My new TV came in last night and I threw Creed on it while cleaning up the styrofoam and box.
Creed says he doesn’t have a choice. He has to fight.
The people around him remind him that, hey, it’s actually a choice. You’re kind of stretching “have to” here.
It’s nice when a choice is clear. I gave in to Black Friday ads and bought a TV. That was clearly a choice. (Though I’m sure you’ve seen a deal that made you feel like you had no choice. Time to buy.)
Sometimes you don’t realize you had a choice. If you’re unhappy, you’ve made some choices leading to that state. There are choices you’ll make today that can continue that. Or you can make choices to start turning the ship around.
This reminds me of a question Tim Ferriss brought up in a podcast episode with DHH. He also mentions it in Tools of Titans:
TF: Have you outgrown your systems or beliefs? Is it time that you upgraded? Or, on a personal level, as Jerry Colonna, executive coach to some of the biggest tech stars in Silicon Valley, would ask: “How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?”
A lot of things feel automatic but you probably made choices to create whatever system it is that made it automatic.
In Choose the Life You Want: The Mindful Way to Happiness, Tal Ben-Shahar explains that you have choices all the time:
“In fact, at every moment in our life we have a choice.
RMaybe this realization shouldn’t have come as such a surprise to me. After all, research in psychology illustrates that about 40 percent of our happiness is determined by the choices that we make—what we choose to do and how we choose to think directly impact the way we feel.”
But they’re still choices. And the accumulation of your small choices day in and day out has a lot more power over a lifetime than most single choices.
To make a good choice, practice recognizing that everything is a choice in the first place.
And be grateful that your choices today will probably be smaller than choosing to live your GOAT-boxer father’s legacy and try to rise out of his shadow.