35 Lessons From 35 Years

Hey, folks, welcome to this Sunday special edition. This is Nick the poet from Cadre. Got a little bit of my man Neil diamond here. We'll just wait till a few more people come in for the live stream. Great day to be alive. Great day to be alive. Let's go. Any new music that you've been listening to lately, please share in the chat. So, I hope you enjoyed my last video, which was 35 lessons that I've learned in 35 years, and that was numbers one through ten. And today we're going to continue with numbers eleven through 16.

Okay, so I will do just a brief recap of one through ten. And number one, don't take yourself too seriously. Number two, paradoxically, to be serious is life's greatest pleasure. I found life to be a paradox. You can watch the previous video to learn more about that. Number three, positive attitude leads to good results. Number four, live the question and you will grow into the answer. Number five, love is the answer. And I think we have to keep learning this over and over again. Number six, we think we need more self improvement, but what we really need is more self love.

Number seven, create, connect, collaborate. And that's my current personal credo that I discovered with a life coach a couple of years ago. And it's led me to a lot of awesome opportunities, including the opportunity to speak with you today. Number eight, giving and service will heal, and the universe will take note. And number ten, your relationship you have with yourself sets the tone for every other relationship in your life. Okay? So now let's move into number eleven, which is go lightly. And I'm gonna read this quote to you from my man, Aldous Huxley.

And he says, it's dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly, child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you're feeling deeply. Just lightly. Let things happen, and lightly cope with them. I was so preposterously serious in those days. Such a humorless little prig. Lightly. Lightly. It's the best advice ever given me. I don't know what a prig is. This is. Huxley wrote this probably in the sixties, but I'm guessing a humorless little kind of fool, you know, which I maybe have called myself before.

Lightly. Lightly. It's the best advice ever given me when it comes to dying, even nothing ponderous or pretentious or emphatic. No rhetoric, no tremolos, no self conscious Persona putting on its celebrated imitation of Christ or little Nell. And, of course, no theology, no metaphysics. Just the fact of dying and the fact of the clear, light. So he's kind of going deep here now into some kind of metaphysical stuff, but just bear with me. So throw away your baggage and go forward. There are quicksands all about you sucking at your feet, trying to suck you down into fear and self pity and despair.

That's why you must walk so lightly. Lightly, my darling, on tiptoes. And no luggage, not even a sponge bait, completely unencumbered. And so this was important for me, especially as I was getting sober and beginning my mental health journey, because everything felt so life or death. Everything felt so unbelievably serious. And it's tough to recover in that mode. We have to take our recovery seriously, but I don't think we have to take ourselves, you know, so seriously. By lightening up kind of the world opens up different possibilities, and.

And paradoxically, we can have more success with this easing and lightening of the attitude. So this go lightly quote has been with me, you know, throughout, I think. My therapist shared it with me about ten years ago, and I've just never forgotten it. So our next thing, let me get my gimbal straight here, is to try easy, right? So take your hands off the steering wheel of life and just coast for a while. Now, you may still do difficult things. You may still do things that are really tough, right?

And. But you try easy. There's always the saying of try hard, but you can actually try easy, right? It doesn't have to be so serious all the time, you know, you can work incredibly hard and have a super positive attitude and get a ton done and be a success and all that good stuff, but just try, you know, try it easy and see if that does anything for you. You know, as my friend Ronan says, you can take it or leave it. You can catch this or not, right? But that's what I'm throwing out to you today.

Try, but try easy. Number 13. Every moment is a blessing. So every single second that we're alive is a blessing. I forget this all the time. You probably forget this all the time. But like any good lesson, it's not about being perfect. It's about just practicing it, you know? Practice, practice, practice. Just like when I was a tennis player growing up. You gotta keep practicing. Even the try easy thing. I remember I had a coach who told me, Nick, I think you might just even be trying too hard, because I would get so tense, you know, out there.

My forehand, especially, I tighten up. But I'd go to the slice, you know, or I would. My backhand was always better because I had two hands. We all have these perceived weaknesses, right? But in our weakness is our. Is our strength because we learn to rely on it. You know, that forehand was weak, so I got extra help with it, and it slowly got better. And sometimes, you know, I remember I was playing in the city tournament final one year, and I was playing against a mentor, and I just crushed this forehand and won the city tournament.

I was probably 20 years old, and it was an amazing feeling, right? But there's been other times where I've choked at the last second. Right? But if we keep trying and stay open, you know, these opportunities are going to keep coming up, and we're going to realize that every moment really is a blessing. Number 14 is change your actions to change your thoughts. And so this is a classic twelve step thing, you know, and the twelve step programs have really helped me a lot. And, you know, there's a school of thought that if you change your thought, then you can change your life.

But a lot of the, you know, the kind of twelve step philosophies that change your actions, and then you change your thoughts. And so who knew that making coffee before a meeting or going to a treatment center to share your story or, you know, helping someone else in sobriety by giving them a ride to a meeting or whatever it is, by taking these little actions, the rest of my life began to transform. And once again, it's that magical spiritual paradox where I do something and I get this result. So it used to be drinking and drugs and madness, and I would get that, you know, a certain result from that.

Now it's spirituality, service, humility, creativity, connection, exercise. And I get a certain result from that. And I like this result better, you know? And so that leads me into number 15, let go of your perfectionism and become one with the loving ways of the universe. And so perfectionism is something that haunts us all in different ways. And I think, once again, it's just a practice. And it's identifying, you know, through journaling or writing or through talking to others, kind of where we might be perfectionistic, because we don't need to get over this on our own.

And we oftentimes can't see our blind spots. You know, we can't see where we're being overly perfectionistic. And so that's why I think, you know, no man and no woman and no person is an island. We need to be with the community, wherever that community is. If you find it here on Cadre, if you find it in a twelve step program, if you find it with your therapist. If you find it in a biking group that you bike every Saturday and you chit chat about it. We need that. We need that community to help us to let go of the perfectionism and realize that we're enough in and of ourselves.

And once again, it's that fine balance where doesn't mean we can't try to do amazing things and be ambitious and get things done. But it's about learning where that perfectionism is holding us back and maybe where we need to get know more disciplined as well. And that can be, you know, a part of that flip side, and number 16 is surrender works once again, a paradoxical thing. If we keep fighting and hanging on, you know, there's a time to fight and there's a time to hang on, and then there's a time to surrender as well.

And sometimes through this surrender, we access our strength. And once again, it's. It's alerting experience and it's figured out when to surrender. Maybe sometimes we surrender too early, we give up too easily. You know, David Goggins says that when you think you're totally gassed, you're only 40% of the way there. And so that reality can exist at the same time as the reality of surrendering, that you're, say, powerless over alcohol and drugs or food or whatever the issue may be, or your mental health status or your relationship status.

And so, once again, it's hard for us to do this on our own, but together, we can identify when is it time to push? When is it time to surrender? When is the time to keep going with this project? Right? And more resources are available than ever, so I highly recommend tapping into them. So you've now heard lessons one through 16 of 35 years. It was my 35th birthday last week, May 6. I am a Taurus. Fellow Tauruses, unite. Or I guess it's the bull. So, fellow Tauruses, unite. And you gemini birthdays coming up.

I think after May 20. Happy early birthday to you. We will keep the ball rolling. Please leave a comment in the chats or hit me up. com. Let's go.