When you hit the crossroad

If you use the systems and habits approach to improve, you will build up great habits. You will start to achieve your goals and experience success.

Everyone who follows this approach will eventually hit an ultimate crossroad. This ultimate crossroad will be difficult and confusing.

Because you have experienced some success and solidified the habits required, you will find that you can take one of two paths forward.

The leveraged path is one that presents the opportunity for extreme movement. You will have unlocked the key to succeeding but see that extreme success often means extreme sacrifice.

You must make this sacrifice to experience the showering of praise that will arrive once you push beyond the possible. It will solidify your place and will lock you into a new you.

Because you used the systems and habits approach to improvement, you have learned about the systems. You start to see a larger picture. This often taints the leveraged path in a way that others cannot comprehend.

You see that those sacrificed aspects might be more meaningful in your life than any achievement. You will feel the emotion of contentment. Sacrificing that for an ego boost becomes silly.

The other path is one of calm contentment. It feels as though you don’t need anything else to be happy or complete. Instead of pushing beyond the boundaries, you realize how beneficial it is to keep living within the boundaries.

Many of the benefits from the leveraged path appear on the calm contentment path. You can inspire others. You can help the world. You can help those around you.

You have built solid systems in your life. These are purposeful. You can put your knowledge out there for the world to explore without sacrificing those closest to you.

You focus closer and inward instead of outward. Instead of wanting the admiration of millions you simply want the inner satisfaction of helping a few close to you.

You will realize the leveraged path is risky. You risk it all for one small slice that becomes extreme. Or you keep with the wholeness that comes from the systems approach.

If you can get to this crossroad, congratulations. Most won’t. They will still desire the benefits of the leveraged path without truly understanding it or the calm content path that coexists. Instead, they simply crave more, without even knowing what “more” they want.

You will also find that there really isn’t a choice here. You will laugh at the options, knowing which one is for you.

Growing, improving, pushing oneself, and intellectual curiosity exist in the path that most would never take until they get to the decision point.

You will never hear about those who choose the calm content path. They will remain historically small, insignificant to everyone outside of a small circle.

But within that circle, they will mean everything. And for them, that is all that matters. You may judge it as a big fish in a small pond. That is fine. Nothing judged of them can change the calm, contentment that flows throughout their life.