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“Then get ultimately crushed by the world because actually nobody but you cares about the results if the gain is small. Or you get a pat on the back, that's it.”You mean that the world will only care if the gain is big, if I achieve "a lot"? If so, I question:
- Should I condition my happiness to something external that I can't control? (what the world thinks of me, of what I do/did)
- How can I ever be satisfied if I only compare myself to others? There's always someone better than me. Shouldn't I compare myself only to myself, past-me against present-me? Shouldn't I be making gifts to future-me by doing now what will make me happier / better / whatever?
- Why does "nobody care if the gain is small"? Can't a small subset of the world, e.g. people close to me that I know and who know me, care about me as I care about them? Isn't that enough, most days of our lives?
> “Ultimately you might also find that the end result was totally not worth the effort sunk.”
That would be the logical reaction of someone who only cared about the end result, and failed to reach their goal. But what if you care about the journey, the mission, the doing? What if "the effort sunk" was welcome, what if it was pleasure, growth, a good bone to grind for you? What if it made you happy?
Then you would find that the effort is well worth it every single day, because it is its own reward, because there is no further expectation beyond today's step, or because you learned to decorrelate your happiness from the satisfaction of expectations that lie beyond your control, your actions, your thoughts.
> “There are only relatively few ways that do change life significantly...”
Agreed.
> “... and most of them do not take intense effort or self discipline.”
Strongly disagree, with every fiber of memory and experience I can find. You would need to substantiate that, because it's an extraordinary claim... If one puts neither "intense effort" nor "self discipline", very little happens, and certainly not "significant life change". Quite the exact opposite is required for growth IME.
One key to all this is to stop thinking in terms of "goals" and instead design "systems" whose outcome gets you closer to where you want to go. In effect, building a vehicule and giving it a direction (or rather, recognizing that you are a vehicule, and take charge, assume full control). Whenever you put energy into this thing, it goes that way, your way, and you along with it (i.e. personality changes, evolves). Even your happiness, it's not a distant or abstract "goal", it's a very real, very practical system that you design to fit your life, values and aspirations. It produces your happiness whenever activated.
The ultimate goals are superb and never attained. The practical systems are tiny Legos but they work every time, and become huge in time.
And when you die, a "happy life" is often judged by a dumb sum of all moments, of all the little things, little bricks... That's the compound effect we get to see, but only retrospectively, unless we're told about it and we train ourselves to see the world in 4 dimensions, before it becomes too obvious/late.