Breaking Patterns: What Your Life Needs
Where are you?
Do you even recognize yourself? Your life has patterns. It repeats and repeats. You feel the friction and the pain when you break a pattern. When you break away towards something unknown.
It’s scary for sure, but that friction is a sign of personal growth. It’s a sign you’re actually on the right track. Otherwise you’re just coasting.
But first you need to know what the patterns are in your life.
Playing it safe feels right and it’s so very easy. We often miss and mistake opportunities based on how easy they are. It’s easy to start anything, but much more difficult to build something of value.
Starting a blog = easy
Writing everyday = hard
Getting a date = easy
Getting a date with the person you like = hard
Running a mile = easy
Running a marathon = hard
All this “hard” stuff is totally within your abilities –
but you have to want it bad enough (otherwise you would have started by now). But just because you can do something, does not mean you will.
If you have nothing better to do with your time than to spend it on Facebook, checking email, going to work, and doing the same thing on the weekends your life needs some major adjustment.
You need to shake things up yourself or life will do it for you (and it will).
Start exercising, start traveling, take a job in another country, build a website, write a book, make a movie, set an epic quest for your life (reminder = you’re already on one).
If you don’t see the patterns in your life and how each day was like all the rest, then your whole entire life will be like this. Same.
Comfortable, predictable, boring
Becoming a “fulfilled human being” is a goal young people want but are unclear how to aim for. No it’s not doing what everyone else is doing like following the template life before you and getting a 9-5 job, or taking the same vacations to the same places as everyone else.
It’s also not simply doing the opposite of everyone either.
It’s doing what you want to do
A successful man is someone who knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, and where they’re going. This is easy to write and so stupidly obvious – but we screw this up.
We major in something in college as a way to make money. We date whoever stumbles into our life. We go with the flow, hopping the currents of change will blow us into a place of wealth, happiness, and abundance…but that is never ever the reality for anyone.
You need to steer the ship yourself.
So where are you? How did you get there? Are you growing or are you coasting? With growth comes adventure, flexibility, and uneasiness. With coasting comes rigidity, predictability, boredom, death, and the feeling: “I can live better than this.”
This expands to all aspects of life.
You’re body knows this too, it’s telling you, are you listening?
The easy is doable, but is is worth doing? I’m not so sure. Starting is easy, but to really do anything takes persistence, luck, knowing what the hell your doing, and a few thousand hours.
So start something
It’s easy to do, but make it a choice of your own free will. Free and unteathered from the influences that drive decisions out of fear, desperation, or greed. Make this a way of life – keep your exposure to the unknown the norm, and your return to what is familiar comfortable but brief.