Comment by whyso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whyso | Hacker News Reader

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I have had hard time identifying non-materialistic ambitions. My mind has always been able to short circuit the ideas, similar to the ones you mentioned, as a way to make more money. Effectively turning them into greed, which is supposed to be bad. But I think I have been making wrong conclusions. As mentioned in other comments, developing a stronger feeling towards non-self pain points and retraining my mind would probably be the way to go.

Most of my beliefs are for self. Mostly because of the idea that each of us is a random instance, executing for optimizing random functions. Some are aware of the functions, and for some it is a black box. This breaks the boundaries between right and wrong etc in my mind and so on. But also diminishes the idea of exposing these beliefs and doing something with them seems meaningless.

Don't let yourself confined by what's "supposed to be". Trust your emotional state derive from what's good or bad from first principles (i.e. from experience).

That said - it's good to do an exercise and imagine it's 10 years later, you've created a company startup for the sole purpose of making one billion dollars, think about what you can do with the one billion dollars, what opportunities you've sacrificed, what you've risked.

How do you feel about it? Was it worth it? Would you do it again?

The answer might be different for everyone.

You can repeat for any other number of ambitious goals - getting married to a very good person; spending two decades raising children; moving to a new country; or even getting divorced; travelling around the world; becoming the best at an activity; become world famous for something, etc.

For any one goal - think, what kind of person tend to achieve that goal easily, then the price of achieving that goal is to become that kind of person. Do you still want to achieve goal? If I didn't want to become the kind of person who'd marry my partner, it means to me I didn't actually want to marry her to begin with. Personally, to achieve X, is equivalent to, to become the person who achieves X easily.

It helps me re-focus on what actions to take.

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