The Importance of a Cohesive Life Philosophy
I haven’t written publicly for more than a year, but I been doing a lot of reflecting recently and wanted to share some of the things I’ve been thinking about. In an insightful interview, Phil Libin underlines the importance of a cohesive life philosophy in guiding individual decision making. This resonated deeply with me and I’d like to take a stab at explaining how I’m thinking about life choices circa 2015. In the last year, I’ve been focused on a few themes: trusting yourself as the key to living fully, the importance of delayed gratification, and finding internal sources of happiness. To develop a cohesive life philosophy, I felt that the need to explore the common foundation of these seemingly disparate thoughts.
What is my life philosophy? While you cannot determine the course of your life, you can invest in understanding where you want to go on your life quest, so then you can correct course and steer toward you goals to a certain extent. I want to have a good grasp of what I do and more importantly why I do it. I find it helpful to think of these goals from three perspectives: daily (present), short term (immediate future), and long term (distant future).
Daily (“Present” Timeline):
Let’s start with the present. Lars Dalgaard goes through a neat exercise every morning: he looks in the mirror and asks himself the question: “How can I live today in a legendary way?”. If you are truly secure and happy in your life, you don’t focus on asking the world to fulfill your needs, but focus all of your time on giving. You have nothing to ask for, because your satisfaction is internal. It means to never be “checked out”, “coasting through life” or be “in your head”. That’s what Buddhists call “living in the moment”, and why Stoics are looking for tranquility. You are 100% engaged in every conversation or task at hand because you are focused on making each moment legendary. The path to get there is through confidence and every experience in life (be it personal or professional) should give you more confidence. You become legendary through having experiences that push you and by challenging you. These experiences build your confidence by showing you what you’re capable of, which is often more than you could imagine or believe you are prepared to handle. Once you have enough self-esteem to stop worrying about the small things and become truly available to give to other people, then you are prepared to live in a legendary way.
Distant Future (“Long Term” Timeline):
Now let’s address how I think about the distant future because then we can shape the immediate future as a bridge between the present and distant future. In the distant future, I want to be giving back as much as I can. It is similar to the “legendary” present in the sense that you are giving back, but is also different you are giving back in a more “strategic” way. On your path, you accumulate skills and experiences as a result of your life experiences, which make you capable of giving back at scale. Once you’ve accumulated these skills and experiences, you will be ready to give back at scale.
What are these essential traits? I would argue you need two things: confidence and skills. Specifically, you should have a healthy balance of confidence and skill. Confidence without the supporting skills might lead to extreme situations where people take on more risks than they can handle, leading to bad consequences for oneself or others. Another example: imagine a hypothetical scenario of a sociopath who doesn’t think twice about harming others on his path to “success” (confidently so) or just being stupid (confidence without substance). On the other hand, skills without confidence leads to a squandering of human potential. Think of the amazing people stuck in some corporation that exploits their talents or those who don’t chase their dreams just because the faith is lacking.
I truly believe (perhaps naively so) that every human being has some special magic to them, but not many of us are lucky enough to uncover the full potential of our magic. Therefore, if one wants to uncover his or her magic, I recommend seeking challenging paths with high upside for learning. Once you truly believe that you have some magic to you, it would be highly selfish NOT to give back by putting your magic to use. Now, if one wants to accumulate both enough confidence and skills for the mission yet be determined to reach the distant future, where should one be spending energy in the immediate future to get there?
Immediate Future (“Short Term” Timeline):
The immediate future is the most intriguing part of the puzzle. I want to gain two main benefits from my experience in the immediate future. I define “immediate future” as a year or two in the future because you cannot really predict life beyond this. From the immediate future, I want to get a) confidence to put to use in my daily life (present) so I live legendarily every day b) get both confidence and skills for the distance future, so I am ready to give back by unleashing my magic.
How do you design such a short term future for yourself so that it brings both confidence and skills as you walk this path? I attempt to model my short term future after the “Lord of the Rings” journey: incredibly challenging yet with a lot of upside for personal and professional growth. I want to be putting myself in experiences of high intensity, but with the ability to come out of them unscratched (what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger). Essentially, I want to maximize how much I can learn from my experiences. Learning should be priority #1. How much one learns is a derivative of the risk and magnitude of the challenge. Time is the only resource you have so the value of every day cannot be stressed be enough. Money comes and goes: it’s not that hard to become wealthy in Silicon Valley. Making money should not be a priority if your goal is to have a legendary life and find your magic. As Randy Komisar puts it in his book name, it’s better to master an art of creating a life while making a living, not the other way around. I highly encourage people to put a huge value on every day of their lives. This means seeking adventure and not deferring their “Lord of the Rings” journey. For some of us, there are hurdles we must leap before doing what we really want (i.e. debt to repay, or a family to support), but for a lot of the younger generation that’s not the case.
So please: jump straight into what you want to be doing. In life, you go on a long journey, but the road isn’t infinite. It’s possible that, just around the corner, there’s a secret gate leading to a secret road. You won’t find it if you don’t create your own route. Take the hidden paths.
