Eternal Learning

How Far We’ve Come

Today’s post is based on a quote that I heard while watching one of Benjamin Hardy’s videos (from his 30 Day Future Self Program). The quote is the following:

There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.
Ernest Hemingway

Obviously, this quote could be analyzed in a lot of ways and I think it is very deep, but the focus of this journal entry is the second half: “true nobility is being superior to your former self.” This is such a true statement, but I think that it is almost an unnatural way to view our lives. From a very young age we are taught to compete. Not only in sports, but public schooling creates a competitive environment where students try to have the best grades, the best clothes, the most friends, and more. We are literally indoctrinated into believing that our worth is determined by our superiority to our peers.

I agree with Hemingway, this view that is held up and supported by current culture does not hold any nobility. I believe that our society is being greatly harmed by this competitive environment. Because of this indoctrination from childhood, it is hard to acknowledge and feel happy for the success of others. Instead we tear down those who we feel have beat us in some way. It is common, for example, to hear criticism of the rich, calling them greedy and selfish, from people who, hypocritically, spend all of their time and money selfishly.

In order to have peace and growth as a society, we need to change these attitudes. We need to realize that life isn’t a race against each other, but against ourselves. At the end of it all, what matters most is that we are better than we once were. We can feel true purpose in life as we self evaluate and strive to be better today than we were yesterday.

These are questions that Benjamin Hardy recommends asking ourselves in order to see “how far we’ve come”:

How much progress have you made in the last 30 days?
How much progress have you made in the last 90 days?
How different is your life than it was 5 years ago?

I have spent some time pondering these questions, and it really helped me to see and appreciate how far I have come. I will continue this topic tomorrow by answering those questions for myself and writing down the way I think my life has changed. I hope that you will set some time aside as well to write down some answers to these questions and realize the progress you are making.

Listening vs. Giving Advice

Hannah and I read about Love Language #2: Quality Time in The 5 love Languages by Gary Chapman this evening. Honestly, I am trying to put into words what I learned from this, and it is super hard. I have a lot of thoughts jumbled in my head, and I struggle getting them out in a way that makes sense and sounds good. I want my posts to not only be “journal entries” about my daily learning, but to make sense and sound somewhat professional. Right now I am struggling to find that balance. Often in my journal I just write down whatever thoughts pop into my head and I am not too worried about if it makes sense or has a flow.

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me. In this chapter, Chapman shares the story of a man who came into his office and explained how he had distanced himself from his wife during their 17 years of marriage, until she left him. The man didn’t do anything drastic, but when his wife would talk about issues at work, he would listen for a few minutes and then share his advice on what he thought she should do. When she didn’t follow his advice, he would become irritated and not want to talk about the problems anymore. He didn’t realize until too late that he was pushing his wife away by not listening well.

I think that Chapman summed up the situation well in these words: “He listened only long enough to hear the problem and formulate a solution. He didn’t listen long enough or well enough to hear her cry for support and understanding.” The reason this stood out to me is that I see this man’s behavior in myself and the relationships I have.

I love problem solving. I have loved it since I was young. One of my favorite subjects in school was math because I liked being able to work through and solve problems. I do the same thing when I listen to what is going on in someone’s life. My first instinct is to share possible solutions and give advice. I have seen in the past how this can put strain on relationships, especially my relationship with my wife. She wants to be heard by me, but doesn’t necessarily want to be told what to do.

I am very grateful that Hannah and I are taking the time to read this book and I know that it will help us in our relationship with each other and in the relationships we have with others. I am committed to being more aware of how I listen to others. I will listen to understand rather than to respond/give advice.

Give and Receive

I spent a lot of today in the car listening to Unfair Advantage: The Power of Financial Education by Robert Kiyosaki. This book has helped me realize how ignorant I am in the area of finances and motivated me to put more focus on financial education. I honestly have a hard time truly grasping some of the things he talks about in this book, but there are some great concepts that I am taking away from it as well. What really resonated with me today is this quote:

Give others a better life and you will be given a better life in return.
Unfair Advantage by Robert Kiyosaki

The context of this quote was talking about how the rich (most of them) don’t work for money. People who work for money are most often those working pay check to pay check and they become very greedy. This was great to hear today, because in all honesty, for the last couple of years I have been working for and focusing on money. I have a lot of debt, I am not great at monitoring spending, and I am just trying to stay ahead of the bills. I have felt myself being sucked into the “rat-race” that most people spend their entire working lives in.

I think that one of the biggest dangers of working for money is the loss of purpose and hope. I have felt and seen this in myself. There are times when, looking at my finances, I feel that I will never be free; I feel like I will spend every day of my future working to make just enough money to pay for our expenses. When this is my perspective, all I want to do is go to work, eat, sleep, and watch TV in order to forget about my stress.

If you read my previous post about core values, then you know that one of my core values is hope, with the associated guiding principle of moving forward trusting that everything will work out as it should. This core value has helped me to not feel the negative emotions mentioned above. Listening to Robert Kiyosaki today helped me realize how to make sure I don’t fall into that dark place again.

When we look outside of ourselves and, as said in the quote, try to improve the lives of others, our lives are improved in return. This is how the truly successful become successful. The best businesses and inventions are made to improve lives. I experienced living in this way in a deep way while living in Guatemala for 2 years on a service mission. During that time, my focus was completely on helping and blessing the live of others and I was immensely blessed because of it.

Today, I have a renewed commitment to not work for money or for myself, but to focus on improving the lives of others. I know that this will not only fill me with purpose, it will bring about opportunities and the finances I need to be free to continue blessing others in greater ways. I hope that reading these thoughts helps you feel a desire to add value to the lives of others, because I know that your life will be blessed in doing so.

The Importance of Working Hard

I read a few articles today and one really stood out to me from Blog Maverick – The Mark Cuban Weblog called Don’t Follow Your Passion, Follow Your Effort. It is a pretty short, so go check it out. At the end of the article he breaks down the purpose of the post into the 4 steps below:

When you work hard at something you become good at it.
When you become good at doing something, you will enjoy it more.
When you enjoy doing something, there is a very good chance you will become passionate or more passionate about it
When you are good at something, passionate and work even harder to excel and be the best at it, good things happen.

Now, this is pretty self explanatory, and I don’t think I can put it better, but it brought various thoughts to my head that I want to put into words. I agree whole heartedly that hard work causes us to become good at whatever we are doing. I have seen this in various jobs and positions that I have had. I think that getting to the point mentioned in number 2, where you enjoy what you’re doing, is often a difficult point to reach. As you work hard at something, you get better and better, but you need to reach a certain point before the enjoyment kicks in.

A personal example of this is when I did summer sales: going door to door selling pest-control. I worked hard and gradually improved during the 3 month sales season. There were a few days where I did really well and I started to feel enjoyment which caused a spark of passion, but the spark always died within a day or two. I would fall back into feeling that I wasn’t a great salesman and I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t end up continuing in that line of work, so my hard work never did bring about much more than brief moments of enjoyment. I do believe that if I had decided to continue, I could have moved through all 4 of these stages and great things could have happened through door to door sales, but it wasn’t the route I felt I should take at that time.

Since then, I have worked very hard at other jobs in landscaping, construction, and currently at a solar company. In each of these jobs my hard work has lead to enjoyment and even some passion for what I was doing. I am now experiencing stages 3 and 4 of this process in my job, which I have been doing for about a month. I have worked hard and know feel confident in my daily tasks and that confidence has helped me to enjoy being at work. I feel the passion developing in me and motivating me to work even harder.

I think that there are a few reasons that in some cases we can move through these stages quickly, but in others, we never really move on to enjoyment. It could be that it is just really hard to become good enough to feel enjoyment, like me with summer sales. Timing is also a very important factor. You might work hard, become good at something and start to enjoy it, but at that point you realize that it is time to do something new. Lastly, I think that the environment, circumstances, or situation play a big part in one’s ability to work hard, become skilled, enjoy, and become passionate about something. My current environment cultivates my desire to work hard, become more skilled, and enjoy what I am doing. Some situations are not this way and need to be left behind in order to find something better.

I know that as I continue to work hard at various things in my life I will become good at them, enjoy doing them, and develop passion that helps me to work even harder and bring about great things in my life and the lives of others. I know the same is true for everyone and anyone who is willing to commit to working hard and I wish you luck in that journey 🙂

Core Values and Guiding Principles

I love listening to podcasts and audiobooks while I do monotonous activities like driving, washing the dishes, cleaning, and so on. By far my favorite podcast host is Hal Elrod, author of an amazing book, The Miracle Morning. Today, I specifically listened to podcast number 341: “The ONE Decision That Makes All Others For You” which you can listen to or read the transcript of here. In this podcast he explains how we can rid ourselves of the stress caused by making decisions through establishing core values and guiding principles.

If you are like me, you have probably heard of core values before. The first things to pop into my head when he started talking about these, were things like honesty, kindness, and integrity. I really liked the way that Hal defined core values and guiding principles, as well as the importance of defining both. He says that “core values are personal values that guide you in making important decisions” and that a guiding principle “determines who are you going to be and how are you going to show up.” The difference then, as he explains it, is that a core value is normally 1 or 2 words, such as those shown below, while a guiding principle is the way that it is applied/interpreted by a specific person.

“authenticity, balance, compassion, contribution, curiosity, discipline, freedom, fun, God, growth, happiness, honesty, integrity, inner peace, leadership, learning, love, loyalty, optimism, religion, responsibility, respect, self-love, service, wealth”

The way one of these values is viewed by me and applied in my life, is not the way it will be interpreted in someone else’s life. It is very important, therefore, to not only decide what our core values are, but how we are going to live those core values. So, to finish this journal article, I am going to list a few of my top core values and the corresponding guiding principle. This is something that I want to spend more time on, so I may post about it again in the future. The more core values that we can define, the more decisions we won’t have to make in the future, because our guiding principles will decide for us.

Love
Honesty
Hope
Family
God

I will love everyone unconditionally
I will always tell the truth, in every situation
I will move forward with trust that everything will work out as it should
I will put my family before everything else
I will maintain a relationship with God and be obedient to his commandments

These are just a few core values and guiding principles that I have established for myself today. I invite you to take a little bit of time and define some for yourself. If you are like me there are probably various core values that you are already living, but it will feel empowering to think about them and put them down on paper.

Conversation with My Future Self

Today I watched another video from the “30 Day Future Self Program” by Benjamin Hardy Ph. D. and in it he talked about taking the time to imagine meeting and having a conversation with your future self. He says to “use your future self as one of your key mentors,” which is a completely new concept to me. Positive affirmations and visualization of the future are concepts that my dad taught me while I was growing up, but I had never considered imagining a meeting with myself from 5, 10 or 20 years into the future.

A thought that came to me while watching this video, is what my past self would think of my current self. This thought caused me to think about where I am at in my life and how far I have come in the past few years. Although I am far from where I ultimately want to be in various aspects of my life, I feel content with the progress I have made. I think that if my past self were able to talk with my present self, he would feel confident in the future.

These thoughts and feelings about my current self lead to deeper reflection on my future self. If I am feeling content with my present life, yet I am focusing every day on making my life better, I think that my future self will also feel good about where he is and how far he has come. I sometimes feel embarrassed about mistakes I made in the past, and though I am sure I will still mess up in the future, I think my future self will be proud looking back on how I am living right now.

In my imagination I see myself talking with my future self while sitting on the couch in his living room. I ask him what advice he has for me and what he thinks I should know. He tells me to make sure I continue to wake up early and focus on being productive and improving every day. He tells me to remember what is most important in life: family and relationships. He advises me to set aside more time to really think about my future and to set and work towards goals. Lastly, he says to be patient with myself and move forward with faith, knowing that everything will work out if I do my best.

This visualization exercise recommended by Dr. Hardy was an amazing experience for me. I really felt peace and hope seeing my life through my future self’s eyes. Maybe that sounds a little crazy, and maybe this has been a little confusing, with all of the talk about my past, present, and future selves, but I recommend that you try it out yourself. You might realize that you should be a little more patient with yourself and you may be able to see your situation from a different perspective.

As they say, hindsight is 20/20, so your future self is a great “key mentor” to have as you strive to reach the future you desire.

It Happened for Me

I am currently participating in a course by author Benjamin Hardy, Ph. D. called “30 Day Future Self Program,” which can be accessed here. In the second week of the course, the focus is on our past, and how it can shape our identity. It is important that we realize that we get to decide what the past means to us. Dr. Hardy explains how we can modify our view of the past, as well as events that happen to us in the future, so that they aren’t debilitating, but empowering. This modification is simply changing the perspective of an experience from “happening to me” to “happening for me.” He states that “If you view it as ‘for me,’ then you can become better. If you view it as ‘to me,’ then you’ll become bitter.”

I love this concept and it is something that I have personally experienced and applied in my life. When I was a freshman in high school, I participated in track and field. Towards the end of the school year, I decided to try competing in the running long jump which, unfortunately, resulted in compression fractures to 2 of my vertebrae. Luckily, I didn’t have to go through surgery and I have since recovered fully. There was, however, more than a year of recovery time, the first 3 months of which were spent in a brace that strapped around my torso. It was very hard not being able to run, jump, or be otherwise active as a 15 year old.

This was by no means an easy experience, but it was probably the first time in my life where I had the opportunity to choose to view a trial as something that happened “for me.” I decided to try to focus on the good that came out of that experience rather than the bad. I was grateful to have more time to spend reading, playing games, and enjoying friendships in ways that didn’t involve much physical activity.

Years have since passed, and I still look back on that experience as something positive. I believe that one of biggest things that I gained from the experience is empathy for others who suffer from severe injuries. This being said, there are other parts of my past that I have not been able to accept as positive so readily. There are things that I did when I was younger that still make me blush with shame to think about. Dr. Hardy’s invitation for me, and you, is to “reframe every experience in your life as, ‘This happened for me.'”

I hope that you will commit, with me, to begin reframing your past in this way, so that you can be free to shape your future.

5 Foundations for Success

One of the books that I am currently reading is The Millionaire Mind by Thomas J. Stanley Ph.D., which is a follow up book to The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy. Both books are about the research he has done on the financially successful in America. His research focuses on those who have a net worth over $1 million, thus excluding people who have large incomes, but do not accumulate great wealth.

The part that stood out most while reading The Millionaire Mind today was “the top five factors most often mentioned by millionaires” that contributed to their becoming financially successful, as shown in the image below (11).

The top 5 factors leading to success: Integrity, Discipline, Social skills, A supportive spouse, and Hard work — From *The Millionaire Mind* page 11

These “Foundations for Success” are all skills that anyone can have, which is why they really stuck out to me. None of them have to do with the family/circumstances one is born into, the schooling one has received, or geographical location. Anyone can have integrity, discipline, social skills, a supportive spouse, and work hard. Because one of my personal goals is to become wealthy, this resonates deeply with me and gives strength to the faith that I have in my goal.

I believe that, while all of these skills are important, the best way to develop them is to focus on one at a time. I feel like the area in which I can most improve is discipline. There are various areas of my life that I need to have more self control: time spent in front of the TV, the kind of food that I eat, and the way I spend my money.

So, the way that I am going to apply what I learned today is to focus on being more disciplined in my day to day life. I invite anyone who reads this post to also pick 1 of these skills to focus on in order to foster greater success in your life. If you want to hold me accountable, or want me to help hold you accountable, feel free to comment or send me a message.

Words of Affirmation

This is my first official post! I am excited to share my love of learning with anyone and everyone who stumbles upon this blog! (even if it’s just you Hannah)

Hannah and I recently decided to start reading The 5 love Languages by Gary Chapman. Tonight we read about the 1st of the love languages, Words of Affirmation. As we started reading, the following sentence was used as an example of a statement of affirmation: “Do you ever look incredible in that dress!” (37). It took me a few tries and Hannah’s help to put the correct inflection on the words to give the sentence the proper meaning. We thought that the way “do you ever” is said has particular effect on how the sentence would be understood.

Later on in the chapter Chapman says “Sometimes our words say one thing, but our tone of voice says another … Our spouse will usually interpret our message based on our tone of voice, not the words we use” (43). After reading this part, Hannah pointed out that he was talking about the same thing we had just done with the sentence I mentioned above. This was a neat way to connect with and experience what was being taught.

While growing up, my dad often talked to us about TOV, or tone of voice. As a child it was a concept that was a little hard to understand, and I would often try to justify the way I spoke repeating the word while remaining unaware of the change that tone of voice has. Though it took time, I eventually did grasp the importance of tone and inflection. Being married has given a whole new perspective on the importance of this concept.

Hannah and I have learned, and are constantly reminded of how important communication is. Often, what I think I am saying and what she is hearing are completely different things. There have been countless times where one of us has become upset while the other is bewildered as to why. I think that we are getting better at this aspect of communication, and we will continue to work on it. I’m glad that I could be reminded of it’s importance while reading The 5 love Languages tonight.