If you are on a staple diet of self-improvement and personal growth — quite often, you might have been forced to go through the feeling of inadequacy.
There is a bright chance of you being motivated to do better but at the same time cursing your own existence. Not living up-to other’s expectations disguised as your own — not appreciating your own journey so far.
The bottom Line — you are forced to believe you are nothing but a colossal waste of unlimited human potential — ’coz you are still living an ordinary life!
You are falling for everything that makes you feel charged up. But being emotionally charged up is not going to solve most of your problems. They end up giving you a mild dose of dopamine — ultimately making you somewhat addicted to it.
The endless listicles of life-altering advice often rely on timeless quotations and radical choices. There is nothing wrong with them because they are true — but more often than not they are useless.
They are incapable of solving most of your problems simply because your challenges are singular and subjective. You and only you can find a workable solution if your true intent is to really find one.
Guides & Philosophers — Do you really need them?
Whatever you are, wherever you are — it’s your personal journey and you should be proud of it. There is no need to abhor your present if you wish to leapfrog into an extraordinary future.
There are dream sellers who wish you to emulate all the success principles followed by all-time greats like Einstein, Edison, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs.
These sellers claim to be your best guide and philosophers who are gifted to sense all your untapped potentials so that you end up transmogrifying yourself into quite an exceptional work of art.
They make you believe that one day you can be everything that you wish to be — a millionaire having six packs, a rock star personality, and at least billion of fan following.
Really? You just need to hear what Psychologist Richard Ryan has to say on this, “One of the reasons for anxiety and depression in the high attainers is that they’re not having good relationships. They’re busy making money and attending to themselves and that means there’s less room in their lives for love and attention and caring and empathy and the things that truly count.”
Most of the extraordinary achievers have this tendency to always be in control of every life situations. However when they are with wife, kids, or friends they lose their precious Control, thereby left with nothing but lots of frustrations in their personal relationships.
If you dig a little deep into their social life you would be shattered to know their magnanimous failures on personal fronts.
There is a cost attached to their kind of extraordinary success but nobody is willing to bring that into the open.
Everlasting happy life?
If you still aspire to live an extraordinarily successful life — whatever that means — Are you prepared to pay the price?
Do you even know there is a price to be paid?
And this whole business of having a stratospheric success is sold on the premise that an everlasting happy life is waiting eagerly for you once you achieve the socially accepted tag of an extraordinary life.
In the process, you are always preparing yourself to live an extraordinary life while missing the life that is just unfolding in front of you.
Are you in a pizza eating contest where the top prize is more pizza?
You need to find that out really quickly for yourself. Because once you opt to compete in a contest you become a victim of its momentum — and end up losing most of your freedom.
And if you are pursuing an extraordinary life because you believe it would somehow lead you to a permanent state of happiness. Then you need to pause a little to afford yourself a laugh at the very implausibility of such presumption.
Because happiness can never be an end product in itself, it’s a by-product of how you chose to spend your time.
If you expect a good life to make you happy then you are chasing an illusion — ‘cause you are never ever going to be consistent with your own definition of “good life”.
The trap of good life is often a major obstacle in appreciating what you have in your possession. Once you lose the things which were taken for granted — you start appreciating its value more — what an unnecessary cost of living an unexamined life?
If you are really keen on happiness, learn to give some rest to your intellect. Pause a little and observe — your mind always wants you to remain alert so that you are much more alive to the possibilities of gainful analytics and associated responses. So that the mind is never devoid of its importance.
The moment you learn to give this mind-tool some much-needed rest — by simply opting to stay disengaged from the automatic chain of thoughts — you will feel unburdened from the heaviness of its cluttered existence.
Misplaced belief!
There is a very high probability that life you are living is beyond extraordinary for someone who is simply less fortunate.
There is a misplaced belief that one needs to be unsatisfied with the present to leapfrog into a better future.
As long as you are preoccupied with searching the meaning of life you are losing each and every moment of it.
If you are subscribing to these misplaced beliefs then I am afraid you are on the path of self-inflicted prolonged unhappiness.
At the core of our happiness lies the perfect alignment between who we are and what we choose to become.
The primary reason why there exists so much of deviation between the two is what HBS Professor Clayton Christensen call strategy sequencing — where the default attitude being “First I will work a job I hate and make a lot of money and then I’ll have a family & then I’ll do what I want & be happy.”
That’s the precise reason why number one regret of life is — not having the courage to live the life we want, instead of living the life prescribed by others.
What a tragedy — we are so deeply conditioned we need the courage to find what we really want from life.
But at the same time, we tend to show lots of courage when it comes to following in the footsteps of someone celebrated as a success icon. In the name of security and certainty what we end up is — living an impersonated and unhappy life.
Misplaced Yardstick?
It’s far easier and uncomplicated to use just one yardstick to measure a successful and happy life. As a result, we don’t venture beyond the most commonly accepted yardstick — MONEY.
And the primary reason why it is accepted as an undisputed yardstick — — because money has unlimited potential to buy most pleasures that have a price tag attached to it. Due to this widely accepted mindset, in our search for happiness, we often end up settling for all sort of pleasure-seeking activities.
- Instead of working for a healthy glow we don’t shy away from using the money to buy fancy beauty products.
- Instead of working towards bringing calmness inside us we are ready to spend loads of money to explore exotic locales.
We keep searching for external validation for everything that we perceive to be our accomplishments.
However, we often forget that this sense of accomplishment lies beyond the boundaries of success and failure. It’s the variety of our life experiences that make us cherish moments of life brushed in different strokes of color.
Life of abundance and happiness is waiting for you, once you succeed in debunking the Myth of scarcity.
If you wish to arrive at a particular destination of your choice then it doesn’t make sense wasting your energy on a treadmill. Because as author Tony Schwartz says “ Energy, not time is the fundamental currency of high performance.”
At the same time it makes sense to appreciate that “While obsessive work may be the necessary condition for any extraordinary success, though it’s never a sufficient condition for a fulfilling life.”
Originally published on betterhumans.coach.me
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