You found my old blog. Thanks for visiting! For my new writing, visit mikesententia.com.
Interesting post on Study Hacks about pseudo-striving — doing pleasant work that might maybe be sort of related to your goal, but isn’t really the important work that gets you there. Here’s the description that made it connect for me:
For the aspiring lifestyle designer [who wants passive income from a website], dedicating hours to e-mail auto-responders, WordPress widgets, and social network engineering is also pseduo-striving. It gives you lots to do, nothing is really judged a success or failure, and nothing is really hard, but you feel engaged and active. It’s quite pleasant. Many of the successful entrepreneurs from Chris’s book, by contrast, had a reality-based fixation on actually making real money from real people before doing anything else (be it leaving their job or optimizing a web site). This is less pleasant, because you might fail time and again to convince people to give you their money, but ultimately it’s all that matters, so that’s where your initial energy should be focused.
I see this a lot in magick, too. Reading all the books. Doing guided meditation to have visions and spiritual experiences, even though it’s really just hypnosis. Doing healing sessions, taking credit for successes, and excusing failures because “their unconscious wasn’t ready for the healing.” Those are all more pleasant than honestly testing your magick and debugging your technique until it works.
But the only thing that matters is causing actual change in the world. So, if you want to be successful as a mage, start there.
That’s going to be one of the core ideas in my book: Test early, test often, and make sure you’re actually doing magick, rather than getting by on placebo and suggestion. Might be less popular, but it will create more successful mages, which is really my goal.
If you liked this post, consider visiting my current blog at mikesententia.com.Tags: Learning