You haven’t fully lived your life if you never once screwed up. Encountering a person who hasn’t made a single mistake in his life is like finding a needle in a haystack.
Life is rocket science that’s pretty challenging to understand. Very often, we find ourselves in a tight spot without even being aware of how we come to that place. There’s a good side to screwing life up, though.
While making tremendous mistakes can make you want to live in a cave away from the crowd and never show yourself to the public again, it can also edify worthwhile lessons.
Screwing up can breathe new life into you if you decide to welcome every painful experience— may it be for better or worse. However, if you don’t want to royally screw up your life, there are certain things that you need to avoid or consider.
Let’s get into it!
Keep your belief system in check
A belief system is a set of principles that enables us to analyze our day-to-day reality. These are the ideologies that you believe are true about the world, serving as a guide to your decisions. It is what drives you to choose what things you find valuable, who to follow, and who to listen to.
People who have not established a strong belief system are most likely to believe something just because someone they know tells them. They often get swayed in making decisions because they have no solid foundation to lean on.
Come to think of your job. What is it that drives you to choose that field of career? Is it because you want to pursue it, or someone else told you to do so? For many, it’s the latter. The same goes for religion, how you view money and family.
If you often align your parents’ belief system with yours, you will screw up. It is important to understand that the world that your parents lived in before is way different from the world now. A lot of things have already changed.
It is necessary to do a reality check every now and then to avoid being miserable. German-American billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel asks us to bombard ourselves with these questions. What are the things that you find so valuable and the things that make you happy? What are the ideologies you believe in but most people oppose?
We’ve mentioned earlier the downside of not having a strong belief system. Let’s be fair. Having a strongly founded belief system isn’t always good as it can take us away from reality.
Always remember that reality is negotiable. The things you believe in aren’t always reliable, and sometimes, they are limits that our society has set.
There are people who lived their whole life firmly believing in their belief system just to find out that they are heading the wrong way.
Avoid relying on outside factors
Letting other people direct your life is one heck of a good way to screw up your life. Of course, you can’t control who your parents and siblings will be, you can’t control the place you were born, but you can control where you are headed. You are the driver of your life. The steering wheels are in your hands.
Living life like a leaf in the wind may sound like a romantic poem, but it isn’t entirely a good piece of good advice. Just imagine letting the wind decide where the leaf would fall, and it suddenly fell right into poop in the streets. You wouldn’t want to be such a leaf, would you?
The best way to predict the future is by building it yourself without relying on others too much.
The truth is, nobody really cares about how you care or should care about yourself. People will come and go in your life, no matter how much you want them to stay.
The only person who will remain by yourself from beginning to the end is no other than yourself. Thus, it is your responsibility to believe in yourself, be accountable for your decisions, and provide the best possible life for your future. No one else is going to do this for you.
Uncover your full potential and live up to it. Start investing in yourself, and you’ll see that you can do the things you thought you couldn’t.
Refrain from picking short term convenience over long term opportunities
We all want an easy life. Who don’t, right? This is why a lot of people nowadays choose short-term convenience over long-term opportunities. Many of us aren’t too fond of delayed gratification. We want a thing in an instant. We want to take the shortest route as much as possible.
Short-term convenience brings misery in the long run. What seems to be an “easy” life at first often ends up with a complicated life down the line. Paved roads usually get picked than paths that are less traveled.
Why walk on a rocky and bumpy road when there’s a highway available? But here’s the thing.
In the world we live in now, untraveled paths are more likely to bring people to triumph. People who have chosen the path that fewer people are taking became trailblazers, changing the way people do business and disrupting various industries.
Go out of your comfort zone, learn delayed gratification, and be willing to sacrifice. It’s better to suffer now and enjoy the seeds that you sow later on than enjoy now and suffer for the rest of your life.
Goals are absolutely zilch
Both winners and losers harbor the same goal— to win. People love to set goals, and I bet you have some too! However, planning isn’t for everybody. It means nothing to some.
Goals don’t make a person better, and it doesn’t give them an advantage over others. In fact, goals are nothing but a double edge sword. Once you set a goal and achieve them later on, you’ll have nothing else to do afterward, so you need a new one. On the other hand, if you fail to accomplish your goal, you’ll be miserable, not having the guts to go for them again.
Setting a goal isn’t actually bad, and it can be a great tool…but only if people would use it properly. The problem with having goals is that people get attached to them while not having a clear vision of how to achieve them. Consequently, they only ended up procrastinating.
If you are among people who tend to procrastinate— if you think that you’re not a goal-oriented person— you can try similar strategies that will help you thrive.
Every day, ask yourself: How can I make today better? Target short-term goals rather than long-term ones, and you’ll see your life improve in just a matter of weeks.
Don’t think you can do it all alone
Great successes are always achieved in teams. No one in this world has managed to build an empire by detaching himself from all the people in the world. We are all social creatures, and we need someone to help us in our ventures.
An African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together.”
Having a support group increases the chances of success since it will be a two-way relationship where others can rely on you for things that they know nothing about, and you can depend on them for something you aren’t fully aware of yet. In the grand scheme of things, you need people around you.
