3 Practical Tips on How to Live a Fun and Meaningful Life

Okay, show of hands: who worries about having a boring and mediocre life?

No, your life is not as boring as your grandma’s (unless you have one of those active grandmas who dance salsa on Thursdays), but you might cave in to society’s expectations, and you may have a tendency to go for “the safe choice” just so you can please your proud and pestering parents.

And so life can get a little boring. Not because you suck, or the whole world hates you, but because we live in a world where you have to take action on the kind of life you wish to lead.

Let’s talk about how you can create a more fun and meaningful life for yourself with these three practical tips.

Imagine that you visit the doctor’s office today and discover that you have an incurable disease. The doctor gives you six months to live—at most—and that’s being optimistic.

You don’t know what to say.

Your mind keeps playing scenes from your life, like you’re watching a movie about yourself—only you’re not satisfied with the ending. A sea of questions swim around in your head:

Why do I have to die before my 97-year-old grandma? Can’t we just swap? It’s so unfair.Who will show up at my deathbed?How will I be remembered? What will people say at my funeral?

It’s never fun to imagine yourself on a deathbed, but it is a necessary exercise because it forces you to reflect on what’s truly important in your life. It helps you to appreciate life, clarify your goals, and most importantly, make the most of your day.

Use this exercise from one of my favourite authors to create a more fun and meaningful life for yourself, so that when the time comes, you won’t have any regrets on your deathbed.

We’re constantly told to make safe decisions throughout our lives, but there are two problems with that:

Fun and meaningful choices are never “safe” (that’s what makes them fun and meaningful), and“Safe” options are about as exciting as watching your grandma ironing T-shirts on a Sunday afternoon.

When given the chance, always choose the more outrageous option, and don’t let the naysayers stop you.

I’ve often been called crazy and naive by my peers, but I’m OK with that because I’ve been stepping outside of my comfort zone. I’ve lived with a host family in Barcelona, moved halfway across the world to study creative writing (yeah, you should see the looks on people’s faces when I tell them that), and jumped out of an aeroplane.

See what happens when you make more outrageous decisions? You gain valuable experiences that you’ll never forget. You meet people who are equally or more insane than you, and as a result, you feel inspired to live a more fun and meaningful life. I dare you to start making a few more outrageous decisions on your own. Remember, you decide what’s outrageous enough for you. Your mileage may vary. My tip is to begin small and work your way up.

As you live your life this way, you’ll soon look back at your “outrageous” decisions and realise that they weren’t that crazy after all. Instead, you’ll find yourself smiling.

We learn to fear failure from a very early age. We bury our faces in shame when we fail an exam, and blush when we ask stupid questions. We think we suck when we fail to get a job. Of course, this is a recipe for disaster: it’s exactly this kind of fear that leads us to have boring and mediocre lives.

So, what can we do about it?

Fortunately, most fears are learned. They’re a product of our environment and with a little help, we can begin to unlearn them. Think back to the last time you were scared. Perhaps you had a class presentation or a job interview. Your hands and face may have been sweating like crazy and all you wanted was for it to be over, but as soon as you exited the room, the fear disappeared.

Sound familiar?

That’s because failure is not a matter of life and death. It’s an internal struggle; a nasty voice inside your head that tells you that you’re not good enough.

The problem is that your body responds to this voice in the same way it would fight off a sabre-toothed tiger. When you take your fear for what it is (a learned behaviour that has been internalised), and ask yourself: “what’s the worse thing that could happen?” you often find that yes, you might embarrass yourself, but it’s not the end of the world.

Be proud that you did something instead. Most people never do.

Please don’t be one of those people who stand still. If you don’t try, you’ll never move forward, and you’ll have a boring and mediocre life.

Something tells me that you’re different—something tells me that you’ll move forward one outrageous choice at a time because you know that’s the only way to live a fun and meaningful life. So go ahead, be more outrageous.

You don’t need anyone’s permission.

You don’t need to be afraid.

You don’t need to be perfect.

But you do need to act now. Set sail, my friend, and leave the safe harbour behind. After all, you don’t want to have any regrets on your deathbed now, do you?

What are your tips on how to live a fun and meaningful life? Please leave your outrageous thoughts in the comments.

It can be easy to run through the maze of life without pausing to think of its meaning: 10 Ways to Live a More Meaningful Life

Featured photo credit: Damian Gadal via Flickr

Olle Lindholm helps people make the most of every day. You can grab his free special report and sign up for his free 10-part e-class. A good day for Olle usually involves a walk with friends, a book, and an illegal amount of chocolate.

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A Guide to Practical Contentment

A lot of people search for ways to find happiness, but I’ve found the idea of contentment to be more important than happiness.

Why contentment over happiness? A couple of important reasons:

Happiness can go up or down each day (or moment), but contentment is something more stable.We tend to seek to increase happiness by adding things (food, excitement, a warm bath, time with a loved one) but contentment is a skill that allows you to subtract things and still be content.Contentment can actually be a good place to start as you make changes (changes and contentment might seem paradoxical to some, but hear me out).

What is contentment? For me, it’s really about being happy with who you are. Which I wasn’t for many years, and I think most people are not.

In my life, I’ve learned to be better at the skill of contentment (not that I’m perfect, but I’ve learned). I am happy with my life. I am happy with myself. I’m happy with where I am professionally, and don’t seek to add more readers or pageviews or income. I’m happy wherever I am.

And while many might say, “Sure, you can say that now that you’ve reached a certain level of success,” I think that’s wrong. Many people who achieve success don’t find contentment, and are always driven to want more, and are unhappy with themselves. Many people who are poor or don’t have a “successful” career have also found contentment. And what’s more, I think finding contentment has actually driven any success that I’ve found — it helped me get out of debt, it helped me change my habits, it has made me a better husband, father, friend and collaborator, perhaps even a better writer.

Worst of all, with the attitude of “you can be content because you’re successful”, is that people who say this are dismissing the path of contentment … when it’s something they can do right now. Not later, when they reach certain goals or a certain level of financial success. Now.

Let’s take a look at the path of contentment, how it’s a good place for habit change, and how to get started down the path.

We start out in life thinking that we’re awesome. We can dance in public as 5-year-olds, and not care what others think of us. By the time we’re adults, that’s been driven out of us, by peers and parents and the media and embarrassing situations.

As adults, we doubt ourselves. We judge ourselves badly. We are critical of our bodies, of ourselves as people, of our lack of discipline, of all our faults. We don’t like our lives.

As a result, we try to improve this lacking self, try to get better because we suck so much. Or, we doubt our ability to get better, and are very unhappy. Or we sabotage our attempts at change, because we don’t really believe we can do it.

This self-dislike results in worse relationships, a stagnant career, unhappiness with life, complaints about everything, and often unhealthy habits like eating junk food, drinking too much alcohol, not exercising, shopping too much, being addicted to video games or the Internet.

So what’s the path to being content with yourself and your life?

The first problem is if you don’t trust yourself. That’s an important area to work with.

Your relationship with yourself is like your relationship with anyone else. If you have a friend who is constantly late and breaking his word, not showing up when he says he will, eventually you’ll stop trusting that friend. It’s like that with yourself, too. It’s hard to like someone you don’t trust, and it’s hard to like yourself if you don’t trust yourself.

So work on this trust with yourself (I give some practical steps in the bottom section below). Increase it slowly, and eventually you’ll trust yourself to be awesome.

The second problem is that you judge yourself badly. You compare yourself to an unreal ideal, in all areas. You want a beautiful model’s body. You want to achieve certain goals, personally and professionally. You want to travel the world and learn languages and learn a musical instrument and be an amazing chef and have an amazing social life and the perfect spouse and kids and incredible achievements and be the fittest person on the planet. Of course, those are completely realistic ideals, right?

And when we have these ideals, we compare ourselves to them, and we always measure up badly.

The path to contentment, then, is to stop comparing ourselves to these ideals. Stop judging ourselves. Let go of the ideals. And gradually learn to trust ourselves.

Read on for the practical steps.

Before we get to the practical steps, let’s talk about contentment and change. Many people think that if you’re content, you’re just going to lay on a beach doing nothing all day. Why do anything if you’re content with the way things are?

But actually contentment is a way better place to start making changes than unhappiness with who you are.

Most of us are driven by the need or desire to improve ourselves, to fix certain things about ourselves that we don’t like. While that can definitely be a place for driving some changes, it’s not a good place to start from with those kinds of changes.

If you feel there’s something wrong with you that needs to be improved, you’re going to be driven to improve yourself, but you may or may not succeed. Let’s say you fail in your habit change. Then you start to feel worse about yourself, and you’re then on a downward spiral where every time you try to improve, you fail, and so you feel worse about yourself, and then you’re on the downward spiral. You start to self-sabotage your changes, because you really don’t believe that you can do them. Based on past evidence, you don’t trust yourself that you can do it. And that makes you feel worse.

That’s if you fail. But let’s say you happen to succeed, and you’re really good at succeeding. So you succeed — maybe you lose weight, and so maybe you don’t feel as bad about your body now.

But what happens is, if you start in this place of fixing what’s wrong with you, you keep looking for what else is wrong with you, what else you need to improve. So maybe now feel like you don’t have enough muscles, or six pack abs, or you think your calves don’t look good, or if it’s not about your body, you’ll find something else.

So it’s this never-ending cycle for your entire life. You never reach it. If you start with a place of wanting to improve yourself and feeling stuck, even if you’re constantly successful and improving, you’re always looking for happiness from external sources. You don’t find the happiness from within, so you look to other things.

If you’re externally looking for happiness, it’s easy to get too into food, or shopping, or partying, or overwork, to try to be happy.

If instead, you can find contentment within and not need external sources of happiness, then you’ll have a reliable source of happiness. I find that to be a much better place to be than relying on external sources of happiness.

A lot of people wonder, “If you find contentment, won’t you just lay around on the beach, not improving the world, not doing anything?” But I think that’s a misunderstanding of what contentment is.

You can be content and lay around, but you can also be content and want to help others. You can be content and also compassionate to others, and want to help them. You can be happy with who you are, but at the same time want to help other people and ease their suffering. And that way, you can offer yourself to the world and do great works in the world, but not necessarily need that to be happy.

Even if for some reason, your work was taken away from you, you’d still have that inner contentment.

The question is how to get there. How to go from being unhappy with yourself to being content?

The path is learning a few crucial skills:

1. Build self-trust. The only way to fix a lack of trust is in small steps. If you the unreliable friend wants to rebuild trust with you, the right way is not for him to say, “Now, trust me with your life” — instead, it’s to start building trust in small steps. Do little things, and see if the trust is held up. Over time, you open yourself up more and more.

What I usually do to build trust is to start with small things that I’m totally certain I can do — drinking a glass of water every day is an easy example. I want to drink more water, so I set a bunch of reminders to drink a glass of water when I want to wake up. If you can keep that up for a week or two, it helps you trust yourself. Most people try to change hard stuff, fail, and then the trust is gone. So start with the small stuff.

2. Notice your ideals. The other problem for finding contentment is that we’re constantly feeling bad about ourselves, because the reality of ourselves does not meet some ideal we hold. That ideal could come from mass media, looking at magazines and movie stars. Or it could just come from some idea about how perfect we should be. When it comes to productivity or how our bodies should look.

The truth is, the reality of ourselves is not bad, it’s only in bad in relation to the ideal that we have about ourselves. When we let go of the ideal, we’re left with the reality that can be judged as perfectly great. It’s a unique human being who is beautiful in its own way.

So ask if you’re feeling bad about who you are and how you did. If so, it’s because of the ideal. To recognize that takes awareness first. Notice your ideals.

3. Let go of the ideals. Once we notice the ideals, we need to stop comparing ourselves to them. Let go of the ideal. The only way to let go of the ideal is to see the pain that it’s causing in yourself and realize you want to end that pain, and letting go of an ideal that’s hurting you is self-compassion. Watch the pain. Be compassionate with yourself and stop causing pain in yourself with this process of comparing yourself with ideals.

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Practical Parenting – Questions You Need to Ask Yourself

Parenting 101

Yesterday at lunch, I had a fascinating conversation with my business partners Mikey and Johnny about parenting. Mikey has two kids (ages one and three), as does Johnny (seven and ten) and we discussed the merits and pitfalls of the various parenting styles. Of course we covered over-protective parents who don’t allow their kids to… well, be kids. We talked about parents who seem to hand their insecurities, fears and issues down to their off-spring. And parents who micro-manage every moment of their child’s day. We also spoke about kids playing team sports where no scores are kept during the game because the grown-ups don’t want any of the kids to experience losing.

Good grief.

My Childhood

Growing up in a country town, I spent countless hours with my mates riding our bikes (without helmets) through dense leach-infested bush. In the middle of the wilderness, we would make fires, build ramps and jumps for our bikes, ride down stupidly steep hills, catch frogs and other critters, wade in swamps and often get lost. When we weren’t exploring the wilds of Latrobe Valley, we were playing team games and sports where there would be actual winners and losers. Amazingly, nobody died from losing a game of football, playing in dirt, climbing a tree or coming last in a running race.

And I should know; I came last many times.

So, clearly the bloke with no kids is not the guy to turn to for parenting advice but as a casual observer, can I respectfully suggest that perhaps all our parental protection, direction and intervention might (at times) be leaving some of our kids ill-equipped to deal with the messy, nasty, unfair, uncomfortable reality of life beyond the parental bubble? Life post-childhood?

Just saying. 

Life Lessons

I worry about kids who never experience any kind of loss. Who never scrape their knees. Who never climb a tree, chase a frog, attack an ant nest, crash their bike or play in dirt. Who never experience the unfairness of life. Who never have to work hard or get uncomfortable. Who never fail anything at school because some grown-up decided that giving marks or grading work could be detrimental to the child’s self-esteem. Again, good grief. Wait till that child enters the workforce and their first boss is a total prick.

Let’s see mum and dad fix that.

But then again, maybe the non-parent is missing the point? What would I know? The only thing I’ve ever raised is a Golden Retriever. And he had issues. Which is why I need your help today. Feel free to answer one, all or some of the following questions. Don’t be shy. Participation makes this a worthwhile exercise. I will give away five signed copies of my new book for the contributions that blow my lace-up Ugg boots off. Yes, we will post books anywhere in the world.

Here are my conversation starters:

Am I vaguely in the ball park with this topic or am I totally missing the point?Are we adequately preparing our kids for life beyond childhood?When does protecting, guiding and encouraging a child go from being a positive to a negative?What are the signs, symptoms and consequences of an over-protective parent?Do we tell our over-protective, neurotic, control-freak friends what they’re doing or do we stay out of it?Your general thoughts on the matter?

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