Brett's Blog

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Nietzche

So I was trying to think up some ways to get more eyeballs on my blog and I thought, “I’ve got it, why not tell everyone the meaning of life! I mean, it’s kind of an important question right? I think a lot of people might like to know the answer, so I’m gonna give it to you. Yeah, that’s right. I’m going to tell you the meaning of life. You’re welcome. We’re gonna get to it in a second but first, a little spoiler warning, you ready? I know this will come as a shock to some of you, but I must confess, I don’t know what the meaning of life is. At least not exactly. Now before you get upset with me, let me say that I wasn’t completely lying to you. What I do know is a meaning of life. See, I can’t tell you what the meaning of your life is. Only you can do that and you absolutely should. What I can tell you is what my meaning of life is and hopefully, it will provide you with some inspiration.

Some of you may be familiar with a psychiatrist named Victor Frankl. He became famous for writing about his experiences in concentration camps during WW2. He endured some of the most difficult experiences a human being could ever face and yet, instead of breaking him, those experiences strengthened his will to live. A popular quote of his that sums up his basic philosophy is as follows, “Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning or purpose.” In other words, life can be very difficult at times and so we must find a why, a reason to go on living, a reason to work hard, a reason to bear the sadness, pain, and all the rest. In the concentration camps, Frankl noticed that this meaning in life, or lack thereof, was the single most important factor in determining how the various other prisoners handled their situation. He noted that some people who had gone into camp young and in top health would wither down to nothingness, while other older and far less healthy prisoners seemed to react fairly well to their predicament. It didn’t matter the gender, the age, the education, or former economic status of the prisoner, in this new environment where all were in a sense equal, what mattered was each individual’s reason for living. If the prisoner believed they had something worth living for, something that gave their life meaning, they would do as well as anyone could expect under such devastating circumstances, while those who didn’t have that meaning wasted away or committed suicide. It should also be mentioned that often these prisoners either didn’t know the fate of their loved ones or they had been murdered. So having a loved one as a reason to go on living often wouldn’t do. The reason had to be intrinsic to the person. At the end of the war, Frankl used these insights to form the basis of Logotherapy, his own form of psychotherapy based on the belief that the primary motivational factor in humans is in finding meaning in their lives. 

While I hope that you never experience anything remotely close to the cruel experience of being a prisoner in a concentration camp, I do believe there’s value in at least imagining yourself in some kind of similar experience. Take away your family and friends, take away your wealth, your degrees, your possessions, take away the things you do for entertainment, take away your youth or good health, take away mirrors to see your physical appearance, take away the opinions of others, take away everything and see yourself naked both literally and figuratively. So now then, what is left? Whatever it is, it is you in your most pure. When it comes right down to it, this is exactly what I’m trying to accomplish in my life and with this blog. I want us to see ourselves in our purest form and ask ourselves, “who is this person?” Well, this person is the complex psychology of everything that ever happened to them and their perception of those things. Yes, but we’re taking away all of that for a moment. So, what does this person consist of? That’s an easy one right? They consist of organs and blood and on a deeper level, they consist of atoms and molecules, the very same ones found in all other humans, other animals, the planet, the stars, the cosmos. In a very real sense, you are not you, you belong to the universe. So then, what is true to say is that the only thing that makes you you is, whatever it is you decide to be. We assign meaning to ourselves, to our lives. My grandfather used to tell me, “Hey tiger, remember, what you put up here,” he would take his finger and tap the side of his forehead, “What you put up here, no one can ever take away.” Simple advice? Yes, absolutely. And absolutely true and profound. The identity that you develop for yourself is the basis for everything else. So it is of the most extreme importance that you think on this. You see, you are not what happened to you, you are not what others believe you to be, you’re not even who you believe yourself to be. What you are is whatever you decide you want to be. Now I could tell you what you should be. I could recommend for instance that you start by choosing to be good. I think that’s solid advice, but the problem is of course that I’m suggesting that to you. You haven’t committed to being good for any other reason than because some guy who has a blog told you to do it. You have no real dog in the fight. You have to decide on a course of action that has meaning behind it. Meaning that puts your life into context, meaning that is innate to who you are at your core. That’s the only kind of meaning that has real power. The power to motivate you through the good times and the bad. If there was a terrible car accident and out of everyone close to you, you were the only one to survive, would your meaning still hold up? When you can answer yes to that kind of question, you know you’re really onto something.

If you think on this and you either don’t come up with a meaning that feels satisfactory or you think of a meaning but worry it might change in time, that’s fine. I’d recommend coming up with the best thing you can think of, but you must understand that this meaning you assign to life is evolving just like life itself. As your experiences change, so to will your meaning. This is why it’s best not to think in terms of absolutes and specifics. A broader approach with room to evolve is best. Let’s say for example that you decide the meaning of your life is to help others. Well, if you’re a parent this could mean focusing on giving your child the best possible childhood experience. When the child is grown, this may evolve into helping others in your community. The basic meaning hasn’t changed, only its strictest definition.

The answer lies in evolution…

I do not consider myself to be an overly spiritual person. I don’t burn sage in my home to purify it and I don’t own any healing crystals, but I do believe in invisible and unknown forces in the universe. I believe in them because I’ve seen them at work time and time again in my life. You can call it God or evolution or whatever you like, but I am convinced of its existence. So what am I talking about? I’m talking about how the nature of the universe is in expansion, forward momentum. I’m talking about how everything is constantly evolving. About how everything in the universe seems to be learning. Physical evolution in itself isn’t a mystery, after all, our old pal Darwin figured that one out well over a hundred years ago, but I’m saying that’s not where it ends. I believe evolution is everywhere. It is not limited to the physical. It’s in each of us mentally and spiritually. This is exactly why the answer to man’s motivation is in finding meaning for his life. It’s what we are here on this earth to do, to gain knowledge and to use that knowledge in some way to further our understanding and continued evolution. Consider this, why do we have babies, raise them, and then we die? Why does the cycle repeat over and over again? Why not just have a couple of billion people on the planet that just live forever? Because that’s a stagnant system. The ability for one person to learn and grow and innovate is limited. After a certain age, most people have already had all of their really good ideas and so it’s time for them to go and for the next generation to come in and improve on the ideas of the last generation. If you think about it in your own family, perhaps you can see it more clearly. Think of the beliefs and parenting skills of your grandparents and then of your parents and then of you, can you notice any evolution? I believe I can, and that’s not to say that my grandparents and parents weren’t smart and capable people, but I had the opportunity to watch them and see where they went right and wrong. I then took that knowledge and applied it to my parenting skills for my daughter. Now surely it’s not a perfect system. I will lose some good qualities that my parents had and pick up some bad ones that they didn’t have, but if on the whole, I’m doing an even slightly better job at parenting, then the general principle remains true. There is forward progress being made. We see this in our society as well. Certainly, technology is evolving, but society itself is evolving too. We are becoming more liberal, more accepting of others, less violent, and so on. It may not always appear this way because there will always be setbacks and the rate of positive change is never as fast as we might like, but it is there and statistics will back me up on this. Put simply, the universe wants us to grow. So let’s see what that looks like in a single person’s life. 

Something happened to you. Genetics play a big part too, but something happened that hurt you and gave you a scar. This happened when you were very young and it informed your life. It played a significant role in making you the person that you are now. It happened and maybe there was some attempt by a parent to help you deal with it and maybe there wasn’t. Either way, you found yourself in uncharted waters. You, as the person you are, had to deal with something that was beyond your ability and it was extremely difficult. Somehow, over the years, you did learn to deal with it simply because you had no other choice. If you were lucky, then the scar wasn’t too deep and you found a healthy way to deal with it. But more than likely you struggled with it and you did some things right in dealing with it and some things wrong and that scar has followed you throughout your life, all the way to this very moment. So what does this scar have to do with the meaning of life? It has everything to do with it because your scar, the one that might look similar to other scars on other people, but is not quite the same, that one that is uniquely yours, that scar is also your story. You can choose to ignore it. The vast majority of people do exactly that. They cover it up with legal or illegal drugs or some other addiction or they become hyper-focused on work or they have their 2.5 perfect kids, a beautiful house, and a two-week vacation to Disney World every year, and these people, they’ll look at you like you must be outta your fucking mind like, “Scar? What scar? I had a perfect life, I am having a perfect life! Can’t you see how perfect my life is?” And these people are lying. They may be lying to themselves so badly that they don’t even know they’re lying, but they are. So the meaning of life then is to not lie. To not distract yourself with whatever bad habit you choose, but to take a trip back in time to a scary place. To the place where you got that scar. You need to become your own parent. You need to go back to that place and handle the situation the way it should have been handled long ago. You need to become the parent for yourself that your real parent or guardian never was. Of course, you can’t literally go back to that place, but you can do it in other ways. What people don’t understand is that time travel exists. It has always existed, just not in the way they show it in movies. 

You can time travel through your memories. You can time travel by having those difficult conversations with the people from your past. The kind of conversations where you say things like, “You should have been there for me! It really affected me when…” or “I forgive you” or “I don’t forgive you”. You can time travel through therapy. You time travel back to a place in your mind where you allow that event to become so painfully real and present that you either break down in tears of sadness or tears of rage or both. You time travel again and again until it doesn’t hurt so bad anymore. Until you feel comfortable with your scar because you feel comfortable with yourself, you feel comfortable in your own skin. The only way out is through. You must go through the pain of your past before you can come out the other side. This is a seriously challenging journey in and of itself and is beyond the scope of this article to get into any detail.

Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need road.

Doc Brown (Back to the Future)

Okay. So let’s say you found yourself a good support system and you carefully went through the pain in your past, so now what? Can you just go live happily ever after? Not exactly. You can’t just go on with your life because you realize that whatever your scar is, that’s you. Like it or not, you are defined not by your scar exactly but by your response to your scar. This doesn’t mean that you must live the rest of your life with heavy trauma, quite the opposite. What you realize in this journey is that you’re stronger than your scar, you’re stronger than the people that hurt you and so you are now in a place of real knowledge and true power. And here’s where the whole meaning of life comes in. You’ve gone back in time and saved yourself figuratively and now your job, the meaning of your life is to take all that knowledge you’ve gained on your journey and use it to save other people literally and in doing this you contribute to the larger goal of the universe, evolution. 

Sounds simple right? Well, it is. But it’s also the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Just look around you at all the people who haven’t even begun to do it. And do you want to know why? Because it’s the absolute scariest shit anyone can face. The very fact that you’re reading this, assuming you’re not my mom (hi mom), should tell you that you’re already ahead of most people. You see through all the bullshit and you want something deeper. You’re so much braver than you give yourself credit for. Real bravery is admitting all your issues, all your fears, all your hang-ups and being able to look at them honestly, being vulnerable enough to admit them to another person, and then finding the strength inside yourself to heal them.

Now I’ve been talking about childhood scars this whole time and it’s because usually, that’s where the most significant scar is formed, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to childhood trauma. People will experience different traumas and different scars throughout their lives and so their path to meaning may start later in life or change or evolve with time. You have probably heard of someone who lost a child or another important person in their life. Maybe it was due to cancer. This person used to have a normal job but after getting this new scar they change course. They form and head a charity dedicated to cancer research. This is exactly what they’re supposed to do. This is evolution at work and it’s heartbreaking but also beautiful. People often ask things like “Why would God take such a good person?” Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not claiming to know God’s plan, but the best and most obvious answer to that question is this exactly. So that one person that was close to the person that died might be filled with enough passion and motivation to seek answers to the problem in hopes that future people won’t have to suffer the same fate. In its most basic form, this is the meaning of life. Learning from the mistakes of the past to make the future better.

The cool thing about this meaning is that if you look out for it, you will begin to see how the universe or God, or whatever you want to call it, is pushing you in this direction. It wants you to understand yourself and your scars. It wants you to heal and it wants you to use what you’ve learned to help others. You may be already doing it. What is your job, hobby, or area of interest? Can you relate it in some way to old scars? What are the things in your life that are currently causing you pain or frustration? Is it possible that these current events could somehow be traced back to a very old and unresolved wound? And if so, what do you think it is the universe is trying to tell you? It’s important to notice these signs and to try to interpret them correctly because if not, they will continue to happen. Think of the universe as a really annoying and persistent charades partner. They can’t just come out and tell you the meaning of your life, so they will just keep trying to tell you it in some different way. It’s your job to listen and interpret properly. My guess is that you already know exactly what the universe is trying to tell you, the real question is whether or not you’re finally ready to listen.

So there you go, the meaning of life, or at least a version of the meaning of life. I hope you found something of value in it. I’d like to end by returning once more to family. I’d like to show you just how powerful this meaning can be. Let’s say you do nothing else of significance in your life other than being a good parent. I have this little thought experiment I think about whenever I’m finding parenting particularly difficult, it’s about the awesome potential of one person. You could have a family line filled with generations of sadness, abuse, and dysfunction. A family line seemingly destined to continue this curse for generations to come. It’s quite simple really, a child is raised in a dysfunctional home and eventually grows up to be a dysfunctional parent, has children of their own and the process repeats itself. But, if one person breaks that cycle. If one person says, “Screw that! I may not know how to do it, but I’m going to work at this thing and I’m going to be a good parent and raise my child the way I wished I had been raised.” And that person, maybe they’re not perfect but they show up and they do the work and they raise a good kid and that kid, he or she will never know any of the generations of trauma that came before them and they will grow up to be good parents and so on and so forth. And though that first person who decided to break the cycle is long gone and will never see what he created, the results will still be there for generations to come. And all those new family members will be better human beings and they’ll be more kind and loving to everyone they come in contact within their lives and eventually, that positive ripple effect from one person deciding to step up and do the right thing will be so vast that it would be impossible to quantify. That is what’s at stake. That is why it’s so important. That is what the universe wants from you. That is the meaning of life and if you do it, the universe will smile on you for the rest of your days.

I wanted to give a special shout-out to Ryan Kraus, host of the “Cold Case Murder Mysteries” podcast. So what does true crime have to do with the meaning of life? Well, I gotta tell you guys, this ain’t your mom’s true-crime podcast! In my opinion, Ryan is the best kind of genius, balancing on the edge between crazy and profound. He dissects some popular murder/mysteries on his podcast through the lens of his unique brand of evolutionary psychology. I can’t say I always agree with him but when I do, it’s like getting a peek behind the curtain of the universe. Anyway, I seriously doubt I could have written this piece without his valuable insights into the nature of the human mind and beyond. So thank you, Ryan! I’d highly encourage you to give him a listen. A recent podcast of his on the murder of Amy Mihaljevic is as good a place as any to start, particularly if you’re interested in some of the ideas I presented here. 

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-seasonal-yield-of-barren-emotional-fields/id1257454051?i=1000536097293

A look back at some life lessons from Mr. Rogers…

Hi neighbor, how are things with you? Today I wanted to tell you about a movie I watched recently. It’s called “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. It’s the true story of a man who was very special to me when I was a little boy. Maybe he was special to you too. His name was Mr. Rogers and he had a television program called “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood” where he talked to boys and girls about their feelings. He let us know that it’s okay to sometimes be mad or sad or just confused and that it’s good to talk about our feelings with each other. I know that for me childhood could sometimes be a little scary and sometimes I wouldn’t know what to do with my feelings. Mr. Rogers made me feel safe and understood. He made me realize that I was special just the way I am. Although I never met him, Mr. Rogers was my good friend. But that was a long time ago and too often as I’ve grown, I forgot about all the good things Mr. Rogers told me about. Maybe you forgot about them too. That’s why I loved this movie so much. It made me remember just how special we all are and how wonderful this world we live in really can be when we love ourselves and each other. 

Now I’d like to introduce you to another friend of mine. This is Jocko and when I was a little boy, Jocko was my best friend in the whole wide world. Some people think Jocko looks a little scary and I guess that’s fair, but to me, he wasn’t scary at all. In fact, he was always there for me whenever I got scared. I think part of the reason I loved Jocko so much was that my Nana got him for me and I loved my Nana as much as a person can love another person. My Nana died many years ago and these days Jocko lives up in my attic and we don’t spend very much time together anymore but that’s okay because Jocko and my Nana live right here, in my heart. And I know she would be very proud of the man I’ve become. I know Jocko is proud too, he told me so.

Thank you for letting me share my little story today and now my friend, I’d like to ask you, did you have a special friend when you were a little boy or girl? I bet you did. What was their name? What did they look like? What special person in your life gave them to you? You know we are so lucky to have special people in our lives. People that loved us and helped shape us into the wonderful people we became. It’s with that in mind that I’d like you to read this next section, words by Mr. Rogers himself…

“I’d like to give you all an invisible gift. A gift of a silent minute to think about those who have helped you become who you are today.  Some of them may be here right now.  Some may be far away.  Some, like my astronomy professor, may even be in heaven.  But wherever they are, if they’ve loved you, and encouraged you, and wanted what was best in life for you, they’re right inside yourself.  And I feel that you deserve quiet time, on this special occasion, to devote some thought to them.  So, let’s just take a minute, in honor of those that have cared about us all along the way.  One silent minute…”

“Whomever you’ve been thinking about, imagine how grateful they must be, that during your silent times, you remember how important they are to you.  It’s not the honors and the prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls.  It’s the knowing that we can be trusted.  That we never have to fear the truth.  That the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices, is very good stuff.”

I hope you took a moment and did as Mr. Rogers asked. I know I did and I found it a very powerful and emotional exercise. I’d also encourage you to seek out the movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”. It starts a little slow but turns into something truly special. I can’t think of a movie that affected me so much in an emotional but positive way. I watched it for free by getting on my Amazon Prime streaming service and signing up for a 7 day free trial of Starz. Below you’ll find a magical little clip from the movie. It’s made all the more magical by the fact that the incident shown actually happened to Mr. Rogers in New York City.

Well, I’m afraid that’s all the time we have together today. I’m so glad I got to spend it with you. And never forget, you’re perfect just the way you are.

There’s only one person that was there in the womb with you, one person who will be lying next to you on your death bed, one person who will be there for each and every moment in between. It’s you baby, so you’d do well to snuggle up and make friends because it’s gonna be a long ride. And if you try to make friends, only to find you’re not great company, change yourself until you are. Change yourself until you’re someone you’d actually like to hang out with. Better yet, someone you’re proud of, someone you can laugh at or with, someone you can forgive, someone you can trust, someone you can love. 

Good advice right? Of course. We know it inherently, and yet so many of us don’t follow it, choosing instead to look for happiness and fulfillment outside of ourselves, often in other people. So the obvious question is why? Why look for fulfillment in others and not in ourselves? I’ll offer up an informed guess from a man who’s made this mistake and has thought on these matters much. The answer is simple, we don’t want to hang out with ourselves or laugh or trust or love ourselves, because we don’t really even like ourselves. We are a known quantity. We’ve lived with ourselves and we’ve let ourselves down, we’ve become far too familiar with all the ways we don’t stack up to some ideal version of ourselves we’ve created in our minds. Over time we’ve come to convince ourselves that we simply aren’t up to snuff. This isn’t self-loathing and I’m not saying that there aren’t aspects of ourselves we like, but on the whole, we believe that we’ve failed ourselves. So we seek outside of ourselves to find happiness, particularly in our love relationships, after all, another person is an unknown quantity, surely they must have figured out all the things we haven’t. Certainly they don’t come prepackaged with all that disappointment. They’re fresh and new and everything is great…until it isn’t. Until we realize that they’re just as lost and disappointed with themselves as we are with ourselves. Or, as is too often the case, they’re actually worse than us. Perhaps they’ve even taken advantage of us since they’ve seen that we’re desperate and unsure of ourselves. So then you find yourself not only dealing with your problems but the problems of another person as well. 

This isn’t just limited to romantic relationships. We take the advice and or opinions of others and either try to change ourselves to meet someone else’s opinions about what we should be doing or how we should act or we allow their opinions of us to hurt us or worse, we internalize them until they become part of our larger narrative about ourselves and all the things we aren’t doing right. And these people don’t necessarily have to be “bad” people. They can be our friends and family members, people with good intentions but whose opinions, if taken to heart, can still end up being dangerous to us. It’s often not a nefarious act, quite the opposite. Most people will try to give you good advice, the trouble is that they simply aren’t you and therefore they may be considering a hundred different things that don’t align with what you actually want. Instead, they’re telling you what they want for you, based on their own, sordid life story.

I’m not saying that everyone is going to give you bad advice, for instance, I believe I’m currently giving solid advice to you, dear reader. So how do you tell the difference between good and bad advice or who’s really the right friend or lover for you? To be honest, that’s a really difficult question to answer. And at the end of the day, you may get things wrong even if you do everything right, but sooner or later you will get it right if you do this, get to know yourself. Really get to know yourself. You may be thinking, “but I already know myself! After all, haven’t I been living with myself all this time?” Sure, but how much of that time did you spend thinking about your values, maybe even making a list of them? Or what about the values you’d want in a partner or friend? How about a list of your goals for the next year, five years, or decade? Have you come to terms with any possible traumas from your past? Maybe seeing a therapist or at least researching the topic? Have you learned how to be brutally honest with yourself, taking full responsibility for all your faults and mistakes? Have you developed a real, unshakable confidence in yourself? How are you doing with the whole inner peace thing? I bet most of you can’t answer yes to most of these questions and if you can, my hat is off to you because if you do it right, it’s some time-consuming and often painful work. Time-consuming and painful and totally worth it. That’s not to say I’m some holier than thou sage or anything, far from it, but I have been working on myself for some time now and so I speak from a place of personal knowledge and experience. Working on these things and finally starting to make progress on them is like slowly breathing out long-held stale air and then taking a deep breath of fresh and sweet oxygen. Difficult people and troubling situations suddenly seem manageable. The difficult moments still come but you see them for what they are, difficult moments, moments that pass. Things begin to make sense. There is the sense that everything happens for a reason and that it’s slowly leading you to the right path, the path you were always meant to be on. 

I want you to get real quiet for a minute, really still. There now, can you hear it? Faint and far off in the distance, someone is calling to you. It’s your future self, the one who took every right next step, the steps that are sometimes hard to take but the ones you already know you should take. It’s calling to you and saying, “God, you should see the view from here. It’s so beautiful. Please, please do the right thing so that one day soon, you too can see what I see.”

Get to know yourself. Do the work. Earn your own respect every day. If none of this speaks to you, that’s fine. Thanks for reading. But if it does, if it’s in your heart, then do it. It isn’t easy, but it is possible and so worth it.

Writing the story of our lives

The fateful moment when Little Red Riding Hood first encounters The Big Bad Wolf…

What would happen if you’d never heard the story of Little Red Riding Hood before and you began reading the scene where the Wolf had just eaten Grandma, dressed in her clothes and now Red is delivering her famous line, “But Grandmother, what big teeth you have!” And the Wolf replies, “All the better to eat you with my dear!”? What if we paused the story right there?  What kind of story would you say you were reading? Most likely you’d say it was a tragedy, a gruesome horror story, and you’d be right. If someone then told you that it was actually a popular children’s fairy tale, you’d think the rest of the world must have gone mad! You’d think this because you’d be missing the key element of any story, context. It is only when we read the story in its entirety that we can understand and appreciate it fully. It’s only when we take the 30,000-foot view of all the events, characters and their decisions that things begin to make sense. This concept is true of all stories including the biggest story any of us will ever participate in, the story of our own lives. Today I want to look at some of the elements of story and how they can help us in our own journeys through life.

The lesson that Little Red Riding Hood learns by the end of the story is to not talk to strangers, but there are several key events that must all take place before she can fully learn this lesson. Her mother must tell her not to talk to strangers. She must then break her mother’s rule by talking to the Wolf, which ultimately leads to the Wolf eating Red’s grandmother and trying to eat Red herself. Fortunately for Red, the Woodsman comes in at the last minute and saves her and he even manages to save her Grandmother by cutting open the Wolf’s stomach. Now we see that this story we once thought was a tragedy, actually has a happy ending and even more importantly, Red Riding Hood has grown as a character. It was only by going through the various ordeals of her story that she learned the seriousness of her mistake and a valuable life lesson.

in some versions of the story, Red is much more resourceful and saves the day herself with no help from a Woodsman. I prefer these versions because they give Red much more agency in her own story. She helped create the problem and now she alone must fix it. I believe this is also truer to real life.

If we think about our own lives we can realize that this is the same kind of process we go through time and time again. We can tell a child that the stove is hot and that she shouldn’t touch it, but inevitably the child will touch the stove. It is only after getting her fingers burnt that it becomes unlikely she’ll ever make that mistake again. Another example would be that inevitable “bad” relationship and even worse breakup that we all seem to experience sooner or later in life. At the end of that relationship, we may think “How stupid was I to ever get involved with that person!” It’s only later that we realize, what seemed like a horrible experience at the time was really an invaluable lesson that will usually lead us to a much better relationship eventually. In essence, mistakes are invaluable to us because they’re how we learn.

If we can begin to look at the various mistakes and difficult experiences of our past as invaluable learning experiences, we can begin to reframe the narrative of our lives. I’ll use my own life as an example of this. I had a very difficult childhood. I believe that this experience helped to develop two things in me. One was a tendency toward depression and anxiety and the other was a deep sensitivity, a propensity towards creativity and empathy. I had these special talents that I realized others didn’t have. I could have used them to do good things, maybe even some great things, but instead, I let my darker traits take over. In my teen years, I began experimenting with drugs, a choice that would come to haunt me for many years and eventually lead me to my absolute rock bottom. I had made a series of truly stupid mistakes, I had gotten myself into a real hole and I was absolutely miserable. I didn’t have a job and I could barely force myself to get out of bed. I saw myself as a complete failure and my situation as totally hopeless. I was frozen in that moment of the story and couldn’t see the big picture. At that point, I was saying something like this to myself “I can’t believe it. You had so much potential, so many opportunities to really do something with your life and you wasted every single one of them. You might as well give up now since you’ve proven time and time again how much of a failure you are.” This negative thinking, this negative approach to my story was doing absolutely nothing for me but making me more miserable. It was only by changing my narrative that I found I was able to begin changing my life. I began to say something like this to myself, “It all makes a crazy kind of sense. This was your path all along. That whole time you thought you were making mistakes, you were actually doing exactly what you should have been doing. You had to go through all of that to gain the wisdom to be ready for your true calling, to help other people. Not as a doctor who’s read a lot of textbooks on these problems but as someone who’s actually lived them and come out the other side. You’ve been given this gift, this priceless insight on how to come out of the darkness and change your life for the better. You will be an inspiration. Now go out there and begin helping others!”

I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all that easy. I had to work very hard at changing many aspects of my life and it’s a process I’m still going through, but reframing my story has been an immense help to me. I looked at my whole story and took real ownership of it. And then I asked myself what it all meant, what kind of story did I want my past, present and future to tell? To answer that I needed a goal to work toward. Where did I want this story to go? What kind of an ending to my story would make sense? What kind of ending could I be proud of? I decided that for me, using my skills and knowledge to help others was a great goal that really seemed to satisfy my story. After I knew the ending, it was easy to look back at all the experiences of my life and see how they were always leading me towards this future goal. I couldn’t go back and change the past or try to say that a mistake wasn’t a mistake or a traumatic experience wasn’t traumatic. Trauma is trauma, but I didn’t have to a victim of it. I didn’t have to think of it as a negative or something destined to doom my future. It was an event that ultimately helped make me stronger and uniquely qualified to reach my goal of helping others and in that way, it was actually an empowering experience. When you do this, when you create your own story it empowers you. It also gives you a compass, you know what direction to point towards. We wouldn’t expect to be able to build a fine house without a solid blueprint, so why do we go through our lives without a solid blueprint or narrative? If we don’t create our own narrative one will be created for us by other people and circumstances. 

So create your own story and make it one you can be proud of. This can become an exciting process. We are all on our own grand adventure through this life complete with a beginning, middle and end, with exhilarating triumphs and devastating setbacks, there will be romance and heartbreak and calls to adventure. There will be villains and of course, there will be a hero, and that hero is you. Congratulations, you have landed the starring role in your own personal adventure. You are the main character, the co-writer and the reader of your own story. You can’t control everything, but you have much more agency than you might imagine. Do not wait for the Woodsman to save you, defeat the wolf yourself, learn your lessons and let them make you stronger and then decide what it all means. This is your story, make it the adventure of a lifetime.

“Listen, there comes a time in a man’s life when he makes a decision to just live, to survive or he wants to win…”

Teddy Atlas

It’s only the middle of the 8th round but things aren’t looking good. We can see it in our guy, he’s not putting anything behind his punches, it’s like he’s trying to make an unspoken pact with the other guy, “I won’t hit you hard if you promise in return to not hit me hard.” Except the other guy’s not interested. He’s throwing shots with bad intentions. Fortunately our guy’s still fast enough to slip past most of them, but the ones that land, land hard. And just when he looks like he’s got nothing left, he’s saved by the bell. He stumbles back to his corner and takes his seat. That’s when his trainer bends down, looks him right in the eyes and says, “Listen, there comes a time in a man’s life when he makes a decision to just live, to survive or he wants to win. You’re doing just enough to keep him off of you and hope he leaves you alone. You’re lying to yourself, but you’re going to cry tomorrow. You’re lying to yourself and I’d be lying if I let you get away with it. Do you wanna cry tomorrow? No? Then don’t lie to yourself anymore. There’s something wrong with this guy. Now back him up and fight a full round.”

That’s a true story. Our guy was Michael Moorer, the other guy was Evander Holyfield and the trainer was Teddy Atlas. Those were Teddy’s exact words and Moorer went on to win that fight and become the new heavyweight champion of the world.

There’s a reason that when discussing life, you’ll often hear people use boxing phrases like “Always go down swinging.” or “You gotta learn to roll with the punches.” It’s because boxing is a great metaphor for life. So today I thought we’d look at some of the ways they’re similar and learn a few things about life from the story I just told. 

So is life really like a fight? I believe it is. Think about it, we’re always in one kind of fight or another. We fight for everything worth having, in fact it’s the fight itself that makes things worth having. Do you know why so many people win the lottery only to loose it all in a few short years, their lives usually ending up worse off than they were before their supposed good fortune? The reason is simple, they didn’t have to fight for it and so they had no appreciation for what it takes to earn that kind of money. They had no respect for it. Put simply, fighting is essential to life. It is through our struggles that we learn and become strong and gain confidence. Fighting is in our nature. It’s what the universe wants us to do. No one is born being super successful or completely good and honest. No one is born with all the qualities of a perfect parent or perfect spouse. Take any person who you look up to in life and I guarantee they’d tell you that they had to fight for what they have and where they’ve gotten. 

There’s only one small problem, no one actually wants to fight. Our nature is only to survive. We will do whatever is necessary to ensure our basic survival. To meet our basic needs like food and shelter and relative comfort. Fighting asks us to go beyond that. Fighting is scary, it forces us out of our comfort zone and asks us to expend energy, to reach down deep, to face our demons and beat them into submission. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “Boy, I can’t wait to get into the ring of life today and get knocked around for several hours!” And yet that is exactly what is required. Just like our guy in the boxing story, we are faced with a choice. We can either do whatever is necessary to get by or we can fight with everything we’ve got. While doing only what is necessary sounds like the easy and therefore most attractive decision, I would argue that it’s actually the more difficult decision. Like Teddy said, “You’re lying to yourself and you’re gonna be crying tomorrow.” Because tomorrow and for the rest of your life you’ll have to live with the fact that you didn’t do everything you could have. You’ll know you could have done better and that you could be in a better place right now but you took the easy way out instead. It’s hard to find pride in that and all too easy to find regret. It’s much better and ultimately easier to dig deep, to fight hard for that short period of time and walk away now and forever a champion. Even if you loose, you win because you’ll know you gave it everything you had. 

Now all that being said I fully understand that it’s easier said than done. I’ve always found inspirational speeches slightly annoying because I would end up thinking, “Wow, that sounds great and I’m definitely feeling motivated right now but what happens the next time I know I should fight but I can’t seem to find the willpower to do it? Then I’ll feel even worse about myself!” This is a great point. After all, we all know what we should be doing, the problem is making ourselves do it on a regular basis. I think the reason you never hear about that part in those motivational speeches is because it’s a truly difficult question and there’s no easy, inspiring answers; at least none that I’ve found. The best answer I can give you is going to sound cheap and like a gimmick, but it’s the truth. Keep reading this blog. Keep putting one foot in front of the other. Keep moving towards your goals. The truth is that there are no easy answers. The truth is that you’re more than likely to fail sometimes, to refuse the call to fight. You must learn to be okay with that. It’s not worth celebrating, but constantly beating yourself up is no good either. We must learn to love ourselves, flaws and all. Another important rule in fighting is that when you get knocked down you must get back up, brush yourself off and get back in the fight. I’m not asking you to become the world heavyweight champion overnight, I’m asking you to fight. Fight whenever you can and however you can. For some of us the fight might be to go from a five figure salary to a six figure salary and for others it might just be finding the motivation to get out of bed and make yourself lunch or take a shower. Wherever you find yourself on that spectrum, you must be willing to incorporate a fighting spirit. Believe in yourself, in your own inherent worth and in your ability to become better. The rest may come slowly but if you’re patient and persistent, I promise you it will come. Don’t give up now, after all, this is the fight of your life.

Author’s note: Eventually I plan on writing another article going over some of Teddy Atlas’s most inspiring quotes. The man has a gift for inspiration. In the meantime, for those looking for a little more inspiration, I’ve included this video of Teddy discussing some similar themes to the ones we touched on today. Remember that in life, just like in boxing, it’s important to have the right people in your corner. I’m grateful if you’ve chosen me to be one of those people.

We learn a lot in school. For instance, I could tell you that John Wilkes Booth killed Abraham Lincoln or that the Earth is the third planet from the sun, I could even tell you that pi is 3.14 and change. But in all those years of learning we hardly ever really learn anything about how to actually go about the business of living our lives. What does it mean to be a human being? How do we become a good person? How do we best care for ourselves and others? How do we deal with bouts of depression or anxiety? How do we find the motivation to achieve our goals? How do we become happy? These are just a few of the hundreds of important questions about life that we never really learn. Instead we just sort of stumble around in the darkness and hope we find our way. I think that’s a shame. I think it’s important to try to be the best human you can be, not only for yourself but for your fellow humans as well. This belief has lead me to become fascinated by the following question, assuming you’re willing to put in the effort, is it actually possible to become a better human? By that I mean happier, more content, more well adjusted, more successful and so on. And if it’s possible, how do you go about doing it?

I’ve begun to take this question head on by researching a variety of areas related to personal development and then applying what I’ve learned in my own life, and so far the results have been encouraging. I haven’t found “one simple trick” or “magic pill” for changing your life. In truth it appears that slow and steady work on yourself is what makes the difference, but the good news is that it does make a difference. We can actually change our lives for the better! That to me is extremely exciting and good news.

So if it’s true that we can change our lives for the better, why don’t we? Why aren’t we all screaming the good news from the rooftops? As best I can tell, the answer to that question has a lot to do with fear. By and large, we’ve all grown complacent. We’ve grown comfortable with being uncomfortable. Even though many of us are unsatisfied with various aspects of our lives, we tell ourselves that things aren’t too bad and therefore it’s best to keep the status quo versus making changes that might prove difficult, changes that are as of yet unknown to us and therefore frightening, better the devil you know than the devil you don’t right? And so we go on in the same way we always have, until one day we wake up and realize that most of our life has passed us by.

I don’t know about you but that strikes me as more than a little sad and completely unnecessary. Shouldn’t we at least attempt to make positive changes in our lives? And what if making those changes weren’t as difficult and frightening as we think? That’s where this blog comes in. It’s my attempt to offer you simple technique’s and ways of thinking about things to help better your life, to make you happier and healthier in mind and body. I’ll be doing this by sharing stories and struggles from my own life, how I’m learning to overcome them and how you can too. Think of it as a wonderful experiment in making ourselves better humans.

I want to be perfectly clear, I am not a doctor or therapist. I have no fancy credentials to wow you with. My school was the school of hard knocks. I’ve lived with depression, anxiety, and all its relatives like laziness, lack of discipline, low self confidence and even addiction. Through lots of hard work I’m managing to come out the other side. I’m still working on it and believe it will be a life long journey, but it’s one I’m committed to. So if like me; you’re dedicated to positive change, willing to put in the work and ready to fight for yourself, then you’ve come to the right place. I’m constantly researching everything from health and fitness, to eastern and western medicine, to philosophy and psychology in an effort to not just defeat depression and anxiety, but to see how far we can go in a new, positive direction. I’ll be updating this blog frequently with the best information I find and with my own opinions of things. My goal is to grow a community where we can help each other become our best selves and so I’d love your input as I begin to grow this blog. I look forward to the adventure of a lifetime.