TL;DR

Most people don’t know what they want

Whom am I speaking to? Who is this going to help?

The guy who has nothing going on in his life and is just drifting.

My Practical Experience

Your goals are a Choice of Action!

I came across a monument holding the wishes, prayers, and desires of visitors. Here’s one:

Reading this post, in addition to many of the other ones I’ve seen, led me to one conclusions: everything we want is a choice.

If you desire good health, it’s a choice to choose to eat healthy food and workout. Sure, you may develop a sickness, but if you read Dr. Schindler’s book, “How to Live 365 Days a Year”, Schindler shows that three out of every four hospital beds are occupied by people who have EII – Emotionally Induced Illness.” Meaning, they somewhat think themselves into being sick. So, developing good health also means choosing to focus on your mental health by holding a relaxed attitude toward life, as it comes to you.

Happiness is also a choice. Why? Because our feelings toward anything in life comes form the label we choose to assign to the event. Someone may cut us off in traffic; it’s out choose to interpret the event as a personal attack, or as someone who is in a rush to say goodbye to his dying mother. In both cases, we get to choose how the event influences us from a happiness level.

Finally, love is also a choice. Love takes work, commitment, authenticity, and vulnerability. It can be a lot at times, with many of our ideas of what love looks like being shattered. But, if deep down, you commit yourself to loving people independent of their human flaws, then it becomes your choice.

If you really want it, be SPECIFIC

Many of the posts I found were vague, wishing for general happiness and prosperity. It’s perfectly fine to have a wholistic view of what you desire your life to look like, but it becomes quite difficult to make that vision a reality if you don’t know what the first step in the journey of a thousand steps looks like.

Have a broad vision of where you want to go. Then, setup SMART goals. Finally, fail epically, and cultivate the judgement as the reward for your experience.

While I was in Japan, I matched with a shy librarian who seemed genuinely interesting, but was way too shy.

“It was too bad we did not have our chance encounter”, she mentioned, when I finally told her I was leaving the next day despite having attempted to invite her to a nearby bookstore twice, and a few other places two more times (4 total outreaches).

Something I learned from her was that intelligent, well-read people will sit on their intelligence as an excuse for not taking action they view as “intellectually beneath” them; this is more of what I experience and less on her. For this girl, she was simply too shy; she shot herself in the foot when she said, “I imagined someone like YOU would be so busy”.

Anyway. This encounter has reminded me of the fact that if you truly desire success, you cannot afford to be shy, nor wait for luck to find you. Instead, you CREATE the life you want by CHOOSING to iteratively fail your way upwards. It would be easier to sit in your imagination, feed your ego, and tell yourself the narrative that you’re an intellectual superstar, or winning life–when the reality indicates quite the contrary.

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 want.

Given your thoughts and opinions, what practical actions can we take?

Be concrete about your goals and have the right framework for accepting many loses.