Last week, Chris Penn blogged his 11 Little Secrets to staying happy, healthy, productive and sane. Fellow bloggers followed suit, turning the idea into a mini-meme.
So I’ll bite.
Justin Kownacki’s 11 Little Secrets to Being Moderately Successful
1. Don’t Use Your Job as an Excuse for Not Having a Life. Ideally, you enjoy your job. Optimistically, you love it. And realistically, you can stomach it for 40 hours a week in order to pay the bills and keep a roof over your head. The rest of your time is your time. Live it.
Everyone can live a life that’s filled with amazing moments. Not all of that will happen at the office. Don’t feel guilty for not living there.
2. Create Something You’re Responsible for Sustaining. Maybe it’s a business. Maybe it’s a work of art. Maybe it’s a child.
When you’re emotionally invested in something, you’re living a life that no one else has lived. That’s your story.
When something (or someone) relies on you for its very existence, that gives you a clearer perspective. Your choices now have consequences. You can be a hero every day. Embrace that, because it’s a responsibility not everyone has the opportunity (or the stomach) to enjoy.
3. Pretend Your Kids Are Watching. Imagine the idealized version of you, the way your kids think of you when they’re too young to realize that you’re just another flawed human being.
Now make the same choices that the idealized version of you would make. Isn’t it wonderful be to able to look up to yourself?
4. Observe People. If you only ever live inside your own head, you’re missing the big picture.
Everybody you meet is a litmus test for your own beliefs. Are your presumptions correct, or are people more complex than you give them credit for?
As a freelancer, I choose to work from cafes every day because a) I like coffee, and b) I like watching people. I like hearing and seeing the ways they interact. I learn from the choices they make, and from the way they phrase their questions and answers.
And what I learn from observing others helps me better understand myself.
5. Surround Yourself with People Who Challenge Your Presumptions. The world is the way we make it, so reminding yourself that people have differing worldviews is helpful when you’re trying to understand why the world doesn’t always work the way you’d like it to. It can also help you think differently about your own beliefs, and lead you to separate the grey areas from the black and white.
Plus, how you’d solve a problem is not always how I’d solve a problem. If you know how others would act in your place, your artillery of possible responses to any situation increases exponentially.
6. Be Comfortable Alone. Ultimately, we live our lives alone. If we’re lucky, we spend those lives affecting and being affected by others, but that’s entirely external. The bulk of your life is lived alone, in your own head.
Be comfortable there, because there’s no getting out.
7. Draw a Line Between Quirks and Flaws. Our irregularities come in two flavors: the quirks that make us individuals, and the flaws that prevent us from succeeding. Don’t waste time perfecting your quirks when your flaws are what’s actually holding you back.
Your high-pitched laugh or your tragic fashion choices are quirks; others may find them annoying or endearing, but they’re incidental to who you are as a person. Your chainsmoking, your grudge-holding and your refusal to show up on time are flaws; if they don’t kill you directly, they’ll certainly degrade your quality of life.
Remember the idealized you? The idealized you doesn’t have those flaws. Work on that.
8. Be Specific with Your Language. Words mean something. Don’t take them for granted.
Like him or loathe him, Christopher Hitchens is one of the most specific writers I’ve ever read. The words he chooses to express himself mean exactly what he intends for them to mean, which leaves very little room for ambiguities or misinterpretation of his ideas.
Relying on tired metaphors and figures of speech is lazy, and it muddies our ability to understand one another. When you’re writing or speaking, be conscious of every word you select. It’s better to use your 1000 word vocabulary well than to sleepwalk through a minefield of ambiguities.
9. Walk Where You Can, While You Can. America is a car-based culture, which leads us to consider most locations as widespread vistas. But that’s just one sweeping point of view.
Walking through a neighborhood gives you the time to see the bricks and pavement that comprise the daily lives of the people who live there. It prompts you to consider the ways our lives are connected, and to marvel at the ways our lives have evolved from the times when walking was the only way we could have gotten from place to place.
It’s also good exercise, great “thinking time” and better for the environment than driving.
10. Take Naps. Few things in life are more pleasurable than pressing the pause button on your obligations and recharging. Don’t let a puritanical work ethic rob you of the freedom to disconnect on your own terms.
11. Have Extremely Few Inviolable Principles. Life is a grey area. People, situations and opportunities are constantly evolving. What’s “right” for one person may not be “right” for you, and it all may be “wrong” tomorrow.
The fewer filters we invent to ignore other people and discount their opinions — or to judge them into categories, instead of as fellow complex humans — the richer our lives and the greater our potential will be.
Plus, the less you believe in, the less often you’ll consider yourself a hypocrite. And then the idealized version of you will have a lot less explaining to do.
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Tags: Armchair Sociology, christopherpenn, common sense, ethics, honesty, inspiration, language, networking, perception, personal
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