Talking about finding things in the most unexpected places
I think I have finally found meaning and a very very sharp perspective of my life
I can totoally relate to this stuff that I have found..this article blew my mind!
And here I was looking for "travel tips" when I stumbled upon http://www.mavericktraveler.com
and gave me a sense of perspective of "now".
Please read this article, all credits goes to him!
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Several months ago, I met up with an old friend. Like many of the great men with which I consider myself lucky to cross paths in life, I met him overseas — in Brazil. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that he was also traveling alone, brazenly grabbing the things that he wanted, whether they were fine women or crazy adventures, all while running a successful passive-income business on the side.
So, when I returned back to the States several months ago, he was one of the very few people whom I notified of my arrival. He’s one of the few guys in the world I can fully relate with and trust; an interesting and cool guy who’s always either hustling 18 hours per day, planning, building and launching a new business or looking for adventures in the most random corners of the globe. (I have other friends, but I’ve long learned that a one-sided conversation where I tell them my countless adventures and they just keep nodding isn’t a fun way to spend an evening.)
The plan was to have a couple of beers and reminisce about our old times. We met up and immediately began talking about where it all began: Brazil. After that, he told me about his recent two month trip to Colombia’s Caribbean coast. I told him about my European adventures, and what a fantastic time I had living in The Baltics this past summer. He was enthusiastic, asking me lots of questions and even making a few mental notes about going to Europe in the near future.
But, then something happened. We ran out of things to say about our past travels. We ran out of things to say about our future travels. Right there, in a split second, he did something completely unexpected: he switched to the present. He began talking about things that he was doing now. I fully expected that our whole evening would be spent talking about that night in Rio, or that night in Belo Horizonte, or that night in São Paulo, but as far as he was concerned, the past was firmly in the past. He was now busy living a new chapter in his life, and that chapter was right now and right here in New York, not inside the samba clubs of Brazil or the salsa clubs of Colombia.
Living in the present isn’t a bad thing, but what caught me completely off guard was my complete unpreparedness for the topic at hand. I felt like a high school student who got caught in surprise pop quiz. I felt ambushed. I didn’t know how to react. Truth is, I didn’t have any plans for the present. I didn’t know what I was going to do. In fact, that was probably one of the reasons why I really came out to meet him; maybe I was seeking some kind of guidance, some kind of support, someone to point me in the right direction. And here he was, a guy who always got shit done, a guy who always had all the answers.
I was searching for answers to my own emptiness and lack of direction (living in the past was the most obvious hint that I didn’t have anything better in the present). I was still mentally in that glorious old world and didn’t know how to adjust to this new one. Maybe I didn’t want to adjust at all. After all, in that other world I was free from planning concrete goals; I could eat, drink, and flirt with gorgeous women all day, every day. It was truly a carefree life. But in this world, I needed to get serious. I needed to set direction for the future. I needed to create my own reality. But where do I start? How do I bootstrap myself out of the past and into the present?
The breakthrough came to me one evening while I debated whether to go for a run or not. Running, as far as I’m concerned, is a boring, monotonous activity, but it’s also the easiest and most effective way to engage in a vigorous physical exercise, especially given today’s sedentary lifestyles. There were many times in the past where I made all kinds of excuses, but something about that particular evening was different. It suddenly hit me like a ball of lightning that I’m a healthy young man with two legs and two arms. I’m not sick. I don’t have a fever. I don’t have bad knees. I don’t have a heart
condition. I don’t have a lung condition. Physically, I have everything I need to be able to run any distance I wanted. The only thing that was holding me back was laziness (which was my way of saying that my time was better spent sitting on the couch and watching a mindless TV sitcom than investing in my own mind and body). Maybe when I’m 80 years old with bad knees, I wouldn’t be able to physically run anymore, but now as a perfectly healthy young man, not being able to take advantage of what I possessed hit me as the most illogical thing in the world. I went out and ran the longest distance in many years.
That evening sparked a revolution in my mind, forcing me to scrutinize and reexamine my thought processes and actions. An image popped into my head; I began to see myself as a nation which was blessed with countless natural resources, but didn’t have any form of government nor a well functioning economy to convert those resources into wealth. Imagine a country that has within its borders all the major raw materials: oil, wheat, sugar, copper, silver, cocoa, ore, diamonds but doesn’t have the machinery to turn those resources into goods or doesn’t even bother to trade these commodities with other nation. I realized that everything I needed was already in my possession, and that all I now had to do was begin extracting, harvesting, processing, marketing and exporting them.
I had everything: experience, health, intelligence, intimate knowledge of various subjects, but yet I was still looking outward for some magical potion that could somehow fill an obscure void and give me that little push into the right direction. That’s why I began seeking salvation and guidance from someone else, namely my friend. But how could my friend ever help? How could he give an answer to such an open-ended question as to what to do with my life? He was just another guy, a guy just like myself, who only differed from me in his unstoppable tenacity to implement his raw ideas into money-generating assets. We were like two countries with the exact same resources, except his country had a stable government and a robust economy and mine didn’t. He had guts, I didn’t.
Next, came the second part of the puzzle: how to stop looking for some opaque, nebulous, open-ended salvation from others, and instead be more concrete with what I need and how I should go about getting those needs satisfied. (The part about being more concrete with my needs made me immediately remember a couple of one-itis’es in my youth when I idolized women without being forward with what I really wanted: hardcore, monkey sex.)
Since people are inherently egoistic, I quickly realized that in order to get what I wanted, I need to give them something that they wanted in return. Successful people are successful precisely because they spend their time on things that yield them the maximum possible return. Doing lots of things for free would bankrupt them quickly. (I doubt my friend would meet me again if only to reminisce about some distant past that’s no longer relevant.)
The key to getting what you want is figuring out how to use what you already have in ways that are beneficial to someone else (who, in turn, has what you need). The important point is that you can only begin bartering with others once you’ve done a complete inventory of your present stock. It’s only after you know the true value of your own raw materials, will you be able to trade them profitably with other parties.
Armed with this understanding, I began to view myself as an efficient factory with two assembly lines: assembly line of my “outputs” (things that I’m able to synthesize and “sell”: my knowledge, experience, intelligence, skills, etc) and assembly line of my “inputs” (things that I’m “buying”: what I need/want/desire from others). Essentially, I realized that my success lay in seeing and presenting myself as a flexible microeconomic unit which could efficiently generate output while simultaneously processing input, instead of some insolvent opaque matter that only sought very abstract things like the meaning of life and salvation from everyone it interacted with. I even visualized myself being composed off various gears, like the ones you find inside a mechanical watch. The gears are constantly turning, with one gear spinning another, and so on.
Whereas before I was like a land blessed with natural resources but with no government and no functioning economy, now I was an efficiently running factory, producing things that can be used to get what I want from others.
I ultimately realized that no one — not my good friend, not my parents, not the bartender, not my boss, not some cute girl, not even The Pope — had The Answer. I was asking the wrong questions. Everyone, after all, is simply trying to get by with what they have. Nobody has the answers to very abstract questions like the meaning of life. Construct a more specific question — the more specific, the better — and now finding someone with the answer is a much simpler task.
It all made sense. At the core, life is based on inter-human barter. I sell, he buys. I buy, she sells.
As time went on, I began to observe my environment in a completely new way, as though I was suddenly graced with x-ray vision. I began to see and feel the intricacies of each situation, no matter how simple or complex. I started noticing that certain people always magically get what they want, no matter where they are and what they are doing. But I’ve also noticed other people who are always stagnant, lost, confused, and forever struggling, as though the answers to their problems lie outside their realm; for, they are always seeking something, be it understanding, support, salvation, sympathy, empathy, compassion, or pity from someone else. If they only knew the right place to look.
