TL;DR
You are in the driver’s seat of your life.
Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?
The hallow person who is passively living life, or being overly busy with no main vision of where he wants his life to take him.
My Practical Experience
It’s truly amazing how ONE book can propel you to make the significant leaps in your life.
For me, there were three books in particular that led me to passive action:
- Courage Is Calling: Fortune Favors the Brave, by Ryan Holiday
- Principles, Ray Dalio
- Man’s Search for Himself, Rollo May
Of course, in retrospect, it wasn’t these particular books by themselves that led to life-changing action on my part, but the prepared mental state I arrived in, from all the books I’ve read prior, as well as my prior experience, that made me receptive to the ideas that each of these books had to offer for me at the right time.
So, how does this relate to developing inner strength?
For much of my youth, I found myself in a constant tension and rush to get things done, but never full at peace from within myself.
Course Is Calling was the book that made me act out and move out of my comfort zone to directly confront that inner anxiety I was constantly fighting; this manifested itself by moving across the country to the middle of nowhere to go all in on my work. It was then that I was confronted with my true enemy: my underdeveloped inner state. I found myself relinquishing control over my life to other people because I did not know what I wanted, and I hoped that if I followed the right people then they would lead me to my date.
I was lucky to have found ONE person who gave me the right words to listen to, “Think about what you want”. He was the one guy who listened to me in my time of distress, and gave me exactly what I wanted to hear, without using it against me, or manipulating me into suggesting something that I “should” do. I’m proud to say that even today, he and I are great friends.
The book Principles, laid the groundwork for developing the inner values and I can shape and develop from my personal experience to get me to where I wanted to go. Ray Dalio’s book profoundly influenced me to start writing down, objectively, what my beliefs were on myself, other people, and the world around me; these beliefs, in combinations with an accurate, objective understanding of how the world works, permitted me to seek out what I wanted in spite of the differences between my ideal values and the reality of the world. In other words, Principles gave me the framework from which I could start actively failing forward towards winning life on terms that were my own, as opposed to passively following directions of other people and relinquishing the driver seat of my life to someone else.
Naturally, as I begin to carve out my own path, I find myself becoming increasingly isolated from others; I begin to spend more time thinking deeply about “what I want”. This turned out to be much harder than anticipated because, as mentioned in Principles, I wanted to get the the ROOT source of all of my desires, rather than the mere symptoms of insecurities. For examples, dating beautiful women, being respected by other people, and having rich friends, were all my first instinct of what I thought I wanted, until I began to dig a bit deeper.
You see, all of these things were outside of my control; if I wanted respect from other people, then my life would be at the mercy of strangers; as long as I desired their respect, they were in control of my life, which would take me out of the driver’s seat of my life, and put me back in passive mode, which is not an experience I wish to repeat. Likewise, getting sexual validation from pretty women would be like filling up an empty cup that had no bottom; the moment the validation from other people (including hot women) stopped, my cup would be as empty as it was prior, and I would be left feeling hallow inside.
I realized that the way of getting “what you want” out of life begins with asking the fundamental question, “who am I?”. No book does a better job of answering this question than Rollo May’s book, “Man’s search for Himself”. In this book, I learned about the importance of cultivating self-identity through experience, and how the path towards freedom and fulfillment is an active struggle towards voluntary adoption of greater responsibility.
I learned that in order to grow, we must begin by questioning the values we hold to ourselves, and have the courage to be wrong about the path we take with the understanding that the judgement we receive is the reward for this experience. I learned that the hardest step in developing courage is accepting full responsibility for one’s own standards and judgments, even though his wisdom is both limited and imperfect; for it is the courage to be and trust one’s self despite the fact that one is finite; it means acting, loving, thinking, creating, even though one knows he does not have the final answers, and he may very well be wrong! Most importantly, I realized that the greatest good that we can contribute to society over the long run starts at the individual level by cultivating a strong sense of inner identity and finding the center of strength within ourselves; a single person with indigenous inner strength exercises a great calming effect on panic among people around him.
All of these lessons have made me take the right actions that increased my self-esteem, rather than actions that were out of insecurity, like trying to “look good” or trying to please everyone at work. I think one of the biggest developments has been in my ability to actively control how I emotionally respond to new situations. I can feel the lower-level emotions of insecurity rising within me when confronting old situations, and yet I can actively reinterpret the situation all together.
I think from all of these lessons, some of the more pragmatic lessons I’ve learned include:
- No one can offend you without your consent
- I will never blame other people or my situation, because then I relinquish my driver’s seat in life. If I am to blame, then I am the one who can resolve it; if I blame someone else, then I am at the mercy of their actions to resolve the issue.
These two points alone have allowed me to be more grounded in who I am, and stay highly resistant to negative influences.
There’s really so much to learn, yet looking back, I can see more clearly the amount of work that has been done. Much of this work has been mental and philosophical in nature, yet it lays the groundwork for the compounding future the lies ahead of me.
To whomever this post comes across, I sincerely hope you too find the path to develop your inner strength :).
How does this opinion explain how the world really works in a way that accurate, wholistic, and realistic?
Most people don’t know what they actually want in life. Most people don’t even know what they think they want from life.
If you wish to live a life that’s on your terms and fulfilling towards the best version of yourself, your people, and the world around you, begin searching from within.
How do you search from withing?
- Spend more time alone
- Read
- Write
- Meditate
- Iterate and be patient. Compounding takes time.
The power of reading
Where would Elon Musk be if he had not read Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy?
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Steven Jobs, etc. were all influenced by ONE book that drastically changed the course of their lives.
Only, it wasn’t actually ONE book, but the culmination of all the other books (as well as personal experience) leading up to that ONE influenced book that allowed these people to be fully receptive to the life-changing ideas of the book.
Read as much as you can. Read what you like, until the habit of reading itself becomes as fun as child’s play.
Thanks for the advice, now how can I practically put this to use in a simple way for daily execution?
Read, write, and meditate daily. The answers will eventually come to you. Then, you will find yourself among the lucky few who are at peace within themselves.