Never Taking Life Seriously: Awakening Conscious Action

Have you got a sense that you have not taken much seriously in life? Conscious thought completely out of the window, autopilot all the way… to oblivion.

This is a very personal subject for me, perhaps you can relate.

There is a degree of tragedy to being lured by the easy things in life.

There is a degree of tragedy to living for the moment.

There is a degree of tragedy in having no discipline.

And I must admit my life is tragic.

From a young age, I have been lured into the easy route.

Drifting through life is a sin.

Then I must admit I am a sinner.

I was a sinner.

Since the beginning…

I love stories.

But I cannot fall back on much.

I know not of the Macbeths.

I cannot remember much of the many protagonist’s journies.

I did not take much seriously at school.

I was busy trying to get somewhere with the cool kids.

And besides, any study of literature stopped at 16.

Dissecting novels was no more.

And I read non-fiction ever since.

I cannot remember the last fiction book I read. It must have been Dickins in school – and even then I was not the type to take much seriously.

My young sister at 15 knows more about literature than me.

And it’s embarrassing.

The middle hasn’t been much better…

Unsavory behaviour was all it took to get cheap attention and stay relevant.

It still works.

But thankfully I no longer subscribe to the channel.

Not like I once did.

It’s easy to get caught up when you leave school.

I studied my A-Levels to avoid getting work.

‘Work’ to me was a job in a warehouse.

It was the only possibility I could see.

It’s all my friends were doing.

It’s all my family was doing.

And it’s all I was expected to do.

But being an entrepreneurial madman, I had other plans.

My mother’s friend runs a market stall and was going to Manchester to buy some clothes to sell – from the wholesalers. I went with them with ￡500 I had from my grandmother.

What did I come back with?

￡200 worth of grinders, pipes, bongs, and other accessories.

It turns out selling cannabis itself was a lot easier.

Three months later I got found out by my parents. They gave me the ultimatum. I stopped selling cannabis and spent the entire money on cannabis over the following month instead.

Game over for the entrepreneurial young kid selling weed.

The Probation Service.

It was a surprise to many.

The new identity

It was finally time to re-evaluate who I was.

I was 21 at the time.

Five years had passed since leaving school and before this shot… I hadn’t done much.

Studying counselling had helped me secure an administration position, and I was well on the way to working within my personal development plan to become a Probation Service Officer when I got a phone call from a friend.

‘Karl I’m earning ￡1800 a month 35 hours a week they have a bar in the office we are selling PPI to the public it’s crazy mate, I can get you a job if you want?’

A week later I was there.

I used the sales job to move into recruitment, which had become an obsession over several years – primarily through my struggles of getting into a career and finding a ‘job that mattered.’

The road was long.

It was windy.

And quite often it can be easier to hitch the ride.

I had hitched a ride on the identity I had formed within my home town.

It wasn’t my identity.

My friends had given it to me.

Old experiences made up how I was perceived.

Family ties and associations.

They all become a shackle to our mind, they become the resistance to our authentic self.

But now it was my turn.

I wasn’t in my home town. This was my career.

This was my identity.

I could be who I wanted to be.

I was the driver in my car.

Switching gears at the interchange

This identity shift was a powerful factor in my life.

There was a time in my life that I had nothing. I wouldn’t speak up for myself. I daren’t look up most of the time, my eyes glued to the floor like trampled chewing gum.

Finally, I had something in life.

The job in recruitment ended. And my passion for writing was reignited last year.

During my five years ‘doing nothing’ – I had been creatively writing.

Blogs, game reviews, a whole bunch of stuff.

Millennial stuff. Online forums. Anyone who was really on the internet before 2008 knows how it used to be.

Before everyone’s attention was monopolised by YouTube and Facebook, people had to browse websites they were interested in.

Online communities were segregated, like the apartheid of the internet.

I created a blog for my recruitment endeavours before landing the job in recruitment… so I was already writing about my interests in context.

I decided to use my abilities in WordPress website design to create a website for businesses – and it took off. For fifteen months it worked, then I crashed and burned.

I was not writing advertisements that brought in customers. I was leaving it to myself to cold-call businesses.

Cold-calling is great. But if it’s your only source of business, you’re sort of screwed.

Advertising – generating a client – doing the work… that is possible, you know? It happened a couple of times for me, but no frequent enough. I didn’t have the money to advertise.

And so I crashed and burned.

And I rose once again, like the phoenix.

From the ashes, we have these scriptures

These pieces of writing – this blog – is the gift I have been given by the Gods.

And thankfully I have found my life purpose.

It is to study the greats of literature and become an excellent writer.

And I have finally reignited my interest in literature.

I have a deep sense of regret that I have wasted the precious time we have here and have not recognised the greatness of these works before.

Are you at University studying English Literature? Please – for my sake – use every God damn hour you have.

I am only 26, but I can tell you now life is quite different now than when I was 24, 22, 20. It is a hell of a lot different.

No longer do I have eight hours of leisure time a day.

And no longer is the opportunity to study present to me at all times.

I don’t have a lecturer.

I don’t have a study group.

I don’t have a structured curriculum.

And that is something you can be thankful for.

I can read the work of great writers. And I have started to. I intend to read many of the classics.

But there will never be the opportunity to sit in class, dissect the work, and get other’s opinions.

That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t take control of my life-long learning and tackle the subject heavily – over the years.

I can start today – and this can last for twenty years.

What is this piece about?

The article is a plead for you to take your life seriously.

I have had a transformational experience.

And I must be thankful for that.

Every minute on this Earth is a blessing. And I am curious to search for ideas, stories, and knowledge that makes it all the more wonderful.

Unlocking parts of life you could not recognise before.

Studying marketing and understanding influencing.

Studying psychology and understanding people.

Studying writing and understanding story.

All of this gives you new perspectives on life.

A new layer to your reality.

Life is as rich as you make it

You have a choice of more a million things you could do every second.

Try to picture everything you could do within this moment.

There is not enough time to take every action.

Therefore we must prioritise which action is important.

Is smoking that next cigarette important?

Or is writing that next word?

That is a question I just had to ask myself – this is my first-day stopping smoking after ten years.

And guess what? Writing the next word was more important.

Because the choice is yours. Every second.

What is more important?

Priorities dictate your thoughts.

Thoughts dictate your feelings.

Feeling dictate your actions.

You control every one of them.

There is virtue is going all-in

You were born with a huge amount of potential.

You must live up to that potential.

And when you make bad choices, you disseminate that potential.

It becomes anxiety, worry, and angst.

It becomes regret, resentment, and anger.

It becomes evil forces within your life that work against you.

And others.

No shame

There is no shame in going all in.

It is the opposite.

There is shame in not giving it your all.

Be your authentic self, pursue your higher calling and let go of the shame in being who you are.

Authentic people gravitate towards one another.

They respect each other.

Have you ever met someone and you thought ‘yeah he was a Character’

You’ve heard it before, right? He was a ‘character’

Like everyone else is soul-less when you compare them with this person.

There is no virtue in being a robot.

Be your true authentic self and people will gravitate towards you – the right people.

Meaningful Life

Your pursuit is your meaning.

Without it, you are free to create your meaning.

The meaning could be unclear – or worse yet forever lost, never to return.

The meaning could go and get drunk Friday to Sunday.

The meaning could be your children and wife.

The meaning should be the pursuit of your dreams.

Mastery

The road to mastery is a long one.

To get there, we must awaken our inner-selves.

We must take conscious action.

Every single day, we must change.

Every single day, we must think.

Every single day, we must act.

And in the end, we will be able to say we are the masters of our craft.

The masters of our field.

The masters of ourselves…

Taking life seriously

You are here once.

Is the reason you are here…. Immediate pleasures?

Is it earning the most money out of your friends?

Is it having respect in the club on the weekend?

Or is it finding your purpose, sticking to the script, and creating a legacy that will last longer than you?

I know where I’ll be put my vote.

And it’s on my future.

Every choice I make is to be an investment in my future self.

I am not perfect.

I am not ready.

I am not prepared.

But it’s time.

What would you do?

Break to the pressure – or be able to rise to the occasion and bring your A-Game?

A quick thank you to Sol Stein

Thank you to Sol Stein for his work, Stein on Writing.

It’s an 11-hour audible book. I am trying to summarise it, but I’ve only got through it once – and it is one of those works I want to buy in hardback and study.

And to summarise it – I think that reading the hardback would be a must.

It is filled with too much knowledge and wisdom to be summarised as easily as most books I have read.

If you haven’t already – and you are a writer or a ‘wannabe writer’ like me – read the book.

I know nothing of grammar, besides what I have learned myself.

And there are some habits I need to get out of.

An editor's dream is this article, a freestyle article that I wrote one night that due to my 1,000,000 million word mission cannot be straightened out into the piece it has the potential to be.