How Not To Go About Finding Your Purpose
I finished reading the 17th version of “The Morning Routine That Will Make You Unstoppable” article on Medium, right after I listened to Tim Ferriss discuss the habits that make yet another world-class performer so successful (“what brand of candles do you light for your morning meditation?”). I was determined that the next morning I WILL get up at 5am, I WILL do my 15 minutes of meditation, I WILL write down ten ideas to develop my “idea muscle”, I WILL have that disgusting superfood smoothie for breakfast, and I WILL NOT budge until I’ve done my three hours of “deep work”. I did cut myself some slack on the Wim Hof cold showers - those could come in phase two.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about you haven’t familiarized yourself with enough experts, articles and classes that prescribe some version of a morning routine or daily discipline as the foundation of every overachiever’s superior performance. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any person in possession of good sense, must be in want of an endless supply of mental clarity optimizations to help them find and realize their life purpose.
The next day I (barely) dragged myself out of bed at 6am. I did the meditation, made the smoothie, wrote some ideas... My longest winning streak lasted four days before I went back to getting up at my usual time (7:30am) and making excuses as to why I can’t do the vast majority of things that will make me “unstoppable” today, though I certainly will tomorrow.
A lot of self development content excels at making you feel inadequate, weak-willed and lazy, even in the face of years of evidence to the contrary (e.g. working 60- to 80-hour weeks). All these attempts to systematize my day were a manifestation of my illusion that I could structure and control a self-discovery journey by “optimizing” the process. Unsurprisingly, even though many of these tools were useful later when I used them in the right context (even the cold showers), I failed.
I was trying to discover who I was by taking the outcome-based, overachieving approach that got me stuck in the first place. The step I missed was releasing the idea that the process is controllable. All the productivity hacks in the world won’t guarantee success. Ideas need to marinate, beliefs need to change, the desire to experiment needs to emerge. That doesn’t happen on a timeline.
The only commitment you need to make is to stay in the process.
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