The Mindset that Changed My Life

Summary

After graduating and moving to New York, Lindsiann felt stuck despite wanting to travel and live more boldly. She reflects that traditional New Year’s resolutions—focused on outcomes like money, appearance, or follower counts—often fail. They rely on fragile motivation and perfectionism without changing how a person acts day to day.

Instead, she embraces high agency: the belief that you can shape your life through action rather than waiting for circumstances to change. This mindset inspires her to travel solo and make decisions even when she feels uncertain.

Key Ideas and Strategies

• Choose action over endless deliberation. Rather than asking, “What’s the right decision?”, ask, “What decision can I make?” Acting can provide information that waiting cannot.
• Take small, concrete steps. Leave the apartment, book the trip, send the message, or start the project.
• Don’t wait for a “real life” to begin. Degrees, confidence, a new job, and other milestones can become reasons to postpone living. There will always be another goalpost.
• Treat missed days as recoverable. Perfectionism can make one missed workout or journaling session feel like a reason to quit altogether.
• Look for agency within your circumstances. Even if you can’t immediately change your job, relationship, or hometown, you may still find ways to improve your everyday life.
• Practice gratitude and engage with the present. Lindsiann says her sense of being stuck shifted when she stopped living on autopilot and recognized the choices available to her.
• Seize the day. Live as though life has already started—because it has.

People and Sources Mentioned

Lindsiann, Sylvia Plath, an unnamed online tweet, Dead Poets Society, and the phrase “Carpe diem.”