A year ago, I chose to listen to music when I was working. I found myself more focus on working with the musics on, and I persuaded this was good for me. It turns out to be wrong.

Choosing Our Lives

No, my work performance was not affected by those music time, instead it increased my concentration on work. Music isolated me from outside and helped me focus more on work.

It worked, but later I found out that not only music could achieve this goal. Any videos could help me with this.

I chose to listen to music, and I gained nothing apart from more concentration on my work. If I chose to listen to Youtube videos, I could gain a lot more than just concentration, eg, improvement on my English listening skills, different mindsets of successful people, different soft skills learnt from others, etc.

That’s why I chose to listen to Youtube videos a year ago.

In fact, we are making different choices every second. We choose between reading books and playing mobile games, between going to gym and sleeping at home, between eating healthy food and eating snacks, between watching useful experience sharing Youtube videos and watching funny short clips.

Our lives are the accumulation of our choices in the past. We can choose to become successful, or choose to be normal. Others can advise us, but we are the ultimate decision makers.

We Can See Fears as Opportunities

This afternoon I chose to listen to this Youtube videos while working. Of course I couldn’t hear 100% of the content as I needed to focus on work, but I got some ideas about how to concur the fear when we speak impromptu.

This is a 1 hour long video related to communication technique. I like what the speaker talked about communication:

• “Anxiety actually help us. It gives us energy, helps us focus, tells us what we are doing is important. But we wanna learn to manage it.” (05:19)
• “Getting our of our own way is important….We need to see the speaking opportunity that we are a part of as an opportunity, rather than a challenge and a threat.” (24:28)
• “First I have to truly listen to what I am hearing. It is very easy for me when I hear a challenge question, to get all the defensive and not hear what the person’s asking. I see it as an opportunity to reframe and explain.” (50:34)

In other words, we are making choices when we are giving a speech. We can choose to fear the whole speech, or see it as an opportunity to share our thoughts to others; to act defensive to those questions from others, or take this opportunity to clarify the ideas?

If we learn to make choices, if we are able to see all the values from different choices and make the right one, we can expect a better lives ahead.

Life = Sum of Choices

Now I chose to write my blog post in English, which is my second language. I am not very good at English writing, but I still chose to write in English because I know that the more I write in English the more I can learn and the more I can improve my English writing skills.

Most of the time we need to push ourselves to face the hardship in order to have better results.

Just like some people believe in the idea of passive income. However, passive income is not about doing nothing and earn money, but about doing everything to develop a system that can ultimately run by itself and help us earn the money. In that sense, people who want to earn passive income might turn out actively doing more that they expected.

So do you want to earn that passive income? Yes or No? If we choose the “Yes” path, we need to keep pushing ourselves until we see the the end of the road.

It is OK if we haven’t been successful yet, because it only tells us that we didn’t make some brilliant choices before. It is alright because no one can change the past, so it is OK to ignore it (after learning from it).

If we try to make good choices from now on, we will eventually be successful. This is not a lie because we can see a lot of successful people out there.

Last but not least, let me share this short animation about choices to you.

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If you want to know more about what I have learnt from other successful people, you can click the below link. This could the one of the life-changing articles for you:

Idea 013: You will NEVER get prepared