Today was productive thinking and re-evaluating day. I spent some time going over my personal assessments, namely the Enneagram test, during my usual morning routine. It was enlightening to reread my personality type, which is a 3 type. I’ve also taken other personality assessment, and they all allude to the same strengths and weaknesses. I’m a proponent of personality assessments when they are viewed holistically (using many assessments). They provide unique insight and often are very accurate portraits of our personalities. I don’t believe them to be prescriptive. They don’t define you, but they can give some insights and recommendations to help understand yourself better and discover ways to improve.
I also listened to a podcast by Naval Ravikant on Shane Parrish’s podcast Farnam street while I was working out. Naval is intelligent, well read, and articulate and discusses wide rangings topics from thoughts on happiness, how to make consistently good decisions with high upside, and what to read. It was enlightening and very timely since that’s been on my mind especially after I reread my Enneagram. It got me thinking about where I should be spending my time and not caring about what others are doing or how well they are doing. What are the things I enjoy and want to do?
Also, the conversation went along the same lines as my conversation with Aeron the other day. The idea of pulling yourself out of the world’s constructs established through tradition, government, laws, media outlets, peer pressure, etc. It’s taking oneself out of the equation and unshackling yourself from how we “should” act, do, or be.
For example, keeping up with the Jones’ is a construct that we’ve created. We feel embarrassed if we don’t have the stuff other people have. We force ourselves to be extroverts because that’s what the world seems to embrace. We read certain books because that’s what everyone else is reading that appears to be intellectual. We have all these invisible forces pulling at us to behave a certain way. The sooner we’re able to see these seemingly gravitational pulls, the faster we can prevent ourselves from getting sucked in and creating a life congruent to your value systems rather than what “society” wants so we can be revered, acknowledged, and be seen.
Why would we want this when being revered, acknowledge, and seen is so attractive? The answer, I surmised, is inner peace. Living congruent to your value systems. Living in alignment with your specific intellectual design rather than trying to bend your natural dispositions to aspire to be like others when living to the highest potential of your own design seems a more worthy calling.
I enjoy days where I get to reflect and ponder life’s direction because I think it’s one of the most influential activities you can do to maximize your potential. It’s like looking at a treasure map, and you have multiple sites where the hidden treasure lies, but your time is limited, and you can only go to one.
In each one, there are different amounts of hidden treasure (The harder the trek the bigger, the treasure) and to get to each one requires slightly different skillsets. Your job is to figure out which one to go after that will give you the highest expected return given your abilities AND hopefully the one that will also maximize the joy you receive going on the journey. (I was hoping to just use a marathon example, but it was too simplistic and misses on specific nuances a treasure hunt provides.)
You don’t want to stay in this mode forever, but it’s important to take the time to continually check if you’re headed towards the treasure that pushes you to your limits to help you grow without breaking you. You can easily go after the one that requires little effort, but you miss out on the considerable upside of the reward and the growth that comes from pursuing something that is at the edge of your abilities. This journey isn’t for the faint of heart because it’s a hard road that aims to break you. But the more that it doesn’t break you, your grit seems to calcify and become stronger and more durable. So when you face things that would have crushed you before, the impact is no longer sufficient.
This was a good day of reflecting.
Aside from reflecting on my Enneagram and life direction, I had some great meals today. I found another place that delivers and has some great food. It’s a bit on the pricier side, but I consider it a celebratory feast before I move to my next location. I bought both lunch and dinner at this location. I’m most likely ordering the same for tomorrow as well. It’ll be my official last day at this place and then on to the next.
I also spent today doing laundry and going to Big C mart to pull more money out of the ATM since the ATM at seven eleven was busted. However, after coming back to the condo, I saw that there was an ATM on the property! Oh well. At least I got to see this random dog head into the store, and no one even bothered with it.
Oh, I almost forgot but today was a pretty crazy day in cryptoland. Bitcoin had a huge run, and we almost broke the 10-month descending trendline which would have been a huge deal. We’re on the precipice of a huge movement in price. Fidelity and Bakkt are helping with bringing in institutional money into the market. Exciting times.