When I was a young kid, I used to play in the driveway with the garden hose. And I would turn it on and watch the water cascade over the uneven surface, bounce around and under the rocks, carve paths through the dirt, and eventually pool in the low spots.

I’m sure that my grandparents hated when I did it because why would I just run the hose?? But they never said anything if they did.

As I grew up, I would occasionally visit brooks and rivers, and just a couple of times I visited the ocean, and every time, I found myself watching the water.

Watching how it would move around obstacles, how it would slowly refill any change you made in the dirt or sand.

Water is unceasing, unrelenting, and impossible to avoid. Water can smooth even the roughest of surfaces if given enough time.

Water changes all things that it touches. It makes new paths where there were none before. It can be gentle and forceful.

But the one thing that lies at the core of it all: a constant, never-ceasing force.

Your highest life requires you be relentless in your pursuit.

Here are 5 lessons to be learned from water.

1/ Water doesn’t change it’s temperment.

Think of two bottles: a bottle of soda and a bottle of plain water.

When you agitate both bottles, the soda releases some carbonation and causes the bottle to stiffen and, if you open it too soon, fizz and explode over you.

But the water, it just is. It goes back to existing as if the agitation never happened.

Respond like water to the things in life.

Let them happen, feel every emotion you need to, and then let them go.

2/ Water can be life-giving in small amounts and deadly in large.

A dip in the pool is refreshing but encountering a flash flood is life-threatening.

Similarly, in your personal growth, you have to control the amount of influence others have on your life.

Try to learn from too many people, and you find all growth stops.

Learn from just a few people who genuinely light up your mind and you can’t wait to see what they said.

3/ Water can look the same but will always be different.

When you throw a rock into a pond, there’s a splash of water and ripples that follow. The rock is swallowed up by the vastness of the water.

But it’s still there.

The water looks no different, but it has changed.

Some small amount of it has been moved.

Events in life are much the same–you may not see the impact right away or even for long.

But every event in life changes you.

Gather enough of them, and the disruption is large enough to change the shape of water.

4/ Water will smooth even the roughest of surfaces, given enough time.

Everything you experience in life will be smoothed over in time.

The griefs and heartaches will gradually fade–always there, but less noticeable.

The happiness and joy gradually fade too.

A small disruption on the grand scale of your life will be smoothed out.

Likewise, your life on the grander scale of the universe is but a drop in the bucket.

5/ Water is slow-moving but never ceasing.

Perhaps the most important lesson, the Grand Canyon in the United States is purely evidence of water damage over an extraodrinarly long time.

So must you be in your life.

You must make steady progress, day in and day out, toward your highest life.

Once you start this journey to grow, you can stop, but you’ll never be satisfied.

Be like water. Never ceasing and relentless in the pursuit of your highest life.

Build strength and change your life. Then change your world.

–

With love and a sense of urgency.

Jeff