God I miss that feeling.

I am rediscovering it luckily. You know, when you have this thing you want more than anything, and you give it your everything.

A girl you are chasing, a rank in a game, a better position in a job, a software you want to build, to nail entrance exam for university, to find a solution for a problem that’s been bothering you forever.

There is a huge promise of value. Signals going mayhem, shouting “GO HERE! THERE IS A BIG REWARD! BIGGER THAN ANYTHING IN YOUR LIFE!”. Then you do everything for it. You wake up, pour coffee, and spontaneously go work for it.

I remember watching this video all the time:

It is true. Those things that we want as much as we want to breathe, we will go beyond our normal human form to achieve them. A superhuman.

I really miss that.

And there’s this huge puzzle; the “it” is not always clear. I mean the goal. The target. The promise of value. It’s not always so clear, right?

You building a breakthrough innovative software (according to you) could yield you millions. Or nothing. Or few bucks from couple users.

So the promise of value is a question mark.

???

What then? This is where belief comes in. Absolutely stubborn faith that behind the question marks lies a big reward. The better you can envision those question marks as HUGE reward, the faster your car goes.

That’s the hard part. Most people don’t have the imagination or the leap of faith without evidence to figure out what kind of reward is behind those question marks.

You watch any succesful people, they have this extraordinary drive and belief in what they do.

???

The question marks don’t mean anything to them. They just want to drive and are confident of the direction, even with the hidden reward.

That’s the hard part. It requires imagination. As does astrophysics. They lack the ability to run controlled experiments on the stars. They rely on observation and imagination.

"In the case of science I think one of the things that makes it difficult is it takes a lot of imagination.” - Richard Feynman

I think it is the same for the goals with hidden reward. Goals with no direct measure of where you are standing at, and where the finish line is, or what is behind the finish line. You have nothing but blind trust, dreams and imagination.

Dream -> Goal -> Means -> Reward

Go! Go dream and imagine. Now.

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Naess

Chasing something with everything you got is…