Leveling Up: Part I — What is a Leveled Up Human?

All humans to varying degrees must bear the weight of their circumstances. While most people would love to have the ability to snap their fingers and magically improve them, life isn’t exactly fair and unfortunately no such magic exists. These circumstances may work to benefit some while proving truly burdensome to others. Although they may have been determined by some combination of good and bad luck, we must not fall victim to them. For example, if you are reading this, you are one of the lucky ones, as your circumstances have allowed you enough freedom to end up on this blog. It is with this “free will” that you have the choice to rise above the perceived limitations they present. We must choose to focus on the things in life we can control, because focusing on the things we can’t is a waste of our energy. So while there are times most of us may not be able to control our circumstances (outer environment), we may be surprised to learn how much control we have over how we perceive and react to them (inner environment). With practice, we can construct our inner environment like an athlete training to build strength, or a musician learning and mastering an instrument. Over time as we develop our inner environment, our outer environment naturally will follow suit. Classically, the development of our inner environment is called self-development. This is the environment we must learn to master in order to take our first steps towards leveling up.

Before we embark on our journey of self-development we must ask the question — what does it mean to level up as a human? Development means progress, as such there has to be some sort of measure by which we can gauge our development by. The athlete may measure their progress by gauging the amount of weight they can lift compared to the last workout. The musician may measure their progress by seeing how efficiently they can play common chord progressions in different keys. In both these examples it is imperative to keep some sort of practice log or diary if one wants to measure and thus maximize their progress. So before we can even begin to answer the initial question, we have to go deeper down the rabbit hole. We need to come up with the variables we are to measure in order to track our self-development. One question leads to another and we are left asking — are there optimal values? We don’t know where we are going until we determine what set of values are important to us, which will in turn determine our trajectory and thus help us answer the initial question.

Before reading further, write down on a piece of paper what you value.