Whatever Happened to Having Fun?

BY Brett

Somewhere between our growing obsession with performance and the desire to make life easier to handle, we’ve begun to snuff out the flame that made us want to live life in the first place.

When’s the last time you sat in awe of a moment, and said to yourself, “Damn, I’m glad to be alive”?

When’s the last time you stopped worrying about your performance, whether you were going to be on time, whether other people will hate you for doing what you know is right, and whether you’re even doing the right thing in the first place?

When’s the last time you let go, and just had fun?

Fun is the thing we are all seeking in the moment – the ability to feel carefree and truly enjoy doing something – and, yet, as we’ve turned life into a mechanized set of actions your average robot can perform, we’ve started to lose it in every part of our lives.

That, my friends, is a tragedy.

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Total Self-Improvement: How to Become a Complete Human

BY Brett

I’ve always tried to be great at everything I’ve put my mind to. School, athletics, even writing this blog – I’ve always tried to reach my best, in every facet of my life.

Why? I believe in becoming a complete human being. One that has strengths in every area, and weaknesses in as few as possible.

Becoming a complete human is the end of all self-improvement. It is the goal that we are always striving for – to become a balanced, good person across every aspect of our lives. A true jack-of-all-trades or the archetypal Renaissance man is what I’ve tried to become – and I think everyone in the self-improvement game will trend towards becoming one themselves. It’s part of the natural process.

Becoming a complete human being requires being very good in every ‘sphere’ of life – it requires having integrity and being an honest person; having diverse knowledge of a wide range of subjects; being...

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How (And Why) To Transform Inaction Into Action

BY Brett

It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking that I hold tremendous power, writing for this blog, which thousands of people read per day.

It’s easy to think that I’m some guru (I’m not) with the ability to change people for the better.

It’s easy to think that I hold all the responsibility for changing you, that my content is what will cause you to change yourself over time so you can live a better and easier life.

It’s easy to think all of this because it deflects responsibility from yourself. Since the job of changing yourself is in my hands, you don’t need to put any effort in; you figure that whenever you get the ideas in your head that you need in order to live better, you’ll automatically change, with no extra effort. You think it’ll be as simple and as effortless as flicking a switch.

Wrong. I can only show you what is possible, what ideas work, and what practices we can use to improve ourselves....

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Fear and Desire: Two Sides of the Same Coin

BY Brett

I touched on this in my last post, but I think this point is critical enough to warrant a post of its own.

Desire and fear are emotions predicated upon the future. Desire makes you expect happiness once your need is met, and fear makes you expect unhappiness or pain when something bad happens. However – the expected emotions (happiness/unhappiness or joy/pain) from desire and fear are always more severe than they would be in reality.

Ever have something important and scary coming up – a big presentation, a speech, or any other pressure-filled situation? Remember how you felt beforehand – you were probably fearing that you’d mess up, that the ordeal would be torture, that there was no way that you could make it. I’ve been in those situations many times, and my default response would be to go into “survival mode” – to do the least possible to pass the time and get through it.

However, when it was all...

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Are You Making Life, Or Stealing It?

BY Brett

Since my last post on losing my edge and the ensuing swing back to defending and upholding my values, I’ve done some more introspection and discovered something disturbing about myself: I have been waiting for someone else to tell me when I’m good enough. Ergo, I haven’t been determining my own self-worth, but waiting for someone else to tell me when I’m good enough.

For someone who thought that we should never allow other people’s opinions to change what we think of ourselves, this was a disturbing realization. I felt like my very way of life was a lie, because I had been mortgaging so much of my self-worth on the opinion of other people. I had cut myself in two in this way – I believed that we, ultimately, are the sole judges of our own value, but I didn’t apply that to myself.

Here’s some context: For years and years, I’ve been waiting to go to college – preferably the best school possible,...

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13

Don’t Lose Your Edge

BY Brett

Warning: Do not read this post if you are looking for something immediately applicable for your life – instead, read on to see what the process of self-development looks like and what actually goes on in my head.

For the past few weeks, a disturbing habit has crept up on me and has seized my life – I’ve started to get lazy.

I’ve not done as well in my work, I’ve not worked out as hard as I should, I’ve hardly done work at all, and, on the whole, my performance in every aspect of my life has fallen. I don’t feel as good as I did, I don’t work as hard as I did, and I stopped performing a lot of my good habits. My to-do list, for example, has stuff from two weeks ago that’s important and that I need to get done, but I’ve been procrastinating.

Some of this is just me realigning my priorities with the onset of hockey season (hockey and school eat up about 12 hours of my time per day), but the other...

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You’re Always Going to Be Yourself

BY Brett

What is the root of all self-hate, lack of confidence, and lack of self-trust?

Wanting to be someone other than yourself. You believe, that if you change yourself and become someone radically different (by fixing your ‘problems’), life will be better.

Don’t get me wrong – changing your perception of yourself and your self-concept is great. That’s cool stuff. But it has to come from the right place. It has to come from a place where you’re already content with who you are, but you have a few things you could do better, so you decide to take the steps necessary to fix it.

One of the biggest realizations that I ever had was that, even though I was changing myself quite a bit internally, I still felt like the same person. Sure, I felt better every day, but it’s not like I was walking around like I was Superman after making significant strides in becoming the person I was meant to be. I felt normal.

That’s...

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Are You Asleep – Or Are You Alive?

BY Brett

Are you happy with yourself?

Like, honestly – truly happy?

Even if you think you’re happy, read on and disregard the next sentence.

It’s not your fault that you’re not happy.

From the time that you have been born, you have been taught to be unhappy through a long, long process of social indoctrination. You have been taught by example from your peers, your teachers, your bosses, and your family that being happy is an impossibility in this world.

Ask yourself another question: how many truly happy people do you know? Not many, right?

That’s because they’ve been victims to the same conditioning process that you’ve gone through. Over time, society has – unintentionally, mind you – wiped all trace of happiness from the population at large. A lucky few have been able to find consistent happiness, but the majority of people have been programmed into living a dull existence of consumption...

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Reaching Your Potential: Are You Holding Yourself Back?

BY Brett

Inspired by the people who are truly living awesome lives and radically traveling (a big dream of mine) while doing so, like Colin Wright, Tim Ferriss, Cody McKibben, and Jonny Gibaud, I sat down a couple nights ago with a cup of tea and asked myself a couple of questions:

“What would I like to have done by the time I’m 25 years old? How high is my potential?”

So, I made a list of things that I would like to do or have by the time I’ve turned 25. Here it is:

  • Read tons of books (if given a number, I’d say over 300 for leisure alone, not counting school-issued books)
  • Been to 25 different countries – drawing from every continent except for Antarctica. Must-sees: Italy, The UK, France, Spain,...

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Trust the Process – You’re Going to Be Okay

BY Brett

Oftentimes, I write a lot of these blog posts as a way to remind myself of certain truths to living that I’ve neglected or have forgotten as I’ve moved forward in life.

This isn’t one of them. This is a post made purely to help you – because I know of the things that you might be going through right now, or might be going through in the future.

This isn’t a post that I want to go viral (actually, I never really care if my posts do go viral), nor do I care if a billion people on the internet read it and link back to me.

My goal? To help one person out. That’s it.

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