How to embrace more opportunities
By: Cosmin Angheluta
Tags: Self Improvement, Life Lessons, Life, Self, Personal Development

Ferris Bueller once said:

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

From here comes the lifetime forgettable lesson that sometimes, or I should say almost always, appreciation is the key to a good life.

I learned this lesson not so much time ago. I was going through a period where I believed everything was horrible. Everything that happened in my ordinary days was never enough, and I couldn’t accept how time was passing by while I remained in the same situation.

I was sick of living the same emotional rollercoaster every day until I realized I wasn’t. I suspected the problems were the bad habits I adopted over the past years and the adaptability I had to achieve. So I started asking myself: why was I self-sabotaging? Why have I adapted to life so much that I forgot to appreciate the little things of the ordinary?

In the next few days, I actively searched for an answer, but I couldn’t find one. I couldn’t even describe the problem, so how could I find a solution?

Then, one day, I was passively listening to a streamer talking about how he got used to driving his car, how we didn’t even need to think about the movements of his feet anymore, and I understood.

Adaptability and bad habits weren’t my dominant problems: they were only a reflection of it. The real enemy was the exaggerated self-protection I covered myself with, which forbade me to experience the vast rainbow of human emotions.

From that moment, I convinced myself we all have an internal ranking system, allowing us to discriminate between bad and good experiences. But this powerful ability can lead to great discontent if used unconsciously.

We think our life isn’t full of possibilities, but what if we are avoiding them? What if one of our friends, or acquaintances, invites us to take a drink, but we refuse because the last time it wasn’t pleasurable? Do we lack opportunities, or are we too afraid to take them?

The decision to accept or refuse the invitation comes from the ranking system. But if you cannot use it correctly, it will keep you from incredible experiences that could turn your life upside down.

The problem is the Ranking System

Nowadays, we have so many blessings in our life we often take them for granted. Living in a society where each of us can afford almost anything makes us lazy and incapable of appreciation, which spoils our experiences in the long run.

Our internal ranking system gives marks to any adventures we live, whether we like it or not. Since we live in hundreds of thousands of situations, we feel the necessity to rank them, so we can understand better if we loved them, or we hated them. Hence, there would be a few experiences we would mark as 10, the non plus ultra of life, and those we would rank as 0, a horror movie became true. In the middle, there would be the vast majority of experiences, from an unacceptable 1–5 range to an enjoyable 6–9.

However, that’s not everything.

There’s a last piece of the puzzle that would help us solve the ranking system problem, and that is youth.

When we are children, we know very little about the external world. We are a white piece of paper on which any experience can write something. In our innocence, both negative and positive adventures are incredible, both because we aren’t aware of the danger but also because we don’t care too much about it.

It takes time to refine this complex ranking system that would define our choices for the entire life, but once it fossilizes, it becomes incredibly hard to change if you are not aware of how it works.

The ranking method builds our character, and we can’t remove it. Throughout this system, we learned to split opportunities in things we liked, and we’d love to repeat, and those we hated. So we create a mental map in our head, trying to prevent any unhappy situations to live only the acceptable or the pleasurable ones. But living in a 5–10 range is dangerous and unproductive. Over time, our fives will become ones, our eights will become sixes, and our tens unreachable. The ranking system will shrink many times, and before you know it, you will remain stuck, searching for a ten that will never come.

However, you can change your internal system if you act intentionally and stop over-protecting yourself.

Take every opportunity with your open hands, don’t escape situations that seem stupid or awful, say yes to more things, and you will enlarge your ranking system again.

You don’t want to live in a 6–10 system, and not even in a 0–10 system if possible. You want to experience so many opportunities to need a 0–100 ranking system to rank them fairly. The more different emotions you take in, the broader and complex your life will be, full of nuances of different feelings.

Still, don’t throw yourself in every event out there. Take one step at a time instead. Your body has to adapt to this new environment, so here are three things to always keep in mind that could help you in your transformative path.

The Three Rules of Appreciation

Don’t be picky

Opportunities are there for you to take them, but they don’t stay forever. If someone invites you to go out, accept it, even if you are not sure about it. The host may not be your favorite, but it could bring a valuable lesson in your life.

If you stop being picky, you will find gratitude. So accept any experience that comes your way and be grateful for the possibility to have lived them.

Still, there’s a big difference between accepting more and accepting anything. Of course, your experience will influence your choices, and if you know that you hate the mountain, you won’t plan a trip to Everest. But if a couple of friends plan a high-altitude trip, and they invite you, consider the offer before declining impulsively. Even if you hate the place, your friends may reverse your experience, and you could enjoy it more than you imagined.

Extract a lesson from each experience

The key to finding gratitude and fulfillment from enlarging your ranking system is in the lessons you can extract from each experience you live. Glorious memories make us feel great, and we should be grateful for them, but poor memories are on another level.

Unpleasant experiences teach you how to live and how to manage stressful and painful situations. Without the bad, you couldn’t recognize good. The one without the other doesn’t exist, so if you over-protect yourself from pain, you won’t be able to identify pleasure anymore.

Every successful person went through terrible periods before they became who they are today. Without the sufferings, they wouldn’t have worked so much to reach their goals, and we would have never known about them.

Don’t compare yourself with others

Comparing ourselves to others is an insidious error, but it damages us more than procrastination, bad habits, or overwork. We trained to compare our performances with those of our fellows since primary school when they give us grades. But this behavior becomes problematic later in life.

One day, we may see our old mates starting families, major life projects, and reach incredible goals. So we compare their achievements with ours, and we underestimate ourselves.

We use double standards, undermining our achievements, and overvaluing theirs. It seems like everything in their life is easy, while we strive in pain, trying to reach our goals.

Also, we lost the ability to transform that brief slip of envy into determination we could use to better our condition. So comparing ourselves to others becomes a double problem because it makes us feel bad, and it doesn’t allow us to improve.

Experience the Ranking System

One last thing that could help you improve your ranking system is to practice actively ranking after every experience, keeping in mind the best and the worst as reference marks. By doing that, you can expand your system and move from a 5–10 to a 0–10, a 0–20, or even a 0–100.

The wider your ranking system is, the more you will appreciate most experiences, and you’ll be able to extract gratitude from them. An experience you would rank a three would only be better than a zero, one or two experience in a 0–10 ranking system. Otherwise, if you use a 0–100 ranking system, a 30 will be better than every experience between 0 and 29.

Be grateful for every adventure. In case you forget, keep this link somewhere safe.