You are going to have to get real with yourself. You are going to have to decide that you love yourself too much to stop settling for less than what you really deserve.
The people who are meant for you are going to meet you on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort zone around the things that actually move you forward.
When we are afraid of failing, or feeling vulnerable, or not being as good as we want others to think we are, we end up avoiding the work that is required to actually become that good.
The breakdown is often just the tipping point that precedes the breakthrough, the moment a star implodes before it becomes a supernova.
A mind-blowing, singular breakthrough is not what changes your life. A microshift is. Breakthroughs are what happen after hours, days, and years of the same mundane, monotonous work.
Other people’s lives do not revolve around you, nor do their thoughts. They are busy thinking about themselves in the same way that you are thinking about yourself.
The fact that you are imperfect is not a sign that you have failed; it is a sign that you are human, and more importantly, it is a sign that you still have more potential within you.
You must mourn the loss of your younger self, the person who has gotten you this far but who is no longer equipped to carry you onward.
Take a piece of paper and a pen, and write down everything you aren’t happy with. Write down, very specifically, every single problem you face.
Rock bottom becomes a turning point because it is only at that point that most people think: I never want to feel this way again.
Human beings are guided by comfort. They stay close to what feels familiar and reject what doesn’t, even if it’s objectively better for them.
If you really want to change your life, let yourself be consumed with rage: not toward others, not with the world, but within yourself.
One of the biggest reasons that people avoid doing important internal work is that they recognize if they heal themselves, their lives will change—sometimes drastically.
Sometimes, we make choices because we don’t know how to make better ones or that anything else is even possible.
We are not really wired to be happy; we are wired to be comfortable, and anything that is outside of that realm of comfort feels threatening or scary until we are familiar with it.
In uprooting, you are not allowing yourself to blossom; you are only comfortable with the process of sprouting.
Instead of perfection, focus on progress. Instead of having something done perfectly, focus on just getting it done.
Any other reason you offer for not showing up and doing the work is simply you stating that you prioritize that reason over your ultimate ambition, which means that it will always take precedence in your life.
It’s no longer about the great ideas you had about how to change your business; it’s about whether or not you did.
Start quantifying your days by how many healthy, positive things you accomplished, and you will see how quickly you begin to make progress.
Maybe the kind of success you’re really hungry for is to feel at peace each day, or making your life about travel instead of work.
When you are more compassionate about other people’s lives, you become more compassionate about your own.
People will respect you far more if you can acknowledge that you are an imperfect person—like everyone else—learning, adapting, and trying your best.
By not assuming you know everything or that you need to seem perfect, you can admit when you’re wrong, ask for assistance, and lean on others sometimes.
There is a difference between failing because you are trying something new and daring, and failing because you are not showing up, doing the work, or being responsible for your actions.
If your schedule is unmanageable, you’re never going to be as effective or productive as you could be.
You do, however, need to understand that the people you spend the most time with will shape your future irrevocably, and so you must choose them wisely.
You only have so much in a day. Rather than using it to try to become good at everything, decide what matters most to you.
You may feel as though you cannot take action, when you most certainly can. You simply do not feel willing, because you are not used to it.
Instead of being afraid of anger, we can instead use it to help us see our limits and priorities more clearly.
Jealousy is a cover-up emotion. It presents as anger or judgment, when in reality it is sadness and self-dissatisfaction.
Other people are not here to love us perfectly; they are here to teach us lessons to show us how to love them—and ourselves—better.
The very act of holding these fearful thoughts within our minds is exactly how the fear is controlling us in the first place.
Instead of trying to battle, resist, and avoid what we cannot control, we can learn to simply shrug and say, and if that happens, it happens.
When we are in full acceptance, fear leaves our consciousness and becomes a non-issue. It is at this point we realize that it always was.
Your first reaction to something is very often the wisest reaction, because your body is using all of the subconscious information you have logged away to inform you about something before your brain has an opportunity to second-guess it.
So the big, huge goal that you’re working toward? You’ll get there, and then there will be another mountain to scale.
Very often, the things we envy in others are fragments of our deepest desires, the ones we won’t allow ourselves to have.
If you want to change your life, you need to make tiny, nearly undetectable decisions every hour of every day until those choices are habituated.
If you want to spend less time on your phone, deny yourself the chance to check it one time today.
At our most instinctive, physiological level, “change” trans-lates to something dangerous and potentially life-threatening. No wonder why we build our own cages and stay in them, even though there’s no lock on the door.
Instead of trying to use your intelligence to hack what’s next, try to get better at where you are currently.
Mental strength is not just hoping that nothing ever goes wrong. It is believing that we have the capacity to handle it if it does.
To heal, we don’t need to avoid it. We need to develop logic to see situations for what they are and respond appropriately to them.
The reality is that worrying does not protect us in the way that we think it might. We cannot beat fear to the finish line.
Rather than spending your time shrinking yourself and your life out of fear of potentially confronting some kind of hardship, work on developing your self-esteem and know that even if you were to fail, you wouldn’t be judged, exiled, or hated in the way you fear.
You let go when you build a new life so immersive and engaging and exciting, you slowly, over time, forget about the past.
Everything you lose becomes something you are profoundly grateful for. With time, you see that it was not the path. It was what was standing in your way.
What you’re underestimating is the fact that though you can leave a place, or a person, or a situation…you can’t leave yourself.
Mental health and self-mastery is the ability to see and feel and experience a thought without responding to it. The response, or lack thereof, is where we regain our power and reclaim our lives.
What you get for going through something painful is that you become more resilient, more self-sufficient, more empowered.
Fear is not going to protect you. Action is. Worrying is not going to protect you. Preparing is. Overthinking is not going to protect you. Understanding is.
We falsely believe that if we constantly remind ourselves of all the terrible things that we didn’t see coming, we can avoid them. Not only does this not work, but it also makes you less efficient at responding to them if they do.
The real glow up isn’t proving the people from your past wrong. It is finally feeling so content and hopeful about your future that you stop thinking about them entirely.
Nobody is looking at you the way you think they are. Nobody is thinking about you the way you wish they would. They are looking at themselves. They are thinking about themselves.
The next time you’re trying to craft a glow up story that is compelling to others, ask yourself why you are still waiting for their approval. The answer, almost always, is that you still do not have your own.
Once you have a clearer image of what your most powerful self is like, you then need to evaluate what habits, traits, and behaviors are actively holding you back from fully embodying that person.
The ability to say to yourself: “I know I struggle a lot with this, so I’m going to take my time and work on it” is one of the most powerful things you can do.
There is no path in life that you can take that will be free of resistance from others, and so it is important that you not only become okay with being disliked, but you anticipate it and act anyway.
Powerful people are the ones most unfazed by small disturbances and most willing to fully process and work through the big ones.
“Validating your feelings” sounds like a big term, but it really means one thing: It’s just letting yourself have them.
When we stop resisting feeling sad and just let ourselves be sad, we realize that it will not last forever.
Inspiration can be misleading. Big dreams not backed by strategic plans are big flops waiting to happen.
The most important thing you can do to live meaningfully is to work on yourself. To consciously become the happiest, kindest, and most gracious version of yourself.
When you are genuinely on your own path, the future won’t be clear, because if it is, you’re actually following someone else’s blueprint.
Your ultimate purpose is to become the ideal version of yourself. Everything else flows from there.
The reality is that inner peace is the true happiness, and everything else is just a false means of trying to convince yourself that you are “okay.”
Remind yourself that your worries are a fabrication of your mind’s need to identify potential threats for survival, and true happiness is being here in the moment.
When you are consistently sidelined from your own anxiety, it’s because you don’t have a plan regarding the thing that’s making you scared.
Stop trying to predict what you can’t know, and start putting your energy toward building what you can. You and your life will be better for it.
Reflect on what went wrong, learn from what went wrong, and figure out how you’re either going to make up for it or change the outcome in the future. Then let it go.
Focusing on what happened disproportionately to what’s happening now, or what you want to happen in the future, is what keeps you completely stuck.
In almost every case, it is simply informing you that there is more out there for you, and it is pushing you to go pursue it.
Many people would undoubtedly agree that they believe the purpose of life is to enjoy it. However, so many people struggle to be present and actually experience their lives as they are.
Practice arriving into today by focusing on taking life one day at a time and doing the most with what you have in front of you currently.
Genuinely happy people are more at peace than they are ecstatic about everything they experience.
You cannot avoid all pain, but you can absolutely avoid a lot of suffering by staying focused on your internal growth.
Happiness is refusing to fill your schedule to the absolute brim so you can wring the most you possibly can out of every second of your life.
If you really want to enjoy life, you have to make time to do what you loved when you were young.
What’s your favorite line so far?
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Forever Winter 