I grew up in South Florida, in a city called Coral Gables. It's a little place with Spanish-named streets and avenues just south of Miami International Airport and north of UM. We had streets like Granada Boulevard, Santander and Malaga. I lived on a rather french sounding street called LeJeune road.
After I graduated from Coral Gables high school (home of the cavaliers), I went to Florida International University. I believe there where around 30,000 students my freshman year, which meant there were a lot of young, beautiful girls, fraternities and parties.
There were also classes, of course, but most of college life was about having fun.
I worked in retail most of my high school years. I worked at shops at the mall like Old Navy, Pacific Sunwear and sold computers for a while at a place called CompUSA on Kendall Road. In college, though, I decided I needed something a little more fun, so I went to bartending school and went to work at bars and clubs in Coconut Grove.
The party scene is Miami is superb.
Great DJs, amazing women, and top quality drugs & alcohol.
A little drugs and alcohol didn't do any harm to anybody, right?
I worked at one of the top clubs in The Grove: Oxygen Lounge. As an employee, I could party at the club on my off night and I didn't even have to stand in line. Hell, I didn't even have to go through the front door. I came in through the kitchen, and I could bring a girl with me if I wanted to. An amazing way to impress the ladies.
It was so much fun.
But you also start hanging out with the wrong kind of people. Worst of all, is that you start copying some behaviors in an attempt to be accepted in this group.
your good friends and the people that love you start calling you less and you start seeking out other people that are not going to give you a hard time for wanting to party all the time.
And if you're not careful, after that you don't want to hang out with those people anymore. You start hanging out with new people who party even MORE, drink MORE and do MORE drugs.
You will devolve among the lowest common denominator in the group.
These are known as lower companions.
Now, you don't have to be an alcoholic or a drug addict to understand what I mean by lower companions, and OK, maybe I went a little dramatic there, but think about this: have you ever been surrounded by people your age that just spawned in the environment that they're in but don't do anything to take control of their lives and just keep doing the same thing that they always did?
Oh, This is just who I am, man
It can be difficult to break out of that.
The idea of people who don't push you to show up as your better self and have your best interest at heart comes in many forms.
We sometimes mistakenly think that the world is just the way it is.
people are the way they are.
The universe is in some kind of stasis or equilibrium.
WRONG!
Everything is changing, all the time, from the subatomic level to the great cosmos, things are always in motion. The question is are you doing things that get you closer or push you further away from your true self?
There's no instruction manual for taking control of your life.
You just need to start having tiny little behavioral changes that nobody notices or celebrates and tou need to step into the unknown without any guarantees of any kind.
and repeating these tiny changes over time is what produces change.
perseverance.
being able to do hard things.
Saying no to drinking or consuming on a Friday.
Avoiding that soda.
Working out for 15 minutes.
Wake up at 6:00am.
The stoics talk about "when you make beautiful choices, you are beautiful".
It might seem like we're losing our freedom, but we're really becoming free.
The commitments we make to ourselves will start to develop that muscle and have positive effects in the future.
As soon as you start living your life with actions that are in accordance with the best version of yourself, you'll start attracting people whose life you will improve and you'll improve in the process.
Art, sports, literature, cooking, traveling, business, history, health, well-being.
People have many different interests and you can learn a little about all those things all while developing and growing from your own talents, hobbies and experiences.
This is how I feel right now.
I'm surrounded by friends I look up to and who I'm constantly learning from. I've found friends who are amazing chefs, activists, athletes and entrepreneurs who are happy to see me make progress.
I'm not saying I've got life figured out, by any stretch of the imagination, but I definitely feel like a better version of myself that when I was in college, and I feel that I'm surrounded by friends who are teaching me, learning from me and helping make the world a better place, one memory at a time.
It's getting late now.
I think I'll hit the sack.
Thoughts?
All images generated by me using Mid Journey.
