In this article I am using an example in which we are starting a new business with the Kaizen 1 way… a business that is going to succeed and more importantly, where growing it causes the owner of the business to grow into the kind of person who can… can make a lot of money, can sustain growth, can have it all… can build a life worth living.
So, this article will be about change, or better said the art of change.
Change is scary, mainly because it is a disruption. And it also requires one to know what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.
Working with me is designed to cause lasting changes… but it is really always up to you.
The Kaizen Method Ensures Continuous Improvement across all parts of the “organism” and keep it in ess… evolutionary stable strategy state
Certain methods cause sustainable changes, which in another language, a new evolutionary stable strategy. And other methods, the methods “other people” teach you cause a flash in the pan result, because the change is abrupt and disruptive… the environment, your skills, the rest of your life don’t have time to adjust and acclimate to the new situation.
Growth, in nature, is gradual… unless something goes wrong.
A seed will grow shoots that have enough solidity that they can support themselves… except when some human mucked with fertilizers, and the shoot grows to long too fast, and can’t support itself.
This is the basic idea about organic growth, organic changes… changes that are aimed at evolutionary stable strategies…
The particular issue I am dealing with is creating a new business while I am running the one that is providing me with my livelihood.
The “desire” aka greed dictates doing it fast. The faster I can build it, the faster I will have a choice.
Greed/desire is not interested in me or my life. it is interested in jumping to the end.
Doing it fast is much like the seed that will die because it grew too fast.
While you are growing anything, you also need to grow.
If I gave you an already built business, you would drive it to the ground. Why? Because a business includes you, and you’ll lack the growth that enables you to run the business.
I remember when I first entered the publishing business as an employee/partner. In my youthful arrogance, I almost managed to run it to the ground.
The owner, at some point said: “You are brilliant. Let me tell you what to do…”
I remember being deeply offended, and I also found that statement ridiculously contradictory. this was 29 years ago.
Looking back, from what I see now, the owner was absolutely right. I needed to grow myself through doing first what had been done… instead of letting my brilliance to run the show, making changes, without being able to know what worked for 10 years before my entry to the business… A brilliant and short run… like a supernova… quickly burning out.
There is more to doing anything than brilliance, talent, maybe even skills.
I think this is what is underneath “the ten dark years” rule: in those ten dark years the future winner grew themselves to be able to deal with the success.
It may take forever… or it may take ten years.
In the movie, Groundhog Day, the reporter played by Bill Murray, had to become the kind of person who would deserve being loved. And in the beginning, and for a long time, he was not changing, nothing got learned from day to day.
Another movie showing the same principle is 50 First dates. It’s a process, you need to become someone who you weren’t before to have what you want and keep it.
A fence that is built fast, falls down fast… says the saying, and it is a principle.
If you have to take a vacation from your job, you should not go back… is another principle.
Unless you can enjoy the process, you’ll have a hard time creating anything new, and becoming anything new.
There are two basic ways to be “motivated” or moved to do something.
- The first is necessity, pressure, need, want. All your external… not within. Once the necessity, the pressure, the need goes away, the change will also go away.
- The second is inner motive power. Motivation simply means: being moved. Motive and Motion… motive is what creates motion. The adjective.
- The first is the goal-oriented way, go to a goal, or go away from the non-goal… Get out of poverty, get out of sickness, get out of loneliness, get out of low status… Ultimately leads to emptiness and unhappiness.
- The second is moved by an inner need, an inner vision, a direction.
- The first is desire, the second is ambition.
I don’t think the words, desire and ambition, give the phenomenon justice, but i don’t have better words.
Ambition is organic. It comes from within, and it cannot be extinguished: the “job” is never done. Life is never don. Ambition is life. It stops when you die.
I used to be afraid to attain my desires… make money, success. I could see others fizzle out, or settle down, or sit on their laurels… and get fat, bored, and depressed.
Today, I am still afraid, but my numbers say that there is enough inner fire to be able to move me to further heights.
I am not sure this makes sense, so let me try to say it differently:
I used to have more desire than ambition. Desire is like hunger: once you ate, it takes time to get hungry again. Ambition is like life: just because you are alive, you want to get up and do things.
In his book, Rebooting, Kabbalistic writer, Yehuda Berg, calls it desire… but that is an unfortunate choice of words. But his diagnosis is close to being on the money: depression is a sign that you have too low ambition… your inner fire is not being stoked.
Desire, the worldly stuff, the greed for the end result, actually extinguishes ambition.
I have been pondering how to reduce students’ desire… so it doesn’t dampen ambition.
Muscletest says that desire can be sublimated to ambition… the question is how.
I am working with a client now, who in three days managed to move some of the desire into ambition, and his ambition grew from 10% to 12%.
He didn’t do it alone: he is working closely with me… on his project.
And he is being forced, by me, to do the steps fully…
His desire would make him jump through phases, and he wouldn’t even know it. Because he would not be able to see the path, the process, because desire is only interested in the object of desire.
Another phenomenon that is worth knowing is this: if you didn’t earn and therefore didn’t deserve the result you got, your conscience will make you get rid of it.
When three years ago, or was it two? I got successful on Amazon as a seller really fast, too fast, I wasn’t growing fast enough. And the success felt unearned… and maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t… but my conscience definitely made me do something stupid to come down to earth and be poor again… lol.
It is good to see.
You can fool other people, but you cannot fool yourself. And you cannot fool nature.
- Kaizen methodology includes making changes and monitoring results, then adjusting. Large-scale pre-planning and extensive project scheduling are replaced by smaller experiments, which can be rapidly adapted as new improvements are suggested
