In 1933, an overwhelmed and frustrated woman named Frau sent a letter to psychologist Carl Jung, asking “how to live”.
(She had no Instagram influencers to shout her motivation platitudes, I suppose)
Jung replied:
“Your questions are unanswered, because you want to know how we should live. We live as we can.
… If you convince the next and the most necessary, you always do something significant and intended by fate.
He shared the key to life.
This is one of the recovery communities such as anonymous alcoholics.
It was even the title of a song in Disney’s Frozen 2.
“The following good thing.”
Revisiting this story led me to think about how my reflections on success and progress have changed over the years.
“Success” redefined
I’ve been doing these Nerd fitness stuff for over 15 years.
Millions of people visit the site each year, more than 50,000 customers have bought things via NF and our coaches served more than 15,000 customers in 1 against 1.
Meanwhile, I changed my perspective a lot on “success” and “living well”.
I used to think that the only way to success required militant discipline following a specific plan. I never missed training and I was incredibly proud of that.
It did not come to mind how much Privileged and simple life I lived, where I was 100% to control my time.
(Apologies to all parents and caregivers who have read my 25 -year perspective!).
Now that I am 40 years old and I can see the types of people we In fact Help with Nerd Fitness, I changed my point of view on success and “living well” in a fairly spectacular way.
Success does not occur when we learn to do everything perfectly, but instead, when we are going to stay afloat, even when things go wrong.
In other words, success is to learn to be coherent in an incoherent way. Learn to be good enough for long enough.
And that means that when life seems chaotic, reducing our concentration to “the following right thing”.
Do the next thing
A recent newsletter The author Oliver Burkeman explained how he had chosen to keep a little bit of health in a crushing world.
This led me to these sentences from the author Eckert Tolle:
“What you call your” life “should be more precisely called” life situation “. It’s psychological time: past and future.
… Forget your life situation for a while and pay attention to your life.
Find the “narrow door leading to life”. His name is the now.
Reduce your life at this time. Your life situation can be full of problems – most of the life situations are – but find out if you have a problem right now. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes, but now.
Do you have a problem NOW?
When we ruminate on what has already happened, and we panic about everything that could happen or that must happen in the future …
It is easy to feel out of control and outdated.
Which brings us back to this shot solution: “The following good thing”.
It is only a cliché because it is true.
We can zoom in Wayyyyy and restrict our attention to something that is still under our control. In some situations, Yes, there is a problem right now. And we can just focus on this only thing.
But in many other situations, it is often that we worry about all the problems that could be, or the problems beyond our control, which prevent us from acting on the real things that we can control.
Burkeman continues:
As for telling me that I only needed to do the next thing … You can only do the next thing, so the next one, whether you like it or not.
It is a bit strange, in fact, to designate one of these techniques as “shrink your horizons”, as if they somehow implied to limit you artificially.
Really, you consciously recognize how limited you were.
We all know how easy it is for us to over things.
And when the world looks like a garbage dumpster, it can help zoom in this next decision, the smallest objective, and to make the following right thing.
This could involve training or a walk, focusing on the next meal, calling our therapist, or Finally saying no to a commitment.
If “now” is the only time that exists, then “the right thing” is the only thing we can really do.
I’m going to do the right thing for me: take a walk.
-Teve
PS: Maria Popova has A great writing on “The next good thing” Regarding his life as a writer who inspired this play.
PPS: Nerd Fitness hires a few distant and part-time humans (in particular with flexible nights and weekends) to take planned and programmed calls from potential customers interested in our 1 against 1 coaching. Click here to find out more.
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