How to Let Today Change You (Just a Little)

Source: Toa Heftiba / Unsplash

We're often told that it's only consistent habits that will change our lives and grow our mental strengths. However, life is built in moments. There are many moments that offer the potential for opportunistic growth, if we're up for it.

Here are five ways you can opt into small opportunities for growth today. These are very low commitment and have low potential for downside but high potential for upside.

1. Accept a Social Bid

Have you ever watched a YouTube video where the creator approaches someone randomly and asks them to accept a challenge? "Will you go to Paris for me, right now, and return with a baguette?"

This is a dramatic example of a social bid. In regular life, people offer social bids regularly — like the stranger who attempts to strike up a conversation, the fellow runner who smiles as you run past, or your partner or child starting a conversation. John Gottman and others have researched the importance of accepting social bids for our long-term relationship health.

Accepting a social bid can change us and our relationships in unexpected ways — from just improving our mood to starting the ball rolling to a deeper intellectual or emotional connection.

2. Explore the Edges of Your Capacity to Understand

We have topics we're embarrassed to have never understood properly, like how toilets flush, the basics of calculus, or why you're not supposed to store leftover canned food in the cans. AI tools offer new personalized learning opportunities to correct these gaps in our understanding.

Pick something you'd like to understand and ask ChatGPT or another AI chatbot to explain it like you're 10 years old, or using an analogy to a topic you already understand well. You can keep this simple, or ask about a topic that feels at the edges of your capacity to understand — that is, where it feels like your mind is having to stretch to your full capacity to get your head around it. Observe how that feels.

AI tools have expanded what's termed "The adjacent possible" — knowledge that's only a step or two away. This is the zone where great innovations tend to come from, including innovations in ourselves, like expanding the boundaries of our capacity to understand abstract ideas.

3. Tell a Story You Haven't Publicly Shared Before That Contains a Lesson

Sharing traumas is one way to be vulnerable (a dramatic example of a social bid), but that's not what I'm talking about here. Instead, share a story you haven't told before that contains a lesson.

I'll participate! In my early 20s, I was walking past a ringing public phone booth, curious because I didn't know pay phones could ring. I picked it up and won several hundred dollars in a radio station game.

Sharing a story like this can help you connect experiences that have shaped your self-view or worldview. My experience led me to see myself as someone capable of being lucky, and reinforced the idea of responding to random opportunities—exactly what we're talking about here.

4. Attempt to Find a "Rich" Small Problem Where Solving It Will Have Larger Significance

When longstanding scientific puzzles are solved, it's often not by the experts working directly on the problem, but by someone tackling a different issue who sees a connection. On the way to solving one problem, we often solve others.

Scientists (e.g. mathematicians) sometimes explore small problems to see if they hold potential richness, where patterns and solutions might reveal ideas of much larger significance.

We can adopt this scientific thinking in our own lives, whether addressing a work problem or personal patterns like overthinking. The challenges that trip us up are like fractals, repeating in larger and smaller scales, such as a major issue you overthink and a minor one, or a small way you hold yourself back from being fully yourself and a larger way. Try solving a small issue and see if it provides richness for progressing with a more significant one.

Happiness Essential Reads

Why Thinking About the Future Makes Your Life Better Now

What If You Didn’t Need to Feel Better to Live Better?

5. Mentally Prepare for the Next Unpredictable Moment

The topic for the post you're reading was inspired by a podcast episode in which my PT colleague, Professor Todd Kashdan, was interviewed. Among many things, he talked about social bids and how unpredictable moments offer opportunities to be brave. In another piece (in a different context), he gives a lifeguard analogy. Our days are often like the lifeguard supervising a pool, who has just a few unpredictable opportunities to use their training and make their impact.

On seemingly mundane days, take the opportunity to mentally prepare for the next unpredictable moment where you can speak, act, or do the right thing. Without advance preparation, intense moments can overwhelm us emotionally, leading to poor choices. For example, this week someone rear-ended my car while I was stopped at a light and then... sped off. Events like these happen, and it helps to consider beforehand how you'll act and how you want your values to guide you.

Small Moments, Pivotal Growth

If big personal changes, new habits, or ambitious learning projects feel out of reach, there are plenty of opportunities to grow through small moments. Some of these occur spontaneously and we have the option to respond. Others we make for ourselves, like solving small problems to build our intuition for solving our larger ones.

For more on how to become a creative solver of everyday problems, try this guide.