The playground distinction: A simple distinction really… uncollapse reality and your commentary and you’ll stop marker feelings (emotions) from pulling you out of your well-being. 1
A relatively short sentence… But like with everything that is simple: it is not easy.
It is not easy to see, and it is not easy to not leave the two sides collapsed… the world, religion, society, your rules fight against it.
Morality, societal rules, personal rules, ego
- If your moral values come from religion, school, they will be hard to break
- Your ego may have created rules in which you have to be smart, even smarter than others… hard to break
- Your ancestral history may put you in a victim/abused/exploited mindset, and that is hard to break
- Your soul correction may work actively against you growing, becoming whole and complete
- and a lot more (Read the footnotes!)
In a previous article I mentioned that even though I even lead the Playground back in 1988, I got a huge breakdown that I could barely climb through in 1995 when my mother died.
How is that possible? I was already masterful at uncollapsing the two sides of the picture… so why? How? What was missing?
What I never saw before is that many of our complaints have a “no” in them… and while they sound valid, they are not reality. 2
My particular complaining was: I wasn’t there when my mother died, and I didn’t, I couldn’t help her to get well.
It took me a whole six weeks of wallowing, self-flagellation, AND a conversation with a coach, to see that none of the “no” parts ever happened. It didn’t happen that I wasn’t there. It didn’t happen that I didn’t or couldn’t help her get well.
What actually happened is this:
My mother was in Budapest, Hungary
I was in New Jersey, USA.
My mother died.
Everything else is commentary. Everything else didn’t happen, it was just talk.
Now, you would thing that seeing it (insight alert!) made a difference for future occurrences of that same phenomenon… “there is never any no in reality!”
Far from it.
I had to practice. But, of course, life doesn’t, isn’t designed to give you many organized opportunities to practice a distinction… life is going to throw stuff at you with instant upset… so LIFE is not a good place to learn things…
Practice is the purpose of the Playground.
Here is an example: you know, you have seen the big parks in cities with built in chess tables… if nowhere else, in movies.
Do you think the dudes that play there every day ever get better? No. But why? Because learning, practice, as nowadays it is fashionable and hip to say “deliberate practice” is impossible while you play a game to win.
You need to play specifically for learning… and take the time to cogitate, to analyze, to fully see what is happening from every side possible.
Life is serious business (fun) if you want to have a good life.
I have noticed that most everyone, 99.4% of all people rely on their natural intelligence to wing life.
Everyone in my family, every one of my students, every one of my fellow students (except one)… that is how people deal with life that is a serious business.
No wonder humanity hasn’t evolved in the past 30,000 years. Intellectually, and consciousness-wise.
The only learning that matters, the only learning that makes a difference, is learning that alters you. It creates a muscle memory, or it creates a new person inside.
I used to be 100% like most people… top of the class without studying.
Then my father said, at age 13: you need to get good at the violin before I let you learn guitar.
It was the most unreasonable demand… but I did it. And when I got really good: I had a choice to remain with what I was newly good at and started to love, or start something new.
I had a new relationship with playing an instrument, or singing which was my second musical “instrument”. I started to do scales 70% of the time, and “pieces” only 30% of the time.
But it didn’t carry over to my school work, or to swimming, or to gymnastic: I was still only did there what I had to do to get by.
But, I was lucky. I guess Life had plans with me, because at age 16 I was not good enough to stay in the school I was: I was one of the least performing students.
I knew I had to learn to learn… had to learn to study, to go beyond just using my natural quick wit. And I created a system… and I quickly produced results no one expected of me.
I brought the same painstaking, eager beaver method to my participation in Landmark Education: I made it a separate “job” to master the material I was given. 3-6 hours of input… 34-37 hours of processing.
Yeah, for mastery that is the proportion: for every hour of input to take, you need 10 hours of practice.
Did you think that the depth, breadth of my understanding and knowledge was achieved with my natural intelligence? Not at all. I worked at it… diligently, tenaciously, over time.
I am seeing that I haven’t brought the same attitude to learning business, to learning marketing… and I am trying to get by on my natural intelligence, which is not enough.
I work with students who are sure that watching a video, attending a webinar, reading a book, or having a coaching call with me is going to get them to a place where they will be able to change themselves “molecular” level.
Between you and me: impossible.
But how you do anything is how you do everything: you are just as “skating” on your natural intelligence, what you already know, in your work! And not surprisingly: you are not happy.
Why? Because the “design” of a human is to be happy only if certain conditions are met.
I subscribe to Nietzsche’s take on it:
“What is good? All that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? All that is born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosopher (1844-1900)
When you are skating in life on what you already know, your natural aptitude or intelligence, the power in you isn’t growing, no resistance is overcome, and you are not happy.
It is a rare program that focuses in on one distinction, and lets participants practice and practice and practice.
Programs, courses consider that people pay for is information. But information is worthless unless it changes who you are…
So most everything is worthless information out there, as much as 91% of all you can find, paid or free is worthless…
If you want me to look at MY stuff: my articles, my hundreds of webinars, maybe even my coaching calls are worthless… because they don’t force you to do the practicing.
Exceptions are the Reclaim (67 steps), the Accountability program, and this… Becoming an Idea Machine practice… The Playground combined with choosing.
All the posturing of how advanced you are, how spiritual you are, how blah blah blah you are is that: posturing.
Unless you become the kind of person who lives in a way that the power is growing, that resistance is overcome, you are going to remain unhappy, and nothing and no one can change that.
You are, most likely, part of the 99.4% of humanity who will remain the same, using only your real or imagined intelligence.
But if you feel in yourself the stirring of the Power… you owe it to yourself to step off the diving board and land in the deep water of becoming all you can become.
The Playground is an amazing and FUN vehicle.
One of the people, definitely part of the .6% of humanity who shares generously his own methods, is James Altucher.
In his books, Choose Yourself, Reinvent Yourself, Choose yourself for Wealth, in his podcasts he talks to everyone who is willing to listen, and teaches the .6% who is willing to learn.
This podcast I watched today is excellent… watch it. It goes hand in hand with what I am saying.
It’s an hour long, but is worth the .6%’s time
Is that you?
- The second distinction of the Playground is that unless the ability becomes automatic, muscle memory, you have only gotten some, a little of what is available…
- What feels weird in hindsight is to what degree I didn’t fully understand what I had already seen. I 1987 I did a course, The More Money Workshop, where the mantra was: “nothing is missing, unless you say so”… Missing is saying “no”, saying that what is missing should be there. You should have this and that, or you should be this and that… making you utterly miserable… and losing sight of what you have, who you are, and even of what you are doing. Very very very costly, damaging… and all part of the Playground.
