As Winston said in John Wick, “How you do anything is how you do everything.”
What does this mean? It means that the way you approach life in the smallest detail, also shows how you approach life in more important things.
For example, I once had someone tell me that I give 100% at everything I do. This isn’t to brag, just an example. I have wasted alot of time and energy giving 100% doing things that didn’t help me.
The reason that I give 100% is that to me, life is either everything or it is nothing. You either do things to the best of your ability, or you don’t attempt it. I attempt things that even at the best of my ability I can’t do, and failure is just part of life. Somethings are impossible no matter how much willpower, connections, and resources you have.
Now I know that many of you will say that those things can get you anything in life. Not at all. You can’t buy love, you can’t buy peace and happiness. You can rent pleasure, you can experience transient satisfaction, you can drug yourself into a stupor, but peace and happiness is out of the range of most people.
Why? It takes hard work to make peace with our own unhelpful ideas and that of society. It takes commitment to work through therapy, talk to friends, introspect with a mentor. There are many roads to peace but it takes letting go of the ego and embracing the truth. I don’t pretend to know what the truth is. The truth hits me over the head often and says “Hey listen to me!” I try to listen and remember. Happiness and peace require humbleness while life rewards egotism. No one who has power is peaceful or happy.
So when you think about how you want to approach life, being thoughtful has its rewards.