On becoming, and underbecoming
1.
This weekend has seen me spend time with very many people. Among which was a late-night board-game binge, a quiet dinner with a bottle of wine, two uncles’ catching-up over coffee in Chinatown, of all places, a lunch amid the crowd, an attempted date, and a friendly chat over life and goals, and a quick ten minutes of information download and profiling.
It’s been insightful. I’ve been thinking a lot.
I used to have a vague plan for making myself better; the D+ project. Didn’t turn out well; fell by the wayside. What motivates people is a little more complex than vague goals, a catchy name and the pressure without reward.
Some time ago, I read — probably in a reddit comment — about how one cannot hope for unequal exchange. Geeks date geeks and hipsters date chic, people generally tend towards equals or alikes. If you really wanted someone special, you would have to be special yourself.
Relevant uncle quote: You marry someone to take care of [her], you don’t marry someone to have her take care of you.
What value can you offer? What can you bring to the table (in your unique combination, or that nobody else can offer)?
This is why you should become the person you want to marry. Like attracts like. It’s possible, but highly unlikely that you’ll marry a fairy godmother who’ll set everything right for you simply by waving a magic wand and going bippity-boppity-boop.
That’s not to say that having somebody else to lean on wouldn’t be helpful, or that you couldn’t both work together and push each other on to great goals; it’s simply that nobody will solve your problems for you unless you start solving them yourself.
(Question, then, what is counselling?)
2.
I read here and there, as part of my daily feed, about motivation, discipline, goals, goal-setting, lifehacks, pushes, and so forth. I am enthused by the ideas but rarely set them into effect, and one of the ideas is that of a social contract. Telling people your goals can help guilt you into accomplishing them.
That is perhaps not the right way to motivate people, but whatever works. Here are a few of mine, by the end of the year:
- Start lifting some sort of weights, power or otherwise
- Start some sort of social activity with people churn
- Start some sort of personal enrichment programme
- Continue bullet journalling, or at least maintaining it, and begin a habit of planning.
Let’s see how many of these I can get around to by the end of the year.
