Existential development requires you to move beyond physical needs and mental concepts. In that space, you begin to identify yourself as what you are before motion and value judgment. Holding onto this state, even as the world turns on its own axis all around you, is how you mature from your childish beginnings to the potential adult that was always within you.
Category: Transforming Your Identity
Shatter the Flow of Your Unfulfilled Life
It is impossible to know what you are capable of when the most important aspects of your life have been derived from people who came long before you or happen to hold greater influence.
Challenge How Others Categorize You
An ordinary person is so afraid to define himself that he stumbles accidentally into whatever social function resists him the least. Never going too far in any direction provides safe barriers for him to avoid injury, but they also nullify all forms of heroic action. He spends his entire life chasing a dream that a collection of voices planted in his head many years ago, only to die never having lived at all.
There is a Reason Why You Began
You need to own your motivations if you are ever going to break out of your ordinary routines and aspire to something more. It is the only way you will have the will to try, to tread onward when things go wrong.
Remember Why You Act
Though daunting as it may be, accept that you will never flawlessly live up to your own standards. No one is perfect in their actions. The heroic person is willing to try, without end, despite falling short of his ideals.
Be Careful What You Aim For
One way or another, everyone alive today navigates in a world that grows denser with competing ideologies. The level of devotion solidifies to match the breadth of possible alignments. There are now more people who are more sure of the rightness of their increasingly opposing values. Conflict is inevitable. Clarity is essential.
Suffering is a Symptom of Growth
For all your power, whether natural or acquired, you still can only function in a rather narrow band of comfortable experiences. Step outside this range, and the outcome is death. Approach your limit you will experience every trauma a human mind can. There is no way to expand this area except to march purposefully into trauma.
Seek Out New Ways to Arrange Reality
The value of a mind does not reside solely in the total information it stores. Indeed, knowledge can betray you if it prevents you seeing beyond its boundaries. Whatever you know is not the limit to what can be known. Think beyond the constraints of tradition to look upon all things with new eyes.
Make Your Ambition Meet Your Insight
Intelligence and creativity, without the ability to apply them in proportion to their stature, are tremendous burdens to carry. Their unfulfillment can lead to a hollow kind of psychosis that rots a talented mind from within. To be given ample faculties is a responsibility for which few young people prepare. Through chance, a seed of greatness appeared in you. Now the seed must grow.
You Are Equal Parts Dark and Light
A good man handcrafts his values, communing with others who share his goals. Self-sacrifice comes naturally for a hero because he knows he is not losing himself when he invests his life into something authentically greater. Men can only be truly good when they have struggled to find their principles and carry them out in the world.