The Answer to Your Question Is Within You
“When we do not trouble ourselves about whether or not something is a work of art, if we just act in each moment with composure and mindfulness, each minute of our life is a work of art.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
Have you ever needed affirmation or validation that your path or work of art was worthy enough to continue?
If you have, you are not alone!
In Rilke’s first Letter to a Young poet, he writes a response to a letter to an ambitious young poet looking for validation of his work. The young poet had recently sent Rilke a collection of poems and asked for feedback.
Rilke’s response was blunt, but immensely poetic. Here is an excerpt:
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you — no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must”, then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life.
Wisdom, in my opinion, is the willingness to live the questions of life with an acceptance of no immediate answer. In a world of immediacy, this is a difficult accomplishment, but one that is enormously important if you are to create anything of value.
You cannot rely on others to believe your dreams before you do. They are YOUR dreams. Hold them dear. Go deep within yourself to find the answers.
Resist The Urge To Outsource Your Decisions
The need for affirmation and external validation is something that I have struggled with for a long time. Maybe it was the way I was brought up or maybe it is something innately within my DNA.
I am not in the position to argue the psychological legitimacy of nature versus nature here, but what I do know is this need for others’ confirmation of my goals or aspirations is something that has kept me from achieving things in the past.
A couple of weeks ago I reached out to someone I highly admire in the space that I am trying to move into and asked them whether I was on the right path. His response was blunt…but very much needed.
HE HATES ME AND I AM NOT WORTHY……were the first thoughts that went through my head as I read his email.
But as I started to dive deeper into the meaning and actually listen to what he was saying, I came upon a profound realization.
I have been outsourcing who I was for most of life.
Needing someone else to tell me that I was good enough to do what I was doing. Whether that meant getting a degree or getting an email from a beloved mentor. I was incapable of truly believing in myself without an external ‘tip of the hat.’
Live Your Questions
The problem when you outsource the BIG decisions in life is that you lose a bit of yourself with each hit of dopamine you receive. The more external validation you have received in life, the more you crave it. And I was a junky.
What is even more insidious about it is that it may not even feel like you are outsourcing. It may feel like an honest plea for knowledge from someone who is more experienced, therefore has more wisdom than we do. But the reality is that whenever we look for answers outside of ourselves, they will always fall short.
I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. — R.M. Rilke
If you are always looking outside of yourself for answers and validation your sanity will be at the whim of critics and trolls. It is vastly difficult to resist the urge to send an email asking things like what should I do with my life or how can I make more money, but in doing so you will learn the art of living, which is to understand that you are the only one that can answer those questions correctly.
You Will Be Unappreciated
In Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday has a blunt directive for all ambitious people that I keep on the wall right next to my computer…
“You will be unappreciated. You will be sabotaged. You will experience surprising failures. Your expectations will not be met. You will lose. You will fail.
Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.” Thats all there needs to be. Recognition and rewards — those are just extra. Rejection, thats on them, not on us.”
He then goes on to warn the reader of the tragic cost that tying your self-worth to external validation can have. He does this by telling the story of John Kennedy Toole’s demise after failing to have initial success with his book, A Confederacy of Dunces.
Toole committed suicide in his car on an empty road in Biloxi, Mississippi before his book was ever published. Eventually, his mother found the book, advocated on its behalf, and it went on to with the Pulitzer Prize.
Holiday continues, “think about that for a second. What changed between those submissions? Nothing. The book was the same…If only he could have realized this, it would have saved him…”
The point here is not to depress the reader, but to wake the reader up to the irrational desire that you can find happiness and answers outside of yourself.
“Ambition,” Marcus Aurelies reminded himself, “means tying your well-being to what other people say or do…Sanity means tying it to your won actions.”
I am now on a path to be more sane. To look within more. To seek external validation less. And to live the questions of life.
How To Be Sane
In ancient greek times, they used to say people “had a genius,” not that a person “was a genius.” I believe this is an excellent way to view success and failure in our modern times. If you are to be sane and happy you need to give back some of the power, both the upside and downside, to a genius that is outside of you.
You have a genius that either shows up or it doesn’t. You have no control over that. What you can control is your work. Your discipline. Your commitment.
You can show up every single day, unabashed by the opinions of others, and do your work.
Then “let go and let God.”
This is the only path to sane, creative work that I have come across that has worked for me.
I hope that you are reminded of it the next time you think about outsourcing your happiness or questions to others. And I hope it prompts you to instead go deep within. For the answer lies within you. Within the journey of living the questions.
One last thing…
If you liked this article, click the💚 below so other people will see it here on Medium.
Waking the F*ck Up
Are you ready to wake up and find more happiness in your life?
If so, sign up for my free 21-day Mindfulness Email Course. I’ll be sending you an email everyday that will help you reduce stress, increase focus, and find more presence!
If you are ready to take back control of your life and start living above stress and overwhelm…
