Building A Better You

 Do Something Hard How comfortable is your life? Your day to day life, I mean. For many of us, I’d say our lives are rather comfortable: We wake up and get ready for the day, we go to work and put in our time, come home and have dinner, then settle in for an evening of reading, or binging a show before falling asleep to do it all over again tomorrow. Often, it feels like deciding what to eat for dinner is the hardest thing I do all day. Some people develop grit when they’re young and they struggle through things in school. I was fortunate enough to have a rather easy time in school. Things came easily to me. I rarely needed to study. It was great, until I got older and was faced with actual challenges. Rather than dive into them, I did my best to avoid them. If I wasn’t good at it initially, I had no interest in continuing to do it. That’s fine for some things. We don’t have to do  everything  that comes our way. I’m not great at organic chemistry? Fine, it’s honestly som...

  Better to Stumble Forward Than to Stand Still My first article took years to write. It’s something I had thought about for a long time. I read books on writing. I watched YouTube videos made my writers. I researched the best things to write about, and the best places to write about them. Where did all that planning and research get me? Nowhere. At the end of it all, I still wasn’t actually writing anything, and therefore, not actually a writer. Maybe I could be called a researcher, or planner, or dreamer, but not a writer. The day I became a writer didn’t come until I was fed up with the way my life was progressing. Looking around, I realized I wasn’t doing the things I really wanted to do. I also realized that nobody was going to come along and say, “Kevin, it’s time to start now.” That was entirely up to me. What was holding me back? This was the question I had to ask myself. There were several answers that came to me: I was afraid of failing. I didn’t feel prepared. I was afra...

 I'm Just Doing My Best “I’m just doing my best.” This is a phrase I find myself throwing around when things get  difficult. Days when I’m struggling to get everything done, when I’m barely hanging on  between work, household chores, and raising a child. When somebody criticizes my work  (or as is more often the case, when I get self-critical) I remind myself that I’m just doing  my  best. I was saying it to myself this morning, somewhere between making my son breakfast, packing his lunch, and making lunch for my wife and I, when I paused and really thought about what I was saying.  Just  my best? If it’s my best, how can it be  just  my best? Isn’t my best what I’m shooting for? It doesn’t always feel like my best though, partly because I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. My best should be getting it all done, getting it all done right, and getting it all done a little bit better than I did yesterday. What I came to realize, however,...