Chris Meistre

Each of us lives with our own version of a Rulebook for Life.  Herein are the standards and the rules we have set out for ourselves that we adhere to when making decisions or react to situations.

When you are born, your rulebook is pretty empty.  As you grow up your rulebook is written in by all the people around you.  Your parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, teachers, preachers and so on.  The rules includes things like being polite, having good manners, respecting elders, and so on.

By the time you’re a teenager you start testing these rules one by one.

It is during this time that we find ourselves and figure out what we want to do with our lives.  The rules you agree with you start writing in your own Rulebook of Life.  This will become the book that you life by for the rest of your life.

Sometimes the rules we write down are very rigid, and this sets us up for disappointment.  If you were taught that someone will always excuse themselves after burping and all of a sudden you find a person that burps without excusing themselves, you’ll go into panic mode not knowing what to do.  This person has broken _THE_ rules, how dare they?  It’s easier if your rule was that it would be good if a person excuses themselves after burping.  That way, if a person doesn’t do it you’re not too worried about it.

Once you’ve been living with a rule in your life for quite some time, it’s going to take a lot from you to change it.  But if you believe you need to change it and once you change it, you will be better of for it!

So… what does your Rulebook say?

What’s the reason for us being in relationships?

I was recently asked this question, after I answered what I thought it was, I was given another perspective on it.  It really got me to think about the way we approach life.

Whether you are in a business-, friendship-, love- or any other relationship, you are in it for one reason: To add value to the other person’s life. It’s as easy as that. If you’re in a love relationship, you are in it to add value to your wife’s life. If you’re in a business relationship with a client, you are in it to add value to their lives. If you’re in a friendship relationship, you’re in it to add value to their lives.

And what do you get out of it?

Well, you get value added to your life! Think about it, why else would you spend time with someone? If you weren’t getting anything out of it, you’d be wasting your time. To be able to get the real value out of it, you shouldn’t concentrate on what you’re getting out of it though. That is where the problem lies in with the way people think today. It’s always about what YOU (or I) can GET out of it, and not about what YOU (or I) can DO.

Advise that will help you relationship

Next time you’re about to do or say anything just think for 1 second if what you’re about to do or say will add value to the other person’s life.  Remember, you are there to add value to the other person’s life!

Fight Club is still one of the best movies I’ve seen.  It wasn’t because of the fighting in the movie, but rather about the underlying message.  The most mentioned of the Fight Club Quotes is “It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything“.

What makes that quote so remarkable is that during this time of recession, a lot of people have had to part with their worldly possession.  The same possessions that have defined who they are for such a long time.  Now that it has been taken away, who are they?

But what this quote is really about is deconstructing and analysing what is happening around you in your world.  By doing this you gain a better understanding of who or what you are. 

Read more Fight Club Quotes.

We all have them in our lives….. you know who I mean.  That person that is the first to point out something wrong when you say something that isn’t accurate, the person that comes up with 10 excuses to not do something or the person that keeps on complaining about life and how hard it is.

All of us have a positive and a negative side to our lives.  That is what makes us human and balanced.  The good and the bad.  Yin and yang. A problem arises though when we tend to dwell on one of the sides for too long a time.  It starts to engulf us and that is what we become.  You can either be too negative or believe it or not, too positive.  I’d much rather be too positive though, but it annoys people more

How do you point out the negative people in your life?

Think to yourself who of your friends or family have said or done any of these things just once too often in the last couple of weeks.

1. You come up with a suggestion of something to do and you tell them about it.  Within 5 minutes of you telling them your plan you are given 10 reasons why whatever you want to do won’t work.  There is a need for people like this in your life, but it does get depressing if they can immediately give you 10 reasons why something cannot happen and not even 1 reason why it might be a good idea.  Take the idea to another person and you’re given 10 reasons why it’s a good idea and 1 reason why it’s a bad idea….
2. You’re happy to be alive and want to share it with the person.  Within 5 minutes of being in their company your energy is just drained away by their attitude.  It might not really be directed at you, but it still drains you.  Don’t confuse this with someone that needs to lean on you every now and then, because that is what friends and family are there for.  I’m talking about that friend that wants to lean on you at least 4 times a week.
3. According to them the world is always against them and everything bad always happens to them.  Or they just have “nothing”.  This is not to be confused with someone that actually has nothing, opposed to your friend or family member that has a car, a house, a job, food on the table and spare money to spend on other arbitrary stuff.
4. People feel uneasy around them and do whatever they can do rather not be in their company.  You’ll find that if a room of 20 people is filled with laughter and joy, it only takes one person to come in to spoil the mood with their negativity.
5. That person that always thinks the worse will happen, and live in fear because of it.  Worrying for instance that going out to the shop someone might run you over in the street doesn’t make sense if you consider that thousands of people are killed in their homes every month.
6. Those people that complain that they have too much work to do and then when there’s less work to be done they complain there is too little work to be done.

What can you do?

Do your utmost not to let them drag you down.  It’s very difficult because it does drain a lot of your energy.  If you feel that being in the company of such people is not worth your effort, rather just avoid them and get on with your life.  Don’t whine with them or talk about “tough times”, rather keep a positive outlook on things and tell them about it.

Make the decision

Being positive is all about setting your mind to it.  I’m by no stretch of anyone’s imagination always a positive person, but I try my best.  For most of the time I have the ability to look at whatever life wants to throw at me and see the positive side to it.  Some things in life I just cannot see a positive side to though.  Things like rape, murder, child abuse, animal abuse and other things I just cannot imagine people doing.

There are hundreds and thousands of books you can read about being a better person or looking at life in a different way.  None of them will help if you don’t decide that you want to be a positive person.

Find out how other people are living, or visit a charity close to your home to see how bad people can really have it.  That will make you appreciate what you have.  No matter how bad it’s going in your life, someone somewhere has got a lot more problems than you.  When we watched Long Way Down and Long Way Round a few days ago, it was wonderful to see how even when cities and villages are clearly living in poverty, they still go out of their way to be friendly and give what little they have to other people, even if they were strangers.  Surely if someone that has NOTHING is able to be positive, I am sure you can find it somewhere in your mind to be positive.

Be happy negative people want to be around you

An article I read a while back gave a nice flip side to this story about negative people.  Everything in this world is about opposites attracting.  That is why you have such funny relationships between people.  Naturally a negative person will be attracted to a positive person, and for some perverse reason positive people will be attracted to negative people.  So if you find yourself surrounded by negative people, give yourself a pat on the back.  You are either a very positive person and people want to feed off it, or you’re just a sucker for punishment…. choose better friends.

Remember

Don’t be too critical of negative people, because remember, deep down we all are negative.  At least at one point in your life you too will feel down and that everything around you is just against you, but it too will pass…. hopefully.

It has been drilled into us by society that the only way you can be worth something is if you are working hard and constantly.  I know this because I feel the same.  For 10 years Bernadette and I have been running CM Computer Services.  And in those 10 years we have been working our asses off…. and for what?  Working hard just seemed like the right thing to do.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to say that working hard is a bad thing, but I’d rather work clever than work hard.

2 years ago I was in an accident that had me on my back for about 2 months.  It was this accident that made me realise life is too short to waste it working 15 hours a day.  It also made me realise that even though we always expect the worse to happen, it very seldom does happen.  I expected our business to go under and us to lose everything during those 2 months because if I wasn’t working, no money was coming in.  Sure it was difficult for those 2 months, and even for a few afterwards while we were getting back on track, but we survived.   I actually think we are better off afterwards than we were before.  I cut down my working time to 8-5 in the day, and switched off my cellphone during the evenings and on weekends.

Needless to say, I got to spend a whole lot more time with my wife and doggies.  We went walking on the beach, cycling, went away weekends to camp and explore the Eastern Cape in our 4×4 adventures. We NEVER used to take holidays, except when we had to close over Christmas holidays.

So cutting down on working hours surely caused me to lose a lot of business right?  That is what I also initially thought would happen, but it didn’t.  I’ll admit that we did lose clients, but looking back I asked myself whether I really wanted them as clients.  On the whole though, everything started going better.

I then got an employee to start helping out again, something which I thought I would never do again.  This allowed me to take off more days in order to explore other things that I wanted to get involved with. The longer he had worked for us, the more comfortable I became with letting go of some of the stuff I held on and let him take control of those things.

This past weekend Bernadette and I reflected a bit on this, and how people perceive us.  This reflection is brought on by this book that we’ve been reading. We both used to have the mind set that the harder you work, the better we are and the more acceptable we will be in our social circles.  Although we’re trying to change it, it still creeps back every now and then and you feel yourself talking about how hard you are working.  Or when people make a comment about us taking off so many Fridays to go on a 4×4 trip, we feel the need to defend ourselves and say that we are still working hard.  Why do we care what these people think though?  It shouldn’t matter to us because we know that we work hard, but we work clever, which allows us to have the free time to go and do what we want to do.  It just comes down that it been drilled into us that it’s the way society wants us to be, WORKING HARD.  We would rather work clever or at other times to make sure we’ve got the free time when we want it.  If this means working a bit later on a Thursday to be able to get the Friday off, then we do it.  We also put in systems to help us with the work load.  Simple things like only checking email at certain times of the day, not leaving your Skype open during the day, scheduling to do certain tasks at certain times, all helps us to complete other work quicker and without distractions.

How many times don’t you hear someone say in a conversation, “I have to work this whole weekend again”, or “I was at the office until 11 pm last night”.  I hear it way too often, but, I’m very guilty in saying things like that as well.  Maybe subconsciously to get recognition for it.  Or how often do you start a conversation with a complete stranger by asking them what they do?  It boils down again that we judge people by what work they do and how hard they work at it.  Next time you hear me say something like that, kick me.  Just remind me why you’re kicking me at the time though

What would happen if you stopped working so many long hours and started concentrating on your life?  You’d be much happier and you would probably be able to finish your work a whole lot faster than you realise.  Just cut the time wasting stuff out of your daily routine.

I think what we need to do is start finding out what is important to US, and then concentrate on that to find your self recognition in doing what you love doing  Don’t let your job define who you are and what your limitations are.