It's Scarier To Be Stuck In A Routine Than It Is To Pick Up And Leave

There's a truth you would do best to comprehend in its grandness. You need to remind yourself of it regularly: The life of your dreams is most likely unattainable. 

The odds are simply stacked against you. No matter how close you are to attaining (what you believe to be) your ideal life, you will never hit the mark.

There will be surprises -- for better or worse -- that you couldn't predict. You will find yourself in places you never imagined with people you never thought would be important to you.

Life never turns out the way we thought it would, however, this does not mean things will necessarily turn out for the worse.

It doesn’t mean you can’t build a life that's as beautiful -- or even more beautiful  -- than the one you imagined.

At the same time, you are very likely going to screw things up. I’m not talking about the mistakes we all make, the ones we learn from and move on from. There is really only one mistake you can’t move past.

This is the mistake of not learning, of not moving on, of not picking yourself up and leaving behind the life you don’t want. Most people are too busy dealing with the minutiae of their lives to see the big picture.

They fail to see what they're turning their lives into. They fail to see who they're becoming.

Every day you follow the wrong path isn't just another wasted day. With each passing, wasted day, life becomes increasingly harder to live right.

The longer you wait to change your life, the more difficult that task will become.

The truism that "we are creatures of habit" is accurate. But you shouldn't be concerned about the habits -- at least, you shouldn't be concerned about the habits you acknowledge.

Yes, habits form the foundation of our reality, but your gravest concern should be the effect your life is having on your person and your psyche.

By repeating your regular routine, you reinforce the habits you've become accustomed to -- habits that have no place in the life you wish to create.

This isn't about good habits versus bad habits; it’s about the right habits versus the wrong ones.

The true causes of your unhappiness aren't the drinking, the smoking and the unhealthy living. It's the habits you aren't even aware of that are ruining you.

It’s the job you can’t stand. It’s the toxic individuals you let into your life. It’s your environment: where we sleep, work, live.

We don’t hate our lives because of how we deal with them. We hate our lives because we think of them as things to be dealt with.

Yes, problems will emerge no matter what. Life will throw things our way, problems we don’t bring about ourselves -- things we can’t possibly avoid, fix or undo.

The real question is this: If we understand how difficult life is without our help, why do we choose to make it more difficult?

We're not all sadists, of course. The answer is we simply don't know better. We don’t understand the way it works.

Maybe some of us aren’t capable of understanding. But I suspect most people don't even attempt to understand. If they did, they would realize that they're digging their own graves.

By choosing to stay where you are, do the same thing and remain around the same people, they condemn themselves to boring lives. By not choosing change, they're deciding to keep things the same.

Even when you're happy in your life, things will never be exactly how you want them to be. We will always want something, some sort of change; this is human nature, and it will never change.

The trick is to focus on fixing what is most important in your life.

Focus on your health. Focus on surrounding yourself with the right people. Focus on spending the little time you have doing things worthy of your time.

Focus on finding and creating a physical environment that both energizes and relaxes you.

You won’t regret ridding your life of all that is negative. You won't regret picking up and leaving. You won't regret restarting and reinventing yourself.

What you will regret is deciding not to change -- deciding to continue down the path you already know is wrong for you (even if you aren’t brave enough to admit it to yourself).

You should always aim for happiness, but you should never stop seeking personal growth. And the only way to grow is to change.

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