The Best Way Toward the Good Life
Apologies for the late letter! My daughter hasn’t been feeling too well and the holiday threw some routines out of order, so my normal time allotted to this project has been, well, abnormal!
But we’re getting rolling again.
This week, you can expect to learn what to aim at.
I should preface that this isn’t me telling you what exactly you should do, but what activities would be beneficial for you to engage in if you’re to both set your aim properly and refine your skills which will carry you to your target.
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Reach for Something Else
I was able to listen to this podcast between Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dr. Andrew Huberman. They discussed a wide range of things, things that I truly believe are on going to shape the coming landscape of psychology for the next few decades.
My hope in selecting this podcast today is that, if you want to explore psychological jargon, this is a good place for you to start doing that. I enjoyed how they framed certain things, so some things may sound similar (but hopefully not too much haha).
The Best Way Toward the Good Life
Last week we discussed how to aim and the subsequent deliberate attitude it requires. I figured it may be helpful to discuss, now that we have the “why” and the “how”, the important “what” in this process of forging for ourselves a proverbial good life.
Of course, you are the one who ultimately chooses what to aim at and how it’s significant to you, but there are several general activities that are essential to engage in if you want to give yourself the best chances to succeed.
Think of it as time spent honing your aim and practicing your craft.
During my time as an athlete, both in high school and college, there was nothing more clear than the need to practice.
Not just practice the movements you might do during a competition, although that’s highly important, but to also train through yoga, weight lifting, reviewing video of your performance and that of others (professionals).
While you certainly would improve some if you were to stick to practicing your competition movements, it’s remarkably better to incorporate training that targets areas that are characteristic of your movement.
To be specific, I competed in shot put and discus primarily; as you can see, it requires immense balance, tension, precision, speed, and power (not to forget the mental aspect of competition mentality).
Training for anything often requires more than just doing the thing itself.
You have to practice the meta-movements so that when you perform in those pivotal moments, you can focus on the sole act itself without a bunch of little iniquities popping up.
And we know this!
But for some reason, we treat the most important performance of all, our reaching toward a good life, as something utterly foreign and mysterious.
That’s often due to the errors which are commonly made when the object is too close to us—there’s no object closer to us yet so enigmatic as ourselves.
Intimately tied to the “what” in our sequence is the matter of that horribly misused word, “good”.
Why do I call it misused?
So much of what is called good is repugnant and what’s frequently labeled as it’s opposite, the bad, is as necessary as the air we breathe.
How we live, if we leave ourselves solely to the ideas of another, becomes a game of repressing the instincts and dispositions native to you instead of integrating them into some more noble character.
A repressed instinct is still an instinct; the only difference is whether we’re conscious of it’s pull or not—so to fail at integrating your instincts into a more robust conscious narrative based upon the judgements of others is, in itself, an injustice not only toward yourself and your aims but to those you might be able to help flourish along your journey.
The good life is not something that’s necessarily objective, but it’s not entirely a matter of mere perception either.
Again, as all things we discuss, there is a fine balance to be had here.
What’s good for you is not necessarily good for me; we each have different aims and to set your significance solely upon the trajectory of another is to set yourself up for failure.
There are indicators that someone has achieved a good life and is living significantly in their own rights which are observable by, and above all, their degree of happiness.
While happiness is an internal state, you can still tell when someone is happy—there’s a simple aura of satisfaction about them that pulls you toward them (or repulses you if you’re in a sorry state).
They’re also likely satisfied externally as well and their things are in proper order (relationships, finances, career, legacy, etc.)
These facts are why so many self-help books are actually unhelpful—they don’t understand “self” nor “help”.
But I’m not sure I can blame them, it’s not like there’s a guidebook to all of this; hence why we “reach” and not “grab” for more around here.
Yet, millions still hold out silent hope every year for “The Book” that will finally help them.
Why?
Our brains need an outline for future behavior; we need a guidebook.
They’re moldable and “plastic” meaning that we were designed for education and not fixed like a circuit board we’re so often compared with.
The self-help category plays to an instinct within us to strive, improve, and achieve; the same instinct that drove me to start writing; the same instinct that brings you here now.
So if we have these instincts but no guide book, what are we to do?
The direction I’ll point you toward, rather than moralistically assert, is that we need to involve ourselves with the activities which lead to our flourishing rather than our demise.
When thinking of what activities we ought to spend our time on, the kind of activities that may be both the objects of our aim and how we refine it, many of you will draw a blank.
There’s 6 activities that are common to nearly all men and women of integrity; each is a good in itself but when brought into concert with one another produce a nearly inescapable recipe for success.
Read
Write
Health
Community
Contribution
Contemplation
I will be releasing a longer-form essay on the importance of each of these in our endeavor of reaching for the good life, but I’m currently battling with it to keep it from becoming a book for the sole reason that these activities are just that dense.
For now, I’m going to link a thread I posted awhile ago on X that gives a bit more detail about each of these activities:
The most important thing to remember is that you’re the one setting the aim, you’re the one pursuing it, this is simply a potential training regimen which you might order yourself around.
If you’re not sure where to do with this, here’s how I can help:
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Thanks for reading!
See you next week!!
xDevan