WHISTLE WHILE YOU WORK: PERCEPTIONS AND VALUE JUDGEMENTS
Description
One of the things you can do as a person is enjoy what you’re doing — for yourself and for others. You can decide to whistle while you work, as it were.
And making this decision breaks down to looking at what you’re doing, and how you feel about it.
I think of these as perceptions and value judgements, and I’m going rant on these a little bit.
PERCEPTIONS AND VALUE JUDGEMENTS
We get to decide where we focus our attention in this big world of ours. You’re probably awake for 16+ hours a day… What are you doing with that time?
Are you focusing on your health, or your business, or your relationships, or what?
Realizing that you have control over this decision gives you a lot of agency and power over your life.
But in addition to where you put your attention, you get to decide how you feel about what you experience. I call this feeling a value judgement, and contrary to popular opinion, I believe this judgement is a choice.
We all have conditioning, absolutely. Maybe you were raised to believe that something is good, while I was raised to believe that thing is bad…
But I think in the end we all have control over our judgements.
And this is important to realize because if you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy, well, I think you’d benefit from either doing something else or changing the way you feel about it — and both of these are within your capability.
Essentially, what I’m talking about is taking responsibility.
TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Something I believe in very strongly — and something that has served me very well in my life — is the idea of personal responsibility.
Meaning that I believe whatever situation I might find myself in, I’m responsible for it. It came from the choices I made, where I chose to put my attention and the value judgements I associated with those perceptions.
And if I want to change my situation, then that’s up to me. I have to change my actions or change my judgements.
I don’t think many people are willing to hold this opinion. I think they don’t want to take that much responsibility, because it requires a lot of intention toward the choices you make and the outcomes you want.
But once you decide to take on that responsibly — it’s actually incredibly freeing. Because you no longer feel at the mercy of other people and outside forces. You take control over your life.
And let me say this: There are definitely external factors that are working against people and what they want. There’s classism, sexism, racism, agism, etc… We’re all swimming against a current, and that current is much stronger for some people than others.
But my point is that, at the very least, we have a great deal more power over our lives than we’re willing to accept.
TAKING ACTION
We get to choose where we focus our attention. We get to choose how we feel about what we perceive.
If you’re operating form the viewpoint that everything is happening to you, and that you have no control and that you’re a victim…
Then it’s a much harder place to improve from, and you’ll have a much harder time getting what you want.
And that’s what this is all about… It’s about having the life we want.
And toward that end I want to add one more step beyond just perception and judgement… And that’s action.
This post is not advocating for manifest destiny, or the idea that you should try to get what you want simply by focusing positively on it (à la The Secret).
I think positive thinking is fantastic, and it’s great to have a plan…
But once you have a plan, I think it’s better to take consistent action toward getting what you want. You will be much more likely to achieve your goals this way.
So get out there! Have fun! Get what you want!
Catch ya later.
Video Highlights:
0:54 Judge your own Experience
1:48 Perception and Value Judgement
2:49 You Decide where you Direct your Attention
4:01 Value Judgements are your Choice
4:53 Taking Responsibility for your Life
8:34 Take steps in the Direction of your Goals
9:15 Set Goals and a Plan
9:59 Success and Progression
11:37 Happiness does not Increase with more Wealth
13:25 Decide to Enjoy what you are Doing
Click Here For Video Transcript
They talk about in the sort of, you know, when people go and become monks and stuff, right? They make them sweep the floor, like, all the time, you know? I was reading this book about this guy who had to like cut the grass with a pair of scissors. And one of the reasons that they have you do these tasks that seem mundane, that seem like sort of long and tedious is because you then get the opportunity to decide to enjoy that task. And if you decide to enjoy what you’re doing, all the sudden you start to see the intricacies of it. You start to have a relationship to the experience of doing this thing that you didn’t have before, and you didn’t have it because you judged that thing as bad, which brings me to this idea of perception and value judgment.
So one of the things that I think holds people back in life, like everyone’s talking about mindset and positive attitude and all this kind of stuff and yes, that is important. And I think it’s been sort of, you know, it’s been sort of grabbed by pop culture and somewhat misconstrued. People have been somewhat misguided with relationship to this sort of like manifest destiny and “The Secret,” and not that I’m like against the idea of, you know, hey, positive thinking and stuff like that. But I wanna break it down…rather, one thing, I do have a gripe that I will mention after I’m done with my rant here. But I do have a gripe with relationship to, you know, manifesting, you know, bringing things into being by thinking positively about them. So I wanna talk about how I see that.
But basically, what I wanna get to is that I wanna break that down to a practical level for you, which is as a human being we can all agree that you get to decide where you direct your attention, right? So you get to decide whether or not you, you know, put attention on your body, or whether or not you work out, or whether or not you put attention towards creating a business, or whether or not you put attention towards your relationship. Now, that is not to say that there are not, you know, external factors like the society that you live in, like sort of, you know, who runs the government, you know, what’s happening in the world. Like, there are external factors that affect you. But in your daily life, you do get the opportunity to decide where you put your attention.
Therefore, you are choosing what you perceive. So in that sense, you have a lot of agency and a lot of power with relationship to how your life goes because you get to decide where you put your attention, right? So you get to decide where you put your attention. Then you also then get to place a value judgment on what you’ve perceived, right? So you get to perceive stuff, you know, decide what you’re perceiving and experiencing by where you’re putting your attention. Then you get to decide whether or not the experience that you perceived was good or bad. You get to place value on that, and those value judgments actually are your choice. Yeah, I mean they are conditioned. There are societal value judgments. There’s sort of people’s moral lines.
But if you look at different societies and different cultures, they have different sets of value judgments. So that whole, like, value judgment on perception is actually quite malleable. Like for example, in certain cultures, they eat dogs, and that is totally normal. They eat cats, and that is totally normal. And that’s like, you know, that particular judgment is a societal construct that is okay in that society. That’s not okay in the society that I’m in, right? So basically, you get to decide what you perceive by where you’re putting your attention, and then you get to judge whether or not that perception was good or bad.
Essentially what I’m talking about is taking responsibility for your life because one of the things that I believe in very strongly and that has ser
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