On motivation and getting started MoC • On the process MoC

Do What Makes You Vibrate

I've been chasing dreams for so long. But the best things I accomplished in my life always seemed to be the ones I approached on the side, almost inadvertently. Why is that?

There's a sort of self-defeating process that we start the moment we do anything just as a mean to an end. Maybe it's because we lose our focus on the present. Or that we shut down the very brain synapses needed to actually achieve a goal. But more likely, it's because we fixate so much on one way of doing things, which makes us ignore the plethora of other—and often better—ways to get us where we want to be.

We think we know what we have to do in order to achieve our goals. But the world is an incredibly complex system that we, humans, aren't equipped to fully comprehend. From this, I believe in a fallacy deeply ingrained in our brains, which is the tendency to think we can orchestrate our future exactly how we envision it. The hindsight bias, combined with the constant pattern-seeking mechanism inside our brain, and the need to control, give meaning, explain, and categorize the world around us, make us fail to realize one bold, scary truth: we aren't much in control, if at all.

But it's scary only on the surface. Once you scratch the surface, and embrace fully this fact, it gives way to an incredible freedom. Freedom of mind, spirit, and action. And this leads paradoxically the best way to attain our best achievements: by simply following our curiosity. I call this vibrating. When something makes you vibrate, you resonate with it. You fully embrace it and make one with it.

Follow your excitement

When we're led by what sparks our interest, we're no longer in the goal-seeking state. We're at a higher vibration level. A level where our mind is fully open. A level where our brain is fully receptive. And it's exactly in this state that we open up to new insights, new ways, and opportunities. Not when we're obsessing over accomplishing a certain outcome, but when we're open to the universe. When we're willing to follow a mysterious thread, without any idea where it's going, and let it unravel and surprise us.

If you got tired of something that was previously a passion, chances are you switched curiosity for achievement.
You may have started playing an instrument for fun, but now you want to play like that genius you saw on YouTube with millions of views..
Or you started a hobby, but you heard someone making money doing it, so you seek to live off of it too. Beware Proximate motivation.

Pay attention to what you feel when you're doing that activity. What do you feel?
Whenever you do something out of curiosity, you feel joy and excitement. You will be vibrating. You don’t really think of what it’s going to lead to. You're enjoying now. And time flies by.
But when you do it just as a necessary step to reach whatever goal, you feel anguish, anxiety, stress, frustration, and impatience. Your are in a hurry because your thoughts are in the future. And things always seems to take too long. That's when you know you are doing something just as a mean to and end. It's at the exact moment that your mind shuts off and you stop being creative.

This is one of the fundamental tenets of the Daoist philosophy, what it calls action in non-action. When you're doing something without Trying hard to achieve an ulterior motive, you flow with the way of the universe. But when you start yearning just for an end result, you start doing things you don't really want to be doing, just because of an end goal in mind, and your are going against the flow of nature.