| | After learning a little more about life than I knew in my past few posts (which are now pretty dated, unfortunately, due to my inability to keep blogging a habitual practice), I've taken a hard look at myself and who I want to be in the future. I've finally set some goals that I'm really happy with.
But what's interesting is, none of them have to do with achieving anything in life. Rather, they all have to do with the sort of person I want to be as I age and mature. Here are a few I've jotted down as examples:
- Become a man of gravity
- Become a man who leads and inspires by virtue and uplifting
- Become a man who is friendly to everyone he meets and is genuinely interested in all people on the very basis that they are human. Reserve the right to dislike someone, but never judge them or label them. Give respect where respect is due.
- Become completely honest with myself and my own perception of who I am. Admit to my weaknesses and be humble about my strengths. Lose the fear of being honest to the world.
- Become solidified in my own personal set of inner values; hold myself to them at all costs and do not allow them to be violated by others.
- Detach myself from identifying with my personality, my ego, my accomplishments, and my beliefs. Become fluid and therefore impossible to restrain, impossible to violate. Become capable of changing into anything.
- Expect and deserve nothing from the world but take what I want when I can, while at the same time being perfectly fine if it is not gotten.
...As a side note, I'm sure we can all agree that simply by having this list doesn't mean that I'm going to automatically cultivate these traits, just like how the fact that I wrote it down doesn't mean this is who I am or even who I will become. These things will come to me in the course of my life if I live it in the pursuit of becoming this type of person, but I won't achieve it if I don't move toward it gradually. That's how self-development works, I suppose. I'm just trying to have a realistic vision of how these goals will be met (without such a vision, it's pointless to have goals).
When I was a kid, I was told to have a goal. What do you want to be when you grow up? What the hell? How should I know? Even then I realized that I didn't know a whole lot about the world. My dad went to work and I didn't even know what he did. He was a consultant. What does that mean? Didn't matter; I was a kid. But there was such pressure to have a goal for what you want to achieve in life. As we neared the end of high school, that pressure came back around in the form of picking a college.
The vast majority of high school kids do not understand even how their "ideal career" will play out in their adult life quite simply because they haven't experienced it. Sure, you've got those career quizzes online that will test you on your personality then match you to a job, and tell you about why you'll like it so much. Bull hockey. When I decided I wanted to be a baker I had no idea how harrowing it was going to be. I thought I'd be spending my day figuring out recipes and creating new desserts (I'm much more a scientist than an artist when it comes to food). What I actually got was an intense, high-pressure, fast-paced environment focused more on repetition and precision than innovation of either scientific or artistic nature. I couldn't tell you how many times I thought about quitting culinary school and getting into a college to learn how to be a writer--how much easier that would have been, I thought. As though I know anything about writing for a career, right? I'm sure meeting deadlines on novels when you have lost interest in your own characters halfway through the book is equally as challenging if not more so.
What I'm getting at here is, nobody knows where their life is leading them. It's impossible to know. Even if the world weren't constantly changing, every hour of every day, you still wouldn't have the time to learn everything you would need to know to predict how you'll live your life up till the day you die. There are infinite variables, and as I suggested in the previous paragraph, if you hit one of those major points in your life like choosing a career and decide to change your mind, what happens to those goals of opening a restaurant? That's not going to happen if I suddenly become a columnist. So do I beat myself up about having failed in reaching a goal? Or do I rationalize to myself that I need to stay in the food industry expressly for the purpose of fulfilling that goal?
This is mostly hypothetical, of course. Eventually, I connected with baking in a way that I can truly appreciate, beyond the previous backwards-rationalizations that involved me lying to myself about why I like the career that I chose. Furthermore, in my life, I now believe that I should detach myself from results associated from the outside world entirely and focus entirely on myself. That, I can predict, control, and change. A year from now, my self-development goals may change entirely. That's fine. In fact, that helps fulfill the goal of becoming totally fluid.
Of course, I don't want to be thought of as an authority on how to set goals or discourage anyone else from setting achievement-based goals in their own lives. I like to challenge the way people think, and I think that we should all allow ourselves to be challenged as far as what we really do believe versus what we claim to believe, because that divide does exist. But taking my word for it without it really resonating in your own life is the same as adopting a false belief--you would only "believe" it because I said it was right, when in fact, what I'm really saying here is to challenge the paradigm.
EDIT:
I have removed the goal "become a man of gravity" from the list of things that are important to my self-development. The reason for this is because I don't want to base any aspects of my personal progress on the way others perceive and react to me.
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| | Posted 8/28/2008 11:13 AM - 14 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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