There are so many books for self-help, spirituality, success - however you will see that reading those books does not actually help a large population. Why?
Human mind is very intelligent and sharp. It asks only one thing - what is the purpose and why I am doing whatever I am doing at every instant? If your sub-conscious mind does not find purpose, whatever you do -- you will not be fully engaged in that work.
For example we have exams to tell whether we are competent or not -- but our human mind already knows whether we are competent or not - exam is not for that. Exams serve to find whether for a set of inputs your output is better than rest of all others who have given the same exam - or basically if you have mugged up well. Life is the real exam where question papers are out of syllabus - whoever excels there is a good student of life.
Do life have purpose? Apart from replication and survival, there is No purpose. This the sub-conscious mind knows, but tries to hide behind some made up higher purpose. If your made up purpose is strong, you can fool your mind to believe that, using a sort of self hypnosis or hallucination.
There are 4 levels to find purpose and linked to feeling of happiness.
1. Material - Experiencing new things around the world to satisfy self ego. An example is the wish of somebody to become rich and successful in career. Most people like engineers and businessman fall in this category. (What can I get?).
2. Social - Helping other needy beings. An example is a wish to leave a mark as a person known to be compassionate. This is not ego-centric. Examples are freedom fighters, non-corrupt politicians, teachers, doctors, social workers. (Whom can I help and with what?)
3. Intellect - Putting the mind to test and enjoying challenges. This is again ego-centric and deriving pleasure from solving difficult problems. True philosophers and researchers fall in this category (Can I solve this problem? What can help me solve this?)
4. Spiritual - This is beyond physical mind and deals with something loosely called the quantum access; and there is wide belief in scientist circle that level 3 intelligence is a quantum phenomenon and level 4 is beyond that -- deep into information represented and encoded in quantum form. Here, as per gurus, you enjoy exploring the world from a 3rd person's point of view via meditation and self questioning. The end purpose here is any one of the four unions (yoga) - do your duty, offer prayers to the creator, gain access to infinite knowledge, a mixture of earlier three. Example practitioners are monks and spiritual minded people. (What knowledge about my soul and world can I access?)
If you look carefully, you will find most spiritual guys are scientists in their initial part of life as they need to traverse through Step 3 before Step 4 -- only exception is offering focused prayers to the creator which is a short cut and most cannot reach that focus level.
The ultimate goal is to take the spiritual path and as long as you are not taking that path -- in any lower level path you will wander around 'What am I doing and why?'. So you will feel a pinch of unhappiness no matter what you do.
Now, success in current society is unfortunately measured by point 1 only: material. So the best one can do is to maximize the frequency of happiness among the cycles of sadness and happiness. This needs a trick to fool your mind.
So how to achieve the highest level in 1 to move to higher levels later?
1. Assume the post of an authority, CEO, Business magnate or Olympic athlete whatever you think is good. What is good or not for you - you are the decider - whatever you think is good is good - there is no good or bad job in this world. So think yourself already at that position and behave like that. You will become that as this is the rule of attraction in nature - mind creates reality.
2. Next define intermediate rewards - if I do this without procrastination I will get this benefit. If I stop doing this I will get this. Define milestones in rewards: + 1 point for each positive activity (like finishing assignments on time) and -1 point for ill habits or bad behavior (like smoking) - this needs to be collected each day. The milestone can be 50 points, 200 points, 500 points, 1000 and so on. This can be redeemed for gifts, like for 1000 points you take a vacation, 10,000 points buy a luxury car. This needs to be maintained in a physical diary.
3. Use a notebook, to plan your day in the morning and write a summary at end of day of what happened today. All the accumulated happenings you must later compile to your own autobiography - so be careful what you do as this will go out in public as a book in the later part of life when you become famous. This a way to control you actions.
4. Each day you should learn something new. Whatever you learn, write it down in physical notebook and take notes of everything as learning will be fast. If you read a book, magazine, watch a video, listen to music - write notes on each activity as this will enrich your brain and memory to refer to and imagine later.
Mind cannot process too much control buttons - hence above 4 are sufficient - nothing else is needed as mind takes care of the actual path planning to success, as long as you are sticking to the aforementioned 4 points.
In general, there are 3 goals in level 1: take care of yourself, take care of your family, explore new experiences (not assets).
Persons already at higher levels (negligible number) do not require this above guidance. Again, the trick is to fool your mind with a strong position (like a new startup head) with a strong purpose you want to reach (like solving cancer). Else, you will be driven by what other people want you to reach. As base hardware of humans is same, anybody can do anything by correctly programming the software (physical brain part of mind).
Part 1 ends.
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