Which would you choose – control your life more or less?
Imagine that someone offered you the following bet. Two identical twins are about to begin their adult life. One lived by the following slogans
- Don’t worry, be happy (Meher Baba, Bobby McFerrin)
- God will provide (Philippians 4:19)
- Trust in the universe (Many religions)
- The world is abundant (Many spiritualists)
- Things will get better (Oft-offered consoling)
- Hakuna Matata (no worries) (Kenyan slogan popularized in The Lion King)
The other twin lived by the following slogans:
- Luck favors the prepared. (Louis Pasteur)
- Nothing takes the place of persistence. (Calvin Coolidge)
- Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. (Theodore Roosevelt)
- Early to bed, early to rise, makes a person healthy, wealthy, and wise. (Benjamin Franklin)
- There is no substitute for hard work. (Thomas Edison)
- A dream is just a dream. A goal is a dream with a plan and a deadline. (Harvey McKay)
- Only the paranoid survive. (The title of the book by Intel founder Andy Grove.)
Which twin would you bet willl, net, have a more successful, productive, and contented life?
So what?
Of course, changing is not easy, lecturing is ineffective, and advice like “Take baby steps” is so often dispensed, it’s a cliche. The purpose of this short post is simply to invite you to ask yourself if you’d like to pivot even slightly toward one of the twins’ approaches to the life well-led.
Marty Nemko’s bio is in Wikipedia.
