Four Steps Outside the Rules

If you are born in the western world in a classic and ‘normal’ family, the rules are very simple:

Go to school, choose a career or a job, buy something, get a mortgage (maybe), get married, have children, expect promotions and a salary increase, buy something else, retire, die.

Some side effect of these rules might be: separations and eventual divorces, one or two job dismissals, sporadic lovers…

No wonder I see so many sad, stressed and depressed people around me ...

But rules don’t mean truth.

Rules are something most people follow, a belief system, a habit, but this doesn’t imply that they are the best or the only way.

Frankly, if that is the rule, I want to be the exception.

What does it mean for me to be the exception?

It means going back to think and choose my life.

It means stopping to adapt and beginning to create my own chances.

It means living with meaning.

It isn’t that hard to implement a lifestyle like this. I can draft it in four simple steps, and maybe this way you will remember it as the “four steps outside the rules”.

First of all: take care of you. 

This is not a vindication of selfishness, just a healthy awareness. If you take care of yourself first and learn to give yourself what makes you happy, you will be happy (finally!). When you are happy you are a better person for the world and you stop putting your weight on other peoples’ shoulders.

Second: have a vision for yourself, rather than buying into or adapting to someone else’s vision. Why should you always adapt to the expectations of others? Why can’t you try to imagine yourself as you would like to be and make a plan to achieve this vision? When did you stop believing in yourself?

Third: choose meaning, not ambition.

It is natural to feed your ambitions, but haven’t you realised yet that your ambitions aren’t making you 100% happy? How many things have you got and how many achievements have you collected, but still your heart feels empty? Ambitions give you fulfillment only when they have a positive effect on the lives of others, when they contribute to a greater good…

Fourth: give before you take or, even better, give without taking. This step is really subversive. Who professes it gets usually plenty of enemies.

Giving for me is being open without limitations and preconceptions to life’s possibilities: it means choosing intuition rather than logic, it means engaging fully, it means being authentic and no longer being afraid, it means being free. When you choose to live on this “giving frequency” everything magically starts to happen exactly as you have imagined it.

Look around yourself and you will soon discover that the truly happy people are all, in their unique way, "exceptions"..