For bonus points life likes to throw them at you frequently and often if you are willing to push your boundaries in anyway shape or form. However it still remains a great quote and something to inspire to live up too. Knuckle down get back up, master your surroundings, adapt to change and do better that’s the intellectual easy answer. No slow growth needed just jump from your unexpected mistake and do your learning from a 360º unemotional decision, hence you don’t make said or similar mistake ever again.
Easy as.
If only we always had our filters and biases off and could look at life with 20/20 hindsight. Except of course we unconsciously carry those things with us everywhere. At times we acknowledge them and work hard to see through their fog and at other times they are quite simply who we are. They have shaped us though good and bad. When we have had success and happiness; despair and trauma.
The question remains when we want to change why do we spend more time thinking about it, reading and watching stuff regarding it, spending money on the possibility of unconsciously avoiding the grind and skipping straight to reward cycle. Our brains are consistently looking for the ‘reward cycle’ because we have unconsciously been training for it the last 10 years or so. Since the advent of our smartphones that keep us instantly in touch we now have taught our brains if there is even a moment of hardship or grind then the brain can quickly turn to a little endorphin shot by simply holding up our phones without even pressing a button our phones will unlock and we can instantly scroll for must have news ~ the sort that couldn’t have waited for your 30 min / 5 min break or your intense 90 min of putting all else aside and get what you can done. No this news was important beyond the needs of checking in with our spouse or giving undivided attention to our children or friends that may be right there in front of us. Yet we are giving ourselves endless tiny meaningless dopamine hits in order often to hide from something that is in plain sight or our protective brain wants to focus anywhere but here and now.
Change ~ yes you know deep down this wasn’t all you wanted life to be and yet somehow you ended up here. Forever tired unconsciously blaming anyone but yourself and yet in the same breathe loading yourself down with the weight of your version of the story so it’s almost impossible to grow as the debts of your past need feeding over and over in your mind. How can you shift from these burdens if then the only time you spend in the now is when you are avoiding it mentally. Like a mouse trying to make it across the field while an eagle circles overhead. The other side is where you need to be. Take your opportunity when you can and run like hell. Staying forever stuck in your hiding place may keep you alive but if you starve while staying safe does that count as living?
In the end change comes down to not just thinking, dreaming and hoping like you might win on a lotto ticket. It will come down to firstly changing your thoughts into actions, into systems into goals into achievements into the actual things that matter and that you want to do.
A few examples being, you want to live with less stuff and be more minimalist if you are only in the hoping stage you’ll watch endless stuff on YouTube and see people seemingly carefree living without excess things. You’ll be buying things to help tidy up the clutter and yet during all of that somehow you haven’t addressed any of the fundamentals of living simply like Reuse, repair or recycle. No you’ve just got all your original stuff plus some new storage stuff. The few things you did manage to part with, you congratulated yourself with a month later buying more… you guessed it stuff. The underside that you missed in all your research and hoping wasn’t just the stuff itself but to retrain your brain from things matter to experiences matter. because at the end if the day the brain will slowly help you replace one lot of stuff with another lot of stuff.
It’s like if I want to get healthier and decide a gym membership is for me. Let’s pretend for a minute I only do that and though I’m really diligent with it and actually use it pretty consistently. Which in itself is well worth the applause from family and friends. However lets say you are perpetually disorganised in other ways so you are becoming more haphazard with meals and healthy eating. Now getting a take away on the way home from the gym because you haven’t sorted food out. But you are exercising so a few takeaways is well deserved right? Except now because it’s fairly regular it’s making you feel a little blah and bloated so you’re not sleeping overly well. After some nights waking up a bit tired so you start missing the odd session or two- nothing serious however you don’t miss the take away as your too tired to shop and delivery is so so so simple. Oops the first month you shaved a few centimetres now but now you are bloated and putting on weight faster than before. Demobilising and self despair. Why did I bother? So the sum total is I’m putting on weight spending more money at a gym I’m no longer motivated to go to, and on take away food I need because I’m too tired and depressed now to go out and get the food my body actually requires to be healthy and sleep well. When change is wanted and we follow the 1% of slow and steady, change is often the best for accumulating towards success though way less glamorous it rolls out to change everything within our influence. If instead of going straight to the gym enrollment you do 10 minutes of walking or yoga each day. But simply getting up 20 minutes earlier. Looking at slowly eating healthy and planning meals rather than being haphazard plus now you can address your sleep patterns to make sure you stay on track. Good sleep habits will hold it all in place. Then my first “extra” money spend can be a targeted PT session even just once a fortnight to slowly make you accountable for a slow building exercise program that is incorporated into a whole of life change. It’s not so dynamic and sexy that you’re work colleagues will be wowed in the first 6 weeks, but it is purposeful and meaningful so the person that matters will notice after 6 weeks and others may start to notice 6 weeks after that but they’ll notice slowly however more importantly when will you notice?
Remember life is full of setbacks and hurdles so it’s important to not let them have too much weight in your emotional self. Shaking yourself off and doing what you can. Understand if all your energies are burnt changing just one thing and not a broader approach to change as a whole, then that very thing you are looking to change will collapse everything else. Target your motivation at the task; however understand and prioritise the systems and habits that sustain your goal of choice. Without all the interconnecting threads that hold our lives up the only thing sustaining progress will be the ever crumbling foundation which in the end will collapse. Struggles will eventually pass and the only thing that will forever matter is the moment now you can make choices within. So what have you learn not from your failures, because as you can see perhaps it wasn’t really a failure at all, but a lack of understanding how all your threads come together. Like when you do get noticed for all the change and improvement you’ve made and suddenly all your toxic friends surface to tear you down. If your are truly now the hero of getting better and living the life YOU want then maybe just maybe, now those friends who happily kept you in your cycle of failure aren’t the people of your future. Can you change that thread as well as the others you put your goals and sights on? Or without the full understanding of growth and change, will they slowly sink your breakthrough until its a forgotten speck of dust in the rear-vision mirror. Change and resilience is often what we admire and wish for, yet it’s not about numbers on a scale or tape measure if we don’t also embrace change and growth across our lives and emotions as a whole.
This is why it’s important to not only look at your goals or reasons for change but also the wider knock on effects change can bump into so when one of those pillars becomes unstable and threatens to topple over and crush your spirit and determination for change. You have already seen it not as failure but rather the need to see the bigger picture and how your life is filled with different threads that all need inspecting to know what can be cut, repaired or strengthened too keep walking the direction you want not necessarily the direction you’ve ended up.
So as you can see from my ‘The Daily Stoic Journal’ the questions posed a broader reflection (Though whether you can actually read my writing is debatable 🤪) to how change really works from wanting to change to actually making meaningful lasting change. I hope this helps you understand at times its not just failure; but maybe in actual fact it was success that has out grown itself and if you don’t sure up the new progress with a solid foundation to adjust and accommodate your development than it’s not the path to the new goal which has fallen but all the other connecting threads holding it up. Look at the big picture accept your moment of setback, stand back up learn your lesson and be more open to all the change that sometimes one new brick in your foundation may cause. Think to yourself how would you have answered the questions from each of those days journal entries?
Good Luck ~ you haven’t failed until you don’t get get back up and learn.
Thanks for reading through to the end, please feel free to tell me about your experiences and I hope it encourages you to subscribe and follow this blog in the future.
Thank you.
Ben
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cute! 22 2025 Sometimes the things you feel most proud of seem tiny or inconsequential to the outside perspective. magnificent
Thanks. Sometimes progress seems impossible and just treading water is the goal. Until the work starts paying off