Happy and motivated are powerful, yet tricky beasts. Sometimes they are easy, and you find yourself wrapped up in a whirlwind of excitement. Other times, it is nearly impossible to figure out how to be happy and motivate yourself, and you’re trapped in a death spiral of procrastination.
Attitude is everything
10% of your life consists of things you willed or brought about. Don’t sweat that small stuff. 90% is all that you cannot control, the stuff that just happens to you. How will you deal with those things? How will you react? What will you learn? The key to these questions is the attitude. That’s great news, in a way.
No matter your level of formal education, no matter how far you think you got in your life with your career or relationships. None of these things (the 10%, remember?) matter if you have not fostered three most important attitudes. Both can be infinitely scaled. Their power is limitless if you learn how to attend to them.
First is gratitude, the attitude directed towards appreciating anything and anyone. The ability to assign a value to something that others overlook. The deep, bottomless wellspring of being thankful for your health, your family, your job, anything. This is the secret to true richness. It never runs out. And best: it is not a scarce resource, unlike any other resource in the world.
Second is levity or humility, the attitude of not taking yourself too seriously. Never forget where you came from. Never forget what you are: just human. No matter how high you fly or how low you fall, it all just seems so much easier if you tread lightly if you remember not to take yourself and those many projects of yours too importantly to the point of agonizing about them.
It is fine to strive and seek. But this too shall pass. Don’t forget that in your darkest hour and it will set you free.
Resilience
Resilience is the attitude to weather anything from the gentlest breeze to the strongest gale threatening to derail or break you on your journey. Some call it growing a thick skin, a tough hide, robustness or fortitude. No matter what you call it, foster it because you have no idea what people are capable of surviving.
The world is not necessarily cruel by definition, but it can be cruel by ignorance, by the apathy of nature, by forces so large they can toss you around like a speck of dust to make you know your place in the scheme of things. Those times can hurt. A lot.
I wouldn’t lie as you will likely have your fair share of hurt even if you did nothing to deserve it. For those times, I wish for you to have the resilience to suck it up and then get back to work.
Stay true to your values
The goal of life, if there is any, is to gain self-knowledge. To learn who you are and what makes you tick. What makes you tick is this squishy, intangible but very real set of values that make you the person you are. It is the compass that was implanted in your heart when you were born, then shaped by your upbringing and experiences.
If you ever feel lost in life, if you don’t know what you are supposed to do, if you don’t know what is even worth doing, chances are you have not been in touch with what it is you most value. If there is any task worth doing, any adventure or ordeal worth going through, these things are all only helpful as later seen by their ability to help you articulate or confirm your values.
Keep it simple, since as much as you like to think you could be this incredibly complex person, chances are there are some 2-3 core values that make you who you are that define your choices and preferences in people, places, and occupations.
Make it your life’s work to figure them out – I mean to figure them out, to know them without the shadow of a doubt. Then do what is necessary to affirm them, defend them to the death if you should be so inclined. That is what it means to be lead an authentic life. Lead one. It’s not the only way to live, but the noblest in my opinion.
Oh, and I forgot to mention: some of your values can change throughout your life, just to make things a bit harder. Where would the fun in it all be otherwise?
Always return to kindness
You may wonder if this is not just one of those values I talked about above, and I would tend to agree if it were not for the fact that kindness is not just a value. It is something so enormously important I would place it in a category of its own. Whatever your values, whatever you do with yourself, never forget to be kind.
Let me rephrase this since we all forget a lot of the time (we are human): try not to forget, and when you eventually do, make it up by returning to kindness. Don’t ask why. If you have to the reason is this: because it’s the right thing to do.
Listen, life can be short. It can also be very painful and unpleasant, mostly because you put yourself at the center of the universe. But the world is too vast for your small heads. So don’t torture yourselves unnecessarily. The trick is to think of others, to live in service of others, not because it will serve you later in return, not because you expect something from them, but because this is what you were put on the planet to do.
Let me put this more bluntly. Everything you have ever learned, everything you have worked so hard to achieve so far, all that you have accumulated in riches and experiences and glories and war stories – it all amounts to nothing ultimately. That is unless you have found some way – some tiny, modest or outright ingenious way – to put it to use to help others.
Help them find comfort, help them by loving them, by keeping them companionship; help them survive, help them thrive, help them learn something, help them find themselves – anything – but please be of help in some meaningful way to you. And throughout all this: be kind more often than you are not.
Remember, kindness is not the goal; it’s the path. When you stray, just get back on, it’s no big deal.
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Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
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