I wrote a piece back at the start of the year called 10 Choices For a Better Future that was largely focused on behaviorally based choices, I now realize. Just to be clear there is no big plan here I just write this stuff when I’m thinking about it and have time and have some motivation. And in discussing this with someone I occasionally mentor recently (okay a couple months ago) I realized that while that list was good from a choosing how to behave daily standpoint (which is what I writing it for) it didn’t really provide any thinking how to make choices about your life, and that’s a problem because you could apply everything in that piece and still make stupid unguided choices.
In that piece I alluded to writing about how I think of life goals, this is not that piece. Although I guess that piece will eventually get written since this piece also talks about life goals – they just aren’t the center of this piece. The center of this piece is about choices as the key to a successful life. I do think making life goals is a part of it because I think that life goals is the logical way to define what a successful life is for you – and that is essential to guiding your choices.
But fundamentally this piece is about choices and making choices and how you make them is the key to a successful life. People really struggle with this concept. They’ll acknowledge it intuitively – we tell kids all the time that “choices have consequences” – but then they’ll fail to see their life as a result of their choices. Too often you’ll watch people treat good outcomes in their life as a result of their good work, choices, etc. and bad outcomes as a result of other people, bad luck, etc. That’s a really poor way to go through life because it doesn’t guide you to a better life.
My grounding belief here is as follows:
Everything that happens to me in life is either because of my choices or just random luck. But most luck isn’t actually random, the odds are adjusted based on my choices. Example: if I drive drunk the probability I’ll end up getting arrested for DUI increases significantly compared to if I don’t drive drunk, the fact that I get rear ended while stopped at a red light and then get a DUI from an accident that I did nothing to control does not mean my choice wasn’t the cause – it was the only cause that mattered because it was the only cause I could control. If I drop out of high school I increase the probability I’ll be poor in life, when I later get cancer while uninsured the cause of my bankruptcy could be said to be cancer but what I really controlled was dropping out of high school. So I make the best choices I can aligned to my definition of a successful life and the rest is up to luck – my success are a result of good choices and/or good luck and my failures are bad choices and/or bad luck thus to achieve the most successful life possible I want to make as many good choices.
So with that we get the crux of this piece: how to make good choices in life. All the keys are ultimately about feeding good choices in life.
When I sat down to write this I started with the title Keys to a Successful Life and then refined my thinking on the keys (I knew what I wanted to say but writing forces you to think deeper) and then wrote this intro to provide some introduction to my thinking. I’m not offering you an easy button answer here. I won’t tell you how to define a successful life. I’m not here to judge anyone’s choice of a successful life. I’m just offering up my thinking and approach to living a life that will leave you feeling successful, however you define that term. If you don’t want to do work then this is a waste of your time because there are no work free paths to an intentionally successful life.
Let me expand that a bit, a lot of people end up in places where they are unsatisfied with their life and I think that’s sad so I want to help avoid that for myself (and you.) I believe the reason people end up unsatisfied is they never defined satisfied (i.e., successful) and then made choices and learned from those choices to improve their choices to guide their life towards what they consider a successful life. Don’t get me wrong, they made choices but they never made choices guided by an intentional and well thought out definition of a successful life and likely haven’t actively learned from those choices. So they end up in a place that is unsatisfactory and have no clue why or how and no clue how to change it. These keys are how I’m working to avoid that fate and how I believe anyone else can do the same.
They are not a guarantee. There are absolutely no guarantees in life. Someone will do everything here and make all good choices and still drop dead of a heart attack despite doing everything right to avoid that fate. Or they’ll do everything right and just never achieve what they wanted out of their career or whatever. But that’s okay, we can’t dwell too much on that reality or we lose our ability to reduce the chance of it being our reality.
So here are my keys to a successful life:
- Choices are all that you have and all that matter. You just make choices, choices of what to do and what not to do. Those choices will – to the extent you have any control over your life – wholly and completely define your life. Period. You can desperately want to see it differently, but that won’t make it so. There is random luck and your choices and you only have control over your choices, so It’s all choices. Every single day you wake up with literally only the future ahead of you and you have to make choices. Your choices will influence some of the random luck that occurs but there is also just random luck – it isn’t worth worrying about too much, you work on making the best choices and then let the rest of the world (i.e., luck) do what it’s going to do.
- Live as if you have decades of life left. Anyone who says “live everyday as if it is your last” is someone you should ignore. Unless you have a terminal disease or are very old you really should think about life from the standpoint of decades not days. Yes, you might die tomorrow – make sure you have life insurance and what not – but you most likely won’t. This is simple math – I’m in my 40s, most of my friends who are my age will still be alive in 30 years. All of them? No. The majority of them? Yes. Unless you know you are in the minority and will die soon it’s better to think long-term, that forces us to recognize that every choice we make will in some way limit future optionality so we should align and balance our choices with that understanding.
- You are stupid dumb lazy greedy. Just accept this about yourself. You inevitably will make decisions and choices that result from some combination of being stupid, dumb, lazy, and/or greedy. Learn from them, apply the rest of these keys, and move on – but for goodness sakes, don’t pretend you are better than this or ignore this reality. You have to be conscious of your weaknesses and flaws – without awareness you have no ability to improve. And improve doesn’t mean you necessarily change yourself but often it means you create the systems, structures, rewards, etc. in your life that help you succeed in spite of these weaknesses and flaws.
- Define a successful life for you. Define it not with platitudes but with words that serve as guideposts for making decisions. Don’t update it too frequently, it would be meaningless then, but do update it when there are clear long-term changes in life. For example, my goal pre-marriage and pre-children around raising successful children would have been kind of pointless, like great that’s a nice idea but seeing you don’t have a partner or children how much can you make choices to move towards it without having to make so many hops as to be pointless – because too many hops means anything choice can be under that goal. Also remember, a goal is not some abstract thing (“I want to be happy”, “I want to have meaning”, “I want to be successful”) because those don’t help constrain and guide choices it needs to be something that forces you to confront choices.
- Force yourself to think from first principles. This is extremely hard, you will fail at it constantly. It will force you to really think. Most people cannot do this and even many who could will simply refuse because they aren’t willing to do the work. And yet, I believe, it’s one of the most fundamentally important things to learn to do and do. You can almost build a rule for yourself that if you can’t or don’t want to do the work to reason on something from first principles you should just not do it. I’m not much of one for deep long-term introspection – I think it’s mostly a navel gazing waste of time – but even a cursory look back at my dumbest decisions tells me if I had just spent more time to reason from a first principles standpoint I would have likely made a smarter choice.
- Continually work towards a growth mindset. Don’t think of a growth mindset as a binary, it’s not something you have vs not have. It’s a spectrum. Growth isn’t easy because it challenges who you are and what your comfortable with – you can’t grow just by being a “better version of yourself” because when you really truly grow you become a different person. You must intentionally work on growth by recognizing your misses and failures, finding your weaknesses, and identifying opportunities to improve. It requires you be willing to accept painful truths about who you are and change who you are. It requires you to do stuff you don’t want to do to a degree that eventually you want to do it. Growth is really hard but if you fail to continually consciously grow, then everything else here will likely be of minimal benefit.
- Think in terms of triangles. Ultimately if a successful life is about choices you have to recognize and accept that all choices have consequences, they open doors and shut them at the same time. Triangulation is the key to having an honest dialog with yourself about a choice. Triangulation forces us to balance opposing forces, by considering at least three distinct impacts. Hence having three life goals that each conflict in some way will help you make better choices because it will mean when making choices you force yourself to balance. But even when that is not true, looking at a choice
I highly recommend you use writing to actually hold yourself accountable. You don’t need to journal daily or anything. But maybe once a month sit down and write to yourself about the following:
- Do I have a definition of a successful life and has anything made me think I should adjust that definition?
- If you don’t work on the definition of a successful life. It won’t be instant, you won’t read this piece and write it down and be good. One thing that’ll happen is as you start living with your definition and using it to make choices you’ll start realizing you need to revise it as your choices are giving you guidance on what matters while also being driven by what matters.
- Think of the force triangulation in making choices.
- What are some bad choices I’ve recently made and why did I make them?
- A bad choice doesn’t mean a bad outcome. You can make good choices that just don’t work out. A bad choice is something that you realize was bad with respect to what you consider a successful life – regardless of the outcome.
- Don’t make excuses for yourself, if you made a bad choice use the stupid dumb lazy greedy model to figure out why.
- How have your grown as a person?
- Concrete examples and changes you’ve made to how you live. Not one time things or feel good (“I’m trying to have a better attitude”) stuff but real concrete changes.
Good luck with life!