Life is what you are willing to accept.
Life is not what you achieved. It’s not what you went out and got.
It’s what you were willing to accept.
(Can some one stick that quote over a picture of some dolphins climbing a mountain at sunset or some crap like that for me? I want to get into motivational posters.)
Life is what you are willing to accept.
This idea struck me when I was in the shower, and it stopped me in my tracks. (I have a treadmill shower, to stay fit.)
I focus a lot on achievement. On making things happen. And that really is important. It’s a key element in the make-up of your life.
But in the balance of things, it’s small fry. If you were to break your life down in to what you went out and got, and what came to you and you received, what would the break down be?
90% : 10%?
Or think about it this way. How many things are you working on achieving right now? Maybe the most productive people might have a list of 20 things, maybe 50 for the uber-driven.
But how many ‘things’ are there in life? It’s almost infinite. Who sits next to you on the tram? What is the weather is doing? Do they have any bananas today?
So maybe a ratio of 9:1 is optimistic. Maybe its more like infinity : 50.
Ok, it’s silly trying to put number on it. The only want to make the point that a lot of what we have in life is what comes to us.
In that sense then, there is an important and overlooked leverage point for creating the life you want. What you are willing to receive.
For example, if you are willing to sit next to stinky drunken hobos on the train, you’re life will contain that flavour.
However, if you are not willing to accept that, if you get up and change seats whenever that happens, your life will not have that flavour.
There is an important filter here.
And I would say that ‘what you are willing to accept’ is probably the key way to understand your life.
Are you willing to accept verbal abuse from in-laws? Are you willing to accept mundane job tasks? Are you willing to accept living in a hovel above a train line? Are you willing to accept driving a 30 year old Datsun with broken indicators?
This is the power of no.
If you say no to these things, then something has to change.
If you say to the universe, no, I’m not willing to accept a circle of friends always trying to bring me down, then something has to change. It has to.
Now of course this has the element of a gamble to it. If you say, no, I’m not willing to accept a boyfriend who is suffocatingly protective, then you do open the way for the universe to give you the reality of ‘no boyfriend’.
That is a possibility.
But if you can accept that, then you can clear the space for the universe to give you something different.
More often than not, in my experience, the universe tends to be embarrassingly generous. The probability of no boyfriend is much lower than the probability of better boyfriend.
(Gary please stop calling me. Todd and I are happy.)
Professional scrabble players know this. (Yes, they exist). They ‘chuck in’ a huge number of times – much more often than amateur players.
They know that you don’t have to be stuck with a hand of shitty vowels. That’s hard to work with. Much better to clear the decks, trust fate, and try again.
Ok, I’m slipping off point. The central thing here is that to create the life we want, we have to be strong. We have to be really strong in what we’re willing to accept, and really strong in saying no when we need to.
If you get clear on this – if you get really strong on your no, it will have a huge impact on your life.
KatM says
Guys, say NO to giving away money to financial dominatrix types. It is sad that some men can derive pleasure by making themselves feel guilty and shamed into literally giving their money away to some painted peahen females. I’d only heard about this phenomenon until I saw it the other week on the American talk show about health ‘The Doctors’.
Andrew says
Well done Jon…. You’ve brought back the chance for us “plebs” to comment on your articles…
Thank-you…