The Life Half Full

What a miserable title to start off with, but I’m a firm believer that:-

1. It’s better to be honest with yourself about where you are
2. The only way is up is a nice feeling (and a great song too if you were born in the ’80s)
3. There are very few people in this world who could not ask that question of themselves, even if only for a short period of their lives or about one little project or idea.

Let’s face it, no-one is perfect. Plans don’t always work out as we wanted them to. Sometimes we put things right straightaway, sometimes we don’t. I believe a greater measure of mankind is our ability to pick ourselves up after failure and put things right - putting the Hornby train back on the rails in how I saw it as a child.

So why, when I look back did it take me ten seconds as a kid to get things moving again when they went off track, and yet as an adult it feels like it takes much longer to correct my life plan?

Well I don’t know how typical I am, but if I just look back at roughly the decades of my life….

• Pre-teens - Spent most of my time adjusting Hornby train sets - good skills shown here!
• Teens - Realised that showing a modicum of interest and intelligence at school meant I found success and teachers were pleased. Started finding success in love too. Life’s pretty rosy.
• 20’s - Saw that I’d have to work at this life lark a bit but that’s OK. Found much early success (the low hanging fruit of the corporate orchard I guess), and a few knockbacks too. Love life started getting serious too. Sucessful footballers and musicians are younger than me though.
• Early 30’s - Hmmm - knockbacks increasing at work - the slope gets steeper. Decide that love life and settling down might be more important. Hmmm… that feels a bit boring. Spend too much money to try and keep relationships interesting AND serious. Try to hang on to friendships and work harder to keep from falling back down the slippery slope. Managers at work are younger than me. Worry about being halfway through my allotted ‘three score and ten’.

Wow - I really am NOT looking forward to my 40’s at this rate. Does it ever get any easier? What happened to my lifes ambitions? Why am I not an astronaut / touring with the Rolling Stones / a millionaire playboy / lending money to Bill Gates? All of these seemed perfectly realistic dreams at some point?

Now hang on a minute. On the flip side, I’ve had a pretty damn good time through some of these years (what I can remember of it!), I’ve got a lot of friends, some great contacts at work, I’ve learned a lot and I’m still fit, healthy and alive.

I think the important question is what am I doing with it all?

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People Dr Stephen Covey calls this type of thinking a ‘paradigm shift’. Undoubtedly these thoughts are the catalyst for starting to put things right. However what I failed to realise on first reading was that just as the gradual changes in my life took me away from my goals (vague as they were), you can’t just say one day ‘I’ve had a paradigm shift’ and from then on everything is perfect. It takes a succession of paradigm shifts to start to undo the years of failure and lack of focus - the good news is that it putting things right can be done!

It’s easy if it’s something tangible, important to our survival and right in front of us. It’s harder if it’s something intangible, if its only a potential benefit to our happiness or ’self-actualisation’ and if it’s inside us.

The rest of this blog is dedicated to thinking about how we can do this, how I and others have done some things that have helped.

It will touch on improvements that can be made in your work habits, your love-life and dating, your spiritual well-being, organising yourself, your friendships, your health and fitness and anything else I (or you) can think of that might be of use!

Filling life up, day by day….

Marley

Tags: 7 habits, life, optimism

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 11:20 am and is filed under Philosophy, self-improvement. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.