Don't Sweat the Small Stuff ... and it's all small stuff: Simple Ways to Keep the Little Things from Taking Over Your Life

by Richard Carlson

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.

There are two rules for living in harmony. #1) Don’t sweat the small stuff and #2) It’s all small stuff.

“We cannot do great things on this earth. We can only do small things with great love.”

Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, and what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are—always!

Your job is to try to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you. You’ll find that if you do this, you’ll be far less annoyed, bothered, and frustrated by the actions and imperfections of other people.

“Who said life was going to be fair, or that it was even meant to be fair?”

if you allow yourself to be bored, even for an hour—or less—and don’t fight it, the feelings of boredom will be replaced with feelings of peace. And after a little practice, you’ll learn to relax.

The truth is, life is rarely exactly the way we want it to be, and other people often don’t act as we would like them to. Moment to moment, there are aspects of life that we like and others that we don’t. There are always going to be people who disagree with you, people who do things differently, and things that don’t work out. If you fight against this principle of life, you’ll spend most of your life fighting battles.

“Life is a test. It is only a test. Had this been a real life you would have been instructed where to go and what to do.”

One of the most unavoidable life lessons is having to deal with the disapproval of others. Praise and blame are all the same is a fancy way of reminding yourself of the old cliché that you’ll never be able to please all the people all the time. Even in a landslide election victory in which a candidate secures 55 percent of the vote, he or she is left with 45 percent of the population that wishes someone else were the winner. Pretty humbling, isn’t it?

Underneath even the most annoying behavior is a frustrated person who is crying out for compassion. The next time (and hopefully from now on), when someone acts in a strange way, look for the innocence in his behavior. If you’re compassionate, it won’t be hard to see. When you see the innocence, the same things that have always frustrated you no longer do. And, when you’re not frustrated by the actions of others, it’s a lot easier to stay focused on the beauty of life.

the reason we are tempted to put others down, correct them, or show them how we’re right and they’re wrong is that our ego mistakenly believes that if we point out how someone else is wrong, we must be right, and therefore we will feel better.

“If you had an hour to live and could make only one phone call—who would you call, what would you say, and why are you waiting?”

the less you care about seeking approval, the more approval you seem to get. People are drawn to those with a quiet, inner confidence, people who don’t need to make themselves look good, be “right” all the time, or steal the glory. Most people love a person who doesn’t need to brag, a person who shares from his or her heart and not from his or her ego.

Somewhere, in the back of your mind, try to remember that everything has God’s fingerprints on it. The fact that we can’t see the beauty in something doesn’t suggest that it’s not there. Rather, it suggests that we are not looking carefully enough or with a broad enough perspective to see it.

I guess it’s safe to say that practice makes perfect. It makes sense, then, to be careful what you practice.

Blaming makes you feel powerless over your own life because your happiness is contingent on the actions and behavior of others, which you can’t control. When you stop blaming others, you will regain your sense of personal power. You will see yourself as a choice maker. You will know that when you are upset, you are playing a key role in the creation of your own feelings. This means that you can also play a key role in creating new, more positive feelings.

Inner peace is accomplished by understanding and accepting the inevitable contradictions of life—the pain and pleasure, success and failure, joy and sorrow, births and deaths. Problems can teach us to be gracious, humble, and patient.

If being peaceful and loving are among your primary goals, then why not redefine your most meaningful accomplishments as being those that support and measure qualities such as kindness and happiness? I think of my most meaningful accomplishments as stemming from inside myself: Was I kind to myself and others? Did I overreact to a challenge, or was I calm and collected? Am I happy? Did I hold on to anger or was I able to let go and move on? Was I too stubborn? Did I forgive? These questions, and others like them, remind us that the true measure of our success comes not from what we do, but from who we are and how much love we have in our hearts.

Our disappointment comes about in essentially two ways. When we’re experiencing pleasure we want it to last forever. It never does. Or, when we’re experiencing pain, we want it to go away—now. It usually doesn’t. Unhappiness is the result of struggling against the natural flow of experience.

Try getting angry without first having angry thoughts! Okay, now try feeling stressed out without first having stressful thoughts—or sad without sad thoughts—or jealous without thoughts of jealousy. You can’t do it—it’s impossible. The truth is, in order to experience a feeling, you must first have a thought that produces that feeling.

The next time you’re feeling upset, notice your thinking—it will be negative. Remind yourself that it’s your thinking that is negative, not your life.

Minding your own business goes far beyond simply avoiding the temptation to try to solve other people’s problems. It also includes eavesdropping, gossiping, talking behind other people’s backs, and analyzing or trying to figure out other people. One of the major reasons most of us focus on the shortcomings or problems of others is to avoid looking at ourselves.