How do you become superior?

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”

Ernest Hemingway

The minute you believe that you are better than someone else you have lost the essence of our shared humanity; you are buying into the lie that the world revolves around self and our reason for existence is simply to serve our own egos and desires.

Nothing could be further from the truth. We aren’t here on this earth to build monuments to ourselves. The pale accomplishments we take such pride in today will mean nothing in just a few years. We are here to impact the lives of others and make a difference through service to others.

In order to accomplish this we must completely surrender our desires to be better than any other person and put our energy and focus into being the person that God created us to be. Relentless discontent with the status quo, our own status quo, is the key to becoming the person that you were born to be…

Don’t skip over the stretch…

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

In fitness and exercise stretching is the key to preventing injury and enabling your body to perform at an optimal level.  It is a very intentional practice that, if skipped, leads to stiff and sore muscles, sub-optimum performances and potential injuries later.  Stretching is a key activity because it enables the future, but you have to choose to do it.  

I think that growing through our experiences in life requires the same intentional effort as stretching before or after exercise.  Pausing to reflect on what you’ve learned, how you’ve grown, what specific experiences have taught you is critical if you want to enhance your abilities and achieve new levels of growth.  Another way of saying this is that by choosing to actively reflect on your experiences you are stretching your mind and soul versus simply living a passive existence.  

Taking the time to intentionally pause and learn is the mental stretching that enables any experience to become a foundation for bigger and better things.  I have met a lot of people in life who have a “something happened TO me” attitude or perspective about their experiences.  Reframing this to focus on what you can learn shifts this to become a “something happened FOR me.”  These are the people that inspire and motivate me.  They choose to take any experience, whether good or bad, and not be defined by it but to instead learn from it and redefine their life based on having been stretched and grown.  

How are you stretching in your life?  Are you taking the time to intentionally learn and grow from the experiences that happened for you?  

Stretching is a choice that enables future performance and prevents injuries.  It is an exercise that is best done daily by simply taking five minutes at the end of each day to ask yourself “what have I learned from my experiences today?”

If you want to grow, don’t skip the stretch…

How do you measure return on investment?

“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”

John Ruskin

Who am I going to become, versus, what am going to get?  These are fundamentally different questions.  I’ll admit that I have spent a lot of my time in life thinking about “return on investment” and that I haven’t spent nearly enough time time thinking about it at an experiential level.  

Working hard is fun.  It is awesome to put in the effort and the labor and see the results that come from it.  But perhaps the most important results are the ones that we don’t measure through tangible “things” but are instead the experiences we have gained and the relationships we have built.  Those are the things that shape us, mold us and create the platform that we build upon for the future. 

To measure success more holistically I think I need to spend some more time thinking about the question “who am I going to become from this effort?” 

 

Sign up here to receive the daily quote that inspires my blog posts. Thanks!

dusty

%d bloggers like this: