Your destination is the place you want to arrive. The destination dictates the journey you must go on to get there.
It can make sense that we make sacrifices to achieve a goal we want. Life isn’t meant to be easy.
The journey is where you spend your time, and time is your limited resource in life. Would it not be wise to pick the journeys you wish to travel?
Aspirational destinations
So much of social media is about the destination.
The beautiful meal.
The successful entrepreneur.
The amazing view.
Yet the reality of them often isn’t sexy.
The beautiful meal
The definition of the last decade was appearance over substance.
No one can taste your photo, so the taste is easy to sacrifice when you are optimising for a different outcome.
The ‘successful’ entrepreneur
“Too incredibly busy” is their life status:
Too busy for friends
Too busy for family
Too busy for health
Late nights and long weekends turn into years of stress, anxiety. Years that can’t be purchased back.
Money (if they ever get it) won’t buy back friends, family or health when they are gone.
An exotic view
Flying, queuing and arguing with taxi drivers and more queuing. Paying to follow the crowd means you are in a crowd! It hardly feels special.
You get that photo to prove something to everyone. Yet, all you achieve is proving to yourself that no one cares. You didn’t care about your friend having fun and only thought of yourself not having as much fun.
Impressing people doesn’t make them happy. Try giving them your time and attention instead.
Reality isn’t sexy
It’s easy to see the sexy parts of someone else’s life. It fools into thinking we want exactly that.
When we reach the destination and find it less satisfying than expected, we feel deflated.
Instead of chasing highs, we find we are chasing lows. Rug pull…
What is your NOW?
As every day passes that is another page of the story of your life. It keeps ticking by.
Your story is all the things that go wrong and the enjoyment you can derive from them.
Your whole life is a journey. Its ultimate destination is a gravestone. It would be absurd to optimise for the best gravestone. The only thing that matters is the journey of your life, not its destination.
Each decade, each year, each day.
It is not about where you get to,
it is about what you get to do.It is not about where you are,
it is about who you are.
There is no second chance to live the life of all the things you were too busy to do the first time.
Your life is how you live it now.
Heartbeats
Mo Gawdat talks about time as heartbeats. There are only so many heartbeats in your life. Every use of time is spending your limited heartbeats.
Do not put things off, do not wait.
Spend your heartbeats on the things that make you feel alive. Do not waste them on proving anything to anyone but yourself.
When a bird sings, it doesn't sing for the advancement of music. But if somebody stops to listen and is delighted, that's fine.
When a mountain stream flows out of a spring beside the road, and a thirsty traveler comes along and drinks deeply, the traveler is welcome. But the mountain stream is not waiting with the intention of refreshing thirsty travelers; it is just bubbling forth.Alan watts
Optimise for the journey
Money is a mechanism to give you autonomy, sacrificing your autonomy to seek money is a fruitless game. Like a dog chasing it’s tail.
“Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.” - Ayn Rand
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You must savour the journey for a destination to be worthwhile.
That doesn’t mean easy. That might be hard, with stress that pushes you in ways you need to be pushed.
Learn to know and accept yourself first to find worthwhile journeys for you. Ignore what the rest of the world does.
Then you make a list of destinations that require journeys which delight you.
“Do not let your fire go out. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in the lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach.
Check the nature of your battle.
The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.”
Ayn Rand