You only feel strong emotions for something that you care about (whether good or bad).

However, it’s not always good to follow your emotions. You can’t always trust them. Sometimes, you have feelings that you misunderstand. And you start thinking that you love skydiving when, in truth, you actually love the rush it gives you. We’re pretty bad at understanding why we feel something.

Emotions can lead the way and point you toward things that make you feel alive. But then, it’s your job to use logic to figure out which part of that activity actually makes you feel that passion.

The opposite is also true. Sometimes your emotions and desires tell you that you don’t want to do something. But why don’t you want to do it?

Do you NOT want to do something because it hurts you? Or because you’re scared of it? It’s hard to figure out sometimes because our mind’s defences often just want to block out that we are weak. It’s called denial.

Have you ever said to yourself, “I didn’t really want it that much anyway“, when actually you were tearing up inside? Rather than confess that we’re weak/scared of something, we’d rather just say that we didn’t like it anyway.

There’s the problem though. Our mind has already associated fear with weakness. When you’re afraid, or scared of something, it means you’re weak, right? Wrong. When you’re afraid and give in to that fear, that is the problem; but only fears that stop you from living your life and achieving your dreams.

Don’t face your fears

People always say:

You should face your fears

However, I say that you should only face your fears when they stop you from living your dreams. That’s because some fears are fine. Some people are scared of cockroaches, or snakes or spiders. That’s fine; it’s not really a big deal.

For these people, I’d say that having fears is normal. Normal and even healthy. If you aren’t afraid of guns then there’s something wrong with you.

But sometimes… sometimes you’re scared of speaking in public when you really really want to be a good manager. Or you’re scared of publishing your writing even though you really want to share your ideas and make the world a better place. Or you’re scared of opening your own business even though you have a great service that you think will really help people.

THIS is when your fears stop you from living your life and achieving your dreams. And this is when you’ll feel internal conflict. ALL THE TIME. “Torn between two lovers” and all that. And the reason is because you yourself want to do something, and you yourself don’t want to do it.

In that case, the only solution is to change yourself to be yourself.

So what do you do when your fears and dreams conflict?

Priorities: Fears and Dreams

A lot of people have empty dreams. There’s a big discussion that’s going on about the difference between dreams, goals, resolutions, plans, etc. I was sucked into the debate for a time, but now I’ve realized I don’t really care about the definition of the words themselves. I care that people understand that when you want to achieve a goal (plan, dream, whatever), you have to have an extra step, which is to set out the way you’re going to achieve it.

But even before that, you have to know what you’re getting into, if not you’ll never have the motivation to even start. And if you push yourself to start anyway, you’ll lose that motivation before long. Haven’t you noticed how many people make New year’s resolutions and never follow through with them?

To know what you’re getting into, one of the ways is to look at your fears and dreams together, and see whether you’re willing to still chase that dream if you have to face your fears.

Take an afternoon to yourself. Sit somewhere that’s nice and lonely like your bedroom or a grassy field. Don’t do anything but let your mind wander and imagine. Imagine chasing your dream. Imagine what you would be doing on a typical day of you chasing your dream. Then imagine yourself facing your fears as you chase that dream. How would it look like?

Is it worth it? Would you be willing to go ahead with it?

I don’t know the answer to those questions. And neither do you. At least not until you sit yourself down and imagine for yourself whether you’re willing to go through 2 hours of training every day for the next year so that you can get better at basketball. Or whether you can spend 30 minutes a day, 4 times a week, to learn a new language. Or whether you can summon the courage to stand up in front of a small crowd to practice your public speaking skills.

You won’t know until you figure out how important that dream is compared to your fears. Once you figure it out and have your priorities straight, you’ll then have a good idea of which one wins. If your fears scare you more, don’t bother facing them. The dream wasn’t really that important to you anyway (or maybe that fear is just too deep). Or maybe… maybe you just have other more important things in life bigger than that dream. I can definitely respect that.

HOWEVER!, (and this is a big however), if that dream is worth it to you, it’s time to think about ways to face your fear, because that fear is what is keeping you from being a man who feels complete.

It’s not an issue of whether you achieve your dream, or even whether you’re good at it in the first place. You can chase a dream even if you know that you have a high chance of failure.  The issue is about you chasing your dream. When you don’t; when you shy away from that thing in life that calls you like a beacon; you stop believing in yourself. You stop trusting yourself.

And that is something that breaks my heart every time I see it.

Let me put it another way.

How can you be a trustworthy man if you don’t stick to your principles?

Because that is what your dream is; it’s a way to realize your principles (what you truly believe in) and make sure that they happen in the real world.

If you don’t, all you’ll do is regret your life the whole way through and you’ll be one of those people who always talk about “one day” living your dream. Don’t be one of those people. I’m in the journey of moving away from this myself.

Conclusion

So to recap, it’s fine to be afraid of something, when it has nothing to do with your dreams. Because then, it doesn’t really bother your life or affect it in any way. But when fear stops you from living your dream, it’s time for you to work it out.

You don’t owe it to me or anyone else. You owe it to YOURSELF so that you can start living life and stop regretting it.

Oh no. I’m doing it again. I’m all over the place. I can’t keep watching myself! Every time I turn around, I mess up again. Then I regret it later. I’m a liability to myself.

Do you know that feeling? That feeling like you’re contradicting yourself. Like you can’t be trusted. Like there are multiple parts of you and each one is going in a different direction and you feel lost, not knowing which part of you to follow.

I’ve found that it happens the most when you can’t keep your word. When you start keeping your word, and being true to your own promises, then you start trusting yourself, more and more.

Trusting yourself

A few things happened in my life recently. Both to me and the people around me. These events made me realize how far I’ve come from 7 years ago when I first started my journey of self-discovery and self-improvement. I took the red pill. I looked at myself and how I was. I mean really looked at myself. All my flaws and what I hated about myself as well as all the things that I thought were good.

There was a point in my life where I said to myself, “I’m going to do this“. Then I didn’t. I said it again, “I’m going to finish this“. Again I didn’t. Every time I felt like I’d failed myself. When I said things, I didn’t do them. After doing this a few times, I couldn’t trust myself any more.

And when I couldn’t trust myself, of course, I projected it onto others around me. Unconsciously, I was pulling myself away from the world around me, because I thought that what I did was wrong. And I felt that everyone around me also thought that what I did was wrong. I felt like I was lying to myself and the world around me. Have you felt like this before?

The thing was, I didn’t actually know at the time why I felt so unhappy with myself. So I took the red pill. I sat down and thought for a long time about things. And I realized that I wasn’t consistent.

Being consistent

Being consistent could mean a lot of different things, but for me, it was about having my internal voice and my external actions coming together. When I questioned myself, I started noticing problems:

I said I loved family. Then why was all my time being spent away from them? I said religion comes first. Then why was I forgetting it in my daily life? I said I wanted to be strong in any situation. Then why was I scared of talking in front of people? I said I wanted to be smart. Then why had I stopped reading as many books as before?

Even though to anyone outside, it looked like my life was actually pretty fine, inside I was carefully disassembling the idea that I was living my life in a way that was good for me. I was realizing that I was probably being self-destructive and that my current attitude would give me some major problems in a few years.

What were my core values?

I had to sit down and really think about how I would live my life if those really were the values I thought were important to me.

That internal conversation evolved into questions of whether those really were my core values in the first place.

What was important to me? I mean really important to me?

It took me time to figure them out. But it was worth it. After that, it was easier to see when I went off track in my life. I just had to look back at whether it fit in with my core values. Honestly though, it’s still evolving even now. Not the values themselves, I have those down I think. Rather, my understanding of how those values fit in with my life are evolving every day.

Be myself? Or change myself?

I struggled with this for a while. It’s not my fault, society made me that way. I was bombarded for years with messages of, “You’re unique” and “You should be yourself”. The problem was, nobody ever explained it to me.

So I thought that it meant I could never change a single thing about myself, even the parts that were horrible, and wrong, and self-destructive.

It took me a long time to realize that being myself should mean following through with the core values that I thought were important. In short, my ideal self. Everyone has their own vision of how they would like themselves to be. That was the truly unique self that I needed to become.

To be myself, I had to change myself.

That realization was mind-blowing for me. I had to change myself to become consistent with my ideal. I had to change myself to be the person I wanted to be. I had to change myself to be myself.

In the end, I’m happier now after changing myself to become more consistent.

Some side effects of being consistent

You’ll:

1. Be true to your word. Promising something means you have to follow through. If not you’re not being consistent with yourself, this is when you start having multiple selves. The part of you who really wants to do it and promised to do it. And then there’s the part of you who is against it and in the end decided to skip doing it. Every time you don’t follow through, you not only divide yourself in two and more, you also start giving your negative side more power. The person who goes through with his word is the person who is fully in control of both sides of himself.
2. Have a much stronger sense of who you are. It’s the you that believes in these things and ACTS on them, not just says the words. You’re consistent, your life flows, and when questions and decisions come your way, you can be consistent and easily decide what you want to do as long as it doesn’t go against your core values. At the end of the day, it’s much easier for you to look back and say, “Here. This is the kind of person I am. Everything I did today reflects that.”
3. Have a clearer direction in life. All those choices which are useless to you (and aren’t consistent with you and what you want) are simply ignored. This doesn’t limit your life. It frees up your time for you to do much more meaningful things rather than wasting time worrying and regretting. When you don’t know what to do, you have to spend so much time experimenting new things to see if you might like it. Odd thing is, you’ll even try things that are bad for you even when you know it. Be strong. Be principled. Be consistent with how much you want yourself to succeed. Forget all those petty side issues that aren’t in the direction you want to go in your life.

So the question is, would you change yourself to become a better version of yourself? Are you doing it now?

Once you reach happiness, will it stay with you forever?

It’s impossible to be truly happy all the time. Honestly, that would be a bit psychotic. Can you imagine a person who was smiling all the time? Even when problems happened or someone close to them died? I’d want to put that person in a mental asylum. Life comes with it happiness and sadness, and it’s only human (and healthy) to feel the full spectrum of emotions rather than just being happy all the time. So then, is happiness a stupid goal?

Is happiness a stupid goal?

If happiness comes and goes, why then do we put happiness as our final goal in life?

We still want happiness anyway. And it’s actually fine. I’ve personally divided happiness into two: the feeling and the environment. Happiness is a worthy goal to have, but the goal shouldn’t be just to have that feeling. Rather, your pursuit of happiness should be a happiness of an environment where your innermost needs and desires are taken care of. You’ll still be sad when a loved one dies, but it’s not the sadness of living a life where you haven’t fulfilled your potential and made a difference.

So aim for a future where your inner needs are cared for: security, love, respect, health. Once those few needs are taken care of, everything else is just icing on the cake ( I don’t know why people say this, I like the icing more than the cake). Can’t go to Disneyland? You’d still be a bit sad, but life is still good. And when something truly wonderful happens, then you can freely be happy without feeling like there’s something missing in your life. THIS is the kind of happiness you want.

Why that kind of happiness?

Have you heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? It’s classic management theory that tells us that a person has to fulfill his basic needs of food and sleep before he can think of looking around for higher aims. It’s a little flawed here and there and doesn’t work perfectly all the time, but it’s a good rule of thumb that you can use.

And it does make sense to a point. When you still have to worry at the back of your head about your innermost needs, you can’t truly be happy because you haven’t achieved everything you truly need yet. Simple example: how can you celebrate a promotion and be happy when you haven’t eaten or slept in 3 days? It’s just not as important. Or when your son is hooked on drugs? Or when you have $300,000 of debt?

So how can I enjoy my happiness?

Tiny bursts of happiness pale in comparison when truly large problems exist in the background. And this is what I’m saying. The happiness we should be working towards isn’t those tiny bursts of happiness that come along from day to day. The happiness we should be working towards is the happiness of an environment free of major problems. Once you’ve cleared most of those problems, you’re free to not just be happy, but to truly enjoy that happiness when it comes.

We all want more choice in our lives, more opportunities. Unfortunately choice has a confusing paradox; When you have a lot MORE choice, you become LESS happy.

Crazy ain’t it?

Decision Paralysis

When you have more than about 7 choices, you start getting lost. Which choice is better? Will you have to try each choice to see which is best?

What happens then is that you’re paralyzed and can’t make a decision until you “get all the information”.

Not making a decision means not making  a choice that could be making your life better. You become LESS happy.

Opportunity Costs

In the old days, there would only be 1 type of jeans. If you wanted to buy one, that was the only one. Nowadays, you walk into a store and see 100 different kinds. So now you just have to try each one to get the best.

Imagine 2 stores. One only has 3 types of jeans. The other has 100 types of jeans.

You waste sooooo much more time trying 100 jeans than just 3 jeans. Therefore, you won’t ever try out all 100 jeans.

When you finally DO pick one of those jeans out of 3, you can choose the best one. When you choose out of 100, you might only try on 10 pairs. So you lose out (opportunity cost) on 90 types!!

You therefore become LESS happy because instead of gaining on one pair of jeans, you’ve lost out on 90 pairs. Because any of those 90 pairs could have been better than the pair you just tried on.

And the problem duplicates itself when buying cars, or houses, or even just choosing what to do with your life. When you have SOOO many more options, life becomes tougher, because it becomes harder to know if the choice you take is the best.

Then what should I do?

So what do you do? Stay tuned for my next post; “Satisficing: Why it’s good enough”

Most of what flows into people’s brains on a daily basis is pure junk. It’s not worth reading or listening to. It takes up your time and makes you less productive. So you’ve gotta consume less information to be more productive.

Because in the end, information doesn’t help you. People try to know more and more in the mistaken belief that knowing more will help you. It doesn’t. Not if you know a lot about something irrelevant.

Relevant information helps you. So it means you need to identify what is important to you so that you will only take in information on that. I personally stayed off facebook for 4 or 5 months. Granted, part of the reason was that I forgot my password, it was still a good experiment. Nowadays I log on for 5 minutes every week or so. I don’t need an hourly update on other people’s lives unless it’s on my sister and my brother-in-law who are overseas.

I don’t read my emails much anymore either. It’s not like there’s ever anything uber urgent anyway. Whatever comes my way can usually wait one or two days at least.

It frees up a lot more time to do the things that I value in my life like bonding with people face-to-face instead of online, and being with my family, and also simply relaxing. I can’t believe how tense some people’s shoulders are.

And you know what it even gives me time to actually study some useful things instead.

Try it. I know ramadhan is over, but fasting doesn’t just mean food; it can mean information too.

Examples of answers:
• Learn to play the guitar.
• Visit Cambodia.
• Start my own restaurant business.
• Become a professionally certified engineer.
• Get that promotion.

The problem here is that all of these are just plans. You might argue that getting your dream career of owning your own restaurant is a goal, but it’s not.

There’s a simple test to see if it’s a goal or a plan. Ask yourself if you’ll be happy once it happens. If you have a restaurant, you still won’t be happy just having it. You’ll want it to run well and succeed. Why? To see people enjoy your food? To have the money to support your family? To put your kid through college?

Getting a restaurant is just another plan. And plans are bad when they’re left alone without a proper goal to direct them.

People who have goals

Imagine this. Life is a physical journey. A trip to somewhere. The goals are your destination. Now let’s say that your “goal” is to get to the Eiffel tower. By knowing your destination, you can choose the road you want to travel!

1. The fastest road? It might not be the easiest, but it’s the fastest way to get there. In life it would be the road where you work hard at even if you don’t like the work. Reason being that it will get you that job where you get to travel a lot.

2. The most scenic route? Some roads are very enjoyable even though it might take you a little longer to get to your goal. Maybe this is your choice. Choosing the career path that you enjoy the most.

3. Or simply the one that’s easiest without a lot of twists and turns? There are some roads that are worth taking just because they are so easy. You don’t have to think because you get onto the highway and just drive. No “second left at the 3rd traffic light”. No “when you see the pyramids, you’ve gone too far”. In life, this means the safe route. The one where it’s impossible for you to get lost. No risk, but that also means no risk of failing to get there.

You can now make plans (roads) with the focus of reaching your goals. What roads will you take? What plans will you make? Either way, it’s a lot easier to get there when you know where you want to go in the first place.

Some common questions:

What happens if the plan fails?
That’s fine. Plans fail all the time. Often because of outside forces. Imagine these failures as roadblocks. It doesn’t matter if one road is suddenly blocked off. You can easily make a detour. Change plans and keep heading towards your goal.

Those who don’t have a goal would be in big trouble though. They just want to travel that road. The don’t actually know where they’re going. So the moment the road is blocked, their whole life is over. Don’t be them.

Some people became rich THEN became happy.
That’s not really a question, but I’ll answer it anyway. Yeah. And some just become rich and are never happy because they never reached their life goals. But when you’re rich, you don’t have to take the roads anymore. You can just take a helicopter.

What I mean is that when you’re already rich, or influential, or have lots of friends, then you might not be traveling the normal roads anymore. A helicopter is your way of traveling to your goal. Try it that way if you want. Get rich first then get happy. That’s route number 3 that I mentioned up there. Remember though, even if it is the fastest route, it might still take  long time and you might not be very happy doing it.

Don’t just plan, Make Goals!

So basically what I’m saying is, don’t make plans and think you’re making goals. Make proper goals. Goals that don’t leave you feeling empty once you achieve them. There’s a quote that goes:

A man should have an impossible dream. If he does achieve that dream, he’ll have nothing left to live for.

I don’t believe that one bit. I say that:

A man should achieve his dreams as fast as he can. After all, it’s not worth living if you’re not living your dream.

So choose your dreams, your goals, very well. Give it some deep thought. After all, it IS the rest of your life.