The Balanced Life. In this chapter, we’re going to be discussing health, love, wealth, and happiness. In order to have a balanced life, you must have all four pillars. Your job is to find an equilibrium between the four pillars, learning how to balance all four, is what makes things difficult. Now through that, we have four different topics. We have school’s attempt. We have The balanced day. What does it look like? Depression is a good gauge for living a good life. happiness must approach you.
Schools Attempt
Through their curriculum, they teach us the basics, history, math, science, physical training. The problem with that is, it’s an academic balance, but it’s not a balance for life. Right? So what’s the problem with that? Nothing really. If you want to have a good conversation, having known a little bit of history, knowing a little math, knowing a little science, keeping yourself in a little bit of nutrition, which is physical training, is good, you’re an all around person.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re an all around person with your life. Right? You could still know all of that, be a great person to have a conversation with, but be deeply depressed and be a miserable person on the inside. You’re well balanced in the academic life, but when it comes to your own personal life, it’s in disarray, it’s in shambles. Right? So schools attempt in keeping us balanced, it does a very, very successful job at keeping us balanced on subjects. Right? At least the curriculum in theory does. Now in practice, you can argue that, but that’s not the topic of discussion.
What Does A Balanced Day Look Like?
Spending time exercising every day, that’s your health, right? If you want to be healthy, or if you want to be happy, you need to be healthy. The healthy you are, the happier you are, the more energy you have, the more time in the day you have. Why? Because you have more energy, the less struggle you’re having because it doesn’t take you as much energy to walk up and down stairs or get in and out of your car. The more time you’re happy with your kids. Why? Because you have more energy. Right? So spending time exercising every day is very important.
Spend time, improving relationships with loved ones. And if you don’t love anyone and there’s no one that loves you, then spend time improving a relationship with yourself. Right? Now, in The 12 Things I’ve Learned, we discussed this. It’s impossible to love something else, if at first, you don’t love yourself. So through this health, love, wealth and happiness, it’s okay if you don’t have another person, because you can love yourself and be self-sufficient and be perfectly fine, you don’t have to have a whole bunch of people. I go over it more in that book. So please go read that book.
But I’m going to briefly touch on it here: you have to look inside for love, not outside. True love comes from within, not from outside. Spend time working on your finances, which is wealth. If you don’t look at your wallet every day, and when I mean wallet, I’m talking about your bank account and your budget, your finances. If you don’t look at it every day, then of course, it’s going to go disarray. You have to be focused on your finances. You have to look at them. You have to pay attention to them. You have to see what’s going on. You have to micromanage them, in the beginning, right?
Once you set up a system and you have it going, then you know what you’re doing, you can’t have the balanced life, if you don’t pay attention to the things that matter. Now, I understand, money doesn’t buy you happiness and all this other stuff, at least that’s what they tell you. I don’t know, I think money can buy you happiness because I want an airplane. I’ll be happy if I have an airplane. I can’t buy it with goodwill. I got to buy it with money. So I’m pretty sure money does buy me happiness.
However, not to sound too cliche, then if you don’t want to be stressed, you have to have your finances in order, in order to have your finances in order, you have to tend to your finances. Just like they say, “Tend to your garden or tend to your business.” You have to tend to your finances, if you want your garden or your finances to reap the benefits. To reap rewards, you have to tend to it. Now, spend time for yourself, this is different from loving yourself. Loving yourself is finding the internal love for yourself, being able to accept yourself for who you are.
Now this is, spend time for yourself.
Spend Time Doing What Makes You Happy, Not What Other People Perceive As Happiness, But What Makes You Happy.
If going outside and looking for bugs makes you happy, then go outside and look for some bugs. Who cares what other people think? It doesn’t matter. If you were to tell me that going outside to look for bugs is what you like to do, I’d probably look at you like, have fun. I’m not going to join you because that’s not fun to me. However, what’s fun to me, what happiness is to myself, is accomplishing goals, finding a task that seems impossible and figuring out a way how to do it. That to me is extremely fun. I like it. But to most people, they look at me like I’m crazy. So find out what it is that makes you happy and go do that. That’s the happiness part of it. All right.
Depression Is A Good Gauge For Living The Good Life
If you’re depressed, find the root problem. Is it because you are lonely and don’t have friends? Then this is what you do, work on the relationships that you do have, and build your social skills. If you don’t have any money, always struggling, look at the people around you, if they’re also struggling, find different people. Find a different social group because you are the people who you are around. So if everybody around you is poor and broke, then it’s better to be alone.
If not being alone is what you can do, then find a social group online. That has to do with making money, follow Ray Dalio, follow Elon Musk, follow the people that are making money. Maybe not follow the celebrities, but find out who is making the money in whatever you’re interested in and follow those people. Don’t be worried about what Gilly Jolly said yesterday to entice a fight, who cares? It doesn’t matter. Trust me, when you have your own private jet, you can fly away from all of it.
If you don’t have any energy, or are overweight, then read a book on healthy food and exercise. Right? It’s that simple. You don’t have to be told by all the gurus, what’s best for you. You have to figure out what’s best for you by yourself. That’s what’s best for you, right? It’s not what’s best for Erik, it’s what’s best for you. What’s best for Erik is most definitely, not best for you. No, it’s not. You can try it, but it’s probably not the best for you, unless you’ve been through everything I’ve been through and lived my life exactly how I lived mine. Then it’s probably not the best for you. And whatever’s best for you is most likely not the best for Erik.
So you have to figure out what’s best for you. You’re an individual in this world and depression is a great gauge. Right? If you’re just overall, not happy, explore things that make you happy, try new things until you find happiness. Right? It took me a while to realize, I’m most happy when I’m in the middle of a project. I’ve been on vacations, I’ve traveled, I’ve done everything. But I am at peace in the middle of a project. I love it. It’s what turns my mouse in my little hamster wheel, working. I enjoy it. So I don’t need a vacation from what I’m doing, because I’m not depressed. I’m doing exactly what I’m doing, what I like to do. Dr. David Buss, evolutionary psychologist says, “Some depression is purely chemical, like you have a malfunction in your brain. But for the most part, depression is a trigger that is telling you something is wrong in your life.”
So if you don’t find what… We’ll revert back to another chapter, creating your value. If you don’t know what your value to this world is, it can cause you to be depressed, because something’s wrong. Because we all know we’re here for something, we didn’t just drop on this planet for nothing. What are we here for? We’re all here for something. But if you don’t feel like you’re living to your full potential, then you can be depressed. And part of that is because you know that you should be doing more, but you’re not. So remember the steps that we learned in creating value and start creating value for yourself. The faster you start creating value for yourself, the faster you’re going to be able to combat that depression. Does that make sense?
Again, I talked about it a little bit before, previously in this chapter, you have to love yourself. Right? If you don’t love yourself, then you’re going to be depressed. It’s the easiest thing to do, to be depressed about love. “Oh, this person is not giving me the love that I need. This person broke my heart. My mommy didn’t love me right. My daddy didn’t love me right. My sister didn’t love me right.” You see how It’s all external. Why don’t you look in the mirror and be like, “I didn’t love me.” And then figure out why, or better yet, figure out how to start loving yourself? Because once you have the love for herself, what do you need the love of mommy? Why do you need the love of daddy? It doesn’t matter if they hugged you when you were a little, it doesn’t matter. You can hug yourself.
Happiness Must Approach You
Once you build all the other pillars, first, when you have your health, right? When you’re exercising every day, this is why I’m talking about loving yourself, when you have your love. All right? When you’re healthy, you’re exercising, you’re feeling good, you’re breaking a sweat. You’re getting nice and you’re enjoying yourself. You can walk around, you have more energy, when you’re feeling good about yourself. And then you can look in that mirror and you can just name all the things that you love about yourself.
Now I’m not saying, gloat about yourself because I am one of the hardest people in the world on myself. I always find fault because I love challenges. I love to challenge myself. So I want to be perfect. So when I look in the mirror, I love myself. I love critiquing myself. Why? Because I want to be perfect. Right? That’s what I like to do and not everybody likes to critique themselves and be honest with themselves all the time. So I’m not asking you to be honest with yourself all the time or critique everything, because I mean, that’s a little too much.
But it’s also the love that was shown to me when I was younger, I always critiqued, to make sure that I was the perfect this or the perfect that, so I was always critiqued, like on a basketball court or on a football field or in the classroom or articulating my speech or whatever it was, didn’t matter. It was always critiquing, constructive criticism as they like to call it.
Wealth
when you master your impulses, because most of the time it’s impulse, that’s our problem. Why did you buy those pairs of shoes? Because it was impulsive. Why’d you get drunk and spend all that money? It was impulsive. You weren’t thinking about it. Sounded like a good idea at the time. So once you reign that all in and you get your health in order, you start loving yourself and you get your finances in order, you get your wealth, right? You get it all working together, then happiness is the consequence you receive for having all of that. Does that make sense?
So the sooner you master the four pillars, the sooner or the faster you will achieve the good life; health, love, wealth, to happiness. So first, work on your health, then work on loving yourself, which is with health, then work on your wealth. And in turn, if you do all that, you have a balanced life and the consequence will be happiness.