One of my favorite quotes from an ad is from the Men’s Hair Club… where the owner says: “I’m not just the president of Hair Club for Men, I’m also a client!”
I would never want to do business with anyone who is not also a client of their own business…
And of course, I am a client of my own. Meaning: I learn from what I write… and I learn and test everything first, before I recommend it…
With that said: to date the two most valuable nuggets I got out of my participation in my 67 step coaching program are:
- 1. innovate your way out of the problem
- 2. add suspenders to your belt aka Build Forgiveness Into the Land
I am fairly certain that the newly discovered idea about the missing 13th floor, (that it is the Tree of Life, that the Tree of Knowledge ratifies the stupid way humans live their lives) would have never come to me without the idea that you can innovate your way out of a problem.
One of the typical issues I see with myself and with my fellow humans is having a fixed way, one way, to see things, and no idea that we could look at them in many different ways.
One of the ways people use books and coaches is to nudge them to look in a different way.
But I have rarely seen a person initiate their own looking differently.
The principle comes from Jeff Bezos, who is a billionaire, of course, and actually tells us how and why he became a billionaire.
But if you look deeply, as I have, you’ll see that every single billionaire has that edge: initiating their own looking differently move.
Now, I have no ambition for riches, but I have an ambition to have the freedom, the financial freedom to not have to deal with money worries. And I have the ambition to get my brilliance to bubble up… and there are conditions for that… for example having no worries. The snake just bit its tail…
Ok, I wanted to share with you an example of me innovating out of a problem. I have had more, but without documentation I forget everything: this is another condition for the brilliance to bubble up: memory blocks new brilliance…
The story is fairly simple, but I was stuck for quite a few years… so simple doesn’t mean easy.
I have an under the sink water filter. I installed it myself 13 years ago. And changing filters was always a problem…
A few years ago the filter burst open and flooded the downstairs apartment with water. It happened at night, as these things tend to happen…
My landlord came by and tightened the filter housing… and that was the end of my ability to exchange filters… and that, with the muddy water we have in Syracuse, is an every two months requirement.
The water flow got so low, that it took 12 hours to provide drinking water for the day. But I could not unscrew the filter housing.
Problem.
I was thinking of buying a new whole filter… $140 the same quality I had before.
And then I said: Innovate your way out of this problem…
And then it came to me: “If the mountain won’t come to you, you must go to the mountain”
I took the whole filter assembly to Home Depot, and sweet talked a CUSTOMER to unscrew it for me.
He did it, and I danced a little victory dance around him.
The guy working in the plumbing department didn’t want to touch MY filter…
Anyway, my five gallon container filled up in mere minutes…
Cost: zero dollars, zero cents. Other than a trip to Home Depot.
Now, the real takeaway from this story:
If you are not happy, not fulfilled, not anything: you can start considering that you’ve been looking at that area from a fixed vantage point, with a fixed attitude.
Consider that transformation is a simple trick: you move to the right, you move to the left, and look again.
EVERYTHING looks different from a different angle. And sometimes the angle is a different question: you ask different questions and you end up with a major transformation.
The questions you ask are the reflections of your fixed attitude.
Asking different question is not easy, but even if it were: you may be too darn lazy to upset the apple cart.
The number of people who visit this site, had they asked a different question upon reading my transformative (intending to transform) articles could be in the hundreds of thousands.
We would notice that many people… but your reading habit is “reading for information” not “reading for transformation.”
Would you agree to an experiment?
Given that information (answers) are not transformative, would you look at asking at least one different question a day?
The transformation is not in the answers. The transformation is in the question.
The moment you stop asking that question, your life goes back to how it was, leaving you with a memory.
I see people doing that to themselves… Not pretty.
Don’t be that kind of person.
Keep asking good questions.
Questions orient, answers don’t.
You said you wanted to grow. You said you wanted to become a person. You said you wanted to deserve more. You said you wanted to be worth a damn.
Now prove it.
Start asking good questions. Of yourself.
