The goal of everything - and why you can’t change it
Humans want to impose their will on the world around them. Sometimes, it works. We've blasted tunnels through mountains to make travel easier. We've almost eliminated several deadly diseases. All in all, we have a decent track record when it comes to shaping the world to fit us. But there are some things that we can't change. No matter how hard we try. No matter how moral and righteous our justification. Nature will not bend to our will. One of those things is our desire to achieve.
When you ask what’s the one driving force behind everything we do, the answer is that we want success.
We want to win. We want to provide for ourselves and our loved ones. And to leave a legacy. And we want to defend our homes.
Success is always the goal.
But, where there’s a winner, there’s always a loser. That’s hard for some people to hear. They have the misguided notion that everyone should win.
But it’s the truth. Someone must lose.
Nature doesn’t care that your morals say everyone should be equal. That everyone should have the same as everyone else. You don’t get to tell the winners that they’re evil because they won.
You don’t get to take from the winners and give to the losers. That’s not how the universe works.
The winners are the ones who heft the world up onto their shoulders and carry it forward. When you demonize them and take from them for committing the sin of winning, they stop trying. And the world stops moving forward.
That’s the beauty of the Universal Operating System. When one person works struggles for their own benefit and wins, they pull the rest of the world along with them.
Think of the iPhone. It's generated massive wealth for Apple. In doing so, it made smartphones ubiquitous. Now almost everyone has enormous processing power in their pocket. Even the losers win.
Yes, there’s a disparity in the degree to which everyone won. Apple, its shareholders, and its employees won a lot. Everyone else won a little. But, it’s in that disparity that we find the motivation for the next Apple to come along and move the world forward.
We’re all in this life together. One where we’re competing with each other in some way.
You don't get to choose whether you take part. But, you get to decide how much effort you put into the fight.
You can choose to watch television or read a book.
You can choose to take a nap or take a training course.
You can choose to sit and stare at the sky or to write the great American novel.
But you don’t get to choose how others participate.
The desire for success is hard-coded into our DNA. Humans want to strive, struggle, and succeed. To build and think bigger, better, and faster. And to the winner goes the reward.
But the loser wins too.
That’s the way of things. And no amount of hand-wringing virtue signaling will ever change that.
And that’s a good thing. Because if it did, the world would stop moving forward.
Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay