Take the Leap

Day 65 / 366

You can’t design your life like a building, it doesn't work that way. You just have to live it and it will design itself.

One scene from How I Met Your Mother that I keep returning to is the final scene from Season 4. This scene never fails to motivate me. That season was particularly rough for Ted, a lot of bad things happened to him including getting left at the alter and getting fired from his job. He is fed up with life not turning out the way he planned.

The biggest shock I have had while growing up is how random things in this world are. When we were kids we thought that grown-ups had it figured out. But it couldn’t be farther from the truth. No one knows what they are doing. It’s everyone’s first attempt at life, and they are all winging it.

You can plan as much as you want for things to go your way, but the number of external factors is so huge that you can never be sure of the outcomes. The phrase “When it rains it pours” is so true. Life is filled with higher and higher peaks and lower and lower lows.

Sometimes you have to get out of your own way. Do the thing that you want to do. Things will happen the way they have to happen, you will never have full control over the outcomes.

Listen to what the world is telling you to do and take the leap

As Ted says at the end of the scene, a lot of shit happened to him that year, but damn it if it wasn’t the best year of his life. All those horrible things led him to take a job as a professor, which brought him one step closer to meeting his future wife.