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.

We believe in rooting our everyday functions in logic and reason, yet we come to the same conclusions after long periods of contemplation as we do in the blink of an eye3. Our leaders sorely overlook the human element of our sociopolitical issues and I need not cite the divorce rate for you to believe that we’re not choosing the right partners (nor do we have the capacity to sustain intimate relationships for long periods of time).

It seems people believe the most intelligent thing to do is not have emotions at all. To be effective is to be a machine, a product of the age. A well-oiled, consumerist-serving, digitally attuned, highly unaware but overtly operational robot. And so we suffer.

Here are the habits of the people who have the capacity to be aware of what they feel. Who know how to express, process, dismantle, and adjust their experience as they are their own locus of control. They are the true leaders, they are living the most whole and genuine lives, and it is from them we should be taking a cue. These are the things that emotionally intelligent people do not do.

1. They don’t assume that the way they think and feel about a situation is the way it is in reality, nor how it will turn out in the end.

They recognize their emotions as responses, not accurate gauges, of what’s going on. They accept that those responses may have to do with their own issues, rather than the objective situation at hand.

2. Their emotional base points are not external.

Their emotions aren’t “somebody else’s doing,” and therefore “somebody else’s problem to resolve.” Understanding that they are the ultimate cause of what they experience keeps them out of falling into the trap of indignant passivity: Where one believes that as the universe has done wrong, the universe will ultimately have to correct it.

3. They don’t assume to know what it is that will make them truly happy.

Being that our only frame of reference at any given time is what’s happened in the past, we actually have no means to determine what would make us truly happy, as opposed to just feeling “saved” from whatever we disliked about our past experiences. In understanding this, they open themselves up to any experience that their life evolves toward, knowing there are equal parts good and bad in anything.

4. They don’t think that being fearful is a sign they are on the wrong path.

The presence of indifference is a sign you’re on the wrong path. Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way. (Or, rather, are being called up to be healed.)

5. They know that happiness is a choice, but they don’t feel the need to make it all the time.

They are not stuck in the illusion that “happiness” is a sustained state of joy. They allow themselves time to process everything they are experiencing. They allow themselves to exist in their natural state. In that non-resistance, they find contentment.

6. They don’t allow their thoughts to be chosen for them.

They recognize that through social conditioning and the eternal human monkey-mind, they can often be swayed by thoughts, beliefs, and mindsets that were never theirs in the first place. To combat this, they take inventory of their beliefs, reflect on their origins, and decide whether or not that frame of reference truly serves them.

7. They recognize that infallible composure is not emotional intelligence.

They don’t withhold their feelings or try to temper them so much as to render them almost gone. They do, however, have the capacity to withhold their emotional response until they are in an environment wherein it would be appropriate to express how they are feeling. They don’t suppress it; they manage it effectively.

8. They know that a feeling will not kill them.

They’ve developed enough stamina and awareness to know that all things, even the worst, are transitory.

9. They don’t just become close friends with anyone.

They recognize true trust and intimacy as something you build, and something you want to be discerning with whom you share. But they’re not guarded or closed as they are simply mindful and aware of who they allow into their lives and hearts. They are kind to all but truly open to few.

10. They don’t confuse a bad feeling for a bad life.

They are aware of, and avoid, extrapolation, which is essentially projecting the present moment into the foreseeable future—believing that the moment at hand constitutes what your entire life amounted to, rather than just being another passing, transitory experience in the whole. Emotionally intelligent people allow themselves their “bad” days. They let themselves be fully human. It’s in this non-resistance that they find the most peace of all