Let us talk about when it is worth making a change. It does not get more practical than that.
And here comes the reprimand: where making changes is concerned, most of you are living in a film. Most of you come to change with a sense of emergency, out of hysterical and amorphous internal statements along the lines of this cannot go on and something has to be done about this.
You have already started badly.
The basic thesis of this piece is that significant and essential changes — the kind that genuinely stand a chance of turning your life for the better — are made when things are relatively good, not when they are bad.
Most of the time we are busy putting out fires or applying a cosmetic and superficial solution, and when the immediate distress passes, the change we made so much noise about evaporates without leaving any positive trace.
Let me offer two working assumptions that are accurate for most people reading this.
One: you need to make some change in your life.
Two: the overwhelming majority of you do not yet know which change you need to make.
And on that second point I have to recall an earlier piece of mine. Most people's problem is not admitting that they are doing something wrong. Most people have no difficulty displaying that minimal maturity. The burning problem is that most of us live in the illusion that we know what we are doing wrong. And we do not.
Because change requires you, first and before anything else, to do something that comes a long way before the hysterical instruction to move yourself and start acting.
Change requires you first to think.
And that is precisely what distress makes impossible. A person in acute difficulty has a narrowed field of view, an urgent need for relief, and no tolerance for the slow, uncertain work of finding out what is actually wrong. So they change the most visible thing, because it is available, and because doing something feels like progress.
Which is why the good period is the right one. You have the capacity to look, you can afford to be wrong, and — crucially — you can tell the difference between a change that would improve your life and a change that would merely stop the current pain.