Do It For Yourself – who’s benefiting from your actions?

Remember that we started this series with a fundamental sentence: you are the most important person in your life. You, and only you, are responsible for your actions, for their outcome, and for the level of energy that fuels you as a result. You’re responsible for your wealth or poverty, for your relations, for your mistakes or successes. Or in a simpler way: you’re the only one responsible for your life.

In the first post we formalized the way you interact with the world, which is based on a 4 steps path:

1. intention
2. energy
3. action
4. outcome

And each of your action will respond to 3 simple questions:

1. how you do it?
2. why you do it?
3. who’s going to be the beneficiary?

The answer to these questions have a direct impact on the energy you can use at every moment in your life. Each answer can influence dramatically your overall energy as human being, or, to be simpler again, it will shape your entire life.

If you just come here I recommend that you should first read the other posts in the series, although they wouldn’t be mandatory for this post. And in this post will talk about the third question, the final one:

Who’s going to be the beneficiary of your action?”

The third answer is the most easy to understand: who is going to actually enjoy what you’re doing? Who’s at the end of the line? Who you try to reach? Who’s the target? If the second answer was about the “because”, the third is about the “for”: you do things because somebody drives you to, but those actions are for somebody also.

Most people tend to think they have a clear understanding of their targets. They think they obviously know the actual goal for their actions. And at the beginning of your life this is entirely true: a kid is always crystal clear about what he wants. You’ll never have doubts about that one.

But as you grow up, as you adapt to different communities, habits or beliefs, you tend to blend your action goals in a much larger picture. You start to do things for the benefit of others, just because you’ve been thought that. Is wonderful to do things for others, but as a result of a direct, non-biased experience. Do things for others because you feel good about it, not because they told you it’s good to do it. You start to do things because it’s an established habit, or because “it was always like this”. You start to do things sometimes not really knowing why you do those things.

And here comes what I call the fake-targets, or the fake-beneficiary: those persons, or concepts, or things for which you do things in your life, without even knowing that. Take a moment and think about all your actions and try to answer to this simple question: “who was the real beneficiary of that?”

It might happen that all you’ve done in your career was not entirely for you. All those extra hours of work were beneficiary not for you, because they failed to give you that promotion, but for the company. You even got a worse health after that…

In relationships, you do a lot “for the sake of the relation”. You compromise, you pretend not to see things, you accept situations or words that you shouldn’t accept, but you do this “in order to stick to the relation”. Guess what? Those relations never work.

Dig deeper into your life and try to find out all of the actions that you thought you’ve done for you, but actually they had another beneficiary: starting from school, from your job, from your friends or so-called friends, from your family. You’ll discover – with a little bit of bitterness, in the beginning, I have to warn you about it – that most of the time you’ve been acting for other peoples. You’ve been feeding with your actions other beneficiaries…

Those are all fake-targets, as I already told you, they pretend to be something but they aren’t. Most of the time they pretend to be you, your desire for success, for a relationship, for a family or for prestige. But at their core they are nothing but cultural habits that you embraced without judgment. And that you’re actually feeding by giving them all your energy in your current stream of actions. Making them stronger and even more appealing as they grow.

It’s true: you cannot live in a society without adapting to it. And adaptation is nothing but a compromising process: you give something from you, part of your freedom, most of the time, in exchange from something from the society, wealth and respect, most of the time. Those actions are taking your energy and putting it back into the society. It’s nothing wrong with that, as long as you are doing in consciously. As long as you know every second who’s the real beneficiary.

You have to always observe what you do. You have to always know who’s the real beneficiary, in order to identify all of your fake-targets, induced either by the social conditioning, either by early thinking patterns or whatever context you want, but not you. You always have to chose your personal path, and most of this blog is about that.

It’s about learning how to do things for myself, because I am the most important person in my life. It’s about how to overcome my obstacles, being them simple but devastating habits like procrastination, or deeper things like my twisted roots. It’s a constant witness of my efforts in doing better and better. And is also a witness of my mistakes in the process. We’ve been born with a dark side too.

I admit, this requires more than average skills and ambitions. This is not a thing that you may do on a moderate level, because you cannot perform with your greatest potential without investing all your energy. It takes time and patience to learn how to do your actions, to find out why you do what you do, and to identify without mistake the real beneficiary of your life.

But the reward is huge. Is a life of unparalleled richness and fulfillment. A life of freedom and achievement. Of love and understanding. I’m not enjoying this life right now, I’m only glimpsing at what it can be. But I’m already on my path to it.

Are you on the path for the life that you deserve? If not, you can start right now. Just watch the way you act and put all your attention to it for a while. Soon you’ll be finding your own way to do things for yourself. As I told you, this is not an easy task and requires a lot of discipline and energy. There will be times when you’ll fell out of the wagon. But even if you’ll have your breakdowns along the way, you can always start over.

As long as you’re the most important person in your life.
[tags]personal development, personal growth, beliefs, motivation, success, productivity[/tags]




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