when we think about our life we usually think about it in the form of a story you know first we were born and then we did some things and made some memories and now we're here and we work in our job or whatever but in the future we plan on doing more things seeing the world maybe and saving up enough money for a enjoyable retirement we all tend to view our lives in a sort of narrative structure like this with the beginning a middle and an eventual end which kind of makes sense because by reflecting
on the past it helps us make sense of where we are now and by having hopes and dreams for the future it gives us something to look forward to something to plan towards and if we currently don't like our present situation we can place our pains and frustrations on the hope of a better tomorrow but if you think about what it feels like to actually live life like what it feels like on a day to day basis it feels completely different we kind of just wake up we feel kind of groggy we stumble down stairs
get the coffee hop in the shower and get dressed before getting in the car to get that bread and after you get that bread you get more bread at McDonald's because you have an addiction and then you come home usually pretty tired and you veg out and watch Netflix or whatever you do until you go to bed this is what living life usually feels like to most people most of the time life in general is usually pretty normal you do the things that you do every day you kind of have a routine or a pattern
you stick to and life usually isn't super inspiring or mind-blowing it's just sort of the day-to-day experience but is there anything wrong with that I mean social media has us thinking that everyone's hanging out on yachts all the time going on crazy adventures trying out the two thousand different bananas in Southeast Asia and everyone's getting married person of their dreams popping out the most beautiful babies but that's not life that's a highlight reel and these highlights that we constantly absorb by the people we follow on Instagram or the movies we watch on Netflix these highlights
start to really influence the story we tell ourselves about our own lives we start viewing our lie at least our lives live to its fullest potential as a life with as many of these highlights in it as possible so the days when these awesome crazy things aren't happening we view that as somehow suboptimal our amazing days become the expectation and our normal days become boring like we're wasting our potential we're wasting our lives away but this story we tell ourselves this adventure life no one's life is like this not Dwayne Johnson not Elon Musk sure
these guys are doing some really cool important things more often than we are but still the majority of their lives they just sort of wake up they do a bunch of things they don't want to do they're grinding it out they're working hard they're often really frustrated or stressed out they still poop they still have to eat you know most of their lives exists in this sort of day to day monotony they're experiencing life in the exact same way that you are except when Elon Musk is fantasizing about escaping the day-to-day grind and taking a
vacation instead of the Bahamas he's thinking Mars assuming you get eight hours of sleep every night which I'm sure you do you only have about 16 hours to live because you only experience life one day at a time that little section of time between lifting your head off the pillow and putting it back down again and all that stuff in between that seems kind of normal and kind of inconsequential that's all life is it's just that thing over and over and over again and this can sound super depressing or super inspiring depending on how you
look at it it can be depressing obviously if you don't like those 16 hours usually a lot of us are slaves to our bad habits we do things we don't want to do we work jobs we don't really like and we're put in certain financial or social situations that we really don't like being in so every single day day after day is something we generally don't like doing which is why we fantasize about the future so much we're still waiting to live our real lives and if this is all there is then that's obviously super
depressing but there's a silver lining because changing your entire life isn't big of a feat as you might think it is since life is lived in these little 16-hour mini episodes that's a very manageable amount of time to perfect we can start to build habits that we actually enjoy doing and that are good for us and we can train ourselves to make choices that are actually aligned with our values and will help us be the person we want to be every single day because a good life is just a series of good days not necessarily
days where everything went our way and nothing was difficult or stressful but days where our system was running we gave life a good shot we made choices that are aligned with our values and we did the little things that make us happy maybe that's having a good conversation with a friend or putting a little extra effort into cooking so you eat something kind of memorable and that you're proud of maybe that's developing one positive habit at a time so that the things that keep you grounded and happy and your mood elevated start to become things
that you do automatically viewing life on a micro scale like this also adds clarity to the little choices we make throughout the day if you've always wanted to be a more social person then that means saying yes to beers with the boys today when you get the invitation and if you're constantly fantasizing about being a more fit person that means going to the gym today because your life is today that's all it is it's just today repeated a big THANK YOU to Skillshare for sponsoring this video one problem you might encounter when trying to start
a new habit is that when you try to go from something like watching YouTube videos obsessively every single day to try to replace that habit with reading a book you're going from something that's super stimulating to something that's a lot slower paced and harder to do so the transition can be pretty jarring and you might quit right away unfortunately a great way to counteract this problem is to take smaller steps so go from something super stimulating like watching videos to watching just better videos a great example of this is to utilize today's video sponsors Skillshare
which is an online learning platform with thousands of classes covering dozens of topics that will help you learn real-world skills and just make you smarter in general simon Sinek even has a class on Skillshare where he teaches you about how to give better presentations which is the class I'm currently diving into Skillshare is offering better ideas viewers two months of Skillshare premium absolutely free which means that right now when you click the link in the description you have access to every single class on Skillshare including simon Sinek awesome presentation class and after your free trial
expires Skillshare is still super affordable if you choose their annual membership the monthly hit is less than $10 a month so kind of a no-brainer so click that link below and get access to the thousands of classes that are on Skillshare expand your mind make yourself smarter and have a great time if you like this video make sure to hit like because when you hit like the algorithm does fancy things and my bald head appears in people's home pages and if they're struggling through life or there's something they want to work on sometimes my videos
motivate them to make a positive change so it's kind of a win-win for everybody if you're lurking here and this is the millionth time you've seen my face or seen one of my videos what are you doing just hit that subscribe button and hit the bell icon so that you don't miss future videos you'll actually get notified and be part of the notification army also I just relaunched my Instagram the minute we hit 10,000 followers is the minute I give away a whole bunch of Kindles so that you guys have absolutely no excuse not to
read the books I recommend so hit the link in the description follow me on Instagram I know this is kind of ironic because I just said like oh we're influenced by Instagram and all these people on yachts and stuff but I can assure you I'm almost actually I've never been on a yacht and I love a really normal life so delete all those travel pages unfollow them follow me instead because I'll probably make you feel really good about your life yeah other than that thank you for watching and we'll catch you in the next video
