“The great secret of getting what you want from life is to know what you want and believe you can have it.” — Norman Vincent Peale.
For this first edition of the newsletter, I want to talk to you about the contrast of life.
If your life is drifting aimlessly, it’s because you haven’t done the hard work of answering what you want. This is something you need to hammer into your brain every day.
I can’t stress this enough. If you don’t answer this question, you won’t know what goals to go for, which way to go, and which people to associate with; it is tied to everything.
During my twenties, I struggled a long time with this question. After high school, I went to study, but after completing my degree, I realised I didn’t want to do what I studied, and I didn’t know what else I wanted to do.
So I dove into self-development. Reading all the books I could find, looking for answers. Along the way, I found some excellent life advice, but I kept coming back to the same punchline over and over. Do the work of answering the question: “What do you want?”
How do you do it?
Start a regular practice
Get input – data. Try different things.
Read books, talk to people, do things. Follow the clues.
Creative people like us are blessed with the ability to do many things – good at many things, ‘great potential’. This is a good and a bad thing.
You have the confidence to try and risk new things, but you also have the idea in the back of your head that you don’t need to stick with something if it is tough, as all things eventually get into the mundane, that you can just switch to something else, ‘because that might be easier’.
It’s the one you stick with that works. The one you make work.
So, back to life.
Life is about contrast. Good and bad, beauty and ugliness. Light and dark. You need the one to know what the other even is. Doing a lot of things means you only find out what you don’t want; finding out by omission is still a strategy. Dating a few people shows you who you don’t want in your life. Making friends shows you who your people are.
This is not something to lament, this is a good thing. This means you keep going. If you wake up in the morning and you are still breathing, you can try something.
This is also why its a great idea to teach this to young kids, asking them what tehy want, because it is not taught in the school system. The school system only produces obedient factory workers (link). If they were taught that they need to know what they want out of life, they need to figure it out for themselves; it will save a lot of time and stress and soul searching later on.
“Knowing others is intelligence; knowing yourself is true wisdom.” Lao Tzu
Then you ask yourself how do you feel. Listen for an answer.
Do the people in your life give you energy or take away energy? The things you do, give or take? Go through your whole life and evaluate the things and people in it.
This is where the regular practice comes in handy, daily or weekly. It’s just something that you keep coming back to regularly. Self-reflection time is invaluable because it shows you a zoomed-out view of yourself. The foundation of improving yourself is getting to know yourself.
Journal prompts:
- What would the ideal outcome look like?
- What did I love about this?
- What did I hate about this?
- What would someone I look up to think of this?
- Looking back, what aspect attracted me to this beforehand?
So you need the tough times to get clear on what you don’t want.
Often when you go through a hard thing, you think – “I’m never doing this again”. That is a valuable experience.
Thomas Edison tried “10 000 ideas that didn’t work”. It’s rare to try something and love it for the first time. It’s more common to have tried a few things that didn’t work. Few business stories have that ‘one in a million lucky shot’ where someone strikes gold on their first try. Generally if you go back into their history, you find a few hits and misses. Of course, outliers exist, but expecting some trial and error is more realistic.
The key is curiosity. Curiosity about life. Not just settling for good enough. Take everything you can out of a moment, a relationship, a career choice, and then move on.
Another thing that makes this more complicated is growth. We are here on earth to grow. To experience this contrast, choose which way to go and grow. Think about it: you can’t go through experiences and not learn something. The human brain is a learning machine.
It will tell you next time, don’t do that; do it like this; this is easier.
So take the time to ask the question. Answer the question. Listen for the answer, as it might be hidden under a few layers of self-knowledge.
Until next week. Go Create.
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