Life is short, we all know that. We also live once, we all know that as well. But what we don’t know is that the best day of your life is when you decide your life is yours to create. There’s no need for apologies, excuses, or scapegoats to blame that something isn’t going your way.

You are responsible for the quality of the journey you are currently on. The day you take control and understand that you can bring your desires to reality is the day your life truly begins.

You can live an epic life if you choose too. Before you start thinking of excuses in your head as to why this statement cannot possibly be true for you, silence that voice for just a moment and hear us out instead.

When we say the word “epic” we don’t mean jumping off yachts in Europe during the month of August or buying bottles in a club. We mean that you can accomplish whatever dreams you have and follow your passion in life that will eventually lead to rewarding pride, value and peace of mind.

There are four ways you can decide to live your life:

Boring- Little risk. Little reward. Lazy. Not much to talk about.

Mediocre – Have a paycheck but hate your job. Life would be okay if there wasn’t so much emptiness, dissatisfaction and complaining. Complain, complain. Refuse to take action to correct it. Keep complaining.

Above average – You’re moving up. You’re following your passion but something is still missing. You don’t take the extra step needed and quit too easily.

Epic – You’re doing what people only dream of doing. You’ve done the unrealistic. Much more difficult but the rewards last a lifetime. You’re in the top 1% of the population not because of your wealth but because you went out there and showed the world you have the courage to do what you love, make a name for yourself and create your own future.

An epic life starts with the changes you make to your day to day operations. The average person works 91,520 hours in their life time. That is mixed with a lot of vacations, sick days and just working 9-5 with no overtime. Too bad those people end up dying with a balance left on their mortgage. That means you need to work double those hours and put it all on the line for the epic life you want.

The beauty of an epic life is that it’s mainly up to you. It is mostly what you decide you want to do with it and how far you want to take it. Your boundaries and limits are the ones you set in your head and if you tell yourself the sky is the limit, who knows what you are capable of accomplishing.

An epic life for one person might be being paid to play video games all day, while another would involve bringing thoughts and emotions to life by writing music or literature. Someone may love to travel the world on business 300 out of 365 days out of the year, while another loves the feeling of working from home. It is whatever it means to you.

An epic life is a life of doing what excites you. It doesn’t mean go skydiving, but I see it instead as doing work you’re proud of sharing with the world, getting paid for it, and having the freedom to enjoy life on your own terms.

You need to figure out how to turn what you love into a way to making money so it won’t even feel like work to you. Why suffer from the age of 21 to 65 working a job you absolutely hate because it doesn’t reflect who you are? To me, an epic life could be summed up like this: It doesn’t feel like work and I can’t believe I get paid to do what I do.

We are the only creatures that can choose our life. We can choose the journey we want to take in life. That is quite unique to the human experience. Lions are big and strong but if they decide to be vegan and study yoga, that’s not possible.

Sharks can’t decide one day to start a blog about cooking seafood dishes and get paid for it. I know it sounds silly, but I hope you get my point. We, on the other hand, have so many choices. The possibilities are endless and only we can determine the outcome.

Everything that we have become up until now was based on a choice. When we were at a younger age the choices were made for us. But when we became adults the power to make choices has completely shifted to our control. Some have embraced that power while others still let other make the choices. You have to remember that the life you choose to live and the world you choose to live it in are both completely up to you.

Living an epic life means having the ability to do what you want at any point that you want. Those who are struggling haven’t made many choices. They got lemons and let those lemons rot. If you let others control your life, you will be miserable as a result.

As humans, the ability to choose makes us unique. Why give that power away? You know what’s going to happen when you don’t choose? You’re going to bitch and complain when things don’t go your way. You’re going to hate your own life.

When you’re on your deathbed you will say,

“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” Not choosing is such a waste a of a life.

Don’t follow the conventional path of go to school, go to grad school, get a boring job, make money, move up the ladder, have a family and be bored for the rest of your life. It’s a recipe for dehumanization. Don’t want to be able to show what is inside you and prove to the world that you had the courage to make good use of all of the individual abilities and desires you were born with?

The only map we have in life has a point A and a point B at the end of the pages. It goes from birth to death. That’s all we are guaranteed. We’re all going to get to point B at some point. It’s what we do between those two points that will shape our lives and the type of legacy we leave on this planet.

Your time in this world should be filled with laughter, love, family, friends, gratitude, giving and excitement. Sure there will be rough stretches but we won’t let that ruin the overall journey. When we arrive to point B, we will have left our legacy, made sure people knew we were here on this earth, affected as many lives as possible in a positive way, and left no stone unturned in the process. That’s epic. That is living an epic life.

Live an epic life. Stay elite.

Preston Waters | Elite.