 You should always be self-interested, rationally self-interested. It's redundant. You cannot be self-interested without being rational. But it's always good to remind people we mean rational selfishness. Because it's so easy to misconstrue or to distort or pervert Einwann's ethical theories. So the whole framework, the whole framework is my life. Making the most of my life, living the best life I can live as a human being. And that's where the rational comes in because what does it mean to be a human being? What that means is to be a rational animal. What that means is to exercise my reason in living my life to the best of my ability. So that's always the framework. It's how to live the best life that you can. Well a big part of that is ultimately identifying your values. Identifying the things that are important to you. The things, if you will at a concrete level, that are going to lead you to success. Are going to drive your happiness. Now we've talked a lot about abstract virtues. About the virtues that are involved, the actions one needs to take. And the values, reason, purpose, self-esteem, the one needs to engage in. But how do you operationalize that? How do you operationalize, for example, your purpose? How do you operationalize a hierarchy of values? How do you operationalize choosing the things that you're going to devote significant amount of energy, significant amount of effort, significant amount of time, significant amount of effort to pursuing, to achieving? And this is where the common language of dreams comes in. Now what are dreams? What does it mean to pursue your dreams? What does it mean to have big, audacious dreams if you have them? What does it mean to dream in this context? Now it can mean fantasies. It can mean things detached from reality. And the terminology of dream is a tricky one because dreams are things that you have when you're asleep. You're not completely conscious. And it's very dangerous to just assume that our dreams are just things we don't understand. They just appear out of nowhere. They happen to be there. And they're probably not attainable because they come out of nowhere. And certainly not the context in which I mean dreams in the context we're talking about here. I think a dream in the context we're talking about are not, as Tom says here, pipe dreams. We're going to answer this question, I think, implicitly. But the dreams I'm talking about here are big, audacious goals. And most of those dreams are going to be focused on kind of what you want to do in life. Like the big goals that you have in the various areas that are important in your life. Most of that is going to be around issues related to your career. Which is related to around your central purpose, the integrating purpose, the integrating activity that you engage in in life. So dream here just substitutes for my big, audacious goal. The thing I really, really want to achieve. The thing I think, you know, the Everest I want to climb in whatever area of life that Everest happens to be. That could be that you want to climb on to Everest. That could be a dream of yours. So dream just means big and audacious. It does not mean, and it's actually a bad word. Maybe I shouldn't even use the term dream. Because it does connote subconscious, unachievable, unknowable pipe dreams, as Tom writes. But dream also brings forward a particular emotional context. Dreams are goals we're passionate about. Dreams are goals that we have energy, hopefully, around achieving. That it's just hypothetical. It's not just something I think is good. But I really want to achieve. And I've got a lot of my energy and my emotion tied up in achieving. So that's what I mean by goals, by dreams, sorry, big, audacious goals. One second. So the first question is, how do you discover your dreams? How do you know what your dreams are? Now some people know what those are. They've had them from when they're young. They know they want to build a skyscraper. They want to be an architect. They want to, I don't know, cure cancer. They've got some big, audacious goal. They want to understand a philosophy. They want to be a teacher. Some people just know. Even then, that's not good enough and we'll get to that. So we'll get to people who know what their dreams are and what they need to do. As a first step before acting to achieve them. But many people, many of us, don't know what our central purpose should be, what we're really passionate about, what we want to do with the rest of our lives, what we want to achieve, what we want to attain in our lifetime. What that big, audacious purpose, what that big, audacious goal value should be. And here is where introspection and trial and error are so important. Generally, I think trial and error are not appreciated enough, generally, in life. Knowledge just doesn't just implant itself on you, knowing how to do things, knowing what to do, knowing what you should do in life. It's rare that you just know trying things, succeeding, failing, figuring out, introspecting. What you enjoy, what you don't enjoy is crucial. So some people just know. How do they know? Well, they know because during their childhood, they developed certain values. They connect to certain activities. They relate to certain things in a particular way. It's hard to tell exactly why. Some people just latch on. I think it's partially how they're raised, how independent they are, what environment they're in, and the choices they make, the choices they make, the things that attract them and how introspective they are as kids in identifying what excites them and what doesn't. What they enjoy and what they don't. But most of us don't have that clear knowledge. So what's required, and you know, Harry Benz wearing was on the show, what, two, three shows ago? Two shows ago? One show ago? I don't know, recently. And he talked about introspection, and I got some questions about how one introspects. And it's a great question. And one of these shows, I'll bring in somebody who is an expert on this, but let's take a stab from a non-expert, me, in terms of how to introspect. Because I think introspection is such a key feature of living a good life. Introspection is such a key feature of identifying your values, recognizing them, and then being able to achieve them. So introspection involves identifying your own responses, identifying your emotions and your thoughts, thinking about them, assessing them. I really, you know, I really enjoy solving math problems. Why? What is it about? This is asking yourself the questions. What is it about the math problems I enjoy? In what way is that joy being expressed? So introspection is about asking yourself questions about your own responses, about your own mental and emotional activities, trying to understand where they come from, testing them out. I hate doing X. Do I always hate it? Are there circumstances where I don't hate it? Let me try it. Let me try it and see. Let me alter the circumstances. Let me see. Do I hate math because I've got a bad teacher? What if I take a math class on the Khan Academy online? Do I still hate it? I'm bad at languages. Am I? Let me do a Rosetta Stone thing to learn a new language. I'm really bad at languages. So testing is part of an evaluating. Oh, that worked. I did okay. It was pleasant. I hated that. So thinking about your own values, thinking about your own actions, thinking about your own mental states, thinking about the reasons for it, and what you can learn from it, and whether you like. I've got this horrible emotion. Where is it coming from? Is it rational in sense that it doesn't seem justified based on the facts that I'm observing out there in the world? Should I reconsider? What would I have to do to reconsider? Is it so bad I need to see a therapist or I can try to do this by myself? So a big part of introspection, a big part of pursuing your dreams, discovering what your dreams are, discovering what your values are, is this kind of process. What do I enjoy doing? What do I like? What do I don't like? What do I get excited about? What really is thrilling to me? What kind of activities? And if nothing, why are there activities I haven't tried that might be interesting, might be thrilling? So identifying your values is about thinking about what gets you excited. What makes you energized? What gets you thinking in positive ways about excited about the activity? So it's about discovering your own set of values. And again, sometimes you'll never discover the thing, oh, this is the thing. I want to be a doctor. You might have to go out there and say, OK, what kind of activities do I like? What kind of activities make me excited? What kind of activities? I think it's this. I don't want to sit at a desk all day and stare at a computer screen. OK, so all those professions that evolve doing that are out. Let's think about professions that don't. Let me go study this. Let me go achieve this. And then you have to go and try. It's very difficult to project into the world, to project in your mind how you will respond to a variety of experiences, a variety of activities. You have to live them. Now, something's obvious. Some things you can, of course. Travis says he gets excited by many, many things. Yeah, I do too. So if you get excited by many, many things, you have to start prioritizing. Or is there a common denominator between those things? Is there something I could do that will achieve all those things? This is where you get big, audacious goals that could integrate a wide array of exciting phenomena, exciting things. Let's say you decided to dream that you like business, you like philosophy, you like history, you like teaching. Well, can you integrate all of those? Or can you integrate some of them? Can you start a business that deals with some of these other aspects? If so, how? What would be the steps for you to achieve that ultimately? Or are there things that get you excited? You're going to have to put to the side as hobbies or something that you don't have time for now. Maybe you'll get back to it later and focus on the things that are most important. So first, one has to identify what one is excited about. Make a list. What your dreams are if you already have a dream. Then the next step is to screen those. Which one of these dreams are just superficial? Or short-term? Or very narrow and concrete? When I was a teenager, I really wanted a Mercedes Benz, what is it, LS450? Like the convertible, the two-seater convertible, two-door. I mean, yeah, I really wanted, I mean, that was a dream of mine was to one day drive one of those. I mean, that's fine. That's fine. But in running my life, that never became a priority. It was never something where I said, okay, making a choice about these things. This is what I'm going to do. Even in choosing cars that landed up, there were more practical or better automobiles that I chose over that. Even though somewhere back there, there's still this feeling of, yeah, I used to want to have one of these Mercedes cars. It's dissipated because it's shallow. Or there are a lot of things we dream of when we're young that it just turns out are not that important. And one of the things that's really, really crucial to do is before doing anything about your dreams, your values, your goals, is to figure out which of them are important. And which of them can guide you toward happiness and which of them are just fun, interesting, nostalgic, nice, but not important. So you've got to figure out what is important. And this is where you create a hierarchy. Which of your values are more important to you? Which are less important to you? And you've got to figure out the ones that are important to you. And then at some point, you've got to have some kind of a dream, some kind of a goal, some kind of a mission in your life. It could be simple, but it's got to be, this is the purpose. You've got to have a purpose, something meaningful, something creative if you're creative. Something where you're creating value for you and for the world, so that you can trade. Because otherwise, you spend most of your life working on stuff that is leading nowhere. Where you're not passionate, where you're not excited, where it's not your dream and it's not important to you. And people hate their jobs. People dislike what they're doing. They feel like they're wasting their lives. They have mid-life crises. What have I done with myself? Even people who are very, very successful because they didn't do what they really wanted to do. They didn't give it a shot. They didn't give it a try. And you spent a huge amount of effort in your work, expend massive amounts of energy on your work. It has to mean something to you, not to anybody else, to you. Otherwise, it's just in a sense, waste the time. And of course, we started out by saying, you have a limited time. The one thing we're limited with is time. So, oh, Troy, thank you. Really appreciate that. So, spend some time in your life introspecting about what's important to you, introspecting about how you want to spend the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years of your life. Introspect about what you want to be doing, how you want to make a living, what kind of activities you want to engage in in the majority of hours of every day. What is your productive purpose in life? Is it important? Is it rational? Doesn't integrate with your other values? So, again, a dream can't be divorced from everything else you're living. And then go back to that process every few years. Go back to it. Re-evaluate it. Test it against your experiences to date. Figure out, am I on the right path? Am I moving towards achieving my dreams? Am I moving towards achieving my values? Am I moving towards success? Have my values changed? Is my dream altered? Have my values changed because I know my ideas have changed, my experiences have changed. I'm older. I want something different. I was on the wrong path. I made mistakes. I don't know, whatever it is. I did things because my family wanted them done, not because I wanted them done. I wasn't selfish enough. I wasn't independent enough. At any point in life, you should stop periodically and ask yourself, what are my dreams now? I mean, maybe when I was 20, I had X dream, but now what are my dreams right now? What do I want to achieve right now? And then figure it out. Take into account everything you've learnt. We all grow, hopefully, in life. How do I, you know, give in everything that I know today? What do I want to do with my life? What do I want to focus on? What do I want to achieve? What's my dream now? You don't, you should never stick to a dream because it was your dream in the past. You should never just accept, create a hierarchy of values in a sense and stick with it because it's your hierarchy of values forever. You've always got to, you know, be thinking, be judging, be evaluating. Is this really what I want to do? Is this really where I want to be? Are these really my values? Am I gaining what I thought I'd gained from them? And if not, why not? And where should I go in life from here? Thank you for listening or watching The Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening. 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