Life

4 Steps to Loving Your Ordinary Life

10.21.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 17 Comments

4 Steps to Accepting the Worst Parts of Yourself

Let’s start with the bitter truth:

You will never be as good as you think you should be.

And life will never be as easy as you expected.

All of us are faced with the same reality. There will inevitably be times when we slip up and fail to meet our (unreasonable) expectations of ourselves. It’ll likely happen quite often too. And if we don’t embrace these slip-ups and failures as necessary lessons learned, we will gradually and unknowingly become self-conscious about everything we’re not doing and achieving according to planned.

Honestly, it happens every day to the best of us—we hopelessly catch ourselves thinking about how we’re falling short.

We worry that we [Read more…]

5 Hard Questions that Can Save a Life (and Spare Some Pain)

10.14.2019 by Angel Chernoff // 17 Comments

5 Hard Questions that Can Save a Life (and Spare Some Pain)

We waste our lives waiting for ideal paths to appear in front of us. But they never do. Because we forget that paths are made by walking, not waiting.

There’s nothing more disheartening than a perfectly healthy, reasonably affluent human being with the whole world in her hands who’s chronically unhappy and unproductive. There’s really no excuse for it either, yet Marc and I see this phenomenon unfolding every single day—people who choose to be stuck in misery and refuse to admit it. This mindset often results from an extremely unbalanced life—one with too much expectation and not enough discipline and appreciation.

The bottom line is that when you have very little discipline for accomplishing new things, and very little gratitude for what you already have, you’ll never know the true joy of making progress in life, because nothing will ever change, and even when it does, it will never be good enough in your mind.

So, how do you cultivate balance in life when everything is already so far out of whack?

For a decade now, Marc and I have [Read more…]

7 Hard Things You Should Start Doing for Others

10.07.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 36 Comments

7 Hard Things You Should Start Doing for Others

Don’t just rant online for a better world. Love your family. Be a good neighbor. Practice kindness. Build bridges. Embody what you preach. Today. And always.

About a decade ago, at one o’clock in the morning, my grandpa who was suffering from Alzheimer’s got up, got into my car and drove off. Angel and I contacted the police, but before they could find him, two college kids pulled into our driveway with my grandpa. One was driving him in my car and the other was following in their car. They said they overheard him crying about being lost at an empty gas station 10 miles away. My grandpa couldn’t remember our address, but gave the kids his first and last name. They looked him up online, found our address, and drove him home.

I was randomly reflecting on that incident today while sitting near the edge of a beautiful ocean-side cliff in San Diego. As I stared off into the distance, the sudden awareness of footsteps behind me startled me. I turned around to see a young lady who was almost in tears slowly walking to where I was sitting. I jumped up, walked up to her and asked, “What’s wrong?” She told me she was deathly [Read more…]

10 Excuses the Mind Will Tell You Before You Take the Next Step

09.30.2019 by Angel Chernoff // 15 Comments

10 Excuses the Mind Will Tell You Before You Take the Next Step

STARTING NOW: NO shortcuts. NO quick fixes. NO blaming others. NO “I’ll do it tomorrows.” NO MORE EXCUSES!

The mind is a wonderful thing. It’s also an excuse-making machine that frequently tries to convince us not to take actions we know are good for us. And this prevents many positive changes from taking place in our lives.

I’ve had to learn to watch these excuses very carefully in order to make the positive changes I’ve made in my life: a healthier diet, regular exercise, meditation, more sleep, daily writing, better planning, less procrastination, more focus, etc.

If I hadn’t learned about these excuses, and how to suppress them, I would never have succeeded in making these positive changes. In fact, until I knew better, I had failed countless times when I was young because my mind’s deceptive tendencies used to get the best of me.

So why does the mind mess with us and make irrational excuses?

Because the mind wants comfort, that’s why. It’s afraid of discomfort, pressure and change. The mind is absorbed in its comfort zone, and anytime we try to stretch that zone too far, for too long, the mind tries desperately to get back to ground zero at any cost—including sacrificing our long-term health, happiness and success.

So let’s expose 10 of the cowardly mind’s most damaging excuses once and for all… [Read more…]

5 Reasons My 90-Year-Old Grandma Smiled on Her Deathbed

09.23.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 41 Comments

5 Reasons My 90-Year-Old Grandma Smiled on Her Deathbed

“You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.”
― Mae West

Fifteen years ago, I was lucky enough to witness the humble, elegant, peaceful passing of my 89-year-old grandpa. As I sat quietly in his hospice room alongside my grandma and other family members, his nurse smiled softly and said, “I can see he lived well. People his age often pass just the way they lived.”

And as I drove home that evening, a couple questions kept cycling through my mind…

“Am I living well?”

“What do I want to be able to smile about on the inside when I’m on my deathbed?”

These questions are tough, especially the second one. At the time, I desperately struggled to envision myself on my deathbed—just thinking about it stressed me out. So I simply avoided the question and the healthy soul searching it demanded of me. I distracted myself for a few more years until I found myself back in a hospice room with my 90-year-old grandma (who was the most amazing human being I’ve ever met, by the way).

On the final day of her life, I sat with my grandma for the entire day, in silence, in laughter, in tears, and in awe of a woman who was still smiling and sharing stories despite incredible weakness and pain. Her mind was amazingly strong [Read more…]