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How to Live Life to the Fullest Through Personal Growth
Note: This is a guest post from Mark Harrison of Thirty Days to Change Your Life
Many years ago, I came across a book by Anthony de Mello called Awareness. De Mello was an Indian Jesuit priest whose writing was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church. To me, he is a great source of inspiration, and he has much to say about happiness and pain.
Life is easy, life is delightful. It’s only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.
One of De Mello’s key messages is that, by nature, life is not a struggle. Attachment – greed, craving, ambition – is the cause of all misery, and so to be detached is to be happy.
Does this mean we should have no preferences? Should we not want to achieve more? Should we not desire and seek out the good things in life? I think it would be absurd to say that we should have no preference between different experiences and conditions, but a distinction needs to be made between preference and attachment.
In The Importance of Being Smart, I wrote how smart people can achieve much more – with much less effort – than those who just work hard. There’s a comment there by Frode that I’d like to discuss:
… lazy people seem to be smarter, as they use a lot of brain energy on finding an easier way to do stuff.
Interesting, isn’t it? Lazy people seem to be smarter. But I agree that thinking like lazy people is a good way to work smart. Here are two reasons:
- Lazy people find ways to accomplish something with the least amount of effort. If you are lazy, you will diligently find ways not to work. Applied to finishing tasks, it means that you try to accomplish it with the least amount of work possible.
- Lazy people ensure that when they work, they do things that have impact. Why? Because it allows them to gain more with less. They don’t bother doing something that won’t give them results.
Note: This is a guest post from David Turnbull of Adventures of a Barefoot Geek
I live in the future. No, this isn’t a McFly-moment, it’s a always-have-my-thoughts-in-the-future moment. And it’s a problem.
Living with your mind focused on the future causes you to miss out on the now and our lives are made out of moments of now, not of moments of the future. By living in the future you don’t actually live at all.
Of course, it’d be nice to live so I’m trying to enjoy the journey – the present. Here are some ways to do that:
1. Focus
Pure focus is bliss. When your thoughts, actions and emotions are all directed towards a single function you are focusing and you are in the present. You should get lost in your work. Set a deadline for yourself to finish a task and see your level of focus skyrocket.
Persistence is important to achieve success, but giving up is also important. I’ve written about persistence before, so here I want to look at giving up.
Why is it essential? Why is it necessary to give up? Because it allows you to focus your energy on the few things that are truly important. By giving up, you:
- Stop unfruitful effort. What’s the point of spending your time and energy on something that doesn’t work? The more you spend your time and energy there, the more you waste your resources.
- Avoid spreading yourself too thin. There are probably many things that you want to achieve. But you can’t achieve everything you want. Your resources are limited so you need to choose and prioritize. If you try to do too many things at once you will end up achieving nothing.
- Reduce your stress. Pursuing too many things means giving yourself unnecessary pressure. Don’t let your ambition stop you from enjoying your life.
- Free up time for your loved ones. Don’t be so busy that you don’t have time for your loved ones. By giving up, you ease your burden and free up time to build meaningful relationships.
Note: This is a guest post from Douglas Cartwright of Living Words
Recently, I was watching a television show about Dean Potter, an American ‘slack line walker’ who strings one-inch thick nylon ropes between high mountainous places and walks across them.
Whilst that’s impressive, you might think “I’ve seen tightrope walkers before.”
But Dean is different. He does it without a balancing pole, or a safety harness, and the line is, literally, slack unlike the traditional high-wire walker. So it moves in the wind as he walks on it.
That’s amazing – but what is more interesting is what he says about why he does it:
“When I’m on a slack-line the feeling that if I slip, I die, totally overwhelms me…I’m after a feeling of total control of my life…that’s what I’m after in all of my life…I’m drawn towards these obsessive goals…”
Do you want to live a happy life? I’ve written before about being happy, but here I want to take a different angle and look at one important cause of unhappiness: loving stuff. Many people try to fill the void within them by buying more and more things they don’t need. When new gadgets come out, they buy them. When their friend has a new car, they want it too.
But why does it happen? Why do people love stuff? The reason is they believe it will make them happy. They believe the more stuff they have, the happier they will be. Is that true?
The answer is no. Perhaps they think they are happy, but they can actually be much happier if they do it differently. This isn’t just my opinion; scientific research supports it. I will discuss it more thoroughly below, but first let’s see some disadvantages of loving stuff: Read the complete article »
