Happy Free Thoughts Thursday, people.

I hope 2022 has been a great year for you.

As a reminder, "great" can be defined however you want it to be. It's your life.

If 2022 hasn't been your best year, then take advantage of the transition and go into 2023 with the mindset that it WILL be great and that you won't settle for anything less.

Adopting the right attitude is more than half the battle.

How to Make the Most of 2023:

I've done a lot of soul searching the past three years and I've made some pretty drastic changes in both who I am as a person and in my life as a whole.

It's been tough and it's been fun.

Below are five changes that have made my life exponentially better.

I hope they make yours better too.

1 – Learn to say no

It sounds simple, but think about how often you do things you don’t want to do simply because someone asks you to.

Maybe it's going out even though you'd rather stay in. Or making small talk with someone even though you're running late. Or taking on additional work even though you're already swamped.

All of these things are draining, and they're all a result of fear.

Fear of missing out. Fear of letting people down. Fear of being passed up.

Time is your most valuable resource. If you want to spend it wisely, you have to learn to say no.

2 – Decide what you don't want

The world tries to convince you that you need to know exactly where you want to be in 5 or 10 years. But you don't.

Unfortunately, a lot of people spend so much time trying to figure out where they want to end up that they never actually go anywhere.

A better approach, in my opinion, is to decide—generally!—what you want your life to look like and then take steps that lead you in that direction.

The best way to do this is to first decide what you DON'T want your life to look like and then work backwards from there.

This is helpful because you can refer to real experiences you know you haven't enjoyed rather than relying on hypothetical scenarios you imagine in the future.

It’s impossible to say whether or not you'll want to end up somewhere you’ve never been, so decide what you don't want and then use the process of elimination to figure out what you do want (generally).

3 – Put down your phone

Americans spend an average of 5.4 hours on their phones every day—outside of work! That's 37.8 hours per week. Half of that time is spent on social media.

If you sleep for 8 hours a night then you're awake for 16 hours a day. If you spend 8 hours at work then you have 8 hours a day to yourself. If you spend 6 of those hours on your phone then you have 2 hours to yourself.

What are you sacrificing in real life to look at other people's lives on a screen?

Time you could be spending with friends and family? Or reading a book? Or exercising? Or working on a business / hobby?

The best way I've found to minimize the time I spend on my phone is to make my screen time a widget on my home screen. That way, every time I unlock my phone I see exactly how much time I've already spent on it up to that point.

I'm no saint and, like many of you, I use my phone a lot for work. But since adding my screen time to my home screen I've reduced it from 6.5 hours per day to 4.

4 – Stop taking advice, start taking action

"If you want to live a life most people aren't willing to live, you have to ignore the advice most people are willing to give." — Me, just now (5 out of 10)

Everyone is going to have an opinion about what you should do with your life.

But most people's "advice" will simply be projections of their own fears and insecurities disguised as "what's best for you."

Be confident in your ability to discern which advice you should take and which advice you should leave. And remember—you probably don't want most people's lives, so you probably shouldn't take most people's advice!

The truth is, even good advice from people you look up to can only go so far. And as much as we'd like them to give us the answers, there is no substitute for experience.

You can get advice from every guru in the world, but if you don't apply what you learn then it’s all for nothing.

Action > advice.

5 – Focus on yourself

Have you ever looked at someone else's success and felt jealous of them and then all of the sudden had the gap between where you are and where they are suddenly shrink?

Me neither. (But if that's how things worked I would have become rich and famous a long time ago!)

Every second spent focusing on someone else's life is a second that could be spent improving your own.

Focus on yourself this year and remember:

"There are two ways to have the tallest building in the city. Build yours higher than everyone else’s or try and knock everyone else’s down." — Unknown

One last thing

Aspire for big things but don't forget to celebrate the little things.

"Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.” — Marcus Aurelius

Live your life to the fullest,

Chris

P.S. Find this interesting it? Please share it with others!

Watch my videos on YouTube