I’ve said this a lot, and I’m going to say it again and again and again: life is not a sprint.

Life is a marathon – and you are only racing against yourself. You don’t have any other competitors.

Your marathon starts the day you were born. You are in the middle of an unbelievable marathon. We all are.

When you evaluate or judge yourself everyday for doing something wrong – man, I can’t believe that I wasn’t able to talk to that woman; I’m such an idiot! What’s wrong with me? – This is just one person; just one encounter. It doesn’t make a difference.

This is a marathon. That woman that you beat yourself up about at that moment – you will never remember her in the long run! Never. The minute you meet someone new, you’ll forget she even existed.

Think for a second about the last woman that you beat yourself up about because you weren’t able to approach her. Man, I wasn’t able to talk to that woman on the street, damn! – And then you spent an hour just thinking about her.

During that time you spent beating yourself up, you missed six opportunities to talk to someone else!

If something doesn’t work out for you, immediately realize that you’re in the middle of a marathon. What does a marathon runner do? They take one step at a time. In the Olympics, the marathon runners take one step at a time. And by the time they take that next step, their last one is already erased.

Swimmers take another stroke, and by then their previous stroke is already forgotten. Everything works like this.

You can’t slow down. You have to see your life as a marathon. You can’t let a little bump in the road – some woman who didn’t respond to you – get you down for even a split-second.

If you do let that affect you, you’re basically resting at a pit stop that you don’t belong at. You have to keep moving.

You will never remember that person anyway. I don’t remember any of the people that I supposedly obsessed about. This is something that you need to think about and put into perspective.

The next time you think you’ve been rejected or blown off, put this into perspective: this person means nothing in the history of your life. This person will not be remembered in your personal history. There will be no stories about it.

So you saw a woman in Whole Foods and she didn’t talk to you? So what! When you’re an old man you’re going to be talking about the great things that happened in your life – not “well, 30 years ago I was at Whole Foods Market on West Lake and Denny in Seattle and I had approach anxiety and I wasn’t able to talk to this woman. And to this day, I still can’t get over her.”

You don’t even know her name! You don’t even know what she’s all about! You probably can’t even remember what she looks like.

So every time a woman gets you down – when you think to yourself, man, I just can’t believe I got blown off by that dream girl – you have to think to yourself that in the history of your life, you won’t even remember her.

The quicker that you learn that life is a marathon, the quicker you realize you can keep moving forward. That’s how you work your life