In a previous article, I talked about the importance of prioritizing your goals instead of your projects.
Now I want to talk about the importance of being versus doing.
There is a saying in the personal development circles that to have the life that nobody has, you need to be willing to do the things that nobody does.
I disagree with the spirit of this saying. What they mean by that is that to have an extraordinary level of wealth, success, and impact, you need to hustle, climb, and strain and do things that other people are not willing to do.
And while it is true that to have an extraordinary life, we need to overcome many of our fears, I have come to believe that the life we have depends more on who we are than on what we do.
If it solely depended on what we do, everyone that bought an online course from a millionaire and applied the same techniques and strategies would become a millionaire too.
We were all born in different circumstances and had different opportunities and privileges. To change our circumstances and opportunities for the better, a lot of us focus on “doing more.”
But, it is our inner game, our mental health, our energy, our positivity, our peacefulness that attracts people to our world.
The more we work on ourselves, the more we turn from sellers to buyers. We don’t need to sell ourselves to potential bosses, clients, or investors anymore. Instead, people come to us, and we get to choose and “buy” the opportunity that most suits us.
Another metaphor I enjoyed recently was this: You can be like the sperm, running to beat the competition. Or you can be like the egg: chilling and enjoying life in the confidence that the sperm will come to it.
I always found that when I felt aligned, nurtured, and relaxed, the opportunities came to me. On the other hand, when I was in intense action mode, my work turned like Sisyphus’, forever rolling a boulder up the hill.
By investing more in being vs. doing, we will attract more people and opportunities to us. People are magnetized to people who feel good in their skin.
Taking aligned action
Doing less is really hard. One of the reasons is that we are constantly bombarded by marketing messages that threaten us that if we do not do what they say, we will not achieve what we want.
You can only achieve easy wealth if you do crypto investing, real estate flipping, funds, and so on.
You can only achieve health if you do intermittent fasting, keto, veganism, HIIT, yoga, peloton, and more.
You can only achieve sales if you do social media, content marketing, cold outreach, and more more more.
Our children are also overbooked and overstimulated, and they rarely have time for unstructured play.
As much as marketers will have us believe otherwise, there are many ways to get to Rome. We need to resist all these messages that only one method works or is the best. Or even worse, that we need to do all of these things.
After we have nurtured our being, then we can take aligned action. We do what feels good to us. Aligned action does not feel like hustle and strain. It feels like self-expression and inspiration. It feels like fun and flow.
In a nutshell? Be more, do less. When you do something, do it because it feels aligned to you, not because you are afraid it is the only way to achieve what you want.
What are your thoughts?
Caterina – this is such a thoughtful way to present a simple yet undervalued truth. This ‘who you are’ is hard to measure so is overlooked in research or in discussions to focus on the practical steps only because it does not sell well, because it is more complex, because it is much harder. But it is gold. I discovered this later than I would have liked (but better late than never) and subjectively can vouch for the effects of this ‘inner game’. Your succint piece here helps me articulate it to myself an to share with others this lesson – thankyou.