We trade our fresh sense of curiosity for the comfort of the reassurance that comes from seeing the sun rise for the thousandth time. In every person’s life there comes the night they go to sleep fearing that the sun won’t come up the next day, only to wake up and understand that nothing will impede the sun from making its voyage across the sky. It’s a natural part of life, aging and growing old doesn’t have to be a sentencing, it’s something that can be savored and enjoyed.

No matter what profession or situation you find yourself in, one of the hardest things for us to do is tackle something by ourselves. It’s one of the unspoken difficulties of being a leader, in fact it’s something most people gloss over, but a lot of the time you are looking down the barrel of a gun at whatever challenge is coming up all by yourself. You don’t have the luxury of taking it on with a well-assembled team, you’re out there fighting all by yourself. You have to learn to be okay to do it by yourself.

One of the things most people don’t realize, if you’re driving a certain kind of car and you’re entering a hard turn, you have to accelerate into the turn. The car is a rear-engine vehicle, which means it requires more traction. This is a great life lesson because our life is often filled with hard turns and twists, whether we see them coming or not, it takes great amounts of mental stamina and preparation to deal with them, because we have to keep ourselves from steering off the road, colliding with other motorists, and ensuring the safety of yourself and your passengers.

I like to stress the importance of having people around you who support you and elevate you while pushing you to do your best. By surrounding yourself with people to help you maximize your potential, you’re creating a safety net. I’m sure you’ve seen in a movie or heard someone say “I’ve got your six” or “I’ve got your back.”

You’ve been told by coaches, teachers, friends, instructors, generally anyone with a pulse that “winners never quit and quitters never win.” As cliche as it sounds, it’s important to remember that losing and quitting aren’t the same. Losing is a type of situational criticism, as loss can be our greatest teacher. Sage wisdom doesn’t come from a place of overinflated self-importance, it’s a humble understanding and acceptance of your flaws, your weakness, and the revelation about how to do it better.

As much as you may want to strangle the snot-nosed brat with a beret ordering a 16-syllable drink at Starbucks, you have to realize for every one of them, there are three others who are hardworking and willing to see what the world has to offer. They don’t know the struggles of the past and how the world has changed, to them the world is inconsistent and equally full of threats and wonder.

Something no one likes, we all wish we could do without, but most of us benefit from in the end: criticism. In your time in school or work, I am sure you’ve had to go through peer review or peer edits, it’s inevitable. We use criticism to help evaluate our shortcomings and our talents to see what we can hone and what we can improve.

The wonderful thing about life is the vast potential it has for someone--anyone to tap into. There are endless capabilities and pathways a person can take. This can be daunting for anyone to realize, so, often we try to limit our scope to the easy and the possible.

Hesitation is the most crippling human affliction, it prevents us from taking the chances we need to seize to move forward. Especially in business, people are harmed by their inability to make a decision. For better or worse, the choices you make are more crucial to your business than staying still.

Something taught to me by a business owner I had the pleasure of working with years ago. He said, if you want things to get done, inspect what you expect. What he meant by that is how we should check up on the things we care about. Physically interact with every facet and joint of the business.

A true friend will try to challenge you to meet potentials that you can’t always see for yourself. These challenges will come in the form of questions, competition, and sometimes that friend may get a little pushy. That’s what real friends do: they factor in your best interest and know that watching you sit on your couch all day isn’t going to be too good for you in the long run.

We limit ourselves within a certain capacity as we go about doing our work, saving up energy and willpower for whatever tasks come along. Here’s the thing, when we encounter something that challenges us, we are met with a fierce rebuttal if we go in half-cocked. Then what to do we do? Some give up, some get help, and the rare breed comes at it with one hundred and ten percent effort.

The most bitter medicine is often our own. When we judge ourselves we have to be critical, but denial dilutes the effectiveness of our assessment. It’s hard to come to terms with mistakes and external criticisms, because it can be humbling.

You either love it or hate it, but it’s one of the most beneficial things you can do. Reading can open the gateway to seemingly infinite knowledge or it can transport us from the dull monotony of our daily life to another world in an instant. Whether it’s reading an informative work or diving into a solid story, reading is one of the most basic methods of self-improvement.

People love to judge but hate to be judged. Being judged is inherently an uncomfortable process by which are weighed, willingly or not, and found wanting. It’s a subconscious act, to look at someone and measure up their worth. One of the overwhelming problems with that stems from how we use our own criteria. We are not fit, being inherently flawed, to judge the merit of others.

Memories . . . Something more valuable to most people than any other resource is our memory. In this case, I’ll say memories, because really, it boils down to having a plurality. As we get older, we put more and more stock into our memory and memories, as we rely on our memory to show us the memories of the things we cherished for so long in our lives.

Attitude and gratitude are two uniquely human perspectives that, for the most part, result in us having to make strong adjustments to what many consider to be a natural human reaction. When something doesn’t go our way, we tend to lash out in bitterness and blame ourselves, God, the universe, whatever is close at hand.

Learning something and applying that knowledge is something, but to understand requires an empathic connection with that experience that is necessary for growth. A growth mindset is what enables people to develop skills and mature in a way that is unique to our species. To dwell in the past is to reject that growth, but a forward lifestyle that values progress over stagnancy tends to reward us with greater personal development.

Everything in life requires some degree of effort. Sweeping a porch doesn’t require the same amount of effort as building a porch, but both require the motivation to get the job done. A lot of us coast off of motivation, others have moved past motivation into discipline. Regardless, there’s a lot of thinking that centers around the idea that being lazy requires no effort. I find this funny, because often enough, trying to get out of one’s duties and shirk on your responsibilities often means putting in more work just to escape the obligations or commitments.

Credit where credit is due, a great deal of this stems from something I heard on the radio not too long ago, but felt I needed to share my own story with with it. By anyone’s standard, you could say I am successful. I’m self-employed and run my own business. By the world’s criteria and my sense of self-confidence, I’m a pretty well-off guy. But here’s the thing. By my standards, I’ve come up short.