You may have noticed that I talk a fair bit here about personal development, handling stress, and that kind of thing. It seems that I’m not alone in trying to understand life a little better, because I got tagged by Derek Semmler for the Six Word Memoir meme. He was tagged by Shawn Knight and now he is passing it on to me.

The idea is that you are supposed to come up a great piece of wisdom, summed up in just six words. It could be about money, family, success, or any other aspect of life that you feel is important. For Derek, he decided that his six word memoir would be “Plan for tomorrow, live for today.” He now understands that life is all about balance. If all you do is live for today, you’ll throw all your money away and leave yourself with tons of debt and no retirement. If all you do is plan for tomorrow, you’ll be far too frugal and forget about living in the now. The key is to be able to balance both.

I’ve given my six word memoir a fair bit of thought, because it could be remembered as the single greatest piece of advice expounded on this blog. Many of these potential memoirs didn’t quite make the cut, but I’ll probably still write on them some time in the future anyways. For now, I’m going to say that my six word memoir is:

Take Pride, Pleasure in Little Things

When we are striving for success, setting the bar high with our specific goals, we all too often forget to take pride in the little accomplishments that we have along the way. It’s far too easy to dismiss the small victories, because our eyes are always focused on the big prize.

Think about Olympic athletes, for example. They train for years so that they can compete on the international stage. They tell themselves that nothing short of a gold medal is good enough. As cliche as it may sound, just making it onto the Olympic team is a pretty formidable achievement already and it’s one that should be celebrated. The same can be said about trying to make money online, starting your business, or buying your first home.

Be mindful of the little things, because it’s the little things that make life worthwhile. If you’re trying to make money from your blog, getting your first AdSense cheque from Google is richly rewarding and should be celebrated. It may only be $100 and that’s not going to help you much in the grand scheme of things, but it’s still a monumental milestone. And you should be proud of that.

What’s Your Six Word Memoir?

As is the nature of memes, it’s time for me to pass the baton onto a few other individuals. Before I get to that, let me lay out the rules:

  • Write your own six word memoir.
  • Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you want.
  • Link to the person who tagged you in your post.
  • Tag at least five more blogs.
  • Leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play.

And the five people that I am tagging are:

Consider yourself tagged. Now come up with something memorable!