Cheaters Never Win: What you know by 40...

is that cheaters do win.  All the time.  Terrorists make democratic nations torture and peaceful nations bomb.  Hedge fund managers get richer by betting against the risks they convince investors to take.  Spouses get their cake and eat it to.

But those who cheat themselves, lose.  Every time.  Ask me how I know.

If I had a dollar for every time I cheated myself out of health, out of happiness, out of success, I'd be Oprah.  Or more like the anti-Oprah, rich off the obvious as opposed to manifesting the 'The Secret,' my own spiritual hedge fund manager betting against myself.  There were a lot of lean years where me failing was a pretty good bet too.  Almost a sure thing.  Failures came like cigarettes burn, quick and one after the other.

But I can always connect the dots from my failures to a very clear example of how I cheated myself out of a blessing, out of an opportunity, out of wellness.  Like when I lost the college job my sister got me at UPS when I chose to smoke weed with my girlfriend instead of going in for the first day (and you thought 'Cuz I Got High' was a joke song?  Realest shit he ever wrote).

Or the time I missed out on the opportunity to study abroad at Oxford because I was so over-confident that I didn't do much preparing for the final interview (one of the interviewers, a professor from Harvard, pulled me to the side and said 'you had this.  you will regret not preparing better.'  Damn.  He was cold-blooded and so right.).

Or the time I turned down free grief counseling at Yale after my mother passed and decided instead to self medicate with binge eating and binge drinking for a couple of years (that's the 15 pounds I'm still trying to lose now, 15 years later).

Or the time I... you get the picture.  Big and small, I can remember every cheat and every consequent failure.

So here I am at 40, not meditating every day, sneaking treats after dark, breaking the agreements I made with myself and I find I have a choice.  Either I will start taking full advantage of my blessings or I will not.  Either I will keep cheating myself or I will spend this day feeling what it feels like to be a few pounds lighter, a few depths more peaceful, a few clicks more disciplined.

Today (and every one of the next 25 days, I will have to make this choice again), today I choose to keep my agreements with myself.  I choose to agree with myself that I can be successful.  I choose to get out of my own way.  I choose to do what I said I was going to do with no excuses, no semicolon.

I've learned to forgive myself for faltering.  More on that in a future post.  But cheating myself?  Zero tolerance for that bullshit.

I got off the horse on Friday.  I got back on Saturday and I'm already reaping the reward with this Sunday motivational post.  25 days more of this please.

Are you cheating yourself out of something today?