It’s not what you do — it’s your attitude which matters
Whatever it is that you’re doing — it ultimately becomes a projection in your psyche
When you feel great — everything feels better
When you feel terrible — nothing feels good at all
Therefore it’s your inner state, and your attitude — is what matters
If your attitude is all that matters — then this sheds a new light on the kind of things you’d choose to do
Why would you ever do anything useless — if you could instead do something useful?
We only do useless things because we believe they are anyhow more pleasant, more easy, more “fun”
But if you believed that YOU CAN DECIDE what is FUN, what is EXCITING, what is PLEASANT — then you wouldn’t look for “fun” stuff to do. You’d just do something useful — and have JOY while doing it
Of course the transition is not instantaneous
But it starts with understanding that you have the power over your attitude, your mind, your thoughts, your emotions, your experience
Of course it’s a spectrum:
Where some can only derive any satisfaction and pleasure from a new, intense, arbitrary stimuli
And others can derive utmost exhilaration from any single thing they do
And then there’s everyone in between
It’s easy to say that it’s “all attitude” — it’s difficult to actually change
In practical terms, it’s a climb
It’s a climb, where one would elevate:
-from pleasure-pursuit and distraction-pursuit
-through more creative and instructive and challenging “hobbies”
-to more and more useful pursuits which impact one’s entire life
-to long term vision of one’s life, one’s values, one’s work, one’s impact
It’s a climb, where you want to be progressively introducing more and more creative, more and more meaningful pursuits, and more and more edifying ideas,
And where you want to be progressively eliminating the lesser urges and diversions, slowly and steadily eliminating them from your life
Accountability helps.
It helps to measure how much time and energy and resources you devote to each business
You want to measure it in many ways. A lot of life is inscrutable — but that doesn’t mean cease measuring. It means find more ways to measure it, and construe understanding from that
And you want to measure what you get in return. How you feel
You want to measure EVERY single thing in your life: what it cost you, and what it gives in return
You want to consciously choose what you want to get out of every single thing you ever engage in
And ultimately, you want to consciously choose what you want to get out from the life as a whole, and how you want to feel within this lifetime, as a whole