No matter where you are in life, if you start to pay attention to how interesting your life is, you will start to feel much better about what your life looks like. Sometimes it can be hard to focus what’s good, especially when are in adverse situations. Often, we fall victim to the competitive and comparative advantage. When I get into one of my funks about how my life hasn’t turned out the way I’ve wanted it to yet, I ask myself “If my life was a movie, would it be interesting?” Any good movie has a good amount of adventure, adversity, and resolution to the conflict. When I look at my life, I realize that I’m still somewhere in the middle of the movie and if there hadn’t been any road bumps along the way, then it wouldn’t have been that interesting.
The majority of my friends are doctors, lawyers, or have graduate degrees from some of the best academic institutions in the world. My best friend from college has always said to me “It’s not a race, what are you going to do race to the death?” Once when I told her that my early 20’s had not been nearly the success that it had been for my friends, she gave me some clarity into just how interesting my life had been. I don’t think I ever caught the travel bug, I think I was born with it. I’ve lived in 6 different countries and for most my childhood, I moved around quite a bit. When I started my travels after college with my first trip to Amsterdam, my friend had asked me to do her one favor throughout my travels: “Send one postcard from every destination that you visit for the rest of your life.” To this day, I’ve never left a destination without sending her a postcard. From my early 20’s she has a collection of post cards from around the world, each detailing my adventures, mishaps, and scenes from the movie of my life at each destination. When I think about that, I realize my life has been pretty damn interesting.
So, how do you use this to your advantage if you haven’t traveled the world or think that your life has been interesting? Create the movie of your own life. No matter what your life has been, you could make a movie about your life story that has all the elements of a good story. Find the conflict, adversity, emotion, resolution and you’ll start to see that your life has been far more interesting than you realize.
Tags: life lessons, general advice, perspectives
