Nietzsche said what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. In mathematics, your output relates to what you put in. An army advert said you are the only one who can push yourself hardest.

Managing your ego is tough when you are faced with several types of obstacles at once. And many people choose the path of least resistance, so they end up still talking and behaving the same impractical way in old age.

I called my journey "self development", I started with a very unclear mind but I used thinking to overcome any misconceptions, misunderstandings or complaints I had. That dovetailed with finding the answers to all of life's big questions, which was about the most abstract critical thinking such as: "what is the test for truth?". Now, it is immediately apparent how lost or misguided someone is when they cannot connect the details into a big picture conception. My thinking is clear because I sculpted it with many years of effort, cross-checking and intuition.

So, now I would also partly call your efforts rationality and becoming more rational. This is incredibly vast and abstract a concept; you might begin by watching the TV show House M.D. where they mention the word rational. When you are conscious of what you are trying to do (as a concept you understand), you are well on the way if you are an introverted thinker.

People have told me they want to be extroverted, and I tried to point out that introversion is about powerful thinking which is simply better than only thinking about other people and enjoying their company. But you can't make other people smarter.

This is your life journey now.. learning never ends, just like the most hardcore and badass figures from fiction and reality you can entertain in your mind. Semantic meanings can inspire and be used to elevate you from the mundane, common world and into the numinous. Syntactical functions (reality's math) and syntax is how you translate that ideal, that image, into something that improves life.

Nietzsche also brilliantly declared that life and society can be reduced to one thing: power and the associated feeling of power, and the feeling of increasing power.

Read Jung if you want to get into dream analysis and some extremely sharply insightful psychology. He said that the experience of the Self is rarely found in adult life. Also check out lucid dreaming forums.