Tie Yourself to the Boat
You know that age-old story of Ulysses when he knew that the beautiful sirens were unbearable so he told his crew to tie him to the boat and to not untie him for any reason whatsoever no matter what he said.
“You need to do that with your own life.”
I just had the epiphany this morning that aligning one's life with something that generates aliveness is a life or death situation.
And the only way to do that is to create an environment that rewards discipline towards that aim. We can't expect ourselves to just let our soul follow our passion or whatever that means.
We must be absolutely ruthless with creating discipline and structure in our life.
But what many people get wrong with discipline is that they're trying to discipline themselves towards the wrong things. They're trying to discipline themselves towards the things that other people tell them that they should be disciplining themselves for, not the things that are actually right, revealed through the process of introspection to be the things that actually bring aliveness to one's life.
The distractions of the world are becoming ever more effective at pulling us away from a meaningful life.
You have to be RUTHLESS. There is no other way in our modern world.
When you figure out what you want in life, it then becomes a question of how do you think through every possible way that your mind could become distracted and you remove every possible excuse, internal and external. Every possible external object vying for your attention and every possible internal belief vying for your attention that gets you off track in ruthlessly eliminating those things.
In standing in the nakedness of doing what needs to be done, and facing the entirety of the fear that is the root of all desire for distraction