Ways To Keep Your Life On Track – And Live Longer
With age comes experience and with experience comes lessons learnt along the way; including the School of Hard Knocks. For some people, doing as they say and finishing what they start can be a valuable lesson. Winston Churchill said that he learnt three things that he considered were the most difficult:
- Kissing a girl who is leaning away from you;
- Climbing a fence that is leaning towards you; and
- Admitting you’re wrong.
For others, catching smoke could prove to a be very difficult lesson to grasp.
On his 80th birthday, James McNab reckoned that the School of Hard Knocks taught him three valuable lessons about how to keep his life on track:
- Learning to let go
- Learning to stop comparing yourself to others
- Learning to make the best choices
Learning to let go can include many things – the past and its many events both good and not-so good, holding grudges, worrying about things that what others may think of you, doubting yourself, fearing what may never happen, and so on. According to McNab, the key is to accept yourself the way you are.
At McNab’s ‘School’ he learnt that if you really want to suffer, the best way to do that is to compare yourself to others. He never knew who ‘they’ really were but he convinced himself that they had more than he did, were more than he was, looked better than he did, were thinner than he was and that their lives were made up of only happiness and joy. It took McNab eighty years to realise (in his words), ‘What a load of BS that was’.
McNab made special mention of John F. Kennedy Jr who was named ‘The Sexiest Man Alive’ by People magazine. It looked like he had everything; money, power, looks and brains. JFK Jr, along with his wife, died in a plane crash on July 16, 1999.
It took McNab many years to learn that life was about choices, and, for him, the most important choice we can make is to be happy instead of being angry and bitter. We don’t need some one else to tell us that life has its ups and downs and it’s very hard to be happy when you’re on ‘the downs’. McNab agrees, but how you choose to respond is up to you.
McNab’s final piece of advice to help keep yourself on track are five words: