Week 10: Putting it all together

Time to read: 1.25 minutes

This duck says, "keep reading!"

This summer started with a simple idea: you create your days, weeks, and years. Not the news, not the people who behave badly — you.

We talked about living well is not optional homework, it's the whole assignment. We talked about being well-used and spending your life on worthy pursuits. We talked about how regret rarely comes from what we did, but from what we quietly never did. We talked about being the change you wish to see, one interaction at a time.

Here's what ties all of it together: None of this was ever about the world getting easier or kinder or more sane. It was about you deciding who you're going to be in this world, no matter what.

You choose your response, effort, kindness, integrity, and entire being, consistently, over time, in small and big ways.

Creating your life was never going to be a choice you make once. Your life is an accumulation of small choices, made every day. To be honest, even when it's hard. To be grateful when you want to be rude. To take a break when the words you are about to say are not helpful. To clean up your messes when you inevitably make them (because you are human).

Multiply those choices by a life. That's what "creating your life" looks like from the inside.

So as summer winds down, here's your homework: Keep going. Keep choosing. Keep being well-used. Keep showing up as the person you've decided to be — one day, one choice, one person at a time.

That's the whole purpose of this life.

Live well!

Week 7: How Do You Create Change?

Time to read: 58 seconds

Goodness, owls are cute!

All summer we've been talking about feeling well-used and being responsible for creating your life. I want to shift to how this applies to living in a chaotic world where it seems like people have lost their decency.

You can't choose the news cycle. You don't choose the driver who cut you off, how a stranger talks online, or whether the world gets kinder this year. If you could change these things, you would have a long time ago.

Here's what you are responsible for: how you treat the person in front of you.

That sounds small next to the size of national politics. It's the most important lever you have to enact real change, and it matters. Every interaction you have is a chance to either add to the noise or subtract from it.

Being the change doesn't mean fixing the world. It means refusing to let the world's worst behavior become an excuse for your own. Someone is going to be rude to a service worker today. It doesn't have to be you. Someone is going to assume the worst about a stranger today. It doesn't have to be you.

You're not responsible for how the world behaves. You are entirely responsible for how you do.

I find this concept liberating.

Week 5: How To Live With Integrity In a Chaotic World

Time to read: 45 seconds

Here's the part nobody puts on a poster: living well doesn't mean your circumstances match your values. Often they don't.

You value connection, but you're isolated. You value health, but your body won't cooperate. You value stability, but everything feels uncertain. This is where a lot of people quietly give up and decide that living well is only available to people with easier lives, or money, or beauty.

I think this is exactly where "well-used" gets tested.

Integrity in complexity, as I put it a few weeks back, doesn't mean the complexity goes away. It means you keep choosing your values inside it, however imperfectly, instead of waiting for circumstances to improve before you start living the way you actually want.

Some of the most well-used lives I've seen belong to people whose circumstances were challenging. They just refused to let that be the end of the story. They made one small choice after another until they looked back and realized they created their life.

This tenacity is available to everyone.