January 29, 2010
Aiming for perfection is an easy trap to fall into when you try to make a positive change in your life.
Perfection is an impossible goal, and you’re almost certainly setting yourself up for failure if you set out to achieve it. A much better plan is to aim for improvement. Small, constant improvements, day after day, week after week.
Don’t beat yourself up if today didn’t turn out perfectly. Ask yourself, was it better than yesterday? or was it better than this day last week? this day last year?
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January 21, 2010
This is the story of the first time I ever hit on a girl.
I grew up in the Irish countryside with no sisters and very few neighbors, and I went to all-boys schools all the way up until college. So by the age of eighteen, I was terrified at the thought of talking to women. To me, women were these exotic creatures that spoke a completely different language and you couldn’t look directly at one you found attractive for fear of bursting into flames.
But I liked women all the same, and I wanted to know more about them.
My final year in secondary school, there was one woman in particular that fascinated me. I’d see her every day as d’Mudder drove me to school. We’d pass her at some point as she was walking over the Rice Bridge and up the hill, on her way to the all-girls school at the top of it. She was maybe a year younger than me at the time, had dark hair and looked more cute than sexy.
I called her Bridget, because she walked over the bridge every day.
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January 15, 2010
A few weeks ago I wrote about three people who inspire me. I received feedback from a reader who didn’t agree with my choices. Finding something he didn’t like about each of the three people I had listed, he seemed convinced it was a waste of time to consider any of the knowledge they had to share.
I didn’t think that was such a good idea. In my view, having an attitude like that hurts only you.
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January 8, 2010
The things you own, end up owning you.
That quote is from Fight Club, one of my all-time favorite movies. It sums up a lesson I first learned about six years ago, when I was stuck working in a department store in Ireland, having dropped out of college and dreaming of one day living and working in the United States.
Problem was, I kept making excuses as to why I couldn’t just drop everything and move to the U.S. Most of those excuses centered around material things. I owned over a hundred movies on DVD at the time. I also had a big widescreen TV, a Playstation 2, an Xbox and a nice desktop PC hooked up to a serious sound system. I knew I couldn’t bring all those possessions with me to America. What would I do with them?
For a while, I did nothing. I just stayed where I was, with all those nice things, holding me hostage.
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December 31, 2009
By far, 2009 was the best year of my life to date. My personal growth accelerated to unprecedented levels, I met lots of new people and tried lots of new things. Here at the end of the year, I feel I know myself a whole lot better than I did twelve months ago.
Here are five valuable lessons I learned in 2009:
Inside Out
Things look a lot different from the inside looking out than they do from the outside looking in. I came to understand this when I tried vegetarianism. It was purely for selfish reasons that I decided to experiment with plant-based diets, but after making the switch, all those other reasons (health, animal rights, environment, etc.) began to make a lot more sense.
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