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What Are You Bitching and Moaning About?
Sofia Alonso Bauer
May 23, 2024
Life Gets Crowded
Many of history’s greatest thinkers, leaders, scientists, artists, and entrepreneurs found some of their greatest inspiration by going for walks. Beethoven used to take walks carrying blank pages of sheet music and a pencil. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth used to write as he took walks around a lake where he lived. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle would lecture their students while taking long walks with them, often working out their ideas at the same time. Two thousand years after the Greeks, Friedrich Nietzsche would say, “It is only ideas gained from walking that have any worth.”
Einstein refined many of his theories about the universe while walking around the Princeton University campus. The writer Henry David Thoreau would say, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”
These great minds created time and space in their everyday lives to take a walk. If you are stuck, if you are struggling to figure out a clear vision for the life you want, then taking the time to set little goals for yourself to start building momentum is crucial. Choose to create time and space every day to think, to daydream, to look around, to be present in the world, and to let inspiration and ideas in. If you can’t find what you’re looking for, at least give it a chance to find you.
Wired Differently
Negative reinforcement produces something different in us—motivation. Not to “be good,” but to get out, to get away, to move on to bigger and better things. Use any kind of negativity directed your way as motivation. You have a choice to listen or not to listen to people who don’t believe in you. You can ignore them or you can use them, but you just can’t ever believe in them. Choose to not get mad but welcome their doubts instead. Hear them laugh and use it as fuel. Naysayers are a fact of life. That doesn’t mean they get to have a say in your life. They’re scared of the unfamiliar and the unknown. They’ve never had the courage to do what you’re trying to do. They’ve never crafted a huge vision for the life they want and then put a plan together to make it a reality. They’ve never gone all in on anything. When it comes to you and your dream, the naysayers have no idea what they are talking about. And if they haven’t done any of the things that you’re trying to do, the question you need to ask yourself is: Why should I ever listen to them?
The answer is, you shouldn’t. You should ignore them. Or better yet, hear what they have to say and then use it as motivation.
Our Potential Is Limitless
Thinking big and succeeding does something to us. It causes us to see that our potential is limitless. What’s just as powerful, I believe, is that other people realize their potential is limitless too when they watch someone like you or me bust through barriers and blaze new trails. When we think big and make our own dreams a reality, those dreams become real to them too. Watching someone with a crazy goal give it everything they’ve got and then succeed is so powerful. It’s like magic because it unlocks potential we didn’t even know we had. It shows us what is possible if we put our minds to something and then back that up with effort.
Why aim for mediocre? Why settle for “good enough” before you’ve ever done the work to see what you are capable of? What do you have to lose? It’s not like dreaming up a big vision takes more energy than dreaming up a small one. It’s no harder to think big than it is to think small. The only hard part is giving yourself permission to think that way.
Give yourself that permission because when you’re thinking about your goals and crafting that vision for your life, you have to remember that it’s not just about you. You could have a huge impact on the people around you. While you are breaking new ground in your own life, you could be blazing trails for people you didn’t even know were watching.
How big you dream, whether you give it your all, or whether you give in at the first sign of trouble—these things matter. They matter for your own happiness and success, obviously. But they also matter because they could make a real difference in the world, far beyond what you can directly impact yourself.
Grit
If you don’t get to experience what it feels like to push yourself, to do more than you thought you were capable of, and to know that the pain you put yourself through will lead to growth that you alone are responsible for creating, then you will never appreciate what you have the way that same thing is appreciated by someone who earned it, who worked for it.
The purpose of hard work is to be prepared. It’s to be ready to perform when the spotlight turns on, when opportunity knocks, when the cameras roll, when a crisis arrives. There is value and meaning in doing hard work for its own sake, don’t get me wrong, but the real reason is so that when the moment arrives for your dream to come true and for your vision to become real… you don’t flinch and you don’t falter.
All that time spent doing hard things, rewiring your neurons to endure more pain, sitting in uncomfortable emotions, reflecting on self-improvement, reading biographies and listening to podcasts… Opportunity presents itself to the prepared and open mind.
The goal is to increase the load you’re able to handle so that when it’s time to do the work that matters—the stuff that people see and remember—you don’t have to think about whether you can do it. You just do it. Cultivate your character growth. Put in the reps and do it when no one is watching. Nothing builds character like resilience or perseverance through pain. Nothing destroys character like succumbing to pain and quitting. To be clear, I am talking about productive pain—the kind that produces growth, builds a base and builds character, and gets you closer to achieving your vision.
“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.” - Seneca
Don’t complain about a situation unless you’re prepared to do something about it to make it better. If you see a problem and you don’t come to the table with a potential solution, I don’t want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn’t be that bad if it hasn’t motivated you to try to fix it. And when exactly has complaining ever gotten someone closer to achieving their goals? You work to make a dream come true; you don’t whine it into existence.
I Was Forged in the Flames of Adversity
Problems and adversity are a normal part of every person’s journey. Whatever your vision is, there is going to be struggle. Tough times. Things that bug the shit out of you. You have to learn how to manage those moments. You have to get good at shifting gears and finding the positive in things. You have to know how to reframe the failure you experience and understand the risks you’re undertaking. Confronting problems instead of complaining about them gives you the chance to practice all these skills.
…this being said, I was failing miserably at swallowing the hard pill of adversity. I had moved to a new city, quit my sales job, had no large incoming stream of income anymore to pay rent, groceries, or cost of living… and I was scared. I was scared I made the wrong choice. I was scared to live in an apartment by myself and travel everywhere alone. I was scared I wouldn’t be able to pay rent. I was scared because I was paying huge sums of money to people in order to try and win at the game of business but I didn’t know if it would pay off or if they would screw me over. I was scared because I had no certainty. I would wake up every night at 3:00 AM in a panic attack and couldn’t fall back asleep. My hair began to fall out and my stress was through the roof. I went to get my hormones checked and discovered some hard realities I already knew about myself. My doctor put me on medications to improve my situation, but when my birthday came around and I stared nakedly at my inadequacies and fear that felt all-consuming, I knew something needed to change. I have never been a scared little girl. I have never been someone incapable of understanding and overcoming the maelstrom of emotions I feel daily. I was sick and tired of allowing my stress to dictate my health. I knew it was time to re-train my grit neurons to handle a greater amount of discomfort and pain. I had gotten soft.
In my case, I realized that shifting gears—from bitching and complaining to taking action towards creating for myself the life I want to live and the person I want to be—was crucial. I booked a flight to Washington and I decided it was time to escape back into the woods with the intention to get radically clear on the future I want for myself, the person that I need to be to get there, and the exact steps I need to take to control my own mind and shift gears toward the positive.
The brain responds to negative things more strongly than it does to positive things. We click on negative images and news stories more than positive ones. We focus more energy worrying about negative outcomes than hoping for positive ones. We even have more words to describe our negative emotions than we do our positive emotions.
I have no use for negativity in my life. To me, focusing on all that negativity is just a waste of time, because I don’t just want to survive. I want to thrive, I want to win, and I want to conquer. I was made for it.
To get to a frame of mind where you view all things in life as being done for you, and not to you, is hard. It’s not intuitive to stare adversity or unpleasantness in the face and think, “Yes, this is what I needed. This is what I wanted. I love this.”
But I was not forged for an easy life. Anytime I find myself in a shitty situation and I feel that urge to bitch and moan, my goal is to stop. Take a breath. And tell myself that it’s time to switch gears. I will actually talk to myself out loud and tell myself to look for the positive in my situation.
“You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you.” - Victor Frankl