(Don’t) Throw it in the Pile

You’ve probably heard the saying: “if everyone threw their problems into a pile, once you saw everyone else’s, you’d take your problems back instead”. One of my advisors recently turned that on its head.

To put what he said in my own words: If everyone threw their good things in a pile next to everyone else, and realized how other people got to their good things we’d all take ours back.

I love that this is what I see as an optimist’s version of the famous example. It challenges what we see, I mean people might have their own value in the process of how they got to where they are, but we often can’t see the path.

Next time you see what you want in another person realize that you don’t know the path they took and that they may have to have given up other things that you care about more to make something else happen.

Maybe your friend who bought a condo at 20 wants to move for a job and can’t,  maybe your friend who made a music album has no savings, and no more songs planned, maybe your friend who just traveled across the world, has a job they hate, and that was how they got away from it.

Who knows though, these are genuinely just hypotheticals.

Know that as you make choices no one’s life is perfect.

As inspired by T.K. Coleman