30 Things You Don’t Realize If You Feel You Aren’t As Far As You Should Be In Life

1. Your impact on humanity is not something you measure with a line on a résumé or nice Instagram photos. You leave your legacy in the minds and hearts of others.

2. Joy does not come and go, your awareness of it does.

3. Happiness does not come and go, your awareness of it does.

4. Gratitude does not come and go, your awareness of it does.

5. You will be as at peace with your life as you continually call your attention to be.

6. You’re allowed to do nothing. In other cultures, having long, lingering dinner conversations, taking holidays each year, relaxing and just being are customary… not privileges you have to feel guilty for or justify with your exhaustion.

7. You can be anything ≠ you have to be everything.

8. Maybe you’re not “as far” as some other people because you got sick. Maybe you needed to take a season to lay in bed and cry and sweat out your old pains. Maybe you felt traveling was more important than investing. Maybe what you learned from what you chose was what you needed to do to get here.

9. Some people are better at crafting their lives. Some are great photographers, others have better elevator pitches. Some have great style, others blur out the less flattering details of their lives. Just because something seems better doesn’t always mean it is.  

10. You’re not upset with the way your life is, you’re upset because you assume that your life should be different than how it is right now.

11. You have exactly the life you want. You have chosen every detail – but it’s not until you realize why you’re choosing these things that you’ll really be free.

12. Creating the life you want is the easiest thing in the world. Creating a life you don’t really want is impossible. And that’s where most people get stuck.

13. Analyze what you think would make your life better. Ask yourself if that’s what you really want, or if that’s what you think you should want in order to give yourself permission to feel happy.

14. … Because that’s all that really changes. You either give yourself permission to find and create happiness, or you don’t. Most people wait for the outside world to give them something they think is worthy of being happy about.

15. … Which is why most people also fear desperately that the world will one day take their happiness away.

16. Make sure you’re not more in love with the idea of who an accomplishment would make you more than you are in love with the act of actually doing it.

17. Perhaps what you’re jealous of in other people is not what you don’t have, but what you won’t allow yourself to go get.

18. Perhaps what you’re really worried about when you think things don’t look good enough is that inside, they don’t feel good enough.

19. Your joy doesn’t have to come from work. Work is not all there is! Work is what you do to facilitate your life, not what you should ever rely on to escape your life.

20. If you could speak with yourself a year ago, they’d be shocked at how far you’ve come.

21. If you could see yourself in a year from now, you’d be shocked at how much is going to change.

22. Never underestimate a single day of your life. You meet the love of your life in one day. You’re offered your dream job in one day. Everything that changes your life irrevocably happens in a day.

23. Bullying yourself over what’s not ‘perfect’ in your life yet is not motivating you to do better. It’s only creating more fear.

24. Remember that a few generations ago, just having a home and a job and some family and friends were the ultimate markers of success. Remember that you’re doing as well in life as the standard that you compare yourself to.

25. Your perception of your life is within your locus of control. Circumstances don’t determine your happiness, your decision to be present and participate does.

26. You are healing in ways you do not even recognize right now. You will look back on this next year and see so clearly what was happening, and how beautiful it was.

27. Forget about how smoothly you’re traveling, and focus on the direction you’re going. No path is linear. The way to anything is going to be full of peaks and valleys, what matters is only where you’re headed in the end.

28. You will accomplish the thing you want to accomplish. You will get there eventually. But if you don’t learn to enjoy today, you’ll get there only wanting more.

29. The world is radically different just by the very virtue of you being alive, and your only true purpose is just that: to be here.

30. The real work is learning love. Everything else is just distraction.