The Trouble Is With You

In the first “Daily Freedom,” “Why Do You Want To Be Free?,” I wrote, “Freedom means being free to do whatever one chooses to do. If you do not have something to do, you really do not need freedom.”

I mentioned in the “Money,” article that “the question that seems most difficult for most people is, ‘what do I really want to do with my life, what do I want to be?’” Several articles addressing this question are planned, and I do not intend to address it directly here. I want to point out a mistake we all make, not only about this question, but about most of what seem to be problems or difficulties in our lives.

Most of the problems and difficulties we have in life are of our own making. If you have trouble in your life, before you look for a cause for your trouble in others, in your school, your society, your government, your family, your job, your boss, look first to yourself. The trouble is not the world or others, the trouble is with you.

Most of our troubles are the result of bad choices and a failure to learn all we can to live successfully in this life.

The reason most people have difficulty deciding what they want to do with their life is because they are not able to do very much, and what they can do, is difficult or unpleasant.

Years ago, when I did a lot of hiring and interviewed lots of job applicants, I discovered that most people are incompetent, not because they lack any basic intelligence or ability, but because they never made the effort to learn how to do very much. Most of the candidates I interviewed had learned a great deal in a single field or two, but learned very little of anything else. I interviewed programmers who could not type, could not write a well organized report, could not draw a simple figure to illustrate a problem.

It really does not matter what your culture or background are, or what field you are interested in, if one does not learn everything they possibly can to deal with every possible situation they are likely to encounter in their life, they are not prepared to live. Any American who cannot write a correct English sentence or construct a proper paragraph is not prepared for life in America, and will have trouble which is their own fault. Anyone can learn these things.

Of course failing to learn all we can possibly learn about as many things as possible is just one of many bad and mistaken choices we make. The basis for bad choices will be addressed in another post, the point here is, that all of the trouble in out life that is the result of our bad choices is our own fault. The first place to look for a cause when we have trouble is our own choices, and the first place to look for a solution to our problems is how to make better choices.

The first “better choice” to make is to learn as much as possible about as many things as possible which will also help us make even better choices.