Stepping Aside

So many of the issues we struggle with in life are completely preventable, and it often takes less time and energy to solve them when we remove ourselves as the bottleneck.

Within our neurotic nature, we are always trying to fix things and get involved with as many problems as possible. Inherently that instinct serves a very good purpose, yet we always seem to find a way to add more complexity to our lives and convolute the most simple things.

Delaying response is something that has been tried and tested throughout time. Napoleon Bonaparte, for one, would set aside his mail for a period of two weeks. After that time span was over, he would read his letters and find the exact principle that we can find today: most things solve themselves when we remove ourselves.

Worry, over-analyzing, and dictating decisions can create significant negative outcomes in our lives. To make it even worse, the time we spend trying to solve those problems typically doesn’t give us benefit in the present moment or later in the future. In many instances we are worse off after trying to settle something quickly than if we had waited.

When we step aside and let the world play out as it wishes, many “problems” that we might have otherwise become involved with cease to exist as issues to be solved.

The punch line of this? Most decisions don’t matter, so rather than trying to get every decision right, focus instead on differentiating the important issues from the trivial ones. With choices in life, always go for quality over quantity.

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