While The Twelve Aspects of Life provides a fundamental mental model for making sense of life, your aspirations serve as the compass for a fulfilling and happy life. Your journey towards synthesizing a happier life begins with formulating your aspirations.
Alignment builds resonance. Resonance builds happiness.
Before we get into aspirations, let's explore what it means to be happy. What I have learnt for myself is that happiness derives from experiencing resonance. For example, getting what I perceive to be a want or a good thing makes me happy. I also feel happy when I achieve what I expect of myself. When an experience is aligned with my expectations, it resonances with me and transforms into happiness. Conversely, when things are not going the way I imagine, that is dissonance and is the source of dissatisfaction and unhappiness.
Just as life feels chaotic without a mental model for making sense of life, your happiness becomes a blur without a mental model for making sense of what makes you happy. The question of what makes us happy then, can be answered by understanding our aspirations. Without articulating your aspirations clearly, you leave the fate of your happiness up to chance. The ambiguity makes it harder for you to recognise an experience as either good or bad.
Articulating your aspirations, is the first step towards resonance.
Everyone has aspirations. The trick is uncovering, articulating and organising your aspirations. But first, understand that it's not an exercise that you can do in a few minutes. Being able to articulate your aspirations requires time to brainstorm, draft and refine to attain clarity. If you're just getting started, set aside an hour or two to really ideate and come up with drafts for your aspirations. You could use The Twelve Aspects of Life as reference to ideate. Don't worry about not being clear on your first try. Your aspirations will be refined eventually as you continue to review them periodically.
If you're wondering how to write your aspirations, according to the book The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone, a good way to frame your aspirations is to write them down as though you've already achieved them. Your aspirations should also be a little audacious - slightly out of reach.
For me, that would look like this;
I own a company that help millions of people build a productive and happier lives.
If/When I ever do achieve that, I would have achieved the ultimate level of happiness. But until then, there are many other smaller goals and tasks that I can do for me to build up the resonance of happiness. I urge you to write and clarify your aspirations too, and may it help you recognise and experience more happiness.
With love, teriyakidonaki