The Single Most Life-Changing, Positive Lesson I’ve Learned In Life

6 min readDec 12, 2020

Nicolas Cole Instagram

I was sitting in the middle of the forest with nothing but a tent, a small bag of fruits and nuts, a shovel, and a roll of toilet paper.

Each of us was given a space in this forest to spend 3 days by ourselves.

It was the afternoon, and for miles all I could see were trees and trees. There were no sounds other than the crackling of leaves under my shoes when I would pace my space back and forth. Every once in a while, I would test the silence and let out a scream, wanting to see how long it would echo.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

It carried into the distance for a moment and then faded. …

So many people believe that you are either one or the other:

You’re either the ADD creative who can’t sit still for five minutes at a time, but wildly brilliant.

Or…

You’re the OCD task manager who lives for sticky notes, spiral-bound planners, and excel spreadsheets.

But the truth is, you need both.

If you are the manic creative with no sense of structure, you might have the most amazing ideas in the world but you will be incapable of bringing them to life.

On the flip side, you might be extremely organized and diligent, but unless you are willing to let yourself explore outside your comfort zone and get a little creative, you will never be able to create something valuable on your own. …

Short post, but this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately.

The road to happiness is counterintuitive.

If you want to be happy in the long term, you almost always have to be “unhappy” in the short term.

Let’s say you want to be happy with your body in the long term.

Short-term happiness would be eating the bag of Skittles in your desk drawer.

The Skittles will give you an instant rush.
They’ll taste fantastic.
And then they’ll spike your insulin and tell your body, “Now is a great time to store fat.”

You’ve made yourself happy in the short term, but sacrificed long-term happiness.

The converse of this would be deciding to eat a healthy lunch, or have a green smoothie instead.

Is a healthy lunch so amazingly tasty that you feel a rush of happiness in the moment? …

When we talk about the traits that make people successful, the usual suspects are: confidence, persistence, patience, etc.

We tend to reduce “success” down to the simple formula of:

Belief in yourself + Running the marathon.

And for the most part, I’d agree that is its most common denominator.

But what about all the other little traits you have to pick up along the way?

What about the little things you have to learn to make the most out of that path?

Here are five unconventional traits that I have seen carry some very successful people forward:

1. Humor

The ability to laugh and lighten a room is contagious.

When you laugh, or you make someone else laugh, others can’t help but join in. …

Let me tell you a story.

Eight years ago (has it been almost a decade already?) I graduated from college with a degree in creative writing — a degree most people in my life thought was a fast-track to a barista job at Starbucks.

Not me.

I loved to write. And I was determined to find a way to turn writing into a viable career.

My last class of senior year, my teacher (a published and “successful” author himself) said, “The publishing industry is dead.”

This had become our mantra all throughout college: nobody makes a living as a writer.

My peers hung their heads, defeated.