Meaning Can Be Made Up. How to Bribe Your Own Brain?

Modern people would very much like to believe that life is decided in grand moments. On the day of victory. In a breakthrough moment. In that one evening after which you can finally say, calmly: I made it.

And yet the truth usually looks less spectacular.

What truly builds a person rarely happens at the top. It happens earlier. On an ordinary day. In repetition. In moments when no one is watching and nothing has promised a reward yet. That is exactly where the subject of mastery begins.

I increasingly feel that the biggest things in life do not fall apart because of a lack of dreams. They fall apart because a person does not know how to carry everyday life between one dream and the next.

Results are seductive because they are simple. They offer quick answers. Either it worked or it did not. Either a person won or lost. Either they are “somebody,” or they still are not.

This is a very dangerous way of thinking.

When results become the main language in which someone talks to themselves about their own life, everything starts to turn into judgment. Failure stops being information and starts becoming an accusation. Instead of the question “what did not work?”, the question becomes “what is wrong with me?”.

This is exactly where many people fall into the trap of modern ambition. They do not suffer because they want too much. They suffer because they try to immediately turn every single thing into proof of their own worth.

What you can see from the outside as success is usually only the end of a much longer story. The real work happens earlier: in the system, in the rhythm, in whether someone can return to important things even when there is no mood, no excitement, and no inner “flow.”

Achievement psychology has long been saying something very unromantic, but very useful: a high level rarely comes from talent alone or from a one-time burst of effort. Much more often it is the result of long, deliberate work on specific elements of performance. This is exactly what the model of deliberate practice, and a more popular introduction to it can be found, for example, in the book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.

This is an important shift in perspective. A person stops asking only: “will they be the best?”. They begin to ask: “does their way of working make sense at all?”.

And that is the question that leads further.

What is talked about far too rarely is the plain boredom of the process.

Growth is very often not exciting. It can be monotonous, repetitive, sometimes even irritatingly ordinary. It does not resemble a movie transformation. It looks more like tinkering. Improving one detail. Coming back to the same thing. Learning patience with things that refuse to speed up just because a person wants them to.

So more mature action depends less and less on whether someone feels like it, and more and more on whether they have built a rhythm for themselves that carries them even when inspiration is gone.

These days I am most distrustful of people who talk about growth only in the language of excitement. If something is meant to last, it must also know how to survive boredom.

One of the more liberating thoughts is that meaning does not always have to appear at the beginning.

Many people stop because they are waiting for great certainty. For the ideal calling. For that one signal that says: yes, this is exactly it. Except life very often does not work like that. First comes curiosity. Then an attempt. Then regularity. And meaning matures later.

This is not cynical. It is practical.

A person does not always know first and act later. Very often they act first, and only then begin to understand why it mattered to them. In that sense, meaning really can be partly “made up”, not as a lie, but as a working story that helps you hold on long enough to discover something true.

Many people say today that they do not have time. Sometimes that is true. But very often the deeper problem is not time, but attention.

Attention has become one of the most valuable psychological resources. And at the same time, we live in an environment that constantly tries to hijack it. Notifications, short-form content, other people’s opinions, endless stimuli - all of this means that a person is constantly occupied, but more and more rarely truly present.

Research explains this well. Sophie Leroy described the phenomenon of attention residue: when someone switches between tasks, part of their attention stays with the previous one. The effect is simple: the next activity becomes shallower and weaker. Meanwhile, the study by Adrian Ward and his co-authors, known as Brain Drain, showed that even the mere presence of one’s own smartphone can reduce available cognitive capacity.

That is why the modern person’s problem is increasingly not a lack of information. The problem is that their attention has been carved up.

What most often shatters concentration today?

• constant switching between tasks,
• checking your phone “just for a moment”,
• an overload of short stimuli,
• living in reaction mode instead of action mode,
• mistaking reading about change for real change.

That is exactly why books like Deep Work, which try to restore focus to people as a real skill rather than a luxury for the few, resonate so strongly today.

One of the most underrated skills today is the ability to refuse.

This is not only about refusing things that are obviously bad. That is relatively simple. It is much harder to say “no” to something that is quite good, interesting, sensible - but not the most important thing.

It is exactly these kinds of things that most often break the process apart. Not major crises. Not catastrophes. Just an excess of small things that seem harmless on their own, but together consume all your energy.

In this sense, maturity is not only about knowing what you want. It is also about understanding what you do not need to touch.

Not everything has to be done, commented on, and developed

• not every topic requires an opinion,
• not every decision is important,
• not everything “interesting” is worth your energy,
• not everything that is good is good right now.

In stories about success, it is easy to confuse commitment with overload. It is easy to believe that if something is meant to be great, it has to hurt without end. That you have to keep pushing all the time. That recovery is a luxury for the less ambitious.

This is a very dangerous narrative.

Overload is not always a sign of strength. Sometimes it is simply a well-packaged escape. From fear. From emptiness. From chaos in relationships. From hard questions that appear when things finally go quiet.

So more mature mastery is not about doing the most. It is about acting within a range that truly builds something. Not too little, but not too much either. With room for rest, play, relaxation, and a return to balance.

The older I get, the less I believe people who talk only about tightening the screw. More and more, real strength looks to me like the ability to stop a little earlier.

Many ambitious people live with the belief that without harshness toward themselves, they will stop growing. That they need to shame themselves, push themselves, press harder. That otherwise everything will fall apart.

Psychology says something more subtle. Self-compassion, meaning compassion toward yourself, is not indulgence. It is a way of keeping the mind in a state that allows you to return to action after a mistake instead of falling apart because of it. Kristin Neff’s review shows that self-compassion is associated, among other things, with better emotion regulation and more adaptive responses to failure.

This is especially important for demanding people.

Because harshness can be effective over a short distance, but it is rarely good for years. It does not build trust in yourself. And without trust, it is hard to talk about anything lasting.

The longer you look closely at development, the more clearly you can see that mastery is not a single event.

It is not a medal.

Not one victory.

Not one perfect moment.

It is a way of organizing your own energy.

It is the art of returning to what matters.

It is the art of protecting attention.

It is the art of refusing what distracts.

It is the art of working without tying your worth to every result.

And maybe that is exactly why everything begins long before success. It begins where a person stops asking only where they will end up, and starts asking who they are becoming along the way.

• Peak by K. Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool
  A good book for those who want to see mastery not as talent fallen from the sky, but as the result of conscious, deliberate practice.
• Deep Work by Cal Newport
  On focus without distractions and on why deep work is becoming an advantage today rather than a luxury.
• Atomic Habits by James Clear
  On change built through small steps, systems, and environment rather than through motivational bursts alone.
• Grit by Angela Duckworth
  On how ability alone is not enough if it is not paired with perseverance and the capacity to stay the course for a long time.
• Kristin Neff, Self-Compassion: Theory, Method, Research, and Intervention
  A good entry point into the topic of kindness toward yourself as a real tool of psychological regulation rather than soft self-soothing.