I have written a bunch of articles about deserving. For several reasons, the most important is this: deserving is a tricky word… Is it a beingness verb, maybe adjective or is it a true verb, doingness? I hope I can hold your attention through a few articles exploring this ever so important word… Once you get it, you’ll know what to do. Because you cannot get what you want without deserving it… And if you do get what you want without deserving, what you wanted will kill you… Sounds like a puzzle… it’s a principle.
This article is a year and a half old…
I find myself angry.
On one hand you want. A lot of things.
On the other hand you think it should be handed to you. Because… why? You don’t know. But you see other people who have it and surely there is no difference you can see between them and you… and in many ways you seem to yourself better than those people who have what you want. You are nicer, prettier, maybe smarter, and yet… they are getting what you want, not you.
What you don’t see: you can’t see, what is invisible to you…
It is what is under the hood.
Ultimately, if I compared you to a lion, or maybe even a cat… you would come up short.
For the most part a lion or a cat can see what is important to them. Certainly there are cats that choose the wrong time to cross the street, and get hit by a fast car… but this doesn’t happen all that often.
Whereas you can’t see all the things you need to see to get what you want.
In fact you see only a tiny fragment of what you need to see. The rest: you fill out with your imagination.
I know you think I am judgmental. This is exactly what I am talking about. You don’t know the difference between judgment and assessment… I bet you don’t even know the second word…
In life you get what you deserve. Actively deserve. Meaning what you can and do work for… the value you create, in the world.
But because the human world is a lot more complicated than a cat’s world, you need to be able to recognize and correctly use, a lot more things than the cat.
You need to be able to recognize…
- Who is a friend, and who is a foe.
- What is useful and for what.
- What works and doesn’t.
- What is valuable for others and what isn’t.
- What other people want… from you.
This last one is very tricky: you think you know. But you are way way off…
Actually, you are way off in every single area of life.
And I am angry.
You say: but somehow you earned a roof over your head and three meals a day! And yes, you have.
Our welfare system has set a rule that even if you provide no, or not much value, you are granted the minimum to survive… They take resources from more deserving people to ensure that you survive…
But that is what you deserve in today’s day and age: surviving.
- The trouble is that you think you should have more.
- The trouble is that you don’t deserve it… because to deserve it you need to be worth a damn.
“To get what you want, you have to deserve what you want. The world is not yet a crazy enough place to reward a whole bunch of undeserving people.”
~ Charles T. Munger
What is between you and being deserving is knowledge. Knowing enough so you can recognize a lot of things and respond to them appropriately.
Most people do it through reading, thinking, observing, evaluating, pondering, discussing… It takes active participation with information for it to turn into knowledge.
Even in just one narrow slice of life… like health.
Or making money…
Or relationship…
Or art…
Generations after generations of people never went beyond dealing and seeing the surface, not even deserving the handouts humane societies give to the less intelligent.
And thousands upon thousands of people milking you for the dollars you have for miracles cures, for miracle courses that will make you smart, pretty, rich.
Few cats would fall for the tricks you fall for.
I say, cats are smarter than most humans today. Smarter as cats… obviously.
I have unsubscribed from thousands of email lists, but not everything: some people email so rarely, I am unsubscribing now.
I got an email for a couple, medical intuitives and distant healers… Canadians.
For a small fortune (for me) you can get “diagnosed” and maybe “distant healed”…
You and these “healers” are the perfect match… you deserve each other.
PS: as I am looking for images for this article I see that everyone talks about an intrinsic value “deserving” when they use the word. But in a world of eight billion people “being deserving” is just the beginning. You have to start creating value in the world… Money, love, friendship, respect, all need to be earned. With you providing something of value to the other. Yeah… bummer, eh?
PPS: Unless you can see value in all three ways, you will never amount to much. You’ll be merely surviving, but will not be living. Like a caged cat… some other will provide you with meals and shelter… not you for yourself.
Your success in life is commensurate with your ability to see value. And given the masses of people who don’t… given the confusion “they” create, intentionally, seeing value is hard work. To start seeing what you can’t see…
