Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 367

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Get Out of Your Own Way: A Skeptic’s Guide to Growth and Fulfillment," by Dave Hollis.

There will be a handful of moments you look back on that fundamentally changed your life—when you met your partner, your decision to take a job that ended up propelling you forward, things like that. This talk, this decision we made—that my wife made—to wade into and have a hard, hard conversation about the trajectory of our lives, that was one of those moments for me. 

The day after Hawaii, we sat on our bed and Rachel worked against every ounce of muscle memory in her being. We’re both recovering codependents and confrontation on this scale isn’t something either of us had mastered, but the stakes were too high to worry about that. This was going down. She laid it out in such simple terms, but those terms rocked me to my core. 

“I’m going to reach for a better version of myself every day. I’m going to do it whether you decide to do it or not. Personal growth is one of the most important values in my life, so I’m going to pursue it every single day. Are you going to choose to grow every day, or are you going to tread water? If you aren’t growing and I am, in three months, will we have as much to talk about on date night? In six months, will we still make out as often? In a year, will we still be going on dates? In three years, will we still be married?” 

Dagger. To. The. Heart.

But the biggest thing I’m learning during my immersion in self-help is the tie between growth and fulfillment. You can find things short-term to make you happy, but if you want to truly be fulfilled you need to be growing. And in order to grow, you need to put in the time, do the work, and learn to kick the lies putting limits on who and what you can be.

The truth that counters the lie that I’m defined by my job? 

I am defined by my impact. 

Impact is agnostic to job title. Impact can come irrespective of the name of your company. There’s freedom in untangling what you do from who you are. Once you know your “why,” you can find fulfillment in being challenged to chase it, no matter what your business card says.

If you want a meaningful life, you must create situations that make you uncomfortable. 

Comfort is a casualty of growth. 

If you aren’t willing to put your comfort at risk, you’d better prepare yourself to settle for a mediocre life. I don’t want mediocre. You don’t either. If we’re going to chase more, it’s going to come with the reality that we’ll have to risk more. We’re going to have to risk our usual, safe, normal lives. It’s going to feel uncomfortable—because that’s where the growth comes from. 

Muting discomfort doesn’t feed growth; it stifles it. I get that now.

The sooner you can shift the way your mind interprets the indiscretions of the past—from a lifetime indictment of you as a person to a lapse in judgment that you can learn from—the sooner you can apply the lessons to achieving your goals. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life have become cautionary tales that now inform how I love my wife, how I lead my team, how I parent my kids. Many of them have shown themselves in retrospect to have been the vehicle for some great breakthroughs, setting me up for success by providing a map for how not to navigate what’s in front of me next time.

Today’s culture has demonized failure, which means it’s on each of us to reframe it in a positive light as something you absolutely have to have if you want a rich, full life that continues to be better tomorrow than today. It means measuring success against a set of criteria tied not to how little you fail but how fast you get back up, how much you learn when you stumble, how the resources you needed to solve your mistakes have become part of your arsenal going forward.

The only thing that defines what you can become is you. Letting something external determine your worth or your trajectory is what is called a limiting belief. Limiting beliefs, in fact, are what all the chapters in this book are about: lies that hold us back in some way. 

When I first heard this term it sounded like therapy-speak, like something someone who jumps up and down at a personal-development seminar at the local hotel ballroom talks through on the third Saturday of each month. But here’s the thing: it’s not that at all. It’s not fancy. It’s actually pretty simple. Limiting beliefs are things we mistakenly hold as truths about ourselves. As they inform our identities, they give us permission to pursue certain dreams, act in a certain way, have confidence or no confidence in our abilities, or think we do or don’t have the right to do certain things. We think these are laws, that we have to learn to live within their bounds. But this is simply not the case. 

You create the limits for what’s possible in your life. You decide. You choose that reality. You. Choose. That. Reality