7. Measuring your success by material wealth.
We’re bombarded with images of stuff, with the implication that this stuff somehow elevates personal value and success. So I encourage you to think about how much of your self-worth is connected to owning, giving, and getting STUFF. Because truthfully, success, happiness, and peace of mind have little to do with STUFF.
So what does help create these things?
To laugh often and love genuinely. To respect others and judge less. To win the affection and sincere smiles of children. To earn the regard of honest peers and endure the betrayal of fake friends.
To appreciate the beauty surrounding you wherever, whenever you are. To find the good in people and situations. To give what you can and leave the world a little better than you found it. To have explored ideas and passions and sung at the top of your lungs with jubilation. To know that at least one life has breathed easier because you have lived.
This is what makes a life successful. This is how happiness and peace of mind are attained. Read The Untethered Soul.
8. The need to keep everything the same.
Things change. People and circumstances come and go. Life doesn’t stop for anybody.
Life moves very fast. It rushes from calm to chaos in a matter of seconds. It happens like this to people every day. It’s happening to someone right now.
Sometimes the shortest split second in time changes the direction of our lives; a seemingly innocuous decision rattles our whole world like a meteorite striking Earth. Entire lives have been swiveled and flipped upside down, for better or worse, on the strength of an unpredictable event.
Most of the time these changes come when you’re not asking for them and not expecting them, but they happen. So are we helpless? Are we puppets? No. These changes are going to come; you can’t help that. But it’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you grow; that’s when you find out who you truly are.
So when you find yourself standing on a threshold, the crossing of which will seemingly change everything, don’t fight it. Begin the next chapter in your life.