Elevate Your Life With The Lousy Deal Hack

They say that happiness is a choice, but hey — then everything in life is.

All your emotions, actions, thoughts. Dirty little secrets, big bold dreams.

Bliss and misery, brilliance and mediocrity.

Gettings things done or procrastinating for days on end, waiting for that sweet last-minute panic to fill you with inspiration and creativity.

The problem is that sometimes it’s hard to see through our actions and pinpoint the ones that will likely lead to bad stuff in the end.

We’re just not mindful enough most of the time.

We do a lot of things on autopilot as if it was no big deal.

Well, it is.

A big and oh so very lousy deal.

Photo by Pepi Stojanovski on Unsplash

Sign here, please

Imagine you’re sitting in your room, minding your own business, knitting some gorgeous rainbow socks from the finest alpaca yarn in the city when all of a sudden––you hear someone knocking on your door.

You open the door and see a short shady man wearing a bowler hat and a lovely smile. He pinches his curly mustache and hands you a piece of fancy paper. It’s a one-line contract that says something like

I, [your name here], agree to hand over $10 000 (ten thousand dollars) to the fine bearer of this contract, for he wears a magnificent hat and a lovely smile.

Signed, [your signature here]

“Sure, why the hell not?”––you think to yourself and sign the paper.

You smile. The gentleman smiles.

The gentleman goes prancing to the nearest bank.

You return to knitting a pair of gorgeous rainbow socks from the finest alpaca yarn in the whole city. Lovely day, innit?

This situation is absurd because hey––nobody in their sane mind would just sign a contract and give 10 grand to a shady stranger.

What about a million? Ten million?

What if that fancy gentleman asked for your time, like a day of your life?

Ten days? A month?

Such a lousy deal, if you ask me.

Now here goes the bad news: we sign similar contracts dozens of time per day without even blinking.

Sounds like a great deal! (Photo by me, obviously)

Every action as a mindful choice

Ideally, every single thing we do, every thought we think, every emotion we allow our heart to feel — everything in life should be a mindful choice.

Although I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to reach a state of permanent and absolute mindfulness, we still can do our best to avoid lousy deals.

• Are you really willing to spend hours of your life reading that awful book?
• Is that new Candy Crush really more important than your work today?
• If you knew for sure that the next hour would give you a bestselling book idea if you’d started writing right now––would you? Or would you sign that 10k giveaway contract?

Exercise:
Next time you feel your mind is drifting away from your goals, your most important WHY, your inner ideals: take a piece of paper and illustrate the situation in the form of a lousy deal offered by a shady stranger.

Imagine it in the form of a really, really, really bad deal.

Would you still accept it?

• Yep, I am willing to spend the day watching Netflix instead of pursuing my dream of writing. Signed, [x]
• Of course, I am willing to eat 2 pounds of ice cream in the following hour because I have a zero tolerance policy for the mainstream idea of healthy living. Signed, [x]
• I am absolutely determined to spend 40 hours on playing video games this week because I honestly don’t have anything better to do. Signed, [x]

If that’s what you want —it’s your life. You’re allowed to do anything you want with it, no worries. Just make sure it’s what you really want.

This principle applies to all aspects of life, really, not just work.

• Yes, I am willing to fight with my spouse because he/she didn’t do the dishes. I’m willing to do that even if we both will be dead in a few hours.
• I am very willing to think bad things about this man I don’t even know because I hate the way he’s dressed. I will gladly do so instead of enjoying the glorious weather today––and how great it is to be alive.
• I am absolutely determined to pay no attention to what’s everyone around me saying, as I’m only interested in what I have to say.

Sounds like a good thing?

I hope it doesn’t. I really do.

Call to action

I’m sure that deep inside, we all strive to be a better version of ourselves.

We want to believe in growth, kindness, love, understanding — all that warm fuzzy concepts that sound like heaven on earth.

And yet, we do stupid things. Bad things. Lousy things.

Not because we’re intrinsically evil, but because we lack the mindfulness to think through the consequences.

There is another way.

Make a commitment to be as mindful with your choices as possible.

Would you still accept a lousy deal?