Strive, Thrive and Feel Alive

The best lessons in life have kickback, risk, and the unknown. Like training - whether we lift weights, take on something we’ve never done before or tackle a fear - we get a rub. Something that pushes back and says – oh really, are you sure about that. And WHAT a muscle to work!

As we take on the rat race embarking on the American college system with daughter number two? we are talking a lot about what sort of life she wants and what it takes to get there.

I also find myself tackling the conundrum of what am I going to do when I grow up? Our relatively manual existence is being superseded by a more automated and personalized one.

And without falling into the comparison game of measuring up to other people’s showreels we witness how others publish how they align towards their desires.?

Consider happiness which has suddenly become the #1 workplace metric over covid mainly due presumably to how unhappy we had all become.

And happiness is a strange one – we’ve seen African faces with nothing but a smile seemingly happy to be alive. We know friends who lead a simple but satisfying life keeping things simple, #livingtheirbestlife flying under the radar. We witness some with seemingly limitless resources who devote a considerable proportion of their take to giving back and take joy from that.

We also know summits, too easily scaled, become empty victories. We know there lies payback in persistence and struggle, and challenge and staying the course.

Anything that comes too easy lacks the juice and challenge of achieving it.

There’s power in ‘not yet’.

There’s energy in the hunt.

There’s joy in the process.

There are lessons in the mud.

At the risk of sounding like my mother - the sweetest victories are the most hard-fought. And life is funny. Dreams we obsessed over 10 years ago can strangely and suddenly disappear as we approach their mirage. Learn to course correct. Learn to step towards the flame that demands you to become more.

How is the rub turning up in your life and how can you use it to generate more happiness?

And if success were proportional to the number of people you help or the depth of that help what would you do differently. And what would it look like to start with client number 1 – you?!