Don’t Take Yourself So Serious
Just about a year ago, someone told me “stop taking yourself so seriously”.
It was a criticism that I didn’t understand and it stuck with me. Since then I’ve challenged the idea and wondered how in the world was I taking my self so serious? I was just being me. I just assumed for a while that the person that had given me this criticism just didn’t understand my ambitious nature. However, whether that person understood or not was not the point.
After almost a year, it’s finally starting to make sense.
I had a plan for everything.
The year I was going to graduate college. When I was going to build a company and become CEO. What year I had to be married and have a child by. I had to perfectly time everything so that I could already be a CEO before I birthed a child because once I had a child I was going to be too busy. I was going to have a drive in apartment in Chelsea, New York where I could park my Ferrari in my penthouse apartment that I built. I was going to help redevelop communities around the world with my non-profit. I was going to create a significant impact on the world and leave a legacy with my last name, since I was the last of my family. I had a plan for everything and when it had to achieved by.
I had a strict timeline and I had no time to lose. There was no margin for error. If I didn't accomplish redeveloping communities around the world, who else was going to? This sense of mission got me out of my suicidal depression at one point but now it was egging me back into depression. I had to accomplish this or there was no meaning to my life. That sort of pressure that I had put on myself was in fact, me taking myself too seriously. That made me realize that I was depending on achieving those life goals to become happy. Because in my head, I couldn’t be happy until I was that accomplished.
But that’s not happiness.
Happiness isn’t a person, place or thing. It’s not a status. It’s not your net worth. It’s not the person you marry or your job title. Happiness is you.
It starts with you NOW. The way you look at life decides whether you’re happy at your core no matter what life may throw at you. Because let’s be real, life will forever throw curve balls at you. That’s the same for everyone.
So laugh at yourself sometimes and don’t take your self so seriously.
Stop placing so much unnecessary pressure on yourself to prevent “failure”. Laugh through the disappointments, the “failures”, broken heart and injuries. Laugh. Just laugh. You can spend your time mopping around and saying “why me?” in shitty situations, or you could also be laughing. Which do you prefer? Laugh at life. So much of life is out of your control no matter what. What you can control however is the way you handle it. It’s so much more fun to laugh when things go wrong and just shrug. You can then change course and start all over again. Life is about the journey right?
