A few notes and thoughts. Many people don’t have clearly defined goals, with everything they’re searching for remaining outside themselves. In order to fill this space, they externally search, constantly seeking more, more, and more. This constantly raises their expectation of what they need. Thus their satisfaction becomes an increasingly taller and ultimately impossible order for them to fill. It’s a familiar tale of the child that always gets what he or she wants ends up forever unsatisfied and always wanting more (psychologist call this the hedonic treadmill). With clearly established intrinsic goals, proper motivations, which are in true alignment, satisfaction comes from the daily constructive approach to those goals. But this doesn’t mean choices between immediate gratification in lieu of long term advancement entirely disappear. With proper energy, approach, awareness and trust, they are diminished, but it must be pointed out that anything worth doing is going to suck at some point. In the quest for our goals, we need to become comfortable with delayed gratification, discomfort, frustration, dissatisfaction… We need to embrace the discomfort even expanding our threshold for it as part of the path to our ultimate goals. Studies have shown that self-control leads to long-term satisfaction. Most successful entrepreneurs either learn or are born with the capacity to delay gratification for critical periods in their lives. Even after success, they use self-control to continue to live modestly plowing their profits back into business. John Stewart Mill felt, “struggle and privation” in life is essential to happiness, because it provides us with a vivid reminder of how lucky we are when we have it good. This is also not entirely about willpower, as willpower is quite finite like a muscle as it gets tired it eventually gets up. Speaking of muscles, this is very much like exercise. Is a workout always pleasant, no, but it does keep us healthy. Actually, many people craft a routine to help them regularly exercise. On a grander scale, our larger goals are similarly about a life routine to create synergy and alignment. With the proper understanding and awareness, the tools and approach our world is reinforced with processes and ideas which synergically and naturally (without willpower) aid us in reaching goals — TheGear.