I meant, borrowing your words, are you consumed with a driving ambition or devotion to achieving the uttermost limits of what you could achieve or become, utilizing the maximum of your potential to impact the world? Are you always striving for something you don’t have; wishing to be more than you are in every possible sense of the word… including the efficacy with which you strive for more?
Not as much as I should be.
And if so, what are you doing about it?
1) Completely overhauling my professional capacity and career-path. In the last two years I’ve changed tracks to the point where my income has doubled year-over-year from that point, and am set to another ‘doubling’.
2) I am systematically seeking out those areas where I am most deficient and am seeking means to bypass, exploit, or otherwise mitigate or account for those deficiencies. I have had setbacks and failures across the board, but I do not allow them to stop me. I have had a total collapse of my professional, personal, social, and romantic lives/livelihoods on more than one occassion, and in each instance I’ve “dusted myself off and picked back up again” as it were. I’m currently working on how to rebuild my social life (as it is utterly lacking) but I suspect that once my fiscal situation becomes stabilized at the newly higher point I’ll have more attentional reserves available to dedicate to this. Another area I am constantly lacking in since my teen years is my physical excellence and dietary habits. I don’t have the cognitive/attentional reserves to address the exercise regimen just yet, but that’s coming. The diet I also am working on; exposing myself to new foods and food combinations in order to expand my pallatte (as an autist this is an exceptional challenge for me in ways that are non-obvious.)
None of these things are, to be quite frank, particularly pleasant. I typically can’t stand people for example; and though I have been told time and again I make an “excellent” host/guest/conversationalist/party-goer… it’s physically exhausting to me (this is related to cognitive deficiencies on my part; I am unable to ‘filter’ out things and must consciously assign attentional levels to all things around me—try staying perfectly alert in complex settings for, say, an hour or two and you’ll get why being around groups of people is exhausting to me.). Despite this I have raised that as a priority on my regimen because being able to cause compliance in people without their perceiving it as duress is useful. This is also why I’ve been teaching myself how to code; and why I also pay attention to any manner of topics.
I could keep going down the list, but that about summarizes it.
This is nonsensical. Do we always conform to patterns merely because they’re the patterns we always adhered to, unquestioningly? The question is being asked now.
If there is no decent answer—then what justifies this article?