The heads of liberty is the choice to do what is for the growth of all, to feel good and wonderful.  The tails is the choice to do what is the detriment to all and to feel badly.  Many people believe in liberty to feel good but not to feel bad. 

Some people WANT to feel bad.  Nothing any of us do will change this individual’s desire to experience the dark end of the spectrum. You cannot love someone into changing.  Futhermore, this is an encroachment upon someone’s liberty. 

They are free to feel ill and experience pain.  It is upon those of us with a appropriate philosophy to let them know that this is a choice.  That is right, one can feel good or ill about one’s circumstances. 

When I was young I felt depressed and ill about damn near everything.  This feeling did not stop me from working hard to learn and grow, I just felt poorly about the whole affair.  Once this became my habit, I used it for motivation. 

Rather than feel good about growth, I used a perspective that allowed me to feel “worse” about doing nothing.  This strategy motivated me to grow.  Eventually though, this attitude reached its limits. 

I liken this to twenty steps forward and ten back.  This is emotional alchemy.  When you are despondent barely surviving in life at 60%, or even lower at 40%, you can transform your despair into anger. 

Then utilize this to motivate yourself into passing.  Each iteration of the philosophy you go twenty steps forward and then ten back.  So you go from 50% to 70% and back to ten.  This leaves you with a net gain of 10% at 60%. 

At each of these major transitions in your life, you get a net gain of 10% until you reach 90%.  Now you try to use emotional alchemy to get mad, and to get even with yourself.  Yet you cannot go over 100%.  Thus you keep going ten forward and ten backward! 

You stay at 90% until you learn to change your alchemy.  Anger no longer works, you have reached the limit of this type of change.  You cannot use force anymore.  It is too damaging to yourself. 

This is the most difficult of changes to make for the driven individual.  No more “Push, Push, Push.”  You have to learn a new method.  Now gains of inches are important.  To use the terms of finance, when you a small firm, it is easy to double revenues. 

Yet when you are Microsoft incremental gains are everything.  You cannot double when you are a $500 billion company without swallowing everything else and having nothing to eat!  So you settle for additional or geometric growth versus the exponential type. 

Now inches are good.  One foot forward and 23 inches back is good progress.  Even standing still is a loss as the universe is on an escalator, always moving forward.  If you are not going with the wave, it is overtaking you.