Fundamental Growth

Once we know that our desires dictate the state of our emotional well-being we can direct ourselves to seek desires that we are fully capable of fulfilling in the real world and to disregard desires that prove impossible of fulfilling. However, when taken to the extreme this leads to a situation of zero growth since we will only seek to do things that we have the full competence to do and will not do anything outside of our current limitations. For most of us, this is unacceptable. We seek growth in our abilities to control our circumstances and to accumulate and experience what we desire.

This leads us to conduct our lives so that in order to feel balanced and good on a consistent basis we set desires to fulfil our primary needs and everyday issues based upon what we already have the full competence to carry out. If we don’t do that then we set the attainment of those desires based upon real world capabilities that we don’t have and that leads to recurrently feeling bad from day to day. Once we can fulfil our basic desires consistently we can then set aside time and resource to develop the capabilities that allow us to do more and to achieve higher standards consistently.

Our personal growth depends entirely upon our ability to expand our competencies to a level where we can rely upon them constantly. Thus we need to set aside time for learning through accumulating knowledge and through experimentation with application until the new skill or new process for getting things done is so thoroughly learned that we can depend upon it. Learning requires us to set desires that we initially don’t have the capability to fulfil and so the process of learning can easily generate negative emotions and despondency if we don’t recognise that and manage our attitude carefully.

The process of learning is largely about taking things that are currently impossible for us to do in the moment and making them possible for us to do in the moment. The process of achieving competence is about taking those newly learned things and practicing and developing them until they become robustly dependable attributes. At this point we can depend upon them and we have achieved our aim of expanding as a person with higher capabilities than ever before.

This link will take you to part 6 of this series: fundamental motivation

These links will take you to the preceding parts of this series:

Part 1: fundamental insights
Part 2: fundamental survival
Part 3: fundamental emotion
Part 4: fundamental desires

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