1. They do not believe every feeling they have means something.
They don’t assign value to everything they feel. They know that conviction doesn’t make something true.

2. They aren’t threatened by not being right.
They understand that having a misinformed belief or incorrect idea does not invalidate them as a person.

3. They do not use logic to deny their emotions.
They validate their feelings by acknowledging them; they do not say someone “shouldn’t” feel a particular way if they do.

4. They do not project meaning onto everything they see.
Particularly, they do not assume that everything they see or hear has something to do with them. They do not compare themselves to other people, simply because the idea that other people exist in comparison to oneself is mindless at best and selfish at worst.

5. They do not need to prove their power.
Rather than embody an inflated image of their invincibility, their disposition is predominantly peaceful and at ease, which is the mark of a truly secure person.

6. They do not avoid pain, even if they are afraid of it.
They cope with discomfort in favor of breaking an old habit. They trace the root of a relationship issue rather than deflect from the symptoms. They recognize that the discomfort is in avoiding the pain, not the pain itself.

7. They do not seek out other people’s flaws in an effort to diminish their strengths.
They do not respond to someone’s successes with observations about their failures.

8. They don’t complain (too much).
When people complain, it’s because they want others to recognize and validate their pain; even if it’s not the real problem, it’s still a form of affirmation.

9. They do not filter out certain aspects of an experience to catastrophize it.
People who jump A-Z and only think up worst-case scenarios usually do not have the confidence that they can take care of themselves if something unexpected were to arise— so they prepare for the worst and rob themselves of the best in the process.

10. They do not keep a list of things people “should” or “shouldn’t” do.
They recognize that “right” and “wrong” are two highly subjective things and that believing there is a universal code of conduct to which all people need to adhere only makes the person who believes that consistently disappointed.

11. They do not consider themselves a judge of what’s right or wrong.
Especially when it comes to offering friends advice, they don’t assume their ideal response to a situation is the solution everyone needs.

12. They do not draw general conclusions from their personal experiences.
They do not draw their own generalized conclusions about the human race based on the small percentage of the world that they experience each day.

13. They do not change their personality based on who they’re around.
Everyone fears rejection, but not everyone gets to truly experience the kind of acceptance that comes from being yourself unconditionally.

14. They can stand up for themselves without being aggressive or defensive.
Though it sounds like a contradiction, aggressiveness or defensiveness is indicative of insecurity. Calmly standing up for oneself is indicative of inner resolve and self-esteem.

15. They do not assume that this is always the way their life will be.

They are always conscious of the fact that their feelings are temporary, be they good or bad. This makes them focus on the positive and let the negative go with more ease.

The good news is that your life is probably different than how you think it is. Unfortunately, that’s the bad news, too. As Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman says: “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence, but of the coherence of the story that the mind has managed to construct.”
Yet the tools for that construction are not only our experiences, hopes, desires, and fears. There are psychological biases that prevent us from seeing an objective reality. In a sense, our collective reality is nothing but subjective experience v. subjective experience. The people who do not understand this believe their subjective experience is, in fact, objective. Our inability to coexist is not out of lack or inherent social dysfunction, but simply a lack of understanding of the most fundamental aspects of the bodies we inhabit.
This phenomenon has been studied since ancient Greek philosophy, and it’s typically referred to as “naïve realism,” the assumption that we see the world as it actually is, and that our impression is an objective, accurate representation of reality. Psychologist David McRaney summarizes it as follows:
“The last one hundred years of research suggest that you, and everyone else, still believe in a form of naïve realism. You still believe that although your inputs may not be perfect, once you get to thinking and feeling, those thoughts and feelings are reliable and predictable. We now know that there is no way you can ever know an “objective” reality, and we know that you can never know how much of subjective reality is a fabrication, because you never experience anything other than the output of your mind. Everything that’s ever happened to you has happened inside your skull.”
So what are these biases that affect us so deeply? Well, for starters, while there are many that are identifiable, there’s nothing that says you can’t create your own, unique biases—and in fact, it’s likely that most people do. Yet those are likely derived from some combination of the following.

1. Projection
Because our sole experience of the world is only through the apertures of our senses and ultimately, our psyches, we inevitably project our own preferences and consciousness onto what we see, and interpret it accordingly. In other words: The world is not as it is, it is as we are. We overestimate how typical and normal other people are, based on how

“odd” or “different” we feel. We assume that people think the way we do—because our internal narrative and process of the world is all we know.

2. Extrapolation
Extrapolation is what happens when we take the current moment we are in and then project those circumstances onto our lives as a whole. We make assumptions based on what our current circumstances “mean” about us, and then also begin to believe that things will always be the way they are—hence why tragedies feel so insurmountable, yet happiness feels so fleeting (in fearing that happiness won’t last forever, we lose it—in fearing that grief will last forever, we create it).

3. Anchoring
We become too influenced by the first piece of information we hear. For example, our world views tend to be the culmination of our parents’, not our most inherent beliefs. During a negotiation, the person who first puts an offer out creates a “range of possibility.” If you’ve heard of three people getting their books published for about the same amount of compensation, you begin to assume what will be possible for you, simply from your first frame of reference.

4. Negativity
We can’t stop watching car crashes and pay more attention to bad news and find ourselves absolutely enthralled by the destruction and drama in people’s lives—and it’s not because we’re morbid or completely masochistic. It’s actually because we only have the capacity to be selectively attentive, and we perceive negative news to be more important and profound, therefore, what our attention should go to first. Part of the reason for this is an essence of mysteriousness (when we don’t know the purpose of negativity in an existential sense, we become fascinated by it).

5. Conservatism
The sister of “anchoring,” conservatism is believing something more only because we believed it first. In other words, it’s an apprehension toward accepting new information, even if that information is more accurate or useful.

6. Clustering illusion
“Clustering” is when you begin to see patterns in random events because you have subconsciously decided to. This is what happens when you start seeing the car you want everywhere, or notice everyone wearing red when you’re wearing it. You subconsciously create patterns that, to other people, would be seen as random, simply because you’re seeking a confirmation bias.

7. Confirmation
One of the most commonly known biases, confirmation is what happens when we selectively listen to information that supports or proves our preconceptions of an idea or issue at hand. It’s how we mentally insulate ourselves and our worldview. It’s also how we self-validate.

8. Choice-supportive

When you consciously “choose” something, you tend to see that thing more positively, and actively disregard its flaws, more often than you would of a thing you did not choose for yourself. This is why the idea that we are autonomous in deciding what’s right for us is so crucial
—it dictates how we’ll relate to that thing forever.

If you ask any young adult what their primary stressor in life is, it’s likely something that relates to uncertainty. If you were to boil it down to a sentence, it would be something along the lines of: “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”
How many times have you heard someone say that? (How many times have you said that?) Probably a lot. The idea that we should know is a heaping pile of socially crafted bullshit that’s been superimposed on our psyches since kindergarten, and it’s holding us back.
Nobody—not one of us—knows “what we’re doing with our lives.” We can’t summarize the big picture, not yet. We don’t know what we’ll be doing in 5 years, and pretending that we can predict that isn’t being responsible or ambitious, it’s cutting ourselves off from living according to our inner navigation systems as opposed to the narrative we once thought would be right.
You owe nothing to your younger self.
You are not responsible for being the person you once thought you’d be. But you do owe something to the adult you are today.
Do you know why you don’t have the things you once thought you wanted? Do you know why you’re not the person you once thought you’d be? Because you don’t want those things anymore. Not badly enough. If you did, you’d have and be them.
If you’re wondering “what you should do with your life,” it’s likely that you’re in the limbo between realizing you don’t want what you once did, and giving yourself permission to want what you want now.
Thinking you know what you’re “doing with your life” quells your hunger. It soothes your mind with the illusion that your path is laid out before you, and that you no longer have to choose, which is another way to say, you’re no longer responsible for becoming the person you want and need to be.
Hunger is important. Complete fulfillment is the fast track to complacency. People don’t thrive when they’re fulfilled. They stagnate.
So fuck knowing what you’re “going to do with your life.”
What are you doing today? Who do you love? What intrigues you? What would you do today if you could be anyone you wanted? If social media didn’t exist? What do you want to do this weekend?
“What do I want?” is a question you need to ask yourself every day. The things that run true will weave through your life, the ones that pop back up again and again are the ones you’ll

follow. They’ll become the places you remain, the people you’re drawn to, the choices you make. The core truths will win out, even if other truths are lodged beside them.
Listening to it is saying: What do I want now?

1. You’re meant to be extraordinary.
Extraordinary people are just that—rare. Recognizing this doesn’t mean you’re giving up on your potential, it means you’re dissolving the illusions you have about what it means to be your whole self and live your best life. We tout the “one in a billion” success story as though it’s the natural end goal of working hard and actualizing yourself. It’s not. The real question is what work are you willing to do even if nobody claps? What will be worthwhile if it goes unacknowledged? How will you feel loved by a few people if you aren’t recognized by many? Finding the exceptional in the ordinary is the real extraordinary.

2. You’re at the beginning of your life.
Some of you reading this will not make it through your 20s. Others won’t make it past midlife, or even past this year. Keep a skull on your desk if you must—nobody assumes they’ll die young, but that doesn’t mean they don’t.

3. Your faults are more forgivable, and your attributes are more exceptional.
Believing that you’re less responsible for your misgivings and that you’re more exceptionally skilled at your strengths is the mindset to which many people default, but it ultimately just keeps you small. If you don’t acknowledge the magnitude of the poor choices you’ve made, you’re bound to justify doing them again; if you live and act as though you can slide by because you’re ever so slightly better than everyone else, you’ll never actually try.

4. You can literally be whatever you want.
If you don’t have the IQ of a rocket scientist, you cannot be a rocket scientist. If you don’t have the coordination to be a professional dancer, you won’t be a professional dancer. Wanting something badly enough doesn’t qualify you to have it.
You cannot be whatever you want, but if you work hard and don’t give up and happen to be born to circumstances that facilitate it, you can maybe do something that crosses your abilities with your interests. And if you’re really smart, you’ll figure out how to be grateful for it, even on the difficult days.

5. You can outsmart pain.
You cannot think your way out of pain. You cannot predict it, or avoid it, or pretend you don’t feel it. Doing so is living a fraction of the life you were meant to, and it will make you a fraction of the person you’re supposed to be.

6. Love is something other people give you.

People cannot transmute emotions, which is interesting to consider when you realize how utterly consumed the human race is with the concept of getting other people to love us. This is because when we think other people love us, we give ourselves permission to feel love. It’s a mind game, one in which we rely on everyone but ourselves to allow us to feel what’s already inside us. (If you think love is something that exists anywhere but within your own mind and heart, you will never have it.)

7. Feeling something deeply means it’s “meant to be.”
The intensity with which you experience something (or someone) does not equate to how “destined” it is. Many people deeply feel they’re called to be famous in their field, but they do not have the skills or the grit to make it; most people who get married feel deeply they’re in the right relationship, but that doesn’t mean it won’t end in divorce someday.
Breakups are meant to be. Job losses and hurt feelings and disappointments are, too. How do we know this? Because they happen often, they are the most pivotal redirects. Forget the final picture you want your life to amount to. It will never exist the way you think it should, and in the meantime, it will only ensure that you waste what you do have in the moment. There’s only one final destination here—the only thing you’re rushing toward is the end of your life.

8. If you work on yourself enough, you won’t struggle anymore.
If you work on yourself enough, you’ll understand what the struggle is for.

9. You can control what other people think of you.
You can control how you treat people, but you cannot actually control what they think. The idea that behaving a certain way will elicit a certain response is a delusion that will keep you puppeteering through your life. It will distance you from the person you want to be and the life you want to live. And for what? People are going to judge, criticize, condemn, love, admire, envy, and lust based on their own subjective perceptions regardless.

10. Hard work guarantees success.
If you’re looking for any one particular outcome as the end goal of your hard work, you’re most likely going to end up disappointed. The point of hard work is to recognize the person it makes you, not what it “gets” you (the former you can control; the latter, you can’t).

11. Your thoughts will change themselves when your circumstances change.
Most people assume that when their lives change, their thoughts will change. When they have someone who loves them, they’ll think they’re worthy of love. When they have money, they’ll have a different attitude about it. Unfortunately, the opposite is true— when you adopt a new mindset about money, you’ll start behaving differently, and then you’ll be in a different fiscal position, for example. Your mind creates; it is not created.

12. Other people are responsible for your feelings.
The only place you have complete control over what’s said to and around you is in your home. Otherwise, you exist in a diverse world of many people and opinions of which are likely to “offend” you at some point or another. If you want to assume you are the focal point of everyone’s life and ascribe meaning to every passing comment and idea that

doesn’t soundly resonate with your own belief system, you’re going to live a very difficult life. Changing how other people think and treat you is not a matter of how outraged you get, but how willing you are to explain, teach, and share. Defensiveness never precedes growth, it stunts it.

13. Emotional intelligence is infallible composure; self-esteem is believing you are supremely, completely “good”; happiness is a product of not having problems.
Emotional intelligence is the ability to feel, express, and interpret your feelings productively; self-esteem is believing you’re worthy of loving and being loved despite not being supremely, completely “good” all of the time; happiness is a product of how you cope with your problems and whether or not you see them as the opportunities they are.

14. The right person will come at the right time.
You will not be ready when the love of your life comes along. You also probably won’t be ready when you see the listing for your dream job, or to buy a house or maybe have a kid or maybe quit that job and try to write the book you keep thinking about or get sick or lose a relative or die yourself. If you wait on the feeling of “readiness,” you’ll be waiting forever, and worse, you’ll miss the best of what’s in front of you.

15. You can postpone your happiness or save it up like money in a bank.
People postpone their happiness to keep themselves safe. They dig for another problem to have to solve, another obstacle to overcome, another passageway until they can feel the happiness they know is in their lives. You cannot save up your happiness; you can either feel it in the moment, or you miss it. It’s that simple. It’s temporary regardless. The only variable is whether or not you ever felt it in the first place.

16. Anxiety and negative thinking are pesky irritants you just have to learn to thwart.
Anxiety is one of the main driving forces that has kept you—as well as our entire species
—alive. Struggling with a crippling overabundance of it usually means you’re not listening to it, or there’s some major issue in your life you refuse to address or take action on. The power of negative thinking is that it shows us what matters and how we need to respond to our lives.

17. Focusing solely on your own needs will make you happiest.

Despite what many corners of the Internet would have you believe, self-sufficiency is just a precursor to happiness. It is the foundation. It is crucial, but it is not the connectedness on which human beings thrive. Committing, sacrificing, trying and trying again for the people you love and the things you believe in are what make a life feel worthwhile. Meeting your own needs is the first step, not the ultimate goal.

1. The way it will feel to have the life you want. The place you’ll live, the clothes you will wear, what you will buy at the supermarket, how much money you’ll save, what work you’ll be most proud to have done. What you’ll do with your weekends, what color your sheets will be, what you’ll take photos of.
2. The parts of yourself you need to work on, not because someone else doesn’t love them, but because you don’t.
3. The fact that sometimes, the ultimate expression of self-love is admitting you don’t like yourself and coming up with steps to change the things that you know you can and will do better.
4. A list of things that turned out to be very right for you, and what similar feeling accompanied each of them.
5. The way you will quantify this year. How many books you want to say you’ve read, how many projects you’ve completed, how many connections with friends and family you fostered or rekindled, how you spent your days.
6. The things in the past that you thought you’d never get over, and how insignificant they seem today.
7. What you will create today, what food you will eat, and who you will connect with. (These are the only things you carry with you.)
8. How you learn best, and how you could possibly integrate that form of comprehension into your life more often (do things that are more visual, or listen better, try to experiment more often, and so on).
9. The fact that you do not need to be exceptionally beautiful or talented or successful to experience the things that make life profound: love, knowledge, connection, community, and so on.
10. The cosmos, and how despite being insignificant specks, we are all essential to the core patchwork that makes up humanity, and that without any single one of us, nothing would exist as it is right now.
11. The proper conjugations for a language you could stand to speak conversationally.
12. The people you smiled at on the street this morning, the people whom you text regularly, the family you could stand to visit more—all the little bits of genuine human connection that you overlook because they’ve become givens.
13. How you will remember this time in your life 20 years from now. What you will wish you had done or stopped doing, what you overlooked, what little things you didn’t realize you should have appreciated.
14. How few of your days you really remember.
15. How you likely won’t remember this particular day 20 years from now.
16. Everything you honestly didn’t like about the person you’re no longer with, now that you’re not emotionally obligated to lie to yourself about them.
17. A list of all the things you’ve done for yourself recently.
18. Little ways you can improve your quality of day-to-day life, such as consolidating debt, or learning to cook an easy signature meal, or cleaning out your closet.
19. The patterns in your failed relationships, and what degree of fault you can rightfully hand yourself.
20. What you subconsciously love about the “problems” you struggle to get over. Nobody holds onto something unless they think it does something for them (usually keeps them “safe”).
21. The idea that perhaps the current problem in your life is not the problem, but that your perception is skewed, or you aren’t thinking of solutions as much as you are focusing on your discomfort.
22. The ways you have sincerely failed, and how you can commit yourself to doing better, not only for yourself but for the people who love and rely on you.
23. The ways in which your current situation—though perhaps unplanned or unwanted— could be the path to the place you’ve actually always wanted to be, if only you’d begin to think of it that way.
24. Your mortality.
25. How you can more actively take advantage and appreciate the things that are in front of you while you still have them.
26. What your life looks like to other people. Not because you should value this more than you value your own feelings, but because perspective is important.
27. What you have already accomplished in your life.
28. What you want to be defined by when all is said and done. What kind of person you want to be known as. (Kind? Intelligent? Giving? Grounded? Helpful?)
29. What you could honestly be defined by at this point, based on your consistent actions and interactions, and whether or not that’s what you really want.
30. How your unconscious assumptions about what’s true and real are shaping the way you think of reality.
31. What other options exist outside of your default way of thinking; what would be true if the things you assumed were not.
32. The details of whatever it is you’re working on right now.
33. How you can possibly put more effort into said work that deserves your time and attention and energy more than whatever you become distracted by does.
34. How you can help other people, even just by sitting down to speak with an old friend, buying someone dinner, sharing an article or a quote that resonated with you.
35. Other people’s motivations and desires.
36. The fact that you do not think the exact way other people think, and that perhaps the issues you have with them are not issues, but lapses in your understanding of them (and theirs of you).
37. The patterns of the people you know, and what they tell you about whom they really are.
38. The fact that we assume people are as we imagine them—a compilation of the emotional experiences we’ve had with them—as opposed to the patterns they reveal to us in their behavior. It’s more accurate to sum people up by what they repeatedly do.
39. What you would say if you could tell every single person in the world just one thing.
40. What you would say if you could tell your younger self just one thing.
41. The years of practice it takes to learn to play each instrument in your favorite song. The power and creativity it takes to simply come up with a melody, forget a piece of music that moves you to your core.
42. Where your food comes from.
43. What your big objective is. If you don’t know what you generally want to do with your precious, limited time here, you’re not going to do much of anything at all.
44. What you’d put in one box if you had to move to the other side of the country and could only bring that.
45. Getting to inbox 0.
46. How much your pet loves you.
47. How you can adequately and healthfully allow yourself to feel and express pain when it comes up (as opposed to just freaking out and trying to get rid of it as fast as possible).
48. Plot twists. The complexities and contradictions of your favorite characters in your favorite books.
49. Who you would be happy to also live for, if your own desires and interests were no longer your sole priority.
50. What your future self would think and say about whatever situation you’re in right now.
51. An upcoming trip, whether it’s booked or not. What you’re going to do, what you’re going to take pictures of, what you can explore, who you’ll be with, who you’ll meet.
52. The hardest nights of your life. What you would have done differently. What you would do if you could re-enter those hours and advise your past self.
53. The best nights of your life. Not only what you were doing and who you were with, but what you were thinking and what you were focusing on.
54. The fact that it is hard to do everything: It’s hard to be in a relationship, it’s hard not to be in one. It’s hard to have to perform at a job you love and are emotionally invested in, it’s hard not to be living your dreams by a certain age. Everything is hard; it’s just a matter of what you think is worth the effort.
55. What you think is worth that effort. What you are willing to suffer for.
56. Aesthetics that you love. The kind of spaces you not only want to live and work in, but which make you feel most like yourself.
57. What actions, choices, and behaviors you think could have saved your parents.
58. Your singular, deepest fear.
59. What your singular, deepest fear tells you about your singular, deepest desire.
60. The little wonders. The smell of rain when the windows are open in the summer, your favorite T-shirt, songs you loved as a kid, your favorite food when you’re hungry.
61. Your stories. The strange and simple and beautiful things you’ve experienced and how you can better share them with other people.
62. What you will be motivated by when fear is no longer an option.
63. What you are motivated to do when fear is no longer an option.
64. What “enough” means to you. What’s enough money, enough love, enough productivity.Fulfillment is a product of knowing what “enough” is—otherwise you will be constantly seeking more.
65. Your dream moments. Having a birthday party in which all the people you love attend, or getting on a plane to Thailand, or losing the weight you’ve always wanted to, or being debt-free, or renovating a house.
66. What you’d do if you had $1,000 of extra disposable income each month.
67. What actions you could take to move yourself in the direction of the life you want— where you could search for networking opportunities, what friends in neighboring cities you could visit and explore, how you could get out more.
68. The feeling of sun on your skin.
69. The smell of spring.
70. What you can do with your minutes, as opposed to your hours, or days.
71. How much of your self-perception is built by culture, or expectations, or other people’s opinions.
72. How much of your self-perception is sustained by culture, or expectations, or other people’s opinions.
73. Who you are when nobody’s around.
74. What you thought you’d be when you were younger. How the elements of that play into your life now.
75. How you’d behave differently if this entire time-space reality were in fact a holographic illusion over which you ultimately have control.
76. How you’d behave differently if your fate were dependent on the thoughts you think and the actions you take in any given moment.
77. The basic premise of various ancient philosophies, and which resonates with you the most soundly.
78. Melodies of songs that haven’t been written yet.
79. The fact that the way to change your life is to change the way you think, and the way to change the way you think is to change what you read.
80. What you’d read if you chose books and articles based on what interested you, not what other people say is “good” literature.
81. What you’d listen to if you chose music based on what interested you, not what other people say is “good” music.
82. What genuinely turns you on.
83. What qualities you admire most in other people. (This is what you most like about yourself.)
84. What qualities you most dislike in other people. (This is what you cannot see, or are resisting, in yourself.)
85. How love would save your life, if it were capable of doing such things. (It is.)
86. How infinite the universe is; how infinitesimal we are; how perhaps each is a reflection, and extension, of the other.
87. How complicated the questions are; how simple the answers turn out to be.
88. What “yes” feels like to you. People very often focus on the warning signs that something is wrong, but not the subtle signals that something is right.
89. How many random, chance occurrences were involved in nearly every important advancement in your life.
90. A mantra, or many mantras, all of which work to support your unwavering conviction that the future will be different, and you will figure out how to make it so.
91. The fact that the kind of love worth choosing and keeping is the kind that ever so slightly tilts the axis on which your world spins, leaving nothing to ever be the same again.
92. How to fight better. How to eloquently communicate your thoughts and feelings without putting people on the defensive, and starting an argument where there should just be a deepening of connection.
93. What you’d live for, if your primary interest was no longer your own wants and needs.
94. The people who depend on you, and how absolutely devastated they would be if you were no longer in their lives.
95. Who and where you will be in five years if you carry on as you are right now.
96. The most important things you’ve learned about life so far.
97. How you came to learn the most important things you’ve learned so far.
98. How many people go to bed at night crying, wishing they had what you have—the job, the love, the apartment, the education, the friends, and so on.
99. How many times in your life you went to bed crying, wishing you could have what you have now—the job, the love, the apartment, the education, the friends, and so on.
100. What you can do to more consistently remind yourself of this.
101. What your most fully realized self is like. How your best self thinks. What they are grateful for, who they love. The first, and most important step, to being the person you were intended to be is to conceive of them. Once you’ve accomplished that, everything else falls in line.

The ancient Greeks called it Akrasia, the Zen Buddhists call it resistance, you and I call it procrastination, every productivity guru on the Internet calls it being “stuck.” Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton call it the “knowing-doing gap,” or the experience of knowing the best thing to do, but doing something else anyway6.
Common sense tells us that if we put another hour into novel writing each night, ate better, woke earlier, chose affirmative thoughts, spoke honestly and connected more genuinely, we’d live better lives. But the real question, and the real work, is not understanding what’s good for us, but why we choose otherwise. Understanding the fabric of resistance is the only way we can unstitch it.
There are many reasons we self-sabotage, and most of them have something to do with comfort. Modern society (innovation, culture, wealth, success) is designed to convince us that a “good life” is one that is most comfortable, or able to provide us with a sense of being pain-free and secure. This is pretty directly related to the fact that human beings are hardwired to seek comfort, which translates to us as survival—we’re physiologically designed that way. It only makes sense that in our more fully actualized intellectual and emotional lives, we’d want the same.
Moving yourself past resistance is a matter of shifting your perception of comfort. It’s about considering the alternative. It’s altering your mindset to focus on the discomfort you will face if you don’t do the thing in front of you, as opposed to the discomfort you will face if you do.
If left unchecked, the knowing-doing gap will leave you a shell of the person you intended to be. It will wreck your most intimate, passionate relationships, keep you from the kind of daily productivity required to achieve any goal worth working toward. It will keep you in a manic state of indecision (do I, or don’t I? Which feeling do I let guide me?). You have to take control for yourself, and you can do so by considering the big picture. The alternative. The way your life will be if you don’t do this thing.
How will you quantifiably measure this year? What will you have done? How many hours will you have wasted? If you had to live today—or any average day—on repeat for the rest of your life, where would you end up? What would you accomplish? How happy would you be? What relationships will you have fostered? Will you be looking back knowing you likely damn well missed out on what could have been the love of your life because you weren’t “ready?” What about the hours you could have been playing music or writing or painting or whatever-ing? Where will those have gone?

You will never be ready for the things that matter, and waiting to feel ready before you start acting is how the knowing-doing gap widens. It’s uncomfortable to work, to stretch the capacity of your tolerance, to be vulnerable with someone you care deeply about, but it is never more comfortable than going your whole life without the things you really want.
Anxiety builds in our idle hours. Fear and resistance thrive when we’re avoiding the work. Most things aren’t as hard or as trying as we chalk them up to be. They’re ultimately fun and rewarding and expressions of who we really are. That’s why we want them. Taking small steps will remind you that this is true. It will soothe you in a way that just thinking about taking action never will. It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking rather than think your way into a new way of acting, so do one little thing today and let the momentum build.
And thank whatever force within you that knows there’s something bigger for you—the one that’s pushing you to be comfortable with less.

Eric Greitens says that there are three primary forms of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and the happiness of excellence5. He compares them to the primary colors, the basis on which the entire spectrum is created.
The happiness of pleasure is largely sensory. It’s a good meal when you’re hungry, the smell of air after it rains, waking up warm and cozy in your bed. The happiness of grace is gratitude. It’s looking over to see the love of your life sleeping next to you and whispering, “thank you.” It’s taking inventory of what you do have. It’s when you speak to something greater than yourself, expressing humility and awe.
And then there is the happiness of excellence. The kind of happiness that comes from the pursuit of something great. Not the moment you arrive at the top of the mountain and raise your fists in victory, but the process of falling in love with the hike. It is meaningful work. It is flow. It is the purpose that sears identity and builds character and channels our energy toward something greater than the insatiable, daily pursuit of our fleeting desires.
Just as removing one of the primary colors would make many others impossible (without yellow, you could not have any shade of green) without any one of these happinesses, it is almost impossible to thrive.
One cannot replace another. They are all necessary. But we try anyway.
To drink in excess, for example—the happiness of pleasure—is common when the happiness of excellence isn’t being pursued. But it is not, and will never be, the solution.
“Lots and lots of red will never make blue. Pleasures will never make you whole.”
The happiness of excellence is the work of emotional resilience. It’s the highest ranking on Maslow’s hierarchy. It is measured, deliberate, and consistent. It is often avoided because the discomfort is palpable, and the reward isn’t instantaneous. There’s no contact high during the first days of marathon training when your lungs are stinting and you want to vomit. But over time, you develop your skill. You begin to imagine what you could accomplish. You fall in love with the process.
Though all three of the happinesses are different, they are all shaped by context. Someone who has gone without food for three days is more attuned to the happiness of pleasure than people who consider meals and shelter givens.
Likewise, those who have never acquainted themselves with the power and pleasure of working toward something fueled not by the sparks of passion but with the embers of sober, consistent resolve, do not know that on the other side of exerted effort, there is profound reward.
Many of us are colorblind to the joys and complexities of our lives, and it is because we are missing a part of the foundation. We want to be authors but have no desire to develop the discipline it takes to sit down and write for four hours a day for years on end. We want to be legends and geniuses and masters, but care little to develop the discipline it would require to log our 10,000 hours—so to say.

Happiness is not only how we can astound our senses, but also the peace of mind that comes from knowing we are becoming who we want and need to be. That’s what we receive from pursuing the happiness of excellence: not accomplishment, but identity. A sense of self that we carry into everything else in our lives. A technicolor pigment that makes the entire spectrum come alive.

Eric Greitens says that there are three primary forms of happiness: the happiness of pleasure, the happiness of grace, and the happiness of excellence5. He compares them to the primary colors, the basis on which the entire spectrum is created.
The happiness of pleasure is largely sensory. It’s a good meal when you’re hungry, the smell of air after it rains, waking up warm and cozy in your bed. The happiness of grace is gratitude. It’s looking over to see the love of your life sleeping next to you and whispering, “thank you.” It’s taking inventory of what you do have. It’s when you speak to something greater than yourself, expressing humility and awe.
And then there is the happiness of excellence. The kind of happiness that comes from the pursuit of something great. Not the moment you arrive at the top of the mountain and raise your fists in victory, but the process of falling in love with the hike. It is meaningful work. It is flow. It is the purpose that sears identity and builds character and channels our energy toward something greater than the insatiable, daily pursuit of our fleeting desires.
Just as removing one of the primary colors would make many others impossible (without yellow, you could not have any shade of green) without any one of these happinesses, it is almost impossible to thrive.
One cannot replace another. They are all necessary. But we try anyway.
To drink in excess, for example—the happiness of pleasure—is common when the happiness of excellence isn’t being pursued. But it is not, and will never be, the solution.
“Lots and lots of red will never make blue. Pleasures will never make you whole.”
The happiness of excellence is the work of emotional resilience. It’s the highest ranking on Maslow’s hierarchy. It is measured, deliberate, and consistent. It is often avoided because the discomfort is palpable, and the reward isn’t instantaneous. There’s no contact high during the first days of marathon training when your lungs are stinting and you want to vomit. But over time, you develop your skill. You begin to imagine what you could accomplish. You fall in love with the process.
Though all three of the happinesses are different, they are all shaped by context. Someone who has gone without food for three days is more attuned to the happiness of pleasure than people who consider meals and shelter givens.
Likewise, those who have never acquainted themselves with the power and pleasure of working toward something fueled not by the sparks of passion but with the embers of sober, consistent resolve, do not know that on the other side of exerted effort, there is profound reward.
Many of us are colorblind to the joys and complexities of our lives, and it is because we are missing a part of the foundation. We want to be authors but have no desire to develop the discipline it takes to sit down and write for four hours a day for years on end. We want to be legends and geniuses and masters, but care little to develop the discipline it would require to log our 10,000 hours—so to say.

Happiness is not only how we can astound our senses, but also the peace of mind that comes from knowing we are becoming who we want and need to be. That’s what we receive from pursuing the happiness of excellence: not accomplishment, but identity. A sense of self that we carry into everything else in our lives. A technicolor pigment that makes the entire spectrum come alive.

Most people don’t want to be happy, which is why they aren’t. They just don’t realize this is the case.
People are programmed to chase their foremost desire at almost any cost. (Imagine the adrenaline-fueled superhuman powers people develop in life-or-death emergencies.) It’s just a matter of what that foremost desire is. Often enough, it’s comfort. Or familiarity.
There are many reasons people thwart the feeling of happiness, but a lot of them have to do with assuming it means giving up on achieving more. Nobody wants to believe happiness is a choice, because that puts responsibility in their hands. It’s the same reason people self-pity: to delay action, to make an outcry to the universe, as though the more they state how bad things are, the more likely it is that someone else will change them.
Happiness is not a rush of positive emotion elicited by random events that affirm the way you think something should go. Not sustainable happiness, anyway. The real stuff is the product of an intentional, mindful, daily practice, and it begins with choosing to commit to it.
Everybody has a happiness tolerance—an upper limit—as Gay Hendricks coins it4. It is the capacity for which we allow ourselves to feel good. Other psychologists call it the “baseline,” the amount of happiness we “naturally” feel, and eventually revert back to, even if certain events or circumstances shift us temporarily.
The reason we don’t allow those shifts to become baselines is because of the upper limit—as soon as our circumstances extend beyond the amount of happiness we’re accustomed to and comfortable feeling, we unconsciously begin to self-sabotage.
We are programmed to seek what we’ve known. So even though we think we’re after happiness, we’re actually trying to find whatever we’re most accustomed to, and we project that on whatever actually exists, over and over again. These are just a few of many psychological impediments that hold us back from the emotional lives we claim to want. Here are a few others:

1. Everybody has a limited tolerance for feeling good.
When things go beyond that limit, we sabotage ourselves so we can return to our comfort zones. The tired cliché of stepping outside them serves a crucial purpose: It makes people comfortable with discomfort, which is the gateway to expanding their tolerance for happiness.

2. There is a “likability limit” that people like to remain under: Everybody has a level of “success” that they perceive to be admirable—and unthreatening to others.
Most things people do are in an effort to “earn” love. Many desires, dreams, and ambitions are built out of a space of severe lack. It’s for this reason that some of the most emotionally dense people are also the most successful: They use their desire for acceptance, love, wholeness, as fuel—for better and for worse.
The point is: Once people surpass the point at which they think people will judge and ridicule them for their success (as opposed to praise them for it), they promptly cut themselves off, or at minimum severely downplay/minimize it so as to keep themselves in good standing with those from whom they desire approval. (It’s ultimately not that people value ego and material over love, but that they think those things will earn them love.)

3. Most prefer the comfort of what they’ve known to the vulnerability of what they don’t.
Even when “what they don’t” is, objectively, much better. If we redefine “happiness” in terms of what human beings innately desire (comfort, inclusiveness, a sense of purpose, etc.), we can then make the choice to seek comfort from things that are ultimately aligned with what we want to achieve.

4. Many people are afraid that “being happy” = giving up on achieving more.
Happiness is, in an essential form, acceptance. It’s arriving at the end goal, passing the finish line, letting the wave of accomplishment wash over you. Deciding to be that way every day can make it seem as though the race is already over, so we subconsciously associate “happiness” and “acceptance” with “giving up.” But the opposite is true: The path to a greater life is not “suffering until you achieve something,” but letting bits and pieces of joy and gratitude and meaning and purpose gradually build, bit by bit.

5. People delay action once they know truth—and the interim between knowing and doing is the space where suffering thrives.
Most of the time, it’s not about not knowing what to do (or not knowing who you are). It’s about the resistance between what’s right and what’s easy, what’s best in the long v. short term. We hear our instincts; we just don’t listen. This is the single most common root of discomfort: the space between knowing and doing. We’re culturally addicted to procrastination, but we’re also just as enamored by deflection. By not acting immediately, we think we’re creating space for the truth to shift, when we’re really only creating discomfort so that we can sense it more completely (though we’re suffering needlessly in the process).

6. People believe that apathy is safety.
We’re all afraid of losing the pieces and people that make up our lives. Some people try to cut ahead of the pain-curve and don’t let themselves feel as though they wanted or liked those things in the first place. The undercurrent here is the sense that everything ends and all is impermanent and while those things are more or less true, there is something just slightly truer, and it is that death gives life meaning. It’s the fact that we can lose what we have that makes it sacred and precious and wonderful. It’s not about what pain you suffer; it’s about what you suffer for. You can choose to cut yourself off from feeling good so as to buffer the sense of loss and suffer from numbness, or you can have an incredible life and mourn wildly when it’s over, but at least there was a means to that end.

7. Few know how to practice feeling good (or why it’s necessary).
It is almost essential to raising your upper limit, augmenting your baseline, and ultimately assimilating to the new chapter(s) of your life without destroying them out of unfamiliarity. Practicing feeling good is simply taking a moment to literally let yourself feel. Extend that rush just a few seconds longer, meditate on some things you’re grateful for, and let it wash over you as much as possible. Seek what’s positive, and you’ll find that your threshold for feeling it expands as you decide it can.

8. People think happiness is an emotional response facilitated by a set of circumstances, as opposed to a choice and shift of perception/awareness.
It seems that the people who are steadfast in their belief that circumstances create happiness are not to be swayed—and that makes sense. It’s for the same reason that we buy into it so much: It’s easier. It’s the way to cut corners on your emotional life. It’s seemingly logical and fairly easy to attain, so why not stand by it fiercely? Because it’s ultimately false. It maintains that you must wait to feel happy, and as we know, unless you are cultivating your baseline to be all-around higher, you’ll spend the rest of your life bopping from one perceived high to another. Some of the statistically happiest countries in the world are nearly impoverished. Some of the most notable and peaceful individuals to grace the Earth died with only a few cents to their name. The commonality is a sense of purpose, belonging, and love: things you can choose to feel and cultivate, regardless of physical/material circumstance.

9. Most people don’t know that it’s possible to shift their baseline, since it’s always framed in a way of being “how one naturally is.”
If I’ve heard it once I’ve heard it a thousand times: the woman with anxiety who says, “It’s just the way I am.” The man with a dozen irrational fears who attributes them to “his personality.” The thing is that nothing has to be an essential part of you unless you decide it is—least of all anxiety and fear. In fact, those things are never essentially part of who someone is; they are learned behaviors. They are ego-reactions that go unchecked. They are flashing lights and waving flags from our innermost selves that something is not right, but we’re avoiding making the shift (mostly by deflecting on the circumstance being out of our control).

10. People believe that suffering makes them worthy.
To have wonderful things in our lives without having suffered for them somehow translates to us feeling as though we haven’t truly “earned” them and therefore, they are not completely ours. On the flip side: The idea that beautiful, joyous things could simply be ours without any conscious creation of them on our part is terrifying, because the opposite could just as well be true.

11. Many people believe they can beat fear to the finish line.
Worry is the Western cultural pastime, and it’s ultimately a deflection from the fact that we buoy between extremes: not caring about anything or caring so much about one thing it could break us altogether.

Worrying conditions us to the worst possible outcomes so they don’t cause as much pain if they come to pass. We’re thinking through every irrational possibility so we can account for it, prepare for it, before it surprises us. We try to imagine every “bad” thing a person could say about us so they’re not the first to do it.
But this does not change anything. You still won’t expect difficult things to arise. You will never know what people are really thinking, or how often. You will not be able to prepare to cope with your irrational fears, because there’s no basis in a reality you could possibly get ready to deal with. You cannot beat fear to the finish line. You are not cheating your way around pain. You’re actively pursuing more and more of it.

12. Happy people are often perceived as being naive and vulnerable.

If nothing else, happy people are stigmatized as being clueless and ill-informed and delusionally positive and disconnected from reality, but the only people who perceive them that way are people who do everything in their power to justify the negativity in their lives they feel they cannot control. It is people who don’t choose a better life that are naive and truly vulnerable, as “happy people” may lose everything they have, but people who never choose to fully step into their lives never have anything at all.

1. You paid the bills this month and maybe even had extra to spend on nonessentials. It doesn’t matter how much you belabored the checks as they went out; the point is that they did, and you figured it out regardless.

2. You question yourself. You doubt your life. You feel miserable some days. This means you’re still open to growth. This means you can be objective and self-aware. The best people go home at the end of the day and think: “or…maybe there’s another way.”

3. You have a job. For however many hours, at whatever rate, you are earning money that helps you eat something, sleep on something, wear something every day. It’s not failure if it doesn’t look the way you thought it would—you’re valuing your independence and taking responsibility for yourself.

4. You have time to do something you enjoy, even if “what you enjoy” is sitting on the couch and ordering dinner and watching Netflix.

5. You are not worried about where your next meal is coming from. There’s food in the fridge or pantry, and you have enough to actually pick and choose what you want to eat.

6. You can eat because you enjoy it. It’s not a matter of sheer survival.

7. You have one or two truly close friends. People worry about the quantity but eventually tend to realize the number of people you can claim to be in your tribe has no bearing on how much you feel intimacy, acceptance, community, or joy. At the end of the day, all we really want are a few close people who know us (and love us) no matter what.

8. You could afford a subway ride, cup of coffee, or the gas in your car this morning. The smallest conveniences (and oftentimes, necessities) are not variables for you.

9. You’re not the same person you were a year ago. You’re learning, and evolving, and can identify the ways in which you’ve changed for better and worse.

10. You have the time and means to do things beyond the bare minimum. You’ve maybe been to a concert in the last few years, you buy books for yourself, you could take a day trip to a neighboring city if you wanted—you don’t have to work all hours of the day to survive.

11. You have a selection of clothing at your disposal. You aren’t worried about having a hat or gloves in a blizzard, you have cool clothes for the summer and something to wear to a

wedding. You not only can shield and decorate your body but can do so appropriately for a variety of circumstances.

12. You can sense what isn’t right in your life. The first and most crucial step is simply being aware. Being able to communicate to yourself: “Something is not right, even though I am not yet sure what would feel better.”

13. If you could talk to your younger self, you would be able to say: “We did it, we made it out, we survived that terrible thing.” So often people carry their past traumas into their present lives, and if you want any proof that we carry who we were in who we are, all you need to do is see how you respond to your inner child hearing, “You’re going to be okay” from the person they became.

14. You have a space of your own. It doesn’t even have to be a home or apartment (but that’s great if it is). All you need is a room, a corner, a desk, where you can create or rest at your discretion; where you govern who gets to be part of your weird little world, and to what capacity. It’s one of the few controls we can actually exert.

15. You’ve lost relationships. More important than the fact that you’ve simply had them in the first place is that you or your former partner chose not to settle. You opened yourself to the possibility of something else being out there.

16. You’re interested in something. Whether it’s how to live a happier life, maintain better relationships, reading or movies or sex or society or the axis on which the world spins, something intrigues you to explore it.

17. You know how to take care of yourself. You know how many hours of sleep you need to feel okay the next day, who to turn to when you’re heartbroken, what you have fun doing, what to do when you don’t feel well, etc.

18. You’re working toward a goal. Even if you’re exhausted and it feels miles away, you have a dream for yourself, however vague and malleable.

19. But you’re not uncompromisingly set on anything for your future. Some of the happiest and best-adjusted people are the ones who can make any situation an ideal, who are too immersed in the moment to intricately plan and decidedly commit to any one specific outcome.

20. You’ve been through some crap. You can look at challenges you currently face and compare them to ones you thought you’d never get over. You can reassure yourself through your own experience. Life did not get easier; you got smarter.