The Three Principles of Crafting a Great Life
Do you want to have a great life? Well, I can tell you how to do it because some very basic principles can lead to a great life, no matter what you want to do. Want to be a pro-basketball player? A CEO? A stay-at-home mom with five kids? Are you young, old, or middle-aged? Are you rich? Poor? Middle-class? These three principles will work for almost everyone and take you where you want to go.
Let’s start with…
1) You’re either growing or getting rotten: There is no standing still in life. In every part of your life, you’re either going forward or backward. Whether you’re talking about your health, your career, your relationships, your knowledge level, or your skills, you’re either improving or getting worse.
While it is impossible to work on everything at once, the moment you become content in an area and think you can afford to coast is the moment you start going backward.
Granted, not everything improves or decays at the same rate. At 20, if you’re already in a pretty good spot, you may be able to afford not to pay a lot of attention to your health, but at 40? At 60? You are going to rapidly decline if you aren’t working on getting better.
Right after the honeymoon, when everything is going great in your relationship, you may be able to skate a little bit in your relationship. But, what if you’re still doing it in year 5 when your sex life has dropped off a little? When your husband is finding excuses to get out of the house? When you realize you’re dressing like a frumpy old maid for your husband and saving your hot outfits for nights with the girls? You better get to work, or your relationship may be at risk.
You think you can coast and still get that promotion at work? Still get by with going through the motions when your kid is going through something? Do you think if you haven’t advanced as a human being from 20-to-40, you’re going to be doing fine? Not really.
Similarly, drinking with the boys a couple of nights per week can turn into an alcohol problem. Eating a little too much can turn into thirty pounds if you change jobs and go from moving all day to sitting at a desk. You can very easily wake up one day after five years of playing video games and watching reruns, then wonder, “What did I do the last few years of my life? How did I ever get into this big of a rut?” Some people will have something bad happen to them and mentally live in it for years, decades, or even a lifetime. Meanwhile, the longer they trap themselves in that negative space, the rottener their life becomes.
For growth, for happiness, for just plain old, being a better, stronger human being, you need to learn more, add new skills, and keep adding to your strengths. Even small consistent improvements over the course of a lifetime will take you further than a vast majority of the human race. On the other hand, decline is a choice and if you aren’t actively trying to improve, you’re declining.
2) Life is an experiment: It’s very easy for us human beings to think we know more than we do and it’s even easier to think we know ourselves so well that we can’t be mistaken about what we think we like. However, this is all false. We don’t even know a tiny fraction of what’s going on in the world, we make bad snap judgments all the time based on the flimsiest reasons, and nothing is easier than lying to yourself. Because of this, you NEED to experiment if you’re going to get the most out of life. You have to try things you don’t think you’ll like, test your assumptions, and give things a shot without really knowing if they’ll work or not.
Personally? I’ve tried just about every weird type of food known to man. I’ve planted flowers in my garden BECAUSE I didn’t think I’d like them. I’ve made a point of reading books by people that I don’t think I’ll agree with. I’ve tried all sorts of gadgets, supplements, and health tools even when I’m not sure they’ll work. Grasshoppers? Camel? Jellyfish? I’ve eaten them. Negative 140-degree cryochambers? I’ve been in them. Hot coals? I’ve walked on them.
I want to experiment and guess what? Most of the time, my judgment is correct, but also, SOMETIMES, I change my mind. SOMETIMES, I try something, and it adds to my life. SOMETIMES, I enjoy things more than I’d expect.
In fact, just recently, I had a friend really push the idea of doing karaoke in her living room with her and her husband. Honestly, it sounded lame to me. But guess what? As I was doing it, I realized I was starting to get excited thinking about which song I was going to sing. Unexpectedly, I had a really good time.
What about you? Are you exposing yourself to new ideas? New things to do? New people? New places? You’re never going to reach your full potential if you don’t. We all need growth, we need new experiences, and we need to test our assumptions to become the best versions of ourselves. Experiment like Edison and it will make your life better.
3) The 80/20 rule: You’ve probably heard of the Pareto Principle before, which can be essentially translated to 80% of the results come from 20% of the effort. You will generally find this to be true and understanding that is a core part of having a great life. Why? Because over time, if you examine what you enjoy most, what makes you the most productive, what makes you the most money, what gives you the most satisfaction, the people you like being around the most, etc., you can start stacking those results.
If you really love to golf, find ways to make more time for golf. If you own a small business and 80% of your revenue comes from 20% of your customers, maybe you should focus on satisfying those customers and getting more customers like them instead of spending so much time and effort on customers that produce small returns. If it makes you excited to get out of bed in the morning, puts most of the money in your pocket, or dramatically makes your life better, get focused on concentrating MORE OF IT in your life.
Similarly, how many time sinks do you have in your life? You know, people you hang out with that you don’t care about and repetitive tasks that you’d rather not be doing. How do you do LESS OF THOSE things? Spend LESS TIME around those people? This is what Bruce Lee was driving at when he said:
Look at it like this: On the one hand, life is long, but on the other hand, on average, Americans live for about 4,000 weeks.
If you’re J.K. Rowling, are you better off mowing the yard or working on another book? If you’re Mozart, is your time better spent working on a new symphony or doing the dishes? Should Elon Musk be working on getting to Mars or spending 10 hours a day playing video games? We all know the answers.
If you have a bad back, do you want to watch cat videos or do you want to do flexibility and mobility exercises to fix it? If you love spending time around your kids and grandkids, why are you passing up the chance to see them and spending time with your boring friends from work instead? If you’re a salesman and the more calls to prospects you make, the more money you make, you should find a way to prioritize those calls every day ahead of the things that don’t put cash in your pocket.
Find out what delivers those big results in your life in every area and get more of it so that you don’t spend your life bogged down in that 80% of things that don’t pay big dividends.
Bonus – Enjoy the journey: There were only supposed to be three of these, but as I was writing this, there was one other thing that kept popping into my head. That is, you need to find a way to enjoy the journey.
In other words, if you think you’re going to suffer through life, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, then SOMETHING is going to happen and you’ll be happy, you’re fooling yourself. If you’re miserable and you finally get a girlfriend, marry the man of your dreams, make a million dollars, or retire, you might be ludicrously happy for a month or two, but it’s not going to last.
Don’t get me wrong, those kinds of things can certainly be a plus in people’s lives, but we human beings also tend to regress to the norm.
Happy people find a way to be happy under everything but the worst circumstances. In other words, you can put in lots of hours at work, push yourself until you almost throw up in the gym, and give it all you have day after day and still FEEL GOOD ABOUT IT if you have the right mentality or attach enough meaning to it.
On the other hand, miserable people find a way to be miserable under everything but the most outrageously wonderful conditions. “Oh wow, I didn’t know it would be THIS HOT when I went on vacation here,” or “I made $400,000 this year? I mean, I guess it’s all right, but my goal was $500,000 so I failed… again. Sigh… why don’t I ever win?”
Now, this doesn’t mean that you should spend your whole life doing heroin and playing video games, that you should quit when the going gets tough, or alternately that all of us, no matter what we do, aren’t going to face some serious bumps in the road. Sometimes we all have to do things we don’t want to do in service of a greater goal, but if your whole life turns into that long term, there’s something off.
Maybe your thinking is off. Maybe you’re spending way too much time around bad people, doing a job that makes you want to dig your eyeballs out with a spoon, maybe you live somewhere scary, or maybe you keep doing dumb things that put you behind the 8-ball.
What I do know is if you’re not happy with your life, day after day, year after year, decade after decade, then eventually at the end, when you think back over what you did here on this mortal plane, you’re probably not going to feel like it went well. Don’t let that be you.
Even if you’re 90 years old, it’s not too late to make some positive changes and start banking those good days that make up a good life.
