Marc and Angel Hack Life

20 Tiny Changes You Can Make in Your Home to Make Life Simpler in 2020

12.28.2019 by Angel Chernoff // 174 Comments

by Joshua Becker, author of The Minimalist Home

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”
—Hans Hofmann

Have incredible stories to tell by the end of 2020, not incredible clutter stuffed in your closets. I sincerely wish this for my family, and yours, in the year ahead.

So, let me start off here by asking you…

Does your home serve you—or do you serve your home?
Will your home afford you the necessary space to create happy, healthy memories and stories in the year ahead?

These are not questions most of us ask ourselves, but we should. After all, our homes are meant to serve a distinct purpose in our lives—to be both the [Read more…]

5 Year-End Notes to Self that Will Move Your Life Forward in 2020

12.23.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 30 Comments

You are not your bad days. You are not your mistakes. You are not your scars. You are not your past. Be here now, and breathe.

Tragedy strikes a woman who isn’t yet old. A minivan traveling toward her on a dark mountain highway hits her car nearly head-on just after sunset. She grips her steering wheel as hard as she can and veers into the rocky mountainside until her car screeches to a halt. The minivan flips onto its side and skids in the other direction off a cliff, plummeting nearly 500 feet to the ground below. Inside, a young family of five on their way to grandma’s house for Christmas Eve dinner.

The woman doesn’t recall the events that followed during the next several days. She doesn’t recall the three eye witnesses who comforted her and assured her that it wasn’t her fault—that the other driver had swerved into her lane. She doesn’t recall how she got to the emergency room or the fact that [Read more…]

30 Daily Challenges to Improve Your Mental Strength (and Happiness)

12.17.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 20 Comments

Think a little less about managing your problems and a little more about managing your mindset.

Mental strength is built through small, daily victories. It’s the individual choices we make daily that build our “mental strength” muscles. We all want this kind of strength, but we can’t wish our way to it. If you want it, you have to do something about it.

It’s time to embrace the fact that the happiness of your life depends on the quality of your daily decisions.

It’s time to challenge yourself to change the way you respond to life… [Read more…]

5 Ideas You Must Leave Behind to Get Ahead in Life

12.10.2019 by Angel Chernoff // 28 Comments

If you don’t allow yourself to move past what happened, what was said, what was felt, you will look at your present and future through that same dirty lens.

You can never change things by holding on to the existing reality. To get ahead in life, you have to leave some things behind and build a new model for living that makes the existing model obsolete.

You must make a firm decision that you’re going to make a change too. It won’t always happen naturally or automatically. Sometimes you will have to rise up against the wind and say, “I don’t care how hard this is! I don’t care how disappointed I am! I’m not going to let this get the best of me! I’m leaving this behind and moving forward with my life!”

Ready?

Starting today, it’s time to leave behind… [Read more…]

7 Assumptions We Need to Stop Making About Other People

12.03.2019 by Marc Chernoff // 26 Comments

Never underestimate a person’s challenges. Everyone is struggling. Some are just better at hiding it than others.

Too often we judge people too quickly, or too subjectively. We tell ourselves stories about them without thinking it through—our perceptions and biases get the best of us. I was reminded of this today when I received the following in an email from a Think Better, Live Better 2020 ticket-holder (I’m sharing this with permission):

“…I learned the hard way that a smile can hide so much—that when you look at a person you never know what their story is or what’s truly going on in their life. This harsh reality became evident to me this morning when I found out one of my top students—always straight A’s, a positive attitude, and a smile on her face—died by suicide last night. Why? Nobody seems to know. And it’s killing me inside.”

Talk about a reality check, right?

What we tell ourselves about others—what we think we know—is often far from the truth.

And with that in mind, I’m sitting here reflecting on all the little things we have to stop assuming about other people, for their sake and ours… [Read more…]