Change Your Mindset to Change Your Life
How thinking positively makes writing and living better.
It’s the dawn of spring 2020 and already the world seems to be in shambles.
The new Twenties have already started with loads of tragedy, heartbreak, and death — from the sudden loss of Kobe Bryant in late January to the thousands of lost victims from the coronavirus. The new Twenties are surely roaring.
It’s easy to be pessimistic of the times. After all, nothing like COVID-19 has happened in our lifetimes. This is the first time in recent history that our world is truly shut down.
Yet a negative attitude about the times will alas do us little.
I live back and forth between Barcelona and South Florida and just returned from the former three weeks ago. There was not a better time to come back to the States, because just a week-and-a-half after my sojourn in Barcelona, the majority of the city shut down like a light switch.
The difference between life in Barcelona in mid-March 2020 (or year-round) versus suburban South Florida couldn’t be more different. Everyone I know there cannot leave their apartments. Unlike the suburbs where the scenery is spacious, European cities are approximately twofold denser than their North American counterparts.
So when you read a headline using terms such as “Spain, on Lockdown”, the situation is quite literal. I’m voluntarily quarantining myself in Florida, not leaving the house except when I go on my decompression walks listening to the RHCP.
You can’t do that in Spain or France.
If you walk outside in Barcelona it must be for a good reason. You can’t even walk the dog with your spouse, you must do it by yourself or it’s a fine. Other than taking your dog for a walk, you’re only allowed to leave to buy groceries or see a doctor, but otherwise all other life has been put to a halt.
At this point, no matter where you are in the world reading this, you are probably home and negative. You might’ve been laid off, or you might be working remotely for the first time and are going stir crazy.
We empathize with you.
But now is not the time to be a Negative Nancy.
When life gives you lemons you make lemonade. But we don’t always make lemonade.
There are a lot of things that we can do with lemons, who ever said that we have to make lemonade? While lemonade is probably the best thing that you can make with a lemon, there are also horrible applications of this fruit. Acidic lemons give you hellish pain over open wounds. They’re terrible for your teeth. They bring in bugs if left to rot.
Like lemons, it’s up to you to decide on what to do with your time.
You can tell yourself that everything is shit and make yourself feel that hellish pain. You can sit there and waste your time like a rotting lemon. That’s probably the worse thing that you can do with something as valuable as time.
You can spend your time making some lemonade if you’re up for going on a grocery run. Or you can learn how to design mobile apps without coding. Or you can read a book. My friend Michelle even has an ApocaList where she wrote down things to do during COVID-19 such as learning how to juggle.
The point is this: it’s up to you to do whatever you want during this time.
I’ll never forget reading this article by Robert Gryn, the chairman and owner of Codewise who built his venture with no outside funding. He went through severe burnout, firing co-founders, and bootstrapping to building at one point the second-fastest growing company in Europe. The only European company growing faster that year was HelloFresh, which had over $300 million in funding. If anyone knows about time management and grit, it’s Robert Gryn.
He wrote something profound that changed the way I viewed time and life. I’ll let his words speak for themselves.
The other thing that motivates me is the fact that I’m going to die. Oops! I said it. Yes, for some reason this topic is rarely spoken of, it’s almost considered taboo. It’s the one certainty in life, that we will all die one day.
Life is goddamn shorter than you can comprehend. If you’re reading this, you likely have around 15,000 days of life left.
Think about that for a second and let it sink in. This is something that I remind myself of every single day. Now ask yourself if you want to be the loser who waits around for motivation and the “right moment.” Or do you want to be the person who gets up and crushes it every day regardless of the odds and how you feel. — Robert Gryn, January 2018
15,000 days sounds like a lot but it’s not. In the moment a day feels like a long time. But then tomorrow happens, and so do the next few days. Then the week is over. Then weeks pass and a month is up. We only have 12 of them a year and they go by fast.
We tell ourselves that “it felt like yesterday when XYZ thing happened”. It felt like yesterday when I was just a clueless (still clueless) seventeen year-old moving from Florida to D.C. for college, but that was five years ago and this year I’m turning 23. Can you imagine if I told myself “it felt like yesterday when” for everything that happened to me after each five year period? If I do this four more times, I’ll be 42 at that point. That’s almost twice the amount of years I’ve lived! And what do you know, all I hypothetically have are my fifties, sixties, and seventies left (eighties if I’m lucky; maybe tech will solve the Gilgamesh Project, but I digress).
Are you going to let negativity consume your life or are you going to live your life to the fullest? Are you going to be couch-ridden and sad about your situation or are you going to write a blog that could make you serious money on Medium? Are you going to cry or learn how to juggle?
There are always going to be issues around the world. While COVID-19 in itself is tragic, there are inevitably going to be worse viruses. We should be thankful that it hasn’t been more lethal.
Don’t let something like COVID-19 — which is something out of your control — control your passion for living. Read a book, learn how to juggle, write a blog; there are endless possibilities!
That lemonade won’t make itself.
