Don’t go through life hedging your bets, always holding out and hoping that something better will be around the corner. Don’t fret and be paralyzed by what you might be missing out on. Make the best choice that you have available to you and own the decision. Go all-in and make up your mind that whatever you do, you are going to make the best of it. Life “isn’t what it is”, it’s always what you make out of it, and we’re the ones who get to make that choice.

Life very rarely hands you anything. Things you want don’t come gift wrapped just waiting for you to open them. Most of the time it’s a struggle to create the opportunities for yourself to take advantage of. You’ll need to work hard day in and out to get even a chance to do the things you aspire to.

That’s why, when life sees fit to just up and hand you something, where it parks an opportunity right in front of you with the door wide open, hop in and take advantage without hesitation. If you don’t take the ride, eventually life will close the door and ride off without you. Capitalize on the chances that life gives you. Don’t overthink things and end up accepting mediocrity instead.

“For all of the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. Pro and con lists are just as bad. If it’s important to you and you want to do it “eventually,” just do it and correct course along the way.”

– Timothy Ferriss

Our lives are filled with any number of journeys that we embark to try and make ourselves better. Maybe it’s going to college. Maybe it’s trying to lose weight and get in shape. It could be learning a new skill or talent. As with any journey worth taking, along the way there are going to be times when we mess up. When we make mistakes or backslide into bad habits.

Maybe we don’t do as well on a test as we were hoping or we have a bad week where we eat a lot and don’t get to do our normal workout. It’s all a part of the process. There was never a best-selling book where the story goes “They headed out, and then they got there, the end!”. We should expect that there are going to be challenges along the way.

For me, the fault comes when things don’t meet my expectations and I begin to lose motivation. I expect perfection and I have incredibly high standards for myself. It’s too easy to spiral when things don’t go the way you want them to and to give up on everything you have worked on. It’s a fool’s approach, because nothing will ever be perfect. We’re humans, not robots. It’s practically a part of the deal that we are going to eventually make a mess of things.

When things go wrong and start to get away from you, instead of thinking about where it fell short or where you made a mistake, think about how far you have come from where you were when you started out. If the journey was important enough for you to start on it, it’s important enough for you to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and keep going when it goes awry. Don’t throw it away and have to start over again. Hold on to the reality of your progress over the dream of perfection.

Live your life to impress yourself. Don’t rely on other people to give you validation or depend on them to give you accolades when you achieve something you know is impressive to you. They may shower you with praise from time to time but their rain clouds will roll on. People are too often worrying about what’s playing in the next episode of their own LifeShow™ to pay much attention to what is going on around them. Don’t let that cheapen your accomplishments. Be impressed and take pride in the goals you accomplish. Let the good feelings come from within. That’s a well that won’t run dry.

This marks my 50th consecutive day posting something here. Doing a site like this is something I never really saw myself doing, and I had no idea what to expect going in to it. I still really don’t. It’s still a little weird to me that people from all over that I’ll never meet have seen my stuff, and some liked it enough to follow me or come back. I just assumed no one other than the people I tell about it would ever see it. It’s a pretty cool thing.

Writing has been an interesting ride for me. Some days I write very personally and include a piece of myself and no one really sees it. Other days, I post some random quote I happened to find that I liked and people find it and eat it up. That’s half the fun, I never know what will happen. But ultimately, doing this has made me happier than I could have expected. Forcing myself to write every day helps me to be more positive in general, appreciate the things that happen around me more, be open to new experiences, and helps remind me every day that life is beautiful.

So thank you to everyone who stops by and checks out what I post here, both the people I know and the strangers I never will, I appreciate it. Hopefully you get something out of it, I know I have.

Keep looking for the things you love in life, and pursue them with all you have when you find them. Have the courage to go all in and keep going even when you doubt yourself or it seems like the world doesn’t care. Life is weird, and things pay off in unexpected ways. It’s a wild ride, buy your ticket and enjoy it while you can.

I’ve written about this topic briefly before, but one of the things I firmly believe is that it is never too late to do anything in life. So often I hear from people that they feel like they’ve messed up their lives and have wasted them. That they didn’t expect to be where they are at their age. They were expecting to have a more cookie-cutter life. Maybe that’s married with a house and a kid, maybe it’s being in the career they always dreamed about. Maybe it’s just the feeling of having a purpose that they are still struggling to find.

But that’s one of the beautiful things about life. We’re the ones who keep our own score. There’s no official rulebook to this thing. Eventually it will all click, maybe not when you expected, but rather when it should for you. Once it does fall in to place, the only thing standing in your way will be you. You will have a choice to let regret tell you that it’s too late, that if you had only started earlier in life you could have done the thing. Or, you can listen to the voice that knows that doesn’t matter, that you can’t change the past or get those years back, but that no matter what happens, 10 years from now, you will be 10 years older than you are today. When you are 10 years older, do you want to be the person that marvels at how far they have come, throwing everything they had into something? Or the person who wonders where another 10 years have gone?

As sure as the sun will rise, life goes on, with or without us. Everything in our lives, good and bad, has made us who we are today. No matter how long it takes, just remember, it is never to late to be who you want to be.

“To leave the world a better place, to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived, this is to have succeeded.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it’s a feather bed.”

– Terence McKenna

It’s hard to argue with the laws of nature. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. This seems to apply to our own lives as well. When you try and make a positive change in your life, you have forward momentum for a while. You push forward, make progress, grow as a person, do things that you didn’t think you were capable of.

But then, just as you feel yourself reaching your highest heights, something happens. You feel yourself slipping backwards. Like a rubber-band collapsing back you feel pieces of your old self creeping back in. The voice inside you starts whispering doubts in your ear. You begin to wonder how you even did it in the first place. You worry about being able to keep it up. You start going back into your shell, your comfort zone.

It’s a natural thing. There is something about us that resists change, even when it’s positive. There is some odd part of us that wants to sabotage success. Maybe it’s that the weight of expectation is more difficult to bear than being the underdog and surprising people when you accomplish something.

The thing about a rubber-band, though, is it snaps. If you push and stretch yourself long enough, you can break through that haze of doubt that accumulates around you. Every time you resist the urge to fall back, the voices get a little quieter. The whispers mean less and less. You remind yourself that your progress is real, it’s something that you did to get here and that you have it in you to keep going. The doubts are the figments. They burn away like a fog under the light of the sun.