#105 The Fulfillment Formula

Daily practice without the pressure of daily perfection.

Consistency without guilt when you fall off the bandwagon once in a while.

Doing activities that make you feel good about yourself, not guilty.

That’s what a sustainably healthy life looks like.

You can choose what success in your life looks like.

And if you make your daily successes achievable enough so you feel successful every day, guess what: you’re a successful person now.

There’s a reason it’s called Tiny Trust Builders, not massive out-of-reach Trust Builders.

So celebrate that one-minute workout you did.
That one sentence you wrote today.
That one new word you learned in a new language.
That one time you didn’t give in to cravings.

Because daily Tiny Trust Builders create massive momentum and massive self-trust.

And I don’t know about you, my friend, but I’d rather feel successful every day than like a failure because those good feelings will carry over in all other aspirations and relationships.

Learning a foreign language is both a frustrating and liberating experience.

We can focus on the frustration of not understanding the words the way we understand our mother tongue. Or we can realize that without the words, we are free to fall back on other ways of capturing and understanding meaning.

A crying baby can be soothed by words it does not yet understand, because she senses what’s behind the sounds, lets the meaningless melody cradle her to sleep…

Similarly, we don’t always have to know what’s behind the words, as long as we make an effort to understand the meaning behind the sounds.

Hearing a foreign language brings us back to that wordless world the way we experienced it as a newborn, before we tried so hard to put everything within and around us into language.

It makes us remember, there’s more to life than our words will ever allow us to express. And somehow, that’s a soothing thought.