Martin Lecter

There are no goals in reality – only the law of accumulation and your character that produces whatever you accumulate. You are already what you should be. You just have to deepen your character and make yourself more of what you already are. Set your goals based on your personal values instead of just setting arbitrary goals based on what society considers to be success. Goals are simply means to measure progress and an inspiration to do the work.

Cause here is the thing: you can never reach your goals unless you consistently produce whatever the final result is made of on a day to day basis. In order to do that, you have to already be the kind of person who is suitable for reaching the goal you have set – otherwise you will find it hard to produce the right “stuff”. Therefore, it’s better to set goals based on what you are, instead of doing it the other way around, setting arbitrary goals and then trying to change yourself.

That’s also why your personal values are actually more important than your goals – as I wrote previously in my article on values. A value is basically a timeless character goal – like truth, love, mastery, knowledge. A personal value is a goal aimed at yourself instead of at some result outside of yourself. You can’t really say, for example, that by the 31st of dec 2010 you will be a person of perfect truth and love – it’s simply an ideal that you strive for but will never fully reach in your lifetime.

Based on your values you can then set external goals that stem from these values just to keep yourself motivated and happy – but it’s the development of your character based on your values that matters most as you strive to reach the external goals that you set for yourself.

In fact, the striving itself is merely an illusion as well. You are not really striving – you are just making your brain release endorphins by thinking of your future goals and imagining them in your mind. Although it’s not these visions alone that make you reach your goals – instead it’s your day to day habits that get you there.

Imagine a wheel. A wheel can get from point A to point B because it is round. In order to get from A to B, a wheel has to roll. Now think of a rocket. A rocket can fly from A to B – a wheel can’t fly. Although the rocket can’t roll like the wheel can – it can only fly. The wheel gets from A to B because of what it is – because of being round. A rocket get’s from A to B because of what it is as well – flying is more natural for the rocket than rolling.

This is why a method of staring a business that has worked for one person may not work for another – they are simply different people with different traits.

Each one of us reaches our goals in our own way because of what we already are. It’s very difficult to reach a goal that does not “consist” of what we already are simply because it would mean that we would have to change our personalities to reach it – which is nearly impossible to do, and only produces unnecessary anxiety, friction and misery as we struggle to become someone else.

So it is better to set goals based on what you are – ironically you will reach them regardless of whether you set them or not. Because they are based on your character, you already are on your way towards reaching them anyway. And you will reach them, although much slower, even if you consciously force yourself to work on a different goal that you don’t really want.

The truth is that you are being successful all the time simply by being the person you already are. You may not be accumulating what you truly want to accumulate – but you are accumulating something (be it knowledge, or money, or social connections, or computer games, or tv series).

So setting goals is not really that important. All you have to do is consciously work on developing the person that you already are. Set that as your single goal and you need no other.

When you read or hear something that you are not psychologically prepared for, it will usually stir strong emotions within you. First you will feel disgust, then you will feel frustration, then you will feel indifference and finally you will see the sense in the new perspective that you have been introduced to.

There is nothing wrong with adopting a perspective. The world consists of many different perspectives that you can choose from at will. Some of these perspective are religious and others are more modern and scientific – yet anything that you know, or think that you know about the world, is part of a certain perspective that you have created. Each perspective allows you to see the world from different angles and to see patterns that are not present in the other perspectives.

Before I started reading books (other people’s perspectives), I was highly skeptical of most written material. I considered it to be unnecessary for me to read books because I already knew everything that I needed to know (or so I thought). When I started reading, however, I have completely changed my attitude towards books.

Information is absolutely invaluable to anyone who aspires to gaining a better understanding of themselves and the world around them and to live a more integrated and fulfilling life. You can learn virtually anything and become anything that you want to be – if only you are willing to learn.

Keep an open mind towards everything that you read, absorb the information, then make your own personal conclusions based on your own experience.

Oftentimes when we are working towards a goal and we are feeling results we get really excited and confident and so we set even bigger goals and bigger ones until we end up with something that was not at all what we have set out to do in the beginning. We have ended up with something that is not even realistic – it’s more of a projection of early progress into the future with the assumption that progress is linear. Let me explain why this is impractical.

When we learn, the learning does not take place in a linear fashion. Rather, we accomplish a great deal and make a lot of progress at the very start of our endeavor – then the progress curve evens out and moves in a more horizontal direction. The shape of this learning curve is very similar to the shape of an amplification curve.

What often happens is that we get really excited by the progress and start setting followup goals that are based on the assumption that this curve is never going to even itself out. When it does even out, we get frustrated and disappointed with ourselves – even if we do hit the goal that we have initially set for ourselves.

The key is not to go past the goal that you have initially set for yourself. Hit the goal – then stop and regroup your thinking for a while. There is no reason to hurry. If you look at all great empires in history – all of them have fallen when the leader has gotten overconfident and tried to accomplish too much in a short period of time. This has usually led to the weakening of the empire and it’s eventual fall.

Your brain grows in the same way. If you make your awareness expand way too fast and set new and higher goals when you have not even completed your current ones, you will eventually crash – ie. get really depressed and disappointed. Instead, consider hitting the top of the curve – then going for a while until you feel that the curve has evened itself out, and then stop.

Do something else and let your mind do the background processing of all the previous knowledge that you have absorbed. Switch your context. Some people do this by taking a vocation, although you can simply do something else that creates a contrast to what you have previously been doing.

When you then go back to the original task, you will find that you have a far easier time making progress than previously. This is because you are at the bottom of the next progress curve and on your way to shoot up yet again. All you need is a little push and you will find yourself making progress.

You are like an electron that is about to jump orbits – all it needs is some energy and it will jump to the next level – and while an electron needs energy, all you need is some extra knowledge that will help you connect together seemingly unrelated ideas that you have acquired from different contexts and expand your awareness.

We are born into this world without any knowledge on how to effectively live our lives. Some people are fortunate to have well educated parents who can teach them – we others are left on our own. We stumble and we learn and we uncover truths every day that we never knew existed. What does it really mean to know how to live?

Nobody can really teach you how to live your life – it’s in fact something that you already know. You just have to bring that knowledge to your conscious awareness.  We are never taught how to be ourselves – yet deep within we all know what we should be and how we should be without needing any external input. The hard part is putting in the effort into developing these mental faculties to really understand who we really are.

If you at any point in your life feel anger, disappointment, fear or any other negative emotion without having the skills to control these emotions then you don’t really know how to live. What most spiritual teachings have been aiming to do for centuries is to teach us how to connect with the core of our being and to effectively control all negative emotions so that we can be free from them.

Religion is like mental jujitsu where you learn to use your inner forces for your benefit instead of going against their flow and limiting your potential. Then of course there are several styles that you can learn – but the underlying philosophical principles are always the same.

And I think that a large part of learning how to live our lives fully is becoming that self that we already are – ie. flowing with the inner currents of our being – to do the things that we are most likely to enjoy and to be the way we want to be without resisting ourselves.

While taking a walk out in the nature today I was thinking about the way we develop our thoughts over time. The more I thought about it the more similarities I saw on the way we tend to develop a philosophy to the way we develop software and anything else in this world.

Think of your philosophy as code that you write for a computer. A philosophy is the code that runs inside your brain. You can write down your philosophy into text to make it easier to comprehend and debug. You can also extend your philosophy over time and add new features to it in much the same way that you would extend and rewrite code.

If your philosophy is not working well – perhaps causing your brain to make mistakes and get stuck then you need to refactor your philosophy. If you find something that is not working then you are always free to change the way you think. Much like it is wise to throw away old and inefficient code – it’s also wise to throw away thoughts that are found not to make any sense.

The most elegant solution today may not be the most elegant solution tomorrow. Perhaps today your philosophy is working out well for you, but as you add more features to your life your philosophy might require an upgrade to accommodate for all that extra stuff.