A Nudge Out The Door

Of all the chapters in this part of the book, this is probably the most important one.

If you want to love your life, you have to feel like you chose it. This is why copying someone else’s life will never bring you the confidence you’re looking for. Sooner or later you’ll come to realise that copying someone else’s choice is not the same thing as making your own.

The reason this is the most important chapter is because it’s all about the long term. The significance of making your own choice and following your own path will only start to show itself later on in life. It’s your best chance of avoiding one of the most painful emotions that life can throw at you.

Regret.

We think we regret things that happen to us when we look back and clearly see that we should have acted differently, and that we could have made a better choice. But really, what we regret is that we didn’t take control of the situation. That we just let it happen to us, instead of choosing it for ourselves.

This is how so many people can reach the end of their life and feel so much regret. All they see when they look back is an entire life spent just letting things happen, like they never really had a say in what their life should become.

The first and most important rule for living a good life is that you must choose it for yourself.

There is no loophole around this. Choose your life, or life will choose it for you, and you’ll never be satisfied with it.

The steps you need to take to become the person you want to be is actually the easy part. Choosing who you want to be is where most people fail. And for good reason. Making a choice about how you’re going to spend your life is the scariest thing you’ll ever do.

But here’s the secret. If it’s not obvious, just choose something anyway.

If you do that, one of two things will happen. You’ll start working toward it, fall in love with it, and never look back. Or you’ll start working towards it, learn how much you hate it, and start again with another choice.

Both of these options are infinitely better than sitting there undecided and refusing to make any choice at all.

Now’s probably a good time for me to tell you one of the most cliché stories of my life. The time I dropped out of Law School.

I’d just finished studying psychology, and I was completely lost about what to do next. I wasn’t ready to give up the student lifestyle, and wasn’t ready to commit to a master’s degree in psychology either. So, in what can only be described as a panic move, I applied to study law instead.

And so began the three most confusing and polarising years of my life.

On the one hand, I was loving my student life, with all the socialising, partying, and free-time that came with it. On the other hand, I was painstakingly trying to get through law classes in what felt like a foreign language.

I hated everything about law. By the end of my first year I was starting to feel like it was deliberately complicated just to make lawyers seem smarter than they actually are. By the end of my second year I was convinced of it. But I stayed. Mostly because I couldn’t make a decision about what else to do.

When I finally reached the end of my third year, I reached an impasse. To graduate I needed to complete a 6 month placement, which meant actually working in a law firm doing legal work with real lawyers. Naturally, I totally panicked and the reality of my decisions finally hit me. I’d given three years of my life to learning something I hated. I’d built up a massive student debt in the process, and now I was facing the biggest decision of my young life, and one that would change my future forever.

Do I commit to the wrong path, or throw away everything I’d worked for over the past three years?

I guess I’ve already spoiled the ending by calling this a story about dropping out of law school, but yeah, I ran away, pretty damn far away actually. I left Australia and moved to the other side of the planet to restart my life in London.

And honestly, I’ve never once regretted it.

You have to be very lucky to know what you want to do with your life with absolute certainty. Most of us have to make the best choice we can with what we’ve got and hope it all works out in the end.

Just remember, any choice is better than no choice at all.

To truly want your own life and no one else’s, it must be a life you chose.

No Rest for the Confident

If there’s one thing we can be certain of, it’s that being confident is not the end of the journey. You don’t get to stop trying, kick your feet up, and do nothing for whatever’s left of your life. Making confidence last requires maintenance. It’s a reward. To keep getting it means you keep earning it.

One of the biggest fantasies we all tell ourselves is that the time will come where we have achieved everything we’ve ever wanted and ‘made it’ to the top and we can now cruise through life on easy mode, no care in the world and no more effort required.

This is the core fantasy behind pretty much every fantasy we have. And it’s a glorious lie.

The bitter irony is that to achieve all your wildest dreams, you have to be the kind of person that loves the process of growth, of challenging yourself, and living a story that makes you feel confident. Which means if you stopped doing all these things as soon as you felt like you succeeded, you would almost immediately start feeling incomplete when the boredom and lack of stimulation sets in.

You succeed by making yourself excited about your life. And once you’ve truly started living like that, the last thing you want to do is stop.

This is why the idea of retirement should fill you with dread. If you’re working hard so you can reach a point as early as possible where you can never work again, you’re doing the wrong thing and you’ve fallen into a trap. You’ll waste your youth doing something you’re desperate to stop, only to reach the end and realise that stopping wasn’t the answer anyway.

Success is walking a path that you don’t ever want to reach the end of, because you’re enjoying the sights and pit stops along the way so much.

As any millennial will tell you, it seems less and less likely that we will ever get to retire like our parents and grandparents did. The cost of it just keeps going up. But as anyone who has started pursuing confidence will know, the fact that retirement might be off the table for us is actually fantastic news. It means we won’t get sucked into a false promise that keeps us trapped on a meaningless path for money.

Success has to come first, then money can follow, but it’s not essential. You can be wildly successful and have very little money, as long as you have built a life for yourself you wouldn’t trade for the world. Or you might end up building a staggeringly ambitious life and become one of the wealthiest humans on earth in the process.

The thing is, it won’t matter to you either way. Successful and rich, successful and poor, they are one and the same. All that matters is that the person is living the life they chose and wouldn’t want to change.

A great mental test you can take to see if you are on the right track with your choices is to ask yourself this question. ‘If I woke up today at 80 years old, and knew that it was my last day on earth, would I still want to spend time doing this?’

If I knew it was my last chance to ever write again, or if others knew it was their last chance to ever paint, design, photograph, code, test, build, or create, only the insecure would say no.

The rest of us would be doing what we do, one last time.

Self-improvement is a personal thing.

It’s messy, and it ebbs and flows like the rising tide. It’ll often feel like you’re going backwards, but as long as you don’t stop trying, that’ll never actually be true.

I’ve shared with you all the things that worked for me over the years. The thought processes that helped me decide on who I wanted to be, the skills I picked up to learn new things, the habits I adopted to keep myself healthy, and all the little tips and tricks I use to keep myself moving forward.

Some of them will work wonders for you. Some of them won’t. The only way to find out is to try them for yourself.

Self-improvement is hard, there’s just no way around that. But you don’t just owe it to yourself to be a better person. You owe it to all of us as well.

We’re close to the end of the book now, and it’s time to talk about real confidence. Not the fake stuff used by insecure people. Not the shallow stuff you get from selfishly improving your life. The real stuff.

And there is only one way to get it.