Do you have, do you create drama in your life? Excitement?… or how to become a producer instead
This article may bring some pointers how you can have a life of producing results instead of drama.
Why isn’t everyone breaking a path to my door to participate in the Playground, my groundbreaking program?
When I look at my new buyer list, and the products they buy, I get a clearer sense of who I am reaching. I make no effort to reach anyone specific, anyone particular… by the way. I don’t know how to reach the person who would be able and willing to even consider taking the long road to where they want to get to. People want instant of near-instant results. Titillating results.
Just like art house movies are deemed boring, because the cuts are longer than a few seconds long… paths are deemed boring, tedious, and undesirable, if they take longer than 2-3 days, or alternatively a short exciting class with magical stuff in it.
When I look at, for example, happy testimonials, I NEVER see any testimonial form someone who has used the product longer than a week, in fact most testimonials are given after buying or receiving… and talk about the excitement the buyer feels about the result they probably won’t get.
All the mistakes I have ever made came from the same place: I filled out the unknown and unknowable with some imagination of some success or result I would have loved to have. And because I could already taste it, I could already see it, I got really excited. And then I made a mistake… I did, and lost the whole house of cards… while I could have just shut up and go step by tiny step… and not open my big mouth.
It is hard to learn this lesson, because when you are under the spell of the desire trap, the name of the phenomenon I am talking about, you are in an altered state: you don’t know you are in a desire trap. You are mesmerized and you don’t know it. You are hypnotized and you don’t know it. So you act consistently with the mirage… and you destroy it.
The number of people who are caught in the high desire/low ambition trap is getting higher.
Why? I am not sure.
I think people are getting blind to what it takes to get anything accomplished…
Why? It would be easy to blame it on fast food, or fast cars, or texting on your smart phone.
I think that the issue is deeper. Maybe.
I measure your control over your attention in my Starting Point Measurements, because that is one of the fundamental and deep issues that can be trained.
Why is being able to control your attention so important?
One thing is: you have no idea where your attention is: your self-awareness is very low. Being aware of where your attention goes is the key to bring it back to where you want it.
One of the secrets of success is doing things in a certain way… putting all power (not force!) in all action, i.e. making all actions successful. Not half assed… but successful. When you increase the number of actions a day that are successful, your overall success is growing.
But you cannot go from zero to 100 in a day, or even a week. You can go only little by little, and that needs you to keep your attention controlled.
It is hard. You need to train it like you would train any muscle. One of my students is learning juggling… great attention exercise.
There is a program I have tried so far many times… and I have always failed with it. It is called Simpleology.
It works for many people. It doesn’t work for me.
Why? Because its step by step methodology is counter to how I work best. I work best with inner guidance. This is why I was a lousy employee when I was still employed: I have a gap between what other people want me to do, and what I feel I should do next.
When I am left to my own devices, I can move mountains. When I am told what to do, I can’t even get started.
I would say that this is more frequent than is talked about. I can see it on people I teach. It takes some of them months to get to the place where their inner guidance says the same thing what my instructions to them say. And when that happens, magic happens.
Sometimes it takes a step outside of our curriculum… but for the people who do well in my courses, it always happens.
I consider myself “learning disabled”: I am clumsy, uncoordinated, frazzled, tense, and stupid when I am trying to do things dictated from the outside, even if it is just a todo list I made. Frozen. Rigid. Brittle. Not pleasant for me.
When I was young, in elementary school, I was considered stupid. I was dyslexic. I was near sighted. And I was lucky. I was left alone. And to everyone’s surprise, I was the very top of my class.
I wasn’t trying to please anyone… especially not my family: they didn’t care. Never acknowledged any of my results. They were busy getting my brother do better in school. They gave him support… all his life.
The few times my father decided to help me I promptly dropped the ball: my father’s style was different from how I learn best… he got tired of it in no time.
OK, what am I trying to say?
If you want to grow as a person, if you want to grow in skills, knowledge, abilities …
…you can do it best by increasing what there is to increase slowly… you can call it Kaizen, you can call it trimtabbing… call it what you want.
But make sure you first verify with yourself that you are following an inner guidance, not an outer, worldly, pleasing others goal.
I have a student whose whole life is duplicitous. He wants to look to others as one person, but he wants to be another.
A typical addict’s conman attitude.
He is tireless in both lives. Very consistent.
- In his hidden life he is pleasure seeking, excitement driven… can play video games for hours.
- In this “visible” life he does things that have nothing to do with what inspires him, what interests him, what would float his boat. He is entirely outside driven… no match between the inside and the outside. None.
He uses a timer he sets for 20 minutes. Nothing worth doing can be accessed in 20 minutes. I don’t start anything worth doing if I only have 20 minutes. I prefer to just sit and do nothing.
My inner timer is set for 3-4 hours, with a short, unplanned break every hour: you can set your clock by my inner clock. Exactly an hour
When I moved to this house I had my office far from the kitchen.
I barely had anything done: whenever I got up to go to the kitchen, the crossing from room to room was distracting enough, that I lost my train of thought…
Now my office is in my kitchen, and I don’t even notice a break in my momentum when I get up to get a drink, or even when I get up to make a meal. No doorways to cross… and I can stay in the same world I was in, doing deep work in my head.
This is the secret to my productivity.
I do long and deep working sessions, when I put all power in all actions, because my attention is now firmly trenched…
I don’t completely forget about the world, and its demands of me. I am a lot like a dolphin, if I am not confusing my animals: I keep an eye open to track my feelings, to hear what is going on, and I use that “one eye” on cooking, making coffee, or remembering to go to the bathroom.
My theory is that there are several things you need to do before you can be effective and productive in your life.
One of these things is: I don’t answer my phone. It is very hard to return to what I was deeply inside, when interrupted by the phone.
Some of these things, tricks of producers, I know, others I am willing to discover for you. Here are three that I can help you with:
Ayurveda doshas: Vata, Pitta, Kapha. Flat vector icons. 1. Get your health to a place where you can be calm and collected and not jumpy, not excitement seeker, not ravaged by pain or emotions.
In many cases the food list I muscletest for people does that automatically, without me paying special attention to this aspect.
The imbalance you need to remove is called vata. Vata is the amount of “air” in you. Certain activities signal while they also increase vata.
- Exciting stuff
- talking
- chewing… chewing gum, eating nuts, seeds, dried fruit as passtime
- irregular sleep schedule
I have a tendency for a vata imbalance… when I have too many talking engagements, or travel with others, crack jokes, etc. my vata goes out of whack.
The balancing energies are fire in the belly… eating by appetite only, and heavy foods.
I can’t eat salads or other raw vegetables. If I eat when I am hungry, or when the food is ready… but not by my appetite… I get antsy, restless, and have a hard time to go deep in anything, including reading. But I have found foods are not necessarily the primary cause… the activities are more likely to dramatically cause imbalance.
2. Get into the habit of increasing the depth you go with anything… and reduce the habit of sampling, watching short videos, reading short article, texting.
You cannot fall in love with anything during a superficial, forced encounter. And you won’t get into real deep with anything that you don’t like, don’t know, don’t know in the biblical sense.
3. Move the stuff you need while you are doing this next to your computer or desk.
Crossing doorways effectively takes you out of where you were… and you lose your attention, your thread, your stream of thought.
Will I be able to change you from slacker, to a producer?
No, I won’t. Only you can do it. I can only give you suggestions that worked for me.
