What’s your drive in life??

I was speaking to an acquaintance of mine today and we were discussing what we wanted out of life. I said to him, do you have a drive to be rich in life?
He told me, I don’t really have a drive so to speak but if there’s one thing I want in life it’s to be competent. Right at that moment class started and the lecture swung into gear so I quickly forgot about it without thinking about it. But thinking back on it, that’s really deep.

To be competent means, you just want direction, you just want to know that everything will be ok. You just want a safety net and self assurance to know that you’re doing alright. You’re doing the right thing. I think maybe the pursuit of money is a result of this pursuit for competence. You just want money to know that you’ll be alright. you’re gonna be ok, You’re doing life right.

It’s crazy that at the end of the day all we want is to be competent. Know that we’re being a good son or daughter. A good grandchild. A good spouse and parent. That’s deep. I think though that the drive to be competent is really a fundamental mindset. It’s kind of like, let’s not get carried away with ourselves, let’s not be ambitious and go beyond being ok. Let’s just make sure we’re not dead. But even though this is such a basic mentality I’m pretty sure most people operate from this mindset.

I know for a FACT that most people don’t have the drive to be rich. Because people are so damn average. People don’t think beyond today. Ninety-nine percent of people don’t set goals for the next year and the next 5 years and the next 10 years and they don’t think about why they do what they do! They don’t think about getting money in the future. They don’t think about becoming a millionaire. They just think about their next pay check.

Every day I see losers on the train playing the next big puzzle game. I mean not only are they playing these stupid puzzle games (E.g. Candy Crush) on the way to work, I mean they’re spending time to download the next cool puzzle app on the App Store! They’re spending time looking for apps to play! That’s time you could have spent planning goals to get more money!
Sure there’s times I spend where I’m not setting goals or being productive but I just think candy crush and other puzzle games are so damn basic! It’s one of those things to me that doesn’t even register in my mind as a logical option. Play candy crush? What!? But none the less I think majority of people of a large proportion of people on their phones on the train do this based on my own observations. And I’m talking about people young and old.
Everybody is just happy to take what they can get. Minimise regret. Don’t shoot for the stars, because you might fail and regret it. Just do something mediocre.

Funnily enough I was just walking to class today and some guys t-shirt caught my attention. It said hustle. I stared at the shirt as we passed each other but it wasn’t until the last second that my attention was drawn away from his shirt and I realised the guy wearing it was a guy from my classes in high school.

When I’d seen the shirt my thoughts were:

“Wow that’s really rare to see someone advertising that they hustle like that, that guy is probably really cool.”

But once I realised who it was I thought:

“Whaaaaaat? Brotha I know you smart, smarter than me even. But you? Hustle? I mean I know that you know the meaning of the word hustle because you smart but hustle represents a whole culture today. The culture of hustle and creativity and business and lifestyle… I don’t think you’re the hustling type.”

When I thought more about this guy and other smart guys like him I’d been to school with I couldn’t picture any of them caught up in the culture and the mentality of “the hustle”. I rather think that these guys are logical machines. See a problem create a solution, but more so they just do what’s in front of them. Incredible problem solvers but not really a creative force in love with bettering themselves and becoming the next Thomas Edison. I just think they lack ambition.

After thinking about all of this I realised the most ambitious people are highly highly emotionally intelligent. Cognitive, logical intelligence is fantastic, but it doesn’t give you out of the box thinking. They’re too logical. Emotionally intelligent people are driven not by what they know but what they can imagine and feel. They aren’t confined by the parameters within the problem. They don’t wish to find the most efficient solution, they set out to discover the most interesting and creative solution. They are driven by ambition and drive instead of logic.
While thinking about this, one of my old friends instantly came to mind. An extremely emotionally intelligent guy, also intellectually above average but not a genius, but just contained raw ambition. The correlation is obvious. This guy is switched on emotionally, he’s studying medicine but at the same time is developing an app and having it published in the next few months.

I mean I guess the last thing I wanted and needed to add is that being emotionally intelligent doesn’t guarantee high levels of ambition. I’m sure there’s plenty of emotionally intelligent people without ambition.

Which when I think about shocks me and saddens me. I mean why is the default for nobody to have ambition? Why? Is it a choice or is it nature? I definitely think it has a lot to do with nature. I guess that’s ok.
Anyway not sure how to tie this out but I hope you learned something from that. I think it’s really cool. I think now it will be easy to determine who has ambition and drive to be rich in life just after a few minutes of chatting to them. And if you’re not gifted with a whole lot of emotional intelligence I think that is the main thing I would focus on strengthening.

I realise now that I haven’t even considered other drives in life. But I mean, riches is measurable, and people with ambition often want to be rich. I mean there are examples of those people everywhere. And like I say, I mean I think majority of people in life just lack drive altogether so if there is people with different drives then I predict they make up a small percentage of the population. But if you have  something else that drives you in life let me know what it is. I’m curious.

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