A few days ago, Jon Crowley tweeted (and I retweeted) a piece of advice that I’ve lately found more and more relevant to my life and the lives of others around me:
@joncrowley: "I'm convinced that the key to failure is thinking of life as something that is done to you, rather than something you do."
Perhaps it’s a sign that I have incredibly ambitious friends and acquaintances that they are already writing about making the coming year even more awesome than the last. Jon Crowley‘s advice to those who are about to make New Year’s resolutions is not to try and “fix” themselves:
You can’t fix yourself. You have to rebuild.
Take stock of who you are, where you are, and what has changed about your life and yourself. And then do the things that will make you happier, make you smarter and better and stronger, and do them because you want to. No one who is trying to fix a loss, or a heartache, is going to move on – if you do this, you are defining yourself by your tragedy.
This is such an important point that I felt I needed to echo it and add a bit of my own experience to it.
Live & Code has been largely about programming and life lessons. So, you can imagine that I was incredibly delighted to see these two combined in a small exchange on Facebook started by Reginald “raganwald” Braithwaite.
Self-esteem expressed in Ruby
It’s a valuable life lesson made incredibly concise in my favourite programming language, Ruby. I leave the interpretation to the reader. It relates to some themes that I’ve already written about before and will probably write more about in the future.
“When I get sad, I stop being sad and be AWESOME instead. True story.”
— Barney Stinson (played by Neil Patrick Harris), How I Met Your Mother
I think that this is an incredibly inspirational line. While it seems kind of silly to take advice from a television show, I think it makes an excellent point: it is the times when you are at your lowest that you must put in your absolute best. Energy spent being worried and sad can and should be reallocated to taking action and facing the very things that are bringing you down.
And really, all else being equal, being awesome is much more, well, awesome than being sad.
This was originally published as a Facebook Note on January 28, 2009.
Sometimes, it seems like it is impossible to reconcile self-acceptance with the desire to grow and improve. After all, if you accept yourself as you are, what reason do you have to grow? And so, we might compromise one way or the other. I’ve found that I push myself really hard to improve and often don’t fully accept myself as I am. But do self-acceptance and growth really need to be mutually exclusive?
