Are your daily decisions giving you the results you want out of life?

By David McElroy · October 7, 2011

Most of the people I know aren’t happy. They put on brave faces and try to fit in, but in their hearts, they’re hurting — because their lives aren’t what they wanted them to be. Why do people live this way?

I’m thinking about this because of someone I met earlier this week. Her story reminded me of something from the personal life of Steve Jobs, but I’ll get to that in a moment. This woman is a teacher who lives in a nice suburban house and loves her two beautiful young children. Her attorney husband provides nicely for the family and treats her well. But she’s miserable when she’s honest, as she was with me Monday night.

What she doesn’t tell most people is that she’s in love with another man and she says she always will be. He loved her, too, and wanted to marry her a decade ago, but he lived in England and was going home after working in this country for a year. He was an architect and he had his own practice back home. He begged her to come with him, but she didn’t want to leave what she already had here.

So she said “goodbye” to him for the last time at the airport and they both promised to always love each other. In the meantime, she’s started raising two children with a man who provides well for her, but who can’t give her what she really needs inside. Just a couple of months ago, the English architect married, too. She says the new woman looks a lot like her. She says she hopes they’re happy, but her voice sounds hollow when she says it.

Her story reminds me of one from the life of Steve Jobs. It probably just comes to mind easily because of his death this week. In 1990, Jobs was speaking to a graduate business class at Stanford University. One of the grad students he met that night was Laurene Powell, an intelligent young Wharton graduate. They had exchanged phone numbers, but Jobs had a business dinner that night, so he left to get into his car. Jobs later said:

”I was in the parking lot, with the key in the car, and I thought to myself, If this is my last night on Earth, would I rather spend it at a business meeting or with this woman? I ran across the parking lot, asked her if she’d have dinner with me. She said yes, we walked into town and we’ve been together ever since.”

The contrast between the choices couldn’t be any more stark. One person was afraid to do whatever it took to find the happiness she wanted. The other was willing to take a risk — and ditch what other people thought was more important — to follow what his heart told him was right.

In my own life, I’ve sometimes done one and sometimes done the other. When I’ve followed my heart, I’ve generally been happy with the risks I’ve taken, even if they didn’t end up exactly as I wanted. When I’ve ignored what my heart told me, it’s led to misery for me — a misery that leads to reliving certain moments and wishing I had had to courage to overcome my fears and follow what my heart told me was right.

What about you? Are you happy with your life? Are your daily decisions bringing you what you want? If you’re not joyful about experiencing life, you’re doing something wrong. Even if you’re a fellow Christian who believes that this life can’t compare to the joy of experiencing God in the afterlife, He put us here to learn — and the Bible is full of evidence that we’re to be joyful.

Are you at the airport waving goodbye to what you really want? Are you sitting in your car with your hands on car keys, ready to start your car and take you in the direction everyone else thinks you should go? You face those choices every day. It’s your choice whether you let love and joy fly away from you or whether you flout popular wisdom and go back to ask the girl to go with you right now.

It’s your choice. No one else can make it for you. Whichever choice you make, you will live with the consequences for the rest of your life. Choose joy. Follow your heart.

Note: If you’d like to see the full-size version of the beautiful artwork above, check it out here. It’s no longer available, but it was a card someone was selling at Etsy.

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It turns out that the radical far left has been training “Antifa cats” to sabotage anything important to Donald Trump. Everything he did was perfect. Honest. It was all the cats’ fault. Arrest all the cats! This is the latest of my ridiculous satirical shorts. Please go watch it. Then “like” it and subscribe. Please. I’m begging you. (Too much?) Although a couple of the previous videos have had views in the hundreds, most have still been seen by fewer than 20 people. So I seem to be having trouble letting people know that page exists.

Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

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