Marc Chernoff - 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

MILLIONS OF PEOPLE live their entire lives on default settings, never realizing they can customize everything. Dont be one of them. Dont settle for the default settings in life.

Dare to make edits and improvements. Dare to make your personal growth a top priority.

The truth is, you wont always be a priority to others, and thats why you need to be a priority to yourself. Learn to respect yourself, take care of yourself, and become your own support system. Your needs matter. Start meeting them!

Dont wait on others to choose you. Choose yourself today!

Seriously, its not your job to curb or contain yourself in order to become someone elses idea of a worthwhile human being. You are amazingly worthwhile and capable right now. Not because other people think you are, but because you are in full control of the next step you take.

If you feel differently, or if youve been holding yourself back recently, realize that the real battle is in your mind. And your mind is under your control, not the other way around. You may have been broken down by adversity or rejection or stress, but you are not broken. So dont let your mind, or anyone else, try to convince you otherwise.

Heal yourself, and grow beyond the default settings in life, by refusing to settle for the way things have always been. Choose to take up a lot of positive space in your own life today. Choose to give yourself permission to meet your own needs. Choose to honor your feelings and emotions. Choose to make self-care and personal growth top priorities...

Choose to think better about yourself, so that you can live better in spite of the challenges you face.

And yes, we know thats sometimes much easier said than done. Making positive changes takes guidance and practice. And thats exactly what this book will help you achieve, one tiny step at a time.

Are you ready for a great journey? Achieving real happiness and success in life is truly a wild onea journey of unexpected and exciting twists, turns, and vital lessons. Yes, its wild how we outgrow what we once thought we couldnt live without, and then we fall in love with what we didnt even know we wanted. Life keeps leading us down paths we would never travel if it were up to us. Dont be afraid. Dont let your expectations of how everything should be blind you to the beauty of the life youre living. Have faith. Trust the journey.

And of course, if youre struggling with trusting the journey and taming your expectations right now, know that you are not alone. Many of us are here with you, working hard to let go, find more presence and acceptance, and get our thinking back on track. Let us share a quick metaphor with you that we often share with our course students and live seminar attendees:

Imagine you had a ripe, juicy tangerine sitting on the table in front of you. You pick it up eagerly, take a bite, and begin to taste it.

You already know how a ripe, juicy tangerine should taste, and so when this one is a bit tarter than expected, you make a face, feel a sense of disappointment, and swallow it, feeling cheated out of the experience you expected.

Or perhaps the tangerine tastes completely normalnothing special at all. So, you swallow it without even pausing to appreciate its flavor as you move on to the next unworthy bite, and the next.

In the first scenario, the tangerine let you down because it didnt meet your expectations. In the second, it was too plain because it met your expectations to a T.

Do you see the irony here?

Its either not good or not good enough. This is how many of us live our lives... unhappily and unsuccessfully. Its why so many of us feel let down, disappointed, and unexcited about almost everything.

Because nothing really meets our expectations.

Now, imagine you try this instead: remove your expectations of how the tangerine should taste. You dont know, and you dont expect to know, because you havent even tried it yet. Instead, youre genuinely curious, impartial, and open to a variety of possible flavors. You taste it, and you truly pay attention. You notice the juiciness, the texture of the pulp, the simultaneously tangy, tart, and sweet flavors swirling around on your tongue, and all the other complex sensations that arise in your awareness as you chew. You didnt know how this tangerine would taste, but now you realize its different from the rest, and its remarkable in its own way. Its a totally new experiencea worthwhile experiencebecause youve never tasted this tangerine before.

Mindfulness experts often refer to this as beginners mind, but really, its just the result of a mind-set free of needless, stifling expectations.

The tangerine, of course, can be substituted for almost anything in your life: any event, any situation, any relationship, any person, any thought at all that enters your mind. If you approach any of these with expectations of how it should be or how it has to be in order to be good enough for you, they will almost always disappoint you in some way, or be too plain and unexciting to even remember. And youll just move on to the next disappointment or unworthy life experience, and the next, and the next, and so on and so forth, until youve lived the vast majority of your life stuck in an endless cycle of experiences you barely like or barely even notice.