#4: Finding Personal Freedom

The quality of your life is a function of the level of your awareness, how much you feel you are in control of it, and the clarity of your purpose.

You don’t have much time? Read “Finding personal freedom” only (6 mins).

Today’s content:

• Keeping track of your thoughts
• Finding personal freedom (main essay)
• The story of a farmer and his horse
• A voicemail to a friend
• Famous last words

This article is part of my weekly newsletter about how to live a life worth living. Subscribe here.

Keeping track of your thoughts

Tip: I recommend you get a dedicated notebook that you carry with you (or alternatively a notetaking app on your phone — I use Evernote) where whenever you have an insight about you, your life, the world, or anything meaningful really you write it down. Your spontaneous insights are the most valuable ones.

I have made it a habit of continuously taking notes of everything (observations, ideas, any thought) that I think of and that I consider relevant or insightful. I keep it in a chronological journal (or logbook) with the header as a date, a quick comment on where I was (location, event or person) or what I did (e.g. book title) and a bullet list of thoughts, quotes, ideas etc. The next day, I insert a new header on top of the previous day’s paragraph. I call it Rolling Thoughts. Here are two random screenshots:

Whenever the note gets too long, I start a new one, e.g. Rolling Thoughts 2018/2. Over the last three years, I accumulated around 100 A4 pages of notes. By writing down your thoughts, you engage your brain and it will reflect on what you wrote down subconsciously as well as make it more likely for you to remember.

Plus you get to be able to go back and look at your thoughts from the past. I keep another list of business ideas, another one of ideas for ConsciousX, another one of movies and books I should watch and read (and who recommended it), etc. You get the idea. So all my thoughts get caught (while I might be out and about having fun or doing other things) and I can get back to them at a later stage, when I have the time or when I decide to work on a specific subject.

Your thoughts on any subject will become more refined over time and you will cover more ground than you could just by sitting down in a single session and start thinking. Therefore, try taking notes and see what happens.

Finding personal freedom
(and why it’s much better than working out)

Last week, I spoke about awareness and why it’s so fundamental that we continuously work on increasing it (read it here). I find that it’s near impossible to live a content, fulfilled, or happy life without a high degree of awareness of yourself. There’s no way around it. And while it’s a never-ending journey, it’s a fun one.

When you are working out, you gain a lot of satisfaction from getting better, from your progress, plus you feel good immediately after it (you produce dopamine, the feel-good endorphin). It’s the same with your awareness — and it has the powerful side effect of you becoming more and more in charge of your life and how you experience it. There is no better investment that you can make in yourself than increasing your awareness, your consciousness about life. This is what this newsletter is about. Helping you to become better at life.

We spend so much energy, time, and money in maximizing and optimizing our external world (looks, travel, material items, more money, etc.) but we still fail to get a grasp on life, we fail to be in control of it, we are always running after something. Always stressed, always busy to get to the next thing. Life feels like a rat race. You feel like a victim of life, never to be able to catch up to it or overtake and be in charge. Seemingly good and bad things happen to us that are out of our control.

This is because you are investing in your external world. You are trying to make the world the way you want but of course, you can’t do that. The world does whatever it wants (and sometimes you like it and sometimes you don’t). But once you are starting to invest in your internal world, how you perceive the world, you won’t need to be part of this rate race anymore, you will achieve what I call personal freedom. This newsletter is about achieving personal freedom, i.e. independence to the world that is happening to us.

Once you start working on increasing your awareness, you start understanding that you are in charge of your experience, how you perceive the world and what is happening. And, if you keep going, you will come to realize that there is no good or bad, there are just supporting and challenging events in life. And those challenging events are not bad but nudge you to make adjustments and thereby grow as a person.

This might sound unbelievable to you right now but you can obtain full control of the quality of your life without needing anything else than who you are and what you have right now. This statement comes from someone that used to be an investment banker. If you would have told me what I am telling you a few years ago, I would probably have looked at you smiling friendly at best. But we live, learn, and grow and so can you (if you choose to do so).

Life always finds a balance between the two (challenge and support). If you have too much support you become complacent and you will be presented with a challenge, a wake-up call. That will force you to grow as a person if you want to get back to a more supporting experience. It’s a constant back and forth. You can observe that anywhere, in your life, in the world, nature, politics, society.

Life is dynamic, constantly in flux and changing every moment. It’s a painful illusion to believe that we could lock in the status quo. And even if we temporarily feel like we have done so and everything is under control, we get bored, we ask ourselves, is this it?

The world or nature doesn’t owe you anything. It’s all up to you. Are you genuinely happy with your life, are you thriving, enjoying it? By that I don’t mean have you achieved what you set out to do or whether society considers you a success. That doesn’t really matter if you don’t feel ecstatic about life. That is all that matters, really, is how YOU feel about life. And if you don’t feel that it’s amazing, should you not be open to exploring other avenues of making sense of your experience, right? That’s what I did. That’s what — in my humble opinion — anyone should do that’s not happy/content/excited with the status quo. Why would you live a life that’s anything short of great when you can have it?

Ironically, everyone that has a high level of awareness will be at peace with life and feel he or she is on top of it and that it’s amazing. Anyone, who does not have a high level of awareness will be reactive to life, not feel in control and hence not enjoy it. It will feel difficult, it will feel like a burden at times and we constantly need to inject pleasure, success, rewards, etc. to get excited again and forget about our mundane life. If you are not excited about your daily life and constantly think about a better future or about temporarily escaping your reality with holidays, a shopping spree, or a wild night out — it speaks for yourself, you don’t like your life and you are constantly looking to escape.

But this has become the status quo of most people in Western societies. Hence, people don’t really question whether it should be like that. Isn’t that sad? Is that how you are meant to spend your time here on Earth? No. That just doesn’t make sense and luckily it doesn’t have to be that way.

Back to awareness and your perception of reality. Your brain is a massivefilter of the physical reality around you. It decides how you perceive and interpret it before it reaches your conscious mind. You can take control of that filter, alter it, change it, improve it, upgrade it and thereby magically take control of your life and start thriving.

You might say: “So, you are telling me to brainwash myself into a happier life.” No, I am saying the exact opposite. I am saying that currently what you perceive as good or bad in life is just your interpretation of your external world. However, you did not choose that interpretation. It was given to you at your inception and during your first years (I talked about that in the last newsletter).

Maybe this analogy might clarify what I am talking about: Right now, your brain software is in version 1.0. It’s the standard shipment from nature. It has been programmed and optimized over 10,000’s for your organism to have a solid survival and growth strategy. Organism refers to your genes not you as an individual.

Now, life on earth has changed a little since that algorithm of your mind has been programmed. It kind of stands in the way of living life on your terms as you constantly get prompted, among many things, on what could go wrong, what is dangerous, who is a threat, that you need to work harder, faster, and better than everyone else around you, etc.

While this is optimal from an evolutionary perspective, it is diametrically opposed to the quality of your life, your life as an individual as well as the bearer of your genes. Now the very last part might surprise you. Fact is: The world is a completely different one today and therefore your program version 1.0 is not only suboptimal for your own experience but equally suboptimal for the propagation of your organism, your genes.

A stress-free, healthy, confident and happy you are both better for your health and your own well being as well as make you more attractive to the other gender, hence it’s a better reproductive strategy. So it is a win across the board.

In plain English: It’s no brainer to upgrade your software. And that process is called increasing your awareness. And you do that by contemplating, questioning yourself and trying to understand what really is going on.

By deciding to read until here you have taken already the first step in doing so. You have reallocated some of your time from other activities to investing in yourself.

Here’s an explanation for more business-minded folks: Working on increasing your awareness, working on your internal world is investing in yourself while all other activities are an expense: You get something right now from them but no return or payback in the future. It’s a one-off. You constantly need to “spend” again to enjoy life. But working on your awareness changes your perception of life forever so you don’t need to keep spending on external things to enjoy it.

As long as you are in software 1.0 mode, the model that you were shipped as when you came out of the womb (and in which mode the vast majority of the world is stuck), you will have to continue to work and “pay” to stay happy and content. But when you invest in yourself, you don’t need all those external “expenses” (pleasures) anymore. You will come to a near constant state of well-being without them. Just be being in charge and control of your experience. Isn’t that amazing?

You don’t really need to buy anything to get there. All you need to do is to start working on your awareness.

Start observing the world around you without judging it, i.e. without thinking this is good or bad. Just take note of what you say, how you perceive, and what it makes you feel. And start trying to understand how you perceive what happens to you and why. Why are you angry at him? Why are you envious of her? Why do you feel threatened by them? Why did you get hurt by her? These are not facts but perceptions of you.

I leave you with a story:

The story of a farmer and his horse.

One day the farmer’s horse runs away. And his neighbor comes over and says, to commiserate, “I’m so sorry about your horse.” And the farmer says “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?” The neighbor is confused because this is clearly terrible. The horse is the most valuable thing he owns.

But the horse comes back the next day and he brings with him 12 feral horses. The neighbor comes back over to celebrate, “Congratulations on your great fortune!” And the farmer replies again: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

And the next day the farmer’s son is taming one of the wild horses and he’s thrown and breaks his leg. The neighbor comes back over, “I’m so sorry about your son.” The farmer repeats: “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

The next day the army comes through their village and is conscripting able-bodied young men to go and fight in a war, but the son is spared because of his broken leg. (By now you can guess what the villagers said and what the farmer’s response was.)

His son’s broken leg heals but leaves him with a limp. Consolations as usual from the other villagers and the farmer repeats…

As the war comes to an end, all the village’s other young men were killed and the farmer and his son were the only men capable of working the village lands. The old farmer became wealthy and was very generous to the villagers. They said: “Oh how fortunate we are, you must be very happy”, to which the old farmer replied, “Who Knows What’s Good or Bad?”

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I was planning to cover exercises today about how to get to know yourself but while writing the introduction I ended up with the above which is a full newsletter itself. Don’t worry, we will get to the exercises. In the meantime keep increasing your awareness. Don’t judge what’s happening just take note of it and try to understand why you feel the way you feel about what’s happening.

A voicemail to a friend

Interested in more? Here you find the raw (unedited) voicemail (10 mins) I left to a friend who asked me about a number of topics which I tried to answer (in this order):

• How to find bliss in life
• Struggle between living in the moment vs executing your life plan
• Listening to yourself
• Constant worrying
• Victim vs. in charge of life
• What you really want vs what you think you want
• Understanding why you want something
• Finding your purpose
• Learning to say no
• Doing what is important to you
• Can books help you?
• Process of changing yourself

Skip the first 20 seconds to get straight to the content. It cuts off after 10 mins as I switch to topics specific to that person.

Famous last words

Growing as a person is why we are here. Growth is the purpose of life, on a biological level as much as on a conscious and intellectual level (= learning). While most people seek stability, when nothing in life changes, they start wondering whether “this is it” (midlife crisis or any other personal crisis). Keep learning and growing and you will both be happier and better prepared for life and the future. If you like watching short videos, check out some of my videos in the “About this newsletter” section below. I have recorded 43 videos about life and how to think about it.

Help other people to grow. If you enjoyed this newsletter, please clap (as much as you like) and share it with a friend or two. Not receiving my newsletter yet? You can sign up here to receive it once a week fresh in your inbox. You can find all my previous newsletters here.

About this newsletter and me. ConsciousX started as a passion project sharing the life insights I gained contemplating over the last years. As a result, I recorded 40+ videos on topics like why you should stop caring what others think of you (watch my video here, 6 mins), how to prime yourself happy (video, 4 mins), how to communicate with others (video, 7 mins), or why you should embrace uncertainty. You can find all the video’s here. If you want to learn more about me, check out my site. I have also written some other articles on Medium, for example on How to overcome anxiety.

This newsletter was made with love in Notting Hill, London.