How To Find Clarity, Purpose, And Avoid Living A Blurry Life

The solution to most modern problems is clarity.

The solution to most modern problems is clarity.

Why?

Because most of the problems that modern human beings face are the direct result of hyper-stimulation and information overload.

In his award winning book, The Paradox of Choice, psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote:

“Autonomy and freedom of choice are critical to our well being, and choice is critical to freedom and autonomy. Nonetheless, though modern Americans have more choice than any group of people ever has had before, and thus, presumably, more freedom and autonomy, we don't seem to be benefiting from it psychologically”

The deluge of information, advice, and research available on the internet today has had significant negative psychological effects, and led to mass procrastination and analysis paralysis.

There has never been a time in human history where human beings know more and do less. It is now possible to watch 1,000 hours of Youtube videos about how to do something before ever actually doing the thing. In the ancient world, by contrast, almost everything was learned through action and experience.

Education has become entertainment.

We have all of the information we need to radically transform our lives.

What we lack is clarity.

The most successful people are not always those who know the most, but those who take enough clear and specific action in one direction until they see results.

Ivan Djuric, a Youtuber with 100k subscribers, has squatted everyday for 2,000 days in a row. Here is the description of his channel:

“Hi. My name is Ivan Djuric and I am passionate about fitness. In particular, strength training. My goal is to reach a 300kg Squat, 300kg Deadlift and a 180kg Bench Press. As secondary goals, I am aiming to achieve 100 Pushups in 1 nonstop set and 30 strict dead hang Pullups. On my journey to these goals, I hope to inspire, educate and motivate as many people as I can. I think Youtube is a great platform to achieve this. So follow along and never hesitate to leave a comment or question as I'd be glad to answer them. Now lets go get that next set!”

Is squatting everyday an optimal fitness program? Probably not.

Is Ivan Djuric better at squatting than me? Definitely.

We have all of the information we need to transform our lives, relationships and work, and yet so many people are paralyzed looking for answers.

The accumulation of knowledge without taking the relevant actions is also one of the leading causes of anxiety today.

Action clarifies what you need to know.

And clarity is the key to radical life transformation and success.

So, what is clarity and how do we live more clearly?

The Blurry Life

Most people are living a blurry life.

A blurry life is one in which you never really have any idea of what you are actually trying to achieve every day other than make money to support yourself and others.

A blurry life is overloaded with ideas about what you could or should be doing, advice without action, unfinished projects, constant distraction, and no overarching plan or purpose.

It is a life of massive inefficiency, with thousands of hours (and dollars) being spent leading nowhere, and leaving you feeling exactly the same as you did five years ago.

No one willingly chooses the blurry life, yet millions find themselves living one.

A clear life is the complete opposite.

A clear life is one in which you know exactly what you are doing everyday and why you are doing it, so that even if you fail it feels good.

It is a life where everything you consume can be turned into fuel to help you achieve your goals, rather than create friction and cause distraction.

Finally, it is a life where what is most important (family, friends, meaningful work, health and wellness) is prioritized at the expense of everything else.

In short, it is a life with boundaries.

Clarity requires boundaries.

A glob of paint does not become an artwork until the artist turns the paint into a line, creating a boundary. The lines and boundaries turn the painting into an image.

These limitations do not restrict the freedom of the artist, they enhance it.

Form gives meaning.

Limitation breeds creativity and focus.

But, while boundaries are necessary for living more clearly, they are not sufficient.

A clear life also requires that the boundaries and lines that you have set for yourself add up to something specific.

Without having something specific that you are setting boundaries for, it will be difficult to find the motivation to defend and uphold them.

Boundaries without purpose are meaningless.

Personal Projects And The Different Levels Of Clarity And Purpose

So, clarity requires boundaries and purpose.

There are different levels of clarity, and correspondingly different levels of purpose.

An artist who is trying to finish a painting needs clarity and purpose relative to the project of the painting to achieve their aims.

Call these project-clarity and project-purpose.

Projects provide a useful way to think about our lives because they set boundaries around our activities, give them meaning and structure, and clarify our motivations.

Without projects, our lives can appear like a series of disconnected actions or events happening in a a temporal sequence, with no structure whatsoever.

Take the life of an athlete, for example.

One way to describe a typical day for LeBron James is through listing the series of actions he performs: wakes up, hydrates, drives to practice, shoots basketball, lifts weights, shoots more basketballs, goes to sleep.

But a series of actions is not a life.

A life has structure and, for the athlete, the way we almost always interpret their actions is through the shared project of trying to win a championship.

With that project in mind, LeBron’s actions take on a new significance.

What Are Personal Projects?

A project is not just a goal, although that is part of it.

A project is a well-defined action-structure that unfolds over time, towards a specific goal, with a commitment towards finishing.

In order for something to be a project, it cannot be completed by a single action.

Instead, it requires a series of connected actions, performed over a period of time, with the intention and commitment to attaining a goal. The goal can be the ultimate purpose itself, or one purpose among many.

Our lives are made up of various projects and purposes that exist on different levels and time-scales.

Some projects can be finished in a day, such as building a piece of furniture. Other projects can last a lifetime, such as raising a family.

The purpose of one project can connect with and form a part of the purpose of another project.

A couple's project of saving for a house, for example, might have the dual purpose of settling down and also increasing net worth.

Our projects and purposes are nested.

The more clarity we have about these nested relationships, the easier it is to motivate ourselves to complete our projects successfully, because we can see how everything fits together into a meaningful whole.

Thus, project-clarity and project-purpose fuel project-success.

Project-Success

At every level and every time scale, the success and flourishing of our projects and lives requires the same three things:

• Clarity

• Iteration

• Honesty

Success in our projects requires that we are very specific about what we are trying to achieve, that we consistently work towards achieving that specific thing, pivoting when necessary, and that we don't lie to ourselves about how we are progressing.

Project-success goes a long way towards helping you avoid living a blurry life, and realizing your dream life.

But no one wants to succeed at just any project whatsoever.

Everyone wants to succeed at the projects they deeply care about — they want to succeed at the projects that align with their life-purpose.

We also want our projects to add up to something.

Successful projects alone cannot give us the highest levels of clarity and purpose that human beings seek: life-clarity and life-purpose.

How do you achieve life-clarity? How do you find your life-purpose?

These are some of life's most difficult philosophical questions, and while I don't think that I, or anyone, can provide the last word on them, what I am about to say could potentially change your life.

How To Achieve Life-Clarity and Find Life-Purpose (By Yourself)

Here is the good news and the bad news about life-clarity and life-purpose.

The good news is that almost everyone has the ability and freedom to build a clear and purposeful life for themselves in 3-5 years.

The bad news is that if you think you will find clarity and purpose by just living, never taking any time to actively self-reflect, write, plan, and learn, you are setting yourself up for failure and regret.

The alignment of life-purpose and life-clarity is a unique achievement —it does not just fall into your lap by experiencing more life.

The reason many people feel anxious, lost, overwhelmed, and confused, is that they don't take active steps towards self-creation and life-design.

Instead, they live passively and react to what life gives them — what the existentialists called inauthenticity.

One of the reasons why I created the micro-philosophy system was to help people clarify their fundamental thoughts about the world, value, and ethics so that they can live more clearly.

If you think these fundamental beliefs don’t matter to your practical life, I encourage you to study the lives of highly successful people.

Almost all of them have taken the time to figure out their core values and purpose on a philosophical level in order to structure their daily actions.

A micro-philosophy is a core piece of your life-design and self-creation project because it forces you to distill your basic view of the world and core set of values into an actionable system for living.

In a world where you can be or do almost anything you want, it is even more important than ever to develop precise sense of who you are. Without a sense of who you are and what you are trying to achieve, you have no ability to filter the deluge of information streaming into your brain everyday.

This is a recipe for anxiety, procrastination, and regret.

Again, boundaries.

By clarifying your core beliefs and values, you can begin to narrow down visions of your ideal self and set boundaries in your life that make it possible to become that version of your self.

If you have no boundaries around, for example, what you consume, you will become nothing other than an aggregation of what you have consumed.

A formless blob of ideas, advice, quotes, and memes.

A micro-philosophy helps you develop a perspective or lens through which you can filter out the signal from the noise in a way that matters specifically to you.

In order to do this, at some point you will need to dedicate significant time to thoroughly answering the following two questions:

• What kind of world do I believe I am in?

• What is valuable in this world?

Thinking deeply about these two questions can radically alter your life.

(Last week, I published an article outlining a new and simplified version of the micro-philosophy system that is meant to make it even easier to get started building your own worldview here).

For example, one of the main questions that determines how human beings live is their view towards death.

Some people think that their soul or spirit will live on after they die, some people aren’t sure, while others think that death is permanent non-existence.

These are radically different ideas which can significantly alter how you approach your life.

If you truly believe that you live in a mechanical/naturalistic world with no supernatural events, and that your life is going to end in the next 1-90 years, then there should be an extreme sense of urgency towards taking decisive actions to live a life you will not regret.

Life-Purpose, Life-Clarity, and Life-Project

Clarifying your commitments on such fundamental issues can help you begin to identify your life-purpose and, correspondingly, help you live more clearly.

Life-purpose and life-clarity go hand in hand, as purpose clarifies life and life clarifies purpose (when reflected upon properly).

If you have a clear and developed sense of your life-purpose, then it becomes much easier to achieve life-clarity, since knowing your life-purpose will filter what matters from what doesn’t matter to achieving and living out that purpose.

Life-clarity is achieved when you know exactly what you want to do, or were called to do, on this Earth, in this lifetime.

Life-clarity doesn't have to pigeonhole you into one specific career or activity, although for some people that is what clarity looks like.

For example, someone may achieve life-clarity in realizing that they want to spend their life writing, or creating art. Alternatively, someone might achieve clarity in realizing that they want to dedicate their life to growing their family business and leaving a legacy for their children.

All that really matters is that you identify an overarching life-project or projects that embody your fundamental life-purpose.

A life-project is an overarching meta-project that governs and directs all of the different aspects of your life.

It is a life in which you have identified the specific thing or things that will shape your entire set of life-projects and relationships.

A clear life-project leads to a frictionless life.

It is a life in which you unapologetically pursue your purpose it because it aligns with your deepest beliefs and core values.

A life full of successful projects, but lacking in purpose, will leave you feeling regret, doubt, and existential angst.

Without life-clarity, project-success can leave someone asking themselves "what was the point of my projects after all? Why did I spend twenty years building that business rather than a different one?".

Life-clarity creates an alignment between the ground-level success in our lives, and our deeper sense of life-success.

This combination, few would deny, leads to a good human life.

Most bad human lives, if you really think about it, are lives that lack life-clarity.

These are the kinds of lives in which people just do things because they think they should, or they think they have to, when they really don't. Lives in which people don't really even know why they are doing what they are doing, and just find themselves falling into something and never choosing for themselves.

At some point, inevitably, they realize that this is what happened and either regret it deeply and decide to change, or just accept their fate as a fact of life.

Conclusion

The modern human being has access to every possible answer that human beings have ever given to life's biggest questions, every philosophy, and every piece of knowledge at the click of a button.

The problem is that it is becoming harder and harder to live a life with clarity.

Without clarity, we lack purpose and feel a deep and persistent existential angst.

We lack clarity when we don’t take enough action.

We lack clarity when we don’t pursue our projects with specificity, honesty, and persistence.

We lack clarity when we don’t reflect on our beliefs and values in a structured way, so that we can understand the purpose behind those projects.

Doing things and finishing projects is not enough.

Although clear and purposeful projects are essential to finding life-clarity and life-purpose, you also need to develop a sense of your personal micro-philosophy to figure out how those projects fit together into a life.

-Paul