Jeremiah, age 16

Throughout life, everyone comes up with multitudes of personal goals. These goals range in all shapes and sizes, but they all ultimately do one thing: they focus on self-improvement. From my experience, goals try to do this in one of two ways. Either they concentrate on removing something bad from your life (bad classifies as anything unwanted or that is holding you back), or adding something good in (good is anything you want to add to your life that you think will make it better). I would like to offer a new way to think about this. Instead of doing one or the other, try doing both at the same time. Going even deeper and simpler, I would also like to show you how you can actually accomplish both by mainly focusing on just one.

First of all, it is possible, and actually very easy to focus on both removing the bad and adding in the good at the same time. I’ll use several physical examples to illustrate. Think about a surgeon, performing an operation to fix a failing heart. They don’t just remove the heart of the patient and call it good. They put in a new working heart. Another example for the other side of it is having a messy desk. Before you can put something new there, or even work on something, you need to clean up, getting rid of the trash and moving things that don’t need to be there into a better place. If you try to put the new thing onto your desk without cleaning up, it pushes other stuff onto the floor and just creates a bigger mess than you had in the first place. 

With the heart example, you can’t just get rid of the bad. You have to replace it with something good. Then with the desk example, you also sometimes need to get rid of some bad stuff in order to have room for the good. The trick is to make sure you have a nice balance of the two when you’re working. If you clear away all the bad without focusing on adding good in too, it is a lot easier for the unwanted things you just removed to start seeping back in. But sometimes you have to take out enough stuff to fit a little bit of good in the first place.

The main point I am trying to get across here is that getting out the bad and putting in the good are not actually separate things. They go together. You really can’t effectively do one without doing the other. However, once you are working on this, you can actually accomplish both just by focusing on bringing in the good.

The main thing that makes this work is being able to let go of the bad things. (Again, remember bad is used very loosely here. “Bad” things can really be anything unnecessary or not as important that you are trying to replace or remove from your life.) When you are trying to bring in good, you need to be able to let the bad things naturally slide out, or even just move somewhere else. Going back to the desk example, if you bring in the good without cleaning out the bad, it just pushes things onto the floor and creates a bigger mess. However, when you are able to let the unwanted things go, they can go straight into the trash. The good will naturally take the place of the bad. Another example of this is letting the sunlight into a room through a window. When you let the light in you don’t have to worry about taking out the darkness first. The light naturally takes the place of the darkness. The only thing you need to do is open the curtains and let the light in.

Now, I’ve told you what to do and how to do it, but why does it work? Why should you do it? First of all, it works as long as you are slowly able to let go of more of the bad stuff. As you bring the good into your life, you grow more attached to it. The feeling of wanting whatever is good over the bad stuff in your life strengthens. Then, as long as you are willing, you can easily now remove the bad, and the good can slide the rest of the way in. And why should you do it? Well, simply put, when you bring in the good and let the bad go, it is the simplest and most effective way to make lasting changes to your life.

One last thing I would like to add is that there are many things that could be bad per se without needing to be removed from your life. Going back to the desk example one more time, it is also harder to concentrate when you are surrounded by things that don’t matter at that time. Just because you aren’t actively reading that book on your desk doesn’t mean you should get rid of it completely. Rather, you should move it somewhere else like a bookshelf, or even your side table drawer by your bed. The same thing can be done in your life. There are many things that are good or relaxing to do, they just might need to be done at a different time. For example, looking at Instagram for twenty minutes isn’t in and of itself bad. However, doing it as soon as you wake up is probably not the best idea. Deciding to implement a routine in the morning will help you be more productive, but you also won’t have to focus on not getting on Instagram, since the routine will naturally push it to later in the day when it is a better time. Then since you are starting over with when you will be on Instagram, you can pick when you want to do it. Maybe it’s during lunch, or after you have completed some project you are working on. In the end, you haven’t removed Instagram, you have just repositioned it so that you can be more effective.

I would like to end with an invitation. You might have a lot of different things you want to add in your life or get removed, but start with just one good thing you want to bring in. It can be big or small. Then implement it into your life. Don’t forget to mentally let go of some of the bad things. As the good starts to work, don’t be afraid to let the bad drop out of your life. Slowly but surely, you will see changes, and they will be good. Lastly, as things start to work, you will begin to feel not only happier and more productive, but an energy to implement more good. Don’t let this fade, but also don’t get carried away. Pick just one new thing to add in. You don’t want to overwhelm yourself.

As you do this, you can have just as amazing a life as you can imagine.