The Most Selfish Holiday

I love the holiday season—and I love what that season symbolizes. Thanksgiving celebrates production. Christmas celebrates trade. And New Year’s celebrates the pursuit of happiness that underlies production and trade.

New Year’s is the most selfish of all holidays: it is the day when you reflect on the year that’s passed and resolve to create an even better life in the year to come. It is the holiday of self-creation.

How to sell your soul

We are all self-created. Through our choices, we determine the nature of our character and the shape of our life. But most people, most of the time, do not take charge of that self-creation process. They go through life passively, absorbing the ideas and values of the people around them, and radically underestimate the control they can exercise over who they are and how they live.

When I was 23, I was working at an IT company writing business proposals. Actually, “writing” is too elevated a word. In reality I was cut and pasting corporate boilerplate into sales documents. But I spent my free time studying and writing about philosophy, which is what led the Ayn Rand Institute to reach out and offer me a job as a full-time writer.

When I told my boss I was leaving for ARI, he smiled. “Congratulations.” Then he looked off into the distance. “I always wanted to be a writer. Just never happened I guess.”

Those words still haunt me. My boss was a good guy, and still relatively young. He could have lived the life he dreamed of living. It would have taken enormous self-discipline. He had a family and a mortgage, and so he couldn’t quit his job and devote himself to a new career. He would have to build it in stolen moments. But he could have done it. In his way of thinking, though, life had already passed him by.

What really haunted me, however, was how my boss ended up in that position. He had never self-consciously thrown away his dream. It happened by small, imperceptible steps. He finished college and needed a job, so he got the best job available. Why not? He still had his whole life in front of him. Then maybe he met a girl, they got married, bought a house, started a family. Now he had obligations that made doing what he wanted to do far more difficult. “I’ll get to writing someday,” he probably told himself. With each passing year, the dream became dimmer—and the fire in his soul grew more faint.

There are people who ruin their lives in one dramatic moment: a single bad decision that smashes everything they had hoped to build. But that’s the exception. The rule is that we meander our way into mediocrity.

But New Year’s reminds us that we retain the power to build something better. We can decide to make tomorrow better than yesterday.

Refusing to settle

“Happiness,” to me, is a sacred word. And yet the word is so misused and abused that it does not convey to most people even a hint of its true grandeur.

Here’s what it means to me. I only do work that I love doing. I only spend time with people I love spending time with. I only say what I believe and I always say what I believe. The worst part of my day is when I wake up at 3 am and have to force myself back to sleep when all I want to do is run to my desk and start working.

The reason happiness in this sense is sacred is because it’s what makes life worth living—and because I know what sort of effort and struggle went in to making it real.

No one will hand you a life where you only spend time doing what you want to do. It requires deep reflection about what you actually want, and the fearless commitment to getting it. Building the life I wanted required taking enormous career risks, developing skills that took decades, conquering ingrained habits, confronting painful mistakes, say “no” when the easy thing was to say “yes,” ending close relationships, enduring disapproval from family and friends, and refusing to ever make excuses for not going after what I wanted.

You can have the life you want. And this can be the year that you start creating it.

How to leverage New Year’s

Most New Year’s resolutions are narrow and tactical. Lose weight. Get out of debt. Learn a language. Write a book. Tactical goals are important, but they usually succeed or fail at the strategic level. The reason most people fail to achieve their New Year’s resolutions is because they have not built themselves into the kinds of people who know how to set and achieve goals.

In his book Atomic Habits, James Clear observes that:

Many people begin the process of changing their habits by focusing on what they want to achieve. This leads us to outcome-based habits. The alternative is to build identity-based habits. With this approach, we start by focusing on who we wish to become. . . . The more pride you have in a particular aspect of your identity, the more motivated you will be to maintain the habits associated with it. (Atomic Habits, 31-3)

What identity should you strive to cultivate? The deepest answer to that question is supplied by morality. You should strive to become someone devoted to the true and the good.

I’ve written a whole book on how to do that. But if I had to boil down the advice into one resolution almost everyone should make, it would be this: make it a habit to ask yourself each and every day, and throughout each day: what’s my purpose?

• I’m tasked with a project at work. What’s my purpose?

• I’m sitting down to read a book. What’s my purpose?

• I’m attending a party with friends. What’s my purpose?

• I’m playing with my kids. What’s my purpose?

• I’m ready to begin a new year of my life? What’s my purpose?

It’s by acting purposefully that you take control of your mind, your character, and your life.

Happy 2024. I hope you’ll use it to build a self and a life that you love.

Don

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.