The Easiest Traps You Can Fall into in Life — and How to Avoid Them
There are many wrong turns you can take in life.
I have sorted 18 items into three broad categories. None of these categories are definite or even very different from one another. Rather, they are just meant to make the reading experience easier, more understandable, and more cohesive.
Category 1: Reactivity (versus Proactivity)
You cannot control anything beyond your own choices and actions.
Despite this, most people are reactive: their time and energy is spent on things they cannot control, and they are victims to their own feelings and thoughts. As Stephen Covey claims, the correct solution is to be proactive: to focus on influencing only the things that are within your control, and to take responsibility for the choices (actions) you make. You can be proactive and live life with deliberation and direction.
Or, you can be reactive and fall at the mercy of your circumstances.
1: Passivity (versus Activity)
It is your responsibility to change your current circumstances. Instead of waiting for someone or something to rescue you, you need to take matters into your own hands and create the life that you want. In other words, you need to make a decision to actively move forward rather than becoming a passive onlooker in your own life.
2: Dreaming (versus Doing)
You can dream as much as you want to, but nothing is going to get done until you decide to actually do something about it. The thing is, you can only reach your dream destination by taking the necessary steps to get there. This means that you have to stop ‘trying’ and actually start doing.
3: Impulses (versus Values)
Emotions come and go, and it is unproductive, unhealthy, and ultimately unfulfilling to base your decisions on these fleeting states of the mind. As Stephen Covey writes, actions ought to be made on the basis of values that are timeless, universal, and unchanging (like integrity or honesty): in other words, principles. These are deeply meaningful virtues that provide a good and fulfilling life — as long as you commit to them as you live your life.
4: Impatience (versus Patience)
Things do not always happen as quickly as you want them to, and that is not something you can control. It is crucial to be patient in this world where everyone else hurries: because when you allow yourself to be swept away by impatience, you become reactive. But by practicing patience, you learn to widen your attention span and become untainted by external forces and circumstances, and you get much farther than you would by living busily.
5: Blame (versus Accountability)
It is easy — but ultimately pointless — to point fingers. You cannot control other people’s behavior, and so you will only waste time and energy trying to change those around you. Therefore, regardless of your own fault in the matter, you ought to take accountability over what you should have done differently in any given situation to have made it better, and thus turn the focus toward yourself and what you can control in order to solve the issue (as Stephen Covey wisely says, you are the solution to your problems).
6: Cowardice (versus Courageousness)
You do not need to have courage to challenge or overcome your fears. You just need to do it: that is, you need to be courageous. Circumstances do not have to bend around you (most likely, you will not suddenly wake up one day feeling ready to face your deepest fears), so it is your responsibility to take that chance in order to achieve your goals.
Category 2: Short-term (versus Long-term)
Most things that are nice in the moment are harmful in the long run.
Having a short-term approach to life means thinking and behaving in accordance with your momentary desires. Having a long-term approach, on the other hand, means thinking and behaving in accordance with your actual needs. It means practicing self-control and discipline (that is, being momentarily uncomfortable) to attain a better lifestyle and health.
As Jerzy Gregorek says: “Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.”
7: Comfort (versus Growth)
Growth happens outside of your comfort zone. All acts of growth (like gaining muscle, learning a new language, or becoming a better friend) require temporary discomfort. You have a choice, therefore: you can live a life of comfort (with easy, unhealthy, and unproductive ways of living), or you can build a life that challenges you but rewards you in the long run.
8: Settling (versus Development)
As a child, you are dependent on learning new things in order to develop into a functioning adult. However, just because you have reached a certain age now, you do not have to stop seeking out ways to learn and grow. Only by adapting to new ways of thinking, feeling, and doing, can you develop the way you need to in order to not settle for anything less.
9: Distraction (versus Focus)
Distractions are everywhere, but they get you nowhere. When you pay attention to too many things at a time (like multitasking, or making it a habit of tuning into external or internal sources of gratification, like news, notifications, and daydreams), you lose a clear focus. Focus toward specific values, tasks, and people is key — because by focusing on fewer, but more personally meaningful things, you live an infinitely more fulfilling life.
10: Unhealthiness (versus Healthiness)
You need to take care of your mind and body: and again, not with comfort foods or comfort shows in bed or continual rest days. These things may feel nice in the moment (and are good in moderation), but they contribute to an unideal lifestyle in the long run. As with any other habits, commitment to health habits is vital: after all, efforts stack up (and so does lack of effort).
11: Striving (versus Giving Up)
You cannot expect to master a skill if you give up upon failure. In terms of challenge and (potential) failure, psychologist Carol Dweck differentiates between those with a growth mindset and those with a fixed mindset: the latter feel stuck in the skills and knowledge that they lack to make progress on a specific task, while the former look for ways to learn and grow to fill in their gaps. In the end, you can only grow upon failure.
12: Time Wasting (versus Time Management)
Now, we are all different people, and not all of us need to do planning or scheduling to live a meaningful or perfectly good life. However, if you want to get anywhere in terms of your goals, you need to avoid wasting your time on things that matter so little. In this sense, you need to manage your time, because you need to actively dedicate the limited time that you have to the tasks that matter most.
Category 3: Immaturity (versus Maturity)
As human beings, physical and psychological maturation is inevitable.
Yet, so many of us regress or stagnate as we age, refusing to mature altogether. Naturally, there are many ways to be immature or mature: emotionally, socially, and mentally, in particular. It all stems from your own decision to grow up and learn from your mistakes, or to regress into patterns that you ought to have outlearned or outgrown before.
Indeed, immaturity (and maturity) can be found in many areas of life.
13: Emotion Suppression (versus Emotion Regulation)
Though you might be unaware of it, you suppress your emotions on the regular. Unless you acknowledge and accept your emotions as they come, and allow them to stay safely within you without trying to change or assert control over them, you are not truly processing them. Emotion regulation is the key to development both personally and socially (because emotions influence perspective and action), and without it, you might as well be a victim to the things you cannot control.
14: Dishonesty (versus Honesty)
Lying, cheating, manipulating, and being passive-aggressive are all ways that people withhold the truth from other people or even themselves. The truth is, though, dishonesty is counterproductive. Only by honestly and directly communicating the truth, will you respect your boundaries and achieve the life you want.
15: Self-centeredness (versus Understanding)
You live in a world where everyone has different personalities and backgrounds (and, therefore, experiences and perspectives) from you. In order to properly adapt to this environment, you have to be open-minded and also seek to understand others before you make yourself understood to them. No one acts or thinks or feels like you, anyway.
16: Opposition (versus Cooperation)
Competition is inevitable in today’s hierarchical and turbulent society, but it can also be harmful when it turns into imbalance. It might be impossible to turn large-scale problems on their head all by yourself, but it is possible to do it on a smaller scale. Seek to cooperate with others rather than seeing them as your enemy, and choose to be constructive and not destructive.
17: Fakeness (versus Genuineness)
You will only ever be you, so pretending like you are something or someone else is ultimately pointless (and very taxing and unfulfilling besides). Therefore, be honest with who you are: it is the only way to a genuinely meaningful life. Either way, no one will truly like or respect you as you are when they like you for someone you are only pretending to be.
18: Superficiality (versus Meaning)
Humans seek meaning in the experiences they make during their time on earth. With our modern economy and society, however, far too many of us seek superficial and transactional sources of meaning: in material things, shallow social connections, or numbers (like followers or money). Instead, we ought to search for true sources of meaning and focus on the fewer, but more precious, things that feel personally valuable to us.
Ultimately, a good life is not just about avoiding the bad paths that it offers.
It is also about taking the correct ones.
