Feb 13, 2022
The Easiest Way to Change Your Life — and the Life of Others.
The Daily Biscuit — Feb 12 2022 — A 249 word snack-sized piece of wisdom about smiling from today’s journal.
Life is hard. Everyone has their own hardness going on. It’s a fact of life.
We can’t make it an excuse.
Perhaps without realising, it’s commonplace for us to assume that others are either ahead of us, afraid of us, can’t be trusted or that we’re untrustworthy to them. That they’re scared of us or us them.
Over the last few years I’ve begun smiling (genuinely) at others, even strangers. Especially strangers!
It is a mother-bleeping revolution!
I can literally feel the fabric of who I am changing.
It’s led to a mantra I recite often, first heard on ‘The Tim Ferriss Show’ in an interview with Gabby Reece: ‘Go first’.
We all want a better world filled with better people but then we go out, put on our shields up, avoid eye contact — look away if there is any — zone out and wait. We wait for the worries of our world to be resolved and someone else to bring us into the better world we want.
We’ll always continue to wait — for someone or something else — until we decide to go first in life. The easiest place to start: smile first :)
Going first is an catalyst to finding purpose; a bridge between the world we’re living in and the world we want to live in — the world we should be living in.
Connection is at our core.
In terms of investment vs reward, smiling’s benefit— which extends well beyond you — is completely disproportionate to the effort.
What opportunity will you take to go first today? What else can you go first with, besides smiling?
