Self Development
Oct 31, 2023
Screen Of Reality
Build Yourself Instead Before Trying To Find Yourself
It's not about finding who you are, it's about creating who you are. They say life is not about the destination, but the journey.
When I was 20 years old, I had a business and I hated it. I thought I knew how to be successful and perhaps I was even on the right track at that time. A lot has changed since then and naturally as your life continues to evolve.
The patterns of the past start to solidify into a template of being forming the current version of your self now. In many ways You Are A Collection Of Multiple Points In TimePOST that meant the most to you - whether you believe it or not, it's true.
You see, with my business and why I closed it a year and half later was not because it was failing, it was because I had realized the deeper reason for starting it and even becoming an entrepreneur in the first place. And after certain set of realizations driving my motivations to create I decided to devote my self to the path of understanding patterns.
You could think of it as I started to want to find myself as opposed to just building myself. This wasn't necessarily a mistake, as I think it was a critical stage in my development, but with the "finding yourself" journey, when does it ever end? And what are you supposed to do when you found it?
When I closed down my local juice store, it was not because I didn't love to make things and provide my solution to people's lives. That was very much my passion. But, what I really wanted, my real currency was the attention of being seen as an entrepreneur. Whether it was from friends, strangers, or family - it was undeniable I carried a different sense of purpose and I wanted everyone to know that I had one.
Beyond those more artificial layers of wanting to be seen, a deeper insight had appeared and it was the strings that formed that made me want to be an entrepreneur in the first place. After all, I had really started my first actual business making skateboards when I was 12, and that was where my memories took me. A time I had forgotten about as I was so focused on creating, I stopped remembering why.
See, I didn't know it was going to be a business when I was starting it, it just naturally began to happen. I started making skateboards in my basement and started to spend a lot of time down there, alone in m own world, just creating things I loved.
At the core of my expression, and all of my now multiple industrious endeavors, all I really wanted was be to acknowledged - not to be loved per say, just to be seen fully for who I am. And in order to receive that love, always involved a transaction. And it was only given if and when I'm behaving correctly and giving something of value.
I've thought deeply about what it means to find success in the world, success seems to almost take on an image more than ever these days.
Every swipe on every social media platform opens a portal into more and more gurus that are getting younger and younger, and richer and richer by the day telling you how they found the secret to reality, money, success and seemingly every other metric we can use to track success.
But, what is success really? When I was growing up I just wanted to be free, and to me that was successful, but what does being "free" mean? Free from what?
It naturally implies that there's some aspect of either yourself or the world which has a lock on you and you need to escape. Even today there is this talk of How To Escape The MatrixPOST, or that working a 9-5 is like being a slave.
To me it always made sense that you need to develop yourself into a person that will not get caught up in things that unnecessarily take up your time and provide no tangible value to your life, so in a sense that requires building your life and not taking a passive approach of "waiting for it to happen" which is often promoted in spiritual circles.
It's a good perspective to be honest that if you just wait, your real self will appear because sometimes it does, however as with everything, the journey to your real self is not found through simple ideas, mantras or generic sayings either. I mean, did anyone really have to tell you how to become successful? Don't we already kind of know by now? It's talked about all the time. Then why are most people not that successful?
Where I started to make the shift in my reality, was redefining what success meant to me, almost to the point I basically eliminated the word from my internal glossary. What has always made sense to me is that your entire purpose is to become the version of yourself that you admire. You have to want to wake up and be yourself, as you are, but that's not a process which happens by finding yourself, but by designing a life with intention - then by default the happiness will appear if you did it correctly.
I think where this concept gets confused is when we begin to attach these similar ideas and link them to a more spiritual cause, as if we need to love ourselves in the now, for all our past and become this divine being.
See, there were many points in my life, where honestly I hated myself. Hated my being, the entire existence of reality, and every unnecessary interaction with aspects of life that I didn't want to understand. It's actually pretty "normal" when you're a young person I guess, but I'm not sure it should be, but here we are. Even when that was my state of being when I was much younger I still had a recognition it was a phase, and that helped me to grasp that maybe in fact everything about life is phases and cycles.
Life is a series of phases and cycles. Our state of being is represented somewhere on a cosmic graph, showing we're always transitioning from one point to another. We are 3 things at once. Where we've been, where we are, and our potential set of trajectories.
When I had these realizations that all of life was comprised of phases I started to see it everywhere, and it was probably the most impactful mental switch I began to use as my main filter if I found myself interpreting reality as if the current moment was going to last forever.
As I applied this line of thinking to myself on every level, it helped me understand that if each phase we go through had a previous frame, and the current frame I'm in is transitioning to a new frame, I began to see how time and events create the slides of my reality.
It's not that you can predict reality if we have all the variables and understand their little parts and components, maybe on some level there is a predictive algorithm to all of reality, but surely we won't figure it out in this generation and I don't think we need to.
Life is not about the destination, it's about the journey, and what that means to you as you're going through it.
When you think about it, isn't that where the origin point of life is? The current moment is the only frame of reality that is real. Everything else is either a mirage of future time or a memory, which is at best a compression of highs and lows that don't contain the fullest detail of what the moment was when we experienced it.
Even now, how can you be so sure you're experiencing reality at it's fullest level of detail?
Spiritual teachers have talked about this forever, and it's not to say they get it wrong, in fact they're mostly right, however here is the missing piece that I always needed. Beyond just trying to find yourself, you need to build yourself. It's a simple change of words, in fact only one word was changed.
Building Your Self vs Finding Your Self
- Active vs. Passive Approach:
Build implies an active and intentional process of shaping one's identity and reality.
Find suggests a more passive approach, as if the self and reality are already predetermined and need to be discovered. - Personal Agency:
Build emphasizes personal agency, suggesting that you have the power to construct and mold your identity.
Find may imply a sense of destiny or external factors determining who you are, making it less empowering. - Continuous Process:
Build signifies an ongoing, iterative process of self-discovery and personal growth.
Find may imply a singular, static discovery, as if there's a fixed answer to be uncovered. - Creativity and Innovation:
Build encourages a creative and innovative mindset, where you actively explore, experiment, and shape your reality.
Find may limit thinking to seeking what's already known or predefined. - Responsibility and Ownership:
Build implies a sense of responsibility and ownership over your personal development and the reality you inhabit.
Find can sometimes suggest a more externalized search, as if the answers are external and must be found. - Flexibility and Adaptability:
Build acknowledges that your identity and reality can evolve, adapt, and be modified over time.
Find might imply a fixed or unchanging self, which doesn't account for personal growth and transformation. - Empowerment:
Build fosters a sense of empowerment, suggesting that you have the capacity to actively shape your life and reality.
Find may not convey the same level of empowerment and control. - Purpose and Direction:
Build suggests a clear sense of purpose and direction in actively creating the life you desire.
Find may not provide the same clarity regarding the path forward. - Mindset Shift:
Build represents a mindset shift from seeking external validation to focusing on self-fulfillment and self-expression.
Find may lead to a focus on conforming to external expectations. - Embracing Change:
Build is inherently open to change, acknowledging that self-discovery is an evolving process.
Find may resist change, as it implies that there's a fixed self to discover.
When you choose to change your language into where you are Building Your Self, it is telling yourself and the world subconsciously, not that you are an "unfinished project" but you are an "ongoing project". Whether you want to replace "project" with another word it doesn't matter, the point is it's a declarative way of saying not only to yourself but to to the world that you are open to change, and are receptive to the messages of the universe or whatever.
As far as I can tell the only thing we're ever finding is more and more materials to build and use to reshape and reform our reality.
Choosing to build your self reflects a proactive approach to life. It signals that we are not waiting for answers to be handed to us - instead, we create the tools to construct our reality. We become architects of our own destiny, shaping it with intention, purpose, and creative vision.
That's being a Reality Designer.
The cycle of life is a perpetual process. We are not bound by past definitions or identities. Instead, we are free to reinvent, redefine, and expand upon who we are at any given moment.
Raymond
FounderRaymond is a multi-disciplinary designer and developer currently living in either Silicon Valley or San Diego, CA depending on the seasons. You'll find him most commonly skateboarding, having a coffee, programming, algorithmic day trading, creating 3D art or working to bring the Reality Designers vision to life.
