What self-assembly furniture can teach about living a happier and more successful life.
You already have everything you need. You may not believe that is true, but it is. Allow me to illustrate the point with a thought experiment.
A Brief Story
Imagine visiting IKEA and buying a piece of furniture to self-assemble. Before making your purchase, the salesperson assures you that everything you need to build your new armoire is in the box.
You get the item home and open the package. Inside, you find wood panels, bolts, screws, mini-tools, and an instruction book. You open the book and begin to assemble your new home furnishing, but you soon find a problem. The instructions don’t match your pieces and indicate that you will need parts that the factory didn’t include.
Your assembly grinds to a halt, and you return to the store to purchase something more. Armed with your latest acquisition, you are now confident you have everything you need to create the perfect living room set. But once you set to work, you hit another obstacle. The instructions send you back to the store, and the cycle repeats.
Frustrated with your inability to assemble your furniture, you might get mad at the manufacturer for selling you a defective product Or, you could get angry with yourself for having been so foolish as to purchase the item in the first place. You may decide that you don’t want the thing badly enough to do what the instructions tell you and leave it unfinished. Or, worst of all, you might even decide that the problem is a character flaw in yourself and that you don’t deserve nice things.
The Real Problem Isn’t You
Now stop for a moment and consider this; the instructions for assembling the item were written by a committee of people. Most of the people on that committee had never assembled your home furnishing. They are experts in drawing, writing, editing, and printing, but not design or engineering. Instead, they have talked to other people who claimed to know how the idea is assembled and then compiled their best guess on how to build the thing you want.
It’s the instructions that are defective, not the product. Everything you need to construct your beautiful new living room set is in the box, and all the skills necessary to assemble your dream living space are already within you. You don’t need anything more. The product is complete in itself, as are you.
Life Isn’t IKEA, But it Kind of Is
Life is the same way. Most of the advice you receive on living a good life comes from people who don’t know. They just hand down bits of supposed wisdom they received from someone else. Some of that advice is good, but other bits don’t apply to your situation, and many are just wrong. Most advice tells you that you need to acquire something more before you can live a good life. They inform you that you need a degree, a spouse, a better job, more money, a bigger house, a fitter body, more friends, and more social media likes before you can be happy. So you waste your time chasing after these things in vain, hoping that once you have them all, you will be satisfied. But you won’t be because you don’t need anything more to assemble a good life. You already have everything you need, and the constant pursuit of more only keeps you from doing the work of creating what you already have.
The problem isn’t that you don’t have enough. You have everything you need to be happy, and you contain all the potential you require. The problem is that you are following instructions put together by a committee of people who pass along generic advice that they don’t understand. Advice that generally has you looking outside of yourself for something they tell you that you are missing. But you aren’t missing anything. You don’t need to add anything more to your life.
What You Do Need
What you need are fewer instructions. Most of the lifestyle advice you receive comes from people who mean well but are just as confused as you are. Others are trying to show you a perfect and enviable life on social media so they can sell you something. The celebrity who dispensed marriage advice last year is getting a divorce this year. The business person who made an overnight fortune on one lucky move has gambled it all away. The parenting expert’s son was arrested. The motivational guru is on antidepressants, and on and on.
Most people are just barely holding it together. Everyone feels their life is out of control. And why is that? Because everyone is trying to live a life based on a defective set of instructions — a cobbled together Frankensteinian mess of contradictory ideas and rubbish advice.
You are Your Own Expert
Given the above example, you may ask where to find good advice. To whom should you listen? But the problem with that thinking is you are just adding more instructions and building a bigger mess. Instead, your best bet may be to do the opposite.
Rather than add more advice and instructions, eliminate them. Drop all the productivity tips, life hacks, and rules for success. Rather than add more instructions to your page, erase all the advice that is not serving you. Stop looking to others for instructions on how to live and turn inward. Ask yourself what works for you and what doesn’t. Then drop what doesn’t work, no matter from whom you learned it. No advice is good if it does not produce the results you need.
Conclusion
When you put away the defective instruction and look at what you have in front of you, you will find that you already have enough. When you stop listening to all the people telling you what to do and start listening to your innate wisdom, you will find that you know how to assemble those parts into something that is beautiful and uniquely yours.
