Read This If Life Feels Meaningless
You Don’t Need More Discipline or Focus
Nothing seems appealing.
Your motivation is down.
You feel lost.
What you’re experiencing, my friend, is the absence of meaning in your life.
Every day is taken as it comes, and it’s all leading you to nowhere.
I’m sure everyone who aspires to build something great experiences this at some stage in their journey…
Daniel Ek had just sold his first company and retired at 23.
He used his downtime to party and date women he couldn’t get before he hit the jackpot.
… But this wasn’t him.
It quickly became repetitive and dull.
He felt empty and lacked motivation.
Fast forward a few months, and the seeds of Spotify were in motion.
In an interview with Steven Bartlett, Daniel mentioned that he didn’t need discipline or motivation to drop his old ways…
It just happened.
All he needed was a mission to steal his focus.
And the exact same is true for you…
The illusion of rationality
Humans aren’t rational.
That’s not the problem though…
The problem is most think they are.
Ask the average person how they make decisions, and they’d likely allude to it being through some reasonable logic.
According to the discoveries by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, that’s complete, utter bullsh*t.
The majority of your decisions are driven by your emotions.
I figured this out the hard way when I was learning to build AI software.
You see…
Computers are stupid.
They can only do what you tell them to do.
If a line of code breaks or the output from a function isn’t what you expected, you’re the cause.
This woke me up to my broken way of thinking.
It made me realize you can feel like something is right, but that doesn’t mean it is.
Writing code that failed to do what I wanted it to do was a constant reminder to me that logical thinking isn’t the norm.
… But I had an end goal in mind: to learn a skill that didn’t require me to exact myself physically.
This was the difference between me and my peers that dropped out.
I was on a mission to transform my life while they were doing something that could “potentially” help them better theirs.
If you read over that too fast, you missed the point…
It’s impossible to make intentional decisions when you’re not clear on where you’re trying to get to.
Since there’s nothing you’re optimizing yourself for, the majority of your decisions will be based on how you feel in the moment.
Let me give you some context…
My peers who started their programming journey at the same time as me were broke – I was too.
They’d lost their jobs and were looking for a new way to make money.
When I told them I was learning to code, their eyes lit up as they’d heard, “programmers make a lot of money.”
It sounded good for where they were at the time.
As soon as we all got jobs, they quit.
If you look deeply into your life, you can likely see a similar scenario playing out in your life.
This happens cos of our irrationality…
You think you’re rational, but you’re not.
We’re creatures of circumstance.
Where you are in life forms the basis of your beliefs, experiences, and relationships.
Without intervention, you’ll constantly be a slave to how you feel at any given moment.
Your brain works against you (sometimes)
Leaving your life down how you feel is a recipe for disaster.
It’s even worse when you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing…
You’ll constantly be tossed to and fro by the emotions of the day and won’t understand why you can’t stick things out.
Every action you take will be meaningless.
This will make it hard for you to focus on the things you know you should be doing.
For example, I once spoke to a prospect who wanted to learn data science…
When I asked why, she said, “I hate my job.”
This may sound like a logical justification, but it isn’t…
It’s circumstantial and based on emotions.
Your brain processes the information as, “I hate my job, so I’m learning data science.”
In other words, if she were to stop hating her job, then she wouldn’t need to learn data science.
This is a weak foundation on which to build your long-term future.
… And your brain knows it.
As a result, it refrains from providing you with the resources to fulfill that desire.
This is due to evolution…
Your brain is wired to reduce uncertainty.
The unknown has evolved to be synonymous with threats that pose risks to your survival.
When your brain identifies gaps in your knowledge, the path forward feels more dangerous, which effectively makes it a threat to your survival.
The only way to progress from this point is to depend on willpower – a finite resource.
When willpower is low, it’s hard to do hard things.
Since you’re unaware of all that’s going on, you’ll likely think the issue is you lack discipline or focus, but you don’t.
You lack clarity, which prevents you from having conviction.
Many get comfortable after a while of being in this state…
They divert their attention to maintaining the status quo instead of advancing ahead, which subconsciously reinforces the belief they’re not worth much or deserve more.
In their quest to keep life predictable, they’ve trapped themselves.
They wear clothes they don’t wanna wear, drive cars they don’t wanna drive, and do things they don’t wanna do.
They’ve settled.
How to create meaning in your life
Jim Rohn once said, “Five years from now, you’ll arrive… The question is, where?”
What he was implying is that, in life, you’re constantly on a journey somewhere — whether you know it or not.
Those who aren’t aware of this little truth never get serious about defining where that place is. This leads to them constantly arriving at destinations they don’t want to be in.
On the other side of the coin, you’ve got those who are aware…
These people know it’s down to them to be extremely clear on where “somewhere” is if they’re to get there.
They reduce ambiguity with clarity!
This allows their brain to buy into taking the necessary risks to get there — remember, your brain hates uncertainty.
Their journey to where they’ll arrive in the future is no longer a random quest…
It’s a mission!
Each action they take is a deliberate step closer to where they wanna go.
They understand not taking action will only delay the journey further, or worse, prevent them from ever arriving there.
This insight alone fills them with urgency and makes it easy for them to drop out of things that once seemed fun but obstructed the journey.
You don’t need more discipline or focus…
You need a mission.
When you’ve got a mission, frivolous activities drop off naturally – no hacks needed.
You’ll wake up before your alarm to turn it off.
You’ll find the people who can help you get where you wanna go faster.
You’ll spend hours learning so you can take massive action relentlessly.
This won’t change your immediate destination overnight…
If it took three years to stock up heaps of debt, you can’t expect it to go away tomorrow.
But taking consistent and deliberate action on your mission to achieve your desired result will make it happen faster.
With all that said, I know what you’re thinking…
“How do I define a mission for myself?”
The answer to that alone could fill a book, so I’m only gonna give you a snippet.
Set a target for what you wanna achieve in the next 90 days.
It can be anything:
- Go from 0–10k on Twitter
- Make $1k writing on Medium
- Sell 20 high-ticket offers
Try not to limit yourself based on where you currently are: the bigger the goal, the narrower the path.
When you’ve defined the destination, find someone who’s where you wanna go.
Find a way to work with them so you can learn what they did to get there.
Don’t be afraid to open your wallet if that’s what it takes.
Devote yourself to your mission, and it will happen faster than you expect.
Final Thoughts
Your life will lack urgency and meaning if there’s no mission.
No matter what happens, in the future, you’ll arrive at some destination.
That could either be somewhere you’ve architected or a place you ended up at randomly.
Leaving it to chance is risky as it’s likely you won’t want to be where you are.
Designing the end location and devoting yourself to arriving is also risky, but the upside is far greater.
You’ll have the life you want, and everything you do will be more meaningful, which will make you feel more fulfilled.
Thanks for reading!
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