Archives for October 2019

7 Powerful Reminders to Focus on What Matters

10.28.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 29 Comments

7 Powerful Reminders to Focus on What Matters

What you focus on grows.
Stop managing your time.
Start managing your focus.

“Am I making meaningful use of this scarce and precious day?”

That’s a simple question Angel and I challenge our course students to ask themselves anytime they feel busyness overwhelming them.

Because excessive busyness is rarely meaningful.

And make no mistake about it—excessive busyness is a widespread, modern-day illness!

We fill our calendars and our social media feeds with various kinds of busyness, oftentimes just to avoid being bored… to avoid being exactly who we are, exactly where we are. The instant we feel a bit idle, we run off in the direction of the nearest shiny object that catches our attention. And in the process, we not only miss out on the serenity and beauty that exists within ourselves, but we also miss out on [Read more…]

4 Steps to Loving Your Ordinary Life

10.21.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 21 Comments

4 Steps to Accepting the Worst Parts of Yourself

Let’s start with the bitter truth:

You will never be as good as you think you should be.

And life will never be as easy as you expected.

All of us are faced with the same reality. There will inevitably be times when we slip up and fail to meet our (unreasonable) expectations of ourselves. It’ll likely happen quite often too. And if we don’t embrace these slip-ups and failures as necessary lessons learned, we will gradually and unknowingly become self-conscious about everything we’re not doing and achieving according to planned.

Honestly, it happens every day to the best of us—we hopelessly catch ourselves thinking about how we’re falling short.

We worry that we [Read more…]

5 Hard Questions that Can Save a Life (and Spare Some Pain)

10.14.2019 by Angel Chernoff // 21 Comments

5 Hard Questions that Can Save a Life (and Spare Some Pain)

We waste our lives waiting for ideal paths to appear in front of us. But they never do. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.

There’s nothing more disheartening than a perfectly healthy, reasonably affluent human being with the whole world in her hands who’s chronically unhappy and unproductive. There’s really no excuse for it either, yet Marc and I see this phenomenon unfolding every single day—people who choose to be stuck in misery and refuse to admit it. This mindset often results from an extremely unbalanced life—one with too much expectation and not enough discipline and appreciation.

The bottom line is that when you have very little discipline for accomplishing new things, and very little gratitude for what you already have, you’ll never know the true joy of making progress in life, because nothing will ever change, and even when it does, it will never be good enough in your mind.

So, how do you cultivate balance in life when everything is already so far out of whack?

For a decade now, Marc and I have [Read more…]

7 Hard Things You Should Start Doing for Others

10.07.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 37 Comments

7 Hard Things You Should Start Doing for Others

Don’t just rant online for a better world. Love your family. Be a good neighbor. Practice kindness. Build bridges. Embody what you preach. Today. And always.

About a decade ago, at one o’clock in the morning, my grandpa who was suffering from Alzheimer’s got up, got into my car and drove off. Angel and I contacted the police, but before they could find him, two college kids pulled into our driveway with my grandpa. One was driving him in my car and the other was following in their car. They said they overheard him crying about being lost at an empty gas station 10 miles away. My grandpa couldn’t remember our address, but gave the kids his first and last name. They looked him up online, found our address, and drove him home.

I was randomly reflecting on that incident today while sitting near the edge of a beautiful ocean-side cliff in San Diego. As I stared off into the distance, the sudden awareness of footsteps behind me startled me. I turned around to see a young lady who was almost in tears slowly walking to where I was sitting. I jumped up, walked up to her and asked, “What’s wrong?” She told me she was deathly [Read more…]