The older we get, the more nuanced our life journey grows.
While many of us aim for similar things, like a good career, marriage, family, etc., life doesn’t always go as planned. Even if it does, the pursuit of similar things is still processed through a personal filter that’s unique to each of us as individuals.
Your personal filter is something you’ve always had, molded over time by your temperament, your environment and your experiences. It’s how you process the world and come to view it the way you do.
It affects your choices and decisions that impact not just your immediate needs but your future long-term, so it’s useful to keep your personal filter sharp.
The sharper your filter, the more effective you become at discarding what’s shiny but not essential, and keep moving forward on the path that leads to better rather than worse.
Here are a few things that can help you stay on that path:
1. Values over metrics
In this age of information, it is easy to feel you’re being compared with others now more than ever. A few minutes is all it takes to give you endless ways everyone seems to be doing better than you.
Which is why it is increasingly important to stay in touch with your values, which keeps sinking feelings of comparisonitis and not-enoughness at bay. A strong value system sharpens our filter, and reminds us that life is multi-faceted and complex, not a linear, connect-the-dots game or a check list with identical (shiny) items for all.
Integrating values more deeply comes from focus on how we can better ourselves and our choices in the context of our particular circumstances, limitations and resources, rather than a blanket aim to be superior to others using shallow and fleeting metrics.
2. Move toward the light
When your filter is sharp, it helps adjust the context in which you might find yourself stuck, paralyzed or grappling with tough choices.
Speaking of grappling, a paradox we all encounter is that suffering is a hallmark of the human condition, yet it is also what how we grow, learn and become better versions of ourselves.
Challenges impel us to confront our deepest beliefs, and we are forced to shed layers we have carried for so long. Then we find that our load is lighter, and we have come to know something of ourselves.
When we move toward the light, our vision is clearer, our filters sharper.
3. Stick to the essentials
Rule #1 of anything you streamline, reorganize, refine or tighten up is: let go of what’s not essential. The same goes for your internal criteria for what you seek in the outer world.
When offered advice, creating goals or looking for direction, run them through your personal filter to avoid blind emulation. This is why a philosophy can be an over-arching guide but the specifics can (and should) be tailored to your personal situation.
Your filter is only as effective as you make it; and only if you genuinely want your life to improve. When we sort and organize our desires in alignment with our values, we elevate them, and thus, in time, elevate ourselves.
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