Beneath the flowers and the stems,
lie the roots and weeds to condemn.
You look so pretty up top,
underneath are you clean or a dirty workshop.
You must dig to find out,
look in every corner for why you may doubt.
Shackles and chains,
always deny what you wish to attain.
Grab a flashlight and look for the dark,
make it light and get it right.
One of the truest signs of intelligence is the ability of a person to understand that there are things out there in which they do not know about or understand.
This quote here is one of my absolute favorites in regards to this;
The wisest know most what they know least
Socrates
It may seem confusing on first read (much like the title of this post), but as you dissect it a little bit deeper you can finally put a pin in the meaning.
Intelligent people know that there is limits on their knowledge, and they also understand that there is truly an ever expansive amount of knowledge to be had during our lifetime. There are so many elements of our lives that are changing on a day to day basis, even down to the hour and the minute at the pace which we live in this modern age.
With more things happening faster than ever before, it is crucial that you understand this..
YOU DO NOT, AND WILL NOT EVER, KNOW EVERYTHING
Me
Harsh? A little. True? A lot.
Accepting that there are things you do not know will allow you to open up to those things. If you convince yourself you know all that there is to know, you will want nothing less than to learn more. You view yourself at the top of the mountain already, what more about climbing a mountain does someone who is standing at its peak have to learn?
The difference between you and said mountain climber is this, the mountains we face in our lives have no peak.
Can Tom Brady learn more about football and playing quarterback? Absolutely. Even though some may place him at the top of the quarterback mountain, does he continue to try and climb higher? Absolutely.
There are people below Tom fighting hand over fist to replace him at the top of the mountain.
Can Jeff Bezos learn more about business and building wealth? Absolutely. Even though some may place him at the top of the business mountain, does he continue to try and climb higher? Absolutely.
The point is that these two men understand that even though they may be considered the best at what they are doing, there is an endless amount of knowledge and potential for them that they must nail down to stay at the top and continue to raise the roof on expectations for their respective professions.
Understand that there are things out there that you do not know, but they are there for you to know. When you find this knowledge and apply it, understand that it will make you better at what you are doing than you are right now.
Thanks. (and good luck moving forward).
We all have experienced the back and forth relationship between pushing and pulling in our lives at some point.
When we want a girl, she doesn’t want us back. Then when we don’t want her anymore, she seems to want us.
When you are going out of your way to find a certain pair of shoes in your house you might have no idea where they are, but the next day when you have totally forgot about your search, they pop up right in front of you.
As many of you know I, along with two business partners, have purchased an online exercise supplement company called New Dimension Supplement Club.
In the process of our takeover there has been a lot of new stuff put on my plate that I have had no prior experience with. In these situations I tend to do pretty well and that is partly why I was excited to take the leap and begin this venture.
The more time goes by, the more tasks I have to complete, the deeper I get in to the world of e-commerce, the less I find out I know.
It has been taking a pretty good toll on me and I have been getting a little bit more upset than I probably should. After hours and hours of clicking yourself in circles and accomplishing nothing, sometimes I need to step away.
I take the stress off of myself by disconnecting from my desire to obtain a true understanding. When I completely clear myself of the stress, somehow, I suddenly know exactly what I need to do.
If I call it a night and go to bed, I often times wake up in the morning and get back on the computer to work again and magically click all of the right buttons and end up in the ever elusive locations I needed and stressed about just the night before.
I’m realizing that when I am stressed and upset about something, my energy I put out isn’t the energy I need to bring good in to my life. My vibration is too worried about what I can’t find, what I don’t know, that what I need to find is struggling to appear in front of me.
It can be easy to sit and sulk in our negativity, but stepping back and removing ourselves from the situation and from the negativity can give us the refreshing energy we need to obtain what we originally needed.
What I want you to take away from this is to not fight stress. It is okay to step back, press pause for a second, clear your head and your energy, and get after it again.
You will find that the silence and ease of your break will open up your vibrations to what you’ve been looking for the whole time.
Thanks.
You’ll never know how to get there if you don’t know where you’re going.
You’ll never know when you arrive if you don’t know where you’re going.
Once you get there, you will then have a new destination in mind.
Hitting the driving range a couple times a week has taught me a very important lesson that I don’t think I could have learned anywhere else.
Let me preface this by saying that I am an extremely amateur golfer. I lose multiple balls per round and I am the king of mulligans (if I’m paying to be out on the course I’m going to take as many shots as I please).
Now, referring back to the first statement of this article.
You’ll never know how to get there if you don’t know where you’re going.
On the driving range I find myself simply setting a ball down and hitting it. I have no certain distance in mind, and I really have no criteria for a successful hit.
This sets me up for failure.
However, when I pick out a certain distance or a certain flag, I start to find myself better able to critique and make corrections that need to be made, in order to get closer to said flag.
I am 24 years old, and often times I find myself swinging blindly in the game of life. No end game, no goal in mind.
This makes it difficult to move in the right direction. Simply swinging a golf club and hitting a ball in any random direction does not allow for self reflection, and it does not allow for progression in my golf game.
It is impossible to know how well you are moving forward and growing, if you aren’t aiming.
To me, aim is the most important part of life. At this stage in my life, I need to pick out a flag on the driving range and consistently aim for it. There will be things I do that will send my shot slicing in the opposite direction of that flag, and much like a bad golf swing, there will be ways that I will need to know how to self correct.
You’ll never know when you arrive if you don’t know where you’re going.
Second piece to picking out a flag, is that it creates a way for you to self reflect. If you have no flag or distance in mind, you’ll never be able to know what is good and what is not. If I pick out a flag that is 50 yards out and a little bit to the right of me, I have a determined set of criteria that will classify to me as a good hit.
40 yards and right on line with that flag would be a good hit.
60 yards and right on line with that flag would be a good hit.
50 yards distance but 10 yards to the right of the flag would be a good hit.
Picking a flag and aiming for it allows you to better understand what you are doing right and wrong, and ways to make sure that you can consistently deliver a good hit.
Now imagine I have no flag picked out, what constitutes a good hit?
Maybe 100 yards and straight ahead? Yes, that could possibly be considered a good hit. But in reference to what?
It is crucial to pick a certain flag, because if you aim small, you will know what you need to do differently to hit your target. Much like life.
If you don’t know what you want to do, who you want to be, where you want to be, what you want to accomplish, you will never have a way to tell if you are truly succeeding and fulfilling your potential.
Once you get there, you will have a new destination in mind.
Final takeaway from the driving range.
If I am at the driving range and I can hit the flag that is 50 yards out and a little bit to the right of me every single time, what will I do? I will pick a new flag.
I’ll pick the flag that’s 150 yards out and to the left.
Now the entire sequence starts over. I may struggle with this at first, but I will know in my head what I will consider a good hit in reference to this new flag. It all starts with me knowing what I am aiming for.
We as humans get enamored with our own success, and we become addicted to it. We seek out more, and in seeking out more success we find more failure. Triumph over our own failures is what feeds our fire. I will struggle with this 150 yard flag, but once I can consistently hit it every single time I will move on to another, just like I previously did.
I urge you to take no more blind swings, pick a flag for every thing you do and make sure you aim small.
It is okay to divide up your swings and work on multiple flags a day, but do everything with a purpose. Only take swings that help you get better and help you sooner achieve your goal of perfecting that flag.
I have mentioned this before, but this is something I want to write about once again simply because it is one of the loudest points being made in my life right now.
We live most of our lives on a fine line. We walk a fine line between what we want to do, and what we need to do. Majority of the time, it can be difficult for us to see that what we need to do will bring us more benefit in the long term, but what we want to do will bring us more joy in the short term.
This is something we all experience. The hour long nap or Netflix break will provide us with a little bit of rest, something easy that does not require too much effort, but might set us back on something in the future. Maybe we skip a homework assignment and say we will do it on Sunday before it is due.. we have all been there.
But what tends to slip our minds in these situations is the only two things we truly have.
Time. Energy.
Those two things are all that we have on a daily basis. We have 24 hours, and we have the energy that we have provided ourselves with up to that point.
People struggle to find the connection between these two things and let them both slip away.
They then find out later down the road that we have cut our time and energy in half, and doubled the work that is required of us.
Some will say that ‘I like to wait til the last minute so I can put some pressure on myself to actually get it done.’
This is such BS.
It is laziness, and it is the wrong inner voice taking control of us in the current moment and telling us that we basically have unlimited time and energy to accomplish what we need to accomplish.
From past experiences in your life, you should know that this rarely works out.
How many times did you, as a student, say you were going to wait until the day before the assignment was due to complete it? Next thing you know you wake up the day it is due and you have yet to complete the assignment. Now you have to bust your ass to finish something with less time, because you abused your right to control your time, and you also have less energy simply because you have less time.
The energy we have to complete tasks and live our lives is not necessarily constant, because it can be observed that we obviously have more in some situations and less in others, but our energy levels always balance out.
For every spike, we have a crash. Every moment we demand excess energy from ourselves, we find ourselves later down the road with limited energy.
This plays in to the homework example simply because if you offer yourself half the time to complete something, you in turn offer yourself half of the energy. You cannot double your energy in half the amount of time.
Time brings with it energy, and energy is a by product of the time you are choosing to spend.
It struck me to write about this topic again because I am facing moments in my life that are demanding of much of my time and my energy.
I am in situations where I am required to choose certain areas of my life to devote my time and energy to over other areas.
If I decide to work on my writing, that is one hour less of my day that I have to spend in the gym.
If I decide to sit at a computer and get to work on my new business opportunity, that is less time and energy that I can devote to preparing for my teaching certification tests.
Some of the most successful people I have seen tend to be experts at dividing up their time and energy.
They understand this concept and are able to control their time and energy either from just an exceptionally high level of internal understanding, or time budgeting.
Once these successful people learn how they operate the most efficiently, they implement those strategies in to their lives and almost run on an autopilot routine.
The same devotion of time and energy to the same wide variety of daily tasks will create an amazing commitment to your goals, and put you down the most optimal path that you can find.
Begin to understand how you operate, and find the way in which you can live your life that will provide the most efficient work flow, with the highest upside.
Thanks.
Something I have mentioned before in a few of my posts is how what we put out in to the universe is ultimately what is going to come back to us.
Just like my piece last weekend that spoke about judgement..the judgment you put out, is the judgement that will come back to you.
Again, this is a topic that I picked up from my visit to church this weekend. A new series was recently started called ‘What Happy Couples Know’ and it will touch on a handful of different aspects of relationships and marriage. However, I am going to keep the relationship side out of it and relate it back to us as individuals.
As the title says…
If you don’t like what you are getting, take a look at what you are giving.
If life seems to be beating you up a little bit lately, or people you come in contact with seem to be a little bit more rude or standoffish, take a look at the energy and the vibe that you have been putting out in to the world lately.
It can be difficult to look back and truly reflect on this, but if you can do it honestly, there is a good chance that you will find that what you have been receiving lately is because of what you have been giving lately.
Now obviously, this is not always the case.
But a good place to start when you are upset with how life has been treating you, is to take a very close look at how you have been treating life. It may surprise you when you reflect that you haven’t been as polite, or as loving as you need to be in order to let those feelings come in to your life.
So before you curse the world and everybody in it for what has been coming to you as of late, take a few steps back and slow down and truly try to recognize the energy that you have been giving to the world and the people around you.
This leads in to the next point that was a major take away from church for me this weekend..
If you want something different, be it.
The example used in the relationship context of ‘What Happy Couples Know’ was if your significant other has not been as kind or as affectionate towards you recently, you be those things for them and you should get that in return.
However, an important note (I know I said I wasn’t going to make this about relationships but I feel the need to include this piece), do not give only to receive. Give to give.
Aside from relationships, if you want something different in your life, you need to be it.
If you want 6 pack abs, you need to be the person that does the things to get 6 pack abs. You need to eat clean, exercise regularly, etc.
It sounds a little bit obvious, but it really struck a chord with me.
If you want something different than what you are getting in your life, you need to change. You need to be the difference. Do not expect the outside world to simply change because you want it to or change for the better just off of chance.
People get stuck in ruts because they think something may get better with time when actually things get better with action.
A better life comes from you, not what is around you.
So take those two quotes and run with them. Etch them inside of your brain and understand that the things are coming to you are most likely because of what you are putting out. The energy you receive is the energy you are giving, and this is true in your relationship with your spouse or significant other, and your relationship with the universe.
Thanks.
