Midlife Mutiny: 12 Secrets to Defy the Status Quo and Create the Life Of Your Dreams

Everyone changes; it’s a fact of life. If you don’t believe me, think of a few high school friends you’ve lost contact with and search them out on social media. For some people, change is in a positive direction. As they age, they experience life at a deeper level and live into many of their goals, hopes, and dreams.

There are others, however, who are living proof that change also occurs in an unwanted direction. For these people, change is an unwelcome visitor, seizing their hand and dragging them in the opposite direction of their goals, hopes, and dreams. In this chapter, we will look at these two different types of change.

Unintentional change is change that is unwanted. It’s effortless and has no aim, intention, or desired outcome. Unintentional change is the path of least resistance.

A vegetable garden is the perfect image to better understand unintentional change. A garden must be cared for if it is to produce healthy vegetables. Someone must tend to it through practices like watering, fertilizing, weeding, and pruning. It requires purposeful effort to yield vegetables. Left to itself, a garden will become overgrown with weeds and pests, which will damage and kill the plants. This is unintentional change.

The force behind unintentional change is entropy, the tendency towards disorder. Without the work of intentional change, a garden moves towards disorder because of entropy.

The same is true for human beings. Everything in our lives will move towards disorder without the work of intentional change.

I was in good physical shape when I graduated from high school. It was not a result of my diet, as I ate regularly at fast-food restaurants. My good physical condition was because of my involvement in high school sports. Our daily workouts included habits like weightlifting, aerobics, and running.

When I got to college, my habits changed. I switched sports, transitioning from football to beer pong. (I trained often, both on weeknights and weekends.) Not surprisingly, my eating habits worsened. I found it magical that I could eat as much food as I wanted every breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the dining commons. My physical exercise decreased. The walk back-and-forth between my dining table and the food line amounted to my main exercise habit.

After the first half of my freshman year, I had a shocking realization one day as I was standing shirtless in front of a mirror. I couldn’t believe what I saw staring back at me. I was no longer fit. In fact, I was getting fat. I completed that year not having gained the “Freshman 15,” but the “Freshman 30.”

Despite this, I did little about it through my college years, and I graduated the heaviest I’ve ever been. With more time on my hands after college, I was ready to instigate intentional change.

I set a target weight as my desired outcome and went to work on my goal. Next, I read a few books about the best practices of weight loss and determined the two core habits of my intentional change: daily exercise and eating both healthier and smaller portions of food. I started with the habit of daily exercise. After a few weeks of establishing my first habit, I added the second habit of eating better.

This was my shift from the unintentional change of entropy in college to the intentional change of losing weight and becoming healthier. Not only did I reach my goal, but I got into better shape than I had been in high school.

When we instigate intentional change, we stand and fight against the entropy that leads to disordered, unintentional change. We take proactive measures to bring about wanted change in a desired direction. Intentional change reverses entropy. This takes energy. It’s not effortless, but it is possible.

You picked up this book because you want some type of change in your life. You might want to lose weight or become healthier. Maybe you want intentional change in your professional or family life. Maybe you want to change aspects of your personal life. You can do it! It is easier than you think to stand against entropy and instigate positive change.

There is one last truth about intentional change that may be more difficult to accept: you and I can only change ourselves. We cannot change others around us. There may be people in our lives we want to change, whether a spouse, a parent, a sibling, a friend, or a coworker. We’ve made suggestions, encouragements, and even demands, but we are met with the same result. This is because it’s nearly impossible to bring about intentional change in the life of another.

A friend shared with me the story of his contribution to a failed marriage. He’d spent so much energy trying to change his wife that unintentional change happened to him. Entropy took over, and he became more and more frustrated, angry, and removed.

The divorce was a turning point for him where he committed to never allowing entropy to take over again. If he had a second chance at marriage, he wouldn’t waste time trying to change his spouse. Instead, he would pour his energy into changing himself to become a better husband. He would never again allow entropy to mold him into a lazy, selfish, angry, and unloving husband. He realized the only person he could change was himself.

Everyone changes and that change is directional, moving in only one of two directions: a desired direction or an unwanted direction. Are you changing in the direction of your choosing, or are you letting entropy lead you down the pathway of unintentional change?