No limitations. What a personal strategy should be.

The most important condition that must be observed when building a personal strategy is that the dream at the heart of it should have no limitations. Material, intellectual and other considerations should not stop you. If you want to live in the presidential residence in Novo-Ogaryovo, go ahead. If you want to have three wives, be my guest. Buy a yacht and lead the life of a “sea nomad” — no problem. Proceed from the principle of “How I would like it to be if everything was possible”.

Absolutely everything.

Our ability to influence our own lives is almost limitless. Of course, some things are still beyond our control — death, for example. But even so, we are quite capable of significantly influencing where, when, and under what circumstances we die.

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We can’t override the laws of physics, but who’s to say that it’s the laws of physics that prevent us from succeeding? Success is a social construct, not a physical one. And there’s a fundamental difference between the two.

The laws of nature describe the material reality — objective, unchanging and therefore independent of our beliefs and desires. But social laws work differently: they not only and not so much describe the principles by which society lives, but also create it. That is why, unlike physical reality, social reality is what people believe in and what they consider to be the norm.

Social norms are flexible, changeable and not absolute. The most obvious example of their ambivalence is the attitude to power. The desire to possess it, regardless of the motives, is perceived by society as something almost shameful. On the other hand, the possession of power immediately turns a person into a respected and even sacred figure, regardless of the way in which it is obtained.

In addition, the moral and legal assessment of certain actions often depends not so much on their goals as on their scale. The ultimate case of this principle was succinctly formulated by French philosopher Jean Rostand in his famous aphorism: “Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you become a conqueror”.

In his time, the philosopher and diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli earned fame as a villain for his famous treatise “The Sovereign”. But there he only frankly and, most importantly, argued that the nature of power is not divine and is based on very real, earthly interests, pragmatic consideration of which in politics is more effective than moral considerations. As a result, his treatise was banned by the Catholic Church, which, however, did not prevent it from becoming a board book for many prominent political figures of subsequent eras — from Napoleon to Stalin.

Laws and moral norms are certainly important, if only because their violation is fraught with negative consequences. But we should not forget that they have a quite unambiguous and specific purpose: they are tools, a set of rules by means of which society self-regulates. Their meaning is to maintain equilibrium, the current state of affairs.

Undoubtedly, this is also a valuable and necessary task. But it does not always correspond to the interests of a particular individual, who seeks to change the balance in his favor.

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As a result, a contradiction arises, which can only be eliminated in one way: to realize that the area of application of these norms are the relationships in society, and not your inner world of ideas and desires. To succeed, you need freedom, not from external moral and legal constraints, but from internal ones.

It may seem trivial or, on the contrary, counterintuitive, but all the limitations on the path to success really exist only in our heads. We erect them ourselves — in the form of external obligations or internal fears that prevent us from realizing what we really want.

But only a dream free of such limitations will work.

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