Daniel Midson-Short

There is no going back to the way things were before social media. If you choose to use it, or not to use it, both actions have consequences. Both choices have an impact in different ways.

This cultural desire to embrace leisure seems to make us passive. It whittles away our potential. For this reason, the ability to live an easy, relaxed, stress-free life doesn’t seem appealing to me.

When you experience too much comfort, you become captive. Your instincts to grow, to keep reaching for your potential start to dull. In a very real way, you forget who you truly are.

Look at those you admire, and realize what you are really observing. A person who has spent years, sometimes their whole life, developing a specific skill. It might not be obvious the first time you see them, but over time their skill will be what is carrying them.

As an adult, the deepening of friendship requires a deliberate desire. Similar to dating, you have to actively decide to become better friends with someone, and invest some time and interest in getting to know them.

If you spend five years just focused on building one skill, or achieving one goal, you will find all the knowledge you need. It will all be useful to you, and you won’t grow bored of learning about it.

Even in failure, you still gain something. Even if it’s just the knowledge to do it differently next time.

It is very easy to feel like slacking off today, because we haven’t felt the repercussions of the laziness yet. Living with a sense of immediate gratification means that you are essentially damaging your tomorrows.

There is immense power in knowing that nobody cares. It gives you the freedom to pursue what matters and to do it in full view of those people whose opinions you fear.

Our modern lives today are full of excess, but maybe the true value is found in singular moments, singular conversations, singular experiences.

It seems to me that people will blame their emotions or habits for the bad choices they make. But now I can see how not being able to think about something means you are more likely to get it done.

When it comes to social media we avoid showing any negativity of any kind. We don’t post photos where we look ugly, we don’t share our failures, and most of all we don’t tell people what we are really thinking or feeling...

If you are a writer, a speaker, a musician, an actor or an artist, you have to create to feel alive. It’s only because it’s so easy to share our creations today that we start to get addicted to getting attention from them.