thriving – in thriver words

Your Best Life

Only you can define your best life. I recently saw a critic describe the couple featured in Song Sung Blue as a duo that never achieved success. This struck me as ridiculous.

The couple supported themselves making music they loved. They opened for The Red Hot Chili Peppers. There are two movies about their lives. How is that not successful?

There are tons of bands in any given city that have a regular gig and large local following but have never filled an arena. Are they not successful either?

dark crowd filled arena with bright purple and blue light

Funny thing, I’d never heard of this critic nor do I remember his name. By his own definition, I guess he hasn’t achieved success either. Or maybe he’s independently wealthy and considers that a sign of his success.

I mention all of this because you’re not going to feel like you’re thriving unless you’re taking steps toward living your best ideal life or you have learned to glean the best moments from the life you have.

I’m not against ambition, big dreams, moving forward, or getting ahead. I believe most of us can achieve more than we imagine. But I also believe that it’s okay to feel satisfied with a role that fills your heart and soul but isn’t considered the pinnacle of a profession.

How many miserable people do you know who judge themselves by another’s criteria?

How many people beat themselves up because they can’t live up to another’s expectation?

How many people become depressed because a real-life obstacle prevents them from achieving a dream?

I know tons of people from each of these categories. Do they have better lives being miserable or would they benefit from finding a new way to evaluate their situation?

A life lived according to your values, filled with satisfying work, comfortable surroundings, and solid relationships is hard to beat. It doesn’t always bring exotic trips, celebrity elbow rubbing, or world renown. But those things only have the value we allow them.

Alex Honnold may require the challenge of free soloing Taipei 101 for his life to feel complete. I do not need this. Even if I were a climber, I don’t think I’d need to conquer that level of challenge to feel successful. And if you explore any extreme example, you may feel the same way.

At the same time, you may subconsciously assess your life as lacking by using our movie critic’s standard.

If thriving is important to you in 2026, examine your values. Rate them in importance to you. Compare your everyday reality to the level at which it reflects these values. Take whatever steps are required to sync your life with your values.

Even if you don’t reach a single arbitrary milestone, you will feel more successful. Keep it up and you may be surprised that you are inching closer than ever before to your dreams.

It’s hard to argue that living your values is not living your best life. And living your best life and thriving go hand in hand.

Quiet

You can tell it’s a holiday week because it’s so quiet! While the official day may not be here yet, the traffic tells me many people have already put work behind them. I love quiet days with empty streets. My favorite time to be downtown has always been when businesses and stores are closed. It just has a whole different feel.

Like most of our lives in the US, we fill the holidays with activity. Some of us plan elaborate meals with elegant place settings and seats assigned by calligraphied place cards. We clean for hours so we can fill the kitchen and dining room with dishes that will take more hours to clean. We work, work, work only to discover our guests must rush on to another dinner before the ice cream melts on the pie.

We watch parades and football and go back home without knowing what our cousins do for a living or where their kids go to school. It’s amazing how we can busy ourselves into a noisy frenzy that leaves no time for quiet, forget quiet reflection or thoughtful attunement.

How did we get so uncomfortable with stillness?

The barrage of two competing screens is barely enough to distract some in my home. What I keep coming back to is how on edge all that noise makes me feel. Is noise the cause of the anxiety that plagues them?

I guess what I’m wondering is why we create a frenzy and then suffer from the effects of it? Seems a lot like chasing our tails.

What would happen if we sat on the porch or in front of the fire this Thanksgiving and listened to each other instead of watching balloons float down 6^th Avenue or channel surfing through games?

What if we just sat in the quiet? I know it probably sounds like I want to go back to the past. That’s not it.

What would happen if we stopped rushing, pushing, scrambling, hurrying…distracting, distracting, distracting? Especially, when we are actively creating part of our need for distraction.

What if Thanksgiving dinner were a normal supper plus a fancy dessert? Would we take more notice of the flavors and effort put into that one item? Would we take our time and savor it? Would we talk about it while envisioning the preparation? Would it remind us of stories of other desserts at other times – stories that would allow us to connect with the new in-law at the table?

You can say all you want about mindfulness, but quiet stillness as a default would allow us to relax into the present rather than applying laser focus to it.

Where has the ease of being part of the rhythm of the world gone? Perhaps it’s still on the ski slopes or under the curl of a wave. But we no longer feel it in a gallop beneath us on our way to get groceries or hear it in the crunch of a wheel on gravel.

At a recent party, someone asked my Serbian neighbor the biggest difference between living in the US and Serbia. His answer was how much less time we spend sitting and visiting – taking time during the day to enjoy each other and connect.

We have rampant anxiety, violence, addiction, and chronic illness all on the rise. I’m not 100% blaming those on a lack of quiet. But I think it’s worth studying those conditions in order to discover if there are ways in which they correlate with a lack of it.

And I’m certain it’s worth asking yourself why the next time you feel compelled to fill a piece of quiet with noisy, frenetic activity.

Fast or Slow?

Is time moving fast or slow? In general, we accept that time feels as though it moves slowly when we’re young, gradually speeding up as we age. But I’ve become increasingly aware of other factors that affect my sense of time. On the surface, that seems inconsequential. But on another level, it feels incredibly important to thriving.

When a vendor’s business burned years ago, I remember someone saying that from that point on, his time would be divided into before the fire and after the fire. That sounded right since we mark time in unexpected life-changing events as well as cultural milestones- birthdays, graduations, jobs, marriages, and anniversaries.

Our perception of time forms the basis for setting priorities, making decisions, establishing commitments, and meeting deadlines. It’s not uncommon for someone who faces a life-threatening event to suddenly be ready to commit to a relationship. When we feel the shortness of time, priorities change.

On a daily basis, my sense of time is affected by the presence or absence of family, deadlines I must meet, how safe I feel, the goals I’ve set and my sense of accomplishment. When I have family in the house, time seems to stretch out. It’s an odd paradox. There’s often more to do, but it feels like I have more time to do it.

For over 20 years, my work had an understandable flow. It wasn’t predictable exactly, but each job had a particular flow and collectively, there were repeating rhythms. Most of it was driven by customer or reporting deadlines. I’m an expert at creating backward timelines. All I had to do was coordinate 60ish timelines at once.

Now I have fewer established deadlines and a wider variety of tasks. Each of those utilizes different tools and has multiple moving parts. While I have more control over the schedule, I also wear more hats that require me to shift my attention. This affects how I perceive progress and the time each task takes.

I could say that your priorities are reflected in the things on which you spend your time. I think I have said it. And it’s true, but not necessarily in a one-to-one kind of way. If you spend a lot of time doing laundry, your priority could be laundry. It could also be your children. Or it could be other people’s opinion of how you take care of your family.

Becoming aware of your perception of time is important when you begin to map what thriving looks like for you. Each intention will require an investment of time. It may not be possible to achieve the maximum goal in each area and still have a calm, peaceful life. If thriving for you includes calm and peace, you may need to back off of the ideal and choose an achievable goal.

No matter how lofty your goals, how efficient your system, or how intentional your choices, time is a limiting factor that will determine what you accomplish. If you devise a life plan in which accomplishment moves fast while feeling slow and easy, you’ll have achieved the balance I like to maintain.

Sometimes, it’s just hard to know whether time will feel like it’s moving fast or slow.

Fortitude

Is fortitude key to thriving?

In the past 30 days, I’ve had two days off. For the past two weeks, I’ve worked 12 plus hours per day. This temporary gig requires patience and humor. Without a great deal of fortitude, I’d be sunk. As an entrepreneur, I have long been aware that tenacity, fortitude, and flexibility are more important to achievement than intelligence, knowledge, and contacts.

Fortitude is what gets you through when you do everything right and things still turn out wrong. It’s what allows you to get out of bed and be excited about a project no one else appreciates. It’s what enables you to be ethical even when it means your bottom line will take a hit. And fortitude supports the patience it takes to slowly build a successful endeavor. Most importantly, fortitude is what allows us to weather the storms that come our way, slog through the aftermath, and emerge better for having had the experience.

I’d be willing to wager that those who had previously developed fortitude have been less detrimentally affected by the pandemic than others. That doesn’t mean they felt the losses and inconveniences any less, it just means they had a well of mental and emotional strength to draw from while envisioning ways to navigate the rapidly changing environment.

While most years won’t bring a pandemic, all will bring unexpected challenges beyond our control. So how does fortitude fit into everyday life?

Life is a game.

We seem to recognize the value of fortitude in sports competition. We expect elite athletes to train relentlessly, endure painful injuries, and still perform. We expect them to be able to focus and deliver peak performance no matter what is reported about them in the press. We feel free to bash them publicly when they struggle with their head game. And yet many of us allow ourselves to be mentally and emotionally lazy.

But life is the overarching game. And creating the life we desire is infinitely more achievable when we are mentally tough and emotionally balanced. We are all capable of improvement. All we need is to prioritize and practice building our skills.

The sooner, the better.

I’ve seen adults who had very little difficulty early in life self-destruct when hard times finally found them. Perhaps if they had developed fortitude sooner, they could have continued their early success.

Failure and fortitude go hand in hand.

No matter what you’re attempting, you will sometimes fail. As long as you keep learning from momentary setbacks, you will remain on a path to success. Each failure helps build fortitude.

Everyone’s tolerance is different.

Developing mental toughness requires difficulty. Removing all difficulty and pain will not help a child, for instance, develop fortitude. But each child will have a different level of tolerance. And each will require a unique approach for absorbing difficulty as a positive experience. Finding that approach and encouraging children while allowing them to feel disappointment, frustration, fear, sadness, and anger are key roles of parenting. Adults can be guided similarly by spiritual leaders, life coaches, therapeutic techniques, and even trusted friends or empathetic bosses.

Avoidance may be more pleasant in any given moment, but in the long-term can contribute to additional avoidant behaviors, more chaos, less resilience, a lack of follow-through, an inability to stick with a plan, and a tendency to quit rather than persevere. A bit of struggle is a good thing so long as it doesn’t overwhelm to the point of becoming traumatic.

Boundaries are essential.

When you are capable of more, you will be asked to do more. No matter how tough you are, there is a point at which taking on more is unhealthy. Setting and enforcing boundaries is essential for keeping your load at a level that allows you to thrive.

Building fortitude can help you reframe “I can’t.” to “How can I best approach this?” That tiny shift can make all the difference in how you feel.

That can be the difference between surviving and thriving.

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