Make Yourself Obsolete

We all want to feel important and needed, but are we really?

For every profession I look at, I find myself wondering how necessary it really is.

Many of us are not truly working from the deepest, most serious part of our hearts.

Instead, we see it as just a job, just a way to make some money, just a temporary station on the way to something better.

Ask yourself, when something goes wrong with your work, do you care about this deeply? And if you do, is it because you truly care, or just because you worry that others will think less of you? Be honest and sincere here with your thoughts. I am asking you to reflect on these questions, not to feel the need to get defensive.

A few months ago, I spoke with someone in the Education field interested in developing a better curriculum for her students. I told her that she would succeed when the student no longer needed the teacher.

I felt that this was not what she was expecting to hear.

I advised her to make her job unnecessary.

Why would I do that?

I’m not sure it’s a success when students graduate to need another teacher, and another, and another. I’ve often heard that students decided to pursue the next level, whether it’s to a bachelor’s degree, master’s, or even a Ph.D. because they didn’t know what else to do.

Is that worthy? Is that success? Or is it futility?

On the one hand, ongoing learning is honorable. On the other, we keep learning more and more stuff and not having much to show for it.

Is it the contents in our minds that are valuable, or the power we have to make something happen in the real world? Many of us have been led astray or forgotten which of these actually mattered.

No one wants to hear that their job should be made obsolete. No one wants to think that success is in finding a way to make your job unnecessary.

We want to hear that we are essential, that society needs us, that society would crumble without our involvement. But that simply is not the case.

We need doctors so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we have neglected our health, to the point that we have outsourced its care rather than taken responsibility for it?

The most common “solutions” offered are medicines, which to some degree, act as poisons with their side effects.

We need teachers so badly, you may say. Sure, but isn’t that because we never taught students to think from the beginning? We led them to become reliant on digesting specific curriculums and memorizing them, only to forget most of it anyway. And the material they remembered would become obsolete in a few years.

The most common “solutions” offered are more degrees and more courses, often with no clear path toward careers. And for the ones that lead to careers, there is no guarantee that such careers will still exist in a few years.

When the “solutions” keep us reliant on needing more and more “solutions” from the same place, are they truly solutions?

I have no problem with doctors or teachers. I have merely used these as examples. I could have used any other profession.

For any career I can think of, the motivation of that job is to keep you locked in. There is never a true solution to any problem. It’s just a treadmill that keeps you running but staying in place at the end of the day.

Whether conscious and done purposely or not, it seems to be a consistent theme across most jobs. The client becomes an eternal source of revenue – always needing to come back for something more.

We never arrive at some desirable end point. There is just this empty feeling of needing more.

I don’t expect anyone to take today’s lesson seriously. I expect you to read this and continue about your job the same way you always have, and I can’t blame you for that either.

You are one piece of a much larger system. If you talk to your boss tomorrow and tell him: “I realized we’re just running our clients in circles here, and I think I know a way to get their problems fully resolved, so they never have to come back,” you’ll probably get fired on the spot.

There is no profit in true solutions.

We fear becoming obsolete the most, but perhaps it was what we needed all along.

Somewhere, in the Amazon rainforest, there was probably a panacea (cure-all) plant that would have cured everything. And it doesn’t matter because it would have made no profit for anyone. The only profit would have been to destroy the plant to avoid competitors, make it into a patentable drug, and then sell it at a high price.

This is where we are.

We are more interested in making people need us rather than truly offering something worthy. The most worthy thing to offer would be that which would make us no longer relevant or needed.

No one wants to hear this.

I don’t even want to say it because I know no one wants to hear it.

No one will hire me to give presentations at a Fortune 500 Company to tell them that they should make themselves obsolete. They would laugh at the idea that they should look for ways to dismantle their job positions and the company they work for.

Instead, they are focused on growth.

But the more a company grows, the more it shows they haven’t solved anything. They have learned to make others reliant on them, is all.

But if [Insert famous product here] is so great, why do we need more of it? Why does it never satisfy us? Why do I need to keep buying it or keep doing it to get that feeling?

Mind you, this is a feeling which is fleeting and illusory anyway.

If it were truly the best product, I think I could buy it once, and I would never need it again.

Those products don’t exist, of course. The products and services we have are the ones that keep us chasing our tails, coming back for more, like strung-out addicts.

The “solutions” we have are those that work for a few minutes, maybe an hour, maybe even a day, but not much more. In a recent post, I said: “The problem with solutions is that they are all temporary fixes. No problem has ever been permanently fixed.”

Our whole lives, nothing ever worked, but we think: “Maybe this new product or service will do the trick.”

I hope my books and Thoughts help someone somewhere, but I don’t want anyone to feel like they need me, my books, or my Thoughts.

My goal is not to keep you on the line, needing more.

Some of the “best” writers out there are actually the worst. If I read someone’s blog post, and it’s so great, why would I feel the need to read all their books and posts? If they were so great, I wouldn’t need to. If they were that good, I could read an article or two, get the message I needed, and never return to them again.

But that is exceedingly rare.

These days, I am writing everything I feel the need to so that it wouldn’t matter if I were to die. Even if I die, you can still access all that I thought was ever worth saying.

There isn’t this sense of “I must write 100 books or 1,000 articles.” That is irrelevant. The point is, did I say everything I needed to say, to the point that if lightning struck me dead one of these days, it wouldn’t matter?

Did I make myself obsolete? If so, then that was a success in my book.

Again: I don’t need you to need me. If you can click away from this site, and never return and be better for it, then I have succeeded.

Here is a quick example of how making oneself obsolete can lead to success:

A friend of mine had a Master or Guide in his life. He provided direction and words of wisdom regularly. One day, that Master decided to move on. My friend had often received good counsel and friendship and was saddened by his departure. But after this, my friend grew immeasurably. He started to realize that he did not need that Master at all. Rather than following or abiding by the lessons taught, he was paving his own way. In being left Masterless, he was now finding the Master within.

The Master, Guide, Parent, or Teacher who can leave and make you something better for it is the truly worthy one. Don’t misunderstand me to condone abandoning anyone. Only you can decide the point where it is better to walk away, or give space, or leave and never come back. But know whether you do this selfishly or selflessly.

Make yourself obsolete. Make it so that even if you vanished, the world would somehow become better for it.

We risk being made (or revealed to be) obsolete by the natural order of things every day. We might as well do it ourselves.

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Today’s post may be a heavy dose of Truth for some of us. If you would like to dig deeper into Your Life’s Truth, you may wish to read a book I just published, Your Personal Truth: A Journey to Discover Your Truth, Become Your True Self, & Live Your Truth.

You can read the book on Amazon and other major retailers.

Real Learning Comes Through Transformation

“Learning—real learning, wisdom—comes only when you are transformed. It is not an additive process—you cannot just go on adding knowledge to yourself. You will have to go through a transmutation that is hard.” – The Buddha Said… by Osho

I am only on the fifth chapter (out of 22) of The Buddha Said… and already I can see that this book carries great wisdom. It will be worth reading carefully, applying, and rereading, and reapplying. That is what I plan to do. The knowledge in this book could take time and effort to master, as it seems to guide us toward enlightenment.

The passage quoted above was insightful to me, yet it may appear quite obvious on its surface. I have found that most worthy wisdom is just that. It seems obvious and straightforward and often even easy to apply, yet very few of us do.

For example, I can tell you that getting impatient is bad. The next time someone is irritating you or provoking you, ignore it. Let it be. Take a breath and pay attention to something worthwhile in life.

Yet, for someone with the habit of impatience, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be lazy is bad. Do not waste this life. Go out and have the courage to find something that truly matters to you and that will make a difference in this world. Stop doing the bare minimum to get by and increase the standard you expect from yourself.

Yet, for someone with the habit of laziness, will they listen and change?

Or I can tell you that to be vengeful is bad. Stop wishing to get payback on all those that commit wrongs against you. In some cases, they are poisoned from having been wronged, making them want to wrong others. And in other cases, they don’t know the wrongs they commit and do so through a lack of awareness. Lastly, as we have all heard, “An eye for an eye leaves everyone blind,” so is this something we want to give energy to?

Yet, for someone with the habit of vengeance, will they listen and change?

As you may guess, I find it unlikely that the person with a habit of something will suddenly change their life from being exposed to mere words.

Despite that I work as a writer and earn my living this way, it is painful to admit that the words themselves are empty if they don’t cause personal transformation. The learning, the knowledge, the wisdom, the teachings—all of it is empty, useless, and fruitless if we do not change from within.

Yet I have seen, as you have seen, that most of us know the right things to do, to be, to say, and yet fail to do them. Perhaps we need to come to the awareness more deeply that the only worthwhile learning was not in the accumulation of knowledge, facts, or even the pursuit of higher understanding.

Rather, the only worthwhile learning was in whether we could become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions. Awareness is not enough—to be aware is to see that something is happening. But to see it and do nothing seems to be a massive failure, worse than not having seen it at all.

If you see a wall and walk into it, isn’t that somehow worse than someone who never saw the wall and walked into it accidentally?

We must become aware, change who we are, and perform new and better actions.

The point is to do something with all the accumulation of knowledge and facts. Otherwise, the learning was useless. This is not something we hear often.

I am a big believer in education and learning. But what we often forget is that as humans, what we learn should be causing some change within us. And that change within us should cause some change in the real world.

In a similar vein, Mahatma Gandhi said:

“If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him.”

If I read the tragic history of a people, and then I live my life normally, without my heart having grown, giving to charity, or learning more about their present-day struggles, then what have I truly learned?

If I “learn” by acquiring facts, and change nothing, then isn’t that a personal failing?

Yet, the point of this post is not to make us all feel guilty for anything we ever learned, where we failed to convert it into some positive action. The point is to see that we need to be brave and encourage these personal changes to happen.

I have seen many highly educated people increase their learning and awareness while failing to grow at all. I’ve been guilty of this too.

How much time do we spend reading the news versus actually doing something about the world's tragedies?

How much time do we spend educating our children about “the real world” while denying them the ability actually to participate in it?

And how much do we consume books or media while not producing something worthy in return?

Having written this post up to here, I believe you probably already knew everything I just stated. So if we already knew, why haven’t we committed to acquiring more helpful ideas and performing more actions that could help us change more profoundly?

The reason is that we fear change. Even for those who want progress, it still can feel scary or overwhelming to make a significant change.

But we don’t need to make massive changes in every area of our lives, suddenly.

We can decide on certain things that we find to be important and then invest ourselves into them.

I use the word invest because when you invest, you risk losing something. Your risk may be that you hope to help improve something, and in the end, you don’t make much of an impact. Then you may be let down or upset. But of course, we have to be willing to risk losing something to make our impact.

The outcomes we desire are never guaranteed. There is always a risk. We need to choose which risks are worth taking, where we can hope to gain a worthy experience that transforms us.

I think we fear changes because we tend to fear death. Change is the death of something old and the birth of something new. However, why should we fear it? We can guide the change in our lives by moving away from those things that do not work, which are not fruitful, and moving toward the ones that are.

We may find that the greatest life lessons come from the most significant changes within us or around us. Yet great changes imply some form of loss, which again is what we fear. We must become comfortable with the idea of losing something (or someone) if we ever wish to gain anything that truly matters.

We cling even to the things that don’t do us much good because they are familiar. They make us feel at home. But sometimes, that home is worth letting go of, to introduce something that compels us to grow.

In the end, we will lose our lives and everything we ever gained. All of that was temporary. But if we work on transforming ourselves, we will leave a permanent impact on the people around us and on the universe itself.

The universe is not static—it is ever-evolving and changing. Perhaps we could learn something from that.

The key lesson of the day is that we should continue to learn. But for that learning to be worth something, we should be ready and willing to change from within. This can mean seeing the world in a new way, feeling in a new way, and then deciding to stop doing something we used to do—and doing something in a way that we never did before.

We have not truly learned unless we have been transformed from the inside.

As a practical tip, after you read something or learn something, ask yourself:

What has truly changed?

If nothing, then ask:

What can I change, and should I change, given what I just learned?

Stay Connected with the People Who Matter Most

Most people now have large networks of people that they know. There may be family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances (or friends of friends), professional connections, and so on.

Our networks get larger and larger, but also more and more superficial. We know more and more people, but we know less and less about them.

Through the years, I find that it’s very easy to lose the connections that were actually the most important to our lives. If given enough time, the ties get weaker and weaker, to the point where they can break off after a certain point.

Of course, if you had a strong enough connection with someone, you should always have some ability to reconnect and continue your bond or friendship.

Today, I want you to consider if there are people with who you are gradually losing connection but who are worth keeping up with. Just because one of you moved or changed jobs does not mean that you cannot keep in contact.

Some simple ways to maintain a connection are email, social media, messaging, or phone calls. Of course, there are even letters or postcards.

What I have found is that staying connected is a two-way street. You may try to stay in touch with someone, but perhaps they don’t make much of an effort. Perhaps they are content to allow some of their relationships to fade away with time. This can be difficult, of course, but you can only do your part to try to keep up with relationships that are important to you.

Who have you lost touch with that made a big impact on your life? Is there someone you would like to reconnect with?

In some cases, perhaps you actually had a problem with someone. You can ask whether that problem is worth losing contact over. Sometimes it may be, but in other cases, perhaps with time, you have seen that the issue was not major enough to hold a grudge over. It may be time to make amends and reconnect.

What I have found is that good friends are worth keeping in contact with. Close family is also worth keeping in contact with. Sometimes certain bonds may not be as strong as you would like – of course, in those cases, working on continuing to develop those bonds and friendships is worth it.

It’s easy to make excuses - but that’s all they are, excuses. We all have a few moments here and there to send an email, a message, or even make a phone call. No one is so busy that they can’t periodically check in on someone important to their lives.

You may be interested to learn that the author of The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying (read a useful summary on her website here), Bronnie Ware, actually identified this as one of the common regrets people had when they were dying:

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Some of my best friendships go back to middle school and high school. Unfortunately, with three of my closest friends, they ended up moving away during high school, and I never kept in touch with them after this. I did manage to find one of them on social media, but the other two I have never heard from again.

Sometimes we don’t realize the value of certain relationships until it is too late and we have lost them.

Try to think of someone worth reconnecting with (or building a deeper connection with) in your life. Consider this:

• Is this someone you love?

• Is this someone who supported you during a difficult time?

• Is this someone who you grew up with, and you were there for each other?

• Is this someone that you miss?

• Is this someone who you regret having fought with over issues that now seem trivial?

• Is this a friend or family member (e.g., cousin or aunt) who felt more like a sibling or second parent?

• Is this someone who you “clicked” with or connected with immediately when you met them?

Today, think back to the important people in your life. Is there someone you haven’t talked to in a long time that was a good friend or who played an important role in your life? Consider trying to get in touch again. They may be happy and excited to hear from you.

Think of Death to Live More Consciously

For someone who is 35 years old, I think of my own death quite often. I am very healthy, so poor health is not the reason for this. I am also not depressed, so please do not be concerned in that way either.

I also consider that for anyone important in my life, they may perish at any time. I don’t let this make me fearful, but I realize that this is the truth. Since much of my way of life is to pursue the truth, I think we need to acknowledge that life can be taken from us at any moment. We are not in control of when or how it will happen. We can eat well, exercise, and maintain our health to the best of our abilities, but this does not free us from the possibility of sudden illness, an accident, or senseless violence.

I am a highly optimistic person, and so the last thing I want to do is make someone fear that death is coming for them and their loved ones any time soon. I want us to accept that it can happen and use this for our personal betterment, rather than as something to become anxious or depressed about. There is no reason to expect death to come soon for many of us. Yet, because there is no reason to expect this to happen, our lives are often out of balance. We may even live as if we will never die, which of course, is false.

Many people prioritize work, or money, or even things above their loved ones. Still, if we considered even for a moment that a loved one may not be there tomorrow, then surely we would be awakened to the true value of our relationships with family and close friends.

Sometimes I think today could be my last day alive. If this were the case, what would I do? As strange as it is, I often find myself figuring out that I would live my life as an ordinary person, fulfilling my ordinary obligations. I would pursue a good meal, spend time with my wife, write my Thought post (as I’m doing now), and reflect on my life and the nature of society and its problems, as I do regularly. I would also try to help whoever I could.

Surely, if I knew I was going to die today, I would probably feel the need to reflect on whether my life had been worth it – whether I accomplished what I wanted to. But what is the point in waiting for death to think of this? Think of it right now. Are you accomplishing what you had hoped? Are you on the path you had hoped? Are you living up to your own standards? Forget the standards of everyone else for a moment.

If we wait until death to think and reflect on our lives, we are perhaps waiting until death to think. Is this the reality we want for ourselves? If nothing else, we should reflect on what we find to be truly important during our lives. If it is love, we should be loving, rather than just wanting others to love us. If it is happiness, we should be spreading it rather than just wishing to feel it. If it is wisdom, we should be the student for many years and then spread our wisdom to life’s students. What value do we hold so strongly that we should be giving it to others happily, rather than just wishing to accumulate it for ourselves?

We must seriously consider our own death to live truly. Understand that your life is limited, the lives of your parents are limited, even the lives of your children are limited. All lives are limited. There is only so much time to do what we wanted, find love, express our love, accomplish something, make our small impact in this world in our own way, and stand up for whatever it is that we believe in. But if we never thought about what we believed or what we wanted, how would we truly pursue it? And how would we accomplish it?

We have to respect that death is ultimately coming for us all. When we have a conversation with anyone, we should sometimes think – this may be the last time I have the chance to speak with this person. Before we get another chance, that person may die, or I may die.

Such thoughts are not meant to traumatize us or make us fearful or agoraphobic. The point is to realize that many of us are living life trivially. We are not present. We see our loved ones as just background noise, as mouths to feed, as wanting to discuss their own boring lives with us, etc. We form barriers between us with our phones, televisions, and other screens. In time, we become strangers in the same house, or eventually, maybe strangers who live in different houses who realize they never really knew each other.

It seems that many of us are afraid to live. It’s easier to follow the lives and dramas in the news media and television shows than to discover and pursue our own truthful life path. We become obsessive about following fake lives on television screens, celebrities, and our friends’ lives rather than forming our own life worth living.

We live in an age when it is more possible to create the life you want to live than at any point in history, but this does not necessarily make it easy. Just as we have opened up so many fruitful paths, we have also opened up many harmful and counterproductive options. The path toward truth and meaning in our lives is one we must commit to, or there will be plenty of distractions along the way to take us off course.

So this is why I find it valuable, and I’m eternally grateful for the simple reminder that I’m going to die. Everyone I know is going to die. These are statements I view positively, as they always help me stay on the right track in my life.

This simple reminder forces me to value people first, always. This is the world I want to live in, where we put people first. Ultimately, every action you perform every day should represent the world you want to live in. I always keep in mind that whoever I am interacting with is a real person first, and second, they are whatever they appear to be.

For example, for any stranger you may see on the streets, think: This is a person first, that happens to be a successful businessperson. This is a person first that happens to be skating in the middle of the street. Or this is a person first, who happens to be homeless and asking for food. Our value comes from being a person first, not from our secondary characteristics. And this is the way it is with all life, actually. Life has value in itself, not because of what temporary qualities it appears to have (e.g., beauty, success, power).

Whenever someone calls me or emails me and needs to talk, I do my best to be there. If it’s family, I drop what I’m doing and do my best to help, or listen, or provide whatever it is they may need. If it’s one of my readers with a problem, I often do my best to help them see better pathways in their life. I never aim to tell someone what to do with their life. I hope to get them to see better pathways that they could explore.

At one point, I was so fixated on my business and my work that I put that first for many years. Now, I don’t. Now, I see that my work is meant to be just an extension of my whole life. My whole life’s work is about helping people. So doing that is important, and I aim to listen to people deeply and help them however I can. If it means setting aside my work for a few minutes, or in some cases longer, so be it.

What point is there in me trying to spread my thoughts if I am not living by them? This is another realization you may come to when keeping death in mind. Are you truly living by what you find to be most important? Are you telling your kid to tell the truth, then you lie to everyone all day at your work and to your spouse? Are you telling your friends to follow their passion but choosing money first in your life every time?

The biggest lie most of us face every day is that we don’t acknowledge the simple fact of our own mortality and the mortality of every person we will cross paths with today. Keep this in mind. If you see 100 people or more today, there is a fair chance at least one of those people you crossed paths with will not be alive in 365 days.

To pursue truth in our lives, we must acknowledge our mortality, and this will help us always to make sure we are on the path to valuing what is truly most valuable in our lives and being congruent with ourselves (being, thinking, saying, and doing in a way that is in alignment). This will also help us to be more present. If you keep in mind the temporariness of life, you will be motivated to get the most from every moment and not take any of it for granted.