How You Should Persue Your Dreams

A snippet of a tremendously insightful conversation I had with J.D. Tal. I highly recommend you check out our entire conversation at http://sett.com/jdtal/there-are-three-ways-to-pursue-your-dreams

There's a lot of potential value you could take from his ideas.

See, this is why it's complicated :)

First of all, definitely not passive. That would be pursuing your dream "poorly", as stated in my three ways. That one is out. So I agree that one should not wait.

But trying to "manufacture" our purpose falls into the second of my three ways - that is making a plan. To say that we manufacture our purpose through our own efforts presumes that without such effort, we don't have a purpose. It implies that we are a blank slate until we decide what to become. I believe that we are born with a purpose already, just as an acorn is born with the purpose of becoming an oak tree.

Which brings us to the third way of pursuing our dreams ...

The third way is not "poorly". We have to give it our all. We have to be hard-working and determined and leave everything on the field. No waiting!

The third way is also not "planned". We do not dream up some imagined future to be pursued. No delusional grand schemes to take over the world!

"Poorly" (i.e. capitulating or waiting) and "Planning" (i.e. creating our own destiny) are currently the two main options offered in the modern world. To my knowledge, few people have even considered the third option, which is neither of the first two,

The third option is to live each day with all of the intensity and resolve that you can possibly muster, but to only do the work that is set before you each day - no matter how trivial or meaningless or insignificant that work might seem on the surface.

The cumulative effect of living in this "third way" for months and years on end is how one finds one's innate purpose. And the paradox is that it leads to grand achievements. It is how one becomes part of the universe, alongside lions and earthquakes.

Now ... there are two huge points that must be understood here:

1. Complexity Theory teaches us that the universe is unfolding in complex and fundamentally unpredictable ways (think of it like the weather - you have absolutely no way to predict what the weather will be like in your neighborhood 30 days from now). As "Complex Adaptive Systems" ourselves, our lives are also fundamentally unpredictable. This means that our purpose is not linear . When our limited mind decides that we want to become an astronaut, it is deciding on a linear path for our lives. Our true purpose is a much richer spectrum of possible paths, all of which are equally viable and all of which are equally unique. Any one of those paths would be the fulfillment of our true purpose, but we have to wait and see which paths open themselves up to us as the complex world in which we live evolves around us. This is a critically important concept to understand, and it is a concept that is brand new to most people.

2. Living in this way requires tremendous faith. Otherwise you are constantly tempted to take matters into your own hands.

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