Striving For Felicity

Personal Growth, Success + Lifestyle Tips

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11 Things To Do Now To Get Ahead In Life

Blog, Personal Development

If you are ambitious, you most likely want to get ahead in life as fast as possible. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Here are 11 ideas to help you get ahead of your peers.

1. Live below your means

If you always spend your entire paycheck before the next one comes in, you will forever be financially stuck. 

Even worse, you will run into financial troubles as soon as unexpected costs come around!

Do your future self a favor and live below your means. 

You can do this by continuing to live in your tiny, shabby flat a few months longer than necessary before you upgrade.

Or you can keep the phone you have for a year longer than you’d planned to. 

Every time you postpone an upgrade of your lifestyle, transfer the money you would have spend on the upgrade into your savings account. 

Since you were willing to spend that money anyway, it won’t hurt you if it leaves your bank account in the form of savings. 

2. Do the inner work

We all have grudges, traumas, insecurities, and limiting beliefs that are doing us much more harm than good. 

The sooner you overcome them, the quicker your life will improve. 

To do the inner work, you can get yourself a coach or mental health professional who will take your hand and guide you.

Whether or not this is an option for you at the current moment, you should also do the inner work on your own.

  • Read personal development books to uncover your limiting beliefs.
  • Journal about their cause, their impact on your life, and the beliefs that should replace them. 
  • Meditate on your memories, and keep remembering them despite every effort you’ve made to forget them. Forgive the person who has wronged you, and forgive yourself for making mistakes. 

In my experience, you don’t have to put much effort into consciously overcoming limiting beliefs. 

If you consume personal development content every day, you will inevitably come across your limiting beliefs. And as long as you are open for change, they will slowly make space for more supportive beliefs.

Forgiveness, on the other hand, requires conscious effort and courage. It is so much more easy and comfortable in the short term to resist thinking about an embarrassing situation or to marinate in our anger. 

Integrate a practice of forgiveness into your daily routine. The beginning will be hard, but it is an important habit to help you get ahead in life. 

3. Build income streams

The more financial freedom you have, the more you can live life on your terms. 

Having multiple streams of income is more important than having one very prosperous stream of income. 

Because that one stream can always run dry. You could get fired from your 9-to-5 for one reason or another. There could be a financial crisis or a pandemic that forces your company to shut down. 

We all experience bad luck once in a while. If you have multiple streams of income, bad luck can’t hurt you as much. 

Start building at least one additional stream of income now to get ahead in life. 

4. Learn how to learn fast and effectively

School teaches us what to learn but very little about how to learn. Due to that, students have been applying outdated studying techniques for decades.

Nowadays, this is a much bigger problem than ever because of the sheer volume of what we need to learn. 

That’s why successful people know that they have to learn how to learn fast and effectively to get ahead in life.

Get ahead in life by using techniques like spaced repetition, active recall, and the memory palace. 

Read also: 11 Tips to Study Effectively | How I Study for Law Exams

5. Learn speed reading

You will spend a lot of your life reading the information, whether in books, online articles, magazines, emails. Or captions. 

Learning how to read faster with more comprehension will help you to get ahead in life. 

Read also: How I Read One Book A Week – 11 Tips To Read More

6. Solve any health issues as soon as you can 

Seemingly small health issues can cause severe consequences if left alone for a long time. 

The healthier you are, the more you can enjoy life and achieve it. So make sure to get ahead in life and take care of any health issues as soon as possible. 

7. Aim to google things just once

Many people nowadays have the mentality that since they can google anything at pretty much any time, there is no need to make an effort to remember the information. 

Change this mentality today and actually make an effort to remember what you looked up. 

Not only does it save you time when you inevitably would need to look it up again, but it also increases your common knowledge and makes you seem more sophisticated. 

8. Let go of things and people that don’t serve you

I’ve recently had to let go of a plan I had been clinging to for quite a while, and let me tell you, it lifted such a weight off my shoulders! 

It really had been causing me unnecessary stress, and I should have adapted to reality much sooner.

You can also feel the same relief once you let go of ‘friends’ you haven’t been vibing within quite a while. 

It’s ok to grow apart. While that person may have been an important part of a phase in your life, it doesn’t guarantee you will stay close later on. 

Be open to changing your relationship into something more fitting. If that doesn’t work, consider dropping it altogether.

9. Start to collect practical experience

While having a degree is good and often necessary to gain a job, it rarely guarantees you are skilled at handling practical work. 

You know that, which will make you struggle to be confident, and your employer knows that.

So, how do we improve our competence? By gaining practical experience early on. 

If you study law, this could be by working as an assistant to a lawyer in your spare time. 

If you are working towards a programming degree, you could do some programming work for others through Fiverr. 

And as a business student, why not try to get your own blog off the ground or manage the social media of someone. 

Get ahead in life by collecting these experiences early on. 

10. Build self-discipline and resilience by starting projects and seeing them through till the end

“How you do anything is how you do everything.”

– T. Harv Eker

With each task that you start but don’t finish, you increase the struggle to complete the next task you take on.

Like so many things, self-discipline and resilience are muscles we need to exercise to keep them strong. 

The sooner you start with their training, the more you are going to get ahead in life.

11. Read books, newspapers, blog posts, fanfictions, etc. – just read

Reading has a myriad of benefits: First and foremost, it is one of the best sources of information our world has to offer; secondly, it trains your concentration and comprehension, and it also increases your vocabulary.

I also believe that it can boost your creativity and imagination because of all the new ideas it presents you with. 

You can hardly go through a day without reading something, be it emails, articles, or contracts. 

So you might as well start making reading an important part of your day to get ahead in life.

What about you? What activity served you well and got you ahead in life? Do you have anything to recommend?

And which of these ideas do you plan to try out? 

We’d love to hear from you!

Until next time, Felicity Seeker.

how to get ahead in life as a boss babe

9 Easy Ways To Reduce Your Social Media Use | Tips For A Digital Detox

Blog, Personal Development

Many people seem to do a digital detox nowadays. But how and why exactly should you reduce your social media use?

Read also: Digital Minimalism Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes

Few people realize that the founders of Apple, Facebook, Instagram & Co. would never have built such a successful company had they spend as much time on phones and social media as the average users of their products do.  

According to some statistics, the average social media user spends almost 2 1/2 hours (145 minutes) every day on social platforms. 

Even worse, the average phone user picks up their phone 58 times a day and spends three hours and 15 minutes using the device. 

That’s more than 22 hours a week, and more than 49 days a year, we lose to mostly mindless scrolling and tapping on our phone.

By contrast, I have used my phone on average a little over 20 minutes a day for a few years, and I only drop in on social media on odd days when I am curious about one specific account. 

Of course, I am no digital saint. I spend a lot of time reading fanfiction on my tablet or laptop, and occasionally I spend too much time watching YouTube videos. 

Still, I imagine I have so much more time during the day to spend on pursuits like studying, reading, and building my business than phone addicts have.

Also, since I stopped using Instagram daily, I feel so much less comparisonitis and FOMO; instead, I am more focused on and content with my own life. 

As you can see, there are plenty of reasons to reduce your social media use. But, since you’re here, I suppose you already know that. 

So let’s get into the tips: 

1. Delete the apps on your phone and only access them via browser

This seemingly small rule has immensely powerful effects. After all, the biggest reason we’ve become so attached to social media in the first place is the convenience of its immediate availability. 

Just grab for your phone, which always carries around with you, swipe up and tap a few times, and voila, in a matter of seconds, you are staring at your news feed. 

Deleting the apps from your phone is not meant to signal you stepping away from social media once and for all. For most people, that measure would be way too harsh to ever try. 

Instead, you should delete the app with the promise to yourself to still check your social accounts from your laptop or tablet. 

The extra time and effort it takes to enter your accounts will do true wonders to quell your motivation to do so. 

In fact, you might soon find yourself losing a big portion of your interest in these apps. 

2. Find an alternative activity for bursts of boredom.

In a world of instant and constant entertainment, we suffer from a lack of tolerance for boredom. 

The second we feel bored – be it waiting in a line, sitting in a waiting room, or counting the minutes until the end of a lecture – we reach for our phones to fill this entertainment void. 

This urge can be difficult to resist at the beginning when you are still very much addicted to the social media rush. 

Pure self-discipline can get you there, but there is also a far easier method: Stay busy. 

Usually, I’d advise everyone to not be busy but productive because the quality of your work counts and not how many hours a day it fills. 

However, in this case, we can benefit from being busy. If you fill your free time with tasks that take up all of your attention, you can’t focus on other things like your phone. 

When you’re bored in lecture, grab a pen and continue to fill out the squares of a page in your notebook. 

If you are bored in a waiting room, take out a book and work on your goal to read one book a week. 

Read also: 

And if you are bored at home, take three pairs of socks and work on your goal to learn how to juggle them. 

Find goals to pursue during every burst of boredom. Ideally, but not necessarily, those goals should keep you entirely away from your phone. 

3. Turn off notifications

Once you have found something to direct your attention away from your phone, it would be counterproductive to have your phone vibrate and ping and destroy all that effort. 

I’ve disabled any notification sounds for text messaging or social media straight from the beginning, and later on, I also disabled notification banners on the lock screen. 

If I have to use my phone for navigation or look something up on the internet, I don’t want to be immediately bombarded with other people’s messages. 

I chose how I spend my time. If I want to look something up online, I do exactly that. And if I want to text with others, I do that on my own time. 

I take control of how I spend my day. 

4. Be busy! 

The easiest way to forget to check your phone and social media is by being too busy to do so. 

So before you jump into your digital detox, make sure to find activities or projects to fill your time with. 

Naturally, these activities shouldn’t include a phone. 

5. Use apps that block your internet or certain websites 

I’m sure you’ve heard of the many apps available that can block your access to certain apps or even wifi altogether for predetermined amounts of time. 

If you think this is the right fit for you, make use of them. 

A word of warning: Don’t be too strict with the limits you set yourself. Keep it to the very essential. 

The more you restrict yourself, the more resentment will build and the more you’re likely to ditch these apps altogether. 

6. Carefully curate a handful of high-quality sides you follow for a certain topic

Are you interested in the news? Don’t just browse through random news sites and read all the breaking news in hopes of getting a tiny bit of different information from each side. 

Instead, curate a shortlist of high-quality and trustworthy sources that will present you with the most complete version of the story. 

The same goes for celebrity gossip. Ditch the dozens of gossip accounts you follow on Instagram. Instead select maybe three sources that have proven the most valuable for you so far. 

If you carefully curate the list of your sources of information, you will spend a fracture of the time gathering the most important information. 

7. Always ask yourself: Why do you want to use this tool? Do its benefits outweigh the time it will steal? And how do you plan on using it? 

Most don’t spend much thought on why we use social media. It’s mostly a kind of herd pressure we mindlessly follow: ‘All my friends are on Instagram, so I should be on Instagram as well.’

Once you actually take the time to analyze your relationship with Instagram, Facebook & Co., it might be surprised how you could spend so much time on an app with so little value to you. 

Why are you using Instagram? What benefits do you want to gain from it? If you strip it down to just these few benefits, how would you need to use the app to attain them? In how little a time a day or a week could you achieve these benefits? 

Chances are, you would only need to check Instagram or Facebook once a day for maybe 30 minutes to an hour to connect with others. 

8. Leave your phone behind when possible or put it out of reach

Out of sight, out of mind. 

If you put your phone into a drawer at home or into your back instead of your pants pocket, it will be much easier to avoid the urge to look at it. 

11. Power through one week of discomfort

The beginning of a digital detox is always uncomfortable. You’ll find your hand twitching to your phone more times than you’d expect.

The good news is, getting over your digital addiction is much easier than getting over a substance addiction. 

After a week, many notice themselves forgetting about their phone and social media more and more. 

So, brave that discomfort for a few days and don’t give up straight away. It will be worth it in the long run!

Do you think these tips can help you to reduce your social media use? Do you have any additional tips? 

Let us hear from you in the comments down below!

Until next time, Felicity Seeker!

Digital Minimalism Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes

Blog, Books, Personal Development

Are you spending too much time on your phone or social media? Here is the Digital Minimalism book review you need!

Read also: Ego is the Enemy Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes

Book Review

Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport is a great book for everyone who spends a lot of time on their phone and social media. Firstly, the book is very convincing on why we should do something about this habit. Secondly, it gives the reader the necessary ‘detox’ tools which go deeper than most ‘hacks’ you find online.

For someone who rarely spares a glance at social media and uses her phone for less than the average person, many of the book’s arguments and tips were not new to me. Still, I’ve gotten enough value out of the book so that it’s been an interesting read. 

Lessons

1. Small changes are unlikely to stick; you have to do a hard detox

“Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

I’m not entirely agreeing with this first lesson. I believe that with enough discipline, small changes can leave a lasting impression on your phone use. 

However, I can see why it is easier for many people to do a hard detox, as Cal Newport found with his feedback. 

So consider doing a two-week or one-month digital detox to override the bad habits you’ve developed. 

2. Do the detox for the sake of lasting change

“The goal is not to simply give yourself a break from technology, but to instead spark a permanent transformation of your digital life. The detoxing is merely a step that supports this transformation.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

A digital detox can induce a lasting and significant change in your habits and, therefore, the quality of your life.

However, it’s harder to reap these rewards if you view the detox as nothing else than a one-week/one-month break. 

Yes, it’s also meant to give you some time away from your phone and social media accounts. But much more important is the effect the detox can have in the long run for you. 

So start it with the goal in mind of forever changing your relationship to digital tools. That way, your motivation to see it through to the end will be much higher.

3. After the detox, many lose their taste for the platform they’d obsessed over

“minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

“An interesting experience shared by some participants was that they eagerly returned to their optional technologies only to learn they had lost their taste for them.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

Sometimes we can be discouraged from trying a digital detox because it feels as if we could never maintain enough self-discipline outside of detox to truly use our social media and phone less. 

So why try it if we are just going to fall back into our old habits afterward?

Fortunately, and somewhat surprisingly, many people realize that post-digital detox, they have slightly lost their taste for the social media they’ve been so obsessed with.

On the first day after the detox, they excitedly open up Instagram or Facebook only to aimlessly scroll and tap around a bit. Quickly they lose interest and close the app in favor of spending their time more satisfyingly.

4. Mental solitude is crucial for a happy and high performing life

“Everyone benefits from regular doses of solitude, and, equally important, anyone who avoids this state for an extended period of time will, like Lincoln during his early months in the White House, suffer.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

“Solitude requires you to move past reacting to information created by other people and focus instead on your own thoughts and experiences—wherever you happen to be.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

Humans are not meant to be constantly surrounded by social input, be it in the form of participating in or just hearing a conversation, social media captions, podcasts, movies, or books.

We need time away from all this input to have the solitude to sort through our thoughts, gain insights, and healthily process our emotions. 

We need moments to just BE instead of constantly having to REACT what others throw at us. 

5. Constant connection with the online world causes anxiety

“Solitude Deprivation A state in which you spend close to zero time alone with your own thoughts and free from input from other minds.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

“The sudden rise in anxiety-related problems coincided with the first incoming classes of students that were raised on smartphones and social media.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

“Simply put, humans are not wired to be constantly wired.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

Another reason why mental solitude is so important is that being constantly connected has proven the afflict big parts of a whole generation with anxiety. 

Mental health professionals have noticed a clear correlation between the arrival of smartphones with their instant access to social media and messaging apps and a big spike in the recorded cases of anxiety. 

And it makes sense, doesn’t it? Time on social media or messaging apps creates a lot of comparisonitis, FOMO, and the need to uphold a certain persona. 

No wonder a constant exposure to this feeds into the anxiety of a whole generation. 

6. Digital connections don’t come even close to replacing in-person interactions despite what it might feel like

Our species has thrived in large parts because of our superior social skills. 

We can peacefully live and work together in greater numbers than any other species on earth. We can diplomatically solve conflicts when they arrive and leave the situation better than when we entered it. And we can feel empathy and detect lies. 

All these skills have been honed for many thousand years. Our brains have evolved to notice minuscule cues in tone, choice of vocabulary, physiognomy, and more to analyze social interactions accurately. 

Nobody should be surprised that digital messaging can’t ever come close to replacing in-person relationships. 

Of course, it’s great to be able to keep up a relationship even while you’re a great distance away from each other. There are undoubtedly many benefits to modern communication. 

However, the relationships you create or maintain digitally won’t ever satisfy our human need for social contact to the extent in-person relationships do. 

That’s why you should always spend more effort on the in-person relationship than your digital one. Instead of commenting on posts of 20 of your online ‘friends,’ use that time to meet a friend at a café or stroll the park. 

7. Reducing your digital presence has the lovely side effect of getting rid of your shallow/fake ‘friends.’

“Being less available over text, in other words, has a way of paradoxically strengthening your relationship even while making you (slightly) less available to those you care about.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

It might be the introvert in me, but I have absolutely no desire to maintain shallow online ‘friendships.’ 

I like having a couple of close friends, who I meet in person once in a while, and only with them, I am willing to keep up a digital connection as well. 

A digital detox can help you sort out the shallow relationships and keep the true ones. Any friend who can’t deal with you not answering their texts within a day is no real friend at all. 

Still, you can give all your regular contacts a quick warning that you will be less quick to answer in the future. 

8. You will be able to reap the benefits of social platforms while avoiding the disadvantages if you set up clear rules for their use

“They would never simply say, “I use Facebook because it helps my social life.” They would instead declare something more specific, such as: “I check Facebook each Saturday on my computer to see what my close friends and family are up to; I don’t have the app on my phone; I culled my list of friends down to just meaningful relationships.””

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

Think about the social media benefits Facebook, Instagram & Co. advertise with. It’s about connecting with your friends and family no matter where you are, keeping up to date on what happens with them, and effectively marketing your business. 

We can undoubtedly get all these benefits from using social media. However, if you are honest with yourself, you will quickly realize that you can reap all these benefits in a fraction of the time you spend on social media. 

Checking in once or twice a week is enough to see whether or not something important has happened to your close ones. 

You can block out an hour or two in your weekly schedule to reply to DM’s or comment on any posts. 

You can also block out time to schedule your business content or free a slot for when you plan to go live. 

All these benefits of social media don’t require you to scroll through your feed on an hourly basis. They don’t even need you to look into your account every day. Once in a while is already enough.

Everything beyond that brings more disadvantages than advantages, especially since opening social media once makes it so easy to get sucked into it for longer than you’ve planned. 

If you set up clear rules and a thought-through schedule, you can reap the advantages and avoid the attention traps the founders have integrated. 

9. Stop using social media on your phone and only use it on your laptop

“if you’re going to use social media, stay far away from the mobile versions of these services, as these pose a significantly bigger risk to your time and attention.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

“First, a nontrivial percentage of people who deleted the apps discovered that they essentially stopped using social media altogether. Even the small extra barrier of needing to log in to a computer was enough to prevent them from making the effort—revealing, often to their admitted surprise, that services they claimed were indispensable were in reality providing nothing more than convenient hits of distraction.”

– Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism)

Mobile apps bring social media companies the biggest number of eyeballs and, therefore, the most revenue. 

Unsurprisingly, they spend more resources on optimizing these apps than on optimizing the web versions. Everything about the apps is tweaked to perfection to capture and entrap your attention.

And since you carry your phone constantly with you wherever you go, it’s incredibly easy to enter these apps full of traps. 

The easiest way to avoid this is by defeating the apps on your phone and only using them on your laptop or tablet. 

The more effort it takes to enter the app, the less likely you are to do so. And the less smooth the user experience, the less likely you are to stay in the app. 

Use that to your advantage for the time during and after your digital detox.

10. Doing ‘nothing’ in your free time is grossly overrated

The easiest way to get sucked into attention traps like social media, digital games, Netflix, etc., is by being bored.

Once you are bored, you’ll get drawn to the easy entertainment these services provide. 

And the easiest way to get bored is by doing ‘nothing’ in your free time. 

I get it; I really do

11. Carefully curate a handful of high-quality sides you follow for a certain topic

I’m sure you have a few go-to sites for the topics that interest you, be it news, sports, celebrity gossip, recipes, or styling advice. 

Chances are also that you haven’t spent all too much time and thought on selecting these sites. 

Most likely, you just stumbled over them and then kept coming back because they might have a tiny piece of additional information that wasn’t covered on the other sites. 

The time it takes to gain such a small piece of additional information is clearly wasted. 

You are much better off by carefully preselecting a handful of high-quality sites that cover your chosen topic most thoroughly. 

That way, you can stay up to date and inspired in a fraction of the time it used to take you. 

Have you tried a digital detox before? If so, did you go through with it, and did it leave lasting change? 

I’m curious to hear from you!

Until next time, Felicity Seeker!

11 Signs You Might Be Secretly Unhappy With Your Life

Blog, Personal Development

Unhappiness is not always obvious, even to the unhappy person. Here are 11 signs you might be secretly unhappy with your life. 

Read also: 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think | Book Review

Read also: 11 Uncomfortable Realizations You Will Have During Self Improvement

1. You obsess over other peoples lives more than you care about your own

As social creatures, we naturally care about other people and what goes on in their life. 

However, if you spend your days obsessing over reality shows, new Insta posts, scandals, pregnancy rumors, and more, you don’t have much time to think about your own life anymore. 

This lack of interest in yourself might be a sign you are secretly unhappy with your life. 

2. You sleep a lot … like A LOT

Sleep is important, and many people should actually try to get more sleep.

However, sleeping more than the necessary amount is a curious choice that can signal certain exhaustion and boredom with life. 

After all, if you’d love your life, you would try to live it to its fullest extent instead of sleeping it away. 

Preferring extra sleep over being awake can signify that you might secretly be unhappy with your life. 

3. You dedicate your entire energy and focus on a hobby/work, so you don’t have to think about the rest of your life

It’s easy to reason that your full dedication to a hobby/work is a sign of your passion and purpose. 

However, many people passionately adore their hobby/profession and still enjoy doing other things. 

Just like how you might adore wearing that one pair of sneakers but still decide to wear the other pair you like once in a while. 

That’s why it can be a sign you might be secretly unhappy with your life if you refuse to spend any time or thought on the rest of your life.  

4. You daydream constantly

Constantly dreaming about your dream life, or a fictional story is a strong sign you are unhappy with your life.

Don’t get me wrong; daydreaming can be an extremely fun activity that strengthens your creativity, imagination, concentration, and visualization. 

However, as with everything, you shouldn’t do it in excess.

5. Your days blend into one another, and time seems to pass slowly at the moment but fast in retrospect

We experience the passage of time very subjectively. Sometimes 60 minutes can seem like 3 hours, and other times like 10 minutes. 

If you feel like every day is a boring repeat of the previous day and looking back, you wonder how the year has passed by so quickly; it means you are not experiencing enough noteworthy moments that could have created memories. 

The more memories we make, the better we can assess time. 

If the days blend in a boring dull, we lose the sense of time. 

Your feeling of time or rather lack thereof can therefore be a sign that you might be secretly unhappy with your life.

6. You’re surrounded by unhappy people

There is a certain interplay between you and the people around you. 

First, we are influenced by who we spend the most time with. I’m sure you’ve heard the quote about how we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. 

On the other hand, we attract the same energy we are living in ourselves. That’s one of the core ideas of the law of attraction. It means that unhappy people attract other unhappy people. 

After all, happy people most likely won’t want to spend time around downers. 

7. You complain, and complain, and complain some more

Some people just ALWAYS complain about absolutely EVERYTHING! 

It becomes apparent that there is more to this complaining than just a one-off when the person point-blank refuses to look on the bright side or logic. 

If you find yourself complaining often and not appreciating how the situation could have been much worse, this might be a sign you are secretly unhappy with your life. 

8. You have nothing to talk about or nobody you’d want to talk to about it

If you have nothing to talk about, it signals a lack of interests and passions in your life. And predictably, an interest-less life is almost bound to be an unhappy one. 

There can also be unhappiness in having passions and interests but nobody you’d want to talk to about them. After all, we are social creatures who want to share our life with others.

9. You don’t care anymore about things that used to matter a lot to you

Caring means something is important to us. If we don’t care about big aspects of our life anymore, it can be a sign that we are unhappy with them but have given up on improving them. 

10. You easily get angry

… at the person walking slowly in front of you, the government for not finding the (in your eyes) ‘perfect’ solution for every problem, that person with the annoying laugh, children playing a bit noisily, the traffic jam, the delay of public transportation, that fanfiction author who doesn’t update their fanfic, or at people who are just radiating happiness. 

If you were happy, you wouldn’t let these things bother you as much. Maybe you’d be annoyed, but in general, you would be much more understanding and empathetic instead of immediately losing yourself in a spiral of rage. 

11. You are pessimistic 

You know how people say you shouldn’t go shopping when you are hungry, because you’ll buy too much? Or how you shouldn’t make any rash decisions while being ecstatic or angry?

That’s because our emotions impact how we think and view the world around us. 

That’s what they mean when they talk about the rose-colored glasses we wear while we are in love. 

If you are unhappy with your life, you will see everything as worse than it actually is. 

Do any of these signs apply to you? Don’t worry; just because one or the other applies doesn’t mean you are secretly unhappy with your life. 

This is only meant to raise some awareness. Don’t use it as a reason to overthink your entire life if you are usually happy with it. 

Until next time, Felicity Seeker!

21 Ways To Live A Beautiful Life | How To Make Your Life More Beautiful

Blog, Personal Development

Life can be gorgeous if you let it be and make an effort. Here are 21 ideas to make your life more beautiful.

Read also: 33 Boss Lady Glow Up Ideas – How To Level-Up

Read also: 15 Signs You Have Leveled Up in Life | Signs of a Glow Up

1. Smile

Smile at strangers, at the beautiful sunrise, for yourself when you hear children giggle because you see someone else’s gorgeous smile. 

Just smile more. 

2. Surround yourself with colors and textures that make you happy

Choose clothes in a color scheme that makes you smile when you open your wardrobe. Choose them in soft and silky textures that feel luxurious and comfy on your skin. 

Choose beddings and pillows in your favorite colors and textures. 

Try to create an environment where everything you look at evokes feelings of joy, comfort, and even luxuriousness. 

3. Have Playlists for every mood

Create an autumn playlist that makes you want to curl up with hot cocoa, a fluffy sweater, and watch the leaves fall.

Create a playlist full of orchestral music, lo-fi and binaural beats for your study sessions.

Have a playlist full of slowed-down stripper songs for when you feel in the mood to dance in lingerie in front of the mirror.

Make your life a movie soundtrack.

4. Shape your lifestyle to your personal preferences

Shower around lunchtime, stay up late and wake up late, burn Christmas candles during summer, don’t travel in your holidays and instead save the money, own two phones for different purposes – just live life on your terms and don’t bother with what the herd does. 

5. Have pets or plants to nurture or love deeply

There is just something magical about having something or someone to take care of. 

So what better way to make your life beautiful than to adopt a pet or a plant and love it to pieces. 

6. Allow yourself to choose aesthetics over functionality once in a while

Listen to vinyl instead of Spotify, buy that unnecessarily expensive luggage and use it as decor in your room in between travels because it looks so pretty, wears fake glasses because they make you feel academic. 

A Kindle is much more practical and, in the long run, also cheaper than physical books. But sometimes, it is worth it to choose aesthetics over logic if it makes your soul sing with joy. 

7. Deeply feel the gratitude for all the blessings in your life

Gratitude is one of the purest emotions you can feel. Furthermore, it’s not only a beautiful emotion to feel in the moment, but it also attracts more things into your life to feel grateful for.

Practice feeling gratitude deeply to make your life more beautiful. 

8. Take action on an even more beautiful future

Life can feel meaningless if all we’re doing is going through the daily motions without change insight. 

Make your life more beautiful by pursuing goals that promise an even better future. This could be studying for a degree, applying for that job, building a business, losing weight, or even just learning how to make pretty gift wrappings.

9. Explore your area instead of always taking the same routes

Look at the area in which you live as if you were a tourist. Have you ever visited the most recommended places? 

And how about taking a slight detour the next time you go for the groceries. Just drive through a neighborhood you’ve never been in. 

10. Improve your financial situation, so you don’t have to worry about money anymore

One of the biggest obstacles to a beautiful life is money worries. Therefore, to make your life more attractive, you should improve your financial situation early on. 

Create multiple income streams, make your money work for you, and accumulate enough savings to overcome any financial hiccup. 

11. Practise (self-)forgiveness daily

Do you ever struggle with unwanted memories that pop up in your mind and remind you of something embarrassing or bad? 

Well, that’s because you are trying to suppress the memory, and the more you resist, the more it persists. 

Instead, you need to relive the memory and forgive yourself for it and ask your past self for forgiveness in return. 

Do this every time an uncomfortable memory pops up, and soon, the memory will be less and less painful and turn up more rarely.

The same goes for any resentment you hold towards others. Let go of the bad feelings and forgive them for achieving your peace of mind. 

12. Consume positive and uplifting media

Good news rarely makes it into any headlines. Instead, we constantly hear about the worst of the worst. It’s not only depressing and anxiety-inducing but also creates an unrealistic view of this world. 

Therefore make sure to consume a good amount of positive and uplifting media. 

For books, I can recommend Factfulness and The Rational Optimist. They are listed on my Reading List for Personal Growth. 

13. Limit the time you spend with pessimists

Some so many people seemingly do nothing but complain – about politicians, employers, the economy, school, their family, strangers, and a million other things.

Spending too much time with those people can pull you down into the hole they’re living in. 

It’s hard to make your life more beautiful when surrounded by people who talk about anything but beautiful things. 

14. Try to see the good in everyone and give them the benefit of the doubt

Many people get offended easily, even though the other person never meant to offend them in the first place. 

They seem to think that people are out to get them when most of the time those people are too busy to think about themselves to spare us much thought.

You shouldn’t be gullible, but you should try to see the good in everyone and give them the benefit of the doubt unless evidence suggests otherwise.

Dare to see the kindness in others. It will make life more beautiful.

15. Maintain a mostly healthy diet

If your diet is healthy, you will feel more energized, and therefore you can enjoy life to a bigger extent. 

If you allow yourself unhealthy food once in a while, that’s perfectly fine and only human. 

16.Keep your body fit

Life offers so many things. To take advantage of them as much a possible, you should be physically fit. 

After all, the length of your life doesn’t matter as much as the quality of it. 

17. Spend your energy on things you have control over and accept what you can’t control

Stop obsessing over the bad weather or economy. Focus on what you can do to make this unchangeable situation better for yourself. 

You will only feel frustrated and bitter if you spend all your energy thinking about something you are helpless to change. 

18. Have your own standards for success

You can make life more beautiful by not relying on outside approval to feel accomplished and proud. 

You can’t control how others will react to your achievements. Therefore it’s a recipe for unhappiness to rely your feeling of success on their opinion. 

Instead, set your own standards for success. It’s ok, to feel proud of a B if you usually get C’s. It’s also ok, to be unhappy with an A- if you were aiming for an A. 

19. Try to discover new things regularly

Life gets dull without a certain amount of variety in it. Furthermore, it’s rather sad to only experience the same things over and over again when there are a plethora of choices you can experience. 

Make an effort to do things you haven’t done before. Go and buy sample sets of food, beverages, makeup, self-care products, and more to get a glimpse into other options. 

You can make your life more beautiful by bringing variety into it. 

20. Learn what hairstyle, makeup, clothes make you shine

There is just something beautiful in having a signature scent and look that people and, more importantly, you associate with you. 

It’s even more beautiful if this signature look brings out the best in you. If it makes you shine just a little bit more. 

Find the hairstyle, makeup, clothes, perfume, and more that make you shine brighter and indulge in them often. 

21. Keep a list of coincidences and miracles that have happened to you to remind yourself that life is working FOR you

Our perception of life greatly depends on what we focus on. Focusing on misery, bad luck, and problems will perceive life as anything but beautiful. 

Therefore, one easy but effective way to make life more beautiful is to direct your awareness to the more beautiful things in life. 

To do this, you can keep a list of coincidences and miracles that you’ve experienced. This will remind you that life is working FOR you and NOT against you.

Which of these ideas do you plan to incorporate into your life from now on? 

Do you have any additional ideas for your fellow Felicity Seekers?

Until next time!

Ego is the Enemy Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes

Blog, Books, Personal Development

I’ve just finished Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. Here is my book review with the lessons I’ve learned, plus inspirational quotes.

Read also: 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think Book Review

Read also: The Unfair Advantage Book Review | 11 Lessons + Quotes

Book Review

“Ego Is The Enemy” is a very ‘tough love’ and ‘no-bs’ book. It highlights the many different ways ego can be our downfall and how to rise above our ego through interesting real-life examples you’ve probably not heard of before. The book is relatively short, with short chapter sizes that are comfortable to read. 

Lessons

1. You’re not more important than others; you’re not entitled to succeed; you’re not above certain types of work

“The ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition: an unhealthy belief in our own importance. Arrogance. Self-centered ambition.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“What is rare is not raw talent, skill, or even confidence, but humility, diligence, and self-awareness.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“Greatness comes from humble beginnings; it comes from grunt work. It means you’re the least important person in the room—until you change that with results.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

Feeling above others or certain types of work is the fastest way to sabotage any attempts at succeeding in life. 

Especially in the beginning stages of your journey, you often have to do dirty work to get off the ground. Maybe this comes in the form of being the coffee boy at your law firm or writing hundreds of emails asking for a chance to guest post on a popular blog. 

It doesn’t matter how superior you feel. As long as you don’t have anything convincing to show for it, your entitlement will impress exactly no one. 

Only your hard work will. 

2. Stop talking about your actions and plans; spend your energy on doing

“In fact, many valuable endeavors we undertake are painfully difficult, whether it’s coding a new startup or mastering a craft. But talking, talking is always easy.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“Talk depletes us. Talking and doing fight for the same resources. Research shows that while goal visualization is important, after a certain point our mind begins to confuse it with actual progress. The same goes for verbalization.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“Success requires a full 100 percent of our effort, and talk flitters part of that effort away before we can use it.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

Planning and dreaming are fun. It makes us feel all excited and organized. 

However, it gets us exactly nowhere. 

Sure, we need some vague basic plan on how to proceed and where to go. But this needs to be far less elaborate than we try to tell ourselves. 

All you need is a goal and a starting point. From there on, the only thing to get you towards success is action. 

Stop telling people about your goals and a grand vision. Get yourself, one accountability buddy, if necessary, but beyond that, stay silent and get sh#t done! 

Everything else is a waste of energy.

3. Decide what’s more important to you: To BE something or to DO something

“Appearances are deceiving. Having authority is not the same as being an authority. Having the right and being right are not the same either. Being promoted doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing good work and it doesn’t mean you are worthy of promotion (they call it failing upward in such bureaucracies). Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

Being a student is easy. Studying not so much. That’s why there are many long-running students without a degree to show for their studies.

Having a blog is not the same thing as blogging. Many people have a blog they’ve abandoned after half a year of not getting anywhere. Far fewer people are blogging consistently every week for years until they succeed. 

Focus more on DOING than on BEING. The latter will deceive you into thinking you are succeeding, only to have this pretty picture crumbling around you in the long term.

4. Studious self-assessment is key

“The pretense of knowledge is our most dangerous vice, because it prevents us from getting any better. Studious self-assessment is the antidote.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“A true student is like a sponge. Absorbing what goes on around him, filtering it, latching on to what he can hold. A student is self-critical and self-motivated, always trying to improve his understanding so that he can move on to the next topic, the next challenge. A real student is also his own teacher and his own critic. There is no room for ego there.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

How does one become a master? He starts as a student and works his way up the ladder.

What does it mean to be a student? Being a student means learning from people more experienced than you through books, mentors, courses, school, etc. 

Learning doesn’t mean knowing, so we test ourselves regularly. And if we don’t do well, we do some self-assessment to analyze the problem and try to see how we can improve. 

This cycle goes on and on until, at some point, our ego sneaks in and convinces us that we have learned all there is and that we are the master now. 

Perhaps that might even be true for a short while, but certainly not in the long term. 

If we don’t keep up with being students, we will fall behind our competitors and the ever-changing world. 

5. Passion can be the problem, not the solution

“Passion typically masks a weakness. Its breathlessness and impetuousness and franticness are poor substitutes for discipline, for mastery, for strength and purpose and perseverance. “

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“What humans require in our ascent is purpose and realism. Purpose, you could say, is like passion with boundaries. Realism is detachment and perspective.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

We all know that work doesn’t feel like work if we are passionate about it. With passion, we are capable of giving 120% instead of our usual best. 

Sadly, many people take this as an excuse for why they can’t succeed. If they would finally find their passion, they argue, everything would be different. 

However, they don’t realize that passion can be a problem just as much as the solution. 

Passion alone rarely suffices to get you to succeed. As soon as passion wanes, you are going to need discipline and perseverance to keep going. 

So never rely solely on passion on your journey to success. Don’t use a lack of passion as an excuse for giving up or not even trying.

6. Helping others helps yourself in the long-run

“Make other people look good and you will do well.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

It sucks if someone takes credit for your hard work. It sucks if your effort is helping someone else, yet you are seemingly stuck where you’ve started. 

But throwing in the towel or demanding recognition is not the solution. 

Sometimes you just have to give, give, give and be patient before you start receiving. 

7. Don’t let your daydreams saturate your craving for a better life

“Living clearly and presently takes courage. Don’t live in the haze of the abstract, live with the tangible and real, even if—especially if—it’s uncomfortable. Be part of what’s going on around you. Feast on it, adjust for it.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“The distinction between a professional and a dilettante occurs right there—when you accept that having an idea is not enough; that you must work until you are able to recreate your experience effectively in words on the page.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

We need to visualize our goals before we can reach them. In fact, studies have proven that imagining themselves training can substitute in part for real physical training for athletes. 

The visualization activates the same brain areas that would be activated if you were doing the actual activity. 

As great as this is, it can backlash. If we imagine our success too often, it will saturate our craving for success because it feels like we’ve already accomplished it.

And without that craving, why would we step outside of our comfort zone?

8. You don’t always have to defend your honor

“We have to stand up for ourselves, right? But do we? So often, this is just ego, escalating tension more than dealing with it.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

Sometimes you have to suck up some amount of mistreatment on your way to the top. Ego is the Enemy highlights a heartbreaking but very illustrative example of a black athlete who had to keep his head down in the face of harsh and very public racism to rise to the top. 

You might also encounter opponents like sexists or racists that try to take a hit at you every chance they get. They try to provoke you into acting out so that you lose everything you’ve worked so hard for. 

Only by remaining calm and keeping your ego in check can you rise into a place of power, in which you can defend your honor without risking your future. 

Mind you, if there are ways for you to speak out against your tormentors without it damaging your climb to success, go for it! Just make sure to not do it blindly because your ego demands revenge. 

9. Don’t wallow in self-pity; make use of the bad luck to the best of your abilities

“Make use of what’s around you. Don’t let stubbornness make a bad situation worse.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

There is always something good that can be wrung out of the worst luck in some shape or form.

It’s immensely hard to see it that way, and most people let their ego lead them to comforting self-pity.

If you manage to withstand this urge, you will come out the other side much quicker and in better shape than most people.

10. Set your own standards of success, and you won’t care about outside approval or criticism

“It’s far better when doing good work is sufficient. In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better. When fulfilling our own standards is what fills us with pride and self-respect. When the effort—not the results, good or bad—is enough.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

Nobody knows you as well as you do. You know your skills, your history, and your goals. 

The metric others set for success won’t always feel like a good fit for you. 

Most people might see a B in school, not as something worth many celebrations. However, if you’ve always struggled and never managed to get anything above a C, this is a huge success!

On the other hand, it’s also ok to be unhappy with an outstanding grade if you know you could have done even better. 

Don’t let other people’s standards hold you back from pushing yourself to the next level.

11. Don’t aspire to mere success; aspire to thrive despite anything life throws at you

“This is what we’re aspiring to—much more than mere success. What matters is that we can respond to what life throws at us. And how we make it through.”

– Ryan Holiday (Ego is the Enemy)

There are a million ways to succeed in life. The thing about success is, however, that there is always a bit of luck involved. 

You know luck in the sense of having been in the right place at the right time to take advantage of opportunities, information, or other resources. 

The flipside of that is that bad luck can hit us just as much and destroy or at least diminish our success.

So while striving for success is a good goal, it would be much better to seek the strength and resourcefulness that enables you to thrive in any situation. 

If you manage that, you will be wildly successful during lucky times and do well enough during unfortunate times. 

Have you read Ego is the Enemy already? If so, what lesson or story stood out the most to you? 

Also, I’m curious, what are you currently reading? 

Share your thoughts with us!

Until next time, lovely Felicity Seeker!