The Choice Is Yours
Day 20-26 / 1000
Pain is something that happens to you. Suffering is something you choose.
This week, I wrote about the difference, and about what happens when you stop carrying things that were never yours to hold.
Here is what has been on my mind this week:
The choice is yours
Within your control
Winning, or losing, support your friends
Negative visualization
Excitement of a new project
Feeling proud
The Jersey lesson
1. The choice is yours
How do you distinguish between “pain” (inevitable) and “suffering” (optional)?
We are ultimately choosing our own suffering.
The fact that every person on this planet has experienced pain is obvious. The pain is inevitable.
We all have experienced all sorts of pain from childhood to adulthood.
Either physical or emotional pain, both of them are parts of life. They are not nice but they are not going to disappear.
But what about suffering? How do we distinguish between these two?
Let’s look at the breakup.
When you break up with your boyfriend or girlfriend you feel heartbroken.
If you really loved this person and cared for them you are going to feel strong emotional pain. Some people say they feel even physical pain after such an experience.
This is pain. It’s inevitable. We all feel some kind of it.
But what happens after the breakup?
We have two routes a person can take.
The first is the path of learning from this experience and taking the good with you forward.
Sooner or later you are going to understand that there is more than one relationship you are going to have in your life.
It’s painful, sometimes for weeks or months, but eventually you understand the lesson and you are more than happy to move on.
The second path is the path of suffering.
This is the unnatural part which is chosen by you to follow.
It is never-ending trying to get the person back.
Listening to sad songs to feel even more sad.
Harming yourself.
Feeding yourself the dreams that you two are going to be back together.
You are dragging yourself behind willingly without any reason.
If the person would like to be with you then you would either never break up in the first place or would come back immediately.
The lesson from this is usually even stronger because it’s much more heavy.
Eventually, and hopefully, you move on. You learn the lesson that self-imposed suffering is not leading anywhere, in this case.
I think there is a special place for pain and suffering in the mindset of people who use these two as fuel to achieve something extraordinary.
Especially those who use it to fuel physical performance.
It’s almost alien how a person can turn something so strong and painful into power.
But this path is not for everyone.
The choice is yours.
2. Within your control
What does it mean to focus only on what is “within your control” when everything feels chaotic?
Things in life tend to get chaotic from time to time.
Sometimes it’s just one week, other times it’s months.
When everything feels chaotic, it is hard to focus on things which are in our control because nothing feels like it would be in control or even close to it.
This period of life is often very overwhelming. You can feel like there is no way out.
I often describe this feeling like drowning.
During this time, it feels like even breathing takes more effort than ever before.
What do you do when something like this happens?
Try to slow down. Find time to step back and reflect on past days, weeks, or months.
What is the thing that has been stealing energy from you?
Sit down with your own thoughts, write a journal, or meditate. The only way out is in.
Things might feel like they are only external and that the world is suddenly against you, but this is rarely the root of the problem.
Yes, sometimes life is not fair, and it happens that many external things occur at once. But it is the self-representation of these things which gives them the power.
If you carefully examine what is happening inside of you, you might discover the underlying cause of your chaotic life period.
Maybe it is the relationship which is making everything look harder.
Maybe your boss is sitting on you for no reason and it’s subconsciously making your life miserable.
Or maybe it’s your habits which you said to yourself 6 months ago you were going to change, and nothing happened, so it feels like you are going against yourself every day and can’t escape.
Once you take these steps to see what’s happening inside of you, you will find what is within your control.
This realization and finding of the root cause will allow you to decrease the amount of chaos that is happening in your life right now, at least to the most controllable level.
Outside things are always going to be there. It might just be a chaotic year in your job or family because of a lot of changes.
You can keep at least a way more down-to-earth perspective once you discover the inner catalyst or problem which is multiplying everything from the outside so much.
How do you feel lately? Are things within your control, or are they chaotic?
3. Winning, or losing, support your friends
How do you support a friend who is winning when you feel like you are losing?
I believe that it is important to support friends under any circumstances.
It doesn’t matter if I’m losing right now, this person is still my friend and deserves the support.
Would it mean that just because my friend is winning and I’m losing right now, it is my friend’s fault? I don’t think so.
During our life all of us go through periods of ups and downs.
It just doesn’t make sense to support others only when I’m winning.
I want my friends to succeed all the time, and I believe that they want the same for me.
There are many ways to support your friend.
Small talk, pep talk, deep talk, short voice message, long text, FaceTime call, or even a greeting card with your words.
These are all the spoken and written ways to support a friend, and all of them count.
You can support a friend by showing up for them at their football match, or being there at their public presentation, or by standing in the crowd and shouting for them when they pass you while they run their first marathon.
There are countless ways to support a friend.
Do what you can at the moment. There is no right or wrong.
Friendships are not about a scoreboard of who supported the other more or less.
Friendships are about being true to yourself and showing up in your best possible way for your friends.
Friendships are for the long run, so choose your company wisely.
What is your way to support your friends?
4. Negative visualization
What is the value of “negative visualization” in a world that is obsessed with toxic positivity?
Negative visualization sounds to many people like something really negative.
The phrase itself carries this feeling like it would be something bad.
When we look aside from how it sounds, we come to the fact that it’s a beneficial and realistic practice to do.
It’s not about not trusting yourself, or diminishing your dreams even before you started working on them.
No. It is understanding of how life works sometimes.
We can make all the plans but the next day everything can be turned around because of something unexpected which we didn’t count on before.
We aim to achieve big things, and we should, because human potential and capabilities are tremendously huge.
But at the same time, using negative visualization helps us be prepared for the worst.
It’s like calculated risk. I’m not going to jump off the cliff to the sea without checking the landing area, rocks, and depth of the water, or without other people’s tips on whether I’m going to kill myself with this jump.
In business you do business plans, competition analyses, and the rest.
You don’t go into a business which might be oversaturated in your region unless you have some competitive advantage.
It’s thinking about the worst which allows us to see the best possible outcome too.
There is no only black or only white.
There is black and white and other hundreds of colours, and life has them all prepared for you.
Have you ever tried to use negative visualization to prepare yourself for something good?
5. Excitement of a new project
How do you keep going when the initial excitement of a new project fades away?
I will remind myself why I started with it in the first place.
For me it’s especially hard to resist new “shiny objects.” They call it the shiny object syndrome.
Obviously I just gave myself this diagnosis on my own, but in recent years I noticed that I get extremely excited about new projects and opportunities.
What I want to do at that moment is to put everything else on the side and pour my entire being into this new thing.
I’m talking sitting on it for entire days, going to bed late because it’s almost impossible to stop myself from not doing it or working on it.
I’m basically obsessed the moment something excites me.
On one hand it is advantageous in many ways because it gives you this unlimited energy to pour there.
On the other hand it’s a devil’s loop.
It happened so many times that I didn’t finish what I started.
Sometimes because of work and other responsibilities.
Other times I actually had no time for it and didn’t even start at the end. Just invested money, prepared everything, but didn’t manage to start.
I’m trying to get much better at this, making more conscious decisions, and thinking more strategically before jumping into new projects. But at the same time I’m definitely still not the best.
That brings me to the question.
How do you keep going when the initial excitement of a new project fades away?
There are two options in my opinion.
First, you don’t. You pass the project to someone else, or you abandon it completely and move on to do something else.
This path is not always bad because there are most certainly projects which are not serving us and not bringing us anywhere.
But be careful to not just jump from one to another ending up not finishing anything.
Second, you remind yourself why you started in the first place.
Like me with this project of writing 100 words for 1000 days, hoping to build the writing habit that will lead to me being the author of a book one day.
There are going to be days when you want to quit, when you feel lazy, when everything else seems to be more important, when you travel, when you are tired, when you are sick.
Before I started this project I tried to remind myself of this fact many times.
I was trying to prepare myself that not every day is going to be filled with endless motivation of sitting behind a computer and pouring my heart into this keyboard.
But I know why I’m doing this and that single thought is the one which keeps me going.
Remind yourself why you started.
What was the fire inside of you that felt so exciting that you couldn’t stop thinking about this project and then finally started? What is the achievement at the end of this quest?
This is your gasoline which you pour into your tank when you think you are running on empty.
Keep going. You got this.
How do you feel with those moments when the excitement fades away?
6. Feeling proud
What was the time you felt proud of yourself for a reason no one else saw?
Let me answer first here.
I felt proud of myself many times.
It is definitely an important skill and technique to practice.
Times when I felt proud of myself for reasons no one else saw are the minor ones.
After a tough day, being proud of myself that I managed to get through.
After a hard workout when I wasn’t sure if I would make it, and I did it.
After tough conversations which I was nervous about but managed to do it.
I believe that there are more moments to be proud of ourselves than we think.
It’s not only about the big milestones. It is about the small every day wins which keep us going forward.
I’m especially guilty of being one of those overachievers who, when achieving something, basically just move on to another thing without proper acknowledgement.
It’s like saying: Well cool, I achieved it, what was the next thing on the list?
I’m trying to get better at noticing the smaller things more often and giving myself credit for achieving something.
Because as I said, it’s not always about the big milestones. It’s about the small every day wins that keep us going.
Celebrate the small things so you can celebrate the big things.
And don’t forget to be proud of yourself during the journey, not only at the end of it.
I would love to hear about a recent moment when you felt really proud of yourself.
7. The Jersey lesson
What is one failure you experienced that actually set you up for later success?
Let me tell you one vulnerable story of mine.
Early in my 20s, right after graduating high school, I had an experience that influenced me greatly.
Back then, my dream was to become the best bartender in the world.
Not a small dream for a 20-year-old guy that just finished high school.
Me and my friend with the same dream found a job in the UK.
All we could think of was London and the epic cocktail culture there. It was a dream to land there one day and make my way to the top.
But back then we were not staying in London. We were heading south, to the small island called Jersey.
They have famous cows there, but that’s pretty much it.
We found a job in a bar where we wanted to get better at speaking English and kickstart our bartender careers.
I had this huge vision for me, this master plan of how my life is going to go in the next 5 years. Step by step, everything was set.
Not that fast forward, it took less than a week to fly back home from there.
The job was nothing like promised over the interview. The apartment was kind of shit. And the owner tried to steal our passports and offer us work at his painting company to earn some money.
In one word, a terrible experience back then for young men trying to enter the world of adults.
Looking back on this experience, it ended up being a really great one because I learned a lot from it and very early on.
My dreams were not completely crushed, but reality hit hard.
My master plan had suddenly dissolved in the clouds of Jersey as the plane took off.
I found myself back at my parents’ house, questioning my life and what I’m supposed to do right now.
This experience taught me that life will almost never go as we planned.
There are always going to be some bumps on the road, missed turns, blind streets, and other things making the ride through life not as smooth as you thought.
But that’s the beauty of the journey. If it wouldn’t be like this, you wouldn’t have stories to tell, you wouldn’t have experiences to learn from.
This experience was one of those that set me up for later success.
Not only in bartending but in life in general.
I didn’t become the best bartender in the world, nor the best bartender in my country, but I managed to compete against some of the best ones and ended up being in the top 5 during one of the World Class competitions in Slovakia.
It was and still is a big achievement for that part of me and my younger self which wanted to be the best at that craft.
To learn such a valuable lesson early on was life-changing for the rest of my 20s.
I learned how the real world out there really is sometimes. It is cruel and unforgiving, but at the same time it is beautiful and full of things and places to experience, and lessons to be learned so you can become the better version of yourself.
What is your failure that set you up for later success?
I aim to deliver the most personal stories, insights, and lessons from real-world experiences I have lived through over the past decade. As I continue building my life and trying to be a better version of myself, I am documenting this journey and the lessons from my life for people who might need to hear them.
- Lukáš