The Meaning of Life: Discover Your Purpose

Do You Have a Pre-Encoded Purpose?

Many books I’ve read seem to assume that we’re either genetically or divinely encoded with some sort of built-in purpose, and all we need to do is take the time to discover it through private introspection. You just sit down one day and write a mission statement and trust that what comes out of you will be the guiding force for the rest of your life. Perhaps every 6-12 months you update it.

Personally I think that’s nonsense. I see no evidence that there’s any pre-encoded purpose in any of us. You may have experienced strong social conditioning towards a particular purpose, such as if you’re born a prince or princess, and certainly your DNA will control some aspects of your life, but that isn’t sufficient evidence of any sort of divine will at work. I think in most cases you’ll just end up with a wishy-washy mission statement that doesn’t mean much.

If you begin with the assumption that you have a pre-encoded purpose and attempt to discover it merely by sitting down and writing a mission statement, I think you’ll end up building a house of straw for yourself. You won’t have a rational foundation for trusting your purpose. In most cases you’ll feel like you’re just guessing, and you might look back on your mission statement a week later and find that it’s not so interesting as you thought it was when you wrote it. You’ll always have doubts about what you’ve written.

When people try to sit down and write out a purpose or mission statement, they usually lack sufficient clarity to do so intelligently. How exactly are you supposed to define your purpose? Are you simply supposed to know it and squeeze it out of your brain like a sponge? What if you can imagine several different missions that might fit you, but you have no idea which is better? What if you can’t think of anything at all that seems meaningful to you? What then?

Just because you may not have a pre-encoded purpose doesn’t mean you don’t have a purpose though. It simply means that it will take more work to define your purpose. Your purpose isn’t really something you discover. It would be more accurate to say that your purpose is something you co-create based on your relationship to reality. I wouldn’t exactly call it a free choice though. There may be multiple choices for you, but all choices are not equally valid.

What is needed is an intelligent method for developing your purpose, a process that makes sense, such that when you arrive at your final answer, you have high trust that it’s correct.

If you’re wondering why defining a purpose for your life matters at all, read this:
Why Does Purpose Matter?

How to Intelligently Define Your Purpose

I’m going to suggest two different methods for defining your purpose. Ideally you should use both of them, since each will help you understand different aspects of your purpose. This is going to be a lot of work, but the end result will be worth it because you’ll reach a point of tremendous clarity. In the end it will be far easier to make decisions and take action, and you’ll find that your life just seems to work once you know your purpose.

Method 1: Emotional Intelligence

The first method is to consult your emotional intelligence. Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about. Emotionally you will feel that it is correct.

The answer you get from this process, however, depends heavily on your ability to generate good input. Essentially what you are doing is exploring the search space of possible purposes, and you’re using the heuristic of your emotional reaction to gauge how close you are. But one thing I failed to mention in the original explanation of this process is that it requires you’re clear about your overall context for life first. If you don’t have that level of clarity yet, then you’ll have a hard time making this approach work successfully — you’ll be approaching the problem from the wrong context, so the potential answers you generate will all be in the wrong neighborhood. Garbage in, garbage out.

To use an analogy, imagine you’re looking at a map of the United States, trying to locate Las Vegas. If you have a good map, it shouldn’t take you long at all. Your eyes might shoot towards the left (west) side of the map, slide right (east) from California to Nevada, and you’ll soon spot Las Vegas in Southern Nevada. But what if you try this same exercise using a map of the U.S. from 1870. Now that’s a problem because Las Vegas didn’t officially become a city until 1911, so you won’t find it on a map from 1870. You won’t be able to locate the city until you realize you’re looking at an inaccurate map and get yourself a more recent map. Similarly, if your context is an inaccurate fit for reality, corrupted by too many false beliefs and incorrect assumptions, then you’re unlikely to be able to define a meaningful purpose for your life no matter what method you use — it’s simply not to be found anywhere on your map. Most likely you’ll settle for something that’s close to your purpose, but not quite right. You may target Reno instead of Las Vegas (Reno became a city in 1868, so it might be seen on your 1870 map).

My output from this method was:
to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.

If you’ve read yesterday’s post, you may notice certain patterns in this purpose statement that link up with my overall concept of reality:
to live consciously = awareness, required for conscious personal growth
and courageously = courage, a virtue required to pursue conscious growth
to resonate with love = unconditional love, which isn’t an emotion but rather a sense of connectedness with everything that exists, implying that working on my own growth and helping others to grow are compatible
and compassion = another virtue, one which helps temper courage
to awaken the great spirits within others = to help others lock in at a higher level of consciousness/awareness, which will give them the means to pursue personal growth consciously
and to leave this world in peace = a double meaning here: 1) world in peace = to do no harm, to work to improve life instead of destroy it, to leave a legacy; 2) leave … in peace = no regrets, knowing I did my best and could have expected no more of myself, refusing to die with my music still in me, inner peace

If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read these two posts to help you identify your overall context, within which you’ll be defining your purpose:
The Meaning of Life: Intro
The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?

Method 2: Rational Intelligence

The second method is to use your reason and logic to work down from your context. The clearer and more accurate your context is, the easier this will be.

To identify your purpose, you basically project your entire context of reality onto yourself. Given your current understanding of reality, where do you fit in? If you buy into the social context that most people seem to use, this will be virtually impossible for the reasons stated in yesterday’s post. Social contexts don’t provide sufficient clarity. At best you may end up with a wishy-washy purpose statement that addresses the basics like making money, having a family, having friends, and being nice, but there won’t be any real substance to it. If you gave it to someone else to read it, they wouldn’t come away knowing you any better.

Fuzzy context, fuzzy projection, fuzzy purpose.
Clear context, clear projection, clear purpose.

Since my context of reality is based on seeing life as a process of ongoing evolution (and I use the term evolution merely in the sense of growth and change, not in the strictly biological sense via natural selection), then when I project this context onto myself, the result is very simple — I’m a participant in the process of growth and change.

This is such a simple approach that it’s easy to miss. All you’re really doing is looking at your overall context of life and projecting those same qualities onto yourself. This projection becomes your purpose, your role in reality.

Imagine a hologram. When you cut off a piece of a hologram, the entire original image is still contained within the smaller piece. Reality is the big hologram, and you’re a piece of it. You inherit all the properties of reality. Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. If your beliefs are accurate, you’ll end up with a sensible, achievable purpose.

This method will also help you identify problems in your context because you’ll notice that something is wrong when you project a false belief onto yourself.

Suppose your context of reality is whatever the Catholic Church teaches. Then when you project this context on yourself, you get that your purpose is to serve God, obey the Church in religious matters, and to strive to be like Jesus.

If you have a null context of reality (nihilism), you get a null purpose. When you project nothing onto X, you get nothing.

If you don’t like the purpose you end up with when applying this method, then what you’re really saying is that you don’t like the context you’re using. This is a conflict you’ll need to resolve. You must either accept the context and the purpose that accompanies it, or you must change the context.

Blending the Two Methods

I think it’s helpful to use both methods for defining your purpose to see where they lead you. If your context is sound, you should get congruent answers from both approaches. Your emotional and rational intelligences will each phrase your purpose differently, but you should see that it’s essentially the same. But most of the time that won’t be the case, and the answers will be different, which means your context is incongruent. You rationally think about reality in one way but you feel it in another way. Perhaps you hold religious beliefs but only follow them sporadically — they aren’t integrated across your entire life. You may feel in your heart that your beliefs are true, but you don’t think them in your head. In this case you have to identify the disparity, figure out where it comes from, and work it through until you can get both sides to agree or you can get clear on which one is correct. Use your consciousness to listen to the emotional side and the rational side, and be like a negotiator between them.

For example, if emotionally you feel that your purpose is to be some kind of artist or musician, but rationally you work out that you should be serving people in need, then you have to work through this disconnect by taking a look at what your context says about it. Remember that your context is your collection of beliefs about reality. When you experience a conflict like this, it will typically lead you to a hole in your context, a fuzzy area that you haven’t yet clarified. In this case you might see that you have mixed feelings as to the overall value of art and music. You partly see them as serving people, and you partly see them as a relative waste of time compared to other pursuits. You’ll have to decide which is the most accurate, empowering viewpoint. You have to fill the hole in your context. Yesterday’s post explains how to do that.

This can be a lengthy process if you have a very fuzzy concept of reality or if you’re very conflicted internally. For many people this will require rooting out incongruencies and consciously filling contextual holes, and it will take a long time before enough of those are eliminated to wield sufficient clarity to define a clear purpose.

At this point your purpose is likely to be very abstract and high-level, so tomorrow we’ll explore how to break it down into goals, projects, and actions.

The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?

How shall we live? What shall we live for, if anything? How we can decide right from wrong? Is there any reasonable way to answer these questions that doesn’t require us to fall back on blind faith?

Let’s Ask the Old Greeks About It

People have been striving to answer these questions literally for thousands of years. One who attempted it was Socrates (469-399 BC). One of his most powerful breakthroughs was the idea of scrutinizing one’s beliefs through a type of cross-examination which became known as the dialectic. This involved asking and answering probing questions in order to arrive at something that could be considered true. Essentially he played devil’s advocate and challenged people to justify what they claimed to know.

For example, there’s a story where Socrates met a young man who was going to court to charge his father with impiety. When Socrates learned of this, he acknowledged the man as a presumed expert in piety, stating that one must be an expert in piety in order to charge his own father with impiety. Then Socrates humbly asked the man to define piety for him, a concept of which Socrates claimed ignorance. The man repeatedly tried in vain to define it, with Socrates offering a simple and undeniable explanation why each answer offered couldn’t be valid. It’s easy to see that Socrates would ultimately piss off the establishment and get himself sentenced to death. He could have escaped, but he chose to stay in Athens and take the poison. Socrates had tremendous respect for the law, even when it meant sacrificing his life to remain true to his principles. As I read about his life, I couldn’t help but develop a tremendous respect for him and his philosophy of life.

Another philosopher who made a significant dent in the question of how to live was Aristotle (384-322 BC), who studied under Plato (Plato studied under Socrates). A young Aristotle expanded on Plato’s ideas regarding the nature of reality (the world of forms), but eventually Aristotle began moving in a new direction and tackled the problem of how one should live.

Aristotle’s best answer for how one should live was the concept of eudaimonia. Unfortunately this word has been tough to translate to English, so there are two favored translations I’m aware of. The first is “happiness,” and the second is “human flourishing.” Most other translations I’ve seen are variations on one of these. Personally I might translate this term as “fulfillment,” although that’s not perfectly accurate either. Eudaimonia is a process of living virtuously, not a fixed state of being. It’s not really an emotion like “happiness” suggests. Aristotle came up with this answer because he found that eudaimonia was the only potential goal of life that could be considered an end in itself rather than a means to another end. I think this is the reason that happiness is perhaps the most popular translation because happiness is an end in itself, not a means to anything else.

Aristotle was interested in finding a right way to live, if such a thing could be said to exist. His answer of eudaimonia consists of two main components: virtuous action and contemplation. The main problem is that the means to discover the virtues was to look at people who seemed to be flourishing and living virtuously and take note of how they lived. As it turned out, such people would usually behave with some degree of integrity, honor, courage, honesty, rationality, fairness, etc. This is not merely an internal observation that one assesses in oneself — such values can be witnessed from the outside in, so Aristotle makes some progress here in attempting to create a semi-objective standard for right living. Like Socrates, Aristotle was also sentenced to death, but he chose to flee Athens and live in exile. (I tell you I’m immensely grateful to live in a society where philosophizing doesn’t currently carry the death penalty.)

The main problem I see in Aristotle’s insightful attempt to answer this question is that his solution is somewhat circular. In order to live well, we need to live virtuously and spend time on self-reflection and study, but how do we know what criteria to use in selecting the virtues or in choosing what to study? We basically have to find people that seem to be living well and flourishing — or in Aristotle’s time, it was suggested that we might also strive to emulate the gods, since they certainly seemed to be doing well. This isn’t unlike certain religions today that provide a model of virtue to attempt to emulate. Aristotle doesn’t answer one key question though: What is the best life one could possibly live? Eudaimonia suggests a way to go about finding the answer to this question, but it still leaves some gaping holes.

After Aristotle many others addressed the question of how to live. Every religion has its own answer. Some people say there’s no answer, that the answer doesn’t matter, that the answer is impossible for us to know, or that the answer is purely a matter of personal choice. The worst answer of all though is what most people do — to ignore the question entirely.

Choosing Your Own Context

What should you live for? Wealth? Power? Service? Longevity? Reason? Love? Faith? Family? God? Virtue? Happiness? Fulfillment? Comfort? Contentment? Integrity? Take a look at this list of values. There are hundreds to choose from.

It is important to make a global choice about how to live our lives, since this decision sets the context for everything else we do. If you don’t choose your context, you get the default/average context, which means you’re essentially letting others dictate your context. To make a gross generalization, in the USA this is a largely commercial/materialist context. It says to get a job, have a family, save some money, and retire. Be a good citizen and don’t get into too much trouble. But don’t really matter either. Be a good cog. Other cultures have their own default contexts. Most people simply subscribe to the default context of their culture with minor individual variations.


Sticking to your culture’s default context is among the worst of your options. Let’s consider the simple cases of a democracy vs. a dictatorship. In a democracy no one is really in charge of the cultural context as a whole, so the most common contexts end up as a mish-mash of bits and pieces that lack overall congruency. This will generally lead to confusion and mediocrity. Such a society will only provide a very fuzzy notion of how you should live, like getting a job, having a family, staying out of trouble, and retiring quietly. Ask an American what it means to live the best possible life, and you’ll get a lot of different answers, and most of them will be fairly fuzzy and unfocused — the kinds of answers that Socrates would shoot full of holes.

Now if you happen to live under a culture where the context is consciously directed, then you have to worry about who’s directing it and what their motives are and whether or not you can trust them. Where you find a strong dictatorship, you’ll usually see a more focused context than in a democracy. If you were to have asked someone from Nazi Germany what it means to live the best possible life, I’d bet the answers would have been more homogeneous and focused. But the problem of course is that such contexts are often designed to keep the context maintainers in power. There’s more pressure to conform to such a context. In the long run this type of context will usually lead to disillusionment, numbness, or fanaticism.

So if you let society dictate your context (which is what will happen by default in the absence of conscious choice), you’ll most likely wind up with a very fuzzy and unfocused context or one that’s focused on the wrong spot. Not a great choice either way. Certainly not the optimal choice. Such a context won’t provide you with enough guidance for how to live properly. You’ll spend a lot of time guessing your way through life or making a lot of mistakes that come back to haunt you later.

Ultimately if you want to get closer to the “best possible life” for you, you have to pick your own context. You can’t merely inherit the default context of your society and live up to what others expect of you. If you try to conform, you’re going to waste your life compared to what you might have done with it if you chose a better context.

So how the heck are we supposed to figure out how to live? Do we simply guess and hope for the best? Is there any rational, sane way to make such a hefty decision?

I can’t make this decision for you, but I can explain how I made this decision for myself, ultimately providing me with an answer that I found very satisfying. I think part of my answer is personal, but I also see part of it as being universal to all of us.

Living the Virtues

After I reached adulthood and began seriously pondering the question of how to live, the first major stopping point was essentially where Aristotle left off. In my early and mid teens, I spent a lot of time working on living virtuously. I saw living the best possible life as becoming a person of virtue: to live with honor, integrity, courage, compassion, etc. I listed out the virtues I wanted to attain and even set about inventing exercises to help myself develop them. Benjamin Franklin did something very similar, as I read in his autobiography, and each week he chose to focus on one particular virtue in order to develop his character.

Oddly, there was a particular computer game I absolutely fell in love with during this time — Ultima IV. To date I would have to say it is still my favorite game of all time. In this role-playing game you are the Avatar, a seeker of truth, and your goal is not to destroy some enemy but rather to attain what is called the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. In order to achieve this goal, you must develop your character in the eight virtues. All of these virtues derive from the eight possible combinations of truth, love, and courage as follows:

Truth = Honesty
Love = Compassion
Courage = Valor
Truth + Love = Justice
Truth + Courage = Honor
Love + Courage = Sacrifice
Truth + Love + Courage = Spirituality
The absence of Truth, Love, and Courage is Pride, the opposite of which is Humility.

I found this system of virtues absolutely brilliant, especially coming from a game. Years later when I finally met Richard Garriott, designer of the Ultima series, at the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3), I asked him how he came up with this system and how he ended up choosing these virtues. He told me it started with brainstorming a long list and noticing patterns in how the virtues related to each other.

As strange as it is that I got these insights from a game, I still think of living virtuously in much the same way today, where these eight virtues come about through the overlapping sets of truth, love, and courage. For the combination of all three virtues though, I feel that “integrity” is a better fit than “spirituality.” Ultima V went on to explore the opposite of these, the vices which can be derived from falsehood, hatred, and cowardice. Unfortunately I feel the Ultima series really went downhill since then and completely lost its soul — I would have loved to have seen the virtue idea taken even farther.

The downside to attempting to live virtuously was that I got tossed around a lot by people who were clearly not living virtuously. Unfortunately the gaming industry is rife with such people, especially where large sums of money are concerned. I was well prepared to deal with other people who valued honor highly, but I was saddened to have the opportunity to do business with so few. Too many people placed money as a higher value than personal honor. So I was swimming against the tide. Even so, I still prefer this choice compared to the alternative.

I also began having a lot of internal conflicts while attempting to live virtuously. I don’t blame the virtues for this though but rather my limited capacity for living in the fullest accordance with them. I was living my day-to-day life fairly virtuously, but what about the big picture? What about the very notion of running a game company for the purpose of entertaining people? Was that virtuous enough? I started pressing myself to do more, to push towards a higher ideal. I volunteered to serve as an officer in the Association of Shareware Professionals for two years (zero pay). I wrote a lot of articles for free. I gave away a lot of advice and coached a lot of people for free. I spoke at conferences for free. I pushed myself to sacrifice more for the benefit of others. I bypassed some opportunities to make more money and instead pursued opportunities to provide more service.

I could sense this was an improvement for me, but still it didn’t seem enough. I still didn’t feel like I was close to optimal in terms of my ability to live virtuously. At first I figured this was just the nature of life, that this was to be a lifelong struggle. But I soon began feeling unsettled, perceiving that something wasn’t quite right. For years I couldn’t figure out what it was, so by default I stuck with what I knew. I had run into the same roadblock Aristotle may have hit, the one that prevented him from getting to the point of answering the question, “What is the best possible life?” I knew it was somewhere different than where I was, but I didn’t know where to look.

What Is the Best Possible Life?

Eventually I came upon another way of approaching this problem of how to live. I asked myself, “Why is this such a difficult question anyway? What’s so hard about it?” That started me along a new line of thinking which soon led me to this question: What would have to change in order for this question to be easier to answer?

Bingo.

It suddenly became clear why this question was so tough to answer. In order to answer it accurately, I’d have to know everything. I’d have to be God.

Let’s face it. Our human intelligence is limited. Our technology is proof of that. My PC is better at arithmetic than I am. That tiny CPU can do a wide variety of tasks that my much larger brain cannot. My hard drive contains more data than I could memorize in a lifetime. Of course my brain has the CPU beat in many areas, but the point is that there are clearly intellectual limits to what our squishware can do.

I asked myself a lot of interesting questions to try to gain a new perspective on this. Can the mind comprehend its own limits? What if a superintelligent alien species came to earth — what would they see as the limits of human intelligence, and where would they perceive our boundaries? What can my brain clearly NOT do?

What if I were more intelligent than I am now? How might I live differently? What parts of my life would a more intelligent being consider foolish, unnecessary, or harmful? If a more intelligent being were to attempt to optimize my life, being able to clearly perceive my intellectual limits, what would it change? How would I optimize the life of a gorilla or a mouse if I could communicate with it? What do I perceive as their intellectual limits? What would the best possible life be for various other species?

And many, many more questions of this nature.

What eventually happened was that my context shifted. For the first time I felt I was actually running up against the limits of my own intelligence. I could begin to perceive where the walls were. Some of these limits were obvious, like the limits on my number crunching ability, memory, and speed. But I began to test other limits too. How many distinct concepts can I hold in my head at once? How accurately can I perceive time or temperature or weight without a measuring device? How many problem-solving techniques do I really know, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

I started studying the brain in a little more detail and comparing my perceived mental limits to what was known about the physical structure of the brain. The most current research in this area is absolutely fascinating. By drugging the brain, you can rob someone of consciousness. By electrically stimulating a cluster of neurons, you can induce an experience the subject would describe as spiritual (pushbutton spirituality?). You can surgically remove a person’s ability to play the piano.

As I developed a greater understanding of human intelligence, I realized that the biggest problem with the question of how to live is that it requires a higher intelligence than we now possess in order to answer it. In order to know what the best possible life is, which is mathematically an optimization problem, you have to know what all the possible lives are. And that requires an amount of data which is currently impossible for us to manage.

Imagine that there are only a million different variations on how you could live your life. In order to choose the best one, you have to look at all one million, apply some kind of criteria to evaluate them, and then pick the one with the highest score. There are three big problems with this. The first problem is that there are too many options to reasonably consider. The second problem is that you’d have to be able to accurately predict the future to know how each life would turn out. And the third problem is that you’d have to come up with the evaluation criteria. The first two are clearly impossible right now, but what about the third?

The third problem is basically what Aristotle attempted to tackle — the evaluation criteria. Living virtuously is one possible answer, but it’s still a bit fuzzy.

So we’ve got some serious problems here. First, we have a search space of possible solutions that’s too big to fully explore. It’s so big we can’t even really comprehend the whole thing. And secondly, we need to figure out the evaluation criteria to intelligently compare one option to another, criteria that don’t depend too heavily on the unknowable future.

Searching…

Let’s tackle the first problem — that of the gigantic search space. First of all, finding a provably optimal solution is impossible. So the truest answer to the best way to live is that it’s unknowable. We aren’t smart enough to figure it out yet. That’s not very satisfying, but it actually helps us a little. Now we’re left with this question: How can we get close to the optimal solution?

Fortunately mathematics has an answer to this question: heuristics. An heuristic is a rule for exploring a search space that can help you get close to an optimal solution when you cannot explore the entire search space. An example heuristic would be hill-climbing. Imagine that you have a big 3D map to explore and you want to find the highest point. With hill-climbing, you’d start at a random point on the map and just make sure that every step you take is uphill. When you can’t go uphill anymore, you’ve hit a peak — a local maximum. Without exploring more of the map, you can’t be too sure your last hill was the highest one on the map, so you may continue to explore by starting at different points on the map and using the same hill-climbing heuristic. Unless you explore the entire map, you can never be certain that you’ve found the global maximum, but the more you explore, the more confidence you gain.

So what does this mean for human living? It suggests a hill-climbing approach to life. You try one way of living for a while, and then you keep trying to improve upon it by taking it “uphill.” You tweak some of the parameters to make it better. For example, you might try to lose weight, make more money, or improve your relationships — any or all of these might be considered a step uphill. And you just keep going uphill until you can’t go any higher.

Of course the problem with this approach is due to the nature of heuristics — you may get stuck in a local maximum that is far below the possible global maximum. The peak you’re striving to reach may only be a molehill in the grand scheme of things. Another problem is that it could take you more than a lifetime just to climb a single hill. You might die before you get very far with this approach.

Ah, but as human beings we have a powerful asset on our side that makes this problem a bit more manageable — imagination. We don’t have to test these permutations physically. We can test them in our minds. But this is only going to work well if our mental map of reality is a close approximation of real reality. In other words our simulation had better be very close to the real thing, or our approximations will be way off, and our results will be worthless. Remember Self-Discipline: Acceptance? In order to have a chance at succeeding at this, we have to accept reality as it truly is — all of it, no matter what we must face about ourselves and how unwilling we are to face it. Otherwise our simulation will be full of glitches. Things that seem to work in our imaginations won’t work in the real world.

The more accurate your mental model of reality, the greater your ability to intelligently assess possible ways of living. This means you must know yourself in all your nakedness, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. You must develop a deep understanding of your own nature as you truly are. This relates to yesterday’s post about bringing your beliefs into alignment with your actions. You must be internally congruent, or your simulations will only spew out garbage that you won’t be able to trust.

I am not certain that everyone has the capacity to do this very well. It requires a high degree of intelligence and concentration to imagine what it would be like to live an alternative life and to assess it objectively. But it’s all we have to deal with. We can only do our best.

I think the optimal solution would be to consider various ways you might live your life, vividly imagine each one in your imagination, and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve covered a certain number of these (and I don’t have a good way to know how many is enough — the more, the better), then you pick one and start living that way. Meanwhile, you continue to remain open to imagining other possibilities, and if you ever perceive one that is better than your current manner of living, you switch to the new “higher” life.

How Do You Compare One Life to Another?

Now we have to consider the evaluation criteria. What is uphill? How do we compare one life to another?

Many people have attempted to provide an answer to this question. One of the most popular answers in self-help today is happiness. We’re told to do what makes us most happy. Seek pleasure. Avoid pain. Almost everything I’ve read about personal development uses some variation of happiness as the ultimate goal of life.

But I think happiness is a cop-out answer. Happiness is just an emotion. And placing my entire life in the service of achieving and maintaining a particular emotional state is clearly suboptimal. For one, I’m very emotionally resilient, and it doesn’t take much to make me happy and content. Happiness and well-being can be maintained largely with a very healthy diet and lots of exercise. I’m already good at managing my emotions and being happy, so I’m certain I can do better than this.

Even if we extend happiness into the realm of fulfillment or flourishing, it’s still a cop-out. By giving such an answer to the question of how to live, all we’re doing is tossing the question over to our emotional intelligence. We’re saying that the answer to how to live is whatever our emotions say is the answer. The assumption is that if we feel fulfilled, that we must be living optimally. I see no logical reason this answer would be correct, given what I know about how emotions work. Not good enough.

For these reasons I rejected any answers that suggested the optimal manner of living was to be found in some kind of emotional state or feeling. I can consciously chose to feel whatever I want just by changing my focus. There isn’t any particular course of action that will induce a feeling in me I can’t achieve just by directing my imagination. I can self-emote.

And then we have a whole host of other self-help gurus who seem to define the goal of life in terms of being successful, becoming wealthy, having fulfilling relationships, etc. Well, as you probably suspect, that’s just marketing fluff with no real substance behind it. Most of these books are aimed at trying to show you how to achieve optimal results within the pre-existing social context, but as we’ve already seen, even if you can manage to hit the supposed peak there, you’ll still going to be living suboptimally. You’ll only spend your whole life trying to climb a molehill and will leave most of your potential greatness untapped.

The way I chose to tackle this question was to look at my life in the context of the big picture of my clearest understanding of reality. This meant looking at the history of life to the degree we understand it, the possible future of life and where it might lead, and the present condition of life. I felt that a consideration of the best possible human life would have to be placed within the framework of all of life, past, present, and projected future. When I look at how life has evolved on earth, I see this force of evolution as something much greater than my own personal existence. I see that life has been continuing to upgrade its complexity, its intelligence, and its overall chances of survival. When I place myself within this context, I see that I have three basic options. I can work to cooperate with evolution, I can work against it, or I can ignore it. My human awareness gives me the ability to make this choice consciously.

As Close to Optimal As I Can Get

I decided that the best possible life would have to lie within the realm of cooperating with evolution rather than working against it. So for me this implies two things: 1) Working to evolve myself as an individual to the highest degree possible, and 2) Working to help life itself evolve to the highest degree possible. It turns out these goals are highly compatible, since there’s a positive feedback loop between evolving yourself and evolving your environment. If you only work on yourself, your environment will ultimately hold you back. You’ll be like Tarzan living among the apes. And if you only work to help others, that would also be suboptimal because you’ll only be able to teach them what you know right now, but you’ll never upgrade your knowledge and grow in your capacity to teach. So a balance of both is required.

For me this boils down to working on my own personal growth and helping others to grow. This became my means of assessing the best possible life I could hope to live.

So what does it mean to grow? To me it means to continually strive to upgrade my most powerful evolutionary assets, which I perceive as my intelligence, my consciousness, and my knowledge of reality. And in order to help others grow as well, I must consequently continue to upgrade my communication skills.

I see the main purpose of my life as serving the process of evolution. This is more important to me than anything else. Everything else in my life is secondary compared to this and must justify its fitness for this agenda. Who cares about getting a job and making money when you have the opportunity to consciously participate in the evolution of life itself? For me all other potential ways of living are nothing but pale shadows compared to this.

Let’s tie this back in with the concept of heuristics now. This yields the following overall strategy:

Attempt to imagine the best possible life you can live with the evaluation criteria of serving the process of evolution itself.
Live it — experience it.
Whenever you ever become convinced that there is a better way for you to serve the process of evolution than what you’re doing now, transition to it.
This is my answer to the question of how to live: to invest the bulk of my life in the pursuit of growth. To me this makes perfect sense. If we cannot fathom how to live optimally, then the best solution would be to develop a greater capacity to do so. If your computer is incapable of doing what you need it to do, then you should invest your time working to upgrade the computer.

I find this answer also combines well with Aristotle’s concept of virtue. Intelligence suggests a direction, and virtue helps mold the path. I believe both are essential for living the best possible life. Of the two though, I think intelligence is the more powerful, since the virtues themselves were derived from our human intelligence. One way of thinking of the virtues is as intellectual shortcuts. If there is too much data to make a truly intelligent decision, you can fall back on the virtues and trust that they are at least not likely to be stupid choices. When in doubt, be honest, be honorable, be brave.

Squishware 2.0

If you suddenly found yourself living as an ape, you could accept the life of an ape and devote yourself to eating bananas all day and try to be a good ape, or you could attempt to become more than an ape and evolve into a human. Once you did that, all your ape goals and accomplishments would seem utterly meaningless compared to your new human capabilities. How silly will goals like building a business or becoming good at marketing appear to a more evolved species?

On the evolutionary ladder, we’re just a bunch of apes right now. But if we keep growing, we will soon be much more. It’s likely that computer technology will more closely merge with our own squishware to make us ever smarter and more capable. But even before that happens, we can continue learning more about our squishware and push it to its limits. Let’s stop living on 3% of our brainpower and crank it closer to 100%.

There are many ways to consciously assist the process of evolution, and our ability to do this right now is of course limited (although more of these limits are collapsing each year). Over the course of a lifetime, I think one person living today who devotes his/her life to assisting the evolution of our species can have a dramatic effect. We still remember Aristotle for his contribution. What more could we accomplish if thousands of us living today devoted our lives to a similar purpose?

I have no way to prove this to you, but I seem to be discovering that the more I work to align my life with the process of evolution, the more my life flows almost effortlessly, as if I’m being magnetically pulled along. For the past year my life has been working extremely well, and I feel like I’m able to think more clearly than ever. This was a recent context switch for me, just within the past year, but I feel as if it’s growing stronger each month. It’s a feeling of clarity that this is just what I’m meant to do with my life. Self-discipline is still required, but I’m stronger and more able to apply it consistently. I think the reason is that I finally feel I am indeed living the best possible life I’m capable of, given what I know right now. When I try to imagine something better, it’s only an increase in my capacity to do the same thing, not a change in the essence of what I’m doing. Getting to this point, however, was not remotely easy, and I’m certain that more change lies ahead. That is the nature of growth — old goals are constantly in the process of becoming obsolete.

Tomorrow we’ll explore how to translate this high-level notion of how to live into a personal purpose that is actually achievable. And then the following day, we’ll cover how to break that purpose down into goals, projects, and actions and get moving on it.

Meaning of Life: Intro

What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Is there a God or isn’t there, and if there is a God, what is its nature? Of all the world’s religions, which one is the most correct? Is there an afterlife? Are we primarily physical beings or spiritual beings?

People have struggled for millennia to tackle these questions. Wars have been fought over them. But as much as these questions cause people to lose their heads (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally), the bottom line is that these are very practical questions.

Behind the Wheel

The way we answer these questions will provide the ultimate context for everything else we do with our lives. If we place any value on our lives at all, we must give some consideration to these questions.

Let’s say you have your life organized around goals, projects, and actions. You set a goal like starting a new internet business. You break it down into projects like writing a business plan and launching your web site. And then you break those projects down into actions like going to the bank to open a business account and registering your domain name. Fair enough.

But why start the business in the first place? What’s the point? Why pick this goal vs. any other goal? Why even set goals at all?

What determines the goals you set (or don’t set) is your context. Your context is your collection of beliefs and values. So if the values of money and freedom are part of your context, you might be inclined to set a goal to start a new business. But with different kinds of values — a different context — you may be disinclined to set goals at all.

The most significant part of your context is your collection of beliefs about the nature of reality, which includes your religious, spiritual, and philosophical beliefs. Your overall beliefs about the universe will largely determine your results. Context dictates goals. Goals dictate projects. Projects dictate actions. Actions dictate results.

Within a certain context, it will be virtually impossible for you to achieve certain results because you’ll never set the required goals that will lead to those results.

Your context works like a filter. When you are inside a particular context, you lose access to the potential goals, projects, and actions that lie outside that context. For example, if your context includes the belief that criminal behavior is very bad, then you aren’t likely to work towards becoming a future leader in organized crime.

Walking in My Shoes

This is a long personal story, but I think you’ll find it interesting. If you take the time to read it, I want you to notice how my beliefs (my context) shifted over time and how dramatically they changed my results.

For half of my life, I’ve been searching for the context that would give me the best possible life. Of course, this is a strange pursuit because it requires searching for a context while at the same time always being stuck inside of one. In other words, the definition of “best possible life” is also part of any context, so I have to find a context that both defines that term AND provides a means to fulfill it.

This pursuit began almost accidentally for me, but eventually I began pursuing it consciously.

Halo

For the first half of my life, until the age of 16, I was Catholic/Christian, baptized and confirmed.
Blasphemous Rumors

But near the end of my junior year of high school, I went through an experience that I’d have to describe as an awakening. It was as if a new part of my brain suddenly switched on, popping me into a higher state of awareness. Perhaps it was just a side effect of the maturation process. I began to openly question the beliefs that had been conditioned into me since childhood. Blind acceptance of what I was taught wasn’t enough for me anymore. I wanted to go behind the scenes, uproot any incongruencies, and see if these beliefs actually made sense to me. I started raising a lot of questions but found few people would honestly discuss them. Most simply dismissed me or became defensive. But I was intensely curious, not hostile about it. My family was closed to discussing the whole thing, but I did find a few open-minded teachers. My high school (Rogers High School in Puyallup) was a very liberal school.

I was disappointed though. What I found was that regardless of their education and their much greater life experience, very few of my friends and teachers ever bothered to question their beliefs openly. And that really gave me a huge shot of doubt. I thought, “If everyone is just accepting all of this blindly and no one is even questioning it, why should I believe it?” Over a period of months the doubt only grew stronger, and I transferred more of my faith from my Catholic upbringing to my own intelligence and senses. Eventually I just dropped the whole context entirely, and in the absence of any other viable contexts to choose from, I became an atheist.

I entered my senior year of high school as a 17-year old atheist. Oh, the irony. Initially I wasn’t sure what to expect, but soon I found the context of atheism to be incredibly empowering. Having shed all my old beliefs, I felt like my brain had gotten an intelligence upgrade. I could think so much more clearly, and my mind seemed to work much better. I also felt more in control of my life than ever before. Without a belief in God, I assumed total responsibility for my results in life. School was easier than ever for me, even though I was taking all the school’s most challenging classes, most of them AP courses. I was so good at calculus that my teacher actually gave me a special test, different from the rest of the class. And one time my AP physics teacher came to me before school to have me show him how to solve a difficult physics problem. I especially found math and science classes so easy that I began looking for new ways to challenge myself. So I’d try to do my entire homework assignment on a 1″ by 1″ square of paper, or I’d do it in crayon on the back of a cereal box cover, or I’d color in my polar graphs with colored pencil and turn it into artwork. People thought I was wacky, but I mainly did these things to keep it interesting because the problems themselves posed no challenge. You haven’t really lived until you’ve done calculus in crayon. :)

I made no secret of the fact that I was an atheist, so when taking religion classes, I’d regurgitate all the raw data needed to ace a test, but whenever there were open-ended essay questions, I’d address them from an atheistic perspective. I’m grateful the Jesuits were as liberal as they were and tolerated my behavior. I have to give them a lot of credit for that.

My family was not happy about all this, especially when my subscription to American Atheist magazine started coming in the mail (I got good at intercepting the mail early). But I was doing so well in school that it was hard for them to complain, and they didn’t want to openly address any of my questions, even though I’d have been happy to do so. They did force me to keep going to church though, which I tolerated for a while because I knew I’d be moving out in a year anyway. But eventually I started sitting in a different part of the church and would sneak out the back and go for a walk and return just before it ended. But one time the mass ended earlier than expected, and I got back too late. My family was already at the car and saw me walking down the street. Whoops! They drove off without me. But instead of walking the two miles home, I stayed out the entire day and didn’t return until midnight. Aside from weddings and funerals, that was the last time I ever went to church.

Despite these conflicts, my senior year in high school was by far my best ever. I aced all my classes.

I opted to go to Pierce College because at the time, its computer science program was the highest rated in the country. I was very happy to move out and finally be on my own. In the fall of 2006 I moved to Texas and entered the military.

Then things got weird.

Judas

While in Texas, my atheism context was further molded. No longer surrounded by Catholics, I met a lot of interesting people there with a wide variety of belief systems. I quickly made a lot of new friends who were very intelligent, and some were open to discussing the nature of reality. I think my Catholic upbringing was like a coiled spring — as soon as I left behind the environment that kept the spring coiled, I immediately shot to the other end of the spectrum. But I went way too far with it. I not only shed my old religious beliefs, but along with it went my whole concept of morality. I was like the guy in Mark Twain’s short story “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” a story about a guy who kills his conscience.

I started embracing all the stuff that was basically the opposite of my upbringing. I completely lost all interest in school and hardly ever went to class. I really didn’t care at all about getting my degree. I went to parties almost every week and drank a lot, one time doing about 14 drinks in a row and waking up with no memory of how I got to bed. I had to ask friends to piece together pieces of the previous night. To this day I’m certain I drank more alcohol before the age of 21 than after (and I’m 22 now).

I have a clean record, never committed a true crime.


Flexible

Our beliefs act as lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can’t otherwise see, but they can also block us from seeing parts of reality. I see a huge part of personal development as the study of these lenses — these belief systems. There are an infinite number of lenses, so the quest never ends, but the more lenses you examine personally, the more you understand about the nature of reality and your role within it.

I have not experienced any organized belief system that is not disempowering in some way. The problem is that they all have a fixed perspective. If you look at reality from any single perspective, you are only perceiving the projection of reality onto your belief system, not reality itself. The more rigid your perspective, the more detail you miss (detail which doesn’t fall upon your projection but does fall upon others), and the less of your true potential you’re able to tap.

For several years I would have described my religion as a field and not a fixed point. It was multi-contextual. I kept the context floating and tried to see reality from multiple perspectives. At first this was unsettling and made it hard to set goals and take action, but I found it worthwhile because it gave me much greater clarity. I began seeing patterns in where certain perspectives would lead, both for myself and others. Just as you might imagine where a life of crime will ultimately lead, you can also gain a subtler understanding of where a belief in a certain type of God will lead and how that path compares to other choices. This is complicated because we aren’t dealing with fixed points for either the starting point or the destination. It’s about fields of possibility leading to fields of potential. For example, a life of crime can begin and end in many ways, but you can still see some general patterns in the pathways from start to finish. You can make some generalizations that will be fairly accurate.

As a result of this introspection, I was able to shed certain beliefs and strengthen others. Some beliefs I found consistently disempowering, meaning that if I adopted them, I would be denying myself access to valuable potential. These included the belief in heaven/hell and the belief in a higher power. That second one may seem surprising, but I opted to let it go because I consistently found it less empowering than a belief in a lower power. An example of a higher power would be a consciously aware God or gods such as found in Christianity or Greek mythology. A lower power would be like a field that is able to respond to your intentions, sort of like “the force” in Star Wars or what some people refer to as “source.” You can pray to either type of power, but in the first case you’re asking, and in the second case, you’re declaring. Many people, myself included, have noted that declarative prayer works better than no prayer and better than asking prayer. I see it mainly as putting out an intention.

So in deciding which beliefs to embrace and which to drop, I keep going back to the concepts of empowerment and potential. I strive to dump beliefs that curtail my ability to access my potential while strengthening beliefs that unlock more potential. If one form of prayer doesn’t seem to work at all, but another one works often, I’m going to adopt more of the latter context.

World in My Eyes

My overall religion has effectively become a religion of personal growth. Every year I continue to tweak my beliefs to try to bring them into closer alignment with my best understanding of how reality actually works. The better we understand reality, the more potential we unlock. Just as understanding a new law of physics can allow us to do things we could never previously do, beliefs about reality work the same way. If you’re stuck with a belief in a flat earth, it’s going to limit your potential actions and results. Similarly, if your religious beliefs are too great a mismatch for actual reality, you’ll be doomed to spend your life only tapping a fraction of your true potential. In my “religion,” knowingly leaving my potential untapped is sinful. Personal optimization is deeply embedded into my sense of morality. Not growing is morally wrong to me — it runs contrary to my understanding of the purpose of life.

The only reliable means I’ve found for discovering what beliefs are empowering is to test them and compare them to other beliefs. This is something I initially fell into unconsciously and in a very destructive manner. But when done consciously and intelligently, it can give you a whole new perspective on life. Just as people who travel a lot report being changed by their experiences of other cultures, you can also expect to be changed by experiencing different belief systems.

I don’t expect everyone else to subscribe to my religion of course. It was a very personal choice of mine and has been undoubtedly shaped by my unique experiences. Yet choosing my beliefs consciously has allowed me access to parts of my potential that I’d never have been able to tap with other belief systems. In most cases I’d have been stuck being way too passive and would have failed to push myself. I’d have been more inclined to accept my given lot in life instead of consciously co-creating it. Because my religion is based on working actively on my personal growth and helping others to do the same, I am driven to take action. Good thoughts or intentions aren’t enough.

Another part of my religion is to strive to become the best me I can become, not a copy of Jesus or Buddha or anyone else. This means spending a lot of time learning about my own strengths and weaknesses and figuring out where I can grow and what I may have to simply accept. Bettering myself to better humanity.

Everything Counts

Do your current beliefs empower you to be your best, or do they doom you to live as a mere shadow of what you could be? Can you honestly say that you are doing your best or very close to it? Are you living congruently with your most deeply held beliefs? Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, how well do you practice them? Do you walk your talk?

On Monday as I walked around Welches, I saw a downtrodden homeless man sitting on one of the overhead walkways asking for money. As over a dozen people passed by him each minute, no one even stopped to give him a kind word or a smile. I thought to myself, “Where are all the Christians?” If Jesus is the model for Christian behavior, what would Jesus do in that situation? What would other role models do? What would you do?

By their words I hear that most Americans are Christian. By their actions I see that most aren’t.

If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief — always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don’t actually believe it. You’re only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn’t.

Actions, not words, reveal beliefs. If you want to understand what you truly believe, observe your actions. This may take some courage to do, but if you follow the trail of your actions, it will lead you to a more congruent belief system. And once there you can begin consciously moving towards new beliefs that empower you, while your actions and beliefs remain congruent along the way. But you’ll make no progress as long as you claim to believe one thing but consistently act in violation of it. Most people in such a situation will spend time trying to get their actions to better reflect their so-called beliefs… and meet with nothing but frustration. I say first get your beliefs in line with your actions and reach the point of being totally honest with yourself, doubts and all. Then you’ll find it far easier to move forward. Don’t be afraid to do this — no divine being is going to smite you for being honest with yourself. And if one ever happens to show up, you always have me to use as a scapegoat. ;)

Although it can be a bumpy ride (it certainly was for me), you’ll come out the other end a far more integrated and empowered human being. Internal incongruencies absolutely cripple us, forcing us to live on only a fraction of our potential. When our actions and beliefs are in conflict, we can’t think as well. We become less intelligent and less resourceful — easily manipulated by others. We have no clarity at all, and we can’t seem to get moving in a consistent direction. We’re like a rudderless ship, being tossed around by the waves.

Congruency is clarity. When you get clear about what you truly believe about reality by observing your actions and admitting the deepest, darkest truths to yourself that you never wanted to face, you’ll set yourself on a path of growth that will put all your earlier accomplishments to shame. You’ll unlock access to resources that were previously dormant — greater intelligence, greater awareness, greater conscience. And you’ll finally start living up to the greatness that has been too long buried under a pile of denial.

Don’t be afraid to face who you really are. You’re a lot stronger than you realize.

And Then…

Tomorrow we’ll explore how you can make the biggest decision of all: How shall you live, and for what?

Self-Discipline: Persistance

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “Press On” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
- Calvin Coolidge

Persistence is the fifth and final pillar of self-discipline.

What Is Persistence?

Persistence is the ability to maintain action regardless of your feelings. You press on even when you feel like quitting.

When you work on any big goal, your motivation will wax and wane like waves hitting the shore. Sometimes you’ll feel motivated; sometimes you won’t. But it’s not your motivation that will produce results — it’s your action. Persistence allows you to keep taking action even when you don’t feel motivated to do so, and therefore you keep accumulating results.

Persistence will ultimately provide its own motivation. If you simply keep taking action, you’ll eventually get results, and results can be very motivating. For example, you may become a lot more enthusiastic about dieting and exercising once you’ve lost those first 10 pounds and feel your clothes fitting more loosely.

When to Give Up

Should you always persist and never give up? Certainly not. Sometimes giving up is clearly the best option.

Have you ever heard of a company called Traf-O-Data? What about Microsoft? Both companies were started by Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Traf-O-Data was the first company they started, back in 1972. You can read the story of Traf-O-Data here. Gates and Allen ran it for several years before throwing in the towel. They gave up. Of course they did a little better with Microsoft.

If they hadn’t given up on Traf-O-Data, then we wouldn’t have such rich collections of Microsoft and Bill Gates jokes today.

So how do you know when to press on vs. when to give up?

Is your plan still correct? If not, update the plan. Is your goal still correct? If not, update or abandon your goal. There’s no honor in clinging to a goal that no longer inspires you. Persistence is not stubbornness.

This was a particularly difficult lesson for me to learn. I had always believed one should never give up, that once you set a goal, you should hang on to the bitter end. The captain goes down with the ship and all that. If I ever failed to finish a project I started, I’d feel very guilty about it.

Eventually I figured out that this is just nonsense.

If you’re growing at all as a human being, then you’re going to be a different person each year than you were the previous year. And if you consciously pursue personal development, then the changes will often be dramatic and rapid. You can’t guarantee that the goals you set today will still be ones you’ll want to achieve a year from now.


Did I give up in the past? You could say that, but it would be more accurate to say that I was infected by a new vision of something that was far more important to me. Had I stubbornly persisted with my past goals, this site would never have existed. I’d be working on a new game instead of my first book.

In order to make room for new goals, we have to delete or complete old ones. And sometimes new goals are so compelling and inspiring that there’s no time to complete old ones — they have to be abandoned half-finished. I’ve always found it uncomfortable to do this, but I know it’s necessary. The hard part is consciously deciding to delete an old project, knowing it will never be finished. I have a file full of game ideas and some prototypes for new games that will never see the light of day. Consciously deciding that those projects had to be abandoned was really hard for me. It took me a long time to come to grips with it. But it was necessary for my own growth to be able to do this.

I still had to solve the problem of setting goals that might become obsolete in a year due to my own personal growth. How did I solve this problem? I cheated. I figured out the only way I could set long-term goals that would stick would be if they were aligned with my own process of growth. The pursuit of personal growth has long been a stable constant for me, even though it’s paradoxically in flux at the same time. So instead of trying to set fixed goals as I did with my games business, I began setting broader more dynamic goals that were aligned with my own growth. This new business allows me to pursue my personal growth full-out and to share what I learn with others. So growth itself is the goal, both for myself and others. This creates a symbiotic relationship, whereby helping others feeds back into my own growth, which in turn generates new ideas for helping others. Anyone who’s been reading this site since last year has probably seen that effect in action.

The direct and conscious pursuit of personal growth is the only type of mission that would work for me. If I made it my mission to master real estate investing, for example, I’d probably become bored with it after a few years. Since I want to keep growing indefinitely, I have to maintain a certain level of challenge and keep raising the bar ever higher. I can’t let things get too dull and risk falling into a pattern of complacency.

The value of persistence comes not from stubbornly clinging to the past. It comes from a vision of the future that’s so compelling you would give almost anything to make it real. The vision I have of my future now is far greater than the one I had for Dexterity. To be able to help people grow and to solve their most difficult problems is far more inspiring to me than entertaining people. These values started oozing out of me as I ran Dexterity because I favored logic puzzle games that challenged people to think, often passing up the opportunity to publish games I felt would make money but which wouldn’t provide much real value to people.

Persistence of action comes from persistence of vision. When you’re super-clear about what you want in such a way that your vision doesn’t change much, you’ll be more consistent — and persistent — in your actions. And that consistency of action will produce consistency of results.

Can you identify a part of your life where you’ve demonstrated a pattern of long-term persistence? I think if you can identify such an area, it may provide a clue to your mission — something you can work towards where passion and self-discipline function synergistically.

This post is part six of a six-part series on self-discipline:part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Self-Discipline: Industry

Industry is working hard. In contrast to hard work, being industrious doesn’t necessarily mean doing work that’s challenging or difficult. It simply means putting in the time. You can be industrious doing easy work or hard work.

Imagine you have a baby. You’ll spend a lot of time changing diapers. But that isn’t really hard work — it’s just a matter of doing it over and over many times each day.

In life there are many tasks that aren’t necessarily difficult, but they collectively require a significant time investment. If you don’t discipline yourself to stay on top of them, they can make a big mess of your life. Just think of all the little things you need to do: shopping, cooking, cleaning, laundry, taxes, paying bills, home maintenance, childcare, etc. And this is just for home — if you include work the list grows even longer. These things may not reach your A-list for importance, but they still need to be done.

Self-discipline requires that you develop the capacity to put in the time where it’s needed. A lot of messes are created when we refuse to put in the time to do what needs to be done — and to do it correctly. Such messes range from a messy desk or cluttered email inbox all the way down to an Enron or Worldcom. Big mess or small mess — take your pick. Either way a significant contributing factor is the refusal to do what needs to be done.

Sometimes it’s clear what needs to be done. Sometimes it isn’t clear at all. But ignoring the mess won’t help no matter what. If you don’t know what needs to be done, the first step is to figure it out. This may require you to seek out information and educate yourself. In order to launch this blog last year, I had to figure out how to do it. I took time to educate myself by reading other blogs and evaluating various blogging tools. It wasn’t difficult for me, but it required a significant time investment.

Sometimes we allow little annoyances to linger a bit too long. In January my wife and I bought a new house. But it was only last weekend we finally unpacked the last box. We did most of the unpacking in the first few weeks after the move, but a couple boxes were shoved into a corner, and neither one of us wanted to unpack them. Why? We didn’t know where to put the stuff they contained. It seemed simplest to just ignore the problem and hope the boxes would magically unpack themselves. Finally we got them unpacked last weekend and took care of a few other home repairs that had been on the back burner as well.

It wasn’t difficult or costly to do these things. It was simply a matter of time to get them done. It didn’t require much skill or brainpower. All we had to do was just accept that they needed to be done, take a few minutes to figure out how to do them, and then do them.

Put in the Time

There are many problems in life where the solution is largely a brainless time investment. If your email inbox is overloaded, this is not a challenging problem. Believe me — there are bigger challenges in life than handling old correspondence. I guarantee you have the brainpower to handle it. Getting your email inbox to empty is purely a matter of time. Maybe it will take you several hours to do it. If it’s worth several hours to get it done, then put in the time. Maybe enjoy some relaxing music as you do. Otherwise just hit Ctrl-A followed by Delete, and be done with it.

How many problems do you have on your to do list right now that can be solved with the simple application of industry? Sometimes you don’t need to be particularly creative or clever about it — a brute force solution will do. But it’s easy to get stuck in a pattern of wishing that a brute force solution wasn’t necessary. It’s tedious. It’s boring. It’s not that important anyway. And yet it still needs to be done.

By all means if you can find a way to avoid a time-consuming solution and find a faster or better way to bypass or eliminate the problem, take advantage of it. Delegate it, delete it — do whatever you can to remove the time burden. But if you know it’s something that won’t get done except via your personal time investment, like the ornery boxes in my home that refused to self-unpack, then just accept it and get it off your plate. Don’t complain. Don’t whine. Just do it.

Develop Your Personal Productivity

Disciplining yourself to be industrious allows you to squeeze more value out of your time. Time is a constant, but your personal productivity is not. Some people will use the hours of their day far more efficiently than others. It’s amazing that people will spend extra money to buy a faster computer or a fuel efficient car, but they’ll barely pay any attention to their personal capacity. Your personal productivity will do a lot more for you than a computer or a car in the long run. Give an industrious programmer a 10-year old computer, and s/he’ll get much more done with it over the course of a year than a lazy programmer with state of the art technology.

Despite all the technology and gadgets we have available that can potentially make us more efficient, your personal productivity is still your greatest bottleneck. Don’t look to technology to make you more productive. If you don’t consider yourself productive without technology, you won’t be productive with it — it will only serve to mask your bad habits. But if you’re already industrious without technology, it can help you become even more so. Think of technology as a force multiplier — it multiplies what you already are.

Four years ago I knew what I needed to do. It took me that long to build the strength and discipline to be able to do it on a consistent basis. THIS WAS NOT EASY!

When you pursue the path of developing your personal productivity, it may cause you some days of hair-pulling and teeth-gnashing, but it does eventually pay off. I think many people are attracted to the idea of becoming more productive out of basic common sense. It doesn’t take much brainpower to figure out that if you use your time more efficiently, you’ll complete more tasks, and therefore you’ll accumulate results faster. Personal productivity allows you to create enough space in your life to do all the things you feel you should be doing: eat healthy, exercise, work hard, deepen relationships, have a wonderful social life, and make a difference. Otherwise, something has to give. Without a high level of personal productivity, you’ll likely have to give up something that’s important to you. You have conflicts between health and work, work and family, family and friends. Industry can give you the ability to enjoy all of these things, so you don’t have to choose work over family or vice versa. You can have both.

Of course industry is only one tool among many. It will allow you to complete your work efficiently, but it won’t tell you what work to do in the first place. Industry is a low level tool. Working hard doesn’t necessarily mean working smart. But this weakness of industry doesn’t remove its powerful place in your personal development toolbox. Once you’ve decided on a course of action and see your plans laid out in front of you, nothing can do the job as well as industry. In the long run your results will come from your actions, and industry is all about action.

This post is part five of a six-part series on self-discipline:part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Self-Discipline: Hard Work

The big secret in life is that there is no big secret. Whatever your goal, you can get there if you’re willing to work.
- Oprah Winfrey

Hard work — yet another dirty word.

Hard Work Defined

My definition of hard work is that which challenges you.

And why is challenge important? Why not just do what’s easiest?

Most people will do what’s easiest and avoid hard work — and that’s precisely why you should do the opposite. The superficial opportunities of life will be attacked by hordes of people seeking what’s easy. The much tougher challenges will usually see a lot less competition and a lot more opportunity.

Strong challenge is commonly connected with strong results. Sure you can get lucky every once in a while and find an easy path to success. But will you be able to maintain that success, or is it just a fluke? Will you be able to repeat it? Once other people learn how you did it, will you find yourself overloaded with competition?

When you discipline yourself to do what is hard, you gain access to a realm of results that are denied everyone else. The willingness to do what is difficult is like having a key to a special private treasure room.

The nice thing about hard work is that it’s universal. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in — hard work can be used to achieve positive long-term results regardless of the specifics.

I’m using this same philosophy in building this personal development website. I do a lot of things that are hard. I try to address topics that other people don’t and bypass the low hanging fruit. I strive to explore topics deeply and search for the gold. I do lots of reading and research. I write lengthy articles and give my best ideas away for free, so I’m constantly forced to better my best. I launched this business in October of last year and have been working on it full time for essentially no pay.

Meanwhile I’m working hard in pushing myself to build my speaking skills. I belong to two different clubs and attend 6-7 online meetings per month. I became a club officer about a month after joining, and I was just elected to a second officer position. I’ve given many speeches, all of them for free. I’ve competed in every speech contest since I’ve joined. If I had put all this time into my games business, I’d have a lot more money right now. It’s a lot of hard work, and I’ve probably got at least another year of training before I’m ready to go pro. But I’m willing to pay the price whatever it takes. I’m not going to take the easy path to a shallow position where I will only come crashing back down again. I won’t get up on a stage and spout a bunch of fluffy self-help sound bites that still garner applause and a paycheck but which don’t ultimately help anyone. If it takes years, it takes years.

I’m taking the same approach to writing my book. It’s a lot of hard work. But I want this to be the kind of book that people will still be reading 10 years from now. Writing a book like this is at least 10x harder than the kinds of books I see dominating the psychology section of bookstores today. But most of those books will be off the shelves in a year, and few people will even remember them.

Hard work pays off. When someone tells you otherwise, beware the sales pitch for something “fast and easy” that’s about to come next. The greater your capacity for hard work, the more rewards fall within your grasp. The deeper you can dig, the more treasure you can potentially find.

Being healthy is hard work. Finding and maintaining a successful relationship is hard work. Raising kids is hard work. Getting organized is hard work. Setting goals, making plans to achieve them, and staying on track is hard work. Even being happy is hard work (true happiness that comes from high self-esteem, not the fake kind that comes from denial and escapism).

Hard work goes hand-in-hand with acceptance. One of the things you must accept are those areas of your life that won’t succumb to anything less than hard work. Perhaps you’ve had no luck finding a fulfilling relationship. Maybe the only way it’s going to happen is if you accept you’re going to have to do what you’ve been avoiding. Perhaps you want to lose weight. Maybe it’s time to accept that the path to your goal requires disciplined diet and exercise (both hard work). Perhaps you want to increase your income. Maybe you should accept that the only way it will happen is with a lot of hard work.

Your life will reach a whole new level when you stop avoiding and fearing hard work and simply surrender to it. Make it your ally instead of your enemy. It’s a potent tool to have on your side.

This post is part four of a six-part series on self-discipline: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Self-Discipline: Willpower

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.
- Vince Lombardi

Willpower — such a dirty word these days. How many commercials have you seen that attempt to position their products as a substitute for willpower? They begin by telling you that willpower doesn’t work and then attempt to sell you something “fast and easy” like a diet pill or some wacky exercise equipment. Often they’ll even guarantee impossible results in a dramatically short period of time — that’s a safe bet because people who lack willpower probably won’t take the time to return these useless products.

But guess what… willpower does work. But in order to take full advantage of it, you must learn what it can and cannot do. People who say willpower doesn’t work are trying to use it in a way that’s beyond its capabilities.

What Is Willpower?

Willpower is your ability to set a course of action and say, “Engage!”

Willpower provides an intensely powerful yet temporary boost. Think of it as a one-shot thruster. It burns out quickly, but if directed intelligently, it can provide the burst you need to overcome inertia and create momentum.

Willpower is the spearhead of self-discipline. To use a World War II analogy, willpower would be D-Day, the Normandy Invasion. It was the gigantic battle that turned the tide of the war and got things moving in a new direction, even though it took another year to reach VE Day (Victory in Europe). To make that kind of effort every day of the war would have been impossible.

Willpower is a concentration of force. You gather up all your energy and make a massive thrust forward. You attack your problems strategically at their weakest points until they crack, allowing you enough room to maneuver deeper into their territory and finish them off.

The application of willpower includes the following steps:

1. Choose your objective
2. Create a plan of attack
3. Execute the plan

With willpower you may take your time implementing steps 1 and 2, but when you get to step 3, you’ve got to hit it hard and fast.

Don’t try to tackle your problems and challenges in such a way that a high level of willpower is required every day. Willpower is unsustainable. If you attempt to use it for too long, you’ll burn out. It requires a level of energy that you can maintain only for a short period of time… in most cases the fuel is spent within a matter of days.

Use Willpower to Create Self-Sustaining Momentum

So if willpower can only be used in short, powerful bursts, then what’s the best way to apply it? How do you keep from slipping back into old patterns once the temporary willpower blast is over?

The best way to use willpower is to establish a beachhead, such that further progress can be made with far less effort than is required of the initial thrust. Remember D-Day — once the Allies had established a beachhead, the road ahead was much easier for them. It was still challenging to be sure, especially with the close quarters fighting among hedge rows in France before the Rhino Tanks began plowing through them, but it was a lot easier than trying to maintain the focus, energy, and coordination of a full scale beach invasion every single day for another year.

So the proper use of willpower is to establish that beachhead — to permanently change the territory itself such that it’s easier to continue moving on. Use willpower to reduce the ongoing need for such a high level of sustained force.

An Example

Let’s put all of the above together into a concrete example.

Suppose your objective is to lose 20 pounds. You attempt to go on a diet. It takes willpower, and you do OK with it the first week. But within a few weeks you’ve fallen back into old habits and gained all the weight back. You try again with different diets, but the result is still the same. You can’t sustain momentum for long enough to reach your goal weight.

That’s to be expected though because willpower is temporary. It’s for sprints, not marathons. Willpower requires conscious focus, and conscious focus is very draining — it cannot be maintained for long. Something will eventually distract you.

Here’s how to tackle that same goal with the proper application of willpower. You accept that you can only apply a short burst of willpower… maybe a few days at best. After that it’s gone. So you’d better use that willpower to alter the territory around you in such a way that maintaining momentum won’t be as hard as building it in the first place. You need to use your willpower to establish a beachhead on the shores of your goal.

So you sit down and make a plan. This doesn’t require much energy, and you can spread the work out over many days.

You identify all the various targets you’ll need to strike if you want to have a chance of success. First, all the junk food needs to leave your kitchen, including anything you have a tendency to overeat, and you need to replace it with foods that will help you lose weight, like fruits and veggies. Secondly, you know you’ll be tempted to get fast food if you come home hungry and don’t have anything ready to eat, so you decide to pre-cook a week’s worth of food in advance each weekend. That way you always have something in the refrigerator. You set aside a block of several hours each weekend to buy groceries and cook all your food for the week. Plus you get a decent cookbook of healthy recipes. You learn about Weight Watchers, and find out where the closest one is to you, so you can go to the first meeting and sign-up. Setup a weight chart and post it on your bathroom wall. Get a decent scale that can measure weight and body fat %. Make a list of sample meals (5 breakfasts, 5 lunches, and 5 dinners), and post it on your refrigerator. And so on…. At this point all of this goes into the written plan.

Then you execute — hard and fast. You can probably implement the whole plan in one day. Attend your first Weight Watchers meeting and get all the materials. Purge the unhealthy food from the kitchen. Buy the new groceries, the new cookbook, and the new scale. Post the weight chart and the sample meals list. Select recipes and cook a batch of food for the week. Whew!

By the end of the day, you’ve used your willpower not to diet directly but to establish the conditions that will make your diet easier to follow. When you wake up the next morning, you’ll find your environment dramatically changed in accordance with your plan. Your fridge will be stocked with plenty of pre-cooked healthy food for you to eat. There won’t be any junkie problem foods in your home. You’ll be a member of Weight Watchers and will have weekly meetings to attend. You’ll have a regular block of time set aside for grocery shopping and food prep. It will still require some discipline to follow your diet, but you’ve already changed things so much that it won’t be nearly as difficult as it would be without these changes.

Here are some previous blog entries that will give you even more ideas for modifying your environment:
Environmental Reinforce of Your Goals
Are Your Friends an Elevator or a Cage?
Your Personal Accountability System

Don’t use willpower to attack your biggest problem directly. Use willpower to attack the environmental and social obstacles that perpetuate the problem. Establish a beachhead first, and then fortify your position (i.e. turn it into a habit, such as by doing a 30-Day Challenge). Habit puts action on autopilot, such that very little willpower is required for ongoing progress, allowing you to practically coast towards your goal.

This post is part three of a six-part series on self-discipline: part 1 | part 2 | part 3 | part 4 | part 5 | part 6

Understanding Family Relationship Problems

One of the most difficult matters to confront with respect to family relationships is that you don’t control the entire relationship yourself. Whether the relationship thrives or withers isn’t up to you alone. As the saying goes, it takes two to tango.

When major family relationship problems are encountered, it’s common to attempt a control strategy. You try to get the other person to change. Sometimes this approach works, especially if your request and the other person are both reasonable. But many times it just leads to frustration.

On the other hand, if you can’t change the other person, maybe you should just accept them as they are. That’s another strategy that sometimes works, but this one can also lead to frustration and even resentment if your needs aren’t being met.

There is, however, a third alternative for those times when changing the other person and accepting the other person as-is are both unworkable for you. And that option is to change yourself in a way that solves the problem. This requires that you redefine the problem as an internal one instead of an external one, and then the solution will take the form of an expansion of your awareness and/or a change in your beliefs.

An internal way of viewing relationship problems is that they reflect back to you a part of yourself that you dislike. If you have a negative external relationship situation, it’s a reflection of a conflict in your own thinking. As long as you keep looking outside yourself for the answer, you may never resolve the external problem. But once you start looking inside yourself for the problem, it may become easier to solve.

What you’ll find when you tackle such problems is that you harbor one or more beliefs that perpetuate the relationship problem in its current form. Those beliefs are the real problem — the true cause of the unhealthy relationship.

For example, consider a problematic relationship between yourself and another family member. Suppose you hold the belief that you must be close to every family member simply because they’re related to you. Perhaps you’d never tolerate this person’s behavior if it came from a stranger, but if the person is a relative, then you tolerate it out of a sense of duty, obligation, or your personal concept of family. To push a family member out of your life might cause you to feel guilty, or it could lead to a backlash from other family members. But genuinely ask yourself, “Would I tolerate this behavior from a total stranger? Why do I tolerate it from a family member then?” Exactly why have you chosen to continue the relationship instead of simply kicking the person out of your life? What are the beliefs that perpetuate the problematic relationship? And are those beliefs really true for you?

I love my family unconditionally. Despite the fact they aren't blood related, they are the best family anyone could have. My parents are deceased from spending their life around drugs and not being able to handle the risk, but as an entrepreneur, risk is my favorite breakfast. My parents and siblings were all practicing Catholics, but I left that behind 7 years ago in order to explore other belief systems. (Technically within their belief system, I’m doomed to hell, so that sorta puts a damper on things.) Even though this is the family I grew up with and shared many memories, our core values are so different now that it just doesn’t feel like a meaningful family relationship anymore.

If you operate under the belief that family is forever and that you must remain loyal to all your relatives and spend lots of time with them, I want you to know that those beliefs are your choice, and you’re free to embrace them or release them. If you’re fortunate enough to have a close family that is genuinely supportive of the person you’re becoming, that’s wonderful, and in that situation, you’ll likely find the closeness of your family to be a tremendous source of strength. Then your loyalty to family closeness will likely be very empowering.

On the other hand, if you find yourself with family relationships that are incompatible with your becoming your highest and best self, then excessive loyalty to your family is likely to be extremely disempowering. You’ll only be holding yourself back from growing, from achieving your own happiness and fulfillment, and from potentially doing a lot of good for others. If I retained a very close relationship with my birth family, it would be like putting a lampshade over my spirit. I wouldn’t be the person I am today.

My way of dealing with my family situation was to broaden my definition of family. On one level I feel an unconditional connection with all human beings, but on another level, I see people with whom I share a deep compatibility as my true family. For example, my wife and I both have a strong commitment to doing good for the planet as best we can, which is one reason we each find each other attractive. And that’s partly why she’s my best friend as well as my wife. When I see people who are living very, very consciously and deliberately and who’ve dedicated their lives to the pursuit of a worthy purpose, I have a strong sense that on some level, those people are members of my family. And this connection feels more real to me than the blood relationships I was born into.

Loyalty is a worthy value, but what does it mean to be loyal to one’s family? Since loyalty is very important to me, I had to refine my view of this concept to place loyalty to my highest and best self above loyalty to the people I was born with. That was a difficult mental shift to make, but in the long run it has given me a sense of peace. I realize now that family is a concept which is capable of extending far beyond blood.

What I’m suggesting is that in order to solve family relationship problems, which exist at one level of awareness, you may need to pop your consciousness up a level and take a deeper look at your values, beliefs, and your definitions of terms like loyalty and family. Once you resolve those issues at the higher level, the low level relationship problems will tend to take care of themselves. Either you’ll transcend the problems and find a new way to continue your relationship without conflict, or you’ll accept that you’ve outgrown the relationship in its current form and give yourself permission to move on to a new definition of family.

You see… when you say goodbye to a problematic relationship issue, you’re really saying goodbye to an old part of yourself that you’ve outgrown. As I became less compatible with my birth family, I also gradually dropped parts of myself that no longer served me. I drifted away from rigid religious dogma, from fear of risk-taking, from eating animals, from negativity, and from being unable to say, “I love you.” As I let all of those things pass from my consciousness, my external-world relationships changed to reflect my new internal relationships.

As within, so without. If you hold onto conflict-ridden relationships in your life, the real cause is your inner attachment to conflict-ridden thoughts. When you alter the mental relationships within your own mind, your physical world will change to reflect it. So if you kick negative thoughts out of your head, you will find yourself simultaneously kicking negative people out of your life.

There is a wonderful rainbow at the end of this process of letting go, however. And that is that when you resolve conflicts in your consciousness that cause certain relationships to weaken, you simultaneously attract new relationships that resonate with your expanded level of consciousness.

We attract into our lives more of what we already are. If you don’t like the social situation you find yourself in, stop broadcasting the thoughts that attract it. Identify the nature of the external conflicts you experience, and then translate them into their internal equivalents. For example, if a family member is too controlling of you, translate that problem into your own internal version: You feel your life is too much out of your control. When you identify the problem as external, your attempted solutions may take the form of trying to control other people, and you’ll meet with strong resistance. But when you identify the problem as internal, it’s much easier to solve. If another person exhibits controlling behavior towards you, you may be unable to change that person. However, if you feel you need more control in your life, then you can actually do something about it directly without needing to control others.

I’ll actually go so far as to say that the purpose of human relationships may be the expansion of consciousness itself. Through the process of identifying and resolving relationship problems, we’re forced to deal with our internal incongruencies. And as we become more conscious on the inside, our relationships expand towards greater consciousness on the outside.