One of my guilty weekend pleasures?

Buying a copy of the Financial Times, plopping myself on the sofa with a cup of Earl Grey tea, whizzing through the business pages and heading straight to the Chess & Bridge columns.

Then Lauren joins me and we attack the weekend crossword.

As I was flicking to the crossword this Saturday, an article about Spotify caught my eye.

The article talked about how a bunch of Spotify users started whinging when Spotify’s random shuffle feature played three or four songs from the same artist in a row. 

That’s not random, the users said.

As it turns out, a randomly shuffled playlist will still have clusters of songs. That’s part of the randomness, even if it seems counterintuitive.

To stop the complaints rolling in, Spotify decided to re-code their random shuffle feature to deliberately remove these clusters.

This satisfied the Spotify users. But it also means that Spotify’s random shuffle is no longer truly random.

Curious stuff.

And I daresay there’s a lesson here when it comes to handling life’s challenges.

See, I used to think that the path to a peaceful & happy life was to somehow engineer a life with as few problems as possible. 

So I’d play it safe wherever I could, in case taking a risk created a new problem. 

I’d script work presentations word for word to try to control the presentation as much as possible. I wouldn't go chat to the pretty girl standing by the bar, even though I really wanted to. I'd refuse to make a decision until I was 100% sure I was making the right decision. And I’d distract myself from the pressure to get everything right with pints of beer and relentless trips to the gym.

I'd traded pursuing what lit me up for avoiding what scared me. 

As a result, my life became safe & predictable.

But what I’ve come to see is that the most happy, fulfilled and easy-going people still have problems popping up all the time.

The only difference?

They don’t view the fact they have problems as problematic. They see it as an inevitable part of life.

It’s a direct read-across to the Spotify story where the users thought the clusters of songs were a flaw even though the system was working perfectly.

Swap “clusters of songs” with “life problems” and you’ll see where I’m going with this.

It’s easy to mistake life's natural turbulence for a sign that life isn't working. It’s also easy to think that if we had our life together, we'd have fewer problems or we wouldn’t have problems at all.

But problems don’t mean we’re failing or there’s something wrong. 

Having problems just means we’re alive and kicking.

If you're ready to stop battling life's natural ups & downs and start flowing with them instead, my coaching could be just the ticket. 

If you'd like to chat about how this could work for you, shuffle your way over here:

https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com