The non-negotiable thing you must do to climb your way out of obscurity
My 3-step framework for becoming yourself
As I’m sitting here once more in this cafe, I’m wondering to myself, “What was the first step in my journey? Or, more specifically, knowing all I know now, what do I wish my first step was? What do I wish someone told me back in the day?”
How could I have cut the fat and gotten right to the chase? Wherein lies the necessity in this whole “self-discovery” process? What was, or would have been, the first non-negotiable thing to do?
Well, let’s see. Where was I? I was lost. I was a kid (Iol, I say this as if I’m not a measly 25 years old right now). I mean, I could really start this story at any point in my life between the ages of 17 and 22ish.
I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know who I was, whatever that means . . .
When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to become a professional soccer player. And even though I did love soccer, the fact of the matter was (and I wasn’t willing to admit it at the time) that I did not love it enough. It was not something I was willing to give myself to fully. I was far more in love with the idea of playing college and professional soccer than I was with the actual lifestyle of it all.
And even though I didn’t know at the time what this lifestyle consisted of, I had overlooked a simple fact: I was burning out. I started each season excited as could be and ended it ready as ever to stop playing.
I should have taken this as a sign that soccer, in the long run, was not for me. Because the burnout indicated not that I needed to make small, technically guided adjustments, but that I needed to adjust altogether what it was I was pursuing (for the record, I don’t really get burnt out writing—because burnout is almost always a symptom of misalignment, not overwork) . . .
Becoming who I am has been a gradual process, one that I seek to now help you shorten or streamline significantly. What’s so complicated about trying to shorten it, though, is that it’s not really supposed to be shortened. Not only is it incredibly complicated and infinitely nuanced, but the fact is that you must be lost in order to be found. You must know, in other words, what you don’t like before you know what you do like.
I saw a video last night (I know, I shouldn’t have been scrolling) of Scott Galloway saying something along the lines of, If you’re in your 20s and you feel lost and unsure of what it is you want to do with your life, then congratulations—you’re right where you ought to be.
Could I have realized deep within my bones that soccer wasn’t for me if I hadn’t done all I did? If I hadn’t gone on to play college and semi-professional soccer, spending my days knocking a ball against a wall, getting kicked out of parking garages, training hours on end for years on end, traveling all over the place in the name of what was inevitably going to be a dream not-come-true? Could someone have sat me down at 18 years old and said, “Listen, man, the fact that you’re burning out indicates that this simply isn’t for you . . .”? I’m not so sure.
And really, would I, right now, relinquish all I learned and all I became as a result of embarking on that journey? Absolutely not.
I know things today about the body, about my body, about nutrition, and fitness, and mindset, and overcoming physical pain and existential torture (okay, it’s not like I was being waterboarded or anything) and a host of other crap that I’d otherwise never have learned—all of which, by the way, empowers me today in this writing journey of mine. Not to mention, I’ve met incredible people, I’ve seen incredible things, I’ve cultivated my abilities, I’ve learned what it takes to get to higher levels, and, most importantly, I’ve learned that it’s okay to walk new paths. To reinvent yourself. I know now that it is sometimes, in fact, 100% necessary to be willing, as hard as it may be, to step away from something you’ve given your entire life to in order to become all you could be.
posted this Note from C.S. Lewis the other day:
This, you see, is what makes my job today a little more complicated. How could I tell someone what they need to do to “get started” if I myself took such a windy path, and am today unwilling to admit that even a portion of it was superfluous, unnecessary?
I guess this must be, then, where it all starts. It starts with acknowledging that you’re in it for the long run, that it’s okay to fail—indeed, that it’s necessary to fail—that you’re still worthy of love, both from others and from yourself, despite the fact that you’re somehow not a self-actualized billionaire, and that feeling lost is, just like how construction workers drive pillars deep into the earth before erecting a high-rise, the first step to feeling found . . . Indeed, that “feeling found” is far less of a solitary moment of nirvana than it is a gradual, near-unnoticeable forward progression.
But what to do? What does this mean for you, practically? There must be something, just one thing, I could offer tangibly—one thing I’d offer to my younger self . . .
Where you’re at
Let me frame this one-dimensionally.
Right now, to one degree or another, you feel lost. You have some things sorted out, and there’s a whole bunch of things you don’t have sorted out. You have an idea of what you like, and you kind of know what you don’t like, but when you look ahead, you see, instead of a path, something like a wall. You don’t see, in other words, a clear way forward. You might feel hopeless, you might not feel all that hopeless. You might feel like your life is altogether meaningless, you might not. You want to do important things, big things, but you don’t know how. You want to live in accordance with your truest self, but you don’t know what that means. You want an identity, but you don’t know where to look for it. You lack both the clarity of what exactly your mission ought to be and what mechanism or medium you might operate through to make this vague dream a reality.
You experience intermittently a sort of perpetual dread, regularly embodying as a result a mixture of what you’re told is depression and anxiety or something of the like. You may have a job, you may be in school, you may even be doing something you enjoy, but feel is not exactly what you were put on this earth to do.
You aspire, but you don’t know to what.
What you’re missing
What you’re lacking, my friend, is clarity. You exist in a state of obscurity.
Why? For two reasons:
You don’t exactly know yourself
You don’t exactly understand the world (I’m not saying you’re stupid, I’m saying you lack information & skillsets that would allow you to operate meaningfully)
Your job, the job I am going to help you perform, is to move from this completely natural, chaotic state of obscurity to a more peaceful, ordered state of clarity. Your job, in other words, is to become yourself. The best version of yourself. The version of yourself in which you know “who you are” and what your place in the world is.
Today’s post is a high-level overview of what you can do, the first steps you can take in your journey, to dig yourself out of whatever rut you’re in. There’s plenty more to come—I can’t cover it all today—so if this sounds like you or if you’d like to learn more about all things self-awareness, I’d love for you to join me in this journey:
I’m not saying this process is going to be easy, and I’m not saying you’re not gonna be able to do it in a couple of weeks or months. But you can, by taking some simple steps, get the ball rolling in the right direction.
Let’s get started.
🧭 Step 1: Make a map
The first thing you must do, my friend, is orient yourself. You have to figure out, to the best of your ability, where you are.
You don’t need to apply for the most important job on the planet, you don’t need to start a business, you don’t need to go on a trip around the world. We’ll get there. But just give yourself a second, even just a day or two to map things out.
Though your instincts may rightfully be telling you to do something to escape this state of existential dread, moving without any sort of aim, no matter how vague, would be to relocate with a blindfold over your eyes: you’d still not know where you are.
Part of the reason you feel the way you do is that you haven’t ordered your reality . . . You haven’t established what’s meaningful. You see, if you don’t know what it is you find meaningful, you cannot gauge whether or not you’re progressing, moving forward. And if you are incapable of feeling like you’re moving forward, you are destined to fall into a state of hopeless despair. Because, you see, to feel hopeful is to believe there is for you a viable path forward.
Now, I know you may be thinking something like, well, I don’t know what’s meaningful!
I hear you. Firstly, my friend, relax your nervous system. You cannot see clearly when you’re frantic. You’re going through life in an ongoing state of angst. Take a second to recognize the fact that changing your location or hopping from one stimulation to the next will not change the fact that you’re discontent in the moment.
🔦 Clarity hack:
As a side note, I ought to mention that an incredible degree of clarity can be found on, for example, a park bench. So much of the reason we fall into states of obscurity is because we move so fast, and fall so deeply—for our unwillingness to sit with discomfort—into stimulation . . . So much clarity, in other words, may be found in simple stillness.
Okay, so what do I mean when I say orient yourself? How can you figure out what it is you find meaningful?
Imagine you are a character in a video game, and you just got dropped into a map. You have a couple of tools, and you don’t know exactly where you are, but you can move around, and you see that there are “resources” hovering above the ground, spaced intermittently around you.
You must first wonder—and you probably already have some sort of idea—what is my objective?
Translated back into real-world terms, what is it that you value most? What do you believe is most meaningful?
Let’s work through this.
🧠 Micro-step 1: Brainstorm
List out on a piece of paper (or perhaps you can read this right now and work through it later) as many things as you can possibly imagine you might want in life. It doesn’t matter if they’re superficial—it just matters that you are, to the best of your ability, being honest with yourself.
What do you really value? What do you think would make your life better? Do you want to cultivate or maintain a group of high-quality friends? Do you want a better relationship with your parents? Do you want to be rich beyond belief? Do you want to wake up every day and feel like you’re making the world a better place and solving the problems you were designed to solve? Do you want an identity? Do you want to live in any particular place? Do you want to get in shape?
Sorry for rambling; I just want to demonstrate that there are no limits, no boundaries here.
Let the floodgates open. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You’ll probably miss some things, and you may not know exactly how to label each “item.” Just give it your best shot.
🔦 Clarity hack:
If you don’t know where to start, take an MBTI test. I prefer Truity’s—and they have tons of other free self-discovery tools for you to use. Results, of course, aren’t perfect, but they are an excellent resource gaining clarity in this process, especially in regards to potential “career” paths.
Okay, so now you’ve got this list. Perhaps you’ve got 10 things, perhaps you’ve got 50. It doesn’t matter. Go through everything you’ve written down and rank it all according to importance (it doesn’t have to be perfect, just approximate). The goal here, again, is to determine what’s most important or valuable to you.
I know you’ll find some things equally important, so what I want you to do is split everything up into 7 categories:
Health
Anything regarding your physical or mental health
Relationships
Anything regarding the people in your life
Spirituality
Anything regarding your faith practices
Financials
Anything regarding your money goals
Purpose & Creativity
Anything regarding your “career”/life mission
Lifestyle
Anything regarding how/where you want to live
Superfluous
Anything that does not fit into one of these categories
Once you’ve got everything organized in these categories and ranked according to importance, I want you to do two things:
Combine anything that can be combined
For example, if you’ve listed in the health category both “build my physical strength” and “eat a healthy diet,” combine these two into something like “become the most physically capable and healthy version of myself.” We’ll specify goals later. For now, we want to keep things at a higher level for the sake of simplicity. We want the big idea. The more all-encompassing, the better.
Eliminate anything that is not immediately (within 10 years) pertinent
While it is important to have a long-term vision in the back of your mind (again, this is something we’ll work on later in a different post), we don’t want, for the purposes of this exercise, to focus on things too far out of your control. And really, I’d say narrow in on the next 3-5 years.
The goal here, as I said, is simplicity. It doesn’t have to be perfect (it’s not going to be), it just needs to be practical. Try your best to get one single item under each category. If you need to have two, that’s perfectly okay.
📝 Note:
By the way—we’re just using this formatting as a mode of organizing and ordering your life . . . This isn’t going to be something you return to every single day for the next decade of your life. You’re not going to turn your relationships, for example, into a checklisted series of daily goals. We’re just framing your life this way for the purposes of getting you out of whatever rut you’re in until you turn these into implicit habits—until you know intuitively where you are.
Okay, so now you’ve got these things, these items listed out.
Next, let’s frame them in a way that allows you to establish some sort of action plan so that you have something, some reference point, to gauge whether or not you’re making progress.
🎯Micro-step 2: Set goals
Yes, I’m talking about goals here.
We’re not aiming to make them completely tangible, because, again, they are likely a little too “all-encompassing” for you to be able to derive a solitary action plan; they just have to establish order. They have to be clear enough so you can determine whether or not something you’re doing—an action you take, a habit you have, etc.—is moving you forward or not.
Let’s continue with the “relationships” category as an example. Perhaps your items are “have a strong relationship with my family” and “have a strong relationship with my friends.”
How can we frame these items in an actionable, goal-oriented manner?
Here’s the key: you must be able to gauge progress by way of what’s in your control. You cannot control, for example, whether or not someone likes you. You cannot control whether or not someone you love feels loved by you. You can control, on the other hand, how often you call your parents, or how much of an effort you put into making time for your friendships.
So, how can we reframe “have a strong relationship with my family”? For the sake of this example, let’s say you don’t live at home, and perhaps in another city. We could say, “Regularly call and intermittently visit my family.”
By framing things more actionably, you can now gauge, say, each week, how much you’ve progressed or maintained your relationship with your family.
Now do this with each category. Reframe each item as an actionable “goal” so you are able to determine whether or not you’ve done what you could do to move the needle forward (or ensure it doesn’t fall backwards). AGAIN, this isn’t going to be perfect. It’s not the “final draft” version of your life outline. All we’re doing here is inching forward, closer to a state of clarity, so you have some sort of idea what it is that you value.
What you’ll want to have at the end of this exercise is a rough idea of where you’re at . . . a map.
🗺️ Step 2: Explore the map
So you’ve got a map—an estimation of what you value. Let’s take this exercise back to the context of a video game.
You have an idea of “what the game is about” . . . the objectives . . . something along the lines of accumulate as many points as possible, or defeat as many enemies as possible, or get to the highest level, or win the game.
Awesome. You’re oriented. Not perfectly, but just enough to determine whether or not something you’re doing is moving you forward meaningfully or not. The only thing you’ve got to do now is give it a shot.
You start moving around, opening doors, exploring buildings, gathering those resources, and testing them out to see what they do. You start practicing different skills and abilities, refining your aim, figuring out what all the buttons do, seeing what you can and can’t do, moving around more dynamically, exploring the boundaries of the map, and ultimately figuring out what you need to do to progress towards those objectives.
The more you play, the better you get, the more you know the ins and outs of the map, the better you are at overcoming whatever obstacles the game throws your way, the more clear the game’s objectives become, and the closer you get to achieving them. Don’t get me wrong—the game does not come without its difficulties. You fail a lot, you get stuck at certain points (perhaps becoming frustrated with yourself), and you realize that in order to progress, you’ve got to refine your skills in a few domains.
Nevertheless, you’re doing it. You’re playing the game, and you’re having a good time.
Translated, once more, back into real-world terms, you start taking action towards your goals.
You apply for that job, you start that business, you take a trip around the world to expose yourself to new cultures and ideas, perhaps taking note along the way of where it is you might want to live for some time.
You start calling your parents a little more often, you get yourself to the gym a day or two more than you were before, you start painting a little more regularly . . . Whatever your goals are, you’re inching your way towards them.
You start feeling a little better, a little more proud of yourself, a little more purposeful and hopeful about life.
Now, I know I’m making this sound a lot simpler than it is. I know you may, for example, want to exercise more but can’t seem to get yourself to the gym as much as you’d like. You may want to start a business, but you don’t know how, and you can’t, for some reason, get yourself to work on it for more than an hour or two a day. I know, to put things plainly, that I’ve not exactly clarified how to break these goals down into clear, actionable steps and get yourself progressing towards them.
Indeed, this process, though simple, is multifaceted and involves a variety of factors and inputs. You might be wondering, “Where should I even start? I’ve got these goals now, but which one is most important, and how do I know which one to start moving towards first? How can I order and structure this list so I have one solitary framework with which to move forward?”
Excellent. Your mind is in the right place. Here’s the answer: we’ve got to start from the bottom, the foundation, and work our way upwards.
What is the foundation of routine? What forms the bottom layer of the framework you’ll use to order your goals?
🗂️ Micro-step 1: Get organized
You’ve got to be organized, my friend. Organization is the structure upon which you cultivate an ordered life . . . the first small step you must take to advance yourself to bigger, more meaningful things.
(Perhaps a disorderly life works for some people, but I’ve personally never seen a person with a messy bedroom whose life isn’t proportionately chaotic.)
I have found in my journey two main reasons you need to be organized:
Organization helps you operate more efficiently
Organization grants you the freedom and peace of mind to move forward towards more important tasks
You see, when you get organized, you are, in short, taking existential pressure off your shoulders. By organizing and systematizing your immediate environment—your room, bathroom, kitchen, garage, etc.—you can move through your day more smoothly and, having fewer things on your mind, you can give more cerebral bandwidth to higher-level tasks.
You’ll notice, after organizing your life, that you may stop procrastinating on that thing you’ve been wanting to do but unable to bring yourself to get started on . . . And you almost certainly will feel less anxious, less existentially pressured, knowing in the back of your mind you’ve taken that dreadful thing—cleaning—off your to-do list. You’ll have made way, in other words, to take the next step forward; until you sort this out, I can almost guarantee you’ll struggle putting sustained effort towards higher-level goals.
Since this is already a long post, and more of an overview than a super deep dive, I’ll forgo detailing this exact process (since it’s mostly self-explanatory). Just get your life organized, and then maintain it regularly. Because it’s much easier to keep the momentum going than having to repeatedly clean up a room that looks like it just got hit by a mortar shell.
⚔️ Micro-step 2: Create and execute daily missions
Okay, so now you’re organized.
What I want you to do next is take those 6 or 7 category goals we created in Step 1 and create 3-5 tangible tasks for each—things you could do that’d “move the needle forward.”
Remember, they need to be action-oriented.
Now, each day, I want you to take one of those tasks (if you want to do two, that’s cool also, as long as you actually do it) and add it to a daily list.
Perhaps on some days you don’t “address” certain categories . . . perhaps if you, for example, called your family yesterday, you might not call them until tomorrow. Whatever tasks you feel are most pertinent—most immediately pressing—add 3-5 of them to a daily list . . a “to-do” list.
The goal here is to move the needle forward just a little bit each day. You probably have a job or go to school, so plan these tasks out accordingly and realistically (don’t worry about going beast mode right now—you’ll get there eventually. Right now, you need to aim for sustainability).
They don’t have to take up huge chunks of time. For example, to call your parents may take just 10 minutes; likewise, the gym doesn’t have to take an hour and a half out of your life, especially if you just got started. . . If you’re having trouble going to the gym in the first place, stop planning out hour-long workouts. Just make a habit of getting yourself there, doing a few pushups or something, and then leaving.
The point is to execute and complete. You want to do small things and finish them. You want to imbue your life with a sense of accomplishment; you want to feel like you’re moving forward, as it is this feeling that will fuel your future efforts.
The goal here, as I said, is sustainability, lasting change.
🔦 Clarity hack:
If you’re having trouble executing a certain task, you need to do one of two things:
If it feels overwhelming, break it down into more digestable, actionable pieces, and do those instead.
If there’s something you do not understand about it, what you need is not action but information. Look up YouTube videos, read books, ask Chat GPT, etc.
If you feel like you’re not progressing, in other words, it’s not because it’s impossible to move forward but because you need to take a different approach to addressing the problem—either through more specific action or with different information.
✍️ Step 3: Recreate the map
Okay, here we are: the third and final step to climbing your way out of obscurity and “becoming yourself” (congratulations for making it this far in the post, btw).
You might be thinking, “Recreate the map, you say? Shouldn’t the goal be to win the game?”
No. Your ultimate objective is not to win the game; it is, instead, to keep playing and keep progressing. Unlike video games, life is a game we want (and have no choice, really) to keep playing.
The good life, in other words, is far more about climbing the mountain (and having a good time doing so) than it is arriving at the top. In fact (in addition to my own experiences), I’ve heard many stories of the emptiness many find at the top of the mountain, having believed the whole way up that its peak held something, some sense of completion, inaccessible elsewhere.
It’s not that you should avoid winning, but that you’re not going to feel at any single point in your journey like you’re complete . . . because wholeness does not come from some solitary moment of nirvana (remember, it’s gradual). Of course, you will undoubtedly feel in particular moments like you’ve “won the game”—the birth of a child, getting married, making a big sale, etc.—but the fact is that the good life is composed of a process, rather than just one single climactic moment.
(Watch a short clip from this video—starting at 25:19, which I preset for you—to understand in greater detail what I’m talking about.)
But how do you know when it’s time to recreate the map? And why should you, anyway?
For the last time, let’s take this exercise back to the video game . . . There comes a moment in your gaming experience when you’ve done, more or less, all you could do. Either you’ve neared the top, having become one of the most skilled players, achieved all the objectives, and won the game, or you may simply feel like you’ve plateaued, like there’s nothing more you could do to continue progressing in the game.
Whatever the case, the fact is that you’re bored. Or worse, a little empty, wondering to yourself, “What’s next?” You may even be a little hopeless, feeling like there lies before you, once more, not a path, but a wall . . .
You've reached the top of the mountain and are now hoping for something new. “What’s next? Is this really it?”
Excellent! You’re right where you need to be.
So many people, having bought into one particular identity, come to believe that whatever mission they were on was the only mission they’d be engaged in for their entire life . . . that it was, in other words, their identity.
And for that period of their life, of your life, it may very well have been. But the thing is that in the midst of these journeys, these missions, we acquire new information, endure new lows and highs, and subsequently become new people. We are, put differently, dynamic beings. We change.
As a result, we need intermittent reinvention. We need to create a new map, since we come to value, through pain and suffering (and pleasure), things we didn’t value before, and stop valuing things we did before.
The good thing, here, is that the longer you play the game, the more you know yourself and what you value, and the more specific, therefore, you may be in crafting your goals.
You may have wanted, at the start of this exercise, to be perfectly specific with your goals. The problem is that you didn’t know yourself enough, having not yet embarked upon these missions and endured the subsequent experiences that could inform the creation of these goals, to be able to perfectly specify what it was you wanted. It is for this reason, you see, that this process cannot be resolved in a matter of months. It is ongoing, lasting throughout your lifetime, gradually inching you closer and closer to a state of peaceful clarity.
📝 Note:
By the way, it is for this reason that getting older is so pleasurable. I love all my older folks, but I must say this: do not listen to anyone who says getting older sucks. Getting older is fantastic, and though youth is precious, there is nothing dreadful about the clarity that comes with age. If someone ages and does not gain clarity, then they never took the time to orient themselves in the first place.
So yes, go ahead and make a new map. Reorient yourself, make some goals, and get moving towards them.
The more you repeat this process, the more you’ll feel like yourself. It is, again, gradual, and while there will be moments of greatness, the relief will often be unnoticeable . . . until, one day, something awakens you, and you realize just how far you’ve come, how much more peaceful you feel.
Remember, you’re not just here to win; you’re here to keep playing the game.
As I’ve said, this post was an overview of the first steps you must take in your journey . . . I simply could not cover everything, and I could not be perfectly specific with each step and nuance you might encounter in your journey. It was just enough to get you started.
Luckily, though, I’ve got plenty of resources soon to be released. If you enjoyed this post, if you thought it helped you get the ball rolling, please consider joining me in this journey:
And if you know anyone else you think this information could be of use to, please consider sharing it with them:
Thank you for reading today’s post. I’m super excited for what’s to come. If you have any questions or would like to add a thought, I’d love to hear from you in the comments below:
Until next time,
RB