The fundamental key to being productive after a workday is to only attempt the smallest workload. This does not mean that you will only complete a small amount of work, it does mean that you do not have to do much work to get started. Make your goal to do the smallest amount of work possible.
I’ll write one sentence for my book.
I’ll practice one guitar scale.
I will only do one exercise in a workout.
Focus on the smallest possible task. Being scared of getting started is what keeps most people from acting. The task looks too great, so they never bother with any of it.
We become discouraged when we see the whole task. To short-circuit that, ignore the whole task. Give yourself permission to stop midway. Better to start and then stop then never start at all.
The whole task is intimidating. It is difficult to be productive after a workday.
“I have to read a WHOLE chapter of this book?” “Do I have to complete a FULL workout?” “I have to edit a COMPLETE video?” “Do I have to wash ALL the dishes?”
It does not matter what task it is, we are demoralized when we think the task before us is massive. When we believe that we have to finish the entire task, which would be a great deal of work, we never bother getting started in the first place.
But the reality is that we only have to get started. We have to give ourselves permission to complete just a small amount of work. This eliminates the barrier that prevents us from simply getting started. Procrastinators lose because they think in extremes. The pain of starting now is too high and the pleasure of putting it off is too great.
The smaller the task seems, the easier it will be to get started. The easier it is to start, the easier it is to maintain that momentum. If you can reduce the barrier to entry of action to the point that it is extraordinarily easy, then you will make it more likely that you actually complete the action.
Identify whatever it is that you want to start, whether spiritual or secular. Take reading the Bible, for example. Most people might tell you that you should try one of those “Read your Bible in a Year program. I do not think you should bother with this. Most people do not have the discipline to read daily the amount of Bible it would take to complete it in a year [it usually comes out to about 3-4 chapters daily]. For most people who are in the habit of reading precisely zero chapters of the Bible per day, this will be too much. It’s like never running a day in your life, then deciding you will rain for a marathon and deciding to start training by running six miles per day. That is not a recipe for consistent action.
Center on the present. Put your mind in the moment and it will allow you to lean into the effort of starting small. It is embarrassing how difficult it is to start even when the task is small. But knowing that, how could we ever think we would be capable of larger habits right off the bat? Some people may be, but if you have consistently failed to develop the habits you want, then do not think about those people. Just focus on the smallest amount of work you can do, and try to do it.
That is the key to being productive after a workday.
After you have been working all day, the last thing you want to do is focus on goals and more work. Most people want to relax, unwind and distract themselves. But if you tackle just a tiny amount of work, you can make a small amount of progress that will ater compound.
The goal of course is to get to the point where you are completing large and seemingly difficult habits. But this cannot start unless a person first begins in small ways.
Overcome the inertia of starting – select the smallest task that will move you forward. Slow progress beats no progress.
In rehabilitation hospitals, some patients are so weak that they cannot even sit on the edge of the bed without desaturation, spiking heartrate, dropping blood pressure, feeling faint, and needing to lay back down. For these people, just sitting on the edge of the bed is a workout. Many people are in the same position with their personal development. It would be challenging just to sit at the edge of the metaphorical bed. So start there, build strength, and then slowly build up to a greater workload. That is how you are productive after a workday.
You have to manage your presentation. The way you present yourself to others is key to your success.
The only way to maintain a degree of control over the impression you deliver and the power you have is through your visual presentation. Your body language, your expressions, your verbal articulations. All other power maneuvers come down through this outlet. Presentation is the delivery mechanism by which you make your move in this world.
This is a lesson you learn from the scripture as well. Nehemiah was a cupbearer for the king of the time. This is a highly trusted position, as one of Nehemiah’s roles would be to screen the king’s drink for poison.
When working in the presence of the king, he always managed his presentation. You cannot have a bad day in front of the king. You cannot be negative in front of the king. Your very life may depend on the king’s emotional equilibrium, which will be affected by the way you present yourself.
It was not until Nehemiah was aware of the condition of Jerusalem in Nehemiah 2:1-2 that he was unable to maintain a positive appearance in the presence of the king. In fact, look at what the scripture says.
“And it came to pass in the month of Nisan, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was before him, that I took the wine and gave it to the king. Now I had never been sad in his presence before. 2 Therefore the king said to me, “Why is your face sad, since you are not sick? This is nothing but sorrow of heart.””
Nehemiah had never once been sad in the presence of the king. If you want an example of self-control this is it. Or if you want an example of managing your presentation in public appearance, this is also it.
Where do we go wrong when we interact with others? It’s when others can tell just by looking at us that we aren’t ourselves. It’s when we give away that we’re having a bad day by our facial expressions. I’m not saying that we can’t have bad days, stress, or difficulty. I’m saying we don’t let it show. If people can tell something is wrong with you just by looking at you, they are in a perfect position to manipulate you. The emotional man is the manipulated man.
It is the role of a man to suppress that type of behavior. I know it’s no longer popular to say that men should do traditionally masculine things like manage their emotions, but as you well know as a reader of Spartan Christianity, I don’t really care what people find popular. A man has to manage his emotional state and, if he is having a bad day, return it to its original state of equilibrium as quickly as he can.
The man is the Bedrock of the family unit. If he’s unstable, the entire family unit’s unstable.
So even though he doesn’t have to be an emotionless robot [though I think he should manage his emotions as well] he does have the incredible responsibility of never letting the people he is leading [his family] know that he’s having a bad day. Men don’t get to have bad days. The crushing burdens of performance will beat a man down if he starts to show his bad days.
Let’s learn our lesson from Nehemiah: manage your presence in front of other people, and other leadership. If you’re working, never let your boss or customers know you’re having a bad day. You don’t get to have a bad day. Additionally, no one cares if you do have a bad day as a man. And in fact, if you act like you’re not having a bad day, it won’t take too long before you forget that you weren’t having a bad day, and that will be back to a neutral day, maybe even a good one.
But it doesn’t matter how it turns out. All that matters is how you act. Actions are everything. Emotions and intentions are nothing. Motivations or nothing. Don’t obsess yourself with how you’re feeling, obsess yourself with how you’re acting.
Manage your presence in front of the king. Don’t let anyone know that you’re having a Down day.
You are an actor on stage. And your mask is one of masculine self-control. The goal is to eventually replace that mask with truly integrated masculine self-control that has no choice but to leak out of you. But until that moment comes, act like a man. Even if you don’t feel like one, act like one. And by acting like one you’ll eventually feel like one.
Last week we talked about progressive overload and its use in training for muscle hypertrophy. With that groundwork, you can better understand this week’s article: how to apply the principles of progressive overload to your personal development.
In developing yourself, you use many of the same tools that you would use in developing your body.
Tracking and measurement of Performance.
Precise Exercise Selection for precise results.
Emphasis on weak or lagging areas.
Application of the specificity principle.
Application of the overload principle.
Continual development of the self is key to everything in life. Whether improving your work performance, relationships, or social skills – all can be improved by progressively overloading these elements of yourself.
I. Understanding Progressive Overload in Personal Development
A. Defining Progressive Overload
If you missed last week’s article, progressive overload is a key idea in physical training. It requires you to apply a stimulus that will activate growth of the body [overload], and continue to apply and increase that stimulus to maintain progress.
Your development must be progressive because what improves you today will be too easy to improve you tomorrow. This applies to weight training as well as personal development. Addressing your basic weaknesses in socialization will require some basic tools. But as you become advanced, those same tools will be insufficient for allowing you to progress even further.
What pushes you beyond your zone of comfort as a beginner may be a warmup for you as an advanced person, both as a lifter and as a charismatic [or whatever/whoever you are trying to become].
B. Establishing a Baseline
The process of improvement always begins with an analysis of where you are right now. You cannot get better if you do not know where you are currently.
When an athlete sits down and writes down the primary demands and requirements of his sport, this is called a “Need’s Analysis”. And it is an excellent way to articulate the basic necessities of your sport.
The same applies to your life and personal development. What are those basic, intermediate, and advanced skills that you need as a human being?
Write these down.
What do you need to do to be able to function in society, succeed in society, and thrive in society [novice, intermediate, and advanced categories]?
If you are going to improve, you have to be self-aware and self-critical. Not to a pathological degree, but no one ever improves by pretending they have no faults.
Life Skills
* Time management and organization * Developing a growth mindset * Basic problem-solving and decision-making skills. * Effective communication skills (listening, speaking, and writing) * Financial literacy and budgeting * Self-awareness and emotional intelligence * Goal setting and planning * Health Discipline (exercise, nutrition, sleep) * Stress management and resilience * Adaptability and openness to learning * Self-Discipline (push yourself when you don’t want to)
Business Skills
* Basic understanding of business ethics and professionalism * Familiarity with common business terminologies and concepts * Work Ethic * Basic customer service skills * Basic project management skills * Basic knowledge of marketing principles * Basic financial analysis and budgeting * Basic problem-solving skills in a professional context * Understanding workplace etiquette and teamwork * Basic networking and relationship-building skills
Relationship Skills
* Active listening Eye contact mastery * Body LanguageConfrontation and conflict resolution * Building and maintaining trust in relationships * Effective communication skills in relationships * Showing appreciation and gratitude * Setting boundaries * Developing and nurturing friendships * Negotiation and compromise skills * Understanding and navigating emotions in relationships * Developing empathy and understanding others’ perspectives
Spiritual Skills
* Mastering daily Bible reading * Showing up to church despite how you feel * Interacting with other Christians in positive ways * Being uplifting * Developing a consistent prayer life * Waging perpetual war again sin * Developing an accurate understanding of the Bible * Attending a doctrinally correct church * Obeying the Gospel through the process of salvation
These are just a few examples, but you can see how you can easily list out skills that you need to be able to survive in the world.
Then split these into categories like novice, intermediate, and advanced that are unique to you. You will be advanced in some skills but novice in others. And no two people will be alike.
This is a critical chance for you to take an honest look at your weaknesses, write them down and analyze them from a third-person perspective, and then actually make some improvements.
II. Identifying Areas for Progress in Personal Development
A. Self-Assessment:
Assessing yourself starts with honesty and humility. Most people live their entire lives ignoring their flaws and weaknesses. This is understandable because it is painful to look at our flaws and weaknesses at first. But avoiding this responsibility robs most people of the level of self-development they could otherwise achieve.
With the groundwork of humility and honey laid, you need to identify your goals. This will be based on a combination of your current levels of development and where you want to go and how you want to improve.
If your social skills are lagging, then you need to set some goals for how you are going to improve.
What do people with strong social skills do?
They make consistent eye contact during a conversation
They add to the conversation
They are funny
They stay engaged and off their phone
Look at people you admire who have the skills you want to develop and identify what it is that makes them so good at socializing. While studying them, see what you can model. What can you attempt to copy?
B. Setting Challenging Yet Attainable Goals
Your goals have to be crystal clear. They have to be attainable, yet demanding in order to achieve.
Some promote the SMART framework for goal setting (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant/Realistic, Time-bound) in personal development.
This works for some while others have a hard time with it. You have to decide what will work for you.
But the specificity of goals is critical. You will not get better at a thing without specifically working to get better at it. Just like the biceps will not grow from sets of squats, so also social skills do not improve from sets of “work ethic” for example.
III. Implementing Progressive Overload Strategies
A. Expanding Knowledge and Skills
For growth to be continued there must be a persistent demand placed upon them. And this demand must progress on a linear basis.
There has never been more free information available than what you can find on YouTube.
You can learn social skills from Charisma on Command. Or You can Learn about Discipline from Jocko Willink and the Jocko Podcast. You can Learn about neuroscience from College lectures or from Andrew Huberman.
And the list goes on forever. Whatever it is you want to learn, or whatever you want to get better at, you can find people teaching it online – and they give away much of their material for free!
There are also courses and workshops offered around you. You can find these with a simple Google search.
Do you want to get better at public speaking? See if your city has a local chapter of Toastmasters. Want to learn self-defense, find a jui-jitsu dojo in your town. Some colleges offer free workshops and seminars with speakers.
The only limit in finding ways to improve yourself is your own ability to think creatively and find out where the people with the information are. Find them, then learn from them, and place progressively greater challenges on yourself to improve.
B. Cultivating Resilience and Mental Strength
The ability to recover quickly from failure and get back to work is a skill that will propel you to success. Because if the average Joe writhes around in his state of failure while you get back on the horse immediately, you are already that much farther ahead of him.
And this is certainly how most people live. We hit difficulty or failure and then just wallow in it. We get down in the dumps and invite our negative emotional state in for dinner. Some might say this is a normal part of processing a negative event, but I would argue that this action makes one adverse event far worse than it should have been. Something that could have been processed and ended is now a long-term emotional event.
Emotions exist to motivate action. We are not supposed to feel negative and then just sit there in a negative state. We are supposed to take action. Take some steps in the direction of our goals. Get back on the horse and we find that the emotion will resolve. It is just there to get us to press on a little more.
So when you hit failure, get excited. Know that it is one of the pathways for growth. And it is a pathway that so many people rarely experience because they hide from it.
The average person spends their whole life hiding from failure. As a result, they never attempt anything worth accomplishing. They are so afraid to fail that it prevents them from ever even attempting. This keeps them in a perpetual state of mediocrity in all of their life endeavors.
And as sad as this is, it presents you with a potent opportunity. You can get ahead of the vast majority of people in life simply by building a different mindset, taking different actions, and not shrinking back from failure when it appears.
Everyone fails – do not be the loser who stays down when he fails.
IV. Monitoring and Adjusting
A. Tracking Progress
Monitor progress towards your goal. Just like you might keep a training journal, it may be worthwhile to try keeping a personal development journal.
This journal should have your primary goals as well as notes and field reports tracking your progress.
If you are working on socialization, you can track how many people you approached to talk to at church. Record your performance and your emotional state before, during, and after the event. This will serve to teach you that you can act in accordance with your goals regardless of how you are feeling emotionally at any given time. This is a great lesson. You have to know that you can act with discipline and push yourself to do anything you want despite your emotional state at the time.
Learn that and you will be ahead of the world.
B. Adjusting the Load
It is critical that as you progress, you increase the demand you are placing on yourself. If you push yourself to talk to 5 people at church, at some point it needs to become 6. Or the conversation needs to progress to a deeper level. Whatever it is, you have to increase the difficulty or volume of what you are doing. That makes your development progressive.
As you progress, you may find that some goals no longer suit your purpose. Maybe you realize that you will never be able to be at a master level in some skill without a lifetime of work. Or perhaps your personal development in the social area caused you to find areas of weakness in other aspects of yourself.
Whatever the case is, you are not married to your personal development plan. You can pivot, shift, and change all along the way.
V. Overcoming Plateaus and Preventing Burnout
A. Recognizing Plateaus
Just like in physical training, as you progress, you will hit areas of stagnation, places where improvement becomes slow or impossible. This is not a problem, just a part of the process.
The first thing to do when hitting a plateau is to keep cool and keep your wits about you. Most people throw in the towel right here. That’s right, at the very first hint of weakness, they give up. While sad, it means that all you have to do is not give up to ahead of the average person.
Next, examine your current plan. When you hit plateaus in the gym you can switch out exercises, rep schemes, splits, etc. What can you adjust or switch out in your personal development plan? If the only socialization you get is at church, and you continue to interact with the same people over and over again, that is the equivalent of doing the same exercises, with the same rep range, with the same intensity for months on end. Of course that will get a little stale and slow your progress.
Maybe you can add some additional socialization. You can attempt to talk to people in public (I know, the horror) or at events or shops. You have to introduce some form of novelty to your plan to break the monotony and allow for continued improvement in new dynamic situations.
Look at those you are modeling and see what they do in different situations. Look to them to develop advanced skills.
B. Avoiding Burnout:
Anyone who has attempted to improve themselves over a long enough time will tell you that there are moments when they want to quit the entire thing. They are not making progress on any fronts, they are frustrated, and they want to go back to the way they were.
When this happens in exercise, we introduce a deload, where we reduce volume, load, intensity, or a combination of any and all of these in order to allow the body to recover and potentiate the potential for gains.
In personal development, you can do this by simply backing off the advanced versions of skills and going down to a baseline.
What level of performance can you consistently generate without conscious effort?
The benefit of personal development is that at some point, your skills at a specific level will be able to be automated. You behave better automatically.
Whatever that level is for you, back off your personal development to this level. Instead of quitting completely, just deload to a level that is manageable without you having to think.
This will allow you to not give up completely on your habits, but also give yourself a break from what you are doing.
Incorporate these strategies for applying progressive overload to your personal development and you will be ahead of the crowd.
We underestimate the value of taking the smallest possible step. Most people fail every endeavor they embark on because they never get started, which is the worst type of failure! If we try and fail, at least we tried. It is honorable to work and give effort even if the results are unfavorable. What is ignoble is to never try at all – to never give any effort towards our goals. This is especially true when it comes to what we want to accomplish or who we want to be in life.
For a righteous man may fall seven times And rise again, But the wicked shall fall by calamity.
Most people never get started because they think only massive action will suffice.
Massive action is one of the tenants of Tony Robbin’s message. I like Tony Robbins and I think massive action is needed for massive results, but I think if the standard is “massive action”, most people will never start because this is too daunting. Other people don’t want “massive results”, they just want some results. And the idea of taking massive action scares them away from taking any action. I think it is important to have incredibly high standards for ourselves, but those standards are meant to grow as we grow. We are not to start off with standards that are so high that it prevents us from taking any action at all.
Many of us require the smallest possible step in order to get started with any type of action, and we will look at some examples of this in a moment.
But by shrinking any task into the smallest possible step required to get started, many of us will find it easier to actually get the ball rolling.
Shrinking tasks is a technique often used in psychotherapy with people who are chronically depressed or unable to make any progress in life. One of the tools in the therapist’s toolbelt is to negotiate with their patient about what they are trying to do, shrinking down tasks until they are so small that the patient can actually do them. Many people need tiny tasks because the idea of taking a massive amount of action seems impossible to them.
Take the example of having to clean your whole house. Even for non-depressed people, this is a massive and daunting task. And many people procrastinate over getting started because they believe they have no choice but to clean their entire house all at once. So they pace the floor and try to build up the motivation to clean the house. They waste massive amounts of time just building the motivation to do what they know must be done.
What would be far easier is to start shrinking the task down.
Maybe we cannot clean the whole house, so what about cleaning one room?
Maybe even the idea of cleaning one room seems to be too difficult. So what about cleaning one corner of a room?
If there is a stack of papers in the room, could we organize just that stack?
If even that is too daunting, what about lifting the trash out of the trash can in the room?
All we have to do is continue to shrink down the action until we find the smallest possible step. At some point, the task will be so small that anyone can take it. Then take that step. And you will find that now you actually have momentum. You have gotten the ball rolling, and that is power. Your progress will not be linear, it will be exponential.
Take advantage of small actions and develop those into habits.
Once you have the habit of shrinking down tasks into small steps, you will find it much easier to keep going.
If you can get yourself started, you can keep yourself going the majority of the time.
Once you have developed those actions into small habits, expand them into bigger habits.
We do not want to develop the permanent habit of only doing small tasks. We need to be able to get ourselves to take bigger action. But we need to stair-step our way there because if we cannot handle small tasks, we will not be able to tackle large tasks.
We also need to Maintain habits by always being willing to take the smallest action – and be content with that. We have to be forthright and state that if you always and only take the smallest possible action, you will not make massive progress. Are you willing to be content with that?
But in reality, many people find that if they take the smallest step, it is much easier to take an additional step after that. Before you know it, you have taken 1,000 steps and have made great progress.
Have the humility to start small.
Perfectionism and ego prevent us from starting small. We believe we are capable of more. Only the weak have to take small, baby steps. When we do not act because an action is seemingly too small, we are saying “I am capable of more, and because of that it will not be happy if I simply do less than some massive action”. So instead of taking a small step, we take no step, and that is unfortunate because it will prevent us from making any progress at all in our life.
Some Tools for Taking The Smallest Possible Step
I – The Two-Minute Rule
Decide on whatever task you want to work on. Decide that you are only going to work two minutes on it. Set a two-minute timer and start working. when the timer goes off, you are allowed to stop working.
The value of this tool is that anyone can work for 2 minutes. It may be difficult, even though it is a short time, but most people can set a two-minute timer and focus. If not, then set a one-minute timer. Whatever the smallest unit of time that allows you to get started and work is.
II – The “It’s Okay to Not Finish” Technique
For this tool, all you have to do is give yourself permission to not finish whatever task you start. While this is not a habit we want to maintain permanently, as we want to be finishers, it is still infinitely better than doing nothing.
To use this tool, simply say to yourself “I’ll just get started, I don’t have to finish this work“.
By doing this, you give yourself permission to stop in the middle of the task. this breaks the task into very small chunks inadvertently.
This is the same principle we mentioned when we talked about shrinking a task down in psychotherapy. That person gives themself permission not to clean the whole room, but to just clean a small portion of it. the job is not finished, but he has made progress.
Whatever it is you are trying to accomplish in life, be willing to take the smallest possible step.
Develop it into a habit. Then you will be someone who gets started. And getting started puts you years ahead of most people.
Desires are different from wants. We want different things all the time, and those wants eventually fade away. If a want does not fade away, or if it continually resurfaces, then it is not a want, but a desire. Desires will outlast wants and be more beneficial to us in our lives. We will act on our desires, and continue to act on them over the long run, even when they fade from time to time.
This is why it is critically important to uncover what our desires truly are so we can pursue them to completion.
Whenever you fail catastrophically in life, it is often due to the fact that you did not desire your goal strongly enough. This is not always true, but it applies in many cases. Perhaps you became comfortable, stopped giving the appropriate amount of effort to your pursuits, and eventually failed. While the occasional failure is inevitable and very helpful in reigniting our spirits, longer-lasting failure comes from fading desire.
When you are pursuing anything in life, you must always ask yourself what you want and why you want what you are chasing it.
Often we chase what we do not even want. We desire different things for different reasons. But all in all, desires can be boiled down into two major, overarching categories: external and internal desires.
You must constantly be assessing your desires to determine if they are internally or externally generated. Internal desires (things you personally want for your own reasons) will be more resilient to failure and difficulty than external desires (things you want because other people want them for you).
Now there is nothing wrong with the occasional external desire. We get a large amount of work done in our lives because of externally generated desires. It is not a stretch to suggest that most of our lives are filled with fulfilling the desires of those around us rather than our own, and that is where it goes too far.
Most kids grow up having no idea why they should go to school. But they are told to do so, so they do. Maybe later in life, they can think of a few half-hearted reasons why their education was valuable. But most kids go to school to fulfill external desires, which is one of the many reasons they learn so little.
External desires are large in number but lead to less powerful results than internal desires.
Internal Desire
External Desire
Going to medical school because you want to be a doctor.
Going to medical school because your parents want you to be a doctor.
Engaging with the youth group because you enjoy it and find value in it.
Engaging with the youth group so you don’t get made fun of and can make your parents happy.
Societal and Cultural Pressure vs. Internal Desire
Also, you must differentiate between societal or cultural pressures and internal desires. Again, this is not to rag on societal pressure. Some of that type of pressure is valuable for an individual. The external societal pressure can keep us working hard and focusing on valuable components of the community. It only becomes a problem when virtually all of our desires are externally generated and nothing about our unique self remains.
Outside sources of desire can squash individuality and confuse people with regard to their desires. When most individuals have the vast majority of their wants and desires generated from outside sources. They lose the ability to discern between what they want and what others want for them. Most people would confuse their own desires with the desires that have been generated by their friends and family.
What we come to realize is that external wants fade away with time.
The tragedy is that most people lock themselves into a specific life based on externally generated goals and cannot leave even when the superficial desire fades away. Many men marry the wrong woman, select the wrong career, and live the wrong life because they made permanent, life-long decisions while buried in emotionalism. They made permanent decisions based on external wants that will fade with time. Their parents wanted them to be doctors and their friends wanted them to get married. So they made long-lasting commitments based on the short-lasting desire to please others. Then once those desires fade, they are left with nothing but the shadow of a life that could have been and the regret that their deepest desires will never be realized.
This is the tragic lot of most men. The man who finds himself in this life circumstance will lie awake in the dark hours of the night, mourning over the loss of his life.
When you are determining if you truly want something, you need to ask yourself “why” at least five times. Best case scenario, none of the answers will involve third parties. If any of the answers do involve third parties, you should make yourself aware that you are making poor decisions based on outside sources. Make sure you will be able to correct your course and choice in the future if you are even somewhat unsure about your choice in the present. Do not make any major, life-long decisions if any of your answers to the question of “why” involve outside pressures.
Asking yourself why will uncover the nature of your desire and make you aware of if this goal is yours or if it is someone else’s.
Again, it is okay to have a few externally generated wants and goals in life. But as men, we should work at all times to make sure those external wants are the minority of our life goals.
Lastly, you must ask yourself what you truly want. When you begin to ask yourself what you want, dozens of answers (or no answers) may bubble up to the surface. It is your job to sift through all of these answers and make sure the things you want in life are truly the things you want. You must discover whether you have true internal desires or fleeting external wants. There are no right and wrong answers. These questions are just meant to help guide your mind and life.
II – Difficulty Erases False Desire
When inevitable difficulties come your way, false dreams will fall away while true desires will hold firm. Difficulty was created for us to fine-tune what we want and to keep us on the correct life paths. We all encounter difficulty from time to time, and this is a good thing. It keeps us focused and centered on our most valuable missions that are congruent with our individuality. If we do not truly desire something, then the want will simply fade away. Difficulty helps accelerate that process.
When difficulty hits us, we get to decide what facets of our life are actually worth the difficulty involved, and what facets of our lives are made better by difficulty. Those components of our work and life that are difficult and frustrating are like flares pointing us towards our mission. If we are still motivated and interested in what we are doing despite the difficulty, then we can know we are on one of the correct paths for our life.
It is not bad when your desire fades with pain – use this as a tool to guide you towards a better life path. The only time this becomes a problem is when you give up everything you ever try the moment you encounter difficulty. Difficulty was designed to make us better, to refine us, and to guide us. It is okay when it prunes unnecessary desires as long as a few keystone desires remain.
III – It is Acceptable to Have Very Few Desires
In the course of weeding out false desires, you may find that there is not much you want. This is acceptable. It is more than acceptable to have very few wants in life.
Think back to life right after the fall of man. Do you think Adam and Eve had many wants? They likely had very few wants because there were very few things to want. There literally were not enough things on the earth to desire. But now in this day and age, there is more to desire than could ever be experienced in a lifetime. And there is much we want to experience simply because we do not want to miss out on experiencing it (fear of missing out – FOMO).
But if we return to our roots, to the basic components of humanity and masculinity, we may discover that we actually do not want much at all. And this is acceptable.
After recognizing that there is not much you truly desire, be willing to accept that you will not get the results. You may superficially desire something because of the potential results that you see flashed before your eyes in public or on social media, but you do not truly want it. Because you do not truly want it you will not work for it and you will not earn it. Accept that you will have to live without anything you are not willing to trade a proportionate amount of effort to receive. Once you accept this, you are on your way to a life of contentment.
Ask yourself if you can live without those results – Most people can live without most of the results that are achievable.
This is why they remain in poor physical, mental, and financial shape. It is abundantly clear what must be done for anyone to get in better physical shape. It is also very clear what must be done to get into better financial shape. Yet why do so few people do either of these things? Simply because they are unwilling to trade the proportionate amount of effort in order to achieve the results. And they are unwilling to invest this proportionate amount of effort because their desire is insufficient. They will never achieve the results because the desire is not there. And there is a myriad of reasons why the desire is not there.
It is okay if your few remaining desires are superficial. You will not be the perfect, deep spiritual being you want to be. Accept it and attempt to leverage it into something better. Even if your desires are superficial, at least you know what you truly want. That is more than can be said for the majority of humanity.
IV – Find your Desires
Spend time alone. The truest self will bubble to the surface when you are alone, far from the prying eyes of external expectations. You are never going to figure out what you really want if you are constantly generating your desires based on outside influence. Get yourself away from their prying eyes and begin to think about who and what you are.
Here are some questions to ask yourself.
1 – When no one can see you, who are you?
When you are far away from people and no longer have to invest mental, emotional, and physical energy into pretending to be something you are not, who are you? And when your entire false reality fades away and you no longer have to put on your mask, who are you? This is a critical question to answer about yourself because it will tell you about your core beliefs and values. And once those are known, you can ask yourself if you want to modify them or change them altogether.
2 – When no one can see you, who do you want to be?
When you are away from all the pressures of friends and family telling you who and what to be, who do you truly want to be? You may find that when you ask yourself this question, the voices of your parents, grandparents, or friends at church will answer. You need to shut out those voices. Continue to ask yourself the question, but tell yourself that you will only accept answers from yourself. No outside sources are allowed to contribute their inane opinion about you.
3 – Ask yourself, who must you be?
You have a specific uniqueness built into your individuality that only you can realize and develop to the fullest. Listen to that still, small voice in the back of your head that has always known the best life paths for you. Maybe you have not bothered listening to that voice since you were a little kid and the world was exciting. You need to start asking yourself who you must be.
What is your unique gift to bring to the world? No one can answer this but you. And you may get no answer for a long time as you ask yourself this question. You have spent so long living for the interest of others that you have forgotten how to live for yourself. But if you are patient, and continue to ask yourself who you must be, you will eventually begin to find answers. And these answers will be critical tools for you to choose life paths.
Also remember that there is no single, correct path for your life. You have many unique talents and abilities, and there are multiple right paths that you could take with your life. What you are attempting to do with these exercises is make sure that you do not waste time going down the many wrong paths that are also available. There are many more wrong paths than right paths. And if you only listen to outside sources and have external wants, then you will make many errors with regard to your life paths.
Here is a step-by-step exercise for you:
Take your journal, find the nearest forest and go spend alone time in it. Leave your phone and all other distractions behind you.
Wait for the paranoia to surface and settle.
Do not stimulate the mind.
Think of running water and allow the mind to settle.
Ask yourself the important introspective questions. You will not get an answer at first. Continue to ask and answers will begin to bubble up.
Ask questions until you are satisfied that the answeres that bubbled up are your own and no one else’s.
Repeat this practice regularly, as it is easy to forget who you are and what you awant, especially after living a life where you are defined by those around you and by their desires.
Find your desires, make them your own, then trade the proportionate amount of work for those desires.
