I have this picture on the main screen of my phone that says “Your better off with a kick-ass half than a half-assed whole.”
It keeps me in check, and I feel like it’s such a simple truth. Often we spend so much time working on everything, trying to blanket the things we need to fix or work on.
It’s like those airplanes you see spraying pesticides over the fields.
If you do that with your life, you end up with the same result, poison in your roots.
I never ask myself to be perfect. In fact, I hate that concept.
There have been some moments in the past that people have said, “You are perfect” and I cringed. Perfection really doesn’t exist. Its not that I don’t like the compliment, but it’s really just not the truth.
I don’t want to be perfect. You can be perfect for someone, but still, how much of that is real, and how much is imagined.
I don’t expect myself to be perfect because I know that making mistakes is how I grow. In my life, I would spend my time 10 times out of 10 with someone who is flawed but willing to grow and learn, up against a perfectionist who thinks they have life figured.
Watch what happens to these two plants when a drought hits. The first adapts and adjusts, the other withers away and dies.
Never ask the people in your life to be perfect.
Accept them for their flaws and if you really do care about them, then stick with them no mater what. Your best friends are the ones that know everything about you and still like you.
That is a very hard fact to accept, but truly being vulnerable with someone you trust is your best way to combat fear. Those people who know what you have gone through will suit up in armor and go to battle with you.
There are a handful of people in my life that I would go to war with, simply because they needed me. I am a loyal soul. Honesty is the only way you can be 100% real with yourself and true friends with others.
Your friends and loved ones will make mistakes…sometimes their mistakes will hurt you. But they have been there through the thick and the thin, give them another drive off the tee after they slice their first shot into the rough.
Rarely, if you let those people go when things go bad, can you find them again. Not everyone plays with a fluorescent ball that you can see in the forrest.
What is your kick-ass half? I have been down the route before of trying to cover everything at once.
Now, I take it one day at a time, one thing at a time. I repeatedly look back over the posts I have written, no matter how hard some of them are for me to read.
I love working on becoming a better man, but I also realize that I can’t be absolutely everything.
I was given some God given talents and aspects of my life that I must use. Put it this way, I will never be a Buddhist monk, because that is not my calling.
But I sure can learn from them and pray like them in order to soften some of the edges in my life. This life we live in can be hell sometimes.
Lets just face it. Sometimes things happen that we thought were impossible.
Nothing is impossible. Fact: you will be stripped of things that you hold most dearly. For me though, no matter the demolition crew that comes through my life, there are some buildings that they cannot knock down.
I spent some serious time reinforcing those puppies. Instead of suffering endlessly, find the courage to grieve and then recover.
Along the path, we lose ourselves.
Sometimes, we really lose ourselves. But you know what the beautiful part about life is?
Its that in the hell that we go through every day, there are people who will still love us no matter what.
No matter how hard or far we try to push them away, the ones that really love us, will stay loyally by our sides, even if you don’t see them doing it.
Even more, they will fight for us. They will fight for what they believe in, which is being there no matter the size of the wall in the way.
They will find a way to break through it, climb over it, dig under it, and go around it. But don’t expect everyone to do this for you, they are needles in a hay stack.
Do your best to see those people in your life, and hold them tight.
They do this for only one reason: they love you.
Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project