Who is your Daddy and what does he do?

[Luke]

Hey hey hey!

It’s been a while! Good to see some familiar faces here in the intro thread. It’s Luke here, aka Lysander on the old AI forums.

Man, I’ve missed having the AI community out there to talk shit through with. There aren’t many people I know of that I feel like I can actually talk things through with and feel like we share a frame of reference to effectively address each others problems. I’m looking forward to seeing the LifeOS community grow into a place where that can happen!

When Leigh announced LifeOS it came at the perfect time for me. I had just started going back and looking at the old notes from the AI courses and trying to work through them again alone. I didn’t get far. I really just got far enough to start taking stock of where I am now. I largely knew where I was going, and I’ve been in the process of getting there for almost a decade now. I expect that to take the large part of the rest of my life. I’ve made some huge strides in the right direction and achieved a lot.

But just cause you have a destination you’re on your way to, doesn’t mean you can afford to lose track of where you are now, in the present where life actually happens. And I feel like I’ve done that somewhere along the way.

In some ways, I am actually living out the One Perfect Day I wrote out for myself circa 2010. I re-read it a month or so ago and it’s fucking weird man! Some of the details are uncannily similar to my life today. A few of the details are exactly what I wrote down. Overall, my life is in a vaaaastly better place than it was when I discovered AI, it’s truly amazing when I compare then to now.

But something is missing.

When I force myself to face what that missing thing is, I keep coming back to the feeling that I’m compromising on something. I am not living according to my deepest purpose. I’m using an ineffective pathway. I’m not pushing my edge. I’m holding myself back. However you want to diagnose it, the result is the same- the nagging feeling that despite all the great things in my life, I am not where I should be… or maybe I’m just not *being* how I should be, regardless of where I am.

And to be honest, I’m not really looking forward to dealing with that. When I joined AI, I was at a real low point. It felt like I had nothing much left to lose and a hell of a lot to gain. Now it’s a little different. Now I’m afraid that digging around too much in the foundations of my life is going to fuck up all the nice things that have been built up on the surface. But it has to be done.

So that’s personally why I’m here at LifeOS, but I’m also here to hopefully contribute to the community and see people change their lives for the better!

Boom

Topic

[Leigh]

Welcome, mate. It’s great to have you here (again).

That nagging feeling that something is missing is actually quite a common one, ESPECIALLY where you get where you wanted to go. When you finally arrive at your vision, you start to realise that what you thought was impossibly perfect is actually just a fraction of your potential and that there’s so much more to achieve.

It might seem scary, like you could fuck up everything you’ve worked so hard for, I can guarantee you there’s a world out there that’s so much more rewarding, exciting, and achievable than you ever imagined.

I’ll PM you with some tools for getting there.

[Luke]

Thanks mate,

Yeah that makes sense. In order to achieve whatever goal you’ve set, you have to develop your skills/confidence/competence to get there. Once you’ve gotten to that point you’ve now expanded what you’re capable of, so if you stop there you’re not actually using your newfound potential. It makes sense that there’d be a sense of something lacking there.

With my career I’ve tried to set unattainable goals so that I always have something to keep working toward, so I should hopefully avoid that problem. And in my career I feel like I have a lot of room to grow.

And I think that’s a big part of the problem- in other areas I don’t feel like I have the same freedom to grow and reach the potential that I feel is untapped. I’ve reached a point in my life that I am happy with, but I’m also restricted by it. To put it in the classic terminology, how much certainty and connection am I prepared to sacrifice to gain a sense of freedom?

Anyway, I’m just thinking out loud here… I’ll keep an eye out for the PM.

Boom

[Leigh]

All fascinating stuff. Looking forward to working through it with you.

[Nathan]

Yeah man, great to have you on board. I’m excited to see where this goes. Great to have you back on the forums. We are totally overdue for a catch up too!

[Luke]

Hey Nathan- didn’t see your post until now. Thanks for the welcome man, been enjoying seeing your watercolours on insta! I think I saw that you moved a little closer than you were before so a catch up is probably more doable now yeah?

Been floating around the site here for a while now and not sure where to start really. I was thinking of jumping onto the Focus Challenge that you guys are doing this month but I was actually on a 50+ day meditation streak just recently partly using the Sam Harris app and partly unguided, and I felt like I’d plateaued with meditation.

I can sit for the 10 minutes no problem, and I can bring my focus to different sensations pretty easily (when I’m properly engaged with what I’m doing), and I didn’t know where to go next. Floor sitting (to introduce discomfort/pain) was a go-to and walking meditation was another but I probably need to sit for substantially longer periods (30 min to 1 hour on the floor) to really start challenging myself I think. But really I think the plateau is about not having a real purpose behind doing it. I started it because meditation has been part of the process in the past of me sorting through things, but with my recent meditation streak I wasn’t really dealing with anything actively alongside the meditation practice. So it was maybe like training the ability to focus, but then not really using that focus to deal with anything.

Thinking about what I wrote in the earlier post (how I feel like I’m partly living my old OPD) and how I still have a sense of dissatisfaction with myself, I feel like maybe I need to start with a new vision and use that to figure out my priorities and what I need to target here.

Boom

[Author]

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