Topic of the day: Life is to be lived by choice and not by chance
In many situations we consider that we are being lucky or having bad luck, depending on the outcome we are facing. In fact, most of these things are happening because we made some choices in the past that brought us to this day when this lucky or unlucky situation happened.
We have the tendency to highlight our successes, but not really to learn from our failures. The combination of both would boost our learning curve and speed up our success rate. Why that? Because by learning from our mistakes, we are actually also accepting that our decisions brought us to that outcome. And when we realize that we are much more responsible for our destiny than we thought before, then we are evolving as human beings. The evolution pace is also dependant on the way we move this sequence: failure > acceptance > learning > new attempts > learning > success.
While I was living in Australia in 2015, I went once to Sydney to attend a conference organized by an education enterprise called The Entourage: I found amazing their idea that education is a key to business evolution, and I thought that could be applied to individuals also. Then I decided to spend on travelling this weekend there, attending the conference and coming back with profound insights. The presentations were great because, at the same time that they were business-oriented, they promoted self-reflection and brought insights that could be applied in several other non-business situations. One of their main mottos was: Life is to be lived by choice, not by chance.
Although I had not thought specifically about that until that moment, in fact, it reflected exactly my life pathway until that moment and I had several flashbacks of my choices that brought me to that moment.
It is indeed true that we are responsible for our own choices (unless if we are being manipulated), and almost everything that happens to us is a direct or indirect result of our choices. Sometimes the results take a long time to appear, for example, a health problem related to inadequate alimentation. In this example, the bad habit of eating unhealthily was the long-term choice that created this severe consequence. Actually, all the habits we create are choices we made at a certain point in our lives and later they become automatic routines, so we do not think we are choosing anymore.
If life is to be lived by choice, then I recommend you checking your current choices and examining the present failures to find the right path you would like to follow. As always, remember to align your choices with your values and beliefs and even re-evaluate them in case you feel off-course.
