Today was the second day of my last semester of college, and I fell back into an old habit that I hate. I overslept and missed my class.
This summer I grew a lot. I had transformative experiences that made me face my demons head on. It was my plan to come back to school and work harder than I ever have. I really thought I had changed, but I am already repeating a behavior I hate.
I do still think that I have changed. But I need to reset my expectations. Change doesn’t happen over night. I wanted to come back and every thing be perfect naturally, in other words, without any effort. That isn’t the reality of life as a human though. Change doesn’t just come about, except through conscientious, intentional, focused, effort. If I want to change this behavior I hate of sleeping in then I need to make a plan to overcome this weakness and then be diligent about sticking to this plan daily.
You can see my plan plan for building an early morning wake-up habit here:
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But either way, that preamble was just to say a bit about why this video had such an impact on me. My main takeaways from the video are:
- That people often need some external source of meaning in order to do the difficult, though fulfilling, acts that growth requires. People won’t wake up early and run unless they have a marathon scheduled. Nor will they grow there mind, unless they are in school working towards a degree. But the real joy is found in simply the act of bettering yourself. If you won’t do these things without an external goal, then you simply do not love yourself enough. If you truly loved yourself, you would do all of the difficult things simply for the pleasure of improving your greatest tool which is yourself.
- you have to be proud of yourself. not bad pride, but the pride of knowing you can be the standard.
- make your own mission statement for yourself. ‣
