There is no such book… I made up the cover myself…
A few years ago I made a lot of money selling my Sleep Rescue Remedy. It worked, and 80% of the buyers bought it again. All I needed to do is fill and ship bottles fast enough.
Sleep is a big problem…
…and unless it is solved, people are getting more and more incoherent and less and less brilliant, less and less able to contain their anger, frustration, fear, anxiety, or desires…
Sleep is a lot like eating: people are unwilling to be disciplined about it, and they pay the price. A big price.
But it is a potentially big money maker.
So why am I not pursuing it? After all making money is good, right?
My answer even surprised me: because it is boring.
Hm, interesting. Is all making money boring?
I spent some time looking at that question. And I have to think, that all making money, oodles, requires you to solve problems that people know they have, so they are already main stream.
And main stream means there are billions of people who know they have a problem, so selling them is a piece of cake… if your product does solve the problem.
But if it is this simple, then it’s boring. It’s repetitive, and requires no thinking, no brilliance.
I know a guy who makes good money. One time I asked him if he could do anything with his life, what he would do. He answered, that he would teach in college, because he would have a chance to use the gray matter in his brain.
If you are like him, making money will not satisfy you.
Now, if your solution, if your product does not solve the problem, if you are a shyster, then it may get more interesting: you have to lie convincingly, make up good and better stories, invent customer success… so it is a lot more interesting, albeit it has no integrity.
And, if like me, you solve a problem people don’t see as a problem, then you’ll be poor.
Because I live and teach by the Anna Karenina Principle:
All happy families are alike, all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way… the Strait and Narrow, the removing everything that would make you unhappy, sleep poorly, have poor digestion, be fat, be uninspired, occupy your cone of vision by yourself… etc.,
Selling what doesn’t work would not work: if you want to love yourself and love your life, you have to have high level of integrity in every area of life.
What’s wrong with boring? Nothing really, other than boring is BORING.
In my business there are a lot of repetitive actions, and one could say that they are boring, and they would be that… for you. But for me almost everything I do is exciting, because for me everything I do is finding ways to be strait and narrow… and it seems that takes some effort… it seems that human nature is a lot like a new puppy: wants to pee on everything.
Or a new kitten… wants to climb on the top of every furniture…
…climb every curtain, every tree, even if it cannot get back down.
Nature wants you to climb higher… and unless you do it inside, it will make you do it outside… and then you can’t get down. And unlike with the kitty, there are no nice firemen with their long ladders coming to the rescue.
I have watched people who could not pay their credit card bills, who had no hopes to pay it from their income, and suddenly they bought some fancy package of some fancy way to make money they have no means to follow… neither the brain, nor the know-how, nor the time, nor the skills, nothing.
My method of making every step I take is part of growth i exciting. This has kept me out of trouble, even though when I get overconfident, I also climb the curtain… my own inimitable way, making myself miserable for a day or two.
But for the most part, I have managed to live an interesting, exciting life that looks, for others, like the most boring life ever.
So what is my secret?
I have a lot of secrets, actually.
Life’s most interesting aspect is that no one secret solution will be effective everywhere.
Not even with sleep… Not even with eating… not even with love…
So when you are desperately looking for the hammer to squash the problem you have, you are really having a fix-it attack… but every fix is the source of much bigger problems, especially when it deals with people.
My mother was a fix-it type person, looking for fixes to constrain me as a child.
She had a fix for everything, for how I ate (or didn’t), for how I slept, for how I spoke, for how I moved.
Being on the receiving end of a fix-it person is a miserable thing… Because all fix-it persons ignore what is there, and replace it with a ‘wrong, must be fixed’ thing.
But, you see, my mother was quite typical, as far as mothers go… She saw nothing of me, other than what bothered her, frustrated her, angered her. And even though her friends told me that occasionally she bragged about me, she never let me know that she noticed anything I did right.
She never looked at life, she never looked at herself through my eyes. Never even tried. My mother’s about-me score was 80%. She never saw how things were, she could only see how she was.
Your high about-me score makes you a poor spouse, a poor mother, and makes you make a lot of false steps in life because you don’t see things as they are, you see them as you are…
One of the most important things I teach people is reality.
Reality is collective hunch at best. Although it is inherently inaccurate, the collective hunch is still a thousand times more accurate than seeing the world, reality as you are.
Even becoming half-skilled at seeing reality is a source of incredible improvements in people’s lives…
And because you are part of reality, seeing yourself as you are is the most freeing of all.
Now, what happens after you become skilled at seeing reality less the way you are, and more how it is? It is a total miracle:
You start to spend less time in your head, and suddenly you have time, energy, and gasp! CURIOSITY to do things that can fill your life with joy and excitement and discovery and purpose.
Teaching people to see reality is not a money-maker, I can tell you that.
Why?
As I said in the beginning of this article, the only thing that makes a lot of money, is solving problems people KNOW they have.
Do you know that you don’t see reality, you only see yourself?
No, you don’t.
My best student whose Achilles heel is the Desire Trap, has pretended for 25 months!
He pretended that he believed me that he had an issue with the desire trap. Whenever he had a chance, he got caught in it, again and again and again, destroying his health, his mood, his intelligence each time. He could not see it, he would have needed to see it to believe it.
It took me 25 months to write an article that drove it home for him… that made him see it on others and then see it on himself… and now he knows he has this problem.
And he is my BEST student. 25 months… definitely not a money maker topic! lol
So from this, you can see that the number of people on the planet, people who can see that they don’t see things as they are, instead they see them as they are is very low, according to muscletest, my type of muscletest where I am asking All-of-it, not my body! is a whole whopping 1000. One thousand people out of eight billion.
So yeah, what I teach is not a money maker because people don’t take to it, don’t look for it, don’t google it, because they don’t know they have this problem. And even when they hear me say it: they don’t believe me. Or worse: they resent me for saying it.
I read. I read a lot. Mostly I read fiction. Thrillers. Mystery, detective, assassin stories by good writers. On average one book a day, depending on the length. I read slowly.
Before I read a book, I muscletest if I should read it.
The only reason to read anything is to see more of reality.
No matter who you are, no matter how high your vibration, you have been presented with a story and not reality. In your studies, on TV, radio, internet, books.
A story standing in for reality, about reality… health, wealth, politics, love, everything.
So was I. I am not an exception.
But I am an exception in that I am conscious of the tendency to see the world as I am, not the way the world is.
So I read and see glimpses of how it may be, behind the story, behind the story they’ve fed me, fed you, fed everyone.
It’s not pretty and not pleasant. but my TLB is high, it’s 70. It’s very high. But it is not 100%, and when reality is shockingly different, in the books I read, my TLB acts up… and I jump up, and run around, and eat, and suddenly I need to make a hot drink… Reality is not pretty, and it is hard to be with.
You do the same things when I tell you something I see about yourself. React harshly. You can’t be with it because it destroys the pretty picture you have in your mind.
But after reacting to what I found out, I return to the book, and read on.
You? Resent me. And you don’t even have the decency or the courage to discuss it with me. You prefer stewing and make it my fault that your life isn’t working.
So the second most important capacity you need to acquire is the MENTAL TOUGHNESS that it takes to stare reality down.
The aspect of reality hardest to face is facing how you really are.
You may think that you know how you are, because you have words for it, but you are like the apologizing man. The agenda of an apology is to buy permission to continue doing what he is apologizing for.
You talk, creating smokescreen through which you can’t see.
How do I know what you really see about yourself? By your behavior. Your behavior reflects how you see reality.
Not what you think, not even how you think.
Your behavior reflects how you see yourself and reality.
And your words and your behavior don’t match.
So there you go… Your low TLB prevents you from seeing yourself as you are.
Now, I hope you have this question, how is it possible that I am having a fun, exciting, happening life, in spite of all the ‘boring’ stuff I do, the boring way I eat, the isolation I live in, and the meager income I live on?
I always say that CONTEXT IS DECISIVE.
Context is words. What I say about what I do? Why I do what I do? What is my goal with what I do?
In the Juice Exercise
In the Juice Exercise, we ferret out the essence of what makes you juiced, what makes you come alive with pleasure. We ask: what context, brought to your life, will make all of your life fun and pleasurable. FOR YOU?
For me it is penetrating the invisible, so I can bring the DIVINE (what’s beyond the visible) to everything. So I do everything with the intention to see what I can’t see, what is invisible to me… when I walk, when I go to the bathroom, when I read, when I write articles… when I do my stretching, when I try to sell the idea to my friend to accept my token of appreciation for all her care. Everything.
So having THAT context that makes me juiced everywhere results in a juiced life… and I love it.
A ‘normal’ person’s life is plays out in the two slices of ‘I know that I know’ and the ‘I know that I don’t know’.
I could learn more about what I don’t know, and move it over to the ‘I know that I know’ slice. But it would be boring.
I literally don’t know anyone who has ever accepted that 99% of all knowledge is in the area of what you don’t know you don’t know.
There are people who give lip service to it, but lip service is lying through your teeth.
Even when someone teaches you, sheds light to a spot that you don’t know that you don’t know, you become all defensive, or huffy puffy, because it is never pleasant to find out that you have been wrong. That you have been inaccurate. That your whole world has been based on some inaccurate view of reality.
That student, who after 25 months was suddenly able to see that he had the tendency to fall into the Desire Trap, is a hero in my mind.
Heroes are ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Being a hero is a moment to moment thing, not a label. A snapshot.
I am almost certain that by now he has lost what he saw… when was it… yesterday?
As I am looking for a quote, or a picture to illustrate it, I am confronted by the optical illusion reflected in what I find: thinking that heroes are, or being hero is a status… The truth is, the reality is, that being a hero, when you are judged from what you achieve, destroys you, and destroys other people.
Being a hero is ONLY in the moment of choice… when you choose what takes courage and skills and a stronger desire than the desire for self-preservation. When you choose to desire something greater than who you are.
People’s blindness is accurately expressed in the memes they admire.
A perfect meme to cement the chicken coop is something you can give lip service to, but will keep you in the chicken coop, like the meme saying ‘heroes are ordinary people who achieve extraordinary results’… obviously they are not talking about you, because you cannot see your way from where you are to extraordinary results, so being a hero is not a path you can take… but you can dream about it… and there you go: you are trapped in the Desire Trap.
Do you see now how that works? How society and its memes keep you trapped?
By the way: the same snapshot approach to failings is what works. If ‘desire trap’ had an opposite, it would be called ‘resignation trap?’ because if you think what you see, what someone else sees as a failing is not who you are, it is who you are being in the moment the snapshot was taken. It doesn’t go all the way to your core: it is an attitude, a behavior, an action that didn’t work. And therefore it can be changed.
So you can see the three mandatory elements to living a life you love:
1. reduce the about-me score, so you can see more of reality as it is This is measure #11 in the Starting Point Measurements. I also measure your TLB there
Your TLB, your about-me number, more2. start to see and act on how you really behave, the ugliness
3. know what gives you juice, and bring it to every aspect of your life. I do this in one or a series of conversations, called the Juice Exercise
Obviously teaching any of these skills or capacities isn’t a money maker… because even after reading this article, if you got this far in reading, strikes you that I am talking about other people… not you. You are not like that, but you can see that other people are.
Maybe I should reconsider solving sleep for people… eh?
