I am re-reading Atlas Shrugged.
When the first two times I read it, I knew it was very important. but an essential aspect was missing for me. an aspect I just got a week or so ago.
This aspect, the difference between ambition and desire. that goes, hand in hand, with the word pairs, producer vs second hander, vertical plane existence vs horizontal plane.
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What are you building with that?
This question was my absolute favorite in Landmark Education’s Communication Course…
I have tried to ask it of people outside of Landmark, and the answers I always got was puzzled silence.
So, what am I asking here?
Well, you are always building something. A more popular but less precise way of saying the same thing: you are always creating something… creating yourself, creating your life, every moment.
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Landmark Education was born in 1991. With its name change it also, appropriately, introduced a “new technology”.
The new technology was based on an earlier statement or assertion: that who you are in the present is given by the future you are living into.
It was also said like this: What gives you who you are in the present moment is the future you are living into.
But, although they were illustrating this assertion with a story , what they meant was this: what gives your being and consequently your actions in the present moment is who you invented yourself to be.
Let’s say you invent yourself to be a winner… what give your being and consequently your actions in the present, that no matter what you do, you’ll at least end up landing on your feet… and that makes you, automatically, a winner. And some of the time you’ll win more than just your safety or your life… you may win some stuff, some arguments, etc.
Pick your battles… have an organizing principle
A good 20 years ago I had lunch with a famous seminar leader from Landmark. We had a long history, and she shared with me how unhappy she was, and how ready she was to quit leading seminars for Landmark Education.
I was quite dumbfounded… she was the best in the country, the most effective…
She said: “We teach people to be more effective, and many use the technology to be more effectively dupe people, abuse people, exploit people, make the world a worse place than it would be if they were not equipped with what we teach them.”
I didn’t have an answer for her… but I was pondering that myself for the past 20 years.
And this morning I am as close to having an answer as ever…
If you didn’t ask… “Know Enough For what?!” then you can consider that you are trapped, at the moment, by the question in the title.
That was the purpose of the title, by the way. To trap you.
While you read your article, to get the most out of it, allow yourself to find yourself in my experience, instead of agree or not agree… OK?
Every person with a mind (that is every person alive!) moves back and forth on a continuum (scale) of knowing enough or not knowing enough… Some days you feel you know everything, on others you feel you know nothing.
Imagine yourself driving down the road and you want to change lanes to the right. You look in the rear view mirror and you look in your side mirrors to make sure there are no cars. Yet there is a blind spot and you aren’t 100% sure it’s safe to move over. So you lean a bit forward – you lean a little to the right and it looks good. You check out the lane next to you from both angles. Then, signal flashing you speed up and start to steer right and just as you do – HONK!!!!
There, in your blind spot, is a car that you were about to roll right into. WHEW!
Heart racing you slow down a bit, steer back to your lane and let the car pass. Then going through the check again – check the mirrors, lean forward, lean to the right, This Time throwing a glance over your shoulder and when you are certain you’ve seen the road clearly, you switch lanes so you can arrive at your destination.
WHAT IF – you are going through your life and not seeing all the perspectives? What if?
Warning: this article is a stream of consciousness article, and you need to read it like a poem, or it probably won’t make a lot of sense. On the other hand it is very important to read, if you want a chance at having the rest of your life not a continuation of the life you have had… That predictable download spiral.
When your whole life experience is that others are more loved, more supported, more appreciated
I had a dream last night that rocked my world. Not in a good way… by the way.
I dreamed that my older brother achieved what I worked, unsuccessfully, to achieve for 26 years… and it took him only a few months.
The opposite of Life is a conversation is you living in a world of object, being an object. An object. Ugh. I don’t want to be an object. But if you look, you ARE treated as an object, by nearly everyone nearly all the time.
People don’t look at YOU, they look at your body, your clothes, your hair… but not YOU.
I participated in a week long training some years ago, and the slogan of the training was “I see you”. And I remember people getting teared up from hearing that.
That is the human condition: people tearing up when they are seen as a person, as an individual… as opposed to the norm: seen as an object to use, to abuse, to blame, to push around.
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We tend to look at the world in black and white terms. This or the opposite…
You and me…
But often what you think is the opposite is not…
My current favorite book, 46 rules of Genius, says:
“Rule 24 (of Genius)
“SIMPLIFY
“People tend to view simplicity and complexity as opposites. But this isn’t strictly true. The enemy of simplicity isn’t complexity, but disorder. And the enemy of complexity is also disorder.
While complexity seeks order through addition,
simplicity seeks order through subtraction.
