As I reflect on the conversations I have had with podcast guests in 2022, I have gained invaluable insight into how to live life with intention and purpose. From understanding the importance of context when it comes to perseverance to embracing the idea of a flux mindset and developing the courage to ask for what I want, this list of 22 life lessons summarizes the most valuable lessons I've learned in 2022.
1.Context Matters When It Comes to Perseverance
It's important to remember that context matters when it comes to perseverance versus quitting, and that sometimes the best decision you can make is to walk away from a situation that isn't serving you. -Annie Duke
2.Satisfaction Comes from Being Intentional
Satisfaction comes from understanding that there is an intention behind what you're doing on a daily basis and creating the practices, the habits, and the routines that make what you're doing on a daily basis more sustainable. -Tara Mcmullin
3.Don't Use Pro-Con Lists to Make Important Decisions
Making a ProCon list of things that can't be quantified and trying to weigh them against each other to come to a rational decision about what's the best thing to do is a crazy, misleading, and dangerous idea. -Russ Roberts
4.Regret Is One of Our Most Useful Negative Emotions
Regret is an emotion and it's a negative emotion. It's an emotion that makes us feel bad. And the way that it makes us feel bad is by making us look backward at our lives and look at a decision we made, look at the decision we didn't make, look at an action we took, look at an action we didn't take and wish we had done things differently. And then we wonder whether, had we done something differently, the present would be better than it is. You're traveling back to the present and you're seeing a reconfigured present based on the decisions you made in the reconfigured past. – Dan Pink
5.Live More Reflectively Less Reactively
When we're not aware, I think when we're not heart-centered, which is where the real intelligence is, where we really become astute in energy, **when we're not aware, then we're going to be reacting. -Danielle Laporte
6.Have a Sentiment That You Have Nothing to Lose
You have to almost have a sentiment for yourself. I have nothing to Lose. If I have nothing to Lose, I'm just going to go all the way and create the most ballsy thing that I can possibly create. That's a really difficult thing to do, but it gets better with practice. And hopefully as you get older, you don't become risk-averse. -Julien Smith
7.A Worthy Goal Is Thrilling, Important and Daunting
So the goal is to optimize the relationship between thrilling and important and daunting. So it's like you've never been, you've never recorded an album, but you know how you see in videos of people recording albums and they've got the big mixing desks and people are moving sliders up and down. You're trying to move sliders up and down with thrilling, important, and daunting to find the best mix for the way that you want your Worthy Goal to sound. -Michael Bungay Stanier
8.Every Piece of Advice in the Universe Has Conditions Under Which It's Not True
Every piece of advice in the universe has some limitations or conditions under which it's true. There's no such thing as advice that is universally true. And so part of testing is just determining whether you fit the criteria for that advice to make sense for you.
9. Life Is Too Short To Waste On Shallow Social Interactions
We are learning social assertiveness in a way that we can all swallow. I also think we've realized like life is too short and our social interactions need to be precious. And so I think that we're going to start seeing more behavior like that, where if there's a bad date or people aren't clicking or like toxic friends or friends out of habit, you know, I lost all my friends by habit. -Vanessa Van Edwards
10. Learn to See All Change As An Opportunity for Growth
A flux mindset and the flux mindset is an ability to see all change, whether it's, quote unquote good or bad, whether it's expected or unexpected, whether it's something you have to opt into or something you couldn't control, it's the ability to see all of it as an opportunity to learn and to grow and to improve. -April Rinne, The Unmistakable Creative Podcast
11. Life Is Not About Overcoming Anything. It's About Integrating Everything
When you talk to yourself and you are going to say things like, What do you want to teach me? I'm here to listen and you're going to be gentle. All day long, and that's the medicine, That's where the power is. It's not about overcoming anything. It's about integrating everything. -Danielle Laporte, The Unmistakable Creative Podcast
12. Develop the Skills to Make You Immune to Automation
Labor economists have known for about 80 years that anything that involves a pattern or a process or repeatable actions, anything that can just be done in the same way over and over again, will eventually be automated by technology. -Tim Klein
13. Everything Requires Collective Effort and Commitment
You are just one piece of a much larger oOrganism and no matter how good you think you are, It can achieve things that you- Andrew Bustamante
14.Write Your Beliefs in Pencil
Don't write your life plan in pen, do a lot of experiments. We should experiment with different fields when we're young and try things out, try out for a year, try out for six months. – AJ Jacobs
15.Use the Knowledge You Have Before Seeking More
Knowledge itself is completely useless. Really. The library is completely useless unless you can take that knowledge and apply it at the right time. Timeliness is critical. Apply it at the right time to create effective, positive change, then knowledge transforms to wisdom, but knowledge on its own doesn't do very much for you. So you can do a hundred courses, a hundred programs, learn a thousand different tools unless you apply it in a timely way to create transformational change and also sustainable change through the consistency of its application.
-Dandapani
16.Question the Defaults in Your Life
Being the type of person who's willing to question the Default and look for alternatives as evidenced by changing the browser on your phone also suggests that you're going to look for alternatives and not just settle with the status quo in other areas of your life. -Frederic Bahnson
17.You Can't Plan for Insight
There's a lot you can achieve with planning and execution, but when it comes to insight or something where other people and chance plays a big role, planning can get you only so far. So he talks a lot about examples, for example in war strategy where there's a lot of planning going on up until you encounter the enemy and then everything falls apart. – Sonkhe Ahrens
18.Don't Waste Time on Things Aren't Good at Or Don't Enjoy
If you're not that good at something and you don't really like doing it, why are you doing it? There's probably other things that you are naturally better at. – Wes Kao
19.People Who Double Down on Their Strengths Are More Likely to Become Outliers
What we're seeing again and again is that the people who really doubled down on their Strengths have more potential for outlier success versus the well-rounded. But what well-rounded means is probably not at the tip of the spear in any one arena. -Eric Barker
20.Screens Provide a Limited Perspective on the World
Even if you could read all the great works from all over the world and see every video and chat with people all over the world virtually, you get nothing more in-depth and enriching as a human than being out in the world, whether that's out of your house, in your neighborhood, or traveling beyond it as far as you can go, the information that you're able to get wherever that is, is incomparable to anything you can get through text or images.
21.Failure and Rejection Aren't Fatal
When we realize that failure isn't fatal, it it can't hurt to put ourselves out there and ask for what we actually want. – Alex Budak
22.Revisit Your Old Assumptions
Revisit old assumptions, but you're not constantly doing that every minute of every day. You have to be able to just act on the assumption that whatever your current belief is, is not true. -Julia Galef
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