If you wanted to make the biggest leap up… happiness, health, wealth, love…
What do you think you’d grow?
Some measures are easier to grow than others.
Some measures, like everywhere in life, will grow easily, but overall their effect will be small.
While others create an avalanche-like result when you grow them even just a little bit..
Life is like a spiral staircase… Every problem, every issue will come back to be addressed on a hopefully higher level… Issue like getting unstuck.
I once read a story about Gandhi. A woman came to him with his child. He asked Gandhi to tell the child that eating sugar is bad for him.
Gandhi listened, and then said: please come back in two weeks.
The woman and the child left… and supposedly traveled for days to get home, and then come back again.
They came in, and Gandhi simply said to the child: Don’t eat sugar. It’s bad for you.
The woman piped up: why couldn’t you say that a week ago?
Gandhi answered: Two weeks ago I myself was eating sugar…
This is the story that came up for me this morning.
I am in the middle of a two-day course I am taking (the recordings, of course). A course that teaches people about sales, and why people buy and why people don’t buy. Fascinating, insightful. Fantastic insights already…
I suddenly understand why I bought a course to learn how to put up virtual summits, and yet decided that I am not going to do it. It was an expensive course. Oy.
What I’ve gleaned I had been unfamiliar with.
The belief that I can’t do it, that if I tried to do it it would be a disaster.
There have been things before, things I bought but didn’t even try, but never before had I the clarity that a belief tells me that I can or can’t do.
Why did it come up now? Aren’t you curious?
For 70 odd years it didn’t come up, and suddenly it is there in all its ‘glory’… Why now?
And suddenly I saw: it came up like Gandhi’s sugar… Until I go through myself, it is inauthentic for me to teach it.
A few weeks ago I taught that if you look at life and everything in it as a process, you can get anywhere with enough desire to get there.
I said that as you go through a carefully crafted process, you reshape yourself and your beliefs…
One of my students who has never done anything in his life and that is how he knows himself promptly signed up to a program where I promise to teach that process…
He was really excited. Then. Then proceeded never to do the process. I think he didn’t hear it… I think maybe he already forgot that there is such a process.
If you want something, but you don’t do anything towards it, of course you won’t have it.
Do all courses, or most courses take you through a process to change who you are for yourself?
I don’t think so. And most people whose beliefs say they can’t do something, end up living their entire lives that way.
Now, back to Gandhi.
Gandhi didn’t feel right to tell a child to do something that he himself didn’t do. So he took two weeks to stop eating sweets and then he asked someone to do something that he had done himself: stop eating sugar.
I think my inner guidance threw up this belief, made it visible, so I can first have compassion for my student, and second go through the process of overcoming it, if I have big enough desire for what it would give
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I first heard about ‘the spectrum’ from a classmate of mine, in 1997. She is, was an advocate for his brother with Asperger’s… which is a certain level of atypical brain syndrome. The mildest is dyslexia, and the spectrum goes all the way to full blown autism.
We have lost touch since, but she has helped me to understand some of the differences I experienced. Differences from others.
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This article has a good idea… it suggests consistency as the way of establishing any new habit and making sure it will happen.
Anything worth doing is worth doing every day… day in, day out.
Meditation, spiritual work, being active, reading, learning… as a campaign they are all doomed to fail… but as a daily practice they build the foundation of a spectacular life.
When established, a daily habit becomes second nature. Just like cleaning your teeth in the morning or taking a shower – it would feel wrong to not do it. However with infrequent habits like music practise 3-6 times per week, or exercise twice per week, taking a day off can cause it to be harder to pick it up again afterwards. Then in one fell sweep your positive habit has been ruined completely, and everyday somehow becomes a holiday from it.
Turn a weekly habit into a daily one.
If you sleep in on Sunday morning, you’ll know how hard it can be to get up on Monday morning. The trick is to get up early every day. Even at the weekend. I always get up at 6am; and find it much easier to maintain if I do it every day. You might think that a life without sleeping in is not worth living for and that it’s really hard to do. But 100% consistency is the best way to do it.
With consistency, a habit should stay on autopilot for most of the time without you having to think about it. Part of the stress of getting up is the conflict between the desires to get up early or late. “Hmm, it’s Sunday, don’t I deserve a lie-in? Won’t I perform better with more sleep? I should really get up and write to the Daily Telegraph about the decline in the duck population.” If you stick with a habit every single day, you eliminate self doubt and uncertainty.
Sequence habits together
Rather than tackling several habits in isolation, link them together in a sequence so they become easier to maintain. My morning routine involves getting up, showering, breakfast, piano practise, a bike ride, then getting on the train to my day job. It’s almost as if the positive feelings from completing each task act as the impetus to start another. If I’m feeling a bit overworked, I can always forego one of the tasks, e.g. piano practise, and go straight to the next one. If the first and last links in the sequence remain, then my less musical routine still stays solid. The idea would be to put habits done 3-5 times per week in the middle of the chain so that they remain stable, even though you skip it some days.
Substitute infrequent habits
If you skip habits every so often by using the sequencing method – you can also substitute those infrequent habits with others, so that at least you are doing something constructive and keeping the routine. If you hit the gym 3 times per week, the other 4 days in the week could be filled with a short walk or some reading. Substituting the task with something similar is best, on your off days for exercise, a short walk is better than painting
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It was 1979. I was 32 years old. The ambulance was using its blue lights and the siren to rush me to the hospital. Of course it was Sunday… no doctors…
X-ray… it wasn’t clear what was wrong. I was in and out of consciousness. Internal bleeding.
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I had a conversation the other day with my core group. They felt to me rudderless, directionless, low on energy… like a floater.
What’s a floater, you ask? A floater is like stork sh!t… floats in the air and occasionally drops on the ground. Storks are known to poop while in the air… their poop dries out and starts its own rise and fall journey with the air stream… no innate motive power. A floater is like that.
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Most people, to one degree or another, are ruled by fear. Most of that fear is fear of nothing-in-particular, just fear. And some of that fear is being afraid of getting hurt, of being laughed at, of looking foolish, of making a mistake, of losing face.
But fear is fear, and on the horizontal plane, for the horizontal self, there is nothing more important than to listen to the fear and avoid doing anything that awakens fear.
Result: your life is stagnant, your self-respect is disappearing, and you shrink, and shrink. It doesn’t feel good.
Fear is getting stronger, and you are getting weaker.
In my view, there is no god, there are no angels, entities, and such. There is also no devil, no hell, no heaven, no afterlife.
But, because humans even on this level of evolution where we are, can create stuff with their thoughts… gods and angels and entities and other stuff.
So at this point (it may change in the future if research and experiments reveal stuff I am not seeing now) my theory is that there is Dark Side and it is created by humans. It’s all thoughts.
Now, with that said, where does it come from what I say, that the voices you hear in your head are the Dark Side? Or the memes…
Because I say that.
So, what do I consider Dark Side?
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I have been curious why certain things I could do, like certain marketing moves, but I am not doing them.
Actually, there are quite a few things that I know I can do, and I don’t do them.
What’s there is fear. Mortal fear.
I am sure you recognize yourself.
Recognize that mortal fear. In ordinary language we call this procrastination. So if you are a procrastinator, if you think you are a procrastinator, listen up!
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I woke up drenched in sweat from a dream this morning.
I was in a diner. I shared the table with someone… I took out a credit card to pay. I went to the cash register, and I didn’t have my card… in fact, all my cards and my cash were gone.
Scary, isn’t it? Lots of phone calls… all my accounts were emptied… But eventually I got above the dark cloud, regained my coherence and started thinking: am I doomed forever?
And I saw that I have assets… and I can get back to my computer and write an email, and I have money.
I built my assets for decades… and now they are there.
What about you? What assets have you built? What lasting things have you done?
What can you count to still have value after decades of your life?
One of the most ignored and most useful advice I have ever read comes from Warren Buffet, his 20 slot Rule.
It talks to stock investors, but it can be easily interpreted as an overall advice for a life well lived.
How do you know if you live your life well… is your life is a well lived life?
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