Progress, not perfection.

I bet if you make a list of positive things about yourself, and undoubtedly there are many of them, fears you have overcome, goals you’ve reached, things you can be proud of that come naturally to you. Reach back to your childhood, perhaps, to your natural state, before the world ground you down.

Read the list to yourself two or three times every day. I promise you, it will light a spark of positivity that will burn for hours afterward. You’ll feel your mind resolving thoughts more positively. Negative thinking will become less instinctive. Intrusive thoughts will fade.

For me the hardest part was shaking this idea my parents had engrained in me, that the consequence of hard work is being tired and even complaining. That’s not true. The consequence of hard work is momentum. Hard work gets easier the more you do it.

You can either suffer the discomfort of hard work or the discomfort of regret, so it’s worth it to make friends with doing things you don’t want to do, because as far as I can tell it never stops.