5 things you do that don’t matter and ruin your life in silence.
Do you also happen to be overwhelmed by all of those “find your purpose”, “do what’s meaningful” or “focus on what matters” kind of advices that seem so obvious for everyone but totally out of your league?
It’s alright, you’re not alone.
There is a lot to read about achieving more or building new habits, but I didn’t see a lot of people talking about how important it is to start with emptying the jar before stuffing it with new things.
Have you read another mainstream article saying that you should focus on doing what matters, but you have no clue how to do?
Let’s just change the angle,
focus on what doesn’t matter at all,
and remove it.
“Do less. Be more.” — Elizabeth Grace Saunders
On my way from before to now, I became passionate about all of those little things people do every days that have a strong negative impact on their life.
And by people, I mean those I witnessed, and myself.
While I took on the challenge to detect those behaviors I also decided to eradicate them.
Today, I spend more of my time trying to do less of those things than doing more of any other.
Here are 5 of them:
#1 — Trying to be the one who’s right
I love to have conversations with people who disagree with me. Because they are the one bringing the most value on the table, and they allow to question established truth to improve and find new truths.
But those conversation can also be a pain in the ass when you have them with someone who just want to prove you wrong.
A healthy conversation is questioning truths,
an ego driven one is focused on questioning individuals.
Moreover, the more you try to be right and prove the other wrong, the more he reinforces his positions by defending himself and end up being even more convinces he is the one being right.
In the end, no one cares if you are right or wrong. And no one wants to talk with someone who just try to prove everyone else wrong.
Moreover, people who admit being wrong the most are also the one growing the most. Because when you’re wrong, you also have the greatest opportunity to learn something you didn’t know.
#2 — Being worried even though you can’t do anything about it
Have you ever lived this moment when you are already in the train, and you know you will be late anyway, but you are still worried?
That, is the wrong kind of worrying.
You’re already in the train, right? There is absolutely nothing you can do from now to make it on time, so worrying is a pure waste of energy and focus here.
Being worried is a useful thing when it’s raising awareness about something you should pay attention to: when you take too long to get ready before taking the train.
Once it’s too late, there is only 2 things you can do:
- Making yourself ready to apologize for being late
- Accepting you’re late anyway, relaxing and enjoying the rest of the ride
#3 — Checking your phone for no reason
I read one day that an average person checks her phone 100+ times a day. I didn’t believe it myself until I install an app to monitor my phone usage.
When you go through a city, it sometimes feels like living in a zombie world.
Everyone is head down on their phone, and ignoring most of the rest of their environment.
We all know how it happens: you have a notification of some random app saying some random friend had some random action on one of your pictures. You are not doing much so you open the damn app, and check the useless comment your friend left, but then you check the news feed and see this funny video about whatever, and then another one about whatever, and then you check your emails, and you realize you have to send this picture to this person, and voilà, that’s how you spend 1h on your phone instead of being alive in the real world of the human being who live in the here and now.
Random ideas I applied to solve this waste of time and attention:
- Turning off 100% of the notifications → I am only reachable when I decide I am
- Removing 80% of the apps from my phone, having all the essential ones on one page and all the rest lost in folders so I never see them but need to search to access them
- Making my life interesting enough so I don’t want to spend more time wasting it on my phone doing nothing else than scrolling and playing
#4 —Being easily annoyed
Today I was in a mall with my friend when we started to argue about something very, very stupid.
I was trying to explain to her something about the schedule of the movies, and she didn’t get it at all.
Now, I have a hard time to not be annoyed when I explain something that sounds totally obvious to me to someone who can’t get it, even though I know it’s only because her English is not as fluent as mine.
I could have translated my sentence in Thai on my phone, and the problem would have been solved in 30s.
She left because I raised my voice and she felt stupid.
100% my bad.
When I got back to the hotel, I received some messages from a cool guy I met in a flight one day, who was traveling and vlogging with his girlfriend.
That’s when I learned he had a very serious disease, her girlfriend left him after cheating on him, and he had no choice but to try to raise money to have a chance to afford one of the last treatments they can try on him to save his life as his brain is being destroyed.
He asked me if I could give him advices on how he could do to share his story and provide enough value to people to raise funds and afford the treatment before it’s too late.
At this moment two things happened:
- First, I did my best to take time and help him the best I could
- Then, I went to hug my friend and say sorry for behaving in such a dumb way
As cliché as it sounds, life is too short to waste it being annoyed for no reason.
Even if I definitely have to keep working on this being annoyed thing, I think the solution lays in the ability to put things in perspective.
Let’s accept the little things and focus on the bigger ones.
#5 — Always trying to get more
This is a mindset I thought was the only good one until recently.
If you can reach $1,000,000 instead of $500,000, why not doing some extra efforts to double your income, right?
But what if $500,000 is actually enough, and your extra efforts could be put in something totally different that doesn’t make money but is 100% aligned with who you are?
See, most of the people I know would go for the additional $500,000, and since recently, I’m not one of those anymore.
People think that abundance is when you get a ton of everything you want, and that as long as something makes you get more of everything, it’s worth spending your time on it.
It’s true, if you consider a materialistic form of abundance.
But life abundance is not about having the most of everything in the world, it’s about having exactly what you need so that your needs are aligned with what you have so you can fully be who you are.
Instead of trying to get more and become greedy, it’s important to identify what it is that we need to go to the next step, and to go get this instead of trying to chase a ton of rabbits just because we think we can.
