You Can Make the Choice To Aim Up

If students do this for 90 minutes, it decreases the chance they'll drop out of university by 50%. So that's how well this works. That's quite something!

Okay, so here's the game. It's not an easy game, but you can do it badly and it'll still work. So that's a good game. The first part of the game is to give yourself the benefit of the doubt. For the purposes of the game, imagine that the universe would not grind cataclysm to a halt if something as horrible and wretched as you had an okay time.

It's hard for people to grasp that because you might think of people as selfish and self-centered and out for themselves. All of that! Most people aren't like that. There's about 4% of people who are like that, and look the hell out for them. They're online trolls by and large. The clinical evidence for that's very clear, by the way. It's pretty much them and not you if you're in interaction with them. It's all about them. But most people are the opposite of that. Most people are better to other people than they are to themselves.

You know, most people are harder on themselves than they are on anyone else. There's something admirable about that because it means to some degree that you're looking out for other people. But there's something that's not admirable about it because it means that you're not treating yourself with the respect that someone with your intrinsic worth must have to flourish.

And so, the problem is, of course, you know more than anyone else what the full range of inadequacies, what your full range of inadequacies most precisely is. You also know all the stupid things you've ever done, and that's a heavy burden. It's hard to look at yourself knowing what you know about yourself and then think that you deserve anything other than suffering for your sins.

It's really hard for people to treat themselves like they would. This is something else I learned from Carl Jung. You know, there's this biblical injunction to treat and love your neighbor as if he were yourself, but that sort of presumes you love yourself. Most people are better at loving their neighbors, but there's actually an equation that rules it.

The first part of the equation is you should act out the proposition that it's incumbent upon you to strive to put your life together so the best possible thing could happen to you. You should strive to take care of yourself as if you're taking care of someone you love. That's hard because, you know, you're trouble.

So, the first part of the game is you have to play. It's like, okay, let's admit for a second that it wouldn't be the end of the world if I wasn't being roasted over a slow fire all the time for my iniquities. I'll give myself a break. Okay, now that's the first. That's hard. You got to think that through. You know, you got to open yourself up to the possibility that the Earth wouldn't crack open and swallow you up if you dared to imagine that things maybe could go okay for you if you did the right thing.

Then the next thing you do is you got to ask yourself a question. Ask yourself whatever that means. It's like, how can you ask yourself and get the answer if you don't know the answer? And why do you have to ask the question if you could come up with the answer? So you're not really asking yourself whatever that means. I don't even know what that means. I thought it up.

Well, how? Well, you don't—how do you think things up? You don't know. Thoughts just appear in the theater of your imagination. They just spring out of the void and there they are. You might think, "Well, I thought that up." It's like, have it your way, but it's not an explanation. It's a theory; it's a dream that it's you.

So, imagine you ask yourself a question. Now, the first thing you're doing is admitting that there's something you don't know. So that's humility. There's something I don't know that I need to know, that I could learn if I was willing to learn. So what don't you know? Here's the question. Five years from now, you could have what you need and want, but you have to specify what it is.

Now, you don't have to specify it perfectly because as you move towards it, you can improve. You know you're going to learn along the way, but you've got to get—you've got to be aiming in the right direction, vaguely. Then you have to move in that direction to learn what you need to learn as you move in that direction.

So then you think and you have to ask yourself this, and then you have to imagine it's like, okay, I get to have what I want and need. What would that look like? Maybe you're just stumped. Then you know, "See, it's such a big question, and you've never really asked yourself that." No one else has ever really asked you that either, and so you don't even know where to begin because you're that lost in the desert. That's a good way of thinking about it.

So in this online program, this future authoring program, we break it down into seven questions for people. My clients used to come to me, my students too, and say, "Well, I don't really know what to do. What should I do?" My answer was, "I don't know what the hell you should do." It's like, you're you. I'm not here to affirm your identity or to deny it; I'm here to help you figure out the pathway forward.

But if you don't know what to do, well, here's some guidelines: don't just do nothing because you can't. If you do nothing, you just get old, and that's something. So there's no doing nothing. You should do something. What? Well, why don't you do what other people do? If you don't know what to do, you start with that.

So what do other people do? Where do people find meaning in their lives? Well, here's a bunch of different domains. Most people want an intimate relationship, and if you don't, well, you've got to ask yourself what the hell's going on. You know, are you bitter, resentful, cynical, terrified, betrayed, hurt, traumatized? Or you might be a misanthrope, and you're one of those people who's extremely introverted. Maybe you're extremely introverted and creative, and you just want to go the hell out in the woods and not see anyone and do your creative thing.

It's like, okay, you're one in a million. You get a pass, but for most people, that's just complete bloody rubbish. So people want to have an intimate relationship. Okay, so you admit that. Then you think, "Well, if I could have that relationship and it was the one I wanted, what would it look like?"

You know, that can get very detailed. How would your family conduct itself if you were sitting around the dinner table? It's like a Norman Rockwell painting, you know, that famous painting of Thanksgiving. It's like if you could have—or maybe you're just having an intimate candlelight dinner with your wife or your husband, and you get to have it and it works.

Well, what does it look like? Who are you? How are you dressed? How are you conducting yourself? What are you talking about? Who could you be if you could have what you wanted? Well, you can imagine, and your imagination will provide you with an answer. Then you can write that down and think, "Well, that looks like that. That'd be a good deal. That'd be worth making a sacrifice for."

Then you say, "Well, what else do people need?" Family. Well, that might mean children. It might mean repairing the relationship with the children you already have. It might mean your parents, if you're fortunate enough to still have them—or unlucky enough, depending on the parents. Maybe you should fix that relationship. You know, and how do you fix it? Well, you try to find out what you can be grateful about that your parents delivered to you.

And then everything left over, you see if you can work it out with them. Then you think, "Well, if I had a relationship with my father that I would want to have, what would that look like?" And then there you go! You got some work to do right there.