This is the First Day of a Life Worth Living
This guest post was written by IvanPerez, you can follow him on twitter here.
Soundtrack:
“Do you know what’s the difference between me and you? You practice gymnastics, I practice everything!” Socrates, Peaceful Warrior (2006)
My whole life, or at least as long as I remember, I’ve always had this obsession with improving and being better. Mix that with being raised as the kid that everyone considered ”the most intelligent” for many years and with my huge curiosity and you can understand why I do what I do. There you have positive social conditioning at its best, but that’s for another blog.
I think one day I tasted the power of deciding to overcome some challenge and improve, focusing on it and getting it, and it became my drug – that, and chocolate 
. That’s the reason why as a kid I was reading lots of pages a day, why I started doing wushu when I was five, why I’ve always had such good marks, why I got into hunting, why I went from chode to the cool guy, why I started this blog, why I got into a lot of stuff (Meditation, Self-Help, Uncluttering, Organizing…), why I plan such big things for my life and, most importantly, why I live everyday as the first and the last day of my life.
Life as a journey of challenges is one of my core values, its just part of me. That way, I know no matter what I want to do, if there’s only a tiny possibility of accomplishing it – even if it seems impossible – I will do it. Because, like they say: In the way you do anything, you do everything.
In this beautiful day, with this beautiful background music, I’m here to inspire you. Yeah, surprise… I want you to live a memorable life, a life capable of inspiring people. Only those individual that love themselves enough will start their new life. This is a life of excellence, of continual improvement and expansion, this is a life of mastery and the mastery of life. Because mastery is a lifelong process, the more you live, the longer mastery will take you. Mastery is about neither starting nor stopping, but about doing.
Yeah, that would be cool, but how do I get there?
Some pointers that will, hopefully, lead you to this mindset. At least that is what I intend to do with this article:
It’s about the journey, not the destination.
Why? Because if you choose to live this way there’s no destination. Deadlines are only mental concepts. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to have goals (that’s the whole point of this post). The journey, this moment, is everything you have make it fun. Improving rather than the improvement, taking action rather than getting the goal.
Focusing on something and making it a reality is beautiful.
If that’s not art, then what is? Focus on what you want, not on what you don’t want.
“The mind is everything. What you think you become.” Buddha
By changing the world we are confirming our condition as humans.
We people have the great gift of being the only creatures on Earth that are capable of changing their surroundings. Use that gift with responsibility.
Your real power lies in your use of responsiblity.
Your responsibility for what happens, your will. It’s the only thing that will never be taken away from you.
You don’t know when you are going to die.
The passion of life.
In improvement, there’s abundance; from stagnation you can only get scarcity. Let go.
There are heros outside comics and films.
There are real life heros, and you can be one of them.
Here are some questions you may ask yourself in order to reveal that place inside your self that is centered, your CORE (if you want to get the most out of this, write the answers down):
- If I was going to die in X what would I do? Think of short periods of time: one year, 6 months, 10 weeks, 3 days, 20 minutes…
- What do I really want for myself?
- Am I happy or I just think I should feel happy?
- What excites me?
- What is my dream?
Conclusion
This is a life of continual centeredness responsibility, inspiration and leadership. And this, my friends, is the best way I can explain what being alpha and being a man is. It’s not about improving, it’s about going for the improvement. It’s not about the results, it’s about living on the edge.
Some people live like this everyday, they feel something when they wake up that tells them today is going to be the best day of their lives, and that is every day. It’s the feeling of centeredness and not noticing people’s bullshit that arises from feeling that you could die the next second. Conciously experiencing every second is just natural from this mindset.
Life has no meaning, you have to give it a meaning. You’ve earned your respect and trust, you just love yourself. I would rather die than living any other way.
[...] Have you ever admired somebody? I bet that at anything you tried to learn and master you watched carefully at those who did it way better than you. Everybody admires someone, everybody has a few role models. This is because of the human natural tendency to improve and feel fulfilled. [...]
[...] Remember that this is the first day of a life worth living. [...]
[...] This is the first day of a life worth living. [...]