Know Yourself

We are born as passengers on a ship, in a sea of unknown. We lay on the deck naked and unaware. Armed with only our genetics and instinct, we have no power over the surrounding forces at play. But over time we begin to grow, and before long we gain an understanding of our environment. Through this understanding, we transform from passenger to navigator, and develop until we can sail the ocean with ease. But then we fool ourselves into believing that we have life figured out because of our newfound mastery. In reality, life does not begin until we set foot on land. So we should make sure we use those skills to dock ourselves in our own personal paradise.

We begin with a necessity to gain understanding, and develop abilities. This is the first half of life. During every person’s life there comes a time when they must decide how to apply their abilities to fulfill some sort of purpose. If we don’t offer unique utility, we will never be grounded to a purpose. During late adolescence there is a transitionary stage where reflection is imperative. If we don’t “know ourself” enough to identify our unique utility, through acquired skills, the second half of our life will never truly begin. This takes a great deal of honesty and objectivity that most people aren’t willing to apply to themselves.

We all have a general idea of what we “should” do, but by chasing something that isn’t authentic to you, you will slowly build up a box around yourself that you can’t escape from. The best way to know whether or not you’re being honest with yourself is if you feel both destroyed and liberated at the same time. It’s painful to knock down the walls around us - they become part of who we are - but if we want to identify our purpose, we must shed the expectations that anchor us. Life is full of external influence, and if we want to reach the proper destination we must focus solely on the direction of our ship. The only way to do this is to ruthlessly and routinely correct the slightest deviance from the course we set.

There is am inherent difficulty in living the way we want. Everyone wants to be happy, healthy, and wealthy, but it's rare that people actually achieve all three. We are not wired to live out the dreams we set, we are wired to be miserable. If we want to change the external, we must focus on the internal. In order to change our default mental settings, we must employ extreme self governance and discipline throughout our lives. Still, there are a lot of disciplined people that don't get what they want. I'm a firm believer in hard work, but energy expenditure and outcome are weakly correlated in my eyes. To me, it's much more about what you work on than how hard you work on it.

If we we could time travel, we would only act in the most highly leveraged ways. The acuity of your decisions typically determines the upside that is realized. Unfortunately, life is very unclear and inefficient. In order to forecast the future, we must accurately extrapolate the past.

I believe I'm currently at the docking phase of my life. I have downloaded many of the deep-seated foundational traits that will follow me for the rest of my life. These are also referred to as "soft skills." Though we continue to develop until much later in our lives, when you hit your early twenties, you can begin to take inventory on these skills. If you feel you have squandered your earlier years in laziness and lack of engagement, you will probably avoid this act for as long as possible. However, just because you may view yourself as unworthy or unmotivated, doesn't mean all of your time was a waste. Judging yourself is detrimental, and inherently subjective. In order to succeed, you just have to harness the commercial aspects of what you naturally excel at, so be objective in your assessment. Acknowledge the areas you're lacking, and then divert your focus to where you are not.

Say there are 10,000 traits out there that lend themselves to success, and we are ranked from 0 to 100 on all of them. Things like persuasion, humor, and honesty, but also more technical or niche skills. Just because your conglomerate score may be lower, you may still have a handful of skills that you are in the top decile for. By identifying the synergistic combinations of these skills, you can find opportunities tailored to you. If by chance, you can't find a good fit, don't compromise. Instead use vision and creativity to productize yourself. You should approach every opportunity through this lens.

How can you expect to be worth anything to others, if you don't value yourself enough to be who you are? We can fool ourselves, but other people can easily tell if you're living out your purpose or not. The people we admire most are those who unapologetically live out their passions. Admiration is when someone is doing better than you, but you still like them. The reason they are doing "better" than you is because they love what they do, and the reason you like them is because you can see that. If you don't love what you do, you can't compete with the people who do love it, and you shouldn't try to. If it feels like play to them, you'll have to work so much harder to achieve the same result.

Life is all about making things easier on yourself so that the hard work goes further. In order to make things easier, you must act strictly in accordance to the the things you excel at and enjoy. You have to be your own biggest fan, and head coach, because we all know ourselves better than anyone else knows us.

"Be disciplined, or be disciplined"

"Work smarter, not harder"

"Escape competition through authenticity"

https://nav.al/competition-authenticity