Before you start your day thinking about how awful or rough your life is, consider realizing the alternative. The common everyday luxuries we’re accustomed to are only a dream to most of the world. When you’re getting down on yourself, always remember to take nothing for granted.

We all believe that our own ideas and perceptions are the best. What separates an intelligent person from an idiot is knowing how to accept your own inaccuracies when faced with the truth. Most people fall short of this, don’t be one of them.

The long and short of this truth is it’s better to be stuck waiting for the “right” person to come along than it ever is to settle. People generally give up on their goals right before it happens for them. Don’t let this be the story of your love life, too.

Unless you’ve walked every single step in someone else’s journey with them, you have no idea what it took to get them where they are. Don’t cheat yourself out of your own dreams by comparing your progress with anyone else’s. Your life is about your own journey, not theirs.

A good thing to remember in life is that people are pretty much caught up in their own imaginary dramas. If someone is hating on you without any good cause, learn to see it as a compliment. Nine times out of ten, hate comes from a place of jealousy, so take it as a sign you’re doing something right and keep truckin’!

Get comfortable being alone with yourself. You may or may not find the love of your life, start a family, or be blessed with a thousand friends. Regardless of how many people come and go throughout our time here, we end the journey alone. So enjoy every moment with every person you can, because they’re all just cameo appearances in your feature film.

People spend hours, days, months, and even years investing their precious time into everyone else’s dreams. Learn to carve out some of that time for yourself to work towards accomplishing your goals. If you’re investing in making yourself the best possible version of you, then everyone wins!

Don’t behave as though you are entitled to all that life has to offer. You are only entitled to strive for it, but don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re owed it.

Life in this world is nothing less than a gift, and you’ll be much happier in the long run if you learn to treat it as such.

Our thoughts come racing in at the speed of light, and they’re a dime a dozen. Don’t trick yourself into thinking you’re something you’re not simply because you had the thought.

People will easily forget what you said, but rarely forget what you did. Show the world who you are, don’t tell them.

Learn to take pleasure in life’s perfect imperfections, because “perfect” is merely an idea. You set yourself up for failure when you expect anything out of life.

Rather than suffering the disappointment, throw your expectations away and allow yourself to be pleasantly surprised when life treats you kindly.

Not only do you not have to please everyone, but it’s also more or less impossible to do so. People are too different from one personality to another to ever possibly be able to make everyone around you happy.

The important thing to remember is that you are only responsible for your own happiness, just like everyone else is for theirs.

Holding a grudge will burn the bearer more than the person it’s directed at. If someone wrongs you and you don’t forgive them and move on, it will bleed over into other relationships in your life in the form of fear, distrust, and bitterness.

Don’t let someone else steal life’s sweetness simply because they are still an asshole.

There’s a reason they say don’t throw stones when you live in glass houses. Hypocrisy is about as common to humanity as breathing. Listen and soak up good advice when you hear it and know it to be true, for sure! Just don’t expect the person who gave it to you to be a glowing example of that advice.

The most stressed out people in life end up that way from fear of not having control. The truth of the matter is that all people have no control over anything in life except their own actions and reactions. The rest is a gamble, so you might as well bet on yourself instead of the world.

You can’t force someone to love you, and you can’t force them to stick around, either. Everyone in life is traveling on their own path, including you.

Learn to be grateful when your path crosses with someone else’s you connect with and learn to stay grateful once your paths part ways as well.

If you focus only on what you’ve lost in life, you’ll distract yourself from all the wonderful things you’ve gained in life, too. This also applies to how you treat the people around you.

Sometimes the people we love leave us behind, but we should never forget to invest in the people that love us and choose to stick around. When you do, you miss the stars for the moon.

This is just a plain old hard fact of life. People can and will be mean to you at times, but don’t let it get you down. People, in general, get pretty caught up with whatever is going on in their own life, and sometimes have little to no concern for how their attitude affects you.

They could have a lot going on at home, or just be hungry. Put simply, don’t let one person’s attitude toward you affect your attitude toward yourself or others.

Now, this might not always be the case, especially when considering friends and family. For the most part, though, the average everyday person really doesn’t give a shit about how bad you’ve got it.

Everyone experiences negatives and positives in this roller-coaster life, but you are responsible for how you react to them and playing the worlds smallest violin will only annoy the people around you.

Don’t waste your precious time reaching out to someone over and over again if they’re “too busy” to reply back. People make time for the people and things that matter to them, point blank.

Yes, people do get busy, but if you or the matter at hand is important to them, they will carve out a small chunk of time to get back to you.

It’s easy to go through life complaining about how someone has taken advantage of you. What isn’t easy, but is much more effective, is to set firm boundaries and stick to them starting with learning how to say ‘no’.

If you can’t learn to tell someone ‘no’, then you can’t really blame them for asking in the first place or accuse them of putting you at a disadvantage. If you lay down like a welcome mat, people will continue to walk on you like one.

It’s sad but true; while you might be missed by some people, their life won’t stop if you’re not in it. Use this knowledge to your advantage.

Don’t allow yourself to be guilted into sticking around in a toxic relationship with someone because they make you feel like they will fall apart without you. They won’t.

We can all run around like chickens with our heads cut off when we get busy, but a good portion of us aren’t really getting anything done.

It’s fine to be a busy person, but make sure all that time and energy you are spending is being directed at accomplishing something important. Learn to see your efforts as an investment in yourself, and strive accordingly.

The sad truth is that most people never even try to accomplish their dreams out of fear of what other people will think, and this is the only guaranteed route to failure. Unburden yourself by choosing not to let other people’s opinions direct your steps in life.

This is your journey, not theirs, and the only reason they can’t see your dreams is because the dream isn’t theirs. Don’t take your own capabilities and passions for granted.

This ties in with the last slide. No matter what other people have said to you or done, ultimately you are the only person responsible for seeing that your dreams become a reality.

The only person who can stop you from achieving your goals, from the least of them to the greatest, is yourself. Don’t do it anymore.

When life shuts the door on you when you’re trying to achieve something, sneak around until you find a back door. There are very few straight paths in this in life, so you might as well learn to seek out and enjoy the winding ones. If you want to be successful at anything, always keep yourself open to new ideas, opportunities, and a change in direction.

It’s just the way the cookie crumbles; people have mouths, and sometimes they will use them to talk about you. There is zero point in letting yourself get caught up in what others are saying. People who believe it blindly aren’t the people you want to call friends, and the ones that are will be watching what you do, not what others say about you.

It sounds fatalistic, but it’s the truth. Knowing that everything must, at some point, come to an end doesn’t have to be a bad thing though.

When we know we have plenty of something, or that it will always be around, we tend to appreciate it much less than the things that are only temporary. Knowing that everything, including life, will one day end makes it that much sweeter to experience.

You need to know it is okay to be yourself and have your own ideas, desires, and opinions, and you also need to know that it is okay for everyone else to do the same.

No two snowflakes are identical to each other, but they’re all still snowflakes. People are complete individuals, but they are still humans, so learn to be at ease with standing out from the crowd and watching others do the same.

When life knocks you down, get excited about it because it means that you tried something. The only way to guarantee that you never accomplish something is if you hold yourself back and never try.

Failure simply indicates that you successfully figured out what doesn’t work, and you’re that much closer to discovering what does!

For every rule that’s been made, there was a person before it who tried something new. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with learning from and building on the knowledge of others, you shouldn’t let it stump your own sense of daring or creativity.

What works for the spider doesn’t work for the fly, so get comfortable with writing your own set of rules in life, because you’re the only one that has to follow them.