“God gave us the gift of life; it is up to us to give ourselves the gift of living well.”
Voltaire
It’s now how long you live, but how you live, that matters most. And in the how are innumerable paths. Question is, which one is right? Can we even know the answer?
Choice is the essence of your journey. Choosing between all those potential lives, all the dreams, desires, and yearnings that have touched your heart and made you who you are. There is no one right way to live. There are many, good and bad alike.
In the end, it’s your choice, no one else’s.
Yet many people choose based on influences that may not bring them to where they really want to be. What seems like good reasoning turns out to be a mistake, and thing with mistakes is that you have to live with them, not whatever or whoever influenced that mistaken choice. For that reason, be careful of the things that might trap you, or send you down a road that was never meant for you. Be it other people, the world, ideas, or fear, many things can stand between us and living a life that is uniquely our own.
1. Doing what other people want
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking.” — Steve Jobs
Some of the worst advice we ever get comes from people who mean the best for us.
“You should go into business.”
“Oh, I think you’d be a great marketer!”
“You can do that things you enjoy later. Focus on paying now, or you’ll pay later!”
“It’s good to dream, but you should be realistic. Do this instead and maybe work on that passion of yours when you retire?”
I listened to all of the above, and it only succeeded at wasting my money, my time, and precious opportunities. Was it bad advice? Not on its own. But for me, it was, because it contradicted with who I really wanted to be.
It might come from a friend, your parents, a coworker, or a total stranger. What someone else wants for your life may sound good. But guess what? They don’t have to live with the life they’re selling you. You do. And if you live by how what others think you should live, you might end up somewhere you don’t want to be at the expense of everything you really wanted.
When it comes to what other people think you should do, have the humility to listen, but also have the courage to say no.
2. The fallacy of sunk costs
“Don’t cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.” ―Aubrey de Grey
That voice of reason in that stubborn part of my head kept telling me to stick with it, even though I hated it, just because I had already invested myself.
“You came this far,” that voice says. “May as well finish.”
Has anyone in your life stuck with something because they were already invested? I know people who have. Some worked out well, I’ll admit. Others… no so much. Some stayed in business until it tore them apart. Others stuck it out in medicine even though they hated it, and ended up as burned out, miserable practitioners. Others finished a degree they would never use, at the cost of four years and tens of thousands of dollars.
“Well, I’ve come this far. I invested this much. I may as well keep going.”
Until what? Retirement? Winning the lottery? Graduation? Some idealized future that never comes? Some people stick it out for thirty years just because they’ve committed ten already. There may be reasons for that. Good reasons. But oftentimes, it is fear: the fear of starting over.
You can get back most of what you invest in something.
The one thing you can never get back is the time — and there’s so little of it to begin with.
When you arrive at the end of your life, those sunk costs will hardly matter compared to the sacrifice of what you could have been. You only get one shot. Don’t let the journey you’ve take so far, however wrong, dictate the journey you start tomorrow.
3. Using money as the foremost determinant of what you do
“Money is like a shadow. When you try catching it, you can’t. But when you move forward it follows you.” — Anonymous
I let so many opportunities pass me by, not because I couldn’t afford them, but because I was too cheap. Likewise, I’ve seen people work their whole lives chasing money, only to find out that they’re no happier for it. They had the house, the boat, the cars, the glamor… but they still lacked something so fundamental that they needed pills just to sleep at night.
Money is a tool, not a compass.
Determining your direction in life solely based on the dollar is not a recipe for a meaningful life. You may do well. You might be successful by other people’s standards. But you still have to wake every morning and look in the mirror and see your life for what it is, not what it appears to be. Money is important, but it makes for shallow company at the end of your life.
Looking at it one way, financial wealth is only one of the six aspects of a full life. It matters — but not when it comes at the expense of the rest.
Let meaning guide you, and let the money you earn serve that meaning, be it taking care of a family, creating something, or whatever else you have discovered to be worth the life you were given. And if that meaning just so happens to be making money, well, so be it, but let more than numbers dictate what you do, because you will have to live with the results.
As Tony Hsieh said, chase the vision, not the money, and money will end up following you.
4. Believing you can only be good at one thing
“Life is long if you know how to use it” — Seneca
We’ve all heard about the jack of all trades who is a master of none.
What about the master of a few trades? Is that so unreasonable?
There are so many quotes out there about how focusing on more than one professional path in life = failure. Yes, focus matters, but are we really so limited?
A lot of people have told me that it’s only possible to be great at one thing. One person scoffed when I said I wanted to write and pursue medical work. Really? I’ve since done both on an ever-improving basis that matters to me, and I intend to keep going. What’s unreasonable is expecting human beings, with all their potential, to narrow themselves down a single track.
We are capable of so much more.
What do you dream of doing? What makes your heart sing? Have you gone after it, or did you let it fall along the wayside? Why or why not? I say, if you have three dreams, go for them with everything you’ve got — because only then will you find out what you can really do, and it’s often so much more than you would think possible.
It doesn’t have to be big leaps and bounds. Small, incremental, consistent action is what turns dreams into reality.
5. Chasing impulsive pleasure
“Others may know pleasure, but pleasure is not happiness. It has no more importance than a shadow following a man.” — Muhammad Ali
We’re wired towards pleasure. Yet the most useful pleasures are the ones that take pain to acquire.
Life is a journey of hardships and victories, of highs and lows, valleys and peaks. It was never meant to be easy, or fun all the time. There is no neverland. There is no pleasure island. In the end, if we want to create a life worth living, we all have to bleed.
Chasing impulsive pleasure may be fun for a while, but it doesn’t end well. Like a drug addict who chases the pleasure of a high, a life lived with pleasure as its sole compass will eat itself alive. You need balance. In seeking a higher meaning than satisfying your need to feel good, you can create an existence that has a quality of pleasure no amount of irresponsibility could ever earn.
6. That you have to have everything figured out
“When I had all the answers, the questions changed.” — Paulo Coelho
I once met an elderly patient who had a shine to him that just wouldn’t quit. Old in years, young in spirit. We ended up talking, as often happens as we wait for a bed in the hospital. When asked about what he did during his life, he smiled and gave a mischievous wink, saying, “I’m still figuring out what I want to be when I grow up.”
He had already lived a wonderful life. Full of journeys. Success and failure. He didn’t have everything figured out. He didn’t have to.
Why so with any of us? It might seem smart to put off starting a journey until you know everything you can about where you’re going. The problem is, in life, you can’t know everything, not even close, and paralyzing yourself in analysis guarantees lost time, lost momentum, and lost learning.
I’m almost thirty. I’m still figuring things out, and I think I will always be in that process of discovering. That’s what life is. We may arrive at a career, a place in the world, but we are never finished.
You don’t have to have it all figured out before you start. Even along the way, it’s fine to feel clueless. Life’s not about having all the answers. It’s about seeking them — and that seeking is what makes life so wonderful, because the adventure is as long and as deep as we are willing to seek that thing that stirs our hearts.
Meaning is to be found not in a final, idealized place where it all makes sense, but in the midst of mysteries.
So go forth. Do something. Put the best plan you have into place, and see where it takes you. Don’t sit still waiting for things to pan out. Only by stepping forward can we see a little further into the mist. So step forward, without all the answers, and you might find that what you were looking for was there all along.
Starting tomorrow, who will you be?
“Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.” — C. S. Lewis
This journey is up to you, no one else. You need to be careful what ideas direct you, but at the end of the day, everything is your choice. You don’t need all the answers. You don’t need a foolproof plan.
You do need one thing: courage.
Courage to go forward despite not knowing. Courage to face your fears. Courage to overcome your doubts and vices. To venture into the unknown, as humans always have, and make something out of the potential that is your life.
The world needs that from you: the beauty that is yours to create.