3/23/2016–My current priority is to prepare to be a great dad.
Getting a wife is easy. Achieving self-actualization appears challenging. A truly great dad does both, likely in that order considering the life-altering effect of marriage. After marriage, progress toward self-actualization continues via new incentives to improve. Improvement is a part of self-actualization (maybe the biggest part) but only when paired/guided by purpose. Purpose is, to me, the target furthest into the future; targets we have that are to be hit sooner are either means to an end or are secondary interests less important than the ultimate, farthest-away-in-time purpose we want to achieve. A “priority”, in my opinion, is the part of one’s purpose which is necessary to progress toward a new phase of the path toward that purpose. My purpose–again, the most future goal–is to be content at death, as best I can put it.
I don’t necessarily recommend this purpose for everyone, simply because it would maybe look much different for someone with no interest in growth, love, or creation. In other words, a lazy person could achieve contentment at death without having contributed little or, even worse, caused net harm. Dying today, I would grasp what I have done to allow contentment and know I’ve lived the most recent years with growth, love and creation in mind. I’d be content knowing that I died having spent my final days trying my best, giving maximum effort to living. (As hard as it is for my friends to believe, this does actually allow room for relaxation and sleeping past an alarm, occasionally). So, with the purpose to die content, I’m able to identify some likely helpful goals to achieve in the meantime, as well as strategies to achieve them.
I believe I will marry and, currently, would like to have a kid. Thus, I can at least identify three targets–checkpoints maybe a more accurate term–on my way to a content death. These are:
- Preparation for marriage
- Preparation to be a great dad
- Being a great dad
Having done things necessary to prepare for marriage (job, $ security, moral foundation, dating experience, knowing myself, etc.) I can identify “preparation to be a great dad” as my current priority. It is clear how this connects to the future goal of “being a great dad”, so I can seek success today without considering how my present decisions will affect future goals. It’s goal alignment, basically; it’s calming. It could turn out that new goals appear–maybe “being a good husband” is a unique goal to preempt “being a great dad”. I consider “preparing for marriage” necessary, but actually incomplete as it pertains to “being a great husband” so, yeah that would have to be a separate goal.
Anyway, the most effective way to live with purpose, I think, is to have a general idea of a long-term purpose and a clear understanding of the current target that would progress me toward that purpose.
Supplementing my identification of priorities and purpose is a method of “how to go about life”. Words like “gratitude” and “patience” are helpful daily reminders of the danger of pursuing purpose and priorities in the wrong way. So to balance “what” i’m doing, I consider “how” to do it–not the steps, only, but the tone and disposition best suited for sustainable progress. Generally, the popular basic virtues are probably helpful for this. In addition to virtues, purpose and faith round-out my mentality for a successful life, with truly demonstrated gratitude as the top virtue.
Back to self-actualization–my current step in preparing to be a great dad. It’s not static, meaning I think I can achieve it only temporarily at various points in my life. Thus, before I marry I’d like to have achieved it in the sense that I’m, at the time, fulfilled in my work and recreation. I’ll be self-actualized when I’m spending my 24 hours each day pretty much how I’d like to, with a specific emphasis on personal growth. Currently, I’m great at knowing how best to spend my time–how to decide if I should do A or B. That’s mainly because I have a clear priority. But I’m not currently pushing myself outside my comfort zone–not yet. I have ideas, three of which I’m about to act on, but these ideas aren’t in motion. So, until that time, there are several hours each day when I’m not “growing” in the sense. I can say, though, that books (mostly business and philosophy) and podcasts help provide daily encouragement to get going.
Specifically, the concept of a “jack of all trades” is one I’ll pursue as part of self-actualization, which will make me a better father. Tim Ferriss has a great take on it, noting the false belief that “specialization” is important today.
My three ideas to self-actualize relate to creating value and learning skills–two things I associate with growth. They are:
- Creating a newsletter–skill: writing; Value: Health guidance for readers
- Podcasting–skill: interviewing/inquiry; Value: Life guidance, introspection
- Acting–skill: communication, presenting, reading people, memorization, empathy; Value: ???
If I can, as Tim Ferriss puts it, “get 80% good at these three things”, I will have a hard time not feeling self-actualized. There’s an insane amount of guidance free on the web–no excuse to not achieve them. With a mentor for each, I expect to hit my goal in one year.
QOTW: “Give me 6 hours to chop down a tree and I’ll spend the first 4 sharpening the axe.” –Abraham
?FNW: Have I acted on each goal? Yes
11/29/2017 review–Though I’ve kept the same definition of purpose and priority, I have changed both since writing this. My new purpose is to enable people’s health, entertainment, and employment. My priority is to pay off all debt. The most valuable virtue I aim to demonstrate is still gratitude. Considering I’m still single almost two years later, I was stupid to write “getting a wife is easy”–it sounds different than what I meant, and I almost deleted it here but I must stay true to what I wrote for the sanctity of the whole website lol! I meant to say it’s a simple, easily understood process relative to self-actualization. Of course, that’s another place I think I was off-target. I don’t think of it as something that you achieve then maintain without trying. Rather, it’s an ongoing process of being in and out-of actualization, though I like the rough definition I used that it’s spending each of my 24 hours growing how I’d like to.