Creating a Life You Love in Six Brutal Steps

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Let’s face it, it is incredibly difficult to figure out what you are meant to do with your life.

And it is even more difficult to build a life you enjoy.

Why?

Ricky Lanusse says it’s because our brains find it incredibly difficult to unpack life. They get stuck in the highlight reel and miss the muck, the struggle, the reality. We think in snapshots.

For example, when we think of an influencer, we see the vacations, the glamor, the opulence, but we miss the work and rejection behind their success.

Part of it is because we are lazy and scared. So, we fail to unpack the intricacies and details of the life worth living.

We see the poster, never the movie.

We see the writer in a coffee shop in an exotic country, acceptance letters flooding their inboxes and a plethora of ‘Hey, I love your work’, beneath their articles.

However, their reality is far from that.

It is one of loneliness, rejection, boredom, and self-doubt. A normal Tuesday consists of spending hours perfecting a paragraph and hunting down citations only to ditch that article because it feels forced and regurgitated. It is staying awake well past midnight wondering how you will make this month’s rent. It is dealing with insufferable customers at their day job, and writing deep into the night with no acclaim, no claps, no book deals — no nothing. Only hope.

But we fail to see all that. Even accomplished writers fail to see it. I struggle with it too. Whenever I visualize a successful writer, I see the accolades and the prestige. I never look under the hood to see the time, sacrifices, and effort it took.

I see the beauty I want to see, and beauty often seduces us away from the truth.

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How then do you create a life you love?

In Mastery, Robert Greene asserts that each one of us is naturally attracted to (and suited for) certain vocations and that it is our life’s task to discover our calling and nurture it. That somewhere in your DNA, it was written you were meant to be an author, and somewhere in Brian’s it was programmed that he was meant to be a coder.

Others disagree.

They point out that we choose for ourselves. We decide to become athletes, and we work towards it. Leaders are made, not born. Substitute ‘leaders’ for any vocation, any career — anything really.

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So, how do you create a life you love?

Well, the internet loves checklists, so here’s one from Jason McBride, who lists some of the things we need to do to build a life we love.

Take responsibility for your life.
Control your attitude.
Stop complaining.
Choose someone to serve.
Make mistakes and try again.
Decide you love your life.

So simple. So elegant. Yet so damn difficult.

Take Responsibility for Your Life

Taking responsibility for your life means accepting responsibility even for the things you have no direct control over.

Our lives are influenced more by the things we have no control over than by the things we exert direct control over. And yet, you still have to assume total responsibility and hold yourself accountable for everything.

It may not be your fault that you seem to be living in a never-ending recession, but it is your job to ensure you make rent. You do not control the market, but you are accountable for the successes and failures of your business. Even though you do not directly control your emotions, you must hold yourself accountable for your road rage.

Control Your Attitude

Controlling your attitude means fighting against your natural inclinations, your mind, and your emotions. It means remaining calm when every fibre of your being is screaming that everything around you is wrong and that it is somebody else’s fault.

It means you register the slight shifts in your perception of people and things, and you self-correct.

You smile when by all rights you should be screaming from the top of your lungs. You look at the positive, the bright side, the silver lining; and you ignore the mountain of negativity.

You choose to work optimistically rather than surrender to nihilism and pessimism.

Stop Complaining

Complaining is the easiest thing in the world to do. It is also the worst.

It is easily rationalized as the natural result of your annoyance at the world, at your partner, at the president, at your boss. But it is a thief of joy and of productivity.

I once got into a wager with a colleague. We bet that none of us would complain about anything to anyone for a week. The first to break would have to buy an expensive meal for the other.

By the end of the week, I had lost and had to treat her to lunch the following week.

Even though I lost, I remember that week fondly. It revealed what I always knew: that complaining sometimes makes problems worse.

During that week, the problems at work did not feel as significant as they used to before.

You will not build a life you love if you are a chronic complainant. At some point, you have to accept that you cannot control what other people do. All you can control is your attitude, your beliefs, and your actions.

So, you choose. If you can do something about it, do it. If you cannot, leave it.

Just don’t keep complaining.

Choose Someone to Serve

Just the phrase ‘choose someone to serve’ is enough to bring chills to a lot of people. We are in the era of solopreneurship after all.

We are all our own bosses. Let others serve us.

But, if you are keen enough, you might have noticed a crack begin to develop in the veneer of our new reality. The crack manifests itself in the declining happiness and satisfaction levels among the digital nomads and solopreneurs.

People are waking up to a reality of loneliness, boredom, anxiety, and general discontentment with their lives, careers, and choices.

This is because you cannot build a life you love on your own. You need others. You need to accept that even though you are not as good as you think you are, you can get there by actively listening to your audience, your market, and those with more experience than you do.

You don’t have to be a slave. But you need to know who you are working for (what market or audience) and then cater to their needs.

Make Mistakes and Try Again

Once bitten, twice shy. This is the reality of many people who have tried and failed.

Westenberg, one of my favorite writers here, points out that many entrepreneurs find it difficult to let go of failing businesses and, even worse, accepting that their ideas might be unsound or that they might not really fit the market. Even as their businesses crumble, they hide behind the sentiment that the market was just not ready for their ideas.

The reality is a little colder — and real.

You will make mistakes. You will fail. But failure does not need to define you. It does not need to make you bitter.

Failure offers valuable lessons — lessons about what to do and what not to do, lessons about how far you are willing to go versus what the market is willing to accept, lessons that peel away your mask and reveal the truth.

So, fail, fail, and then fail again. And then try again, each time incorporating the lessons you learnt.

What’s that old saying again? Fall seven times pick yourself up eight.