This is not the usual Attention, Please topic of SFV or limited attention spans, but it ties into using your mind to directly improve the quality of your life. You can’t do this if you’re so fragmented you can’t identify clearly what you want or stay focused on that goal long enough to deeply tune into that desire.
That’s why I think about Defragging as "Part I" of life improvement. It is a necessary but not sufficient step to getting to where you have the capacity to clearly want and then DO something concretely to fulfill that desire.
This is a brief outline on what to do with that desire you’ve cultivated the capacity for after you’ve defragged your mind. Well, let’s start with the obvious, but something people rarely do: to think deeply enough about a desire means you DO NOT have the target yet and don’t have a clear, easy path to get it. By definition it’s frustrating or challenging or opaque as to the path to quenching the desire. If not, you wouldn’t be desiring it. You want health, wealth, success, satisfaction, fame, peace, happiness -- you want these things because you don’t yet have them. But you can get them with a clear, focused mind.
The first step to attaining your desire is to immediately evaluate your approach to not having them and how you feel about the people who do have them. If you feel angry, bitter, resentful, or jealous of the people who are wealthy, successful, etc., you are blocking your path to ever reaching or fulfilling your desires. These negative emotions/thoughts are absolute obstacles to you reaching your goals. They demonstrate a mindset trapped in scarcity, ignorant of what true abundance exists in the world. When you use your candle to light the candle of another, it doesn’t reduce the brightness of your own. The fundamentals that most people want are non-zero-sum (NZS). Sure, if you want to be President of the US it means no one else can be, but what is the deep desire under the superficial “job” goal? That is the core “want” and if it is "status" or "importance" -- these are NZS. Even wealth is NZS -- basic economics shows that all stable trade relationships are positive-sum for both. It’s why global GDP goes up the more we trade.
What do you do when your neighbor pulls up in a new Mercedes S65? Rejoice! E.g., train yourself, through practiced, conscious thoughts, that then percolates down into your sub/unconscious a genuine feeling of elation for him. It will feel forced/phony at first because it’s foreign. It isn't real initially. And while your jealousy is real -- in the sense that you grit your teeth and your armpits sweat -- those feelings aren’t facts. You’ve trained your mind to believe in scarcity, in zero-sumness, in the belief that if he has it, you can’t have it. It’s okay. You’re normal. No reason to beat yourself up. It’s quite healthy, actually, to start this process of change with these thoughts/feelings as long as you are strong enough to sit with them, tolerate them, own them, and take responsibility for changing them. These scarcity beliefs were likely planted in you when you were very young by loving caregivers that needed to put appropriate limits on a young, unmyelinated brain to help socialize and integrate you into society.
Abundance of material things can only safely be believed once you have control of your faculties as an adult. I’ve never met an adolescent who truly grasped abundance (and very few adults for that matter) and I think it’s because we need secure containment to internalize safety as kids. We need to safely experience "no" in order to feel there is a power embodied in our parents strong enough to protect us when we realize (consciously or not) that we are utterly physically vulnerable to the world and need protectors to shepherd us to adulthood. The experience of healthy limits as kids naturally results in a belief we can’t have whatever we want -- a necessary but falsely limiting belief once we’ve transcended that stage of our development. It was needed then. We essentially used containment by our semi-omnipotent parents as a canoe to get across the river (to adulthood), but rather than leaving the canoe on the shore we’ve strapped it to our backs and carried these limiting beliefs on our backs, slowing us down and drastically reducing the joy of the journey on the other side.
If you are reading this, congratulations, you’ve made it to the other side! The limitations you placed on your desires from your childhood can be dropped today, right here and now, and you can continue in your adventure unencumbered, now able to actually get what you want. You needed those limiting beliefs earlier. They served their purpose. You can let them go immediately.
Your neighbor’s S65 is not keeping you from owning one (if that, after deliberation with an unfragmented mind, is something you decide you want). It is proof that a fulfillment of your desire is possible. Easy even. It is there waiting for you to realize the truth, develop a plan, execute, and achieve the wish fulfilled. Just compare how much easier it is to get an S65 versus living on Mars or flying without any equipment. I’m not certain these things are forever impossible, they are just categorically more challenging than getting a nice Mercedes. I’ll write more extensively soon on creating a plan for and attaining your goals, so I guess stay tuned.
But for the rest of this post I’ll focus purely on transmuting the desire into an attitude capable of fulfilling it. You see him pull into the driveway -- all black, matte, beautiful S65. "This freaking guy. He gets everything he wants. His brilliant kids get straight As and have full rides to Ivies, he works part-time and vacations two months a year. I hate this freaking guy.”
If you could hear yourself in that—perfect (I could certainly hear myself say that, that’s why I wrote it). But it means you are currently carrying scarcity on your back and need to choose (right now) if you want to keep hanging on to it. When you commit to setting the false beliefs down and moving forward without them, abundance and fulfillment don’t come immediately. It’s not magic. There’s no incantation (that I’m aware of) that just manifests your S65—but you’re now capable of doing the work/paying the price of bringing your desire into reality.
When you feel jealousy, or resentment—these are misunderstandings of how the world works and they are limiting your creative capacity to solve the puzzle that life has put before you. The desire is that motive force to find what life has hidden somewhere for you. Our desires are unique. They are the breadcrumbs for our destinies as long as they are transmuted into proper, relentless creative action. There is no limit to obtaining non-rivalrous goods. You cannot get Brad Pitt to fall in love with you. You can have a partner you love and who is deeply attracted to.
How do those negative emotions stop goal fulfillment? I'm not sure, to be frank. I have my theories. I believe these types of thoughts tell your subconscious: "don’t solve this problem for me!" They trick you into telling your subconscious that there is only one of the thing wanted at it is already owned by someone else. It conflates a specific instantiation/manifestation/embodiment with the underlying desire (that is unlimited or available in infinite forms). If you feel jealous or bitter or resentful, you are demonstrating your trapped-ness in scarcity and fundamental misunderstanding of reality.
So fixing this starts with recognizing these scarcity scourges when they crop up. Be grateful for them. By bubbling up they are giving you the opportunity to recognize and eradicate them. Practice noticing the feelings, labeling them (by explicitly saying “ah, there are these old scarcity/limitation beliefs resurfacing; I’ve outgrown those. I understand and embrace abundance and my innate capacity to realize my desires”), and then seeing and feeling yourself with your desire fulfilled, then rejoicing and giving thanks. Again, a lot more goes into the seeing/feeling portion I’ll detail later.
The unfulfilled desires need to have the negative feelings immediately thwarted and reversed. If your wife has not complimented you in two months and your deep desire for her to be proud of you is constantly making you angry, bitter, resentful towards her, these negative feelings are the reason she will not compliment with you. It is that simple. It is your problem, not her problem. If she says she does feel she has much to compliment in you right now, this is your problem not her problem. You cannot brute force a solution. You can manipulate or bribe or negotiate your way to her being proud of you. You must creatively solve the problem by freeing yourself from the negative thoughts, freeing and forgiving her for the current situation, and take responsibility for solving it.
But, but, but! The catch is you don’t solve the problem consciously. You didn’t consciously reason your way into this situation and so that is also not the route out. Instead this situation gives you the opportunity to rely on your gut, your enteric nervous system, your subconscious to solve. (You should give thanks that this scarcity of compliments has become so painful as to crack you open and make you able to see how deep the belief in scarcity goes into your psyche. We all have our idiosyncratic manifestations but if you are experiencing it in this disguise: wonderful! It is your wife embodying your beliefs. There can be no other way, eventually. So for the situation to change, your beliefs must change. And fortunately, they can!
If you say, “well, I wouldn’t resent her so much if she just complimented me more. Why is it on me to change? If she changed and did what I wanted, what I thought she felt when we got married, I wouldn't be bitter in the first place,” you are getting it exactly backwards. The fact that you can feel bitter/resentful to the lack of compliments means that is the cause and the result must be a lack of compliments. If she started to have compliment you (though really who wants to compliment a person like that?) the core issue (scarcity) would persist and either you’d constantly fear her cutting off praise (which would likely be self-fulfilling) or the scarcity belief would morph into some other domain (finances, health, fidelity) and the same bitterness, jealousy, fear would re-emerge in another form (and probably lead to her feeling uncomplimentary of you).
These manifestations -- lack of all kinds (money, happiness, health) -- they are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. Giving a person that is strapped in scarcity an abundance of money, compliments or fame only slakes thirst like saltwater.
There is still much to be explained about how to fully solve scarcity mindsets, including a step-by-step guide I’m calling “Mind Seeds” that may be a short or very, very long piece of writing.
For now, as a start: recognize and rejoice. Train yourself with practice to notice the negative as it rises, cut it off immediately, and replace it with its opposite of abundance and satisfaction and joy. That’s all you need to begin and make real progress. It really is miraculous what you can do when you see the world as a place that can fulfill your desires.