Worrying is for the horses

As I get older, I more frequently hear the advice my grandmother said to me as a child reverberating off my eardrums as a sharp reminder, like she used to poke my sides to make me sit up straight. She passed away before I hit my tween years, so these anecdotes are the majority of what I have from her. Honestly, I think they're the best thing she could have given me.

Realizing many people don't have the benefit of a Pulp Fiction level bad-ass Russian babushka (read her bad-assery here), I am going to share her Cossack wisdom here from time to time.

Don't worry. Worrying is for the horses - they have bigger heads.

Probably one of the weirdest things ever said to me still - there is one other one you'll hear later from her. It never really made sense until I was in a project where I knew about two weeks into an almost four month project, that this is not going to go well.

Worrying is one of the most non-productive uses of your time ever devised. As a human being, we are a limited resource. We have a limited mental capacity, time, and energy. So much stress we can take, hours we can work, etc.

If there is only so much of you to 'spend' on something, you should use it for something good. Using good here as a more generic term of something that is desirable. 

Worry about something has you spend your productive energy and time in your finite existence on something that has no measurable output. This is different than crisis mitigation or planning. In those situations, you are taking a cerebral view of the situation that produced action items and plans for execution - good. 

Think about it this way, at any given moment of any day there is an opportunity cost on your time. Be thoughtful with how you spend it and make active decisions about how you spend your life...

and don't spend it worrying.