Design Your Own Life

The best thing in a one night stand is that it is a 12-hour stand at best, while the best thing in a relationship is when you voluntarily develop the will to have a long term stand, with that someone . The worst thing in a one night stand is when you feel you want more than just physical attraction. The worst thing could happen to any relationship is when you no longer care about where, this, is heading to, which could be looked at, as a series of one night stands but with the same person.

What I am trying to say is that its YOU who might decide to take a one night stand experience and turn it into a beautiful relationship, or you may choose to turn a beautiful relationship into a series of one night stands.

It doesn’t matter, as well, where we start from, it doesn’t matter what the end will be. Yes it doesn't. It's the journey that counts the most, living the bets we make, the choices, the decisions, this is what living is all about. Moving from one point in time to another, from one goal to another, or from one experience to another. Its never about where you come from, or where you will arrive to, its about what you do in the middle, its about which road you decide to take, and what you decide on doing while you are walking that road.

Some might say, how come the destination is not important?

Has everyone who made it, deserved or earned it? The answer, realistically, has to be a big NO. Not every true talent has turned into millions of dollars, and not every president deserved his seat!

The second point, in my effort to support the importance of the journey over the destination, is that any destination is relatively measured; and has no proper benchmark so you can officially and publicly rank yourself among your fellow peers. You can be called Rich with 50k in your bank account relative to millions of human beings. You will always find someone who is richer than you are; smarter than you are; wiser than you are, and more equipped in general than you. You would never reach a destination where you have it all.

Therefore, it is the how I got there-no matter where there is- what actually counts and what actually largely contribute to who you ever become. It's the journey that, more often than not, we forget to live. Its by our human nature that we take the most important people and sometimes the most precious moments of our lives for granted..we fail to embrace the little tiny moment, which in a moment, is going to be a memory.

As a result; the poor, the fat, and may be the less-privileged kid who managed to improve, work on, and educate himself with a comprehensive guide of business and life ethics in his pocket has a superior journey to someone who was born to a wealthy family and with time he failed to learn the value of money and although he is somehow successful still, his journey was little of him in it, little about his choices, little about his own challenges, and little about connecting and feeling with the majority others.

The concept of one’s journey makes us appreciate the most positive values in life as it focuses on what I made for myself. It makes us all fairly benchmarked to each other no matter where we came from or what destination we will end up at. Even without an actual tangible achievement, you still can be successful and your journey would be honorable and worth living, much more than those who were tagged along someone else’s.

Now, if each of us has his own journey to live, and they are all measured by the added value your own journey has brought to your life, we, then, can basically derive the added-value by subtracting the beginning value of your assets at the starting point of your journey from the end value- the destination. The bigger the positive difference, the higher the value of your journey and the better choices you have taken.

By adapting such logic, you no longer easily feel jealous of others, you no longer easily judge a fellow human being and you start to understand that whatever you have got and you never earned doesn’t count..its already deducted and is not part of your own creation. Stretch this thought further and you will easily see that your family, your name, your religion, and anything you were born with is not really the best deal you have got. It was simply forced upon you.

We are all very similar yet we are very different. We think that what happens to us doesn’t happen to others, but we are mistaken. To think that a successful businessman has it all, then you are presuming that he is a successful partner, beloved boss, or the best father or brother…which is not true. No one can be the best on all life’s fronts. One positive shiny front should not out-shadow many others and the opposite is true. By the same token, just because someone in your building or workplace works as a Janitor, it doesn’t mean he couldn't be the best father or have the best relationship, or even have learned 5 languages on his own. He might be happier, more satisfied, and a braver fighter than you are at an SVP level.

I am obliged to highlight the fact that you can’t judge a journey in the middle or based on a random slice of along trip. You have to look at it as a whole, and to do so, quoting Steve Jobs, “connecting the dots, only, looking backward”. Don’t look down at journeys that are in their lows, forgetting that you are living a temporarily high.

One of the best equations I ever come across and learned about during an emotional intelligence course :

U + Others+ Circumstances = Your performance

and since we all know neither others nor circumstances can be all-the-time perfect and in our favor, then our performance during our own journey should not be always perfect and upward, rather it will fluctuate. The most important thing is for the over all journey to add value to yourself and others.

Never forget about what you really want or aspire to be, and while each to his own circumstances, try to create the right chances to pursue what you want the most in life. Don’t look at others who are in a more favorable position, because he/she might be having other malfunctioned sides of his life. Take the time to focus on what you are building for your ownself through out your own beautiful journey. If everyone especializes in what he does best, do you think the term unemployment would have been invented?

At last, and although I still have a life time to learn about happiness and how one can sustain happiness, I like to think, for the time being, that happiness is all about having the will and the early awareness possible about creating your own journey in life, and enjoy living and learning from the decisions you make, not made by others on your behalf, no matter how significant of others they are, during which, you keep adjusting yourself along the way to be able to continue making the right set of decisions and therefore maximizing the value of your journey regardless of the endless possibilities/destinations that you might end up with/at.

Enjoy sculpting your own journey the way you want, but be careful, you only get one journey in life and therefore you better commit to it and make it worth living.