TRUE GOALS, TRUE VALUES, TRUE LIFE MANAGEMENT
ELIMINATE THE MISTAKES AND THE "NON-EFFECTIVENESS" TRAPS
Draft is not quite finished, but, methinks, the point is clear...
Many people mistake "means goals" for true "end goals" of true value. (They are driven to make money beyond what works for a better life, they oversacrifice out of some limited belief or the often accompanying "guilt syndrome", they overdo "pleasure" because they think it is what makes them happy (likewise with food, drink, drugs, etc.)
When we establish what is truly of value, then, and only then, we have a basis to run our lives on.
With true values firmly in mind, we then must apply true, good, solid life management.
And the simplest, but perhaps greatest management technique is displacing low value activities with higher valued activitie. But few of us do the thinking necessary to make that happen.
And the place to start is to get rid of the crazy busy life that is true evidence of lack of value management.
And we must realize that there is virtually no person on this planet who does not have at least 10 hours of lower value time that can be replaced with higher value time. When we do that we transform our lives to a level of being that is at least 10 times one's life before. We stop doing letting the trivial and lower value fill up our tanks such that there is no room for what is of true value, many times that of the lesser value items.
Will you choose that?
To build a deeper understanding read the following and then implement this into your schedule once you have determined what is of true value.
_________________________________________________________
Please do not interpret this as an "I'm wrong and bad...
This article is about emphazing the fact that
1. Time is a reality and
A reasonable person would conclude, if too busy and not getting what he wants out of life: "The indication is that I do not have the energy or time to do all of that which is attached to my obligations."
So... Once there was a little girl whose daddy came home with a briefcase full of work every night and for the weekends. She asked daddy why he was always working at home, to which he exhaustedly replied "because Daddy cannot get all my work done at the office. It takes too much time." To which the little girl recommended "well, who don't you go back to a lower group." (In school, remember, when they had different levels of reading groups...) In other words, why not step down to what is workable in life, so you can have a life where you can give attention to one's spouse and children...
ACKNOWLEDGING WHAT IS TRUE
This discussion is not in terms of a person being stupid, but in terms of simply acknowledging that one needs to have fewer activities that fit into the reality, rather than some idealistic, unrealistic superman fallacy. The bottom line is that we've gotta drop something or we'll just get more stress. No wise person would do otherwise.
"But...but... I've got to do them or I'll lose my job...or prestige...or reputation...or feel embarrassed..."
And living behind a mask based on pride or pressure or trying to live up to something bigger than you is a great killer of life. It is not a choice to make. And you've heard this lots of times: one must be true to oneself if one is to be happy.
It would not be such a problem if we were just busy, but not stressed, and if we were giving adequate time to what is of the highest value. Except that we aren't doing that, because we are "crazy busy".
But one reality is that there is virtually no one on the planet who doesn't have 10 hours in a week that is of lower value activities that can be eliminated. True it would be at some cost, but a truly minor, insignificant level.
One big problem occurs if we have paradigms of how things work that prevent one from solving the problem. "I can't afford any losses or costs of giving up something or doing something not perfectly enough" or "not meeting all the obligations...". It seems that those people are ongoing trapped in a spiralling killer of our spirit, into a one sided view that locks them into a prison. (See also What Are The Boxes You Put Yourself In - Living In "Box Prison".
When we have rigid rules that will not consider the big picture, we get stuck in big ruts.
The wise person will look at things with a wider perspective. He wil see that life is all about "tradeoffs", not about having no "losses". He realizes that the reality is that
we inevitably incur a cost (a loss, let's say) so that we can gain something on the other side that is more valuable.
The wise person would then look for what is of the highest value and insert that into his schedule, such that it pushes the lowest value activities out the bottom, no longer taking up valuable space in one's life.
It is true that if one pushes out the lowest 10 hours one will lose something, but there is also no doubt that using those 10 hours for the most valuable activities will at least produce 10 times the net value. And one of the costs may be some discomfort for the short term. And one of the challenges is not to buy into the falsehood that "well, I'll just do it later (and put of true living until then)."
But of those 10 hours there are some hours where we do life learning, which inevitably results in making wiser decisions, which ends up saving us stress and more hours than it took to do the life learning (over time and within a relatively short period also). The most valuable activity in anyone's life, until they reach true wisdom, is "life learning" where one develops the most vital skill of all: Life Capability - for it gives us the power to create more of what we want.
MISTAKING MEANS AS A GOAL FOR BEING AN "END GOAL"
People who go past the point of happiness benefit for money will live lesser lives because they push out other things that would be more valuable for their time and life.
People who believe that sacrifice for other will get them to a great future and into heaven often are misinterpreting what that means and/or setting it as an absolute rule without recognizing the trade-offs. If we sacrifice watching tv for a night or if we sacrifice eating an expensive dinner (in order to give away the money), we are sacrificing activities of lower value for what we hold as a greater value - contributing to others. But when we go past the point where the sacrifice becomes greater than the extra value to us, especially to the point that we suffer, something is awry with our thinking. We are not using our higher brain, but some primitive brain "rule".
There is a problem and a confusion here between means goals and end goals and true values. The wise person operates by looking at the values in order to run his life, but he "vets" those values to see that they are actually realistically of value, rather than accepting what society says or accepting his interpretation of whatever "bible" they believe in.
And once he finds a value he is able to discern when the the extra value of doing that particular value is not as high as switching to another value that is not yet maximized for value. Surely he does not keep on doing what seems of value such that he pushes out other values and lowers his overall total value in life.
There is no human on the planet who does not follow the motivational triad nor want "deep happiness" (which comes from maximizing the total accumulated value in life).
It is just plain wrong to say "I will sacrifice in this life so that I can go to heaven." It is deluded, to put it bluntly.
Or "other people are more important than me, therefore I will do good for them, so that I will feel better about myself." But evidence of how well that works lies in the emotional content of one's life. If that content is stress, anxiety, guilt, low self esteem and the rest of the related syndrome, then that is a sign of doing something wrong - and of erroneous beliefs. That system is just plain not workable (not true, not aligned with reality). It is often a complex of some smaller erroneous beliefs that lead to a bigger belief that is just plain wrong...and does damage to the person.
He or she just doesn't "get it" about life. It won't work that way!
AN ARGUMENT FOR WHAT IS GOOD IN LIFE
Much of what we do and the beliefs we live by come from culture, particularly that of a church. Often people go too far in those beliefs and don't have a balanced or even thought out perspective - they lean too far one way or the other...into foolishness and self harm.
Here's an argument that might be helpful to some people:
If I put my mind into the mind of God, I would think that he would think the following. The underlying assumption here is that God is enlightened and wise and therefore he would be compassionate and woould know what is of value.
The logic goes like this for a believer:
He created mankind, with a "system" (machine) that got better and better at survival. He created a higher brain that considerably added to the ability to survive - and he wanted us to use it to better our lives with - and to not to be prejudiced against the use of our higher brain, as that would limit our potential for the highest happiness. He certainly would not support the rationalizations and prejudices such as "I'm just not that kind of person." "It's just not me." Or "I just can't learn that." He gave us the basic skills to learn well enough to be able to learn better how to learn, such that we can create the ability to learn anything that is of top value.
He also gave us "feelings" to guide us. If something was not good for survival, we would get a negative "better change this" chemical signal that would motivate us toward better survival. He gave us a "good feeling" mechanism to lead us toward things that would also promote happiness and better survival. And he gave us a brain to use to balance off our natural inclinations so that we did not go into excess.
But many of us do not use our higher brains. That's easy to observe as the evidence is right out there in plain sight: distress, excess weight, anxiety, poor health, poor balance in life. Amazingly, some people take "sacrifice" so seriously that they do not take care of their own emotional and health needs and a spouse (and/or children) they say they value. Surely, God did not intend such damaging behavior and suffering just so we could get our reward "in the end". That would be insane - and God is certainly not a lightweight in thinking ability and wisdom.
The very highest value activity, indeed, is learning how and when to use our higher brain and then using it to learn higher wisdom to apply to our lives. But we get caught up in trying to "have it all", so we end up with quantity but not value. Surely, God did not want that or he wouldn't have given all of what he did to us.
Surely, to ourselves, in our inner world and the part of the world we are involved in, we are the most important asset to take care of and assure happiness in, but we lose track of that and go into senseless living. The guilty feeling people among us think that surely other people are worth more than they themselves - which is a totally absurd way of thinking, one certainly not using higher thinking. Each person in his own world is worth 1,000's of times more than another person in his/her own world - God made it that way, so that we would do well at self preservation and living a good life. It surely does not matter out in the objective, without-meaning world whether we are "better" than someone else and therefore worthwhile. The truth is that, in our inner world we are worth more than all of the other people put together. Each individual to himself is the most important person in the world. Everything we do is from that viewpoint.
Of course, I know that objectively I am no more important out there in the real world than any other of the 7 billion people. To each of them, their own life is of the most value. They all want to get relief from suffering, avoid pain, gain pleasure and to have true long term enduring happiness.
And God set that up to be that way.
It is an affront to a wise God to not honor that.
Yes, I know that mankind has perverted this for his own purposes or from his own misinterpretation, but it is time that we believed the logic and facts rather than those assertions that have not been thoroughly examined and corrected. We should favor the conclusions made from a higher brain using logic and ascertained fact - not pre-digested, possibly erroneous assertions by imperfect men. Even the Buddha said not to believe him but to examine for oneself the truth of what he says.
ANYWAY, THE POINT IS THAT IS WHAT IS OF THE HIGHEST VALUE IS...
As the Dalai Lama says (and a wise God would say): The purpose of life is happiness.
Going for cooperation in the outer world is something we developed for our own safety and well-being. Helping others is something that produces value for our own selfish reasons of "it feels good". We do nothing that we think is not of value to our own selves, despite the mythical stories of how humans are "good" if they give up their lives for others or are super-courageous...and on and on and on. (See how we fabricate and then believe such things in The Believing Brain article.)
MANY PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN SKIM THE VALUE OFF OF THE TOP
There are people who have "learned" that they can operate well by skimming the cream off the top, by taking shortcuts to what they think will work best to get them what they want in life. But the evidence is indisputable that those who do learn the necessary support material behind what works do not do well in life. They are intellectual talkers, surface thinkers masquerading as knowing alot - but their knowledge is thin and broad. Only deep knowledge and understanding leads to true competency in anything.
And we can see the evidence of this approach just by looking at the objective facts and seeing that their lives are full of distress, anxiety, seeking relief and lack of balance in living values. They have spouses who have given up in disappointment such that they just tolerate the lack of follow through of what their spouses say they value. They have lives that are out of their control, based on trying to get approval, look good, be perceived as superior or "good", trying not to lose, trying to be perfect - lives that it could be said are truly "ruined" by their lack of learning life competency and applying it to life. The results are sufficient evidence to prove that they have beliefs that are erroneous and often harmful. And it doesn't matter if one thinks they came from God or from society or wherever, it all comes down to the proof, the evidence in life. (See Must Learn How Things Work To Achieve Competence - Without Life Competence, One Cannot Be Happy!)
___________________________________________________________
Notes for later
For instance, many people think that they just have a specific learning style. But studies have proven that is not true. All human can benefit equalty from any of the styles. We actually just have a preference - plus an incorrect belief that ends up limiting us!
use of logic and facts
deeper undrstanding and workability.
It is just not true that . instead, what is true is this other balance, not rigidly defined from a misunderstood moral concept often unexplained in depth and interpretable.
