Selfie xiaomi

How Bad Do You Want It?

A simple way to think about life:

Almost anything in life is possible for you to do or achieve (from a physics ‘first principles’ perspective).

Now the question is — “How bad do I want it?”



Personal aesthetics

Selfie. Hanoi, 2016

For example, let’s say you want a 6 pack. The instructions on how to get a very low fat body percentage is clear: no eating sugar, fruit, starch, carbohydrates, alcohol, and by participating in intermittent fasting. A few months of doing this can easily put you in the sub-10% bodyfat range (enough to see your abdominal muscles).

Now— the question is:

How much do I care about my personal aesthetics in order to live a lifestyle which prohibits me from eating sugar, drinking alcohol, eating dessert — etc.

Of course — this is a personal choice and decision. Nobody should force you to make certain lifestyle choices you don’t agree with, and similarly — nobody should PREVENT you from pursuing certain lifestyle choices that you really care about deeply!

What are you willing to sacrifice?

Everything great we desire to achieve requires great sacrifice. And not to see sacrifice as this negative, self-denial or self-flagellation thing. Instead, seeing our personal sacrifices as a mark of pride.


Why do you want it so bad?

There are certain things in our lives that we desire deeply. For myself this includes freedom of thought, time, and my schedule. Also essential for me is to have the power to dictate what I decide TO DO, and what I decide NOT TO DO. In my life right now, the way I desire to live my life is this:

Only do what I want to do, and never to do anything I don’t want to do.

It seems the first step to self-wisdom is discovering what your true tastes and preferences in life are. Then the second step is to develop a game plan or mode of living which allows you to pursue your ideal life.

For myself, I know I only got one life to live, and I value myself, my time, my attention, my energy, and my focus so much that I’m not willing to sacrifice it for anything I don’t care for.

So it seems personal egoism and supreme belief in self is essential to having the tenacity and guts to follow a mode of living which you believe is optimal for your own personal thriving.


Create your own ideal lifestyle and world

Mondrian piet

I believe all true innovators are deeply dissatisfied with how the world currently is. And instead of sitting around and moping around and complaining how things suck— we are brave enough, audacious enough, and willing enough to go out to attempt to change things. To change external reality to accord with our own personal ideals.

It seems the ingredients are:

  1. Courage
  2. The understanding that what is true for you isn’t true for others, but you care enough about it to pursue it anyways.
  3. Pure persistence, perseverance, and no fear of failure. To learn from feedback, and to use this information to iterate forward to achieve your life goals and dreams.

You decide!

So to conclude this essay — let me ask you:

  1. What are your life goals? What do you care about deeply?
  2. How much are you willing to hustle, sacrifice, and attempt in order to achieve and gain it?

Or in layman terms:

If you care deeply about something, sacrifice everything in order to achieve/accomplish/do it!

ERIC