Oscar Holm

“You come to understand that most people are neither for
you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves.
You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some
people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson
that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.”

When thinking about wants and yearnings it’s easy to the
point of unavoidable to start thinking about things and
places rather than experiences and events. The concrete
nature of wanting a big house is easily expressed and
thought ofwhile wanting to be exposed to or experience isn’t.
Commonly, the reasoning goes: “I want a comfortable future
with freedom over my time, a house in proximity to nature,
a healthy loving family, a carbon fibre bike and regular
vacations.” Apart from a loving family, which is something
like an omnipresent biological yearning, the rest can be
achieved with enough money. Money becomes the proxy to our
desires and the focal yearning for our life.

To get money we have to work.
Because some areas are more lucrative than others the thinking
goes “I’ll work in whichever area pays me most, which will
get me to what I actually want faster”. However, because
most of our time will be spent in this arbitrary area, not
in our house and sometimes not with our family, that’s
extremely backward. What if instead, our reasoning went: “I want
to create, simplify and organize in a way that provides value
to others while still retaining freedom over my own time”. This
is a mission rather than a quantifiable goal. From there, if
we can make our work align with this mission, we will be more
engaged, the end product will be better, and people will pay
us more money for it. The physical quantifiable goals such
as a carbon bicycle may very well become a biproduct of our
mission aligned work, but once it’s fulfilled, it won’t leave
us empty and wondering what it was all for.