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50.000
Our thoughts have created this beautiful world we live in.
And if we’re not careful, it will be destroyed by our thoughts as well.
We have about 50,000 of them daily, which doesn’t even include our feelings. That’s between two and three thousand per hour, depending on our brain activity. The process continues while we’re sleeping.
How, on earth, do we make sense of those 50.000 little pieces of brilliance or distraction?
How do we choose to engage with one or the other?
Which ones are relevant for our happiness or our misery?
What filters do we use to select which we want to explore further?
Why am I writing this to you on this rainy London morning, commuting from the center of London to Gatwick Airport, where I work with a client?
Because I had a scattered mind yesterday evening and got distracted from what I set out to do just because one task did not go as I wanted.
It started when I was walking to my apartment from work and getting poured on by British rain. I stopped for a quick bite, which was not good quality, only to find out the rain had intensified. I had no umbrella because it had broken the day before. When I was back in the apartment, I thought I would work for 60 minutes on a website I was building, only to finish that task 3 hours later with very little success.
This morning, I woke up early with a scattered mind and trouble focusing during meditation. I decided to push myself harder during my workout, which helped me get my thoughts back on track and focused for the day to come.
It’s one of my tricks or coping mechanisms. It often works, but it’s not guaranteed.
A good workout gets my mind back in order. Today may have been a bad day if I hadn’t done that. Instead, it was a good day (I know now).
The point is that choosing which thoughts to engage with is the difference between success and failure. And no matter which thoughts you choose, you always win. When you choose thoughts that lead to failure, you win. When you choose thoughts that lead to success, you win.
