Re-engineering your life

We’ve all heard more than enough Buffett quotes about the price of swimming naked when others are greedy (or whatever) to fill our proverbial punch-cards 20 times over by now.

Instead, for today, how about some more practical advice from the ‘Sage of Quotemaha’?

Here’s Wazza, on his 5 tips for re-engineering your life.

(i) Take 100% responsibility – end the excuses and complaints;

(ii) Spend time in solitude – read, write, lift, visualise;

(iii) End ALL toxic relationships – easier to say than to do, yet vital;

(iv) Make peace with your past – the only thing you can change, after all, is the future; and

(v) Set clear goals – commit to them, and work on them consistently.

Normally in such a blog post I’d be looking to make a pithy observation or two here, but there’s not much to add to that…it’s absolutely spot on!

Connecting the dots

The point on making peace with your past is an interesting one, because hindsight has an excruciating way of making us think ‘if only I’d…!’.

Yet the past is precisely what brought you to where you are today.

Embrace it, be grateful for it, and clarify future ambitions.

How to live before you die

The one tiny problem with the future is that it’s so darned unpredictable.

This is actually a good thing, because if the future was foreseeable then what would be the point of living out our lives?

However, this uncertainty does mean that we have to trust that today’s setbacks are part of the journey to tomorrow’s successes and satisfaction.

In his famous Stanford commencement speech How to live before you die Steve Jobs noted how some of his most awful failures were ultimately an integral part of his journey to life success.

It’s not possible to connect the dots looking forward, observed Jobs.

What you can do is find and do great work that you love, and have faith that the dots will somehow eventually connect in the future.