3 Things Not To Repeat in 2019
2019 has arrived in all its glory, sharing with us a new set of 365 opportunities to do something new, incredible, and even flawed.
We have no guarantee that we will succeed in our day to day activities, we only know that we have the chance. With another day of breath, we have another moment to see if we have the courage and capacity to make our wishes reality.
There’s a great John Wayne quote I recall every New Years, “Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.”
It’s that learning something from yesterday that becomes the tricky part. There’s the old quote, “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.” If we want to avoid making the same mistakes of the past, avoiding falling into the same pits as before, it’s important to look back at our past mistakes honestly.
For that reason, I’ve made an effort to look at my mistakes of 2018 and pick out the largest three. These are the mistakes that are universal, and easy to repeat without vigilance.
Mistake #1 — Singing Your Laurels
Especially if you find some small measures of success, it can become easy to enjoy sharing them. To tell your closest, and dearest friends about the victories you’ve won and the dragons you have slain. In the right proportion, this is fine and well earned. However, more often it is easy to bore others to tears with your descriptions of your success.
There’s an arrogance that becomes assumed through your enthusiasm, discrediting the success earned. Friends become tired of your voice and your presence, placing you in the cold and forgotten circle of minor acquaintances.
It is better to be understated in your victories, allowing your actions seen to speak to your abilities. Share a little of the good fortune you are having with others, be content with knowledge of your own success without needing to spread it with your own voice.
The stories of your victories may never be sung in the halls of others, but maybe they will if you don’t try to sing them off key.
Mistake #2 — Where’s Your Meaning?
Among the best books I read this last year was Man’s Search for Meaning by Dr. Viktor Frankl, in which the author shares his experiences of the concentration camps, and then proceeds to use it as illustration for his theories on logostherapy. The central point of this being that man needs meaning, that man is made for meaning above all else. When man cannot find meaning, he looks for pleasure, or distraction along the road to death.
Placing self-importance, meaning of existence, in the things that are outside of your control will lead to depression, anxiety, and misery. If you cannot find meaning in something that is greater than the strength of your own hands you will eventually find yourself bankrupt of identity and purpose.
For the longest time I carried the conviction that so long as you were the best and the strongest you had meaning. Your value and the value of others was based on your ability to do and succeed. Success meant value and meaning.
The truth of the matter is you can’t always win, you can’t always succeed. When your sense of meaning is based on winning and you lose, you lose more than the game or the challenge.
Instead of living life knowing that in the twilight of my strength I will become a victim of my erroneous philosophy, to die by the sword I have carried, my sense of value and meaning has required modification. There is more than winning, or the success of the moment. My faith, my belief in God has become prioritized in a way it should have been from the start.
Even if you aren’t religious, switching your sense of meaning and value from what you earn, to what you give makes a tremendous difference. It is looking at Love, the virtue of giving from yourself, as the indicator of success in life rather than what you earn by your skill or effort.
Mistake #3 — Telling The Wrong Story
Among the ideas that my 2018 focused on what the Narrative Fallacy, or Narrativity. It’s when you take complex situations or events and apply a narrative that makes it simple, and more often than not, a story you want to hear.
The consequence of most lines of study, if given any worth while amount of time, is that you begin to see it crop up in your daily life. Throughout the 2018 year, I told myself several stories that I found to be untrue, but at the time suited what I wanted to believe.
This is not a mistake that is easily corrected, or can ever be fully removed from out lives. It is a very human, and sometimes necessary problem. Life can become too complex to appreciate all of the threads that run through it. The key is in being aware of the habit, of placing less faith in our own assumptions and beliefs in the narrative that we write divorced from reality.
What’s Next?
I hope these trio of errors have helped you as much as myself in their identification. These mistakes are universal in their effects, and may crop up again in the new year. There will always be new mistakes, the key is being humble enough to learn from them the first time.
Originally published at terrancelayhew.com on 1/1/19
