Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s fine. It’s not their journey to make sense of. It’s yours.
Author | Photographer | CG Artist | Filmmaker
If you want to be a positive force in people’s lives, you don’t need anyone’s acceptance or permission to do that. Nor do you have to follow anyone else’s standard on how to do it.
There will always be people critical of how you choose to make a positive difference in the world, but the fact is, those people are not your target. Your target is the one person whose life you make a little bit better by being a part of it. And after that person, it’s the next one.
And over time, you can touch many people’s lives in a positive way. And that is something you can do in any way you choose. You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be you.
When we rely on things that are beneficial to us in one way, but bad for us in another, we can become trapped. And this feeling of being trapped can leave us miserable and indecisive because we convince ourselves that there’s nothing we can do. And while it is true that we may not be able to immediately quit a job or leave a dysfunctional relationship, one thing we can do is plan an exit strategy.
Excerpt from: Lessons Learned from The Path Less Traveled Volume 1
You can put yourself on a better path in life starting today, but it requires you to actually do some things.
You must stop perpetuating your own dissatisfaction with yourself, your career, your relationships, or your life by doing nothing. You must commit to no longer settling for the path of least resistance. You must commit to working towards your goals instead of relying on wishful thinking. And you must be willing to deal with life’s challenges without allowing yourself to be overcome by them.
Excerpt from: Lessons Learned from The Path Less Traveled Volume 1
Yes, you can make a difference by being one of a million. But you might make more of a difference by being one in a million.
Conformity doesn’t lead to progress in the same way as being different and inspiring others to change does.
When the example you see others setting isn’t leading you to where you want to go, it’s time to stop following and start leading.
Do you care about your friends? Your neighbors? Your community? Local businesses? Your city? If the answer is yes, what are you doing that demonstrates these things in a significant and meaningful way? It’s one thing to think & say that you care. It’s another thing entirely to actively demonstrate it through your actions & lifestyle.
Making a difference means being mindful of the people, places, and things that you can make a difference with and then taking action in a meaningful way. The act of not making things worse is not the same thing as making things better.
We live in a world where everyone wants to get paid the maximum value for what they have to offer, but very few want to pay for the things of value that other people have to offer, let alone what they may be worth. This applies to the poorest college student to the wealthiest billionaire. And this is why many of the good things that people offer often end up in graveyards.
People will happily pay $6 a day for a coffee beverage, but they won’t invest in someone or something that adds lasting value to their lives while, at the same time, supporting the person or people who created it.
Artists need to eat, too.
The cost of consistently letting your fears drown out your desires is that you sacrifice your life to negative outcomes that exist only in your mind. The fact is, most of the worst of what we fear never comes to pass.
Often, the risk of listening to our fears is greater than the risk of the negative outcomes we imagine. This is because we let our fears deny us of opportunities that could ultimately be life-changing if only we had the courage to do what we truly desired. And even if what we feared came to pass as a result of our initiative, the outcome is simply temporary discomfort (embarrassment, rejection, criticism…) and insignificant in the grand scheme of our lives.
