Title’s a bit verbose, I know. But hear me out…

We all have dreams; and if not dreams, goals; and if not goals, desires. But, counterintuitively, we all likewise tend to be held back by our own egocentrism and vanity. This problem is compounded by the fact that we are -as an internal self-protective mechanism- hardwired to avoid discomfort and uncertainty at all costs, all too often at the detriment of our own progress towards these desires, goals, and dreams.

“When you’re selfish, it’s a dangerous thing, because…at a certain point in life, we’re gonna come up against something that’s tougher than us. And if we’re always selfish, 9 out of 10 times if the only thing we think about is ourselves, when we hit something that’s a lot tougher than us, we won’t have a driving force to do what we do -and so it becomes easy for us to just step back, surrender, and say, ‘forget it, I’ll throw it away’.“-Inky Johnson

So if the things that we do are wholly motivated by self-centeredness, we have little visceral incentive to overcome our discomfort- and fear-avoidant human nature; and we have little reason to do the hard work of bypassing the internal and external hurdles that life throws at us. Extrinsic motivators such as money and external validation can initially be helpful at spurring us into action, but we soon find that, on their own, they are not consistently reliable at motivating us and can quickly become crutches. So what would be a better way to respond to this problem?

“The art of happiness is to serve all. To be truly happy, we must think not only of how we can help ourselves, but how we can help others.” – Anonymous

Perhaps the most effective way for us to overpower the self-sabotaging aspects of our human nature is by doing what we do, with someone else in mind. When you yearn and hope to help somebody else, something in you -something, ironically, in your humanity- drives you to passionately do and pursue your work until you’ve gotten that person the help that they need or could benefit from. One can then come to the realization that, ‘it’s not about me, it’s bigger than me’-a very powerful mindset shift. It is with this new mindset that we most consistently persevere in spite of obstacles.

Such an altruistic perspective makes use of the nobler aspects of our humanity, for the purpose of behavioral change and guaranteed action (on our part, for those we are serving). Your self-centered fears, excuses, and perceived limitations quickly crumble at their foundations. They fall to the wayside, because such a service-oriented mindset leverages the powerful values of decency, integrity, and “what’s right” that are inherent in most of humanity, to set boundaries in which failure to perform at the level that we expect of ourselves and commit to now has exponentially higher stakes: our self-respect.

In other words, not only does our failure to follow through now impact other people, it also impacts our ability to respect ourselves: being able to regard ourselves as ‘good people’ is now intimately tied to our success at taking the right actions (those ultimately of potential positive impact); it’s now intricately connected to our effectiveness at putting forth the desired effort, generating the desired outputs. By in this way coupling our self-respect with our faithfulness to serve others, we effectively gain access to an incredibly deep well of intrinsic motivation, helping others in the process.

Alternatively, as long as we remain stuck in our own universes where everything revolves around us -in our own egos- then the miseries of fear, overthinking, and hesitation will perpetually plague us. It is in living each day for your fellow man and woman that you liberate yourself into the sweet satisfaction of mission and purpose; you free yourself into the fulfilling victory of having value-oriented action and self-actualization finally replace the self-limiting, self-impeding beliefs and desires of the monkey mind.

Now ask yourself, with a healthy amount of leniency, based on the action you’ve taken so far this year, the outcomes that action has or hasn’t generated, and the impact of those outcomes on others, compared to the action that you realistically could have taken, the outcomes you could have generated, and the external impact you could have made: are you a good person?

The world would be a much better place if we all acted on whatever internal discomfort our answer to that question might generate.