While context is decisive, the One thing, the way I teach it is as decisive regarding your life as context.
This is how it works:
Let’s say you invent for yourself and for your life to be consistent. That is your One Thing.
And then you use that one thing to do the same things you’ve been doing, but now you do them differently.
You become consistent in lying, pretending, self-concern… or doing only the easy things that make absolutely no difference for Life, for others, for you.
So you see, context is still missing. Because if you force your one thing to work in your default context, it won’t make your life 10x better.
I know, I know, the book doesn’t say that. I haven’t said that… but here I am, observing five people who did just what I am describing here…
And I can see that unless they design their context also for that 10x growth, it won’t happen.
So using ‘consistency’, the how… again.
What kind of context would pair with that to cause a 10x growth.
We could use almost all ‘how’ and get the same insights… Powerfully, purposefully, committedly, deliberately, with discipline. These are all from this past week from actual students.
I can now see, that like any machine, or process, you cannot just change a part and make the whole work brilliantly.
You need to adjust all the elements that depend on each others.
Let me help you look at another scenario where this is obvious.
You invent the context of becoming rich. It’s an OK context… not the best, but OK.
Then your bring your DEFAULT how to every action you take…
If your default how is, for example, stingy, or resistant, needy, entitled, or arrogant, you can see that suddenly your invented context won’t be able to make you happy, take you to the future ‘becoming rich’. Instead your default how will keep you at the same place.
So what I am saying is this: you need both an empowering context AND a how, your one thing, that can and will take you, reliably, to where you want to go.
It’s a dance…
So if our example person who invented ‘consistency’ as their One Thing invented a context, a direction or a who, for example, ‘I am in harmony with Life’, or one of my favorites: ‘What I want for myself I want for everyone’, the combination of the two elements make every action happen in the right attitude in the right direction in the right way.
This is what Wallace D. Wattles means by ‘The Certain Way’. He doesn’t elaborate. I guess a hundred years ago all these distinctions, context, one thing, who and how, weren’t used or maybe didn’t exist.
By the way, some students are from countries where the language still doesn’t have these words.
Moreover, when I came to the United States 37 years ago, I didn’t have these words either.
This is one of the 1000’s, Ludwig Wittgenstein said about language:
words are tools that we use to play different games, not intended, of course, in a literal sense, but more as patterns of intention