Major life hack: Don't complain, ever. Nobody likes a complainer. They drain the energy of everyone around them. It's exhausting spending time around someone who constantly complains about things outside their control. If it’s within your control, go do something about it. If it’s not, you’re just wasting energy thinking about it. Complaining gives too much power to the thing. Take back that power.
Nobody tells you this: Ignore your mood. It doesn't matter whether you want to do the thing. It matters that you said you'd do it. The world belongs to the people who show up and do what they said they'd do. Reliability is the key to life. Just keep showing up.
Everyone needs to hear this...
Michael Caine on his defining philosophy for life:
Use the Difficulty
As a young actor, he was rehearsing a play when a chair got stuck in the door and blocked his path. He told the other actor he couldn't get by the chair to enter the scene.
The actor's response:
"Use the difficulty...if it's a comedy, fall over it, if it's a drama, pick it up and smash it."
This idea became a defining mantra for his life.
"There's never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty...if you can use it a quarter of one percent to your advantage, you're ahead, you didn't let it get you down."
I can't stop thinking about this...
How can you use the difficulty you're currently facing? How can you embrace the struggle? How can you find flow through the friction?
As with everything in life, control the controllable:
The difficulty is already there. You can't control it. But you can control how you react to it. You can control your response to it. You can control your attitude towards it.
Lesson: Difficulty is inevitable. Use it.