Today’s email contains one of the most revealing lessons about human nature I’ve ever spotted in the wild.
But first, a warning:
If you haven’t seen Season Three of The White Lotus and
it’s on your hit list, look away now.
This email contains MAJOR spoiler alerts.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…
Okay.
On to business.
Lauren and I have been playing TV catch-up after a few months of baby-induced sleepless nights.
Over the last 10 days, we binge-watched Season 3 of The White Lotus.
One of the most intriguing characters is a grumpy and mysterious bloke called Rick Hackett. Rick spends the whole season sipping whiskey while hunting down the man who killed his father a couple of decades earlier.
In the final episode, Rick eventually catches his father's killer and does him in. But then, in the father of all plot twists, Rick discovers that the person he just popped off was his dad all along.
Quite the melodramatic soap opera storyline.
But put that to one side and what struck me instead was the punchline.
See, by going after his father’s killer… then bumping off his father’s killer… and then discovering he’d actually bumped off his dear old dad, Rick has really spent the whole series...
Hunting himself!
It’s a tale as old as time.
Truth is, most hunts are really just
a roundabout way of trying to find ourselves. We might think we’re hunting for a better night’s sleep, a free weekend, a new kitchen, a holiday in the sun, colleagues who aren’t exhausting, an app that tells us we smashed our workout or even the bloke who bumped off our dad. But a lot of the time, we're really after the feeling these things will give us. That warm and fuzzy feeling of self-acceptance, self-trust and being at home in our own skin.
Now, I know some people will roll their eyes at this.
The competitive A-types out there who long for power, status and achievement might look at me like I’d handed them a bowl of wet lettuce if I told them their hunt for glory and prestige was really
a hunt for “themselves”.
For years, I would’ve nodded right along with them too.
But then I heard Rupert “the Spiralizer” Spira spell out how what we all want is a sense of deep fulfilment. And while we think
fulfilment comes from the next achievement, the next break or the next upgrade, those things are just the hooks we hang our hopes on.
Most of us never get taught how to stop the scramble and actually feel grounded.
But at the heart of the work I do is helping people slow down the chase, subtract their mental clutter and find that sense of being at home in themselves.
If you’re curious about how this works:
https://waitinglist.followingfulfilment.com
To fulfilment,
Tom