Perhaps, it would be best to consult more of the world’s respected writers. Many of them have gifted us not just with award-winning books, plays and other works of art, but also with witty, inspiring and thought-provoking quotes.

Discovering Your Passion and What Drives You

Legendary novelist and poet Murasaki Shikibu, famous for her 3-part classic The Tale of Genji, wrote, “The art of the novel happens because the storyteller’s own experience of men and things, whether good or ill – not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of – has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart.”

Indeed, if you’ll think about it, life wouldn’t be fulfilling if there is no passion. You might not have realized it yet, but that zeal might have been lying inside you all along, waiting to be triggered. Discover where your passion is and the best chapters of a great novel, that is your life, will begin.

“How do I do that?” you’d say.

Well, as the 20th century American journalist and dramatist Gene Fowler said, “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.”

Starting to write a good work, just like starting to consciously live a good life, is never easy. You might need to crumple and throw away sheets of paper and waste some ink before you can get all the words flowing from your already bleeding brain and emotions. But the beauty of it is that you’ll never know that in the end you might have been writing a masterpiece.

Of Inspiration and Self-Discovery

If the time comes when you’d feel desperate in starting to liven up your life, you might begin to wonder if it would be bad to take inspiration from someone and somehow imitate what they’ve accomplished.

The answer is no.

You might want to take it from Francois Rene de Chateaubriand, said to be the founder of Romanticism in French literature. He said, “The original writer is not one who imitates nobody, but one whom nobody can imitate.” However, do not fall into the trap of simply copying everything that isn’t even applicable to you that everything in your life will go back to being something that is devoid of passion or any excitement at all. Don’t let American novelist and playwright Truman Capote whisper in your ear, “It isn’t writing at all — it’s typing.” It wouldn’t be bad to try and follow someone’s footsteps, but, let your own self also shine through and your life will be one unique work of art.

A Life Lived With Wisdom

A good life, though, isn’t just about living with what you have inside you. You should, of course, see what’s around you – the people, the environment, the situation and everything else. You need to look around, deal with relationships, and explore new things.

Wisdom plays a big part in having a fulfilled life. You might want to remind yourself of this through a quote from bestselling author of Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera, when he talked about the classic novel Don Quixote: “The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes.”

So, start living your life now. If you’re still at a loss as to how you’d do it, maybe it’s you that Sir Philip Sidney, a 16th century English poet and soldier, would like to correspond to when he wrote: “’Fool!’ my muse said to me, ‘look into thy heart, and write.’”

And in the end, may you have a life that’s like a well-written novel. “’Only a novel’… in short, only some in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language,” as the great romantic fiction writer Jane Austen would say.

Postscript: I would love to hear your thoughts on the direction of this website. I believe in great ideas coming together and creating something powerful. This is my home now, and the readers of PluginID are more than friends in my book, and I value what you think. Please let me know in the comments.

It Always Starts with Your Thoughts

If you are going to do anything worthwhile in life, you must start by changing your thinking. You must answer some very basic questions about what I like to call ultimate questions.

Ultimate questions are philosophical in nature and I propose that all people, not just philosophers, need to ask and then answer them. They are questions that every scientist must answer before beginning the work of discovery. They give us a framework from which to unlock the secrets of the world in which we live. These ultimate questions start with the most fundamental and move to questions of a more practical nature, “does anything exist”, “do I/you exist”, and “are there any absolute truths.” If we are to develop in our humanity and become “fully alive”, then we must first ask ourselves what we believe about ourselves, our world and our place in it. Many may believe that these questions are solely the domain of philosophers, and again, I would strongly disagree.

Philosophy… Who Needs It?

You see, all of us go through life operating under a particular philosophy whether we know it or not. You cannot do anything without it. What do I mean by the statement, “we all live by a particular philosophy?” Well, we all make some basic assumptions about our world and ourselves. We assume that when we wake up in the morning and stand on our floors that we will not fall through them, even if we don’t know why. We believe that things exist. It would be absurd to carry on conversations with people we didn’t think were really there. We also believe that things exist in the same way for everyone. We wouldn’t want to put ourselves in danger by driving down a road that we thought might not be fixed in time and space or may not exist in the same way for all of the other drivers. We know that there are physical laws that govern the universe and we all rely upon them to live in it. We all feel the effects of gravity and are certain that we will not float up into the atmosphere as if there were no gravity. Even the simplest animals understand this, if only instinctively. I believe that everyone to this point would agree with me. Stay with me now as I delve into an area that many will find very challenging.

The Ultimate, Ultimate Question

What is my Ultimate Purpose?

No, I didn’t accidentally type the word Ultimate twice in the heading above. I mean the ultimate question that trumps all others. That is, the first and most important ultimate question we must answer so that it is first and foremost in our minds is, “what is my highest ideal or most important goal and why?” It could also be called an ultimate purpose. What is it? Is it making huge piles of money so that I can live the life of my dreams, have anything I want and go anywhere I want to? Is it to be famous and loved by millions of people? Is it to help the most people or do the most good I can do while I am here on this earth? What is your ultimate purpose in life?

Can you answer that question without a hint of doubt? Can you be absolutely certain that it is the right answer? Absolutely! You can because of who you are. We are all called to answer that question unequivocally – without wavering.

Without answering this question we tend to go through life without a rudder. There is an old saying that goes like this, “if you don’t stand for something, then you will fall for anything.”

I would love to see you answer that question for yourselves in the comments. This is not an easy task and it will require much thought and above all, prayer.

So what if you fail at implementing self-improvement advice? I’ve failed countless times in my fight to get organized and acquire laser-like focus.

So whut if you make a couple of speling errors or typos? It doesn’t change the person that you are and it’s not that big of a deal because people understand you 90% of the time when you make a mistake anyways. And this is coming from a person who’s a total grammar Nazi. Do typos bug me? Yeah. But do they matter, in the grand scheme of things? Not really.

For all the serious stuff we preach — like getting your life into order, figuring out how to live “well”, cultivating good habits — we hardly ever take a step back and laugh at ourselves, at the absurdity that we feel like we need to absorb all these self-improvement concepts in order to live a good life.

You don’t, guys. Life isn’t that serious. It’s a tragicomedy, and you should be laughing at it often.

Taking Yourself Too Seriously

Everyone takes themselves and their personal drama way, way too seriously sometimes.

So what if someone insulted you? So what if your girlfriend broke up with you? So what if you’ve tried so hard to accomplish something, but when it counted, you failed?

They all don’t matter. Have a short memory, laugh at your emotions (as best you can; I’m the first person who’ll tell you that some things take time to heal), and move on.

Think about all the petty stuff you pour your energy into every day. Things like gossip. Arguments. Getting angry at the asshole that just cut you off on the highway. All of those things make you generate negative energy for a reason that you’ll probably forget about a week from now. In short: they don’t matter. If they don’t matter, why do you care so much about them? Learn to let go and to take this life a little bit less seriously.

Yes, I know that this may be the only chance we have at living, and that makes this life really, really serious business, but… Given the choice, wouldn’t you rather laugh at the absurdity of a situation rather than get angry about it?

Quick anecdote: a couple of weeks ago, my best friend and I got into a fight. Well, we didn’t really get into a fight, but I was pretty upset at her because of things that transpired over somebody’s blog. I didn’t approve of her actions and was so disgusted with what happened with regard to that blog that I thought of ending the relationship. Just turning my back on her, forever, because she participated in something that really, really irked me.

We’re still best friends. When we were talking about the situation, she said something along the lines of – “Listen, Brett. This argument over this person’s blog is stupid. It’s so stupid and unimportant. But our relationship — that’s what’s important. How can we let something petty like that destroy what’s truly important in our lives?”

I realized, then, that I was taking myself way too seriously, and had let my sense of self-righteousness get in the way of preserving something that was (and is) truly dear to me.

Life As A Comedy of Errors

After letting go of the idea that life is incredibly serious (because it’s not unless you make it that way), how can we view the negative things in our lives?

As a comedy of errors. The idea is that, when things go wrong, it’s inherently humorous (especially when the people committing the errors take themselves way too seriously, thus making the irony even greater). We’re humans, and we, in our arrogance, think we can transcend our nature and become perfect.

Wrong. We make errors all the time, guys. And when we do, we shouldn’t berate ourselves over it, like this — “Goddamnit Brett! You burnt the burgers again!”

Instead, just be cool with it. Laugh it off, realize that, while dinner may be ruined for one night, it’s not a big deal. It’s not going to effect me for the rest of my life. At worst, if I failed in particularly bad fashion, then I’ll have a nice humiliating story to tell about myself for posterity.

Either way, I win.

Caveats

Even though I’m telling you not to take life too seriously, it isn’t the same as telling you not to take life seriously at all.

There are some things in life that should be taken seriously, like your values, relationships, and work. Those deserve all your energy and dedication, and you should focus on them because they’re what matters in life. If things go wrong there, the comedy of errors theory works — to a point. Obviously, if you get laid off from your job or your significant other rejects your proposal, you’re not going to be smiling and saying to yourself, “Oh, what a comedy of errors life is!”

You’re going to be hurt. And that’s okay, because, in order to experience life to the fullest, we have to experience a full range of emotions.

The idea that we shouldn’t take life too seriously only applies to the mundane things that bother us. Short-term failures and things out of our control are what deserve to be laughed at; we need to relax more and stop going into crisis mode when anything goes wrong.

This also means that all the other advice I’ve given you — most of which, if you’ll recall, is pretty serious — still applies. That is, if you think improving yourself and living a better life is important, then you can’t just laugh at it all the time. You’ll need to be serious and disciplined in order to form positive habits.

When you screw up, sure, you can laugh at yourself. On one condition: that you try again.

Be dependent on success. Attach everything to the success of your performance. Say, “If I don’t come through here, I’m a failure. I suck. I’m not good at what I do.”

If you do that, watch yourself tense up. Watch your performance go downhill. Watch yourself get even more tense as you try to save yourself from failure.

More often than not, your tension will end up being your downfall. At the end of your performance, you’ll look at yourself and think, “Well, I lost. I failed. Now I’m not good at anything, and I’m just a failure,” and so on, until you end up shredding your self-concept into a million pieces and think of yourself as the most incompetent human being to ever walk the earth.

Attachment to the outcome – staking your self-esteem on your performance – did you in.

Unhealthy Attachment

When we attach ourselves to the outcome and stake our self-worth to our performance during a certain event, we tense up because of the burden of our own expectations. We can’t relax because we think that, in order to still have some self-esteem after this event, we need to perform at our best. The prospect of living a life without any self-esteem or sense of self-worth (at least temporarily) makes our minds feel under pressure – because they are.

Think about it this way: what if the person you loved the most told you that, unless you came got a very lucrative, prestigious job that you applied to, they wouldn’t loved you anymore? Their love would be tied to your performance in securing a job. How ridiculous does that sound? Isn’t it inane to think that anyone could tie their love to something as arbitrary as getting a high-level job?

Want to know what you call those kinds of relationships? Unhealthy. (Readers, if the person you love the most would stop loving you over something similar, I’d reevaluate your relationship with that person and ask yourself whether you actually love them or even if you want them in your life)

Well, every single time you get attached to the outcome, you’re doing exactly that to yourself.

You’re saying, “Okay, self, if you don’t get an A on this paper, I won’t love you anymore, and I certainly won’t treat you with respect. If you screw this up, I’ll never trust you again to do anything. I won’t want anything to do with you, but I guess I’ll endure the pain of being stuck with you forever because you’re all I’ve got. But I won’t like it.”

Which puts a ton of psychological pressure on your mind. You are, with this paper (in my example) fighting for your own self-esteem. While that’s a tremendous motivator – that’s why we attach ourselves to the outcome in the first place; we think high risk = high reward – it’s also very unhealthy.

Relaxation, Not Tension, Leads to Better Performance

The lesson to be learned here is that relaxation, not tension, creates better performance. 

Making your body tense up by being attached to the outcome is a good way in the short term to improve energy levels, but, in the end, the stress ends up compromising your ability to perform.

By relaxing, on the other hand, and not caring much about the outcome, you can let yourself perform to the best of your ability. Your movements become effortless instead of being tense. Your relaxation response kicks in, leading to better decision-making.

If you stay in the moment, breathe deeply, and care little about the outcome, you’ll end up triggering your relaxation response (google it to learn more). The relaxation response nullifies most of the harmful effects of tension, like fatigue, irritability, muscle soreness, and lack of focus.

In order to trigger the relaxation response in the moment, you need to do exactly that: relax. Breathe deeply. Let go of the tension that you feel in your body. Feel free of the burden of expectations, instead of trying to stake your self-worth on them.

By doing that, you’ll actually perform at your best, instead of sabotaging yourself.

However, I’ve achieved a fair amount of success. And I know that, in order to be successful, consistently doing the right thing is the key. I’m consistent in my study habits. I’m consistent in how I work out. I’m consistent in how I do my work (an hour and a half of work, followed by a 15 minute break). I’m consistent in how I do just about everything – and, yet, somehow, I haven’t become consistent in my work on this site, even though I’ve been “working on it” for a long time.

Sidenote: even though I know what the right thing to do is, oftentimes, I don’t do it. That’s how hard implementing ANY advice is. So if you’re struggling with implementing self-improvement advice, don’t worry. You’re not alone.

You can’t take days off from practice. You can’t use excuses to get you out of putting the time in that’s necessary to become great.

If you want to be great at anything, everyone knows you have to practice a lot. The best way to guarantee that you practice the number of hours it takes to become great? You make it a habit. Forming great habits is the key to consistency.

A Parable

Jeff and Jack are best friends, and aspire to be master poetry writers. For some reason, poetry calls to both of them – or so they think.

Jeff loves the craft of poetry. He views it as something he does for fun. He knows that more practice will make him into a great poet, but he doesn’t want poetry writing to turn into a chore. He wants to keep it fun and doesn’t want to turn it into something he hates. So, when he feels like it, he writes poetry. Other times, when he feels like it, he reads poetry. Sometimes these reading and writing sessions last all day. Other times, they last 15 minutes. It all depends on how Jeff feels. If he feels particularly frustrated, he’ll give up on poetry for the day and go watch TV. If he’s not having fun, he figures, why bother practicing?

Jack knows that, in order to become the best poet possible, he needs to write and read a lot of it. He sets aside a couple of hours every evening, after his homework is done, to write and read poetry. For the first hour, he writes, and for the second hour, he reads. He does this like clockwork, every single day, whether he feels like it or not. On some days, when Jack really doesn’t want to write, he writes poems about how much he doesn’t want to write. When he has writer’s block, he doesn’t get up and do something else, he just sits there, pen in hand, waiting for something to get on the page. Even when the reading becomes tedious, he continues to read because he knows there’s something to learn from every poem he reads. Jack knows that the only way to improve his skills is to continue practicing — especially during the times that he feels like giving up.

3 years pass.

Who ends up being the better poet?

Who ends up extracting more enjoyment out of poetry in the long run?

Hint: the two answers are the same.

But most of us – 99.9% of us – will never achieve any significant leadership position, like being the head of a government agency, a bank, or a multi-billion dollar corporation. And, almost always, when you hear people referred to as “great”, those people are almost always household names. You know, historical figures, inventors – people who’ve changed the course of human history in a significant way.

Those are the people referred to as “great”.

I think it’s wrong, though, to think that you, too, cannot be great. You can be every bit as great of a human being as they. The only difference is the scale of your achievements, which doesn’t really matter if we’re evaluating you as a person.

The 7 Signs of Greatness

1. Skills: Every great person is “great” because they are great at something. However, just because you’re great at something doesn’t mean you’re a great person. The truly great are “great”, first and foremost, because of their skills and talents, though — if you’re trying to be great without being great at something, you’ll fail. Start here. Hone your skills.

2. Integrity: Every truly great individual has integrity. This means they act as they choose, and think freely. They do what they say, and they stick to their convictions. Integrity means that you are willing to stand up for what you believe in, even against strong opposition.

3. Ambition: Being ambitious means that you have high goals and standards to meet – and you take the action necessary to meet them. The only caveat here is, if you want to be great, you have to make sure you meet your goals fairly and don’t let your ambition get the best of you, a la Macbeth. Being ambitious is good; being Machiavellian and power-hungry is not.

4. Persistence: Great people don’t let their failures discourage them. Instead, failure is only an incentive to push harder. There’s the oft-cited example of Edison, who failed over 100 times to produce a working lightbulb and kept going – he eventually changed the world as we know it because he kept going. Don’t let a rough patch of work get you down; keep working and make it to the other side. Speaking of Edison…

5. Do-er-ness: I don’t really know what to call it, but great people are people of action. They didn’t sit around reading newspapers or blogs or whining about the weather. They acted. They honed their skills through constant practice. They were always doing things and didn’t spend a whole lot of time planning (even though planning is good) or worrying or wasting time. Going back to Edison: he thought of more than 100 designs for the lightbulb. In theory, they all should’ve worked. But because he acted and tested all the bulbs, he found out that only one worked. That’s why action and testing things out in the real world is so much better than languishing in theory.

6. Introspectiveness: In every great man’s life, there was a man who, at one point, was better than he was. This better-than-great man made the great man look inferior, whether because of their superior skill, intellect, passion, ambition, planning, whatever. However, the great man eventually improved and surpassed the better-than-great man, and, because of it, the great man is known to history, while the better-than-great man ceased to be better-than-great (more like “good” or “mediocre”) and isn’t known to anyone. Why did this happen? After getting defeated, the great man surveyed why he lost and asked himself what he could do to make himself better. He then proceeded to make himself better, accentuating his strengths and improving his weaknesses. When he met the better-than-great man again, he won. This is because the great man was introspective and was capable of good self-criticism. To become great, you’ll need to know yourself and be able to make yourself improve.

7. A “Why” or Driving Force: Every great person has a reason why they’re doing the things they’re doing. It’s what wakes them up in the morning, it’s what makes them take relentless action, it’s what makes them want to improve, it’s what makes them practice for hours and hours to improve their skills, it’s what makes them want to be great in the first place. Their “why” creates a burning desire within them to make their dream of greatness come true.

Too many people are trying to become great without knowing why. Is it the money that you think you’ll get for being great? Is it the legacy you’ll leave? Is it the boost in self-esteem you’ll get for being able to think of yourself as great?

Figure out your why, then leverage it. Use it to become great – and not just great at your skills. Great at life.

I’ll give you a hint: you don’t need much. You don’t need a fancy car, you don’t need that kick-ass apartment, you don’t need that new smartphone. You don’t need much, my friend.

Here’s what I think you need to live a fantastic life: good food, good shelter (while you don’t need an awesome place, at least get something that feels like home), fantastic relationships with people you love, work that fulfills you, and a good set of habits (like the habit of being a good, kind person).

That’s it. You don’t really need anything else.

You Already Have All You Need

One way to measure your value as a person is this exercise: imagine what you’d do (or have) if, one day, someone came and stole every single one of your possessions, so you’re left with nothing. No job, no apartment, no money, no computer, no nothing. Just you, and the clothes on your back.

What would you have left?

That mysterious uber-thief may have been able to steal all of your possessions, but your two most important assets remained untouched:

Your relationships and you.

Your relationships are vitally important. As much as I like to preach that we shouldn’t really care what other people think of you, your relationships in life are incredibly valuable — in fact, I think they’re the most valuable things you have (besides yourself). If you lost everything, you’d still have your friends to fall back on if you needed a place to stay, or if you needed some help financially. You’d still have valuable contacts in your network to get you a job again. And, most importantly, you’d have a ton of people (hopefully!) willing to give you the support and love you need.

The thing that we overlook is that, even when the times aren’t rough, our friends and family are still there to give the love and support that we need to carry on with our lives. Yes – I said we need love and support, because I don’t think that we can function properly all alone, us human beings being social creatures and all.

Even when you have all the possessions in the world, though, your most valuable possession is you. You are the best thing you’ve got, even if you manage to score the world’s biggest luxury yacht or private jet or whatever insanely expensive item you can think of. You’re still more valuable than all of them, because you’re human. Because you have the ability to adapt to changing circumstances, because you alone determine what habits you have, because you alone have the ability to make yourself into the hero of your own life.

We’re in the hero-making business here at PluginID. And, even after you lose everything, you still have all you need, because you have the skills and experiences that make you you. You can then leverage those unique skills and experiences to make something of yourself. You can build yourself back up, because you have the ability to do it — we all do. It sounds cliché, but the thing is, it’s true. When faced with incredible loss, we can bounce back extremely well, provided we actually use what we have at our disposal: our skills and our relationships.

Act As If You Had Nothing

If you had nothing, you’d be working a lot harder to maintain, use, and enjoy your relationships (when’s the last time you had a conversation that lasted more than an hour? Be honest!), and you’d be relentlessly using your own human capital (skills, knowledge, etc.) to lock down a job in your area of expertise.

Why aren’t you doing that now? Why aren’t you acting like the only things that you have in your life are your skills (your job, currently) and your relationships? They’re all you really need to live a good life — all the other things, like food and shelter and habits, are just there so you can enjoy those things while being self-sufficient.

Scale your life down. Ask what you really need in your life.

Invest in what you really need to keep your life feeling whole. Ditch the rest, because they’re really not all that important.

It was another day of frustration for me. For some reason, I’d lay out a manageable – but full – schedule of things to do, and, yet again, I had disappointed myself. Facebook had distracted me once again, resulting in me wasting another hour being awake, rather than going to bed. The result? I didn’t wake up on time, missed working out, and had to push it back for 3 hours later, pushing back all the work I had to do that day.

This is a common occurrence for me, but after my revelation following this incident, I think the days of me not following through on my schedule are over. I finally figured out what was going on.

Lacking Self-Trust

Shortly after getting frustrated with myself, I figured out what the issue was: I didn’t trust myself. I just didn’t. By being a drill sergeant in my own head and telling myself things like, “Alright, man, remember, you have to read for 3 hours today,” and “Brett, whatever you do, don’t screw this one up. Just execute. C’mon. Just execute and do what you set out to do today,” all the time, I was actually showing how little I trusted myself.

It makes sense: if I truly trusted myself to execute, I wouldn’t have to tell myself that I have to execute.

Also, by continuing to tell myself that I had to do things, I established a frame where I didn’t want to do what I planned on doing. That also makes sense — why else would I have to tell myself over and over again what to do? I didn’t trust myself to execute because I was setting up a frame where I needed to be convinced to do the things that I set up for my day (things like writing, programming, and reading). The only people who need to be convinced to do something are those who don’t want to do it.

I was blown away by this. Not only was I failing at executing, but my failure was largely self-imposed because of my own assumptions about myself. By yelling at myself (in my head and out loud) to get going on whatever I had planned, I generated a self-fulfilling prophecy. By assuming that I didn’t want to do the work and that I didn’t trust myself to perform, I created a pattern where I didn’t perform and I began to view my work as a chore, creating a huge negative feedback loop.

Letting Myself Do Things

In the wake of the realization that I wasn’t executing because I didn’t trust myself, I decided to unconditionally trust myself. Not my whims, of course, but I trusted myself to get the work done.

Now, all the voices in my head telling me to do X, Y, and Z in A, B, and C ways are gone. They’re no longer in my head. When it’s time to work, I sit down, and just work. No convincing, yelling, or pep-talks needed.

The key here is to have the faith in yourself to start. If you set a rule for yourself that you’ll start doing something whenever you scheduled it to start and you’ll end it whenever you scheduled it to end, and you follow that rule to the hilt, you won’t have to worry about getting things done any longer. The hardest part of doing anything is starting, and if you remove the stress from starting by making it a habit, you’ll be able to trust yourself a lot more.

Now, instead of worrying so much about my execution, I’m free to enjoy my work. Free from the voices in my head yelling at me to do things this way and that, I’m now able to focus on my work, get things done, and enjoy the process.

Do I need a little bit of a push sometimes to get started? Sure. But I know that a small push is all it takes for me to get going, so I’m not worried anymore about my execution as a whole.

I trust myself to start.

I trust myself to keep going after I start.

I trust myself to stop whenever I set the time to stop.

Now that I trust myself, it’s a lot easier to start. Just by assuming that when the time comes, I’ll start, is the most freeing thing in the world.

Here, go on and take it. It’s yours, if you really want it. In fact, you’ve had it all along and you never realized it. You’ve just never decided to take the leap and tap into your own power, my friend. But trust me — it is there, and it will be there for you if you want it.

Of course, it comes with a price: in order to keep the superpower, you must, for 30 minutes a day, sit up straight (or lie down, whichever you prefer; all that matters is that your spine stay straight), and don’t think. If you make that 30-minute session a ritual, I guarantee that your superpower will be working all the time.

The Power of Meditation

What do you call sitting up straight and not thinking for extended periods of time?

Meditation.

And, truly, my readers, it is far and away the best habit you could ever pick up. Nothing I have done in my entire life has changed my life as radically as meditation has – when I’m in a meditation groove and I’m doing it well (as in, no thinking and being very present) for 30 minutes a day, I feel amazing. I feel like a superhero, without the other cool superpowers; I really wish I could fly, but, unfortunately, meditation doesn’t confer such powers upon me. It only makes me feel virtually unstoppable — I can remember one day when I was really well rested and meditated a lot the night before, and I went around giggling all day, saying to myself, ”I’ve got lightning coming out of my hands!” And, truthfully, I felt incredibly powerful that day, kind of like Darth Vader.

Actually, I felt exactly like Darth Vader, just without the cool voice and the evilness.

There is nothing – and I mean nothing – better than the high that meditation gives me. It’s incredible. Everything that would normally annoy me or cause me to be reactive just slides right on by, as if it never mattered at all. I begin to enjoy the little things in life more, from breathing to the wonders of modern technology, and I feel like saying, Whoa every time something cool happens as part of a pure appreciation of life. I feel much more creative and The Resistance is weakened a lot when I’m in a stretch where I’m really into the meditation habit; I’m a much smoother writer and new ideas come to me effortlessly. I also become a kind of social butterfly, even though I’m extroverted already. Sharing things and being expressive are a lot easier.

Predictably, though, when I go without meditation for a little while (even one day!), things go south. I become extremely reactive, the quality of my work everywhere, from school to writing, drops precipitously, and I get hit with massive writer’s block. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, and a general sense of apathy washes over me, which makes it hard to get myself out of the rut.

I’ve also noticed this bizarre pattern that, whenever I’m keeping the meditation habit up, great things tend to happen to me, and the opposite is true too: when I stop meditating, bad things start to happen, like meditation gives me good luck in addition to making me feel amazing.

One piece of advice for all of you: if you start meditating and you begin to observe positive results, you’re probably going to think that you don’t “need” meditation anymore and you’re going to stop doing it. That’s wrong. Once you stop meditating, you’ll stop getting the benefits, then you’ll have to start the cycle all over again. It’s much easier to maintain the habit than it is to keep starting and stopping and starting over again.

I don’t think I can say enough about meditation, so I’ll cut it short here. Meditation is absolutely fantastic, and you’d be a fool to look down on it as New Age nonsense. I was a skeptic once, too. That is, until I tried it. Then there was no doubt in my mind that meditation was and is a great and incredibly rewarding practice that everyone should pick up. I have no idea why it works; it just does. That’s good enough for me, and it should be good enough for you too.

What does going first mean?

It means that, if you really want to go out to eat on a certain night, that you’re the first to suggest a place.

It means that, if you’re interested in a guy and you want to go out with him on a date, ask him. Even tell him how you feel about him (though, asking him out has the same effect).

It means that, if you want someone in a relationship to open up about deeper issues, you should open up first. Lead the way, and people will follow.

Being a Leader Means Others Will Follow

People are much better at following than they are at being a leader. They like having examples to follow. They like knowing that it’s okay for them to do certain things once someone – a leader – has made them socially acceptable to do.

Imagine that you’re out getting lunch with one of your friends, and they bring up the topic of religion. Since religion is a notoriously provocative topic, you have a couple of choices: you can either join them in the discussion, or you can tell them you don’t want to talk about it.

If you actually wanted to talk about religion and were too afraid to bring it up for fear of it being rejected by your friend (and nobody likes feeling rejected), then you’d feel safe to talk about it after they brought it up. If they want to talk about it, you figure, it’s a “safe” topic and there’s no problem. By taking the first step and going first, your friend led the interaction and put themselves on the line: you could either go with them and talk about religion because they made it a safe thing to talk about, or you could’ve shut it down, and rejected them.

By taking the risk of rejection, though, they opened up the conversation – especially if you were too scared or anxious to bring up religion on its own. They led, so it made it much easier for you to follow. They took all the risk of introducing the topic upon themselves.

This same principle can be done anywhere. If you want people to talk to you, initiate conversations with them, since it will show them that you are open and willing to connecting with them. Most people aren’t sure what others think of them, so they’re hesitant to initiate conversations; this phenomenon is why a lot of people (introverts, mostly) are a lot more comfortable and extroverted when they’re around people they know. Since they’re around friends, they feel like they have been granted the “permission” to be themselves.

By being a leader – by going first and dictating what is acceptable – you can help just about everyone out in your life. By being open and nonjudgmental, you’ll allow others to open up, because you’ve already demonstrated that being open and honest is valued and permissible.

If you want people to do good work and contribute, ask them to. Show them that you’re not expecting to do everything yourself and that, yes, you too need help, even if you’re seen as independent and have a lot of leadership ability. Ask for help if you need it. That way, your group members – your team – will follow suit and contribute. They also won’t be afraid to ask for help if they ever need it, since you’ve already set the example.

People are always wondering what they are allowed to do and they’re waiting for someone to show them.

Set them free and go first. Show them what is possible.