Your character is determined by your associations.
Who you are around is who you become.
Choose your associations carefully.
And your associations are not merely the people you are in direct contact with.
What you read, watch, and listen to shapes your character as well.
You become who and what you interact with.
Decide who you want to be and associate accordingly.
Constraints breed innovation.
Having fewer options forces you to be more creative.
When you cannot have everything you want, you must learn to work with what you have.
While having fewer options may feel like a hindrance, it actually makes decision-making easier.
This is why constraints are beneficial for creative work.
With too many options available, anything is possible.
This often makes it difficult to even get started.
By limiting your options, by imposing constraints upon yourself, you can focus on what matters, and that is the work.
Once you realize you have made a mistake, there is no point in reliving that mistake incessantly in your mind.
You already made the mistake once.
Do not make it over and over again in your thoughts.
Acknowledge your mistake, make amends if necessary, learn from it, and move on.
Life lies ahead of you, not behind you.
It is already too late to change the past.
You can, however, reconcile the past by making better decisions in the future.
Regrets are part of life.
Use them as fuel for transformation, not as an anchor to the person you once were.
Your future is not determined by your past mistakes.
Your future is determined by the actions you take to not make those mistakes again.
You get to choose how you feel about this.
You do not have to take it personally.
It does not have to be perceived as a slight against you.
What others do does not have to concern you or bother you.
It probably has nothing to do with you.
Most people are thinking about themselves, not about you.
But what others think about you is none of your business anyway.
You are responsible for your own thoughts, attitudes, and actions.
Do not let what others think, say, or do determine your fate.
Choose your own path and make your own way.
With the right attitude and the right focus, and with your actions aligned toward these, the right people will accompany you along the way.
Our lives do not typically go astray all at one time.
We make little decisions that slowly take us off course.
Enough of these decisions over a long enough period of time results in our finding ourselves far away from where we intended to go.
Looking at where we are, we get confused and ask ourselves where we went wrong.
It was most likely not one decision that threw us off course, however, but many little ones.
Every decision matters and the choices we make add up.
Enough little, seemingly insignificant things, that we do now, if left unchecked, can have a drastic effect on who we become in the future.
For better or worse, little words and deeds, compounded over time, have a big effect on our lives and the lives of those around us.
We must therefore be mindful of how every choice we make today will affect who we become tomorrow.
Meditations on God 