people don’t live
with this mindset. People would rather do what’s easy, or feels good in the
moment, even sometimes they’ll do something because it’s what other people
expect of them.
But
these are all terrible reasons to do something and will likely lead to regret
later on down the line.
A
lot of the pages will be read asking, “what if?” “Why didn’t I take a
chance?” “Why did I make that decision?”
Keep
the end in mind. Make the present count for a well-lived future.
Establish Habits that Take You Where You Want to Go
“People do not decide their futures, they decide their
habits and their habits decide their futures.” -F. Matthias Alexander
A
sure-fire way to write the pages how you want and achieve your ambitions is to
build habits around what’s important to the core areas of your life.
Why? Habits
take out most of the work.
If
you regularly do something until it becomes a habit (And the science says it
takes an average of 66 days to acquire a new habit). The payoff from developing
that habit is great.
1. It
keeps you on track of where you’re going.
2. It
simplifies your life.
“When you build a habit, you don’t have to waste mental
energy deciding what to do.”
Lock
in habits so they become part of your life and you can basically ride your
routines to where you want to go.
In Conclusion
Don’t
worry about writing your life story for anyone else; make it a book you’re
proud to read.
Be
the author of your story, not the victim of it. Deliberately do the things that
take you where you want to go; don’t just let life happen to you.
Write
your life in a way that leaves you with no regrets. Do the things that make you
say, “I’m glad I did,” not “I wish I had.”
Finally,
establish habits that align with the plot you desire. You are what you do
repeatably.
Now,
lets go make our lives worth reading about it!
https://theascent.pub/how-to-make-your-life-worth-reading-about-68ddfd257a3b
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