The Lies We Hold
Four common myths that hold us back from enjoying life
We are complicated creatures. We’re often filled with contradictions in our thinking and actions. We can only overcome these contradictions and build a better understanding of ourselves by turning inward and looking at how we, as an individual, work.
Writing to his brother, Seneca explains the need to take stock of one’s thoughts and actions every night.
“When the daylight has faded from view, and my wife, who knows well this custom of mine, keeps quiet, I become an inspector and reexamine the course of my day, my deeds and words; I hide nothing from myself. I omit nothing. There's no reason my mistakes should give me cause to fear, as long as I can say: "See that you don't do that any more, but this time I forgive you... next time consider not the truth of what you say but whether the one you say it to can endure hearing the truth; good folk are glad to be chastised, but the worst sort find their preceptor very grating.”
This week, we’re looking at four common lies that permeate our culture and that prevent us from living a good life.
Failure is not an option
Failure is often seen as a bad thing, that we are inadequate in some sense because we do not achieve what we set out to achieve. A myth permeates our society wherein we are expected to succeed at everything.
And yet, failure is a key to success. Failure paves the path to what success is. It is through failure that we are able to learn what works and what doesn’t. We can spend all the time in the world understanding what works, but it isn’t until we discover what doesn’t work, and why it doesn’t work that we begin to form a full picture about what the success or accomplishment of something looks like.
As Jessica Lahey writes in The Gift of Failure:
“Sometimes courage looks a lot like failure.”
It takes courage to try something with the understanding it may not succeed. And it takes even more courage to fail at something, get up, learn from it, and try again.
By letting go of our fear of failure, we open ourselves up to the joys of exploration and allow ourselves to be intrigued not only by the potential outcome of something but also by the exploration of what that path to success could look like.
Money is the same thing as happiness
Everything in the world revolves around money. Nothing can be achieved without it. Growing up, we’re always told about the importance of money, we see money change hands for things, we see those who have it and we see those who don’t.
But money is often conflated with the idea of happiness.
Money in and of itself cannot bring happiness. If you look at some of the longest running studies on happiness, you see that while money is important for survival as well as having fun, it has a cutoff for how much happiness it can provide.
This is because money is a tool, not a destination. Too often, we look to what others have and we determine that’s what we want. But we miss the downside--money is what helps us get the things we want but it also chains us if we allow it. The more things we want, the more money we need. The more money we need, the more we need to work. And the more we need to work, the less time we have to do other things we wish to do.
Finding a way to pursue money but not allow it to enslave one is key. If money can buy freedom by providing oneself time, then you have achieved some form of success as the most finite source to an individual is time. How you spend that time will dictate the life you live and the happiness you achieve.
You are your achievements
Everything we do today is displayed for all to see. We post images to Facebook and Instagram about our lives, and our work accomplishments and successes are shared across professional networks like LinkedIn. We immediately are able to judge the value of our lives based not on what we do and how we live, rather, we judge our lives based upon the lives and successes of others.
We are creatures of comparison. Rooted deep within us is a need to compare ourselves to others, to see how we stack up against them. And from this comparison we begin to build a sense that the value we bring to the world is based solely on the achievements we notch into our belt.
To be clear, we are the actions we take--we are the sum of our actions. However, we are not our achievements. Our achievements are in fact byproducts of the actions we take. It is easy to see an accomplishment, but it is not easy to see the painstaking hours and failures that went into that achievement. Achieving anything takes time and dedication.
If you judge yourself and your life by your achievements or lack thereof you will never be happy. Instead, there is pleasure in the pursuit of the achievement, regardless of whether or not the mark is hit.
The Stoics looked at this from the perspective of control and utilized the metaphor of an archer and their arrow. As Cicero once wrote:
“Take the case of one whose task it is to shoot a spear or arrow straight at some target. One’s ultimate aim is to do all in one’s power to shoot straight, and the same applies with our ultimate goal. In this kind of example, it is to shoot straight that one must do all one can; none the less, it is to do all one can to accomplish the task that is really the ultimate aim. It is just the same with what we call the supreme good in life. To actually hit the target is, as we say, to be selected but not sought.”
The goal is to hit the target and achieve the goal. But we do not control the aspects of the outcome, once the arrow is released from our grasp, any number of things can prevent it from hitting the target.
The joy and accomplishment therefore does not come from hitting the target, rather it comes from doing everything in our power to give ourselves the best shot of hitting the target--the hours of practice and training, the breathing, the release of the arrow.
It is the small every day things where we find true success. And sometimes that leads to big accomplishments. But if it doesn’t, that doesn’t mean we are failures.
The decisions you make need to be perfect
How we make decisions is one of the most crucial aspects of our lives today. Everything we do revolves around decision-making. If we do not know how to make decisions, it becomes increasingly harder to find success in life.
Too often, we hesitate to make a decision because we do not have all the facts. We tell ourselves we need more information. We build pro and con lists. We enlist friends and colleagues for their advice. We read several books, which open up pathways and ideas that tell us we need to explore more before proceeding.
And in an ideal world, we would have all the time in the world to make decisions this way. But unfortunately, time is restrictive and that prevents us from having all the time in the world to make a decision.
When it comes to decision-making, the ultimate decision does not need to be perfect, it needs to be thought out enough that you can try a path.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, has what is deemed the 70% rule--the majority of the decisions he makes are made with roughly 70% of the information needed. Not 85%, not 95%, but 70%.
"Most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70 percent of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you're probably being slow."
Decisions need to accompany logic and thoughtfulness but they’re not always going to be right.
And that’s okay.
If the decision is not right, you can adjust but getting enough information to validate the decision you’re trying to make is key to making better and better decisions over time.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo