I grew up dirt poor.
We didn’t eat every day
and we didn’t live in a house
with running water
(yes, this is in North America).
Whenever I get lazy
or feel dissatisfied with life,
I remember that time in my life.
I remember how tough it was,
how challenging it was
to start from nothing,
and how I never wish
to return to that state.
It inspires me to work.
Mally Roncal,
Founder of
Mally Beauty,
shares
(this entire interview is great)
“You want to stay humble
and you want to stay
very, very focused.
You always have to remember
when you were struggling,
just starting,
and you had this hunger
and you were just going for it;
you always want to keep that
as a part of who you are.
But in the same breath,
you want to smell the roses,
you want to say,
“Wow, I’ve come this far.”
You want to stand
on top of that mountain sometimes
and look down and say,
“Wow, look at what we did!”
I have found, in this world,
it’s hard to do that.
Because we, as women,
tend to be overachievers
and we’re always pushing
and we’re never satisfied
and we always want more, more, more.”
Remember what it was like
to struggle
and use this to push yourself forward.
I thought you might like this…
an interesting read about happiness, and why the brain is wired to notice the negatives more than the positives…
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/10/how-to-build-a-happier-brain/280752/
particularly this part…
On the one hand, due to modernity, many people report that moment to moment, they’re having fairly positive experiences, they’re not being chased by lions, they’re not in a war zone, they’re not in agonizing pain, they have decent medical care. And yet on the other hand, many people today would report that they have a fundamental sense of feeling stressed and pressured and disconnected from other people, longing for closeness that they don’t have, frustrated, driven, etc. Why is that? I think one reason is that we’re simply wasting the positive experiences that we’re having, in part due to modernity, because we’re not taking into account that design bug in the Stone Age brain that it doesn’t learn very well.
For me, by repeatedly taking in the good to grow inner strength, you become much more able to deal with the bad. For me, taking in the good is motivated by the recognition that there’s a lot about life [that] is hard.