Life Archives | Page 4 of 8

The Joy of Imperfection.

September 16, 2021 In Life 15 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

‘We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That’s what connects us–that we‘re all broken, all beautifully imperfect.’ – Emilio Estevez

We live in a perfection-obsessed world where everyone has figured it out but the reality is that everyone is winging it and trying to figure it out. Perfectionism is at the root of our present age mental health crisis, with rising suicide rates, depression, and anxiety. According to a 2016 research study conducted by Thomas Curran (Department of health at the University of Bath, UK) and Andrew P. Hill (York St. John University, UK): self-oriented perfectionism, socially prescribed perfectionism, and other-oriented perfectionism have increased over the last 27 years.

Perfectionism is broadly defined as a combination of excessively high personal standards and overly critical self-evaluations (Frost, Marten, Lahart, & Rosenblate, 1990).

Who Luck – The Power of Proximity.

September 9, 2021 In Life 7 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“It marks a big step in your development when you come to realize that other people can help you do a better job than you could do alone.” – Andrew Carnegie

One of the recurring factors I found attributed to the success of great men and women is the value of luck. The luck of who (people, family, friend, partner, spouse, mentor, boss), where (environment) and their ability to seize the day when the opportunity presented itself. Luck they say is when opportunity meets preparedness. These individuals were at the right place at the right time. The best-selling author of Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the concept of “Who Luck”. In a Knowledge Project Podcast session with Shane Parish, Jim said:

People think about luck as kind of “what” luck but I’ve had great “who” luck in my life. And “who” luck is when you come across somebody who changes your trajectory or invests in you, bets on you, gives you guidance and key points.

“Who” luck is when you come across somebody who changes your trajectory or invests in you, bets on you, gives you guidance and key points.

Winter is Coming.

September 2, 2021 In Life 12 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Don’t wish it was easier wish you were better. Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills. Don’t wish for less challenges, wish for more wisdom. – Jim Rohn

Winter is coming is a euphemism for “trying times are ahead”. Winter is the coldest season of the year in polar and temperate regions. Winter is associated with snow, icy weather, freezing temperature and it is also associated with the tough and trying times in life. I grew up in the tropical climate of Nigeria where we had only dry and wet seasons. I did not fully experience seasonal winter until I relocated to the west.

Life is a rollercoaster of circumstances, challenges, crises, ups and downs, frowns, and smiles. As Musician John Lenon once noted: “Life is what happens to you while you‘re busy making other plans”. When the challenges of life happen, they often happen so fast. No one has a problem-free life, tough times do not last but tough people do.

Pay it Forward.

August 26, 2021 In Life 7 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“If you can’t pay it back, pay it forward.” — Catherine Ryan Hyde

Pay It Forward is an expression for when the recipient of an act of kindness does something kind for someone else rather than simply accepting or repaying the original good deed. It is synonymous with the concept of Enlightened Self-Interest – behavior based on the awareness that what is in the public interest is eventually in the interest of all individuals and groups.

Giving back is very important and the need to pay it forward cannot be over-emphasized. No one is self-made, we all get some help from the society and the onus is on us to give back to the society by becoming a mentor, leading by example, volunteering, sharing, and becoming the change we want in the world.

“You Can Have Everything In Life You Want, If You Will Just Help Enough Other People Get What They Want.” – Zig Ziglar

Pay It Forward Movie

Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel Pay It Forward was published in 1999 and adapted into a movie of the same name in 2000. In the movie, Social studies teacher Eugene Simonet (Kevin Spacey) gives his class an assignment: look at the world around you and fix what you don’t like. One student comes up with an idea: #1 it is something that really helps people; #2 something they can’t do by themselves; and #3 do it for them, then do it for three other people.

“If you can’t pay it back, pay it forward.” – Catherine Ryan Hyde

In the movie, 7th grader Trevor implements the plan himself, forming a branch of good deeds. His first deed is to let a homeless man named Jerry live in his garage, and Jerry pays the favor forward by doing car repairs for Trevor’s mother Arlene. He further pays forward by preventing a woman from killing herself.

The Seasons of Life.

August 19, 2021 In Life 15 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes” – Scandinavian maxim

Life is going to happen to all of us at some point. Life is not a bed of roses; it is a roller coaster of challenges, changes, life-defining moments: sometimes you are up, and other times you are down. Whatever would go wrong would eventually go wrong (Murphy’s Law). It is easy to be optimistic and upbeat when things are going right; the real test is how you would handle the trying times. As British writer Vivian Greene once noted, “Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass…It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. – Martin Luther King

In life, you are either coming out of a storm, heading into a storm, or going through a storm. The key to weathering the storm is to understand that the storm is a season of life. As the bible says in Ecclesiastes 3:1-8: “To everything, there is a season, A time for every purpose under the heaven. A time to be born, And a time to die”. A time to sow and a time to reap. There is a reason for every season.

Success is Never an Accident

August 12, 2021 In Life 8 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances.… Strong men believe in cause and effect.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Author Earl Nightingale defined success as the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. This means that any person who knows what they are doing and where they are going is a success. Any person with a goal towards which they are working is a successful person. Success is personal and subjective hence what I think to be success might not be success to you but no matter what your definition of success is, you still need to aim for something. Woody Allen once said that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up. It is the writer who sits down every day to write, the entrepreneur who is always growing his business, the salesman who is always pitching, the artist who is always rehearsing, the sportsman who is always at the gym training, the student at the library studying, the creative who is always creating.

80 percent of success in life is just showing up. – Woody Allen

Make your Bed.

August 5, 2021 In Life 10 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

If you want to change your life and maybe the world—start off by making your bed! -William H. McRaven

Four-star retired United States Admiral William H McRaven delivered an inspiring and thought-provoking commencement speech to the 2014 graduating class of the University of Texas at Austin.

Taking inspiration from the University of Texas slogan, “What starts here changes the world,” he shared the ten principles he learned during Navy Seal training that helped him overcome challenges not only in his training and long Naval career but also throughout his life. At the core of his message is the principle of Laying your Bed daily. In his speech, he noted:

If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.

Actions have CONSEQUENCES.

July 29, 2021 In Life 11 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

You are free to choose whatever action you want to take in life but you are not free from the consequences of your actions.

Sixteenth-century English Mathematician and Physicist Sir Isaac Newton theorized in his 3rd law of motion that “For every action, there is an equal (in size) and opposite (in direction) reaction. It is this action-reaction force that makes it possible for cars to move along a roadway surface. Every one of our actions has consequences, good or bad – Our habits, words, thoughts, affirmations, etc. You are free to choose whatever action you want to take in life, but you are not free from the consequences of your actions.

Like in real life, our actions have consequences: If you work hard, what is hard will eventually work, but you will be cut short if you take shortcuts. What you give in life is what you get back, garbage in, garbage out; if you give out a positive, radiant, optimistic outlook, people would mostly reciprocate by being cheerful. Whether it is working hard, training relentlessly to master your craft, setting healthy boundaries, or getting things done. Actions always have consequences. If you cannot pay the price, you can not win the prize.

You cannot play with the animal in you without becoming wholly animal, play with falsehood without forfeiting your right to truth, play with cruelty without losing your sensitivity of mind. He who wants to keep his garden tidy doesn’t reserve a plot for weeds. – Dag Hammarskjöld

Social Media is Messing YOU up.

July 22, 2021 In Life 13 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Social Media is a means of interaction among people that facilitate the creation/sharing of information, ideas, career interests, insights, and other forms of expression across virtual communities and networks.

Social Media is by far one of the greatest innovations in the past 50 years and, like any invention, can be used for advancement or used for unintended purposes or consequences. For instance, Nuclear Energy can be used to electrify communities, or it can be used to create atomic bombs; books can change your mindset (Think and Grow Rich) or can be read/written to cause harm (Hitler’s Main Kampf or Karl Marx’s Das Kapital). Social Media is a great source of joy, entertainment; we meet most of our friends and even get married through the platforms, business empires have been built, and great ideas exchanged, careers built, hobbies formed and nurtured.

One in six smartphone users say it would make them uncomfortable to miss a day’s updates on social media.

You Only Live Once.

July 15, 2021 In Life 6 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

Life is short, we are all supposed to know that but unfortunately, we don’t. My first vivid recollection of grieving due to the death of a loved one was when I lost my paternal grandmother in 1998. I wept for a couple of days and kind of moved on eventually as we all do. I have lost 3 of my grandparents, recently my mum ( 2019) and my closest cousin (2013). The degree of my grief was kind of based on their age, my closeness to them, and the stage of life I was at the moment of their death.

What these deaths have taught me is that no matter how long I live, I am going to DIE too. Death is the ultimate equalizer in life – The old, young, sick, healthy, slim, selfish, famous, selfless, healthy, narcissist, psychopath, sociopath, cheerful, depressed, gregarious, everyone is going to DIE at some point. The late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs quipped in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there.

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.”

Most of us lead our lives like we are coming back (Jesus), would live longer than Methuselah, like we are promised tomorrow, hence we delay, procrastinate, temporize, stall, we overestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years, and underestimate what we can get done in a year. We say to ourselves “Someday I’ll“, we wait for the perfect time, the perfect mate, the perfect weather, business environment, job, career move, you name it. Knowing that we are all going to DIE, I wonder what we are waiting for.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world; most people just exist.” -Oscar Wilde

Mental Conditioning/ Programming

One of the greatest challenge for most of us is that while growing up we have been mentally conditioned and socially programmed with self-limiting belief systems such as You are here to pay bills, amass worldly possessions, Go to school, get good grades, find a suitable mate, procreate 2 or 3 kids, pay your mortgage, stay in that location for the next 25 years while working for organizations you are not excited about with colleagues and bosses you can not stand, save for retirement till 65, get ill at 70 and DIE before your 85th birthday if you are lucky to live that long.

“The graveyard is the richest place on earth, because it is here that you will find all the hopes and dreams that were never fulfilled, the books that were never written, the songs that were never sung, the inventions that were never shared, the cures that were never discovered, all because someone was too afraid to take that first step, keep with the problem, or determined to carry out their dream.” – Les Brown

Your Time Here is Limited.

The average life expectancy in developed nations like Japan, South Korea, and Switzerland is around 84-85 years while the life expectancy in third world nations like Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Yemen is around 51-65 years. If we use developed nations’ life expectancy as a case study, the average human would live approximately 30,000 days (84 years x 365 days) = 30,600 days. As short as these days are, we still waste it on trivial issues because we think we would live long and we still have time.

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.” — Voltaire

We spend one-third of our lifetime sleeping – 10,000 Days

We spend around 3,500 – 4,000 days working

On average we spend half of our lifetime sleeping, working, and commuting.

What do we do with the remaining time- We gossip, spend endless time surfing the internet and social media comparing our lives with those of our family, peers, and friends, we fight, litigate, have fun. recreate and little time examining our time here or deliberately working on our legacy.

“An unexamined life is not worth living” – Socrates

Most of us live a life of quiet desperation tiptoeing towards our graves. We follow and adhere to the scripts and belief systems handed to us by our parents, school, religion, peers, society, media, and the internet. We do not take the time to slow down and smell the roses. We are busy doing nothing, rushing through the maze of life like rats. As Lily Tomlin observed, “The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” Why become a rat when you are supposed to be a lion. As the African proverb says “The lion and sheep may lie down together but the sheep won’t get any sleep”. You are here to be extraordinary, stop settling for less, please, Go do epic shit.

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..”― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Social Media is Messing You Up

Social Media is by far one of the greatest innovations in the past 50 years and, like any invention, can be used for advancement or used for unintended purposes or consequences. As with any innovation, Social Media is also beginning to mess us up as a generation with rampant division, misinformation, fake news, depression, wasted time online, decreased face-to-face communication, suicides. Lazy thinking, fakeness, narcissism, cyberbullying, to name but a few. As Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde once quipped, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Social Media is one of the major time waters for most of us as we prioritize sharing over creation, likes over self-esteem, retweets over self-care, Instagram stories over self-growth, and personal development. We are constantly comparing other people’s well-curated highlight reels to our own life. Instead of becoming of service to our community, we are obsessed with how we are perceived by the outside world. We spend an average of 1,000+ hours on social media/internet, which would amount to around 50,000 hrs (5-6 years) spent online.

All the Best in your quest to get Better. Don’t Settle: Live with Passion.

Take off your Mask.

July 8, 2021 In Life 10 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Growing up most of us get asked a well-intentioned but somewhat silly question by adults: What do you want to be when you grow up? Really! How is a 10-year old supposed to really know what they want to become at that stage of their life unless they are a genius? The Irony of that question is that most adults are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their adult life but they expect a 10-year-old to answer the question.

Young children answer the question with much self-assuredness and confidence, believing that anything is possible. They come up with answers such as I want to become an astronaut, engineer, medical doctor, lawyer, footballer, or basketballer. They answer the question based on their mental conditioning, media programming, societal indoctrination, religious dogma, and most importantly they aspire to be like their parents, caregivers, teachers, and their environmental definition of success, prestige, and honor.

From a very early age, we aspire to become what our parents expect us to be. Sometimes our parents live their lives through us, they want us to do well and conform to the dictates of the herd, the group, and the society. The challenge most of the time is that we live the role self instead of following our bliss to find our true north or true self. The result is a life lived in apprehension, anxiety, fear, obligation, shoulds, musts, guilt, shame, and conformity. Based on our answer to the “What do you want to become when you grow up question? We try very hard in adolescence to be consistent with that answer, even when the reality is now different. We continue to want to become a lawyer even though, we are a not passionate about the profession.

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we’re going to become, and then when we become those people, we’re not always thrilled with the decisions we made
So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on.
The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret?” –Daniel Gilbert, Harvard Psychologist

We get sucked into the societal lies that we are here to just pay bills, drop two or 3 kids, pay a mortgage for 25 years, save for your retirement till 65, by which time you would be dealing with health-related issues. We slave our youth in the rat race of life, busy paying bills, working in jobs that are not fulfilling for us and we settle for less than we can become. We continuously put on the mask, play the role expected by our family, society, religion, and the world at large. We are afraid of becoming the black sheep, scapegoat hence we lack the courage to live life on our own terms. We settle and do not follow or explore our passions and inclination to become great.

“The trouble with being in the rat race is that even if you win, you’re still a rat.” – Lily Tomlin.

In our bid to live up to the expectations and obligations of the world around us. We use the mask as a coping mechanism: we pretend, lie, mask, create a persona, project, gaslight, fake it, and we do not show our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. We want to fit in with the crowd, the peer and societal pressure are very strong, hence we conform and settle for less than we can become. We project an aura of perfectionism based on the fear of failure in the world.

You are already naked.

July 1, 2021 In Life 9 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

In his thought-provoking and inspiring commencement speech to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University, Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs said:

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

Jobs was right; almost everything falls apart in the face of death. He probably had this conviction based on his scare with pancreatic cancer that eventually took his life. We are all going to DIE at some point in our brief stay here on earth. It could happen any time; the challenge is we do not know when; hence we waste our time believing we still have lots of it, we procrastinate, we fail to prioritize, we major in minor things, and at the end of our life we are filled with regrets, should have and could have.

Know thyself: Scio te Ipsum.

June 24, 2021 In Life 9 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

“There are three Things extremely hard, Steel, a Diamond and to know one’s self.” – Benjamin Franklin

Know Thyself is one of the Delphic Maxims and was the first of three maxims inscribed in the pronaos (forecourt) of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The Delphic Maxims are a set of maxims inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. The two maxims that followed “Know Thyself” were “Nothing to excess” and “Surety brings ruin”.

Knowing oneself requires becoming more self-aware of ones strengths and weakness. As American clergyman Henry Ward Beecher once said “Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.”

“To know that one does not know is best; Not to know but to believe that one knows is a disease.” – Lao Tzu

One of the ways to know thyself is to have the humility that you do not know yourself as much as you think. To know yourself requires radical humility and recognizing your ignorance of yourself. Most of us are putting up a front/ a mask; our life is based on living up to other people’s expectations and opinions of us. Getting to the root of who you are, requires understanding yourself, and reflecting on your childhood because that is where you got domesticated like we do to cats and dogs. We got socially and mentally conditioned with rules, fears, obligations, guilt and belief systems.

Fear, Obligation, and Guilt (FOG)

June 17, 2021 In Life 8 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

‘Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.’ – C.G. Jung

I have often been fascinated about why we act the way we do, why we comply or settle for less than we can become, and how people influence us consciously or unconsciously. In my research, I have found that the 3 major tools used for influencing people or emotional blackmail include Fear, Obligation, and Guilt. The people that easily influence us and know the buttons to press are the people closest to us, our family members, parents, siblings, spouse, and friends.

Emotional Blackmail occurs when someone uses your empathy and care against you. It is a state of haze and confusion, emotional deregulation, you can not see things clearly because of the manipulation and control of the abuser. The favourite tools of the emotional blackmailer include Fear, Obligation and Guilt (FOG), threat, future faking, love bombing, or withholding, triangulation, gaslighting, projection, crazymaking etc

They use Fear, Obligation, and Guilt to influence, emotionally blackmail, gaslight, project, split, triangulate and get their way with us. It all started in childhood, we get domesticated the same way cats, and dogs get domesticated. We are handed scripts that influence our worldview about almost anything from finance, health, religion, marriage, etc. Our caregivers were masters at using FOG to cover up, mentally/socially condition and program us. We do not question these belief systems. Hence they continuously direct our lives.

“They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf.” – Philip Larkin, High Windows

Setting Healthy Boundaries.

June 10, 2021 In Life 11 Mins Read By Lanre Dahunsi

You get what you tolerate.

We teach people how to treat us, we get what we allow. We live in a world where people would use you if you allow them to. It takes courage to set standards for your life as people would constantly take advantage of your insecurities. If you continue to give people the benefit of the doubt, eventually they would get the benefit and you get the doubt. This is a personal philosophy of mine: If you are not going to be there for me in my struggle, you are not going to come near my castle. As Maya Angelou once said, “If people show you who they are, believe them”. If people are always taking from your cup, you would not have anything to give eventually,

A lot of us allow ourselves to be used because we do not have or set healthy boundaries. I know it can be hard to set boundaries or say no, especially to family and friends. Knowing yourself (self-awareness) makes you see people for who they are: The narcissist, the drama king or queen, the codependent, the manipulator, and the gaslighters, etc. You need to say yes to yourself first, it might sound selfish but you need to care for yourself before you can care for others. We stay in toxic and destructive relationships as we convince ourselves that we can not live life without some people. The challenge with that thinking is that your time here is finite, but you keep allowing toxicity into your short life, which is not sustainable.