You Will Chase the Wrong Goals Until You Understand This

This framework makes you stop making decisions you will later regret.

Decisions are everything.

You are making thousands of them daily.

But unless you become very conscious, you are going to make a lot of bad ones.

The following framework helps you to become conscious of what you should be doing.

And no one is going to tell you. You are going to tell yourself.

It is simple to understand and still so true that it can actually be used to make good decisions.

All experiences we have can be put into one of the four quadrants of this framework.

Every experience we have is to some degree challenging or not-challenging, and it feels meaningful or not-meaningful.

The word feels is very important here. More on that later.

This framework is amazing. This is how it allows us to make great decisions:

We can take every goal we come up with, see what experiences that goal would create for us or for others, and then we get a clear answer about whether it is worth pursuing or not.

The fundamental decision to make

Can you agree to the following statement?

As long as you are alive, you can not have no experience.

Because if you can, you agree to the most important and fundamental truth, and I have yet to meet someone who does not agree with this when they take the time to consider it.

So you agree to the most important and fundamental truth, and you agree with almost everyone.

That is mindblowing in itself, but let me go deeper into this (without making it unnecessarily complex) so we can see what actual benefit we have from seeing this truth.

If we can not choose between having an experience or not having an experience (as long as we are alive), what are the next obvious questions to ask?

They are:

• How consciously do we experience what we experience?

• What do we want to experience and what not?

• What can we do to create the experiences we want to experience or to create the conditions for those experiences?

Choosing between experience and no-experience is not an option. We agreed on that.

But we still have choice and power. And that power lies in answering these questions sincerely.

Do we choose to be co-creators of experience, or do we choose to be mere passive consumers of experiences created “for” us?

Once we make the (fundamental) decision to become co-creators of experience, life gets interesting.

Once we make that decision, we can think about goals. And not only can we think about them, but we can think about them deeply and thoroughly. We can ask the next logical question:

If all I can do while being alive is create experiences (or conditions for experiences), then what goals are worth pursuing? What experiences are worth having?

Any experience that feels meaningful!

But what has meaning?

The only variable left then is this: What has meaning?

The great thing about that variable is that it is not really a variable.

If we approach the question with our minds, it looks like a variable. But we do have a more accurate tool than the mind to approach this fundamental question.

That tool is our intuition. When we feel into it, we can very easily say if something feels meaningful or not.

This takes practice. But more than it takes practice, it needs courage and sincerity. Because often we feel that a goal is carrying a lot of meaning, but we instantly also realize that approaching it would require what we imagine to be a sacrifice.

Our mind is projecting all the hard things that we would have to do or all the nice things we would have to give up.

The highest form of living is approaching these hard goals anyway. It is the highest form of living because it involves making all kinds of sacrifices to be true to the potential of being alive. (That is the potential of meaningful experiences that could be had.)

Discipline is not merely a character trait that enables personal growth. It is the sole differentiator between a life lived in alignment with its highest potential and one not.

There is no spiritual path without discipline. A hedonist spiritual path is not spiritual. It may be esoteric and sexy. But it is not spiritual.

For the simple reason that it does not align with life’s potential.

It does not devote all its energy towards creating the highest amount of high-quality, meaningful experiences.

How to feel meaning

This is extremely hard to describe with the tool of language because it ultimately can only be felt.

But there are some extreme situations and experiences that almost everyone experiences as meaningful.

With the exception of very severe pathological cases, women experience giving birth as deeply meaningful. Why else would they have the incredible discipline of bearing all that pain and making all these sacrifices?

Deep, vulnerable conversations that build trust are meaningful.

The simple truth is that if you feel into it, you will be able to answer this for yourself.

I answer the question of what has meaning in the following way:

Goals are meaningful when they create conditions for more meaningful experiences.

Goals are meaningful when they advance the development of consciousness.

Goals are meaningful when they help people raise their level of consciousness:

So many things can be meaningful!

Art can be meaningful. It can be deeply inspiring and empowering. Empowering people to embrace life more deeply and create conditions for more meaningful experiences for themselves.

A business can be meaningful when it is helping people solve problems that enable them to embrace life more deeply and create conditions for more meaningful experiences for themselves.

Social work can be meaningful when it helps people solve problems that enable them to embrace life more deeply and create conditions for more meaningful experiences for themselves.

You can go on and on like this.

All you ever have to do is sincerely ask if the goal you are pursuing is helping yourself or others to create conditions for more meaningful experiences to be had.

Working to be able to own a Lamborghini? It probably does not fall into that category.

Working on empowering people? It probably does.

Our modern society is optimized for removing economic friction. It is not optimized for creating meaningful experiences.

It is optimized for productivity. Optimized for throughput.

But we never stop and ask: Is this creating more meaningful experiences for us?

We just keep doing what we do.

The perpetuum mobile of meaning

There is no perpetuum mobile in physics.

But there is one in the realm of spirit:

Meaningful experiences empower individuals to create conditions in which more meaningful experiences can be had, which in turn empower individuals… and so on and on.

Interpretation is the key

If you think about this even deeper, you realize that making great decisions is all about the ability to interpret well.

Are you able to understand whether your goal is meaningful or not?

Once you are able to understand that, the discipline is the easy part.

Because while it does feel hard to do, it also feels deeply meaningful. So meaningful that you will do it no matter how hard.

If this makes sense to you, you know you want to go deeper with it.

You can do so when you become a paid subscriber, and you automatically join the Inner Freedom Network. Inside, we clear roadblocks on the path to higher levels of consciousness in a powerful weekly live call: