The Meaning of Life: Intro
June 19th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

What is the meaning of life? Why are we here? Is there a God or isn’t there, and if there is a God, what is its nature? Of all the world’s religions, which one is the most correct? Is there an afterlife? Are we primarily physical beings or spiritual beings?

People have struggled for millennia to tackle these questions. Wars have been fought over them. But as much as these questions cause people to lose their heads (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally), the bottom line is that these are very practical questions.

Behind the Wheel
The way we answer these questions will provide the ultimate context for everything else we do with our lives. If we place any value on our lives at all, we must give some consideration to these questions.

Let’s say you have your life organized around goals, projects, and actions. You set a goal like starting a new internet business. You break it down into projects like writing a business plan and launching your web site. And then you break those projects down into actions like going to the bank to open a business account and registering your domain name. Fair enough.
But why start the business in the first place? What’s the point? Why pick this goal vs. any other goal? Why even set goals at all?

What determines the goals you set (or don’t set) is your context. Your context is your collection of beliefs and values. So if the values of money and freedom are part of your context, you might be inclined to set a goal to start a new business. But with different kinds of values — a different context — you may be disinclined to set goals at all.

The most significant part of your context is your collection of beliefs about the nature of reality, which includes your religious, spiritual, and philosophical beliefs. Your overall beliefs about the universe will largely determine your results. Context dictates goals. Goals dictate projects. Projects dictate actions. Actions dictate results.

Within a certain context, it will be virtually impossible for you to achieve certain results because you’ll never set the required goals that will lead to those results.
Your context works like a filter. When you are inside a particular context, you lose access to the potential goals, projects, and actions that lie outside that context. For example, if your context includes the belief that criminal behavior is very bad, then you aren’t likely to work towards becoming a future leader in organized crime.

Walking in My Shoes
This is a long personal story, but I think you’ll find it interesting. If you take the time to read it, I want you to notice how my beliefs (my context) shifted over time and how dramatically they changed my results.

For half of my life, I’ve been searching for the context that would give me the best possible life. Of course, this is a strange pursuit because it requires searching for a context while at the same time always being stuck inside of one. In other words, the definition of “best possible life” is also part of any context, so I have to find a context that both defines that term AND provides a means to fulfill it.

This pursuit began almost accidentally for me, but eventually I began pursuing it consciously.
Halo

For the first half of my life, until the age of 17, I was Catholic/Christian, baptized and confirmed. I went through eight years of Catholic grammar school followed by four years of Catholic high school. I was a boy scout for several years and earned the Ad Altare Dei award. I prayed every day and accepted all that I was taught as true. I went to Church every Sunday with my family. All of my friends and family were Christian, so I knew nothing of other belief systems. My father was an altar boy when he was young, and his brother (my uncle) is a Catholic priest. One of my cousins is a member of Campus Crusade for Christ. In high school I went to optional religious retreats and did community service, both at a convalescent home and at a preschool for children with disabilities. I expected to be Catholic for life.

Blasphemous Rumors
But near the end of my junior year of high school, I went through an experience that I’d have to describe as an awakening. It was as if a new part of my brain suddenly switched on, popping me into a higher state of awareness. Perhaps it was just a side effect of the maturation process. I began to openly question the beliefs that had been conditioned into me since childhood. Blind acceptance of what I was taught wasn’t enough for me anymore. I wanted to go behind the scenes, uproot any incongruencies, and see if these beliefs actually made sense to me. I started raising a lot of questions but found few people would honestly discuss them. Most simply dismissed me or became defensive. But I was intensely curious, not hostile about it. My family was closed to discussing the whole thing, but I did find a few open-minded teachers. My high school (Loyola High in Los Angeles) was a Jesuit school, and the Jesuits are very liberal as far as priests go.

I was disappointed though. What I found was that regardless of their education and their much greater life experience, very few of my friends and teachers ever bothered to question their beliefs openly. And that really gave me a huge shot of doubt. I thought, “If everyone is just accepting all of this blindly and no one is even questioning it, why should I believe it?” Over a period of months the doubt only grew stronger, and I transferred more of my faith from my Catholic upbringing to my own intelligence and senses. Eventually I just dropped the whole context entirely, and in the absence of any other viable contexts to choose from, I became an atheist.

I entered my senior year of Catholic high school as a 17-year old atheist. Oh, the irony. Initially I wasn’t sure what to expect, but soon I found the context of atheism to be incredibly empowering. Having shed all my old beliefs, I felt like my brain had gotten an intelligence upgrade. I could think so much more clearly, and my mind seemed to work much better. I also felt more in control of my life than ever before. Without a belief in God, I assumed total responsibility for my results in life. School was easier than ever for me, even though I was taking all the school’s most challenging classes, most of them AP courses. I was so good at calculus that my teacher actually gave me a special test, different from the rest of the class. And one time my AP physics teacher came to me before school to have me show him how to solve a difficult physics problem. I especially found math and science classes so easy that I began looking for new ways to challenge myself. So I’d try to do my entire homework assignment on a 1″ by 1″ square of paper, or I’d do it in crayon on the back of a cereal box cover, or I’d color in my polar graphs with colored pencil and turn it into artwork. People thought I was wacky, but I mainly did these things to keep it interesting because the problems themselves posed no challenge. You haven’t really lived until you’ve done calculus in crayon.

I made no secret of the fact that I was an atheist, so when taking religion classes, I’d regurgitate all the raw data needed to ace a test, but whenever there were open-ended essay questions, I’d address them from an atheistic perspective. I’m grateful the Jesuits were as liberal as they were and tolerated my behavior. I have to give them a lot of credit for that.

My family was not happy about all this, especially when my subscription to American Atheist magazine started coming in the mail (I got good at intercepting the mail early). But I was doing so well in school that it was hard for them to complain, and they didn’t want to openly address any of my questions, even though I’d have been happy to do so. They did force me to keep going to church though, which I tolerated for a while because I knew I’d be moving out in a year anyway. But eventually I started sitting in a different part of the church and would sneak out the back and go for a walk and return just before it ended. But one time the mass ended earlier than expected, and I got back too late. My family was already at the car and saw me walking down the street. Whoops! They drove off without me. But instead of walking the two miles home, I stayed out the entire day and didn’t return until midnight. Aside from weddings and funerals, that was the last time I ever went to church.

Despite these conflicts, my senior year in high school was by far my best ever. I aced all my classes and was accepted into six colleges as a computer science major: Cal Tech, UCLA (partial scholarship), UC San Diego (full scholarship), UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, and Harvey Mudd.
I opted to go to UC Berkeley because at the time, its computer science program was the highest rated in the country. I was very happy to move out and finally be on my own. In the fall of 1989 I moved to Berkeley and lived in the freshman dorms.

Then things got weird.

Judas
While at Berkeley my atheism context was further molded. No longer surrounded by Catholics, I met a lot of interesting people there with a wide variety of belief systems. I quickly made a lot of new friends who were very intelligent, and some were open to discussing the nature of reality. I think my Catholic upbringing was like a coiled spring — as soon as I left behind the environment that kept the spring coiled, I immediately shot to the other end of the spectrum. But I went way too far with it. I not only shed my old religious beliefs, but along with it went my whole concept of morality. I was like the guy in Mark Twain’s short story “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” a story about a guy who kills his conscience.
I started embracing all the stuff that was basically the opposite of my upbringing. I completely lost all interest in school and hardly ever went to class. I really didn’t care at all about getting my degree. I went to parties almost every week and drank a lot, one time doing about 14 drinks in a row and waking up with no memory of how I got to bed. I had to ask friends to piece together pieces of the previous night. To this day I’m certain I drank more alcohol before the age of 21 than after (and I’m 34 now).

I also started shoplifting — a lot. The first time I did it simply because it was something I’d never done before, something I could never do as a Catholic. It was like a task to be marked off a checklist. But I soon became addicted to the emotional high of it, and I kept doing it more and more, eventually to the point of doing it several times a day.I virtually never stole stuff to keep it. I’d give away most of what I stole to other people, or I’d just throw it in the trash afterwards. About a month into my first semester, I got arrested. 4 months probation. I took about a week off and went right back to it, although I became a bit more cautious about it. One week after the probation period ended, I got arrested again and ended up with 40 hours of community service. I did the service, and soon went right back into stealing. But I refined my methods even more, making it much harder for me to get caught. A few close calls only gave me more confidence.
I grew so accustomed to this behavior that I could steal without my heart skipping a beat. No fear. So I had to keep upping the dosage. At first I started setting little goals, like seeing how many large candy bars I could fit in my pockets at once (13), or trying to steal every bottle of white out from the student store in one day (over 50 bottles). Then I just gave away all the candy and white out to fellow students.

I wasn’t doing well in school and was put on academic probation too. They do that when you don’t show up to class. I can’t say I really cared much though.
But things went from bad to worse when I met another student who was about as morally corrupted as I was, and we became fast friends. I stopped doing the (risky) shoplifting, and together we planned and implemented a two-person theft where the odds of getting caught were very low. It worked again and again, and we both started making some actual money from it. To play it safe and not keep hitting the same locations over and over, we expanded our circle to go way beyond Berkeley to an almost 100-mile radius, from San Francisco to Sacramento to Fresno. Over a period of about a year, we gradually escalated each theft to a dollar value that was now well into the grand theft range (at the time any theft above $400). I think our weekend record was about $2400 worth of stuff.

Shouldn’t Have Done That
Eventually I got caught again, this time for grand theft. Not good. Before this arrest I had discovered that because of my priors, I’d be looking at about two years in jail if I got convicted of grand theft. Not good at all.
And to make it even worse, I was arrested in Sacramento, about a 2-hour drive from Berkeley. But my partner couldn’t wait around and expose himself too, so he drove back. I was stuck sitting in the county jail for an ID hold. I never stole with ID on me, and I gave the police one of my many fake names, but they of course didn’t take my word for it, so I had to wait in a cell while they ran my fingerprints trying to figure out who I was.
So there I was… 19 years old, sitting in jail on Superbowl Sunday 1991. Expecting that I was about to lose my freedom for the next two years.

THUNK!
That was the sound of reality crashing down around me. For the first several hours, I was in shock, unable to think straight. Maybe it was the orange clothes. But with nothing to do but sit and think for an indefinite period of time, I started asking all the big questions again. What the hell was I doing here? Was this really me?

But now my answers were very different. I realized that this context was all wrong. I resigned myself to the fact that I’d have to spend the next couple years in jail, but I also knew that I had changed permanently and that this way of life had now ended. Two years in jail… this would be a painful lesson. But at least I had learned it. I didn’t have a complete replacement context yet, but I began to plant the seed of one. That seed was the realization that no matter how bad things seemed, in the future they could be better. I knew I would eventually recover and rebound. It might be a number of years before I was back on my feet again, but I knew with certainty that I could survive it. Although I wouldn’t have labeled it as such at the time, this was the moment when the idea of personal growth got planted in me. It was the idea that no matter how bad things are right now, I still have the capacity to grow through them and to emerge in a better position in the future. That idea was all I had, but it was enough to allow me to cope.

Three days later I was released. They’d succeeded in identifying me. I was given a court date and sent on my way, charged with felony grand theft. It was around sunset. At first I walked around the Capitol building and garden in Sacramento, just enjoying the fresh air and happy that I’d at least have a few more months of freedom. Jail is extremely boring, and I was just in the county jail, not prison. Unfortunately I had a more immediate problem to deal with. I had no ID, only $18 cash on me, and I had to find a way to go 120 miles to get back home. As luck would have it, I was able to take a late night bus to Oakland for only $16, and from there my (ex) partner gave me a ride home.
Upon returning to my apartment, I found in the mail a letter from UC Berkeley stating that I was expelled. They do that when your GPA starts with the decimal point.

A Broken Frame
For the next few months while waiting for my court date, I was in a bit of a funk. I didn’t do much of anything at all. I slept a lot, took long walks, and played a lot of video games. It’s hard to set goals when you expect to be going to jail for a while.
Eventually I got a lawyer and met with him to discuss my case. Before I could open my mouth, he said, “Well, I’ve reviewed your case, and since this is your first offense, I’m pretty sure we can get it reduced to petty theft, so you’d only end up with some community service if we plead no contest. I’m on great terms with the D.A., so I’m pretty sure he’ll go for it. I strongly advise against going to trial, as the evidence against you is overwhelming, seeing as you were caught red handed.” First offense? Huh? Immediately my brain filled with thoughts like, “Why does he think this is my first offense? Doesn’t he know about my priors? And if he thinks this is a first offense, will the rest of the court also think it’s a first offense? Should I correct my lawyer on this oversight?” After mulling it over in my mind for a few seconds, I decided I’d damn well better keep my mouth shut. It might backfire on me, but there was a chance that it might frontfire too. I figured that worst case, I’d have an angry lawyer to deal with. But the best case was too good to pass up. Grand theft was a felony; petty theft was only a misdemeanor. I had to take the risk. Of course, taking risks was something all too familiar for me.

Several weeks later we went to court. My plan was to keep my mouth shut as much as possible and only say the absolute minimum. Outside the courtroom I reviewed the court’s basic info about the case. They had indeed connected me with my real identity, but they also had my fake name listed too. No priors were listed. My best guess is that someone screwed up and searched for priors based on my fake name instead of my real name, even though the case was going to court under my real name. Human error? Computer error? Who knows? But one big error either way.

Sure enough when we got into the courtroom (a place that was becoming increasingly familiar), the court remained under the assumption that this was a first offense and processed it as such. I plead no contest to the reduced charge of petty theft and got 60 hours community service. I did those 60 hours like it was a dream job, knowing that it could have been 17,520 hours.
My head was spinning. What had just happened? The next two years were now mine again.

Construction Time Again
Soon I moved back to L.A. and got a nothing retail sales job for $6/hour and took a few nothing classes on the side. I’d had quite enough excitement over the past couple years, and I just wanted to enjoy a quiet normal life for a while… spend some time below the radar. I reconnected with old high school friends who were going to UCLA and hung out at their fraternity house at times, but I usually stayed clear of the parties. I played a lot of frisbee golf, tennis, and computer games (especially the Sierra adventure games which were popular in the early 90s). I tried to keep life very simple. I spent a lot of time analyzing my experience at Berkeley, needing to understand it so as to be able to prevent myself from ever going down that path again. But I kept my thoughts about all this to myself.

I knew I had a lot of personal rebuilding to do, but I also knew that I couldn’t go backwards. The morals and beliefs by which I was raised were broken, but living without a sense of conscience clearly wasn’t an option. Was a belief in God required to live by a code of ethics?
I became aware that despite how negative my experiences seemed, they forever changed me in a good way too. By going through those experiences, I had unlocked access to a part of myself that was previously dormant — my courage. Although I had done things that were very foolish, they also took a lot of courage to do. I learned to act in spite of fear again and again. And this conditioning stayed with me. Because I had already faced the prospect of going to jail, any failure that would have a lesser negative consequence than jail wouldn’t phase me. To this day fear of failure has very little power over me. I just say to myself, “Hey, if it’s not going to land me in jail, how bad could it be?”

Of course I had to learn how to temper this courage with some sense of morality and common sense. So during this year of quiet reflection, I gradually shifted my context to create a new personal code of ethics to guide me. But instead of being rooted in religion, I built it in a more humanistic manner, integrating values like honor, honesty, integrity, humility, and fairness. It was a very deliberate and conscious rebuilding process that would continue for at least a few more years. But even during this time of 1991-92 as I was just beginning, it gave me some stability and gradually became my most empowering context up to that point. It didn’t take me long to realize that the courage I had developed could become a powerful asset for me if I learned how to use it intelligently.
I was ready for a new challenge.

Nothing to Fear
In the Fall of 1992, I decided to go back to college, starting over as a freshman. This time I went to Cal State University, Northridge (CSUN). The computer science program wasn’t impacted, so all I had to do to get accepted was to apply. I moved into the dorms at age 21. But I was no longer the same person I was at 18. I was still an atheist religiously, but now I had a strong collection of personal values to guide me. I wanted to see what I was capable of and what these new values might do for me, especially the value of integrity. There would be no cheating, no stealing, no drinking. For me it was all about setting goals and taking action and pushing myself to do my best. My courage was like a new power source, but now I had a strong harness on it. My Berkeley friends had said to me, “If you’d put all the energy you put into criminal behavior into your studies, you’d get straight As.”

But I knew I could get straight As. I’d done that in high school taking all honors classes. That wasn’t a big enough challenge. So I upped the bar my first semester, opting to take 31 units (10 classes). The average student takes 12-15 units per semester. Unfortunately the dean of the computer science department wouldn’t approve my extra units. She was the gatekeeper, and she thought I was either joking or nuts. I talked her up from 18 units to 25 units, but there she stood firm, and even then she still thought I was probably joking. So I took 25 units at CSUN and enrolled in another six units off campus, for a total of 31 units. That was against the rules, since the extra unit approval was technically inclusive of off-campus units too, but I wasn’t going to let pointless bureaucracy stop me.

I devoted myself to the study of time management and learned to use my time very efficiently. I aced all my classes and took my straight-A report cards from both schools back to the dean, now asking for 39 units for my second semester. This time it wasn’t hard to get her approval, but I think she was a bit scared of me when I left. I aced that semester too. Then in the summer of 1993 I did full-time contract work as a game programmer and also went vegetarian. No summer school. In my third and final semester, I added a double major in mathematics (which was pretty easy to get, since there were so many courses in common with computer science), and I took 37 units while continuing to work full-time. I graduated with a 3.94 GPA and ended up receiving an award for the top computer science student each year. Two degrees in three semesters.

This experience gave me a deeper appreciation of the power of context. I would not have even attempted such a thing as a Catholic. I would never have set the goals I did. I’m not sure anyone can truly understand how different reality seems from the perspective of different contexts if you’ve never switched contexts. If you subscribe to a disempowering context, you may be absolutely crippled in your ability to effectively tackle certain challenges no matter how hard you try (if you even try at all).

In the year after graduation, I started Dexterity Software, met my future wife, and continued to explore different belief systems. But now I was doing it very consciously. I was driven by the idea that if one context could open the door to previously untapped potential, then what could other contexts do? Might there be a better context than my current one? My experiences at Berkeley and CSUN were totally opposite, and I knew it was because of my different belief systems. One “religion” nearly sent me to prison; the other allowed me to successfully tap into potential I never knew was within me. I absolutely had to learn more about this.

Over the next decade I experimented with agnosticism, various new-agey belief systems, Buddhism, objectivism, and more. I even tried Scientology for a few months just to see what it was like. I wanted to assimilate a variety of different contexts, experience them from the inside, and then back off and compare their strengths and weaknesses. This produced a lot of instability in my life but also tremendous growth.

I was like a chef trying different ingredients to discover what recipe of beliefs would lead to the best life. And again, the definition of “best” is part of the recipe itself, so my understanding of the meaning of life was also in flux.

Many times I found that a new context set me back, and my results began to decline. Other times my new context was more empowering, and I again started to surge ahead. In the long run as I integrated new empowering beliefs and shed disempowering ones, my life began to improve across the board. For the past year they’ve been fairly stable, and 2005 has by far been my best year ever.

Flexible
Our beliefs act as lenses. These lenses can help us see things we can’t otherwise see, but they can also block us from seeing parts of reality. I see a huge part of personal development as the study of these lenses — these belief systems. There are an infinite number of lenses, so the quest never ends, but the more lenses you examine personally, the more you understand about the nature of reality and your role within it.

I have not experienced any organized belief system that is not disempowering in some way. The problem is that they all have a fixed perspective. If you look at reality from any single perspective, you are only perceiving the projection of reality onto your belief system, not reality itself. The more rigid your perspective, the more detail you miss (detail which doesn’t fall upon your projection but does fall upon others), and the less of your true potential you’re able to tap.
For several years I would have described my religion as a field and not a fixed point. It was multi-contextual. I kept the context floating and tried to see reality from multiple perspectives. At first this was unsettling and made it hard to set goals and take action, but I found it wortwhile because it gave me much greater clarity. I began seeing patterns in where certain perspectives would lead, both for myself and others. Just as you might imagine where a life of crime will ultimately lead, you can also gain a subtler understanding of where a belief in a certain type of God will lead and how that path compares to other choices. This is complicated because we aren’t dealing with fixed points for either the starting point or the destination. It’s about fields of possibility leading to fields of potential. For example, a life of crime can begin and end in many ways, but you can still see some general patterns in the pathways from start to finish. You can make some generalizations that will be fairly accurate.

As a result of this introspection, I was able to shed certain beliefs and strengthen others. Some beliefs I found consistently disempowering, meaning that if I adopted them, I would be denying myself access to valuable potential. These included the belief in heaven/hell and the belief in a higher power. That second one may seem surprising, but I opted to let it go because I consistently found it less empowering than a belief in a lower power. An example of a higher power would be a consciously aware God or gods such as found in Christianity or Greek mythology. A lower power would be like a field that is able to respond to your intentions, sort of like “the force” in Star Wars or what some people refer to as “source.” You can pray to either type of power, but in the first case you’re asking, and in the second case, you’re declaring. Many people, myself included, have noted that declarative prayer works better than no prayer and better than asking prayer. I see it mainly as putting out an intention.

So in deciding which beliefs to embrace and which to drop, I keep going back to the concepts of empowerment and potential. I strive to dump beliefs that curtail my ability to access my potential while strengthening beliefs that unlock more potential. If one form of prayer doesn’t seem to work at all, but another one works often, I’m going to adopt more of the latter context.

World in My Eyes
My overall religion has effectively become a religion of personal growth. Every year I continue to tweak my beliefs to try to bring them into closer alignment with my best understanding of how reality actually works. The better we understand reality, the more potential we unlock. Just as understanding a new law of physics can allow us to do things we could never previously do, beliefs about reality work the same way. If you’re stuck with a belief in a flat earth, it’s going to limit your potential actions and results. Similarly, if your religious beliefs are too great a mismatch for actual reality, you’ll be doomed to spend your life only tapping a fraction of your true potential. In my “religion,” knowingly leaving my potential untapped is sinful. Personal optimization is deeply embedded into my sense of morality. Not growing is morally wrong to me — it runs contrary to my understanding of the purpose of life.

The only reliable means I’ve found for discovering what beliefs are empowering is to test them and compare them to other beliefs. This is something I initially fell into unconsciously and in a very destructive manner. But when done consciously and intelligently, it can give you a whole new perspective on life. Just as people who travel a lot report being changed by their experiences of other cultures, you can also expect to be changed by experiencing different belief systems.

I don’t expect everyone else to subscribe to my religion of course. It was a very personal choice of mine and has been undoubtedly shaped by my unique experiences. Yet choosing my beliefs consciously has allowed me access to parts of my potential that I’d never have been able to tap with other belief systems. In most cases I’d have been stuck being way too passive and would have failed to push myself. I’d have been more inclined to accept my given lot in life instead of consciously co-creating it. Because my religion is based on working actively on my personal growth and helping others to do the same, I am driven to take action. Good thoughts or intentions aren’t enough.

Another part of my religion is to strive to become the best me I can become, not a copy of Jesus or Buddha or anyone else. This means spending a lot of time learning about my own strengths and weaknesses and figuring out where I can grow and what I may have to simply accept.

Everything Counts
Do your current beliefs empower you to be your best, or do they doom you to life as a mere shadow of what you could be? Can you honestly say that you are doing your best or very close to it? Are you living congruently with your most deeply held beliefs? Whatever your religious or spiritual beliefs, how well do you practice them? Do you walk your talk?

On Monday as I walked around the Las Vegas Strip, I saw a downtrodden homeless man sitting on one of the overhead walkways asking for money. As over a hundred people passed by him each minute, no one even stopped to give him a kind word or a smile. I thought to myself, “Where are all the Christians?” If Jesus is the model for Christian behavior, what would Jesus do in that situation? What would other role models do? What would you do?

By their words I hear that most Americans are Christian. By their actions I see that most aren’t.
If you really believe something, you will act in accordance with that belief — always. If you believe in gravity, you will never attempt to defy it. If you claim to hold a belief but act incongruently, then you don’t actually believe it. You’re only kidding yourself. Casual faith isn’t.
Actions, not words, reveal beliefs. If you want to understand what you truly believe, observe your actions. This may take some courage to do, but if you follow the trail of your actions, it will lead you to a more congruent belief system. And once there you can begin consciously moving towards new beliefs that empower you, while your actions and beliefs remain congruent along the way. But you’ll make no progress as long as you claim to believe one thing but consistently act in violation of it. Most people in such a situation will spend time trying to get their actions to better reflect their so-called beliefs… and meet with nothing but frustration. I say first get your beliefs in line with your actions and reach the point of being totally honest with yourself, doubts and all. Then you’ll find it far easier to move forward. Don’t be afraid to do this — no divine being is going to smite you for being honest with yourself. And if one ever happens to show up, you always have me to use as a scapegoat.

Although it can be a bumpy ride (it certainly was for me), you’ll come out the other end a far more integrated and empowered human being. Internal incongruencies absolutely cripple us, forcing us to live on only a fraction of our potential. When our actions and beliefs are in conflict, we can’t think as well. We become less intelligent and less resourceful — easily manipulated by others. We have no clarity at all, and we can’t seem to get moving in a consistent direction. We’re like a rudderless ship, being tossed around by the waves.

Congruency is clarity. When you get clear about what you truly believe about reality by observing your actions and admitting the deepest, darkest truths to yourself that you never wanted to face, you’ll set yourself on a path of growth that will put all your earlier accomplishments to shame. You’ll unlock access to resources that were previously dormant — greater intelligence, greater awareness, greater conscience. And you’ll finally start living up to the greatness that has been too long buried under a pile of denial.
Don’t be afraid to face who you really are. You’re a lot stronger than you realize.
And Then…

Tomorrow we’ll explore how you can make the biggest decision of all: How shall you live, and for what?

This post is part one of a six-part series on the meaning of life:Part 1: IntroPart 2: How Shall We Live?Part 3: Discover Your PurposePart 4: From Purpose to ActionPart 5: TransitioningPart 6: Conscious Evolution

http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/06/the-meaning-of-life-intro/


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The Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?
June 20th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

How shall we live? What shall we live for, if anything? How we can decide right from wrong? Is there any reasonable way to answer these questions that doesn’t require us to fall back on blind faith?

Let’s Ask the Old Greeks About It

People have been striving to answer these questions literally for thousands of years. One who attempted it was Socrates (469-399 BC). One of his most powerful breakthroughs was the idea of scrutinizing one’s beliefs through a type of cross-examination which became known as the dialectic. This involved asking and answering probing questions in order to arrive at something that could be considered true. Essentially what he played devil’s advocate and challenged people to justify what they claimed to know.

For example, there’s a story where Socrates met a young man who was going to court to charge his father with impiety. When Socrates learned of this, he acknowledged the man as a presumed expert in piety, stating that one must be an expert in piety in order to charge his own father with impiety. Then Socrates humbly asked the man to define piety for him, a concept of which Socrates claimed ignorance. The man repeatedly tried in vain to define it, with Socrates offering a simple and undeniable explanation why each answer offered couldn’t be valid. It’s easy to see that Socrates would ultimately piss off the establishment and get himself sentenced to death. He could have escaped, but he chose to stay in Athens and take the poison. Socrates had tremendous respect for the law, even when it meant sacrificing his life to remain true to his principles. As I read about his life, I couldn’t help but develop a tremendous respect for him and his philosophy of life.

Another philosopher who made a significant dent in the question of how to live was Aristotle (384-322 BC), who studied under Plato (Plato studied under Socrates). A young Aristotle expanded on Plato’s ideas regarding the nature of reality (the world of forms), but eventually Aristotle began moving in a new direction and tackled the problem of how one should live.
Aristotle’s best answer for how one should live was the concept of eudaimonia. Unfortunately this word has been tough to translate to English, so there are two favored translations I’m aware of. The first is “happiness,” and the second is “human flourishing.” Most other translations I’ve seen are variations on one of these. Personally I might translate this term as “fulfillment,” although that’s not perfectly accurate either. Eudaimonia is a process of living virtuously, not a fixed state of being. It’s not really an emotion like “happiness” suggests. Aristotle came up with this answer because he found that eudaimonia was the only potential goal of life that could be considered an end in itself rather than a means to another end. I think this is the reason that happiness is perhaps the most popular translation because happiness is an end in itself, not a means to anything else.

Aristotle was interested in finding a right way to live, if such a thing could be said to exist. His
answer of eudaimonia consists of two main components: virtuous action and contemplation. The main problem is that the means to discover the virtues was to look at people who seemed to be flourishing and living virtuously and take note of how they lived. As it turned out, such people would usually behave with some degree of integrity, honor, courage, honesty, rationality, fairness, etc. This is not merely an internal observation that one assesses in oneself — such values can be witnessed from the outside in, so Aristotle makes some progress here in attempting to create a semi-objective standard for right living. Like Socrates, Aristotle was also sentenced to death, but he chose to flee Athens and live in exile. (I tell you I’m immensely grateful to live in a society where philosophizing doesn’t currently carry the death penalty.)
The main problem I see in Aristotle’s insightful attempt to answer this question is that his solution is somewhat circular. In order to live well, we need to live virtuously and spend time on self-reflection and study, but how do we know what criteria to use in selecting the virtues or in choosing what to study? We basically have to find people that seem to be living well and flourishing — or in Aristotle’s time, it was suggested that we might also strive to emulate the gods, since they certainly seemed to be doing well. This isn’t unlike certain religions today that provide a model of virtue to attempt to emulate. Aristotle doesn’t answer one key question though: What is the best life one could possibly live? Eudaimonia suggests a way to go about finding the answer to this question, but it still leaves some gaping holes.

After Aristotle many others addressed the question of how to live. Every religion has its own answer. Some people say there’s no answer, that the answer doesn’t matter, that the answer is impossible for us to know, or that the answer is purely a matter of personal choice. The worst answer of all though is what most people do — to ignore the question entirely.

Choosing Your Own Context
What should you live for? Wealth? Power? Service? Longevity? Reason? Love? Faith? Family? God? Virtue? Happiness? Fulfillment? Comfort? Contentment? Integrity? Take a look at this list of values. There are hundreds to choose from.
It is important to make a global choice about how to live our lives, since this decision sets the context for everything else we do. If you don’t choose your context, you get the default/average context, which means you’re essentially letting others dictate your context. To make a gross generalization, in the USA this is a largely commercial/materialist context. It says to get a job, have a family, save some money, and retire. Be a good citizen and don’t get into too much trouble. But don’t really matter either. Be a good cog. Other cultures have their own default contexts. Most people simply subscribe to the default context of their culture with minor individual variations.

Sticking to your culture’s default context is among the worst of your options. Let’s consider the simple cases of a democracy vs. a dictatorship. In a democracy no one is really in charge of the cultural context as a whole, so the most common contexts end up as a mish-mash of bits and pieces that lack overall congruency. This will generally lead to confusion and mediocrity. Such a society will only provide a very fuzzy notion of how you should live, like getting a job, having a family, staying out of trouble, and retiring quietly. Ask an American what it means to live the best possible life, and you’ll get a lot of different answers, and most of them will be fairly fuzzy and unfocused — the kinds of answers that Socrates would shoot full of holes.
Now if you happen to live under a culture where the context is consciously directed, then you have to worry about who’s directing it and what their motives are and whether or not you can trust them. Where you find a strong dictatorship, you’ll usually see a more focused context than in a democracy. If you were to have asked someone from Nazi Germany what it means to live the best possible life, I’d bet the answers would have been more homogeneous and focused. But the problem of course is that such contexts are often designed to keep the context maintainers in power. There’s more pressure to conform to such a context. In the long run this type of context will usually lead to disillusionment, numbness, or fanaticism.

So if you let society dictate your context (which is what will happen by default in the absence of conscious choice), you’ll most likely wind up with a very fuzzy and unfocused context or one that’s focused on the wrong spot. Not a great choice either way. Certainly not the optimal choice. Such a context won’t provide you with enough guidance for how to live properly. You’ll spend a lot of time guessing your way through life or making a lot of mistakes that come back to haunt you later.
Ultimately if you want to get closer to the “best possible life” for you, you have to pick your own context. You can’t merely inherit the default context of your society and live up to what others expect of you. If you try to conform, you’re going to waste your life compared to what you might have done with it if you chose a better context.

So how the heck are we supposed to figure out how to live? Do we simply guess and hope for the best? Is there any rational, sane way to make such a hefty decision?

I can’t make this decision for you, but I can explain how I made this decision for myself, ultimately providing me with an answer that I found very satisfying. I think part of my answer is personal, but I also see part of it as being universal to all of us.

Living the Virtues
After I reached adulthood and began seriously pondering the question of how to live, the first major stopping point was essentially where Aristotle left off. In my early and mid-20s, I spent a lot of time working on living virtuously. I saw living the best possible life as becoming a person of virtue: to live with honor, integrity, courage, compassion, etc. I listed out the virtues I wanted to attain and even set about inventing exercises to help myself develop them. Benjamin Franklin did something very similar, as I read in his autobiography, and each week he chose to focus on one particular virtue in order to develop his character.

Oddly, there was a particular computer game I absolutely fell in love with during this time — Ultima IV. To date I would have to say it is still my favorite game of all time. In this role-playing game you are the Avatar, a seeker of truth, and your goal is not to destroy some enemy but rather to attain what is called the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom. In order to achieve this goal, you must develop your character in the eight virtues. All of these virtues derive from the eight possible combinations of truth, love, and courage as follows:

Truth = HonestyLove = CompassionCourage = ValorTruth + Love = JusticeTruth + Courage = HonorLove + Courage = SacrificeTruth + Love + Courage = SpiritualityThe absence of Truth, Love, and Courage is Pride, the opposite of which is Humility.

I found this system of virtues absolutely brilliant, especially coming from a game. Years later when I finally met Richard Garriott, designer of the Ultima series, at the Electronics

Entertainment Expo (E3), I asked him how he came up with this system and how he ended up choosing these virtues. He told me it started with brainstorming a long list and noticing patterns in how the virtues related to each other.

As strange as it is that I got these insights from a game, I still think of living virtuously in much the same way today, where these eight virtues come about through the overlapping sets of truth, love, and courage. For the combination of all three virtues though, I feel that “integrity” is a better fit than “spirituality.” Ultima V went on to explore the opposite of these, the vices which can be derived from falsehood, hatred, and cowardice. Unfortunately I feel the Ultima series really went downhill since then and completely lost its soul — I would have loved to have seen the virtue idea taken even farther.

I was thinking heavily in these terms when I started Dexterity Software in 1994. I did my best to hold true to living these virtues and integrated them into the company as much as I could. For example, in the roughly six years Dexterity has been sending out monthly royalty payments (many hundreds of payments total), not once has a single check ever gone out late, not even a day late. I don’t know of any other game publisher who can claim the same, certainly none I’ve worked with. The commitment to do this was a matter of personal honor for me, and my personal concept of virtue was integrated into how I ran the business. Honor was always more important to me than profit… and still is.

The downside to attempting to live virtuously was that I got tossed around a lot by people who were clearly not living virtuously. Unfortunately the gaming industry is rife with such people, especially where large sums of money are concerned. I was well prepared to deal with other people who valued honor highly, but I was saddened to have the opportunity to do business with so few. Too many people placed money as a higher value than personal honor. So I was swimming against the tide. Even so, I still prefer this choice compared to the alternative.
I also began having a lot of internal conflicts while attempting to live virtuously. I don’t blame the virtues for this though but rather my limited capacity for living in the fullest accordance with them. I was living my day-to-day life fairly virtuously, but what about the big picture? What about the very notion of running a game company for the purpose of entertaining people? Was that virtuous enough? I started pressing myself to do more, to push towards a higher ideal. I volunteered to serve as an officer in the Association of Shareware Professionals for two years (zero pay). I wrote a lot of articles for free. I gave away a lot of advice and coached a lot of people for free. I spoke at conferences for free. I pushed myself to sacrifice more for the benefit of others. I bypassed some opportunities to make more money and instead pursued opportunities to provide more service.

I could sense this was an improvement for me, but still it didn’t seem enough. I still didn’t feel like I was close to optimal in terms of my ability to live virtuously. At first I figured this was just the nature of life, that this was to be a lifelong struggle. But I soon began feeling unsettled, perceiving that something wasn’t quite right. For years I couldn’t figure out what it was, so by default I stuck with what I knew. I had run into the same roadblock Aristotle may have hit, the one that prevented him from getting to the point of answering the question, “What is the best possible life?” I knew it was somewhere different than where I was, but I didn’t know where to look.

What Is the Best Possible Life?
Eventually I came upon another way of approaching this problem of how to live. I asked myself, “Why is this such a difficult question anyway? What’s so hard about it?” That started me along a new line of thinking which soon led me to this question: What would have to change in order for this question to be easier to answer?

Bingo.

It suddenly became clear why this question was so tough to answer. In order to answer it accurately, I’d have to know everything. I’d have to be God.
Let’s face it. Our human intelligence is limited. Our technology is proof of that. My PC is better at arithmetic than I am. That tiny CPU can do a wide variety of tasks that my much larger brain cannot. My hard drive contains more data than I could memorize in a lifetime. Of course my brain has the CPU beat in many areas, but the point is that there are clearly intellectual limits to what our squishware can do.

I asked myself a lot of interesting questions to try to gain a new perspective on this. Can the mind comprehend its own limits? What if a superintelligent alien species came to earth — what would they see as the limits of human intelligence, and where would they perceive our boundaries? What can my brain clearly NOT do?

What if I were more intelligent than I am now? How might I live differently? What parts of my
life would a more intelligent being consider foolish, unnecessary, or harmful? If a more intelligent being were to attempt to optimize my life, being able to clearly perceive my intellectual limits, what would it change? How would I optimize the life of a gorilla or a mouse if I could communicate with it? What do I perceive as their intellectual limits? What would the best possible life be for various other species?

And many, many more questions of this nature.
What eventually happened was that my context shifted. For the first time I felt I was actually running up against the limits of my own intelligence. I could begin to perceive where the walls were. Some of these limits were obvious, like the limits on my number crunching ability, memory, and speed. But I began to test other limits too. How many distinct concepts can I hold in my head at once? How accurately can I perceive time or temperature or weight without a measuring device? How many problem-solving techniques do I really know, and what are their strengths and weaknesses?

I started studying the brain in a little more detail and comparing my perceived mental limits to what was known about the physical structure of the brain. The most current research in this area is absolutely fascinating. By drugging the brain, you can rob someone of consciousness. By electrically stimulating a cluster of neurons, you can induce an experience the subject would describe as spiritual (pushbutton spirituality?). You can surgically remove a person’s ability to play the piano.

As I developed a greater understanding of human intelligence, I realized that the biggest problem with the question of how to live is that it requires a higher intelligence than we now possess in order to answer it. In order to know what the best possible life is, which is mathematically an optimization problem, you have to know what all the possible lives are. And that requires an amount of data which is currently impossible for us to manage.
Imagine that there are only a million different variations on how you could live your life. In order to choose the best one, you have to look at all one million, apply some kind of criteria to evaluate them, and then pick the one with the highest score. There are three big problems with this. The first problem is that there are too many options to reasonably consider. The second problem is that you’d have to be able to accurately predict the future to know how each life would turn out. And the third problem is that you’d have to come up with the evaluation criteria. The first two are clearly impossible right now, but what about the third?
The third problem is basically what Aristotle attempted to tackle — the evaluation criteria.

Living virtuously is one possible answer, but it’s still a bit fuzzy.
So we’ve got some serious problems here. First, we have a search space of possible solutions that’s too big to fully explore. It’s so big we can’t even really comprehend the whole thing. And secondly, we need to figure out the evaluation criteria to intelligently compare one option to another, criteria that don’t depend too heavily on the unknowable future.
Searching…

Let’s tackle the first problem — that of the gigantic search space. First of all, finding a provably optimal solution is impossible. So the truest answer to the best way to live is that it’s unknowable. We aren’t smart enough to figure it out yet. That’s not very satisfying, but it actually helps us a little. Now we’re left with this question: How can we get close to the optimal solution?

Fortunately mathematics has an answer to this question: heuristics. An heuristic is a rule for exploring a search space that can help you get close to an optimal solution when you cannot explore the entire search space. An example heuristic would be hill-climbing. Imagine that you have a big 3D map to explore and you want to find the highest point. With hill-climbing, you’d start at a random point on the map and just make sure that every step you take is uphill. When you can’t go uphill anymore, you’ve hit a peak — a local maximum. Without exploring more of the map, you can’t be too sure your last hill was the highest one on the map, so you may continue to explore by starting at different points on the map and using the same hill-climbing heuristic. Unless you explore the entire map, you can never be certain that you’ve found the global maximum, but the more you explore, the more confidence you gain.

So what does this mean for human living? It suggests a hill-climbing approach to life. You try one way of living for a while, and then you keep trying to improve upon it by taking it “uphill.” You tweak some of the parameters to make it better. For example, you might try to lose weight, make more money, or improve your relationships — any or all of these might be considered a step uphill. And you just keep going uphill until you can’t go any higher.

Of course the problem with this approach is due to the nature of heuristics — you may get stuck in a local maximum that is far below the possible global maximum. The peak you’re striving to reach may only be a molehill in the grand scheme of things. Another problem is that it could take you more than a lifetime just to climb a single hill. You might die before you get very far with this approach.

Ah, but as human beings we have a powerful asset on our side that makes this problem a bit more manageable — imagination. We don’t have to test these permutations physically. We can test them in our minds. But this is only going to work well if our mental map of reality is a close approximation of real reality. In other words our simulation had better be very close to the real thing, or our approximations will be way off, and our results will be worthless. Remember Self-Discipline: Acceptance? In order to have a chance at succeeding at this, we have to accept reality as it truly is — all of it, no matter what we must face about ourselves and how unwilling we are to face it. Otherwise our simulation will be full of glitches. Things that seem to work in our imaginations won’t work in the real world.

The more accurate your mental model of reality, the greater your ability to intelligently assess possible ways of living. This means you must know yourself in all your nakedness, both the good, the bad, and the ugly. You must develop a deep understanding of your own nature as you truly are. This relates to yesterday’s post about bringing your beliefs into alignment with your actions. You must be internally congruent, or your simulations will only spew out garbage that you won’t be able to trust.

I am not certain that everyone has the capacity to do this very well. It requires a high degree of intelligence and concentration to imagine what it would be like to live an alternative life and to assess it objectively. But it’s all we have to deal with. We can only do our best.

I think the optimal solution would be to consider various ways you might live your life, vividly imagine each one in your imagination, and assess its strengths and weaknesses. Once you’ve covered a certain number of these (and I don’t have a good way to know how many is enough — the more, the better), then you pick one and start living that way. Meanwhile, you continue to remain open to imagining other possibilities, and if you ever perceive one that is better than your current manner of living, you switch to the new “higher” life.

How Do You Compare One Life to Another?
Now we have to consider the evaluation criteria. What is uphill? How do we compare one life to another?

Many people have attempted to provide an answer to this question. One of the most popular answers in self-help today is happiness. We’re told to do what makes us most happy. Seek pleasure. Avoid pain. Almost everything I’ve read about personal development uses some variation of happiness as the ultimate goal of life.

But I think happiness is a cop-out answer. Happiness is just an emotion. And placing my entire life in the service of achieving and maintaining a particular emotional state is clearly suboptimal. For one, I’m very emotionally resilient, and it doesn’t take much to make me happy and content. Happiness and well-being can be maintained largely with a very healthy diet and lots of exercise. I’m already good at managing my emotions and being happy, so I’m certain I can do better than this.

Even if we extend happiness into the realm of fulfillment or flourishing, it’s still a cop-out. By giving such an answer to the question of how to live, all we’re doing is tossing the question over to our emotional intelligence. We’re saying that the answer to how to live is whatever our emotions say is the answer. The assumption is that if we feel fulfilled, that we must be living optimally. I see no logical reason this answer would be correct, given what I know about how emotions work. Not good enough.

For these reasons I rejected any answers that suggested the optimal manner of living was to be found in some kind of emotional state or feeling. I can consciously chose to feel whatever I want just by changing my focus. There isn’t any particular course of action that will induce a feeling in me I can’t achieve just by directing my imagination. I can self-emote.

And then we have a whole host of other self-help gurus who seem to define the goal of life in terms of being successful, becoming wealthy, having fulfilling relationships, etc. Well, as you probably suspect, that’s just marketing fluff with no real substance behind it. Most of these books are aimed at trying to show you how to achieve optimal results within the pre-existing social context, but as we’ve already seen, even if you can manage to hit the supposed peak there, you’ll still going to be living suboptimally. You’ll only spend your whole life trying to climb a molehill and will leave most of your potential greatness untapped.

The way I chose to tackle this question was to look at my life in the context of the big picture of my clearest understanding of reality. This meant looking at the history of life to the degree we understand it, the possible future of life and where it might lead, and the present condition of life. I felt that a consideration of the best possible human life would have to be placed within the framework of all of life, past, present, and projected future. When I look at how life has evolved on earth, I see this force of evolution as something much greater than my own personal existence. I see that life has been continuing to upgrade its complexity, its intelligence, and its overall chances of survival. When I place myself within this context, I see that I have three basic options. I can work to cooperate with evolution, I can work against it, or I can ignore it. My human awareness gives me the ability to make this choice consciously.

As Close to Optimal As I Can Get
I decided that the best possible life would have to lie within the realm of cooperating with evolution rather than working against it. So for me this implies two things: 1) Working to evolve myself as an individual to the highest degree possible, and 2) Working to help life itself evolve to the highest degree possible. It turns out these goals are highly compatible, since there’s a positive feedback loop between evolving yourself and evolving your environment. If you only work on yourself, your environment will ultimately hold you back. You’ll be like Tarzan living among the apes. And if you only work to help others, that would also be suboptimal because you’ll only be able to teach them what you know right now, but you’ll never upgrade your knowledge and grow in your capacity to teach. So a balance of both is required.

For me this boils down to working on my own personal growth and helping others to grow. This became my means of assessing the best possible life I could hope to live.
So what does it mean to grow? To me it means to continually strive to upgrade my most powerful evolutionary assets, which I perceive as my intelligence, my consciousness, and my knowledge of reality. And in order to help others grow as well, I must consequently continue to upgrade my communication skills.

I see the main purpose of my life as serving the process of evolution. This is more important to
me than anything else. Everything else in my life is secondary compared to this and must justify its fitness for this agenda. Who cares about getting a job and making money when you have the opportunity to consciously participate in the evolution of life itself? For me all other potential ways of living are nothing but pale shadows compared to this.

Let’s tie this back in with the concept of heuristics now. This yields the following overall strategy:

Attempt to imagine the best possible life you can live with the evaluation criteria of serving the process of evolution itself.

Live it — experience it.

Whenever you ever become convinced that there is a better way for you to serve the process of evolution than what you’re doing now, transition to it.

This is my answer to the question of how to live: to invest the bulk of my life in the pursuit of growth. To me this makes perfect sense. If we cannot fathom how to live optimally, then the best solution would be to develop a greater capacity to do so. If your computer is incapable of doing what you need it to do, then you should invest your time working to upgrade the computer.

I find this answer also combines well with Aristotle’s concept of virtue. Intelligence suggests a direction, and virtue helps mold the path. I believe both are essential for living the best possible life. Of the two though, I think intelligence is the more powerful, since the virtues themselves were derived from our human intelligence. One way of thinking of the virtues is as intellectual shortcuts. If there is too much data to make a truly intelligent decision, you can fall back on the virtues and trust that they are at least not likely to be stupid choices. When in doubt, be honest, be honorable, be brave.

Squishware 2.0
If you suddenly found yourself living as an ape, you could accept the life of an ape and devote yourself to eating bananas all day and try to be a good ape, or you could attempt to become more than an ape and evolve into a human. Once you did that, all your ape goals and accomplishments would seem utterly meaningless compared to your new human capabilities. How silly will goals like building a business or becoming good at marketing appear to a more evolved species?

On the evolutionary ladder, we’re just a bunch of apes right now. But if we keep growing, we will soon be much more. It’s likely that computer technology will more closely merge with our own squishware to make us ever smarter and more capable. But even before that happens, we can continue learning more about our squishware and push it to its limits. Let’s stop living on 3% of our brainpower and crank it closer to 100%.

There are many ways to consciously assist the process of evolution, and our ability to do this right now is of course limited (although more of these limits are collapsing each year). Over the course of a lifetime, I think one person living today who devotes his/her life to assisting the evolution of our species can have a dramatic effect. We still remember Aristotle for his contribution. What more could we accomplish if thousands of us living today devoted our lives to a similar purpose?

I have no way to prove this to you, but I seem to be discovering that the more I work to align my life with the process of evolution, the more my life flows almost effortlessly, as if I’m being magnetically pulled along. For the past year my life has been working extremely well, and I feel like I’m able to think more clearly than ever. This was a recent context switch for me, just within the past year, but I feel as if it’s growing stronger each month. It’s a feeling of clarity that this is just what I’m meant to do with my life. Self-discipline is still required, but I’m stronger and more able to apply it consistently. I think the reason is that I finally feel I am indeed living the best possible life I’m capable of, given what I know right now. When I try to imagine something better, it’s only an increase in my capacity to do the same thing, not a change in the essence of what I’m doing. Getting to this point, however, was not remotely easy, and I’m certain that more change lies ahead. That is the nature of growth — old goals are constantly in the process of becoming obsolete.

Tomorrow we’ll explore how to translate this high-level notion of how to live into a personal purpose that is actually achievable. And then the following day, we’ll cover how to break that purpose down into goals, projects, and actions and get moving on it.

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The Meaning of Life: Discover Your Purpose
June 21st, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

Do You Have A Pre-Encoded Purpose?

Many books I’ve read seem to assume that we’re either genetically or divinely encoded with some sort of built-in purpose, and all we need to do is take the time to discover it through private introspection. You just sit down one day and write a mission statement and trust that what comes out of you will be the guiding force for the rest of your life. Perhaps every 6-12 months you update it.

Personally I think that’s nonsense. I see no evidence that there’s any pre-encoded purpose in any of us. You may have experienced strong social conditioning towards a particular purpose, such as if you’re born a prince or princess, and certainly your DNA will control some aspects of your life, but that isn’t sufficient evidence of any sort of divine will at work. I think in most cases you’ll just end up with a wishy-washy mission statement that doesn’t mean much.
If you begin with the assumption that you have a pre-encoded purpose and attempt to discover it merely by sitting down and writing a mission statement, I think you’ll end up building a house of straw for yourself. You won’t have a rational foundation for trusting your purpose. In most cases you’ll feel like you’re just guessing, and you might look back on your mission statement a week later and find that it’s not so interesting as you thought it was when you wrote it. You’ll always have doubts about what you’ve written.

When people try to sit down and write out a purpose or mission statement, they usually lack sufficient clarity to do so intelligently. How exactly are you supposed to define your purpose? Are you simply supposed to know it and squeeze it out of your brain like a sponge? What if you can imagine several different missions that might fit you, but you have no idea which is better? What if you can’t think of anything at all that seems meaningful to you? What then?
Just because you may not have a pre-encoded purpose doesn’t mean you don’t have a purpose though. It simply means that it will take more work to define your purpose. Your purpose isn’t really something you discover. It would be more accurate to say that your purpose is something you co-create based on your relationship to reality. I wouldn’t exactly call it a free choice though. There may be multiple choices for you, but all choices are not equally valid.
What is needed is an intelligent method for developing your purpose, a process that makes sense, such that when you arrive at your final answer, you have high trust that it’s correct.
If you’re wondering why defining a purpose for your life matters at all, read this:Why Does Purpose Matter?

How to Intelligently Define Your Purpose
I’m going to suggest two different methods for defining your purpose. Ideally you should use both of them, since each will help you understand different aspects of your purpose. This is going to be a lot of work, but the end result will be worth it because you’ll reach a point of tremendous clarity. In the end it will be far easier to make decisions and take action, and you’ll find that your life just seems to work once you know your purpose.

Method 1: Emotional Intelligence
The first method is to consult your emotional intelligence. Passion and purpose go hand in hand. When you discover your purpose, you will normally find it’s something you’re tremendously passionate about. Emotionally you will feel that it is correct.
I’ve already written up this method here: How to Discover Your Life Purpose in About 20 Minutes.

The answer you get from this process, however, depends heavily on your ability to generate good input. Essentially what you are doing is exploring the search space of possible purposes, and you’re using the heuristic of your emotional reaction to gauge how close you are. But one thing I failed to mention in the original explanation of this process is that it requires you’re clear about your overall context for life first. If you don’t have that level of clarity yet, then you’ll have a hard time making this approach work successfully — you’ll be approaching the problem from the wrong context, so the potential answers you generate will all be in the wrong neighborhood. Garbage in, garbage out.

To use an analogy, imagine you’re looking at a map of the United States, trying to locate Las Vegas. If you have a good map, it shouldn’t take you long at all. Your eyes might shoot towards the left (west) side of the map, slide right (east) from California to Nevada, and you’ll spot soon spot Las Vegas in Southern Nevada. But what if you try this same exercise using a map of the U.S. from 1870. Now that’s a problem because Las Vegas didn’t officially become a city until 1911, so you won’t find it on a map from 1870. You won’t be able to locate the city until you realize you’re looking at an inaccurate map and get yourself a more recent map. Similarly, if your context is an inaccurate fit for reality, corrupted by too many false beliefs and incorrect assumptions, then you’re unlikely to be able to define a meaningful purpose for your life no matter what method you use — it’s simply not to be found anywhere on your map. Most likely you’ll settle for something that’s close to your purpose, but not quite right. You may target Reno instead of Las Vegas (Reno became a city in 1868, so it might be seen on your 1870 map).

My output from this method was:to live consciously and courageously, to resonate with love and compassion, to awaken the great spirits within others, and to leave this world in peace.
If you’ve read yesterday’s post, you may notice certain patterns in this purpose statement that link up with my overall concept of reality:to live consciously = awareness, required for conscious personal growthand courageously = courage, a virtue required to pursue conscious growthto resonate with love = unconditional love, which isn’t an emotion but rather a sense of connectedness with everything that exists, implying that working on my own growth and helping others to grow are compatibleand compassion = another virtue, one which helps temper courageto awaken the great spirits within others = to help others lock in at a higher level of consciousness/awareness, which will give them the means to pursue personal growth consciouslyand to leave this world in peace = a double meaning here: 1) world in peace = to do no harm, to work to improve life instead of destroy it, to leave a legacy; 2) leave … in peace = no regrets, knowing I did my best and could have expected no more of myself, refusing to die with my music still in me, inner peace
If you haven’t already done so, be sure to read these two posts to help you identify your overall context, within which you’ll be defining your purpose:The Meaning of Life: IntroThe Meaning of Life: How Shall We Live?

Method 2: Rational Intelligence
The second method is to use your reason and logic to work down from your context. The clearer and more accurate your context is, the easier this will be.
To identify your purpose, you basically project your entire context of reality onto yourself. Given your current understanding of reality, where do you fit in? If you buy into the social context that most people seem to use, this will be virtually impossible for the reasons stated in yesterday’s post. Social contexts don’t provide sufficient clarity. At best you may end up with a wishy-washy purpose statement that addresses the basics like making money, having a family, having friends, and being nice, but there won’t be any real substance to it. If you gave it to someone else to read it, they wouldn’t come away knowing you any better.

Fuzzy context, fuzzy projection, fuzzy purpose.Clear context, clear projection, clear purpose.
Since my context of reality is based on seeing life as a process of ongoing evolution (and I use the term evolution merely in the sense of growth and change, not in the strictly biological sense via natural selection), then when I project this context onto myself, the result is very simple — I’m a participant in the process of growth and change.
This is such a simple approach that it’s easy to miss. All you’re really doing is looking at your overall context of life and projecting those same qualities onto yourself. This projection becomes your purpose, your role in reality.
Imagine a hologram. When you cut off a piece of a hologram, the entire original image is still contained within the smaller piece. Reality is the big hologram, and you’re a piece of it. You inherit all the properties of reality. Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. If your beliefs are accurate, you’ll end up with a sensible, achievable purpose.

This method will also help you identify problems in your context because you’ll notice that something is wrong when you project a false belief onto yourself.
Suppose your context of reality is whatever the Catholic Church teaches. Then when you project this context on yourself, you get that your purpose is to serve God, obey the Church in religious matters, and to strive to be like Jesus.
If you have a null context of reality (nihilism), you get a null purpose. When you project nothing onto X, you get nothing.

If you don’t like the purpose you end up with when applying this method, then what you’re really saying is that you don’t like the context you’re using. This is a conflict you’ll need to resolve. You must either accept the context and the purpose that accompanies it, or you must change the context.

Blending the Two Methods
I think it’s helpful to use both methods for defining your purpose to see where they lead you. If your context is sound, you should get congruent answers from both approaches. Your emotional and rational intelligences will each phrase your purpose differently, but you should see that it’s essentially the same. But most of the time that won’t be the case, and the answers will be different, which means your context is incongruent. You rationally think about reality in one way but you feel it in another way. Perhaps you hold religious beliefs but only follow them sporadically — they aren’t integrated across your entire life. You may feel in your heart that your beliefs are true, but you don’t think them in your head. In this case you have to identify the disparity, figure out where it comes from, and work it through until you can get both sides to agree or you can get clear on which one is correct. Use your consciousness to listen to the emotional side and the rational side, and be like a negotiator between them.

For example, if emotionally you feel that your purpose is to be some kind of artist or musician, but rationally you work out that you should be serving people in need, then you have to work through this disconnect by taking a look at what your context says about it. Remember that your context is your collection of beliefs about reality. When you experience a conflict like this, it will typically lead you to a hole in your context, a fuzzy area that you haven’t yet clarified. In this case you might see that you have mixed feelings as to the overall value of art and music. You partly see them as serving people, and you partly see them as a relative waste of time compared to other pursuits. You’ll have to decide which is the most accurate, empowering viewpoint. You have to fill the hole in your context. Yesterday’s post explains how to do that.

This can be a lengthy process if you have a very fuzzy concept of reality or if you’re very conflicted internally. For many people this will require rooting out incongruencies and consciously filling contextual holes, and it will take a long time before enough of those are eliminated to wield sufficient clarity to define a clear purpose.

At this point your purpose is likely to be very abstract and high-level, so tomorrow we’ll explore how to break it down into goals, projects, and actions.

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The Meaning of Life: From Purpose to Action
June 22nd, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

Once you’ve identified your overall purpose/mission, the next step is to turn that purpose into achievable goals, projects, and actions.
I’ve written extensively about this subject already, so I don’t have anything profoundly new to share within the scope of this “meaning of life” series. This entry will mostly be links to previous content.

Once you have your overall context and your purpose worked out, you begin setting goals that would be congruent with that purpose. Here’s a blog entry that explains which questions to ask and how to get started on that: Living Congruently.
The basic idea is that you must align your purpose with your needs, abilities, and desires. Your purpose tells you what you should do. Your needs (money, shelter, clothing) dictate what you must do. Your abilities (skills, talents, education) dictate what you can do. And your desires (enjoyable work, passion) dictate what you want to do. Taken individually each of these areas will only point you in a general direction, but when you put them all together, you’ll find it easier to set specific, practical goals. This way you’ll be setting goals that help you fulfill your purpose, meet your needs, do what you love to do, and do what you’re really good at.

Next, for more specific info on goal-setting, read this article:The Power of Clarity
Finally, for turning goals into projects and actions, read:Quarterly Planning TimeMore on Planning

That’s a lot of reading to be sure, but this is a complex subject. There are whole books written just on subsets of this topic, like David Allen’s Getting Things Done and Stephen Covey’s First Things First.Tomorrow we’ll cover the topic of transitioning, moving from a non-purpose-driven life to a purpose-driven life.

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The Meaning of Life: Conscious Evolution
June 24th, 2005 by Steve Pavlina

In this final post in the Meaning of Life Series, I’ll attempt to present a broader view of why personal development is so important and why I believe that investing in your own growth is the best investment you can make.

Conscious Evolution
When I used the word “evolution” to describe my world view, I was not using the word in the biological sense of natural selection, breeding, and mutation. A few people seemed to get stuck on that term. I was using the broader definition of evolution: a process in which something passes by degrees to a different stage, especially a more advanced or mature stage (source = Wordnet).

This includes the evolution of thought, society, knowledge, and the capabilities of life — the evolution of the noosphere moreso than of the biosphere. The noosphere is our collective knowledge and wisdom, and today it “evolves” far faster than any biological entities. In fact, the ongoing biological evolution of human beings is so slow as to be virtually irrelevant compared to the rate at which the noosphere is evolving. Our biology has evolved little in the past 1000 years, but our technology, knowledge, and culture have evolved massively.
So when I said I wanted to serve the process of evolution, I did not mean it in the biological sense — biological evolution is too slow and has become largely irrelevant. If the biological evolution of humans does continue, it is likely to occur by choice, not as a result of ongoing breeding and mutation over eons. But what matters most right now is the evolution of the noosphere.

What About The Biosphere Though?
I agree that the planet is in bad shape environmentally. But we can’t afford to wait for biological evolution to fix these problems. If we do that, humans will almost certainly become extinct before we have the chance to evolve into something better. Some experts assert that the environment is in such bad shape that we won’t make it to the end of this century… that the destructive processes we’ve put in motion may already be irreversible, even if we we were to immediately start doing everything we could to correct them.
Ignoring these problems isn’t a viable option, but I also think that attacking these problems directly is doomed to failure. There are already people doing that now, but they seem to be making little progress. They may slow the rate of decay a bit, but they’re nowhere near reversing it. There’s too much resistance, and by the time the resistance can be effectively overcome, we’ll be way past the point of no return.

Consider something as simple as diet. The environmental consequences of the Standard American Diet are severe — to say it wastes resources and pollutes the environment is a gross understatement. The U.S. government subsidizes most of it, which hides the true costs. It takes 18 times as much land to grow the food for someone eating the SAD diet compared to someone eating a vegan-plant based diet. If someone eating the SAD diet were to eat vegan for just one day, they’d save more water than they would by not showering for a year. Your decision to eat a burger for dinner is not merely a health choice — it’s an environmental and political one as well. In fact, virtually anything you might do environmentally or politically in your lifetime is irrelevant compared to the simple decision of what to eat each day. You could devote your entire life to Greenpeace, and it will only amount to a puny fraction of what you’d accomplish by living as a resource-guzzling playboy who happens to be vegetarian.

And yet, so few people are aware of the long-range consequences of what they do because their “knowledge” is fed to them by marketers. They buy into the social context instead of thinking for themselves. People make billions off the SAD diet, and it doesn’t hurt them financially if you want to plant a few trees on the side or clean up some trash to feel good about yourself, as long as you keep downing the burgers. But try to attack the diet that makes them rich, and they’ll drown you in marketing until you submit.

I could write about this stuff all day, but it’s already been written. The average person will simply avoid it, and to the degree it does get read, it will only be resisted or ignored. People must have the wherewithal to seek it out because they really want to know what’s going on. But so few people currently have the courage and discipline to do that.

I don’t see the solution as spending more time and energy attacking such problems directly. If I
attempt that, I’ll only be outmarketed by those with a massive financial stake in perpetuating the current belief system, however false it may be. I could spend my whole life attacking smoking, for instance, but in the end it won’t make much difference — I might convince a fair number of people to quit, but many more will become smokers, and many who do quit will simply adopt a substitute vice. So overall there won’t be much impact. My resistance will simply be met with stronger resistance. Force will fail.

So What’s the Solution?
The best solution I can think of is to work on human awareness itself, to help more people see the benefits and navigate the obstacles in pursuing their own conscious growth. I don’t think this requires a change in our biology but rather a shift in the noosphere. I think we already have the biological capabilities necessary to fix the problems of this planet if they’re fixable at all, but we currently lack the awareness, discipline, and courage as a species to step up and take personal responsibility for doing what is right. Most people would rather live an illusion than spend time thinking about the best possible contribution they could make with their lives. But I think I can help change that. A good number of people seem to be reaching similar conclusions.
I figure that over the course of my lifetime, the absolute best thing I can do is to implant and strengthen the seed of conscious personal growth into the noosphere, in cooperation with other people who have similar missions.

Human beings have so much untapped capacity it’s ridiculous. If we can edge up the realization of this capacity and raise the average level of awareness of human beings, then more people will “wake up” and start living with greater consciousness and courage. They’ll begin to drop destructive habits and adopt more positive ones. They’ll start to define a meaningful purpose for their lives, and along the way they’ll encourage others to do the same. They’ll stop living in fear of their own shadow and obsessing over trivialities. And these “upgraded” human beings, living more consciously and courageously, will have a far better chance of solving the greatest problems of humanity and of successfully managing the greatest risks that threaten us.
My mission then is to encourage and assist people in pursuing their conscious growth, to help them find a path away from a life of quiet desperation and towards a life of courage, purpose, and responsibility. I have not been able to think of any better contribution I could make with my life than this.

For me this mission is deeply intertwined with the pursuit of my own personal growth. By working on myself, I increase my capacity to help others. And by helping others to become more conscious and conscientious, I build an environment that reinforces my own growth and which helps to insulate me from the forces that threaten to suck me back down into low-awareness living.

Right now I’m manifesting this mission in the form of articles, blog entries, and an upcoming book. Over the next decade I expect to extend it across a variety of different media: articles, books, audio programs, speeches, seminars, etc. Beyond that I envision putting together a formal organization of some kind to help people grow more consciously and to upgrade their courage, discipline, and awareness, and also to serve as an outlet for people who wish to team up with others who have similar missions.

One challenge is figuring out how to live within the current noosphere while working to change it. You have to rely on the current economic system to provide for your basic needs. My solution thus far has been to systematize and automate my income as much as possible, so I have the freedom to pursue higher level projects without having to invest too much time and energy in making a living. I have a few other ideas that should improve that situation even more.
I don’t really see the solving of social/global problems as the primary end though. I think that’s mainly a side effect of the pursuit of growth, not the purpose of growth itself. I see the pursuit of greater courage, consciousness, and conscience as an end in itself. However, such pursuits will solve many problems along the way, and often this is easier than attacking such problems directly. For example, you can attack problems like being overweight, being addicted to smoking, and having unsatisfying relationships and make very little progress across the board. But if you work on developing your courage, awareness, and self-discipline, these problems will solve themselves — in fact, they’ll become almost trivially easy.

Investing in your own growth is the best investment you can make. Don’t think for a minute that it’s a selfish pursuit. Quite the contrary — it is in fact the best thing you can do to help others. If you feel you are not contributing much with your life right now, don’t beat yourself up about it or deny what you could become if you were only strong enough. Instead, turn inward and work on yourself until you become the kind of person on the inside who automatically expresses good as a manifestation of who you are.Conquer your fear, and the rest is easy.

10 Stupid Mistakes Made by the Newly Self-Employed

April 10th, 2006 by Steve Pavlina Having been a non-employee for about 14 years now, I’ve made my share of stupid business mistakes. I’ve also coached a number of people to start their own businesses, and I’ve seen many of them make similar mistakes. This advice is geared towards small business owners, particularly people who are just starting (or about to start) their own business.

1. Selling to the wrong people.

While sales are important to the survival of any business, you don’t need to push your business on everyone you meet, including friends and family. Furthermore, it’s a waste of time to try selling to people who simply don’t need what you’re offering.

Selling to the wrong people includes trying to sell to everyone. Some customers are much easier to sell to than others. For example, my wife does web consulting for small businesses, and she’s learned that some clients are much harder to work with than others. If a potential customer is broke and obsessively worried about every nickel they spend, if they want a web site but don’t know why, or if they simply don’t understand the Internet well enough, they won’t be a good client in the long run. Feel free to say no to customers that are more trouble than they’re worth. Let your competitors sell to them instead. You’ll save yourself many headaches, and you’ll free up more time to focus on serving the best customers.

Just because someone is interested in doing business with you doesn’t mean you should accept. In my first year in business, I probably said yes to at least 50% of the people who approached me with a potential business relationship. I wasted a lot of time pursuing deals that were too much of a stretch to begin with. I accepted lunch invitations from random business people who just wanted to “see if there’s a way we could do something together.” Virtually none of them made me a dime. If you think a meeting is pointless, it probably is. Don’t network with random people just because you think you’re supposed to network. Today I accept such invitations less than 1/10 as often. If an offer doesn’t excite me right away, I usually decline or ignore it. Most relationships simply aren’t worth pursuing. Learn to say no to the weak opportunities so you have the capacity to say yes to the golden opportunities.

2. Spending too much money.

Until you have a steady cashflow coming in, don’t spend your precious start-up cash unless it’s absolutely necessary. I started my computer games business with about $20,000 cash (my own money), and it went fast; shortly thereafter I was using debt to finance the business. Unfortunately, the original business model didn’t work, and it took five years before the business was generating a positive cashflow. I soon learned that every dollar invested in the business was another dollar that eventually had to be recouped from sales.

In 2004 I started this personal development business with only $9 cash even though I could have spent much more on it. No fancy logo, no snazzy web design, no business cards or stationary. I paid to register the domain name, and that was it. That’s as much as I was willing to spend before I started generating a positive cashflow. All other business expenditures came out of that cashflow.

Your business should put cash into your pocket, so before you “invest” money into it, be clear on how you’re going to pull that cash back out again.

Obviously some businesses require lots of cash to start, but in the age of the Internet business, you can very easily start a lucrative business for pocket change.

3. Spending too little money.

It’s also a mistake to be too stingy with your cash. Don’t let frugality get in the way of efficiency. Take advantage of skilled contractors who can do certain tasks more efficiently than you can. Buy decent equipment when it’s clear you’ll get your money’s worth. You don’t have to overspend on fancy furniture, but get functional furniture that helps you be more productive. Don’t use an antiquated computer with outdated software that slows you down if you can afford something better.

It takes time to develop the wisdom to know when you’re being too tight or too loose with your cash, so if you’re just starting out, get a second opinion. Often the very thought of getting a second opinion makes the correct choice clear. If you can’t justify the expenditure to someone you respect, it’s probably a mistake. On the other hand, there are situations where it’s hard to justify not spending the cash.

4. Putting on a fake front.

Many one-person businesses refer to themselves as “we.” That’s something a lot of new entrepreneurs do, but it isn’t necessary. There’s nothing wrong with a one-person business, especially today. My games business has mostly been a we over the years, but my personal development business is still an I. My wife’s VegFamily Magazine business is a we, since she has a staff working for her, but her web consulting business is an I. It’s perfectly OK to refer to your business as an I when you’re the only one working in it. Pretending that you’re a we when you’re really an I is a bit silly. It’s not going to gain you any respect in a way that matters. Promoting yourself as an I may even be an advantage today, since people will know the buck stops with you, and if you make a promise, you’re the one who will carry it out. Promises from a we sometimes aren’t worth very much.

If you’re a newly self-employed person, don’t pretend you’re anything else. Price your products and services fairly for your level of skills and talents. Some newly self-employed people think they must become actors. The business they promote to the world is pure fantasy. Trying to fool your customers in this manner will only backfire. If you’re so desperate for business that you need to lie, you shouldn’t be starting your own business. If you can’t provide real value and charge fairly for it, don’t play the game of business. Develop your skills a bit more first.

5. Assuming a signed contract will be honored.

I’ve made this mistake more than I care to admit. I’ve had signed contracts with supposedly reputable corporations, and they weren’t worth squat when the CEO decided he wanted out of the deal, even for completely dishonorable reasons. Sure I was in the right, but did I want to go to court to enforce it? No, I’d rather continue doing meaningful work.

A signed contract is just a piece of paper. What’s behind a signed contract is a relationship. If the relationship goes sour, the contract won’t save you. The purpose of a contract is to clearly define everyone’s roles and commitments. But it’s the relationship, not the paper, that ultimately enforces those commitments. When I understood this, I focused more on relationships and worried less about what was on paper, and my business deals went much more smoothly. Once you start falling back on the paper, the deal is already in trouble. Creative (and lucrative) business deals almost always stray from the paper contracts that represent them. One of my attorneys, who had worked on dozens of game development deals, told me that no deal he worked on ever followed the contract exactly; most weren’t even close. And these were big money deals in many cases. Business relationships are similar to other personal relationships — they twist and turn all over the place.

Written contracts are still necessary, especially when dealing with larger corporations where people come and go, but they’re secondary to relationships. Just don’t make the mistake of assuming that the contract is the deal. The contract is only the deal’s shadow. The real deal is the relationship. Keep your business relationships in good order, and you won’t have to worry so much about what’s on paper.

It’s sad but true that there are loads of scoundrels in business. Many of them hold titles like CEO, President, and CFO. There are indeed people out there who seem to care about nothing but money, and they will lie, cheat, and steal to get it. In recent years some of the more despicable ones have gotten themselves indicted (or are already behind bars). But there are plenty of others to whom the word honor has no meaning. For example, in the computer gaming industry, it isn’t unusual for large publishers to feign interest in certain games and string the developers along. They give the developer every indication that a deal is pending, but all the developer sees are delays and false verbal promises. In reality the publisher only wants to keep the game off the market to keep it from competing with one of their own titles; they hope to cause the developer to miss the next Christmas season or to run out of cash and cancel the title altogether. It happens. Business, especially the entertainment industry, is not for the timid.

6. Going against your intuition.

Intuition is just as important in business as it is in other settings. You’d be amazed at how many gigantic corporate deals are green-lighted or red-lighted because of some CEO’s gut feeling. While you might think that logic is the language of business, that’s far from reality. If you base all your business deals on hard logic and ignore your intuition, most likely you’ll be in for a world of hurt.

We humans aren’t very logical to begin with. We simply don’t have enough data to make truly logical decisions because business deals depend on human beings, and we don’t have a logical system for accurately predicting human behavior. Not being able to predict how other humans will behave is a pretty big gap in our logic. And intuition has to fill that gap. The real performance of human beings is what makes or breaks business deals. But to assume everyone will perform as expected is unrealistic in the extreme. No deal ever goes perfectly.

It’s hard to say no to a deal that seems juicy by the numbers when my gut is saying, “You’ll regret it,” but more often than not, I later see evidence my intuition was right all along. Sometimes I just get a bad read on someone, and then years later, several people I know are complaining about being ripped off by that person.

Intuition is a critical part of the decision-making process in business. Since business deals depend on relationships, you need to get a read on the other people involved in any deal you consider. If you get a bad read, walk away. If you get a good read, proceed with caution.

7. Being too formal.

I’ll say it again. Business is built on relationships. In some settings a certain degree of formality is appropriate, but in most business situations being too formal only gets in the way. Business relationships work best when there’s a decent human-to-human connection behind them.

I think it’s a mistake to be too formal even when looking to establish new business relationships. If someone mails me a letter that starts with “Dear Mr. Pavlina” and then goes on to explain a long-winded business proposal, I’ll usually just trash it, especially if it uses the word “we” a lot. Better to fire off an email with a “Hi Steve,” and just ask me very informally if I’m interested in the kind of arrangement you’re seeking. It saves time and opens the door to a real human relationship. Human beings don’t want to build relationships with faceless corporations. They only want relationships with other human beings… sometimes animals too I suppose.

Treat your business relationships like friendships (or potential friendships). Formality puts up walls, and walls don’t foster good business relationships. No one is loyal to a wall… except the one in China.

Formality is boring and tedious. People want to enjoy their work. If someone address me like a computer, I’ll respond in kind — by hitting delete. But if someone demonstrates they have a real personality and a good sense of humor, a connection is far more likely.

8. Sacrificing your personality quirks.

In the early years of running my games business, I took myself too seriously and assumed that I had to act “businesslike” … whatever that meant. Being self-employed was a weighty responsibility, and other people were counting on me. Sink or swim, right?

I started my games business in my early 20s, and people in their early 20s are invariably weird. But I assumed that as a business owner, being weird wasn’t appropriate or acceptable. So most of my business letters and emails looked like they were written by the same people who created Microsoft’s EULAs. The job title of “President” really went to my head. I learned how to function without a personality.

It took a number of years, but eventually I became comfortable just being myself, especially after my games business became profitable. Now that I’m a blogger, my personality quirks and unusual experiences are strengths. My personal oddities give this blog a unique flavor. If I were to take myself too seriously and write more formally, this blog would be very dull and would likely lose much of its audience.

It’s perfectly OK to be your own weird self and to inject your own unique spirit into your business, especially if you’re in your teens or 20s. Don’t be afraid to be more like Steve Jobs… and less like Steve Ballmer. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not. Ultimately you’ll enjoy your work much more if you attract the kinds of customers and partners that want to work with you for who you are — warts and all. Send the people who only want to work with androids to your corporate competitors. They deserve each other.

If other people can’t handle your weirdness, too bad for them. Focus your energy on the people who can.

9. Failing to focus on value creation.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the purpose of a business is to make money. But the real purpose of a business is to create value. While it’s possible to make money in the short run without creating much value, in the long run it’s unsustainable. Even criminal organizations have to create value for someone. When you know your business is just sucking value away from others without providing anything in return, it will erode your self-esteem, and the business won’t be much fun to run.

Why does your business exist? It exists to provide some sort of value, both for you and your customers. The better you understand what value you’re trying to provide, the better you’ll be able to focus. The basic value provided by my games business was cerebral entertainment. The basic value provided by StevePavlina.com is personal growth. Too often business owners aren’t clear on what value they’re trying to provide. They just sell stuff and hope for the best. That’s a lousy business model. The world doesn’t need more selling or more stuff. But it always needs and wants genuine value creation, and that’s where you should direct your efforts.

Presently this web site contains over 400 free articles. That’s a lot of value creation. Thousands of people visit each day to receive some of that value. Helping people grow is the business’ primary aim.

10. Failing to optimize.

Although value creation is essential to a sustainable business, it’s equally naive to assume you can simply focus on creating value, and the rest will take care of itself. You may build a business that provides good value but loses money. As a business owner, you need to find a way to deliver your value in a cost effective manner. Most likely your first attempt will be very suboptimal. You’ll waste too much time, money, and resources trying to produce and deliver your value. That’s OK though. Many businesses start out that way. Just don’t let yours stay that way.

Once you have a particular business process in place, pull it apart and re-optimize it from time to time. Look for ways to make it more efficient. Can you get it done in less time? At less cost? Can you do it less frequently? Can you outsource it? Can you dump the process altogether?

I used to process credit orders for my games business manually. I started the business in 1994, and when I’d receive an order through the mail or via my web site, I’d use some software to input and run the orders by modem. At the end of each month, I’d manually tally the sales. That worked fine when sales were low, but it became burdensome as more products were released and sales increased. Several years ago I upgraded the process such that online orders were fully automated, including instant delivery of the game download. All orders are recorded in a database, and I can view real-time reports to see how sales are doing for each product. It took some work to set this up, but it was well worth it. That one optimization saved me a lot of time and effort, and I don’t have to pay high fees for a third-party order processing service.

Don’t fall into the trap of using archaic methods for doing routine tasks that could be automated, including inventory management, billing, accounting, order processing, communications, and marketing. If you find yourself doing the same repetitive tasks month after month, make sure you put some effort into optimizing them. Not optimizing is like throwing time and money down the drain. It’s often much easier to save time and money than it is to create them.

An Internet business has abundant opportunities for optimization because it’s so easy to try new things and measure the results. In the first year after launching this site, I experimented quite a bit with Google Adsense. Many people don’t like the ad layout on this site, but it’s the most effective layout I’ve tried so far. I use it because it works. Adding the donations page was another optimization. Some people click ads, some people donate, and some do both. So even though value creation is the primary aim of the business, this is still a for-profit business and needs to generate income in order to be sustainable. If I don’t eat, I don’t write. More money means more resources for ongoing value creation. So value creation and optimization go hand-in-hand.

It takes significant effort to build a successful business, but it’s also a tremendous growth experience. I know many people who have quit their jobs to run their own businesses. Many of them didn’t do as well as they’d hoped, but I don’t know any that regretted taking the plunge. There’s simply no substitue for holding the reins of your own destiny.

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It just happened again last week! It seems every time I give a speech
or do a training session, someone from the audience comes up to me and
says, “You’re great at presenting - I just WISH I could do what you
do.”

“You can, I say,” and then I tell the story about how I used to be
scared to death to speak in public and how after years of being nervous
(and usually sick) I finally overcame by fear, blah, blah, blah. It’s a
great story, but really not very helpful, except perhaps from an
inspirational perspective. (If I can do it, you can!)

I usually change the subject quickly because I’ve always felt a little
guilty that I didn’t write a book, or organize my thinking into a
course, or in some other way actually HELP people get better at presenting.
So when I heard that my good friends Michael and Dawn Angier of
SuccessNet had just launched a brand new membership site devoted to helping
people deliver powerful presentation, I couldn’t wait to tell you about
it.

So here I am, now guilt-fr*ee, offering you a guest pass to their new
site “Presentations Made Simple.” With the pass you can download two
powerful reports to help you create and deliver highly effective
presentations.

1. Topic Development & How to Create a WOW Audience Experience by Burt
Dubin
2. The Art of Persuasion--How to Get What You Want Through the Power of
the Word

While you’re at the site you can sign up and become a Professional
Member like I did. That gave me immediate access to a dozen of the best
books I could want on creating even better presentations. Dawn’s book is
especially well written and one I only WISH I had eighteen years ago
when my boss pushed me out of the nest and made me get started speaking
more in public. Dawn teaches you how to get ALL the butterflies moving in
formation and how to turn your energy into power!

Don’t think you need presentation skills? Think again. Every day you
have to present yourself, your ideas, your value, your company, your
products and services. You do it in person, on-the-phone, in writing; at
work, in the community, in your industry and even at the PTA. Every time
you open your mouth you are presenting – you might as well do it as
well as a pro does: confidently and persuasively.

Here’s the cool part about the membership – once a month – every month
- a new resource is delivered to you as a member. Michael and Dawn are
using their extensive network of experts to find the best products
available and add them to the site. You’ll learn the latest in
communication skills and hear from people like Jim Rohn, Jim Donovan and Dr.
Rhoberta Shaler. (Okay, and maybe me.)

One thing is for sure. All of us will have to experience giving a
presentation of some kind sometime during our personal and professional
life. And it doesn't have to be nerve-wracking and stressful. It can be a
rewarding and fun experience for you--and your audience! Hey – what
started for me as a fear ridden, gut-wrenching, anxiety producing job is
now the joy of my life AND the source of my income.

You never know.

Get your free guest-membership pass and your two free-special reports
today become a better presenter tomorrow.

Use this link for immediate access.
http://presentationsmadesimple.com/bfm/?aff_id=314


Here’s to you – the confident, poised and professional communicator,

JoAnna


P.S. Dawn and Michael have run Successnet.org since 1996, and I’ve been
affiliated with them since then. We work together at the World Class
Business Institute helping great companies become better!
http://presentationsmadesimple.com/bfm/?aff_id=314

If you have not read this week's TIP, "Counting on a Miracle," please
follow this link http://customercarecoach.com/public/current_tip.asp

******************************************************

JoAnna Brandi & Company
7491 N. Federal Hwy, C-5 #304, Boca Raton, FL 33487
561-279-0027 fax 561-279-9400
http://www.customercarecoach.com
http://www.customerretention.com