you sensed that you should be following a different path, a more ambitious one, you felt that you were destined for other things, but you had no idea how to achieve them and in your misery you began to hate everything aroud you

Notes from Underground: Dostoyevsky

Reading his book ‘Crime and Punishment‘ really pulls you into the mind of the author, a dark, gloomy, melancholic, and desperate scenario, and this quote tends to veer that way in its intention.

He really dives into the depth of man’s negativity and projects it into scenarios that seem as real as the night sky.

This sense ‘that you should be following a different path’ really hit me when I transitioned from an employee to a contractor. The uplift in money didn’t result in an increase in willingness to work, to learn, and to achieve my objectives. I became stagnant, a shell, an empty vessel receiving my weekly paycheck fix!

Procrastination became the subconscious goal, my mind reverting back to its animalistic tendencies of conserving its energy for a hunt. Bad habits accumulated, unnecessary spending, no self-progression, and basically losing my sense of self. I wanted to break everything I built!

I realized that my ‘passion’ for change and creativity was not being met, in that this chase for comfort, stability, the Middle Eastern long-term goal of work, work, work, buy a home, and start a family was not something I wanted to follow.

I realized that my creativity didn’t necessarily lie in engineering, nor in the academic sense of it; I realized that my creativity boiled down to two things: what I liked and something I can do and can confidently say, “I’M ALL IN!”

I want to be ambitious!

Having ‘no idea’ how to ‘achieve (my) ambition’ was leading me to a place of despair and misery, tapping into my misanthropic tendencies of anger towards anyone outside of my circle. I just didn’t enjoy any existing commitments with regard to social gatherings. I resented people of faith, people with arrogance, uneducated self-proclaimed leaders, basically projecting my insecurities onto easy external targets, basically my negative programmatic and logical mind justifying my anger and misery.

AMBITION has led me onto a path of improvement, but this quote really does not put into perspective what could’ve happened to me if I stayed the way I was.

This feeling of being ‘destined for something greater’ led me to a whole sweep of actions to improve my outlook on life and reactivate my neglected creative tendencies.

I started to read more books, became more social, acted as myself in front of family, went through multiple iterations on launching an e-commerce business, went on holidays, invested in my leisure time, explored creative habits, trained a lot more consistently, and some other things I can’t really remember as I write this.

From all this, I can safely and confidently say that my family, friends, and spirituality have kept me grounded from these spiraling thoughts of negativity, and probably more impactful in keeping me afloat, was RESPONSIBILITY.

All these new books I’ve read, and a change in mindset led me to action advice (based on Stephen Colbert’s insights in his book on the “7 Habits of Highly Effective People” (see preview of book)) in establishing a personal mission statement;

“be present, positive, and creative. to be challenged, and be true to myself.“