This Might Be the Rarest and Most Difficult Psychological Achievement

What are the chances that your average 18 year old — just heading off to university for the first time — is going to be able to make the correct decision about what they want to do for the rest of their natural lives?

And yet, this is exactly what we expect them to do when we ask them to declare their major at university.

Hell, what are the chances that your average forty-year-old is going to know what they want to be when they grow up?

The brilliant psychologist Abraham Maslow thought that personal clarity on this issue was not to be taken for granted. Whatever our age, it’s not a given that we’re sure to find out exactly what we want to do with our one infinitely unlikely, finite existence.

It takes persistent probing, dedicated thought…effort!

Sometimes, it takes a lifetime, and it seems strange (and more than a little bit unfair) that we’re asking young people to nail the rarest and most difficult psychological achievement before they’re even old enough to drink.

“It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.”

-Abraham Maslow

To know who you are — to become who you are — makes you an exception. It makes you the rarest of the rare, and the rest of this article is dedicated to exploring a few ways you can take to get there.

Life only promises an adventure — nothing more. Personally, I think it’s going to be a long adventure for many of us, because of the insane medical advances that are coming down the pipeline right now.

It’s not unrealistic to assume that the first person who’s going to live to 150 (or even longer) has already been born. Some people are way less conservative than I am, and they predict that the first person to live to 1,000 years old has already been born.

I’m not sure I’m ready to go that far, but I know that even if you “only” live to age 90 or 100, you’re going to reinvent yourself over and over and over again during that time.

We will not remain the same, cannot remain the same, because life demands so much from us, and because stagnation represents a kind of “death in life.”

So the good news is that you have a lot more than 18–21 years to figure out who you are (or at least get a hint or two about who you are) and who you want to become. What you want your adventure to look like.

This actually removes a ton of the pressure!

Even if you’re “advanced” in years, you still have time! There are ninety-year-olds reinventing themselves and embarking on new adventures every day.

So one of the first steps is to expand your time horizon and realize that you’re still early. You don’t have to figure this stuff out tomorrow. There’s no race, and so you can’t fall behind.

In fact, you probably have time for…oh, I don’t know…10,000 experiments. Take the next 10,000 days and try something new every…single…day. And at the end of those 10,000 days, not only will you have learned by negation what didn’t work…you’ll still have time!

At the end of 10,000 days, “only” 27 years will have passed, and you’ll be 10,000 steps closer to figuring out who you are. Figuring out what doesn’t light you up, what doesn’t keep you up at night because you can’t wait to do it all over again tomorrow.

Remember that this rare, impressive psychological achievement is yours and no one else’s. Becoming who you are means rejecting who other people think you should be, or what other people try to turn you into. In the entire history of the universe there will never again be anyone like you, and you need to make people respect that.

What I call “cultural gravity” is that social force that slowly but surely drags you back down to average. It’s a regression to the mean, this “lessening” of your Self that you have to resist. That you’ll work to resist your whole life.

Sometimes, cultural gravity can be a good thing! Surrounding myself with winners is how I’ve made such massive strides forward in my own life. The right friend group will take you exactly where you want to go, whereas the wrong one will lead you to disaster or death.

But at the very end — when you arrive at the clearest realization of your Self in all your potentialities and particularities — there is only room for You.

I don’t know of anything more fascinating, elusive, difficult, uncertain, and worthwhile than this search for who You are. There’s nothing more exciting or dangerous or thrilling that you could possibly do in life, and only you can do it.

All the best,

Matt Karamazov

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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