As you may know I am a student of Roy H. Williams, legendary advertising man from Texas. I subscribe to his Monday Morning Memo, and I open it with trembling hands every time: his message for the week is always perfect for me, except that I am not always ready for it… lol.
I spent this morning weeping, depressed, thinking about the movie I didn’t have the courage to watch last night. It is a French movie, The Well Digger’s Daughter, and I stopped watching it when the girl in the movie is going to be seduced and impregnated… I could not watch it. I could not bear the finality of the situation, the evilness of taking advantage of the ignorant, weak, and impressionable.
Of course I as soon as I finish this article, I’ll go and watch it, because, thanks to this email, hiding from what you need to be exposed is not going to serve me.
Whatever gold is hidden in that movie, I must dig it. And if I am lucky, it will help me hit bottom.
Confronting the underlying misery of your life is your number one job, if you ever want to be happy, joyful, peaceful, and have the future to be open to possibilities, really. Not pie in the sky daydreams, but for a real life with real challenges, with real work, with real relationships… life. Maybe Life.
So, in addition this email I am quoting giving me courage to continue on, it has also defined, almost exactly, what we are doing here, who this site belongs to, and who should be staying away: they are not really welcome. Just replace “Wizard Academy” with “Raise yourvibration.com” and it’s a perfect match.
If you think that it leaves anything out, please comment below. Thank you.
Hardship
Is it wise
to protect the ones we love
from the hardships
that taught us all we know?Hardship is the undisputed School of the Masters, but very few students seek admission.
Education begins with memorization. Having learned all the theories, steps and rules, we parry and thrust against the light in a kind of frantic swordplay with the shadows of possibilities. This is when we learn that steps and rules are only a weak and sad beginning. We still have a lot to learn.
Memorization was our first lesson.
Improvisation is the second.
Choices and Consequences are the lessons that never quit teaching.Every industry, craft, trade and profession has its own traditional wisdom that will hide you safe, out of trouble, by keeping you inside the box.
If you’re going to start thinking “outside the box,” you’re going to have to ignore the unwritten rules of traditional wisdom. Do this and you’ll immediately be told that you’re “not doing it right.” And sadly, the new thing you’re attempting to do probably won’t work the way you had hoped.
You won’t have a victory but you will have an education.
So you’ll try something else that doesn’t work out.
Now you’re a screw-up.Most people would crawl back inside the box and quit trying.
But not you.You try again. Fail again.
Now you’re a loser, a nonconformist, a problem child, and possibly unemployed.This, mi amigo, is what they call hardship.
Try again. Limited success.
Now you’re a tinkerer who won’t leave well-enough alone.Try again. Limited improvement.
No one calls you anything now because no one is paying attention.Try again. Major breakthrough.
Now you’re an innovator and everyone wants to swim in your pool.George Washington was a loyal British subject who decided the king was wrong.
Thomas Jefferson envisioned a form of government that Winston Churchill – on the floor of the House of Commons* – would later call “the worst form of government ever created, except for all the others.”
Abraham Lincoln violated millennia of traditional wisdom when he won the war but refused the victor’s spoils, saying instead, “With malice toward none, with charity for all… let us bind up the nation’s wounds…” (2nd inaugural address.)
But perhaps Teddy Roosevelt said it best. Speaking of the choices and consequences we face daily as we improvise our way through life, he said, “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
Wizard Academy is a nonprofit educational organization, a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.
Finally! After 12 years of false starts, mistakes and “almost rights,”
we have a way to explain this place. THANK YOU to Jeffrey Eisenberg and Jeff Sexton, who accepted this challenge 8 months ago and never turned loose of the tail of that dragon.“Wizard Academy: a school for the imaginative, the courageous and the ambitious.” This tells the world who we are and who we are not.
“If you have no imagination, please stay at home. If you lack courage, this is not the place for you. If you have no dream that keeps you awake, go back to bed with our blessings. We have work to do.”It took us 12 years to figure out how to explain who we are
and we’re the ones that are supposed to know what we’re doing.You’re not a screw-up. You’re an innovator on the edge of a breakthrough. Trust us. We know. We’re very familiar with the edge.
And the view from here is magnificent.
Join us.
So there you have it. I am going to publish the above text as our credo… and if you have some additions to suggest, please go ahead. After all, if you are one of those people with imagination, courage, and a dream, you will have something to add. I can’t wait to read your comments.
I am here to raise your vibration; No kidding.
Feeling a very old emptiness right now. Don’t feel like I’m getting much from this, but somehow I don’t think you are full of B.S. Some teachers advise against the guru model. I don’t want to be here for the wrong reason. I do suspect that my reason for attempting this work will change. I have come so far, but still feel so empty. “If you have no dream that keeps you awake…”
Great question: how do people find me… I have no idea. When I look at my stats, there are hundreds of people find the site but each was searching for different things… Very tough to grow.
There is magic, becoming who you really are is deep magic.
Good stuff. I wonder how people find you, but I don’t really want to know. I haven’t felt any magic yet, maybe that’s a good thing.