And everyone’s toolbox is different. Some tools get used every day, and some tend to sit at the bottom of the toolbox, coming out rarely. Some tools are irreplaceable, and if we lost other tools it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
The thing is, I’ve only got my toolbox and being the curious guy that I am, I wanted to know what other people’s toolboxes look like. So I decided I would ask some of my fellow personal growth and life-hacking bloggers what their favorite tool was.
The question was, “What one technique/mantra/exercise/belief/life-hack/event has had the greatest positive impact on your life-hacking and/or personal growth?”
Here are the responses I got:
- Albert, from UrbanMonk.net said:
I would say my favourite technique is releasing all the negative emotions that are holding us back. I’ve got a whole series on it, but the most important is the first: The elusive key to emotional mastery: Is it really that simple?
- Alex, from AlexShalman.com said:
I think one of the biggest life hacks is understanding that ‘Life is empty and meaningless and it’s empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless’ I write more about this here: I Think Life Is Empty And Meaningless. Still Want My Advice On Life?
- John, from PickTheBrain.com said:
My biggest breakthrough was recognizing my self worth.
Motivation comes from believing you deserve great things in life and that you’ll get them if you work hard.
- Steve, from StevePavlina.com said:
I actually wrote an article about that called “10 Ways to Optimize Your Normal Days“. It explains 10 positive habits that I found to have an extremely positive long-term impact.
The first and most important habit was becoming an earlier riser. I used to sleep in late, but I found that I was much happier and more productive when I started getting up at 5am every morning. Getting an early start to each day is extremely energizing, and it sets the tone for a highly productive day.
- Gretchen, from Happiness-Project.com said:
The first of my mantras — or as I call them, my Twelve Commandments — is “Be Gretchen.” It’s very difficult to follow, but it’s crucially important.
It sounds so simple. It’s a piece of advice that people have been doling out for thousands of years (I think the Pythian Oracle is inscribed, ‘Know thyself’). And yet it’s very, very hard to do.
And I’ve realized one of the reasons why. It’s because although you can choose what you do, you can’t choose what you like to do. You can’t control your tastes.
The first of my Twelve Commandments is “Be Gretchen,” and I’ve realized that one of the difficulties of “being Gretchen” is that I must accept myself, as is, which means accepting some things about myself that I wish I could change.
Knowing yourself, accepting what really makes me happy (not what I wish made me happy), is a key to happiness. I have to pursue happiness in a way that makes sense for me. As Montaigne wrote, “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”
I get very annoyed with people like Thoreau who insist that there’s only one route to happiness (which, coincidentally, conforms perfectly with the way they like to live their lives). Or the happiness researchers who say things like “After a person has $15,000, money makes no difference to happiness.” This simply CANNOT be universally true!
“Be Gretchen” shapes the way I think about work, about leisure, about how I treat other people. It has made a huge difference in how I spend my time.
- And my favorite tool:
“Learn to fail, or fail to learn”, which I picked up from Tal Ben-Shahar.
A prerequisite for just about anything major that you try to accomplish in life is failure, and fear of failure holds many people back from even trying. Seeing failures as not only inevitable but also as opportunities for learning has been been my greatest ally in personal growth.
This website, in fact, was kind of a dare to myself, to see if I could do it and make it successful, or if I would fail miserably (as the majority of blogs do). Unfortunately it’s been quite successful so far, (I cleared
10,00011,000 page views yesterday, not bad I think for a blog that’s only been alive 3ish weeks) so it looks like I’m going to have to find something else to fail at.
I think it’s amazing how much variety there is in the answers. it really illustrates, to paraphrase Gretchen, that we have to accept ourselves as who we are and try to find the tools, whatever form they take, that are best suited to us.
You can see all the responses that trickled in after this post here.
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You had me from ‘toolbox’. For some reason, that opening paragraph really hit me.
I seriously don’t get the one about life being meaningless. I even went and read the article, but I still don’t get it. Weird.
The Urban Monk article is a freaking tome. I’m still working through it. After that, I’ll look through Pavlina’s.
I can’t speak for Alex but to me it’s a reference to Existentialist philosophy. The idea behind Existentialism is that life is meaningless and also absurd because inevitably we all die. Thus we have to work to create meaning for ourselves.
I know that probably doesn’t mesh too well with your religious views Fekket,
but you might be interested to know that there is a Christian Existentialism as well.
Hello Stu,
It’s very interesting to learn what’s in your own, and other self improvement bloggers’, toolbox.
The key point is that it’s important to put together our own, unique set of tools from the masses available. What works for one person, might be unsuitable for someone else.
If we try to apply a technique or exercise that doesn’t fit our mindset or lifestyle, we will end up disillusioned and demotivated. Worse still, we can convince ourselves that there’s no point in trying to change and all self improvement ideas are junk.
The value lies in personalizing the lifehack to make it a success- not from forcing our life to fit the technique.
With a few tweaks here and there, we can assemble our own customized toolbox from the assortment of standardized tools out there.
As Gretchen suggests, amazing things happen when you allow yourself to be unique.
Thanks for the link Stu.
To answer Fekket. All it means is that everything we perceive in life, we put our own meanings on. The way the we interpret someone looked at us and what we think it means is just an interpretation. When we realize that life has absolutely no meanings, all the meanings of people, placed and things are the meanings we assigned to them, we develop a freedom, and a new ability to redefine life.
When you have such power, to create new meanings onto things that everyone else believes to be different, you can take you life in any direction you want.