When I look back at the past few years, I realize that my life has undergone significant changes, whether it's my personal mental state, professional identity, or relationships; all are much more satisfying than before.
The key to this change is the choices I made over these years.
And here’s what I’ve learned about how to make different levels of choices to eventually create a new satisfying life.
The Highest Level of Choice
The highest level of choice is a life orientation. It’s a fundamental choice.
It is a decision on what kind of person you ultimately want to become, what kind of life you really want to live, and state of being you are eager to achieve.
For me, this choice is that I want to live a life of continuous creation and fulfillment.
I wasn’t assertive about this choice in the beginning. Instead, it was confirmed through my repeated self-reflection on real-life setbacks.
I remembered my childhood idols were people who spent their entire lives creating, and I never had a sustained interest in other lifestyles. I tried to work in a big company like most people, becoming a cog in the production system, fit into the crowd. Sometimes I seemed to do well, but I always quickly became unable to endure the repetitive daily routine.
The "normal" life was just not for me.
After repeatedly hearing my inner voice of becoming a creator, I realized that I could only obey it. This is destiny itself, and I must find a path to build the life I want despite it not sounding “normal”. Because in my growing and living environment, there were no such people, and no one would truly support or understand me at the time I begin.
To make that happen, I needed to make the secondary choices.
Secondary Choices: Milestones on the Path
To build the life I ultimately want, I moved to the next level of choices, the more specific goals. These are choices that form milestones on the path.
The first secondary choice I made was: I want to master the ability to create and a series of business operation skills. This was the first milestone I wanted to achieve.
This secondary choice is a bit more specific than the fundamental choice. It is more like a mid-term direction.
Although I didn't know how long it would take to achieve it or what detours I might encounter, but I did decide to move on with it. Looking back now, the day I made this decision was a crucial turning point and the beginning of creating the life I have now.
When I made this decision, I had no creative skills or experience and no advanced experience in the workplace. And now I can easily complete an illustration, write an article every week, and have built multiple products.
Achieving this transformation involved making a series of more detailed choices in this process.
Tertiary Choices: Actions
The tertiary choices are a series of actions to achieve the goal of your secondary choice.
For my goal, this often requires choosing the skills and knowledge you want to learn, the environment you're in, and how you arrange your time, energy, and money to accomplish things.
For example, to achieve the goal of mastering creative skills, I first needed to decide on the creative field that suited me. So at first, I just tried different creative mediums and forms that I had an interest in: illustration, 3D, animation, video production, creative writing, etc. In this process, I found that illustration was the most suitable for me to start. These were the actions of my first stage.
After choosing illustration, I put actions on the next stage: improving my skills and developing my own style. And my action was to draw steadily. Over the past 4 years, I have drawn more than 100 illustration each year. Through a lot of practice, I finally started to see my style manifest itself.
Now that I understand the power of choices, I can start setting other secondary choices and more actively creating the next chapter of my life.
Life Is A Series Of Choices
Every moment of your current life is the accumulation of your past choices.
Once you see how the past has influenced today, you will accept the simple fact that the choices you make today will affect the future.
Creating the life you want is not a mystery task, breaking it down you’ll see it’s just a series of choices, choices that can be made by you.
This is Edition No.3 of this weekly newsletter.
P.S. Lately I’ve been summarizing my past experience in creating a workflow for making art as well as turning my current life into a publishing workflow. I’ll share more in later articles. If you’re interested in learning more, just reply and subscribe. And thank you for reading!
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