The first step in mental attitude you need to take in life is to accept responsibility for your current and future situation.
Most people limit themselves to making easy, safe decisions, where fear of what might happen ends up acting as a brake. Over time, those fears are what make us regret not having made other, less easy and less safe decisions that were more in line with what we wanted to achieve.
“In a few years, you’ll regret not having started today to bring about certain changes in your life.”
Risk is an inherent part of living a good life. You can’t truly live without taking risks. Here are some of the risks that smart, happy people, and those more inclined to succeed, take in their lives:
See also: 16 hard things you’ll have to do to succeed
1. They take the risk of failing and getting hurt.
We always say that the only person who never fails is the one who never tries anything. But that isn’t entirely true, because if you never try anything, you’ll always end up failing in some way over time. Sometimes the price a person pays for not leaving their comfort zone and clinging to what’s safe is losing their sense of meaning in life. As a general rule, people who don’t take risks end up, as the years go by, regretting that they never tried.
And this applies to every area of life. Over the course of your life, someone will probably break your heart, you’ll break hearts, you’ll make people pay for the mistakes of people from your past, and you’ll probably feel like crying over hundreds of things that will happen.
But that’s life, and you have to learn to live with it.
You’ll also lose people you thought you couldn’t live without, but you’ll end up living without them and finding much better people.
Hold on to this line: “With a little patience, I have seen the unforgettable become forgotten and the indispensable become superfluous.”
Leave the past in the past. Take whatever lessons you can learn from it. Work on a new project as if you had never failed, and treat your new partner as if you had never been hurt.
That’s the only way to live a full and honest life. You have to take risks knowing that if the outcome isn’t what you hoped for, you’ll have hundreds of new opportunities to try again. Enjoy the process.
2. They take the risk of taking full responsibility for their own happiness.
When you become an adult, there comes a point where you run out of excuses and people to blame. It isn’t your surroundings, your family or your friends who are responsible for your unhappiness. It’s you.
Happiness comes from your own actions and decisions. If you think you need someone else to be happy, you’ll be unhappy until that person arrives, and you’ll be unhappy when that person leaves or lets you down.
Change that mindset. Your partner should know that you’re happy with them, but that you’ll also be happy without them.
See also: Why you should stop trying to be happy
Have your last three partners all been jerks? Then it’s quite likely that the jerk is you, or that your radar is off and keeps steering you towards a particular type of person. Only by taking responsibility for what has happened to you in the past and what is happening to you now can you improve your future.
If you change nothing, nothing changes. So stop blaming others.
Also stop making excuses for not achieving what you want to achieve, for having something you don’t like or for not having something you’d like to have. If you want something, go for it, knowing that achieving it depends only on you.
“When you blame others for what you’re going through, you deny responsibility for your life, and so your situation becomes permanent.”
Blaming others, making excuses and criticising those who have what we want (envy) are the steps that lead us to a life full of misery and failure.
See also: What leads you to poverty, according to the author of Secrets of the Millionaire Mind
3. They take the risk of starting over.
Many people cling to things, places or people even though they know they’re not good for them. Others talk about the past as if the best part of their life had already happened. But no: we should adopt the mindset that the best is always yet to come.
That’s why we should make it a priority to keep looking for new purposes, goals and objectives.
It may seem hard to cut ties with certain things we have today and start from scratch, but remember that all easy things were hard at first, and so everything hard will end up becoming easy once we face it head on.
It’s simply a matter of starting to take the necessary steps towards what we want.
If we don’t like something, we get rid of it. If something adds nothing to our lives, we let it go, whether we’re talking about things or people.
And basically, this is what smart people do: people who know that happiness depends on them, on their actions and on the decisions they make. They know the outcome might not be what they hoped for, but they also know that as long as they keep moving and fighting for what they want, they are living to the full.
Don’t be afraid to throw out what doesn’t work, and don’t be afraid to change your life for the better. Be afraid of exactly the opposite, because in a few years you’ll regret not having fought for the things you wanted, for a life more in line with your interests.
Featured image: Degrer, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
