Some time ago I was reading a passage from the life of one of the readers of Marc Chernoff, co-author of the blog Marcandangel.com, the same people who inspired me with the story of how a string of failures can lead you to success (well worth reading).
In that passage, the reader told Marc how, at one point in his life, he lost his job because of a back injury. Evicted from their apartment and with a five-year-old daughter, he had to move in with his in-laws, and he stayed trapped in a tragic, self-destructive spiral for a long time.
He had lost his positive outlook and the strength to fight for anything. But one day, as he sat on the porch feeling sorry for himself like so many other days, he got a call from a friend. Crying, his friend told him: “My daughter has just been killed in a car accident.”
He admits that at that moment his view of life and of his own situation changed. He felt the loss of his friend’s daughter and the pain his friend was going through. But inevitably he also felt fortunate, because however bad things were for him, his daughter was still alive.
That call brought him back to his senses. He had lost many things in life, including the will to fight, but until then he had focused far more on everything he had lost than on fighting for everything he still had.
After that call, he came back with a very different mindset. He was ready to move on.
Any day can be the first day of the rest of your life. Any day you can decide to do things differently to bring about a change in your life. Any day you can decide to get back up and fight for everything you want and care about. In other words, any day you can decide to be happy again, but to do so we have to give up a few things, in the form of personal commandments:
1. Give up who we were in the past.
When things get very hard, our runaway mind can get caught in one of the worst battles there is: between what we remember and what we feel today. It doesn’t matter who you were yesterday, what you had yesterday, or where it seemed you were destined to end up.
You can’t live on memories. As the saying goes, “use the past as a springboard, not as a sofa.” If you used to be the chief executive of a major company and today you are unemployed, use your experience as a chief executive to fight for new goals. But remember that you will have to fight for your future. Who you were yesterday no longer matters. What matters is what you do today.
That’s why the best words someone can hear when they tell you about what they have lost are usually: “Tough luck. Now get back up and keep fighting.”
(Read: Keys to success when things get ugly)
2. Give up excessive worrying and overthinking.
When you have too many fears and keep going round and round in your head, don’t think you are solving problems. If anything, you are creating them. Worries and fears don’t remove tomorrow’s problems; they rob today of its peace and calm. I don’t know whether life is long or short, but clearly the trick is to enjoy it, not to suffer it.
3. Give up fixating on all the wonderful things we unfortunately don’t have.
“If only I had Bill Gates’s house, my neighbour’s car or Belén Esteban’s luck (she is a Spanish TV celebrity)…” Many people get stuck lamenting everything they don’t have, or believe they should have had in order to be happy. This is the attitude that stops people from enjoying what they do have, which is usually quite a lot.
The same goes for things that aren’t material, which might be emotional or have to do with personal fulfilment. Most of the good things we find tend to come out of other endings.
In the end, you have to savour the present, enjoy the things you have and use them to reach what you want to achieve. But as we always say, don’t make your chance of being happy depend on reaching a goal. That’s not quite how the game works. You should be happy today and, from that state of mind, fight for your goals.
4. Don’t let other people’s judgements control your life.
People know your name, not your story. They have heard what you did, but they don’t know why you did it, nor do they understand your past. In the end it isn’t about what others think; what you think of yourself is the only thing that counts.
Only you know what is right for you and your life. While we can welcome and appreciate advice from certain people (ones we have chosen and trust), we need to learn to tune out the noise of comments from people who don’t really know us and who should probably sort out their own lives before meddling in other people’s.
These may seem like very basic points, but the truth is that, to a greater or lesser degree, most of us have gone through one of them. Others have gone through all four, and some are still stuck in all four at once, waiting for the starting gun to get their lives going again.
We all have a past and we have all lost people and things, but nobody says we have to carry all of it around in a backpack or keep staring in the rear-view mirror. Eyes always forward, and the lighter the backpack, the better.
Further reading
- 4 decisions that can change every part of your life
- 10 toxic behaviours that are ruining your life
- 17 steps to survive the worst moments of your life
Featured image: Wiki.cullin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
