No matter where you are now with yourself, I can guarantee you will feel better if you are productive.
Let’s look at the monotony of the daily life of your average Sinclair Community College student:
You wake up. You do your morning or in the case of our second and third shift workers, your evening routines—even if your alarm didn’t go off, leaving you with barely enough time to get presentable.
You’re either de-icing your car, scratcher in hand like a frenzied swordsman, or headed to public transport or your other means of transportation.
You take your transport and you get to work, where you spend a significant portion of your day selling your time to live and to hopefully afford even the lowest tuition in the state.
Then you head in to class, where you try to shove the rest of life, even if for a moment, into the furthest corner of your mind so you can absorb the information you take in from the day’s activities.
After what can often be an entire day or night’s of classes, it’s another commute home for the fortunate, another clock-in for those in other circumstances.
You’re exhausted and you realize you forgot to eat. The kids haven’t seen you all day. You need to do laundry. You have to call your sister and check in with her recovery from surgery. You forgot to pay the water bill. You put last month’s groceries on this month’s credit bill. You get into a fight with your significant other. You go to bed angry and hardly sleep, but you have to repeat.
For many, this is the grind of life. How do we end up with such different perspectives? How is there even time for optimism? Does your outlook really change anything?
No, your outlook doesn’t change much. No, you don’t suddenly get great deals of time in your life for being an optimist. No, optimism isn’t going to pay your bills or work your 14-hour shift.
Optimism, however, is not just a perspective or something you just suddenly acquire. It’s not a one-size-fits-all perspective either, so let’s talk about real optimism.
Optimism is the lifestyle that results from a general way of thoughts. It isn’t something you acquire; it’s something you generate. Most optimists aren’t detail oriented in most respects. However, this is not to say that optimism suggests you ignore these details.
Optimists project positivity while pessimists absorb positivity, because they cannot generate it themselves. This is the give-and-take dynamic of most scenarios in life.
If you want to be a more “positive” person, examine what being “positive” means. We connect positive with good. Positive connotes to success.
Positive is more of a “something.” Positive space is what exists. So being positive is essentially embodying “being” and “doing.” Positivity is synonymous with doing. It is action. Being positive is taking action.
If you want to see a more positive person, take action. Don’t be scared off thinking it has to be some huge, “go get ‘em” attitude. If you carry around a “go get em” attitude but you don’t have the fortitude to deal with the reality that you’re not going to “get ‘em” most of the time, you set yourself up for failure.
If positivity is success, then you it’s imperative that we understand success outside of comparative success. This doesn’t mean you should adopt the “everybody gets a trophy” mentality; it’s quite the opposite.
You won’t get a trophy—you don’t need one. That’s because you’ll realize life has made you want the trophy, but a trophy is only a symbol. A symbol embodies an idea. You don’t need the symbol, you are the symbol, and it’s time you polish the trophy you already are.
The first step to dusting off that trophy is coming to terms that you are, on some level, at exactly where you are in life because some part of you is comfortable there. You are there in part because of your own desire to either maintain that way of being or to be satisfied in a lifestyle without challenge.
You had some reaction to that. Something came to mind: admission, defense or intrigue. You couldn’t be responsible; after all there are so many factors that are out of your control! Well, here’s another: your truth does not matter to the objective rules of the universe.
Throw out those excuses; it’s better than living with them. I don’t care if they’re excuses you’re comfortable with or even substantial, circumstantial excuses. They’re an excuse and not reasoning because of the way you approach them mentally. Get rid of them. They’re your excuse and not reality because you haven’t accepted how that reason relates to you.
I’m going to take a wild guess that life has not been fair. If you’re an adult, or getting there, or maybe an adult working towards embracing that independence, you’re going to have to understand that the idea that life is fair is completely unfounded and un-evidenced.
Are you going to spend your whole life fighting against nature, against the entire world and everything in it, just to spite yourself? Don’t let your world stop because there are things out of your control.
They’re out of your control because they could not possibly be in your control. You can’t tell me that if you could have controlled it, everything would have been better. How could you argue that? With the knowledge and experienced you gained entirely because those events happened?
Even if you were some almighty being that could rewrite the past, I guarantee you would mess up too. Cut yourself some slack and cut out those excuses.
Not by just haphazardly flinging them out the nearest window, as wonderful as that sounds, they’ll just end up on your lawn or on your car. It’s Poe’s Law with a little Murphy. How you beat those excuses is by understanding the excuse, the reason, and the reason you want to make it. Why do you turn something into an excuse?
Be productive instead. A productive person is going to deal with everything a nonproductive person does. How do they do it? I’ll give you a clue, they’re not working much harder than a nonproductive person. They’re not terribly smarter either.
How is that possible? Well, that’s because “intelligence” is much broader and is comprised of many nuances that the average person does not utilize. We are not brought up in a way that fosters both a biologically holistic and a functionally holistic set of intelligences.
Productive people apply this entire spectrum of intelligences that a person encompasses in the ways that people are designed to apply them.
Do some spring-cleaning. You know how you’re going to do that? You’re going to start to get through things. You’re not going to magically tackle every issue of your complex being in one night. But I can tell you, how you’re going to get through things is by managing yourself—by being productive.
You’re going to lose the weight, you’re going to exercise and you’re going to get through the mental duress and the neurological loops you’ve made habits out of, and you know how? The smallest efforts. So long as they are efforts, and you’ll know if they are, it’s going to work.
If you’re trying to lose weight, you’re going to exercise. Maybe you’ll be motivated for two weeks. By the end of the month, you may not want to, you might skip a day. You might cheat on your diet.
What you’re going to do is by managing yourself, by treating yourself the way you deserve to be treated, by being productive, you will still tell yourself excuses. But, what you’re going to notice, is that sometimes when you tell yourself “it’s not worth it” or “I can’t” or “I’m not good enough” you will hear the tiniest voice in yourself that says, “Why?”
Why, when it is worth it? Why, when you can? Why do you say you’re not good enough when even the smallest place in your heart knows you are? You’re going to see self-worth when you do self-work.
That small sound will echo into your actions, and you have to let it.
If you “do,” if you “act,” you will “be.” It’s not easy, but I’m reluctant to say it’s hard either.
It may be uncomfortable, but it is significantly better than the alternative—stagnation and indifference. Indifference is said to be the opposite of love because indifference has its opposites most opposing force, the inability to change.
Indifference will trick you out of both joy and pain, but ultimately saves you from neither. If you are supremely detail-oriented, you’re going to mistake the difficult portions of life for pain. Indifference won’t cast light on the many joys there are to be found.
From indifference, you decide your perspective. However, life dopes you. If you sit in indifference, you’ll begin not to recognize it. Still, you’ll form your perceptions and reinforce your beliefs. Is it fair to yourself to set your worldview in stone so under the influence?
Learning to be productive can be a lot like learning to ride a bike, but you’re probably going to fall off this one quite a lot more.
However, you can keep riding. You wore a helmet, and your bruises will heal. You know these things. If life’s a journey and not a destination, then you’ve got to learn to enjoy this journey, which includes every time you fall but also every time you get up.
This journey’s going to include speeders, people who probably aren’t even aware blinkers were invented, people who get into accidents—because people on the road are just like people off the road.
You’ve got your sport car hotshots, you’ve got aggressive and defensive drivers, drunk drivers, beginner drivers, drivers who need directions, out-of-towners, you’ve got people trying to merge and people who don’t even have their lights on.
The road is dangerous, but we’re all on it. You will have your flat tires, but even if you can’t change a flat tire now, you can learn how, and a surprising amount of people are there if you look that are willing to help. You can bike or drive, or even walk on the side but you can’t stay still. It’s time to move forward and enjoy your trip again; you’ve been on it the whole time.
Barton Kleen
Managing Editor