Life Direction and How to Choose Your Next Move Short

All or nothing you can give,
Live your life, love to live.

’Cause You Are Young by C. C. Catch

At the core of I Grow Younger is the belief that personal growth (positive change) is surprisingly easy.

Resistance to change (inertia) is an evolutionary relic that helped our predecessors survive against all odds so we can all exist today. We evolved in a world in which frequent experimenting meant a very likely death. 

Our chances of change are the relation between our motivation and our resistance towards a certain action. We often talk about finding motivation, when in fact working around our resistance is what usually gives quicker results.

The Hunter-Sheep model defines two ways you can feel, think and act in – modes that set current life direction.

When we act like a hunter, we’re being driven by love, its physical manifestation (energy), and its intellectual manifestations (curiosity and creativity).

When we act like a sheep, we’re being driven or rather, held back by a mix of paralysing fears and inertia.

The Hunter-Sheep model is fit especially for smaller, everyday decisions. Although the outcome of a certain action might be insignificant, its Hunter-Sheep characteristics are always essential for the direction of your life. 

While we don’t control our thoughts and feelings directly, our actions now generate our thoughts and feelings in the future.¹

True wins are not in visible achievements but in giving your best.

When people in Hunter mode encounter a small to medium size problem, they choose one of two actions. 

1. Pick Quick and Be Slick: They have a quick, small-scale and active solution, based on love and creativity.
2. Move on and Groove on: They dismiss the problem as not worth solving and forget about it.

Sheep reactions tend to complicate things. At I Grow Younger, we believe the majority of people spend most of their time in Sheep mode, choosing one of following reactions to obstacles:

1. Passivity
    They want to act but have no clear solution and feel helpless, lowering self-esteem.
2. The Overkill
    Often internal fears blow the problem out of proportion and they come up with a big, extremely safe, slow solution.
3. Passive Aggression
    They have a passive-aggressive solution, based on fear.
4. Mental self-harm
   They ignore the problem but can’t forget about it and go through a downward spiral of thoughts.

Hunters do it; Then they do the next; And then the next. Sheep think about it; Then they think more about it; And then some more.

Confusing Achievement for Success, and Failure for Personal Defeat

Even before failure is confirmed, the Hunter has already moved on. They get extra motivation and become even more of a Hunter. They also don’t overanalyze.

This is contrary to Sheep, who take failure as personal defeat. Self-esteem drops and extensive useless analysis is done, wasting time and energy when no good reasoning can happen in a biased mess of facts and emotions.

As for success, the Hunter takes it naturally. They don’t celebrate, just move on to the next piece of the big picture. Most importantly, they make sure every success has Added value.

Sheep strategies rarely truly succeed. People in this mode of action often mistake achievements for success. 

Success actually has 3 components.

When a Sheep ‘‘succeeds’’, they often look at the Achievement and not at the Added value, which is usually the key to future success.

Every action you take creates and influences the next. A Hunter move leads to more Hunter moves, and Sheep moves lead to more Sheep moves. 

Each of us has a Hunter and a Sheep inside us. Each move we make is either made by one or the other. But it’s not the moves themselves that matter as much, it’s the mood you’re building, the direction of your life.

1. Focus on your actions.
   How anything external initially makes you feel is not the main part, but how you react.
   
2. Understand what drives each action you take.
   Ask yourself if it’s based on love or fear.
3. Don’t dwell on the past.
   Even if you’ve chosen to act in Sheep mode 100 times in a row in your life, 10 recent Hunter moves are enough.

If you want to be a Hunter in 10 years, being a Hunter in this moment is all you have to do to increase your chances. As per the Golden Rule, one Hunter move generates the next Hunter move and so on – a powerful life direction of joy and courage. No planning is needed, it’s that simple.

Getting stuck in a long line of Sheep moves leads to chronic anxiety, depression, low self-worth and fearfulness. 

Being a Hunter is also very closely related to happiness. The happier you are, the easier it is to get into Hunter mode and keep being happy. At the same time, if you’re unhappy, a transition to Hunter mode is one of the best ways out.

Being a Hunter is not about the quality of choices. It’s all about being fast, adaptive and autonomous vs. the Sheep way of being slow and following protocols.

And scales and timescales matter. There is no Hunter way of doing a 10-hour heart surgery or launching a space rocket because these are long, monumental tasks that have a thousand ways to fail. But on the personal level there is also no Sheep way of confronting our fears and improving our daily life by overcoming inertia.

The smaller, more insignificant a life choice is, the more the choice itself doesn’t matter, only the Hunter or Sheep feeling that it leaves behind has any significance for the future.

This concept is powerful not because it’s immediately life-encompassing. It’s powerful because the effects of it touch everything in your life long after. Any Hunter or Sheep act in the present affects the growth of both your Game of Self and Game of Life.

It’s experience, learning and joy VS. the acceptance of fears and barriers. These are opposite directions with totally different responses in your body and brain, both biological and psychological.

The key thing about the Hunter-Sheep model is not just that it’s powerful and important, but that it’s doable. Our actions are much more in our control than our birth circumstances, feelings or thoughts.

And if your goal is to do good work and have enough money and freedom… this can be achieved with Hunter moves because our economy is built to reward them. Fast-paced trial-and-error and step by step improvements are at the core of starting and running a business.