The Goal of Life & How You Miss It
2 paths you can take. Both paved with goodies.
Both lead to agony and you probably walk one of them.
But before I show them, let me tell you a story…
I met internet marketing when I was 20 years old.
My mother landed on a local marketer’s sales page and asked me to check it out.
That’s my first memory of reading a professionally crafted online marketing message.
You remember them. The pages from 15 years ago with the huge red headlines with enormous claims, underlines all over the place. The big red or yellow, picture-based CTAs.
I was hooked.
Learned more and more about how to write that high-impulse marketing BS. And that led me to think that I’m smarter than others. That I can achieve anything with that knowledge — at least that’s what they promised.
Can you guess what happened?
I haven’t achieved what I wanted so I’ve become impatient and frustrated. That’s where I became sick.
Diagnosis: chronic shortcut-seeking & shiny object syndrome.
I’ve burned out many times trying all the newest methods and failing. In hindsight it’s easy to see why. I’ve never been consistent and persistent enough to make those methods work.
They weren’t “perfect“. They weren’t “what I wanted to do“. Shitty excuses, yeah.
After years of struggling, I could finally learn the lesson of long-term thinking. If you have the same mentality as I had, this can save you some years.
But knowing something and putting it into practice are two different things.
And that’s where you come into the picture…
You’re probably on one of these two paths:
2. Lost Hustler’s Path:
Impatience & wrong values -> short-term thinking -> shiny object syndrome -> …
I was there, as I mentioned.
But what about the other path?
1. Comfortist’s Path:
You do what you must, nothing more. Your goal is to have as much comfort as possible. Just enjoy your life.
The most common cultural sphere.
Your parents taught you what’s a “good life” is about:
- Go to school, get good grades
- Get a good job
- Have a car & shelter
- Found a family
And you’re done.
All you have to do is to keep what you achieved. You can entertain yourself however you can. The more the better.
And this is the big trap.
Where does this all lead?
Too much comfort makes you lazy.
Let’s jump a few years ahead. Likely some of these conditions starts to materialize with time:
Your relationship with your spouse is getting worse and worse.
More arguments, less intimacy, worse overall vibe.
Your knowledge starts to decay in work.
You become slower, making more mistakes, feel more and more outcast in the workplace.
Life comes at you with bad surprises.
Unanticipated problems, tragedies, more and more low rides make you chronically stressed.
You get tired a lot more easily and have pain in your back & knees.
The lack of discipline goes to a bad diet, both physically and mentally. This is the root cause of common health issues, like obesity, high blood pressure and diabetes.
I don’t know about you, but these are not on my list when I imagine my ideal life a few decades from now.
And this is only the beginning…
Thinking ahead:
Your decreasing relationship eventually leads to breakup/divorce or an unhappy life.
Relying too much on your job inevitably leads to financial problems sooner or later. Replaced by younger, faster, smarter people or by AI? Shit happens.
You can’t avoid hard things in life. All you can do is to prepare for them.
Maintaining your health is ridiculously cheap and easy. Just compare it to the consequences of irreversible health issues.
You need to avoid these problems. Why?
Your ultimate goal on Earth
Life’s purpose is to stay alive.
You must remain strong. More and more capable of staying alive. So the goal is not to grow fast…
The goal is to grow forever.
If you don’t grow then you shrink.
In other words:
Not getting better mentally, stronger psychologically and physically means that you’re dying.
The whole point of life is to grow as long as you can. Stay in the game.
How?
Just don’t be stupid
Think in probabilities.
Take calculated risks. Meaning? Only so much that you can stay in the game if you lose but maximize your potential returns.
As Jeff Bezos said:
Outsized returns often come from betting against conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is usually right.
So prepare yourself mentally for being wrong a lot of times.
