It Will Always Be Something

There’s a saying, “It’s always in the last place you look.” I believe it was Jerry Seinfeld who quickly retorted something along the lines of, “Of course it is; if you kept looking in more places after you found what you were looking for, you’d be a crazy person.” Obviously, the joke is in the double-meaning of “last place you look”—meaning both the last place where you’d think it would be (and so it took you a long time to find it) and the final place you look before you find it. What’s interesting about this comment is that it is a complaint after success; you have found whatever it is you’re looking for and are still finding a reason to complain about it.

And that’s the reality for many people: they will always find an excuse or reason to complain no matter what happens in their lives. This uncovers several insights that you should take away from this realization if you want to improve your life:

• If you want to feel better about your life, it’s in your hands to choose to focus on the positives or negatives in life—and to feel grateful or miserable as a result.
• If you believe that something is stopping you from doing what you want to do, imagine that barrier being removed and whether you’d actually do it or if it’s just an excuse so you can avoid blaming yourself for not taking action.
• Your brain always finds something to focus on; you’ll never be satisfied, nor will you ever find a shortage of things you wish were better or things you don’t like in this world.
• Complaining after a positive outcome is one of the most counterproductive things you can do; you diminish your own enjoyment, ruin things for the people around you, and even cause people to want to avoid doing nice things for you in the future since you’ll just complain, anyway.
• Often times, good excuses are “cover” for the real reason you won’t do something, such as fear, negative beliefs, or other underlying reasons that you don’t feel comfortable admitting to yourself or others.
• You actually might not really want what you say you want but rather say you want something because it’ll make you look better in the eyes of others.
• Even if you got what you wanted, your habit of complaining will lead you to immediately finding something else to complain about.
  

These insights can help you turn your outlook on life around pretty quickly:

• You can choose to appreciate things.
• You can stop letting barriers stop you from finding ways to make progress in things that you claim to care about.
• If you don’t really want to do something, you can stop lying to yourself and others about it.
• If you have negative beliefs stopping you, you can change them.
• If you are sabotaging your relationships by putting others’ gifts or favors down, you can stop.
• If you know that your brain is constantly looking for something to focus on, you can give it something constructive to do (like giving a dog or a child something to play with so they don’t cause mischief).
• You can “take the W” and let the negatives go when you’ve attained your positive outcome.
  

This is a very straightforward solution to help you improve your life in a variety of ways. It’ll help your mood and outlook on life. It’ll help build positive relationships with others and possibly even attract more positive people into your life. It’ll help you break down barriers and go after what you want. And, probably most importantly, it’ll help you live life without regrets or resentment against the world because you won’t have felt like you were held back (when it was really you holding yourself back).

So the next time you give an excuse or complaint about why you didn’t do something and how your life would be perfect if you could only do X, then ask yourself why you can’t a. be happy despite X and b. how you can not let a setback or barrier stop you from doing what you want or love to do with your life. Because if you don’t overcome your own negative attitude (at best) or self-sabotage (at worst), it will always be something.