Building Your Moral Compass #morality #selfimprovement #selfcontrol #inspiration

Let's talk a little bit about what our moral compass is. As we embark on this adventure of being, this course of creating, of discovering, it's absolutely critical to have a compass. Something that points consistently and persistently toward a fixed point that matters to us. Imagine you're out in nature with a map. No cell phone, no GPS, you have a map. Imagine you have only the map and nothing to help you orient the map. The map is not so helpful, is it? You don't know which way is north, which way is south. It's really just an added piece of paper you're carrying around. Imagine any one of your favorite sailing movies. Not Pirates of the Caribbean, however, because the compass that they had in Pirates of the Caribbean would point to whatever Jack Sparrow or Elizabeth Swan or Will Turner wanted most. Real sailors, before GPS and cell used the stars at night to navigate and a compass during the day, presumably also at night, to help them navigate and determine which way to go. Among other instruments, they used tools to refer and direct them to a fixed point or direction. Things that didn't change. We as humans tend to be fairly easily swayed by the things that we read or see or hear or watch. Things that cause us to have an emotional response like anger or sadness, excitement or fear. We can easily be influenced or manipulated by those things and those people that may not have anybody's best interest, let alone our best interest at heart. In our modern social media world, the companies that provide us with the social media platforms with which we can connect with each other and provide us with much of the news information that we crave, these companies are driven by revenue. Revenue is created largely by advertising dollars that comes from companies purchasing ads on these platforms. The platforms are as incentivized to increase the time we spend socializing and will thusly entice us to view more content by feeding us more of what we want to view, meaning they feed us more things that are likely what we already search for and what we linger on. These things create kind of a resonating chamber or an echo chamber where the sound is amplified and reverberates around without changing much at all. We are constantly represented by, largely, with content that reaffirms our individual viewpoints and our interests. As we are constantly fed what we have searched for and looked at over and over again, our moral compass can become less and less prominent in our lives, and we can find it harder and harder to stay on a direct course to where we were going in the first place. So, what do we do? There are certain foundational principles and values that are innate, inalienable, unwavering. These unvarying principles and values can be a source of continuous and tremendous strength and direction if we're willing to inculcate and infuse them into our creative process. I had a professor when I was studying music who had perfect pitch. He'd been blessed from birth to be able to hear and recognize tones. Just, you could hear them. It was innate to him. If you asked him to sing a middle C, he'd pluck it right out of the air. And he was never wrong. He was so well-practiced that he could identify the notes of a scale with no external reference. He could play an A-flat for him, and it was like his brain just immediately recognized it, knew it was a second space A-flat. What if we had an internal compass that would always indicate which way is true north? What if we could always tell if we were playing the wrong note, the wrong key, or had some indicator telling us when we were playing the correct note, or the correct key? The values and principles referenced here are core foundational ideas that can assist us in our creative process. They are unchanging and unyielding in the face of social or social media pressure or shifting public opinions. Referring frequently to and deferring to these unchanging principles will lead to a more secure type of happiness, which will ultimately assist and support our realizing, again this is a verb, actively realizing, as in expressing or creating, discovering our maximum potential.