Life is not about being, it’s about creating.
This is hard to understand and in reality it’s a lesson that is learned and re-learned throughout life.
For me it’s always been cued by feeling behind in life or being lost during the day when significant challenges pop up. For some it might be triggered by significant failure, imposter syndrome during success or when resurfacing deep emotional trauma that one hasn’t gained the strength to address yet.
Life is about being in a state of flow. Creating as opportunities come to you and living to the benefit of others as community is what makes us human. We block this state of flow with deep focus on goals and passions - which aren’t inherently bad, they are only misrepresented and misused.
It’s like using a hammer to screw in a nail.
We’ve all experienced the state of “flow”. It’s where you feel at peace with the thoughts and actions you’re taking. If working out is a habit you perform with low mental resources you’ve experienced this state of flow when lifting, where you zone out of everything but the action at hand. For some it’s writing code or working on art.
For me it’s writing.
We break out of flow when we being to think about belonging. When we associate personal goals, needs and desires over those of others. People start companies to feel like they belong in the community of entrepreneurs, people create content on YouTube in the hopes the algorithm finds them a community that appreciates them and people join social media communities because they want to belong.
Wanting to belong isn’t a bad thing - to me it’s as important as the air we breathe. The act of wanting to belong clouds judgement and brings sadness along with it.
It forces us to break flow - dwell on the past that has occurred and worry about a future which may never occur. Mental resources that could be reserved to maintain flow.
During my earliest days as an “entrepreneur” I put the likes of Walt Disney, Elon Musk, Dale Carnegie and Bill Gates on a pedestal - I wanted to be like them, among them and as impactful with my life as they were.
I allocated every bit of my time and effort to mimic the greats in the hopes I could engineer my way to being like them. I found small success from the perspective of awards and some monetary gains, but all of that was meaningless towards what I wanted. I wanted to belong to that community of greats. No matter the number of awards I racked up could help me do what they’d done - outside approval doesn’t make you impactful.
This was me breaking flow for years and years as a young kid.
This was not a mistake that I would ever take back nor would I want to learn it in any different way - we all suck at first.
The mistake that was made was focusing on “I”. I could mimic how they spoke, how they interacted or the companies they would build or the things they created - but doing what has been done is worthless and a waste of time.
The thing that made each of those individual’s successful was creating. No matter their field, they created, honed and focused on creating the best product for other people. Life was about others and is about others.
When you focus on creating instead of being - your mental model shifts to focus on other people’s problems which drives a community to form around you.
When you learn skills to help others, they learn new skills to help you
When you meet amazing people while creating, they meet amazing people while creating
While you refine your talents, they are refining their talents
When you experience new things, they are experiencing new things
All of these unique skills, talents, networks and experiences amalgamate to create beautiful communities and solutions to problems that large masses of people face.
View life as a way to serve others in the best way possible as when you do so, others are mirroring those same actions and we make progress together and benefit each other.
I can speak about flow or creating from the startup perspective - as that’s where I’ve been working as an engineer and building products to solve problems.
One of the biggest sources of breaking this sense of belonging or flow state is when you hear from people that what you’ve been working on creating doesn’t provide value to them. They reject to invest or use your product and it feels like they pushed away the things you’ve been creating for others.
While everyone delivers a “no” differently, these responses have to become cues of what you should be creating.
If you obsess over discovering and solving a problem a group of people have then everything else eventually falls into place. If you’re trying to raise money from investors first without finding something people want - you’ll never get anywhere and more importantly you’ll begin to feel like you don’t belong after facing repeated rejections.
However, if you disassociate away from the solution you’re creating and obsessing on other’s problems and creating the right solution for that problem things begin to fall in place.
The beautiful part of this is finding that problem itself is a process of discovery and continuously creating, testing, deleting and trying all over again. It’s like working out, the better you want you body to perform, when performance is asked of it, requires you to learn you body, tune it and sculpt it day after day.
Finding the problem to solve and then creating the solution to solve that problem is a similar learning process. If you’re obsessed not with belonging, but with the journey of creating for others, success eventually comes.
It also restores a feeling of flow because people know that you genuinely want to discover and solve problems, even if right now you aren’t aware of what to solve. It’s why sales and marketing copy is always focused on “trying to make you realize a problem you have”. But even in writing, we can see through marketing copy and see the true motives behind each action.
Think about others first and things start get a lot better. Sure, it might take a long time for you to reach a standard of impact that’s on the scale of millions or billions of people, but there’s no lack of success in making even one other person’s life better than it was yesterday.
If you can make one person’s life better, you inevitably start to work on bigger problems with more people with unique talents and skills. The journey continues and eventually you may have built something that you can look back on for a few minutes and appreciate what you’ve created and the people you’ve helped and met along the way.
Keep creating and seeking mental clarity.
Swarnav S Pujari