Hey everyone happy Sunday!
I hope you are all doing fantastic!
For this weeks post, I want to talk about handling random bullshit that goes on in everyday life! All kinds of stuff is going to happen to you on a day to day basis. It could be small stuff like stubbing your toe or forgetting your wallet. It could also be really big like your car breaks down or your girlfriend leaves you.
No matter what happens you will always have some kind of reaction to it. Now is it positive? Or is it negative? If you find that you are having negative reactions to the random shit that happens to you what are they?
Do you find it ruins your whole day, or that you often think about it for the rest of the day and maybe the day after? Or at that moment do you get really mad and maybe swear and yell and other stuff like that?
Now if you are having a negative response, ask yourself in what way is this reaction helping the situation? When you get mad or get discouraged or get frustrated does it help you in any way shape or form? I do not think so at all.
The quicker that you can acknowledge that something shitty has happened the quicker you can begin to pivot, move on and take action to remedy it. Obviously, this is easier said than done.
Here is a little trick that you can use to help you eat a punch that life throws are you and keep going. If you have a watch, this is great if not you can use a phone or find a clock, essentially all you need is something to keep the time with. You should also have something like a rubber band on your wrist to ack as a visual cue to remember or maybe some other visual cue that works for you.
Next time something happens that throws you off, start the clock, give yourself a certain amount of time to "react" to this event. In the time frame, you can react how you normally would, but right, when the time is up, you need to begin to either move on or take action to remedy the situation. Even if you are still thinking about what happened and still fuming in your mind by moving on to either fixing it or going about your day eventually your mind with have to refocus and move on.
This is what happened to me that gave me the idea for this post. So I had been working on my last assignment for the semester, a 3000-word essay. I had gotten about 1000 words in and somehow I didn't turn on autosave in word and my computer decided to restart. The entire essay got deleted and when I first realized this my heart stopped and I was fucking pissed. Right away I started searching for how to recover lost docs and other stuff like that. 10 minutes later I still hadn't been able to recover my essay but I simply just started again. By the end of the night I had already gotten down 150 words on the new draft. I easily could have called it a night after that initial setback!
A great book that talks about this is The Obstacle Is The Way by Ryan Holiday. A point that he makes is that when you have something unexpected that's shitty happens to you, just think? Am I going to die from this? No? Well then keep putting one foot in front of the other and crack on!
I hope you guys have a great night and I look forward to putting up my next post!
Thanks so much again to my 12-14 readers I'd love for you guys to put in a comment so I can interact with you more!
Cheers
Zach