Change Your Circumstances, Not Yourself

Lola started keeping a journal when she was twenty. Paging back at forty, she found that her thoughts and habits haven’t changed as much as you’d expect (She’s still complaining about not writing enough). Yet, her circumstances and output have varied wildly, year-to-year. Why did she thrive at a mind-numbing 9-5 in Taiwan, yet struggle to produce one word while working her “dream job” as a digital nomad? Why does she fight to get out of bed in the US, yet pop up with the sun to write pages when she’s living in Germany? When we take a non-judgmental look at reality–where we’ve succeeded, where we’ve failed, and what we actually do, instead of what we keep saying we’re going to do–we can start to figure out where small changes in our environments and expectations can yield huge improvements in our results.