Some Things I Can Only Think I’ve Learned About Life

Some things I think I’ve learned about life (as of May 14, 2013):

• The only way to succeed big is to fail even bigger. Don’t let your failures turn you off from achieving success. Failure is a normal step on the road to success. Work hard, fail, brush your self off, stand back up, learn from your failure, and work even harder. Success will come and will be all the sweeter.
• Don’t make happiness in life one of your goals. Happiness is an emotion that comes and goes. Learn how to feel content no matter what life deals you. It’s all good: the rough times and the happy times. They all mold you into a stronger and more mature human being.
• Never make life choices in order to please someone else. This is your life to live. That someone else has made their own choices. But know: choosing to live your life to please someone else, when you do it, is YOUR choice. If you’ve been trying to please someone else, blame only yourself.
• Successful people have shed blood and tears to get where they are. Rather than waste energy on envying them, work as hard as they have if success is what you want to achieve.
• Talk to people. There is something to learn from everyone.
• There is no such thing as good people and bad people. There are just people. We all do bad things; some more than others.
• No matter how hard life gets, know that it’s a temporary condition. Things WILL get better. Just wait for it.
• It’s OK to be 45 and not know what you want to be when you grow up.
• If you can’t love yourself, don’t expect others to.
• Be happy about the way you look. You are beautiful. So is everyone else. Do not aspire to have “the perfect” body. There is no such thing. Bodies look different. Aspire to be healthy instead. To do so, forget diets. Instead, eat healthy food and exercise regularly.
• Exercising regularly is something that is very difficult to start. Always remember that. Once you’ve started, keep it up because it is so much easier to keep it up than it is to start all over again.
• It is sometimes shocking to look in the mirror and see the natural signs of aging. Always remember that it is infinitely more shocking to look at an aging woman and see puffed up lips, unnaturally stretched skin, and balloons in place of boobs.
• Live life with no regrets. Whatever choices you have made are your own. Learn to accept them. Learn from them.
• Don’t be afraid to bring a little bit of risk into your life, as long it is a calculated risk. If you live life too safely, the best you will do is stay in your place. Embrace life, run towards it and not away from it, live on the edge sometimes, and accept some risk. You will see how much more colorful and exciting life can be.
• Living life riskily, for the sake of risk, is just plain stupid.
• Always know where your priorities lie. Your priorities may be very different from other people’s priorities. That is all right. Do what YOU need to do.
• Our lives are divided into phases. Learn to appreciate each phase for what it is and live it to the fullest. Be content with the phase you are going through. For example, child rearing may be a phase in your life. Enjoy it. Do not live through it feeling sorry for all the things you cannot do while you are in it. It’s one of the most beautiful phases of life and it passes by too quickly. There will come another time when you are in another phase and you can then do other things.
• Dreams are a blessing. They brighten up your life by simply having them.
• Dreams come true by making sure they do. Plan and have patience. Today’s dream does not have to happen tomorrow. It can happen ten years from now, and it will, if you work on it hard enough.
• Each of our lives and each of our circumstances are different. Do not look to others and what they have done with their lives and try to emulate. Live your own life with what you have been dealt. If you live your life trying to be someone else, you will most probably never get there and you will most probably never be content. Look inwardly and try to find out what YOU want and what YOU can do.
• It is wonderful to be able to read about other people’s lives in books. There is always something to learn from them. It is even more wonderful to live your own, full life and have something of your own to tell.
• Don’t judge. Ever. We all make mistakes. We all have our flaws. When you feel yourself beginning to judge others, look inwardly at your own weaknesses and inconsistencies.
• Do not assume that someone who lives life differently from you needs you to enlighten them on the best way to live a full life. They may be far better off than yourself even if you do not see it that way. Or they may be going through their own journey and doing things their own way. Your lessons learned, in the end, are simply YOUR lessons learned.
• People are different. God created them that way. Respect God’s creations and the differences they contain. That is what makes life so beautiful.
• As long as you stay in your little corner of the world, consider yourself ignorant. Open yourself up to people, to ideas, to ideologies, to places, and then make decisions about life. Until you’ve opened your mind up to everything new, your actions are more than likely based on mostly spoon-fed knowledge or on social conditioning.
• If you feel you need to “protect” your faith by not learning about or engaging with others, then know that you have weak faith. Strong faith comes only when you know what else exists out there, when you have engaged with it, when you have looked deeply into it, and then have proactively decided what best fits your needs and understandings.
• True friendship does not require constant communication and does not involve blame games. No matter how long it has been, a true friend will be ecstatic to hear from you and you will pick up with them as if you had just been together yesterday.
• What works for someone else won’t necessarily work, or work just as well, for you. Find your own way in life.
• Do not consider anything you think you’ve learned about life as final. Lessons change and often times what you think you know turns out to be wrong.
• Add a grain of salt to everything you think you know. Be flexible about what you consider to be fact. If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I know near to nothing.