"Life-Changing" Advice

If you consume any sort of self-help content, chances are you'll hear something about a "life-changing" idea. I hate this saying.

Photo by Peter Conlan / Unsplash

If you consume any sort of self-help content, chances are you'll hear something about a "life-changing" idea.

I hate this saying.

Everything we do is life-changing. My decision to drink heavily one night or not at all changes how I feel the following morning, but we don't call that "life-changing". Same with whether I decide to eat out at a restaurant or make food at home. I could meet my soul mate at that restaurant!

My problem with saying that something is life-changing is it describes what it will do but not to what degree. Is it changing my life a little, or a lot?

Every decision we make, everything we decide to do or not do, changes our life in some way. By the literal definition, every single decision we make has the opportunity to be its own Butterfly Effect, having small or massive changes on our lives.

And often it's not possible to know how much of an impact a single decision may make. Let's say you make the decision to wake up at 5am rather than 8am, because you've read that's what successful people do. After a brief adjustment period, you get used to this new wake-up time. And you're feeling pretty good (great!).

How do you know that shifting your sleep schedule back by three hours was the cause of you feeling good now? Maybe it was some other area of your life that made you feel good. There's simply too many variables to consider.

That, of course, doesn't mean you shouldn't try things that others have claimed are life-changing. If there's evidence that doing (or not doing) something will improve your life in a way that you want, then it's worth giving a shot. But the time to evaluate how effective it was is after the honeymoon period has waned and it's no longer "fun". How do you feel after that?

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