Hi Tomodotchi’s,
I hope this blog finds you well! This week, we wanted to share some essential life lessons that have helped us along the way. We feel these are good life lessons that have helped us out in our personal, professional and family life. These may seem basic and we think many of us recognize these lessons fundamentally, but it took a long time for us to truly understand and apply these lessons to our lives. Without further ado, here we go!
1. How to learn from failures
Failures and mistakes are a part of life. After every failure or mistake, we have always felt down and out. People would tell us that it was ok as long as we learned from our mistake. However, we would find that many times we would end up making similar mistakes or failures. Why was this? Well, we realized that we weren’t truly learning from our failures.
For us, learning from our failures means to really take the time to unwind and unpack why we failed and understand what led to the actual failures. Most times, we would simply make a mistake, feel bad and try to not think about it. However, this lack of analysis led us to make similar mistakes because we didn’t understand the root cause. It’s completely ok to make mistakes and fail! That means that you are trying, but next time think about and unpack the reasons that led to the failure so you can recognize them in the future and avoid that mistake!
2. Listen twice as much as you talk
This lesson helped us out so much in our regular life! Many times, we would listen and hear friends, colleagues and family complain about a problem. During these conversations we would insert ourselves and tell stories about our own similar situations or offer advice and opinions.
However, what we came to realize is that most people simply want to vent and be heard. Rather than looking for others to solve their problems, they simply want to be seen and listened too. Our relationships began to deepen as we began to listen more. We had to learn to take ourselves out of the equation and truly prioritize the other person. Many times, we began to feel like we had much more meaningful and impactful conversations even when we hardly say anything.
3. Building self-awareness
If you read our content on the regular, then you know full well how big self-awareness is for us. While this is an incredibly abstract and broad concept, we feel it is critical to understand. Self-awareness is what allows us to reflect and to understand ourselves in the greater context of the world. Having a deeper understanding of ourselves, our impact and who we are has greatly helped our mentality, anxiety and depression. It’s what helps us understand how to live in the moment and be present. Honestly, there are so many different aspects to self-awareness. For us, one of the biggest self-awareness moments was recognizing how different we all were and that it’s better to treat others how they want to be treated rather than how we want to be treated! If you wonder what that looks like, check out our post on that topic.
4. There is more than one way to do things
You’ve probably heard the sayings around this lesson, so again this is a well-known concept. However, it is hard to implement! In the past, we had a hard time letting things go and allowing others to do certain tasks or help us. The reason being, we had an image in our head of how we wanted something done. As soon as the person helping us deviated from our image, it caused us anxiety. We then would take the task back and do it ourselves. This always resulted in us burning out! What we have learned after many completed projects, is that while everyone has different ways and standards of doing things, ultimately, you will always get to your goal. We like to say, while the Ferrari is the ideal, the Oldsmobile will still get us there. Ultimately, you will end up where you are meant to be. Allow others to help you and do things their own way. 10 years down the road, you won’t remember how you got there, you’ll just remember being at the destination.
5. Learning to understand why, not just how
When we were kids, we felt like we had to read and memorize everything to do well. You would think this would have led us to the best results, but ultimately, it didn’t. As we got older, we understood the reason why. It was because rather than understanding the real reason something works, we were only focused on memorizing the result of one specific event. As a basic example, we would memorize that 2+2=4, rather than trying to understand what addition was or how it came together, after all 1+3=4, 4+0=4 and etc.
Ultimately, if you understand the reason why something happens or how something works, you can plug in any numbers and find the solution. Memorizing, in our experience only teaches you how one specific event works. This new way of thinking has led us to being able to find solutions to new problems quicker and build a deeper understanding of the world. Challenge yourself to understand why something works, not just how one specific thing works!
Bringing it home
These are 5 life lessons that truly helped us develop as individuals! Will we learn more as life goes on? Will these lessons have different meanings in 5 years? Most definitely! That is the great thing about being human, there is always more to learn, see and do. We hope these lessons can help you achieve your goals just a little quicker and that you can learn from our mistakes.
Much Love,
Tomodotchi
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Extras
As an added bonus for our readers, we like to include a game of where are the Tomodotchi Pets. They’ve been hidden in 2 of the pictures within this post. Can you find them all? See below for what they look like!
