Many people may say to you: to be successful, you need to have fire in the belly. You need to be hungry.
So people, maybe you, beat yourself into a feeding frenzy, and set out to conquer the world.
Your mother said: don’t go food shopping when you are hungry. Why? Because when your belly calls the shot, your higher faculties take leave of absence, and you’ll make horrible decisions. You’ll buy everything you should not eat, and enough food for ten. I have done it… horrid.
It is when the tail wags the dog.
In success there is more than just getting started
In success there is more than just getting started. For that, maybe, hungry is good, but then you need to calm down, collect your wits about you, and be deliberate, be choosy, be sober.
It’s a whole different way of being than the hungry “they” recommend.
You’ll need to see the big picture and read the small type… take into consideration your time, your energy, your personality, your skills, otherwise you’ll end up broke, or listless, or never really enjoying the process.
You need to train yourself for awareness, and for awareness you need to be awake.
Bad decisions induced by the drunken hunger put you to sleep.
And awareness of what? Yeah, I am getting to it.
You see, you have been asleep for so long, you have missed your life up now, so you don’t know yourself.
The first step is to know yourself. Not the hyped up or hyped down version of you, but you.
In the skill finding workshop I met both: hyped down: “I can’t do anything” and the hyped up “I can do this!”. Both are lies. Not exaggerations, lies.
You cannot get anywhere unless you are clear where you are, you are clear what is going on for you, what is your vehicle, what kind of person is operating it.
The purpose of the first leg of the journey, while you take charge of your senses, is not to get anywhere, but to see yourself in action, see how you make decisions, what you see and what you don’t.
The Greeks said: Know Thyself. Yes, yes. But what does today’s human do? They ask other people to tell them how they are, who they are. Tests, and more tests. Personality tests. Aptitude tests. Energy tests. Horoscopes. Soul correction. Kolbe test. Self-starter personality test. Value profile… the list is endless.
It is YOUR job to discover yourself
It is YOUR job to discover yourself, other people’s view is just a potential guidance: is this true about me? But today’s human doesn’t check the veracity. YOU don’t check if it is true in reality, you check it with your mind, in your head, in your memory.
The past is the past: Today is a new day
You can start behaving rightly at any moment. Today is a new day, and today you’ll start to check it in action. Do I really justify myself instead of taking it like a man? Check. Do I really think talking eloquently is action? Check. Do I really consider repeating what I have heard creative? Check.
Catch it in action. See it with sober eyes. Without judgment.
Judging, opinionating about how you are, won’t change you, will just put you back to sleep.
If you want to live the best life you can live with what you’ve got, you need to play with the cards you were dealt, with what you’ve got.
Living a life of a person who is not you, will make you live a life with impostor syndrome, and you’ll hate it. You will have to hide who you really are 24/7, so you’ll go to sleep. Nobody home.
Iit is very likely that while you were slumbering, while you were thinking that you are different from how you are, you forgot to build skills, the basic building blocks of success.
It is never too late to start
It is never too late to start. Just start small. And don’t start big projects that need skills you haven’t developed, even if you have the potential ability.
But you see, all that, skill building, project selecting, all require you to be awake, to be aware, to have sober eyes, or you’ll fail… and predictably live a life of quiet desperation, and suffering.
If your culture prizes looking and sounding upbeat
If your culture prizes looking and sounding upbeat: ignore your culture. Your culture is feeding you mind numbing, soul killing hype.
Whipping yourself into sounding upbeat is a good indication that you have also beating yourself into being hungry.
Hungry people are like sluts… can’t discriminate. You’ll make choices that are only easing your hunger, but don’t satisfy. Choices that will dig the hole you are in even deeper.
When you are hungry, when you are eager, it is the tail that wags the dog… Is that the kind of life you want?
Just for entertainment…
