If I could choose only three things
If you could choose only three things that had the power to change your life, what would there be? Here's mine
There is an uneven distribution of effort to result in life which is really sexy. The Pareto principle aptly captures it. 20% of actions will yield 80% of results. Originally designed for economic princlples and process design, the Pareto principle has found a larger application for life. This is my story for 2024.
For the first time in a really long time, I have ended the year totally satisfied with how the year went with regards to efforts and results. Not everything went my way, but there’s hardly anything I’d wish to change. In hindsight, there is no way to have known how impactful these decisions could have been. If this interests you, then read on.
Live slowly and mindfully through your own life.
Life happens at break neck speed. One day it’s January 5 and the next time you quietly sit down to think, it’s March 31st. It’s hard to slow down when many things call for your attention, and worse is to be mindful about a few mundane things. However, putting the breaks on your frantic life can do a lot of wonders. While it can improve the quality of your life, it can also show you how much clutter you are living with. Take me for example.
Many people who know me before 2024 would agree that I live with a lot of intention. However, at the beginning of the year, I still was not operating at the level of efficiency and productivity I was capable of. So I decided to review my habits and be more mindful about the things I did. For many people living slowly and mindfully means romanticising your life, but I wouldn’t go that far. Here are a few things I did under living mindfully.
I decided not to hurry through things. I would think carefully about all the angles of a certain action before deciding. If I didn’t have to make a decision, I would not. If something could not be planned, I wanted nothing to do with its promised benefits. I would not take a meeting I was not mentally prepared for nor commit to tasks I didn’t think I could deliver despite the consequences. I would deliberately slow down my actions and observe my efficiency through them. I had only two answers to everything: Yes and No. But I took it a notch further. For my Yes, it had to be an absolute answer. If I was unsure, the answer was no.
The results were incredible. I had clarity in every situation. The world felt a little slower. I was always ahead, moved at my own pace and created a life I loved and enjoyed. My routines never felt dull, even if they involved a couple of repetitive actions. I could build a consistent pattern faster than usual. Onlookers would always mention how I moved at a frenetic pace, but most of the time, my steps felt logical. One activity flowed into the other, and everything felt synchronised. I also had the flexibility to suspend and restart my routine like putting off and putting on a shoe. This introduced a level of excellence to the things I did which did not exist before. My first stab at tasks produced exceptional drafts.
This clarity flowed into how I dealt with people. I could spot patterns with insane accuracy, preempt behaviours and protect my emotions. Doing things on my terms, with clarity, often created win-win situations. People around me could trust my judgement and advice because I had stepped ahead and designed it for them. Where there was an inherent lack of planning from others, it did not constitute an emergency on my part. I could always choose. Choose the places I wanted to be, things I wanted to do, and friends I wanted to have. I could comfortably fulfil the demands of the relationships I had chosen—I could drop everything I was doing and be there for them when they wanted, without my life falling apart. I could show up in the world the way I wanted to, and would not have to pretend.
This is not to say I didn’t make mistakes or have bad days. I certainly had things that were out of my control and had negative results. There were a couple of unmet goals. But I consistently gave myself two bites at a cherry. There was enough time to go back and correct a cause of action and, subsequently, the result. If a negative result occurred, it would not be due to negligence but time and chance. I went to bed every day, knowing I had done the things I wanted to do.
Respect people with all of their biases
The key to a satisfactory life is to surround yourself with multidimensional people whose mere presence challenges your worldview in uncomfortable ways. A lot of people do not recognise their bias and consider them factual. In an ideal world, everyone would see their bias and adjust accordingly, but the world isn’t ideal. A few people are able to see their bias, question them and intentionally own the ones they think are advantageous. If you are one of those people, you would hope others are like that. This phenomenon means that the fundamental make-up of a person is the biases that they hold.
Companionship and society is a basic human need. To build strong human bonds, you need to be able to make genuine friends across ideological and lifestlye divides. Lasting friendships are built on respect. If you can’t respect a person’s agency to hold their opinions and biases, this will always be impossible. If you insist on having a hundred percent similarity in ideologies, you will have an echo chamber. Apart from you being unable to find the opportunities that lead to real progress in an echo chamber, what fun is that and how do you build influence?
By all means, select people who align with your values. In fact, the closer the bond gets, the harder you need to insist on a specific set of values they must hold to be friends with you. The expectation is that there would only be a few people you hold to this standard. Beyond that, differential opinion holders do more for us than we realise. We are reminded that the world does not only exist for our kind. It’s some sort of mental accessibility standard. It improves the solutions we put out in the world and makes us strive for equity because we have shared interests.
Make friends with people whose faces light up when they see you.
Social bonds are essential for our physical and mental well-being. Hanging out with friends is the cure for sadness and, to some extent, depression. People with healthy friendship groups heal faster from heartbreaks and even gain a significant advantage in their life pursuits. If the highest level of happiness is achieved when we share it, little wonder how being in company of shared joy does wonders for your mind.
I started the year wanting to make more friends. As an adult, friends are difficult to make for a number of reasons. Many adults have formed their friendship bonds, and it is almost impossible to add new ones. There is also the problem of the loss of innocence as we get older. We tend to stop making friends because we like people but because of what they have to offer. That’s why “networking” disgusts me. Hence, most new friendships feel like a competition - let me use them before they can use me. Finally, there was the problem of trying too hard. This was not the first time I had said I wanted to make more friends. So what changed?
As I approached making friends, I dropped all the people I wanted to be friends with because they were great. There were a couple of people I was making efforts to reach that proved very abortive. They even sounded dismissive when we eventually got to speak. Instead, I looked at all the people who already had access to me in some way and asked a few questions.
Was this person excited to speak to me or see me every time we interacted? Were they willing to share information about themselves that they would typically not share with a random person, like their wins? Did they have base values that aligned with mine? Were they making efforts to go beyond being acquaintances? If they ticked these boxes, I had one thing to do. Match their energy (and sometimes go over and beyond) and invest in that friendship to reinforce the weak bonds we already shared. If they were a stranger and we hit it off in the first interaction, I would express my desire to meet again and then watch their reaction. I would figure out all the other questions above from the second interaction.
Like the other two things, the results of this were very interesting to observe. That’s when it occurred to me, in practice, that everything someone does says something about how they perceive you. I wanted to work only with good perceptions and those who offered benefits of the doubt until they established your patterns. We are all fallible. In marketing, we refer to them as warm leads. The first few months didn’t necessarily yield anything, but I persisted. For many of the friends I already had, our bonds deepened. They opened up aspects of their lives I didn’t realise existed. It also felt like I had started to meet better strangers, looking to make more friends. Even those who ended up as acquaintances cared in a way that previous acquaintances didn’t.
There were also unintended consequences. For someone who prioritises quality over quantity, many people who had access to me lost it. It became easier to define relationship buckets; close friends, friends, acquintance, strictly business, professional, deals. I didn’t have to keep giving multiple chances even when people’s patterns spoke differently about their perception of me. The most telling one was that if I wanted to see success in my own group, I had to contribute to it. Planning and progress wasn’t just a me thing—it was an us thing now.
Our lives rarely change drastically.
Looking back over a twelve month period, it’s easy to see how my life changed in the last 12 months. Our lives rarely change drastically. But like rain drops, it accumulates drop by drop until the bucket is filled to the brim. We cannot always engineer all the changes we want to see. But as we address the ones we can, there is a multiplicative way that they combine to cover the ones we can’t see. I hope your life changes in 2025. Cheers to a great year!
If you have an idea I might have missed out on, don’t hesitate to put it in the comments. If it’s a contrary perspective or opinion, I would love to hear it. Finally, can you share this with someone in your circle who would enjoy it? I’m counting on you.