What You Desire Should be a By-Product of What you Do
What do you want from life?
I would die for a moment of clear creativity.
What about you? What matters to you? What is that one thing you would never trade for anything else?
Happiness, love, peace, creativity, fame, and so on.
Whatever it may be, take a look at them again. These are all abstract. Intangible. You cannot grasp or hold them forever. They come and go. They are not any one person’s legacy.
None of us desire a daily job, or a walk in the park, a dog, a car, a vacation. Of course, we want them but is it these that we want? Think about it. The only reason you want all these things is that you will get something out of doing or getting them. Happiness or love, fame or purpose, creativity or fun, you name it.
You get the idea right?
We have been living and we still do to achieve one of these. We may want one of them based on the situation we might find ourselves in. A car might bring happiness while a job fills your purpose in life. A dog will share its love and a career in YouTube fame.
Let’s call them the ‘fundamental goals’ of all human beings.
Yes, we all live for these abstract-intangible-fundamental-meaningful goals. One wants to be rich while the other one prefers the peace of mind. Rob is after happiness and Salma would die for love. Syed seeks a purpose in life but you (the reader) want to make him famous (JK).
We are all very discreet yet unfathomably similar.
All our paths are parallel (in our own way) yet destinations (philosophical) similar (I say similar because even though two people want to be happy but the meaning of happiness may not be the same for them).
The point is simple. We want to be happy or rich, helpful or cruel, rude or down to earth.
You cannot just achieve them by directly going after them. You need a conduit. Something that you can work or live for, which will yield the thing you want as a by-product for you. That way you will not only get what you want but you will have a purpose in your life.
Moreover, in these cases, what you want becomes secondary. That is why I use the word by-product.
You will be so fixed in your purpose that you will not even realize that you have been receiving the ultimate gift that gives meaning to you, out of it. In fact, it will the obviousness of it that what you seek will be with you and you will be oblivious to its presence.
I have read a significant number of articles and blog posts on this concept and yet I realized the obviousness of it just yesterday, and today I am here, writing it for you.
I am sitting in front of my computer screen and the cursor blinks; it waits for the computer processor to send some commands to it so that it may display a few letters that I type when a creative idea hits me.
I have written good poems and prose out-of-the-blue sometimes. But, those are not random. They are the result of involuntary connections that my subconscious makes from the conversion of information (that I learned or experienced) to data (patters).
It is clear that I crave creativity.
In this case, my creativity is the reason of me feeding my brain with input. My darling sweetheart right-brain takes its own sweet time to connect the dots and when it does, I realize the ideas in ways and situations I never thought of.
Creativity for me, thus, comes in two ways. I am sure it the same for you as well. One — the brain dots, and second — when I have a project to work on.
I have already explained the first way. The second way is not too different than the first one.
Let’s say I am working on a new project for which I need to use the ultimate power of my creativity. Now, creativity isn’t like that you sit down and it just pops in your head. I will read and research. I will talk to people and listen to their stories. I will visit places and study them. After I have done all I can, here is where my brain comes into play. Creativity time. I have all this information in my head but it has to make some sense to be considered as a piece of creativity. My mind creates connections, I don’t know how (ask a doctor), and I ger the creative idea.
Both my ideas, although through different channels, went through the same process. That is why I said that the second way of creativity is not so different than the first one.
You read and gather information and then the brain again does the same job of making patterns out of them.
Thank you for reading. :)
