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Chasing After a Mirage

What are we chasing after in our short-lived lives? Money, fame, power?

It was Marcus Aurelius who said: “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself in your way of thinking.” 

Too often we are trying to chase down something temporary or illusory. What really matters is much simpler and lies within you. If you want to achieve happiness, why bother trying to impress or please others? Do what is fulfilling for you. 

Take care of yourself and focus on living the good life. 

Man’s Searching For Meaning in the 21st Century

“If you take man as he is, we make him worse. But if you take man as he should be, we make him capable of becoming what he can be.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning is one of the most inspirational books I have ever read on man’s purpose on life.

I keep Dr. Frankl’s wisdom closeby anywhere I go and plan on rereading his epic book soon.

Recently, I stumbled upon the video below and wondered about how Dr. Frankl’s words would apply today in the context of the 21st century. It is easy to get lost in our pursuits of career advancement and far-reaching impact, but it has never been truer that we should all be paying more attention to our internal sense of purpose as a compass.

 

Bubble Awareness

We all live in our own bubbles.

Some people live in a bubble of themselves and their close friends. Others live in a bubble of a college campus. And others live in a bubble of their city. 

We are always worried about hustling to get ahead and looking great in front of our peers, but I wonder how much of our actions are driven by social pressure from the people in our bubbles? 

It’s important for us to keep our minds alert to news outside of our bubble. Our dreams are usually big and cannot be contained by bubbles, so why let your daily thinking be contained by them?

Bubble thinking is herd mentality thinking. Sheep thinking. In order for us to succeed as leaders, creators, innovators, changemakers, and dynamic individuals, we need to free our thinking and daily social interactions from the molds of our bubbles. 

 

Notion of Time and Fear of Death

I have been feeling constantly pressured for time in a race against death.

All the words of wisdom have told me to live everyday like it’s your last. If this daily philosophy was good enough for Steve Jobs, it sure is good enough for me.

But living with this mantra is nerve-wracking and downright frustrating. Life will have some pinnacles of ecstacy and euphoria, but really 4/5 of your days will be spent working hard to reach those pinnacles. By focusing so hard on making your day incredible, you lose out on serendipity and forming a deeper connection with the people and environment surrounding you. 

After reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho and its accompanying interview with Paulo, I have really come to appreciate the idea of living at your own pace and getting rid of the notion of time.

One quote in his interview really stuck out to me:

“When you have an intense contact of love with nature or another human being, like a spark, then you understand that there is no time and that everything is eternal.”

I think what he means is that by trying to plan out an epic day everyday, you lose out on living in the present with these intense relationships with nature and people — which is what ultimately makes life epic.

So instead of living everyday like it’s your last, try living everyday like you’ll live forever. And take the time to live in the now.

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On Gut Instinct

Do you listen to your gut instinct?

I hypothesize that too many people I know ignore their gut instinct too often and suffer as a result.

Your gut instinct is a very powerful tool that can help guide you in everyday decision-making. Listening to your gut instinct is an important skill that you can train yourself to improve in. If you used data and logical reasoning in order to make every decision in your life no matter how small it is, e.g. choosing what to wear in the morning or what to buy at the grocery store, then you would quickly get bogged down in decision paralysis. Simple tasks would become drawn-out mental battles of drudgery.

So why is it that so many people ignore their gut instinct?

They have been led to believe that more often than not, their gut instinct is wrong. It’s untrustworthy. There’s a high risk involved with depending on gut instinct to guide your life. It’s better to rely on logical reasoning and analytical thinking. 

So they turn off the part of the mind that responds to their gut instinct. 

And that’s where things start to go wrong.

By turning off their response mechanism, they let it get rusty. They rely on logical reasoning and analytical thinking that drains their energy and capacity for making quick decisions. They forget how their response mechanism works. So if their gut instinct does somehow trigger a response, they are unaccostomed to it and do not know how to respond.

I am a firm believer in using logical reasoning and analytical thinking where it makes sense: medium-to-large-scale decisions that require rational judgement such as what house or car to purchase or what job to seek out.

But even in a job search, you might get caught in a mental battle between the job that is more safe, gives great pay, but is not in line with your passions and the job that is risky, has less pay, but resonates with your passion and grand vision. Many people would choose to go with the former job even if their gut instinct is telling them to do the opposite. 

I believe that by not trusting their gut instinct in this case, they are causing themselves serious unhappiness.

So gut instinct also has a role to play in the big decisions we make in life. No matter how good we are at ignoring our gut instinct, it will resurface at the times we make the most critical decisions and it will be very difficult to decide how to respond to it. 

That is why it is ultimately beneficial to keep on listening to your gut instinct and keep your mind open to taking risks based on your gut instinct. Eventually, you will come to understand exactly when to trust your gut instinct and when not to. Like anything, your response mechanism improves with practice. But if you ignore your gut instinct up to the point when you’re faced with a critical decision and can no longer do so anymore, then you will be woefully unprepared to make that judgement call.