How To Ruin Your Life (Without Even Noticing That You Are)

Reblogged from Thought Catalog

Understand that life is not a straight line. Life is not a set timeline of milestones. It is okay if you don't finish school, get married, find a job that supports you, have a family, make money, and live comfortably all by this age, or that age. It’s okay if you do, as long as you understand that if you’re not married by 25, or a Vice President by 30 — or even happy, for that matter — the world isn’t going to condemn you. You are allowed to backtrack. You are allowed to figure out what inspires you. You are allowed time, and I think we often forget that. We choose a program right out of high school because the proper thing to do is to go straight to University. We choose a job right out of University, even if we didn’t love our program, because we just invested time into it. We go to that job every morning because we feel the need to support ourselves abundantly. We take the next step, and the next step, and the next step, thinking that we are fulfilling some checklist for life, and one day we wake up depressed. We wake up stressed out. We feel pressured and don’t know why. That is how you ruin your life.

You ruin your life by choosing the wrong person. What is it with our need to fast-track relationships? Why are we so enamored with the idea of first becoming somebody’s rather than somebodies? Trust me when I say that a love bred out of convenience, a love that blossoms from the need to sleep beside someone, a love that caters to our need for attention rather than passion, is a love that will not inspire you at 6am when you roll over and embrace it. Strive to discover foundational love, the kind of relationship that motivates you to be a better man or woman, the kind of intimacy that is rare rather than right there. “But I don’t want to be alone,” we often exclaim. Be alone. Eat alone, take yourself on dates, sleep alone. In the midst of this you will learn about yourself. You will grow, you will figure out what inspires you, you will curate your own dreams, your own beliefs, your own stunning clarity, and when you do meet the person who makes your cells dance, you will be sure of it, because you are sure of yourself. Wait for it. Please, I urge you to wait for it, to fight for it, to make an effort for it if you have already found it, because it is the most beautiful thing your heart will experience.

You ruin your life by letting your past govern it. It is common for certain things in life to happen to you. There will be heartbreak, confusion, days where you feel like you aren’t special or purposeful. There are moments that will stay with you, words that will stick. You cannot let these define you – they were simply moments, they were simply words. If you allow for every negative event in your life to outline how you view yourself, you will view the world around you negatively. You will miss out on opportunities because you didn’t get that promotion five years ago, convincing yourself that you were stupid. You will miss out on affection because you assumed your past love left you because you weren’t good enough, and now you don’t believe the man or the woman who urges you to believe you are. This is a cyclic, self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your future with that lens, and nothing will be able to breach that judgment. You will keep on justifying, reliving, and fueling a perception that shouldn’t have existed in the first place.

You ruin your life when you compare yourself to others. The amount of Instagram followers you have does not decrease or increase your value. The amount of money in your bank account will not influence your compassion, your intelligence, or your happiness. The person who has two times more possessions than you does not have double the bliss, or double the merit. We get caught up in what our friends are liking, who our significant others are following, and at the end of the day this not only ruins our lives, but it also ruins us. It creates within us this need to feel important, and in many cases we often put others down to achieve that.

You ruin your life by desensitizing yourself. We are all afraid to say too much, to feel too deeply, to let people know what they mean to us. Caring is not synonymous with crazy. Expressing to someone how special they are to you will make you vulnerable. There is no denying that. However, that is nothing to be ashamed of. There is something breathtakingly beautiful in the moments of smaller magic that occur when you strip down and are honest with those who are important to you. Let that girl know that she inspires you. Tell your mother you love her in front of your friends. Express, express, express. Open yourself up, do not harden yourself to the world, and be bold in who, and how, you love. There is courage in that.

You ruin your life by tolerating it. At the end of the day you should be excited to be alive. When you settle for anything less than what you innately desire, you destroy the possibility that lives inside of you, and in that way you cheat both yourself and the world of your potential. The next Michelangelo could be sitting behind a Macbook right now writing an invoice for paperclips, because it pays the bills, or because it is comfortable, or because he can tolerate it. Do not let this happen to you. Do not ruin your life this way. Life and work, and life and love, are not irrespective of each other. They are intrinsically linked. We have to strive to do extraordinary work, we have to strive to find extraordinary love. Only then will we tap into an extraordinarily blissful life.

Crushing on Fitzgerald

Crushing on Fitzgerald. What a great poet he is indeed.

39 REASONS TO READ IN ORDER TO WRITE

Reblogged from PROLIFICLIVING.

“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.” – Stephen King

All great authors of our time were also voracious readers, or so Stephen King tells us in his fabulous book, “On Writing”, but then he adds, with the exception of a very few whom he could not understand. They were the exception to the rule. The rule is that you must be a reader first, a writer second.

Reading then must come before writing. Reading books, preferably in voracious volumes, must be as much a part of you as the desire to come to the blank page to produce your own words. Reading must rule as large a part of your days and hours as does writing.

I stopped reading books after high school when I entered the world of technology and engineering. I became “serious” and didn’t have time to “leisures” such as reading and it is one of my greatest regrets in how I wasted opportunity to read.

In 2006, an insatiable reading hunger came over me and I fell back into the habit again. I picked up books, old books, new books, and everything in between. I started to read at home, on the road, on planes, in hotel rooms, before bed, early mornings, late nights, and every other moment in between that was not well spent. I became an obsessed reader and my condition has only become worse over the years!

“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
Stephen King

Since then, I have read about 300 books and continue to read between 50 to 75 books a year. Some are short. Some are epic (Anna Karenina anyone?). I move through a great many genres from novels, biographies, memoirs, business books, fantasy fiction, health books and how-to guides and so much more.

If I had to guess why I fell into reading so hard, I would say it’s because I allowed myself to read whatever that my little heart desired, not what I “should” be reading. I made a decision to never again read anything that I do not thoroughly and completely enjoy. That means I feel fine discarding a book that does not meet the bar or leaving a book unfinished to move on to better ones.

That freedom has been the fuel to the fire of my reading desire, and I just know that I shall not live long enough to read all the books that my heart and mind want to consume.

39 Reasons Why Every Writer Must Be a Reader First

But why? Why is this such an integral part of becoming a writer? What exactly is the relationship between reading and writing especially for those of you who – and I am envious of you if you fall here – are gifted with flawless command of the language?

Stephen King tells it best in “On Writing”, a book I cannot recommend highly enough but since you are here, I have summarized my experience in 39 reasons for you. I beg you to give reading a chance even if one of these reasons resonates with you. Reading …

1. Acts as a mental stimulation.

2. Improves your vocabulary.

3. Makes your writing stronger.

4. Enhances your memory.

5. Fills you with renewed inspiration.

6. Reminds you why you want to write.

7. Grows your appreciation in other authors.

8. Is the best way to consume a single idea.

9. Is an interactive way to decompress the mind.

10. Gives you a sense of urgency about time and how you spend it.

11. Makes you a better conversationalist.

12. Offers you a great exposure to the many uses of the language.

13. Increases your comprehension abilities.

14. Gives you courage to take risks with your writing.

15. Improves your story telling skills.

16. Increases your knowledge in whatever area you wish.

17. Teaches you what not to do when you read bad writing.

18. Reminds you to keep the reader in mind as you write.

19. Emphasizes the importance of clarity for your readers.

20. Improves your imagination, and this you need in order to write.

21. Helps you become the kind of writer that you aspire to be.

22. Shows you the liberties that you can take with writing.

23. Teaches you the rules of good basic writing.

24. Helps you discern between strong powerful writing and poor writing.

25. Gives you the tools you need to express your ideas well.

26. Helps you get in touch with your creative side.

27. Makes your writing flow. It just does.

28. Inspires you to see yourself as a writer.

29. Reminds you that it takes work, really hard work, to consistently write well.

30. Motivates you to take action to create your own work of art.

31. Plants the seeds of self-discipline to becoming – and remaining – a good writer.

32. Makes you proud to belong to the amazing world of writers and readers.

33. Provides you with a growling list of role model authors to look up to.

34. Brings you face to face with what you want to do and asks you to commit.

35. Cures “writer’s block” or writer’s funk (if you believe you suffer from the condition, assuming it even exists).

36. Makes you feel good about the act of writing.

37. Shows you the pure blissful joy that is reading good writing.

38. Gives you the perfect escape when you need a break from your own writing.

39. Feeds you with the precise adrenalin rush that you need in order to come to the blank page and to write.

These are just a few reasons that every successful writer is a voracious reader first.

HOW I AFFORD TRAVEL

Reblogged from Travel. Paint. Repeat

How I Afford Travel

Badass trips on a not-so-badass budget. 

Many travel blogs are written by people who’ve sold all their possessions and have taken a huge plunge into the world of long-term travel. This can sound expensive at first, but when you consider that you don’t have rent or a car payment in this lifestyle (or much room to carry any possessions), it can actually be very cheap to live this way, provided you can work a little along the way, or do some kind of virtual freelancing or contract work. 

I’m not one of those people.

I do have rent to pay, and a car payment, and bills, and the trappings of a fairly typical middle class young urban professional life. I have a cat. I work in a cubicle. I like some amount of routine, and sleeping in my own bed. I have a ladder to climb, that I want to climb. 

I also don’t have a ton of free income to spend on travel.

Despite all this, in the past 2 years I’ve managed to visit 9 cities in 4 countries (Colombia, Jordan, Egypt, Spain) and very soon I’ll be off to visit 7 more cities in 3 countries (Italy, Croatia, and Spain again — I love Spain), a 17 day trip; a few weeks after I return, I’m off again on a small trip to Mexico for a wedding. When I’m done, that’s 16 cities, 7 countries, in just 2 years. Not much for the permanent nomad, but a lot for someone who’sexpected to be at work by 8:30am every weekday.

When people find out how much I travel, some imagine I must have a lot of spare income or be a trust fund baby. I keep encountering this perception — especially among Americans — that travel is this huge undertaking that is incredibly expensive. Well, it sure can be, if you choose to make it that way. But if you step outside this perception, and do some research, you’ll find that it really doesn’t have to be that way. Travel can be affordable, if you plan for it and prioritize it in your life.

Here’s how I do it:

1. Flights. By far, this can be the single most expensive purchase of your trip. A coach round trip ticket from the US to Europe usually runs anywhere from $700-1200 on average, depending on the season. The trick is: don’t buy your ticket with actual money. Buy it with fake money called points or miles. A few years ago, I strategically opened 2 different credit cards (one an AmEx, one a British Airways Visa) with unusually crazy high enrollment bonuses. Within just a few months’ time I went from 0 miles to 50,000 AmEx points (redeemable for airline miles on at least a 1:1 basis) and 100,000 British Airways miles. Keep in mind, BA is part of the OneWorld alliance, so I can book with other airlines using these miles. In just a few months’ time, with 2 credit cards (that didn’t hurt my credit, by the way) I earned enough miles to take 3 international round trip flights — without ever stepping on an airplane. I got the AmEx points simply for opening the card, and I earned the BA miles after spending $2500 in 3 months, which wasn’t that hard for me because I strategically put ALL my expenses on the card for 3 months. 

The trick is knowing which cards to open. These cards usually aren’t well advertised, so you’ll have to do your research. A few good resources to get you started:

Unconventional Guides: Frequent Flyer Master by Chris Guillebeau. This is actually the first resource I used to learn more about travel hacking. If you’re a total newb, as I was, this is the best introduction to the world of frequent flyer miles that exists. But it’s not overly simplistic; there are a ton of insider tricks and tools in here that I haven’t even taken advantage of yet. This guide is the reason I earned 150,000 miles without stepping foot on an airplane.

FrugalTravelGuy.com This is a great blog for those interested in staying up to date on the latest frequent flyer news and credit card offers.

FlyerTalk.com This is a forum for the serious hardcore travel hackers — the credit card “churners” who sometimes earn up to 1 million miles a year doing this. FlyerTalk can be intimidating at first if you’re new to all this, so I’d recommend starting from the top and working your way down.

2. Rooms. Very rarely do I stay in what most Americans think of as a “hotel” when I travel abroad. Many travel hackers and frequent business travelers are loyal to a certain brand of hotel, especially those with their own reward points systems, which earn them free stays (and yes, there are credit cards for this too). These can be a great value and I do participate in a few programs like Hilton HHonors for stateside bookings. For my international trips, however, I prefer everyday price flexibility, so I book a variety of inexpensive, off the beaten path accommodation types — and none of them involve splitting a room with strangers, camping (not counting the bedouin camp I stayed with in Petra, which I did for the experience and not the savings), or couchsurfing. Alot of people associate budget travel with roughing it, but it is possible to be comfortable. In fact, by avoiding the beaten path, I usually have a less expensive, equally as comfortable, and more interesting cultural experience.

Most of my international trips have involved staying at a combination of private rooms at hostels, small independently owned hotels, bed & breakfasts, and private apartments.

Hostelworld.com This room search and booking site will expand your idea of what a hostel can be. Often you’ll find that smaller, inexpensive and independent hotels will list rooms on Hostelworld even if they have a website and brand themselves as a hotel or bed & breakfast. You can search for rooms nearly anywhere in the world, filter by room type (most hostels have private bedrooms, some with private bathrooms and some with shared bathrooms), location (there’s a handy map view), price and more. It’s also low risk - you just pay a small 10% down payment when you book and the rest when you check in. I’ve stayed in some very nice hostels for a fraction of the cost of an equal quality hotel and it’s one of the first places I look when I start planning a trip.

Booking.com This is a rising star in the online travel booking world for hotels. Based in Amsterdam, they are one of my top sources for rooms in Europe (though they offer rooms in several other parts of the world too). Booking.com’s strength is their breadth of rooms available; you can find a variety of low-cost, tiny, independently owned hotels that will be difficult or impossible to find elsewhere. They even offer free cancellation on many rooms. Their pricing also cannot be beat — sometimes I even find rooms that are less expensive than hostels!

Airbnb.com I am a huge fan of this service. A major disruptor to the online travel booking industry, Airbnb offers you the ability to reserve a room in a private apartment directly through someone who lives and is local to the place you’re going. You can book entire apartments or just spare bedrooms, allowing you the choice between having a cozy place all to yourself or staying with — and getting to know— a local, something that may not have happened otherwise (and my most memorable trips have been those in which I connected with locals while I was there). A few other perks can involve more amenities than a budget hostel or hotel may offer, such as the ability to wash your own laundry or cook your own food if you need to (it is an apartment, after all). I travel for 2 weeks at a time when possible (more on that later), and I pack only a carry-on. After a week like that, a washing machine is an unexpectedly welcome blessing. You’ll also get to feel more like a local, even if you never meet your host. You’re staying in a neighborhood, not a commercial, touristy zone. There’s a lot to be said for that. Finally, I love their website. Not only very easy to use and socially integrated, the design is beautiful. I love flipping through the home slideshow of gorgeous apartments on offer. It’s interior design porn at its most authentic — these are real peoples’ homes!

3. Timing and trip length. I would be remiss to say that the above 2 factors are the only methods I use to travel to so many places affordably. The fact is, I can say I fit in 16 cities and 7 countries in 2 years because ofhow many of those cities and countries I manage to pack into a single trip. In 2011, I did only a 1-week trip to Colombia. In 2012, I did a 17-day trip to Jordan, Egypt, and Spain. This year, I’ll do another 17-day trip (that’s essentially 12 vacation days) to Italy, Croatia, and Spain. Considering all the places within those countries I travel to in each trip, I typically pack up and move on every 2-3 days. That’s not a lot of time in each place! Just enough to visit the major sites, take in the atmosphere, and decide if I’m intrigued enough to return someday to make a longer trip of it.

This pace is not for everyone, but it works for me. I’m restless, and like squeezing every drop out of my precious vacation days. Plus, nothing’s worse than booking 5 days in a place you’ve never been, only to arrive and find out you’re bored after 1 day and it’s too late to make any changes. I intend to see the world, and I have to do it in 2 weeks per year. So, I compromise. It can be a little tiring, but I don’t take these trips necessarily to relax — I take them to recharge in other ways. Travel is my passion and I crave new cultural experiences. My worldview has expanded a little more each time I set foot on US soil again; this is creative fuel to the fire of everything I do, from painting to marketing strategy. That’s why I’m determined to prioritize it, even with a limited budget. For those who’ve also been bitten by the travel bug, you get it. The rest of the world will go on thinking that we’re rich, and I suppose that’s fine.

19 Struggles Of Having An Outgoing Personality But Actually Being Introverted by Christian M. Lyons

Reblogged from Introversion Effect.

Like many categorizing systems, the separatist thinking behind them attempts to firmly place us in one container or another.  The flaw in these types of systems is that they don’t always take into account the middle areas of the spectrum.  And any system is just that: a spectrum.  I’ve long stated with unequivocal certainty that I’m introverted.  My friends, however, look at me askance, because I’m actually very fun-loving and outgoing when I need to be.  So on that introvert/extravert spectrum, I fall somewhere to the introverted side, but exhibit limited extroverted tendencies.  Here is an article found on Thought Catalog by Brianna West that I have updated to reflect this: 

1. You’re not anti-social, you’re selectively social. It’s not that you don’t like going out, it’s that you are very choosy about when, where, and for how long. 

2. At any given point, you have one (maybe two) best friends who are your entire life. You’re not a “group of friends” person. You can’t keep up with all that. This small group are those you know well, trust implicitly, and with whom you feel the most comfortable. 

3. Social gatherings that are supposed to be “rites of passage” like prom and dances and other such typical nonsense is just… not for you. You don’t understand it. You want nothing to do with it.  You don’t need a flimsy reason to go out, and these events seem just like that to you.

4. When you do choose to grace a party with your presence, you are the life of it. You’re dancing on the table and doing body shots until 3 a.m.  This is not to imply that you’re arrogant or snooty…it’s just that once you decide to commit to it, you actually commit to it. 

5. … You then retreat into three days of complete solitude to recover. Naturally.

6. You go out of your way to avoid people, but when you inevitably have to interact with them, you make it seem like there’s nothing in the world you’d rather be doing.  Because you are such an active and interested listener, you are able to fully focus on others when you find them interesting and engaging.  That is, you don’t participate in small talk (and why should you?), but if it’s a topic you’re truly interested in, you’re an amazing conversational partner. 

7. Dating is weird, because you’re smiling and laughing and talkative at dinner, and then you don’t want to answer their texts for days, because like, you just want to be left alone…  And there’s nothing wrong with that. 

8. You’re accused of being flirty with everybody, which is hilarious, because in reality, you can only tolerate like four people.  Flirting is your way of being in control of social situations.  For you are not entirely comfortable in such settings many times, you can always find a way to make it bearable.  

9. You retain an air of mystery about you, completely unintentionally. (There’s no mystery. You just feel no need to update the social sphere on what’s going on in your life every two hours.)  You can blame reality television for others’ need to continually provide updates on every little thing they’re doing, because non-introverts often act as if they’re appearing on their own reality show.  

10. Not to mention the fact that you either have days in which you’re tweeting and status updating every five minutes… or you delete your accounts for a month.  We’ve all done it.  Sometimes, you just. need. a break.

11. You become unintentionally awkward because you at once feel the need to be a social life jacket for other people, though you’re just as uncomfortable yourself.  You are sensitive to the discomfort of others, so often because it reflects you’re own discomfort in such settings.  But you’ve developed you own personal safety feature to rescue yourself, and therefore cannot abide by allowing others to suffer through the same intense feelings.  

12. You’ve never really understood the whole “introvert vs. extrovert” dichotomy (can we call it that?) Because you’re… both…  And that’s where the term “ambivert” comes in.  No one truly falls on that spectrum at the extreme ends of it.  

13. You’re always run through the ringer because people think you’re best suited to be the one who gives the presentation, confronts the boss, gives the speech, etc. Meanwhile, you’re practically throwing up over the thought of it.  Your choice to keep to yourself often gives others the impression — wrong or right — that you are much more capable of saying things to others, and that they’ll listen…because you speak so infrequently, your words carry more weight. 

14. You ebb and flow between wanting to be noticed for your hard work, reveling in the attention and achievement you receive, to sinking and panicking over the thought of somebody else paying more than 30 seconds of attention to you.  You prefer to operate behind the scenes.  Let the extroverts take the spotlight.  That’s where they thrive. 

15. The entirety of your being is a conundrum, so needless to say, indecisiveness is your Achilles’ Heel.  This is not always true.  Many introverts are fully capable of being decisive.  But when it comes to leaving your comfort zone, you really have to wait until you determine how prepared you are to participate.  And sometimes, that doesn’t come until the last minute. 

16. You’re at your happiest in places like coffee shops and cafés: surrounded by people, but still closed off and keeping to yourself. In this way, you can feel like you’re part of the crowd without actually having to immerse yourself in it. 

17. You prefer to travel alone, but meet up with people once you’re there, on your own terms and at your own speed.  Not only in traveling, but in most situations, you prefer to be in control of your comfort levels. 

18. It’s taken you years to figure out that you’re different than many introverts you know. Literally years.  Because the spectrum has always been presented as either/or, you may not have realized that ambivert was also a choice.  Until now.  

19. While we were chastised as children for daydreaming, we do so deliberately as adults, as our inner lives are rich, fertile, and sustain us.  And daydreaming doesn’t necessarily mean that your head is in the clouds.  It also means that you could be contemplating issues that no one else is aware that you even know about.  And then you come up with — as if out of the blue — stunning solutions that no one else had taken the time to think through. 

HOW I STARTED APPRECIATING THE SIMPLE THINGS IN LIFE by Grease & Glamour

Rebloged from GREASE & GLAMOUR

I was talking to my younger brother the other day, and he made a comment about how much I had changed – that he still remembered the girl I was only a few years ago, obsessed with designer labels and completely addicted to shopping retail. And he was right. I was constantly running in the world’s hamster wheel, and it forced me to always want more. More shoes. More money. More clothes. More bags. More labels. I realized at one point that this need for excess was fueled by my desire to be happy, but the funny thing is, none of it was actually making me happy. It’s crazy to think about how much, fast forward a few months, I’ve transformed by being on the road.

I ran across Contiki Legends, featuring the life-changing stories of fellow travelers. I’m scrolling through these stories, one of my favorites being the Canadian girl’s first time seeing an ocean in person, and they got me thinking about my own life-changing moment. What was the exact moment that I realized that I was on my way to being truly happy? When did I know in my heart that my life had changed?

For me, it was when I started to appreciate the simpler things in life.

Oh, how cliche.

Yeah, cliche, but true. After traveling through Iceland, London, France and Italy, I booked a last minute flight to Dubrovnik, Croatia. My trip started off with crazy adventures, running around, hopping on and off trains, being photographed in front of major tourist attractions with a lifesize cutout of my father, and it ended in one of the most beautiful destinations I had ever seen.

And this was the exact moment I realized that something in me had changed – this sunrise in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Well, what’s the big deal?

When I was younger, my father used to try for years to drag me out of the bed to watch the sunrise with him in my hometown of Virginia Beach, VA. I never woke up. It was always too early, and I’d pull the sheets over my head and ask him to shut the door and let me sleep. Why watch the sunrise? What was the point?

Yet here I was, in a foreign country off the coast of the Adriatic Sea, watching the skies change colors, in complete bliss. The waves crashing against the rocks on the cliff, the fence filled with love locks inspired by the iconic bridge in Paris, the local man walking across the bridge becoming the perfect silhouette for my photograph – I can’t explain the stillness that surrounded me and how it soothed my soul. I watched the sun rise from the sea into the sky, the world coming to life, and I was the happiest that I had been in years.

I was so grateful to be there in that exact moment, witnessing something so simple yet so magnificently beautiful. No matter where you are, watching the sunrise forces you to be in the present moment – your mind isn’t bothered by thoughts of the past or the future. The world speaks to your soul through your eyes, and it costs you absolutely nothing. And you know what they say – the best things in life are free.

Conversations

Another one from Navin E. I just can't seem to pull myself away from Words Written In Silence.

I often ask myself questions
Talking to myself in my head
I can feel my mouth opening partially
Speaking to faceless men

The same men who hide
In the shadows of daylight
More fearful than the darkness of night
And yet I speak to myself

I imagine the conversations
I had hoped to have; day or night
Faces; behind the words in my ears
Yet, even masks are a luxury

I often ask myself questions
Talking to myself in my head
I can feel my mouth opening partially
Speaking to faceless men