The Single-Most Important Thing You Can Do to Change Your Life

A few days ago, I stumbled across an inspiring Tweet from Justin Welsh, a solopreneur, that shared the 48 things he learned on his way to success.

Things like, If you don’t respect people’s time, they won’t respect you, Everyone has the same 24 hours. It’s how you use it, and Nobody is coming to save you.

Good stuff like that.

It was brilliant. I loved it.

Except for one.

One of them really bothered me. A lot.

And that is one thing I’ve learned on my journey so far: when something bothers you, when it triggers you, there is something more to it.

It’s information. There is something there if you are willing to dig for it.

So I went digging.

Tip #21. You don’t need meditation and sunlight. You need action.

Seems simple enough.

But not for me.

That one has bothered since the moment I read it.

Now, if you know anything that I talk about and share, I am all about taking action.

Action is truly the only thing that will change your life.

So why, then, did Tip #21 bother me so much?

Because action is truly the only thing that will change your life maybe.

Here’s why.

“The world will ask who you are, and if you do not know, the world will tell you.” Carl Yung.

Action without awareness, is well, bullshit. You need to know who exactly you are and where exactly you want to go.

How do you do that?

Meditation. Meditation gives you awareness. And awareness changes everything.

Meditation was the single most important thing that I have ever done in my life to change my life. The moment I found out what conscious awareness was that first time I sat down to meditate, my life was altered forever. And, I’m sure I’m not alone here, sunlight completely changes my life.

Saying you don’t need meditation and sunlight implies three things: 1) That he is unaware of the mountain of evidence supporting the massive benefits of both meditation and sunlight on mood, anxiety, depression, BDNF, learning and memory, sleep, and the list goes on, 2) He has not had to go into the, as Terrence Real so aptly calls it, the “wasteland” and use meditation and sunlight to help crawl out, or 3) He has forgotten.

It is common, and very easy, to “forget”. In fact, our minds are wired in such a way that we have to forget. The simple act of experiencing a new experience forever changes the way we view and experience the world.

In his outstanding book, Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert outlines this perfectly:

“We cannot simply set an experience aside and see the world as we would have seen it had the experience never happened. To the judge’s dismay, the jury cannot disregard the prosecutor’s snide remarks. Our experiences instantly become part of the lens through which we view our entire past, present, and future, and like any lens, they shape and distort what we see. This lens is not like a pair of spectacles that we can set on the nightstand when we find it convenient to do so but like a pair of contacts that are forever affixed to our eyeballs with superglue.”

A big part of me strongly believes that in order to find yourself, to find real success and happiness in life, a person must walk through their version of darkness. Whatever that may be.

How can we know the light if we don’t go through the dark?

So maybe Justin’s success has simply altered the way he once viewed meditation and sunlight. Or maybe he never “did” those things in the first place. Although, I still have no idea how one gains conscious awareness without meditation.

They say you never forget your first time.

I agree.

The moment I “saw myself” experiencing my experience while sitting in a chair in my basement and “hearing” random thoughts pop into my head from some unknown place is a moment I will never forget.

It’s a superpower, the ability to not only imagine a future, but to have the awareness to choose one’s future.

“In fact, there’s really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is conscious experience. Seeing the Great Pyramid or remembering the Golden Gate or imagining the Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them. What’s more, one of these remarkable acts is even more remarkable than the others. To see is to experience the world as it is, to remember is to experience the world as it was, but to imagine — ah, to imagine is to experience the world as it isn’t and has never been, but as it might be. The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future.”

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Of course, you can’t be aware all the time. Actually, that’s impossible. Your brain is always predicting the future, or “nexting”, without you ever knowing. It’s doing it right now as you read these words.

But what if you could be aware of your conscious experience, sometimes? That would be a super, superpower.

Meditating gives you that superpower, and to imply otherwise, simply undermines the purpose of taking action in the first place.

Just “take action” misses the most important element: you need to be aware of the action you are taking and why you are taking that action. Otherwise, what’s the point?

I’ve taken a lot of action in my life. But I wasn’t aware of any of it. Zip. Zero. Zilch.

And, well, that didn’t end up so well for me.

So, yea. You need meditation. Or better yet, you need awareness, and the only way (that I know of) to get it is through meditation.

I know what Welsh was saying in “You don’t need meditation and sunlight. You need action.” I’ve wanted to say that to a lot of people: Stop overthinking and wasting time on things that don’t make real progress and get to work!

But I don’t say that. That would be incorrect. And it so subtly undermines the importance of self-care.

It is that simple maxim that you need to fill your own cup before you can fill someone else’s.

The same applies here.

Meditation is essential to progress. To action.

Sunlight is essential to progress. To action.

Okay. Maybe you can go without sunlight and take a Vitamin D supplement the rest of your life, but what fun is that?

And that’s another thing about sunlight. It’s not just mood, depression, sleep (you know, important things for life), but also Vitamin D, which is turning out to play a far more pivotal role in our overall health than we ever knew.

So yea. You need sunlight as well.

I bet he lives in a warm place that doesn’t have harsh winters, like some experience. Just saying.

The thing is this: we can all experience reality. We can take action and experience it. However, awareness of an event is an entirely different experience.

“Experience implies participation in an event, whereas awareness implies observation of an event. The two words can normally be substituted in ordinary conversation without much damage, but they are differently inflected. One gives us the sense of being engaged, whereas the other gives us the sense of being cognizant of that engagement.”

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness

Maybe it’s just semantics picking on Tip #21, but I feel like there is an important, and necessary distinction to be made.

You need to meditate to gain awareness around your experiences.

Otherwise, you are just taking action.

And this isn’t even touching on how meditation helps regulate responses to external stimuli, which is necessary for success. Or the regulation of emotions, which is necessary for success. Or the benefits it may lend to problem solving. Also necessary for success.

I never thought I would be so inclined to write an article in defense of meditation. Ask me a year ago, and I would have told you that you’ve clearly lost your marbles. Well, maybe it’s me who’s lost his marbles.

Although this article didn’t dive into sunlight as much, Get. More. Sunlight.

Or be like most people and spend an estimated 90% of your life indoors.

Yuck.

No thanks.

Now go meditate.

Change your life.

And, oh yea, did I mention to get sunlight?

You’ll be glad you did.

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