Brock Picken

So what the heck do we do? How do we get out of bed every day and tackle the mindless or overwhelming tasks that stress us out? Wouldn’t it be easier to roll back over and hit snooze? 10 times…

Find a reason to get out of bed. Find a reason to get excited. If your life sucks and you have nothing that brings you joy, it’s time to find something. It’s time to replace negatives with positives. Life is way too short to be miserable.

It’s truly the simple things that bring me joy. Marta and I have the most adorable dogs in the world (yes, I’m slightly biased). Often they drive me crazy, after all they are still puppies. But it’s the innocence that gets me. I walk into the room at their tails wag with excitement. Every moment for them is an adventure. They are happy all the time. Remember when you were a kid? Remember those good times when nothing mattered? You could spend the entire day outdoors and not worry about what time it was. Not worry about being late for a meeting. I know, life changes and we grow up. We get responsibilities. But why does that have to equate to being unhappy?

We have to focus on what we have control over, and forget about what we do not. Is it worth bursting a few blood vessels in your forehead because of something your boss did to tick you off? Probably not. Would it feel good to lay into them? Sure but at what cost? Now trust me on this, I’m risking sounding like a hypocrite here. There’s a reason I work for myself. I don’t have a single employee-of-the-year award on my wall. That’s a butt-kiss award as far as I’m concerned anyway (my apologies to any employees of the year I just offended)…and those “elite employee” awards that I have lots of really just mean I made the company a lot of money that year.

So what do we have control over? There are two things that will matter more than anything else: Your attitude, and your health.

Choose your Attitude.

If I spend every day deciding to be miserable, I will push away the ones who matter most to me. I will draw in negative energy, and even worse, negative people. In my opinion, negative people are like the plague: avoid them at all costs. I want to spend time with people who enrich my life. I want encouragement from my friends when the shadow of doubt creeps in, not a full body-check into dooms-ville. And I want to empower myself to be a better person so people like being around me!

Choose to improve your Health.

Would you rather live a life of vibrancy or illness? Sounds like a dumb question, right? Death is inevitable for us all at some point, so why not do what we can to improve the quality of our time here while we can. We have no way of knowing when our time is up. And frankly I wouldn’t want to know. But what I do know is that through making healthy choices every day, I’m making an investment in my future. I want a long and healthy marriage. I want to be around to see my great-grandkids get married. I’m going to be the healthiest older guy you’ve ever seen.

So what are you going to do to invest in your future?