Prompted: Deciding Destiny
Prompted: Deciding Destiny
Exploring when we should take control and when we should accept our fate.
Hi there,
Thanks for taking some time out of your day to read what’s below. Today’s prompts will ask you to take an honest look at your mindset, and I hope the thoughts below help you as much as they help me.
As always, thanks for reading!
Kevin
Deciding Destiny
The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Destiny is a cop-out. We need to take an active role in our life. We can believe that everything will work itself out, but hope is not a strategy; we also need to take action.
The hardest-working people are the luckiest because they’ve put themselves in a position to strike when opportunity arises.
It’s often said that “we are exactly where we need to be” or “it’s all part of the plan”.
It reassures us because it absolves us of responsibility and leads us to a passive or even apathetic approach, but sitting idly and accepting the consequences as fate is a fast way to damage our self-worth.
We can’t change the hand we were dealt or the decisions that we’ve made in the past, but that doesn’t mean we should sit back and let the universe decide what happens next.
Instead, we should work to control the controllables and take action toward the person we’d like to become.
Taking an active role in our lives requires us to move away from passive acceptance of whatever life throws our way, and refocus our energy on what we can control, our inputs or daily actions.
Even with an active approach to life, we should maintain acceptance of our results. We can meticulously control the inputs, but the outputs are out of our control. Outputs define us when we have a passive mindset, and we accept them as unchangeable, but with an active mindset, they inform how we can change our inputs and begin a new cycle of growth.
When we lean into destiny, we risk succumbing to apathy because if life is random and our path is pre-determined, then no matter what we choose or how we do things, it makes no difference.
While circumstance might decide what trail we start on, our decisions determine if and how we will get to the top of the mountain. We can accept the trail ahead of us as our fate, or we can do the hard work of blazing a new trail that leads us where we’d like to go.
Prompts
Do I lean towards a passive or active mindset?
Are there certain parts of life where I’m more prone to accepting current circumstances as destiny?
What inputs do I need to take control over?
Deep Dive
A quick read about two different mindsets and where they lead us.
P.S. Want to see the format of the “Bite-Sized Prompts” I send throughout the week? Check out the post below to see the details, or upgrade your subscription to try a free trial and get new posts delivered to your inbox next week :)
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next Sunday.
Kevin