your ambition if you have any sense is actually to become competent do you want to be competent and dangerous or do you want to be vague and useless it is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate and so it's a moral Endeavor in some real sense become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue every Advantage comes with a disadvantage so if you're extroverted you're social and you're positive but you're impulsive and you can tilt towards Hedonism and you can't stand
being alone no matter where you land in the temperamental landscape you're going to have your Associated faults and temptations you've got a goal and you'll see that as you progress towards the goal there'll be obstacles that emerge and some of them you don't want to confront that's why it's useful to order your room chaotic room makes you anxious why too many Pathways man people don't really repress the things they don't want to face they just fail to unpack them you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility we're built to walk uphill and when you reach
the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance beware of unintended consequences it's like oh no this thing will just do what I wanted to do and nothing else it's like no it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing but that's also the adventure of your life and so if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms
with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that you've acquiesced to and that'll take all the meaning out of your life it's good for you to go take your place in the world have some ambition have a vision have a goal have a strategy try to be a good person not because it's your duty precisely because that's the proper way to live you sit on your bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something what's one thing I'm doing wrong
that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix you meditate on that you'll get an answer you grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily and it's also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically so almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm and that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain so you
can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense Transcendent you want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're here to live not to not to sleep and the
problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that well first of all that's a vision of of drug-induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work for about a week third you're going to be a laughing stock in a month and depressed and aimless and and goalless it's no that's not it's it's you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility and so it does happen to people as they because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal and it can be a pretty high order goal but then you think now
I'm there now what well the answer can't be well I'm going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the what do you want to be a giant infant with a gold with a gold bottle you never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck it's like you see the problem with that as a conceptualization it's no you want to be like an act of warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand and that's that's Dynamic that's exciting people are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal
it it causes conflict in the moment telling the truth is definitely an adventure seeking for sure but also telling another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens that's an adventure because you don't know what the outcome is going to be so look there's this old idea that it's necessary to have faith in the truth and so here's here's a way of thinking about that someone asks you a question and you might think well here's the outcome I want and so here's how I'm going to answer that
question so that's one way of approaching it but another way of approaching it is you ask me a question I'm going to think about the answer and I'm just going to tell you what I think and it doesn't matter what the outcome is because I'm willing to see what the outcome will be predicated on the idea that there isn't a better outcome than the one that truth produces even if it's harsh and terrible in the in the short term and sometimes it is it's like there isn't a better better way of doing it now you
might say well how do you know that an answer is well I don't know that that's why it's an Article of Faith because I believe and and I believe this deeply the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good by definition even though it's harsh and often uncomfortable because you get in trouble one of the things that I've really learned recently or learned to articulate better is that there's a very tight relationship between aspiration and responsibility the first question might be do you need to Aspire to something and the answer
is well yes because you have to do something okay if you just sit there you'll die you can't just sit there you have to go act out in the world okay so act towards what well that's whatever your aspiration is you have to have a name okay well what should the aim be well it should be something worth doing let's say what why do something that you don't feel is worth doing what do you think's worth doing well if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile you usually judge them positively
if you see that they're taking responsibility at least for themselves but you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you that's pretty pathetic and maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and your family and maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and your community well good for you that's that's responsibility and that's a name well here's one of the things that's cool about that is that your life doesn't have meaning without aspiration or name okay
so you need a hierarchy of values there's got to be something at the top it's got to be something important if you don't have that your life doesn't have any meaning so if you criticize the hierarchy or even the ideas of idea of hierarchy you destroy the idea of aspiration and then people have nothing well that's not helpful people are built for a struggle and they're built for a weight and you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily see if you can put yourself together see what you can do out in the world while
you're waiting to die it's an all-in game it better be worthwhile it took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion so what happens is that if you act out your identity if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action and the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't
know what to do so what do you do when you don't want know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you and there's there's an immense physiological literature detailing the the cost of of of exactly that kind of response people stay where what they do has the results they want that's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions it's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want
is going to happen we hate that and no wonder there are varying degrees of that obviously you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree but by and large we're conservative creatures even if we're liberal and temperament we can't tolerate that much uncertainty you might ask well why and the answer is well because you can be hurt pain you can be damaged you can become intolerably anxious and you can die so it's no wonder you're sensitive we're very sensitive to negative emotion [Music] thank
you
