Everyone wants to be smarter, or if it is too much to ask: wants to look smart.
But why? Because of what? To what end? What would smart get you?
For some people it would help them produce results in whatever they are doing… For others it would get the promise, the mirage of being able to produce results… and they hope that they won’t need to actually produce anything.
Because you only get your rewards, with actual results. In a normal world, in a world where people act rationally. Obviously we don’t quite live in a normal world…
Very few people do what it takes to become someone who can produce.
Why? I am not sure…
For one… there is this issue of nature vs nurture. I can tell you this: You are not born to be a producer, you learn to become a producer. Bummer, eh?
I guess the reason very few people do what it takes to become the person who CAN produce is partially their mindset…
They must be saying something in their head, or listening a voice in their heads that says that a little bit is enough… that life is like a McDonald’s: you get a full meal for a couple of dollars worth of investment. And the rest of your money is yours… you get a meal and you can spend most of your money however you want.
Money is like energy. Like time. You need to shell out for what you want.
If you want to produce, you need to shell out a lot of “dollars”, time, energy, attention, more.
To get anything done, really done,
- takes being good at it,
- attention (doing it in a certain way: all attention, all power in all actions), and
- time.
Life is not like McDonald’s… not at all. You can become like McDonald’s though.
In the movie, The Founder, there was one thing actually worth watching, the part where the McDonald’s brothers tirelessly tweaked the food-making process to be able to turn out fries for pennies… cheaper than other restaurants, faster than other restaurants.
You either have a desire and an ambition to get good at what you do for money, what you do in life, or you don’t… Here is a more detailed illustration of hot to become McDonald’s. I run my life, I run my business 50% effectively… McDonald’s is 70% effective. Most people’s life is less than 10% effective. Imagine what it could be like if you could get more effective?!
Most people don’t even imagine it…
Most people don’t even know they could or they could get more effective and put their desires in balance with what they want from life if they did. I get to read 4-6 hours a day, sleep 8-9 hours a day, cook all my meals from scratch, exercise every day, and I never hurry. I don’t have to.
I have recently started to follow Ben Settle, a copywriter, who specializes in writing emails.
He, among others, teaches that the way to do things fast is to learn to do a lot of it under deadline pressure… Thousands upon thousand of words, ten-twelve-fourteen hours a day. Until you can write fast.
And then have a long and ever-growing idea file of what to write about, so you don’t spend valuable time puzzling, when you are supposed to be writing.
In his book, Super Villains of Persuasion I just finished yesterday, he lists 10 things you need to practice, you need to do, you need to master, if you want to get good at persuasion.
I am sure if he wrote a book about how to get good at being an accountant, he would be able to use nine out of those ten things…
I am sure if he wrote a book about how to get good at being a parent, getting your child get dressed, he would be able to use nine of those ten things.
I bet, no matter what you want to get good at, you need nine of those… the tenth is an affinity, and ability, maybe a talent, that you need, that is slightly innate… maybe not.
I don’t have the need to go into that now… I am more interested in looking at the lack of the desire, the lack of inner need to get good at things. Anything.
Anything worth getting good at? Ye, anything.
I have a student who plays video games… a lot.
Does he have the ambition to get really good at it? No. He just wants to play and win. It is a desire he wants to fulfill… Not the desire to get good at it.
How you do anything is how you do everything.
If you have that bit wanting to get good at something, it carries over to every area of your life. If you just want to get by, on a momentary experience, that… that as well you carry over to every area of life. Even to sex…
All the sales email I see in my inbox talk about enlarging your stamina or your member… none talk about the art of making love.
Like everything, it requires expertise, and the 10 things persuasion, accounting, parenting need: skills. Superior fully developed skills.
I first saw this some 30 years ago.
I was assisting in the Landmark Education Forum behind the scenes. Another assistant’s son, about 10 years old, was there with us, spending most of his time in the hallways or the kitchen, playing with a small ball, juggling it. Rubber ball, so it didn’t make any noise, even when it fell to the floor… which, while I saw the kid, never happened. It also never happened that it wasn’t in movement.
I asked why he was doing it. Three days, about 50 hours over the weekend.
He said that he was doing it so much so he gets good at it.
It made a great impression on me. I knew the kid was one in a million… and that attitude was going to take him far.
When I watch people, they have low abilities. And they have zero ambition to get better at any of those abilities.
I think the attitude that helps you get better at anything is diligence.
Diligence has its own rewards: it puts you in flow… that magical state Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychologist talks about. I never read the book… I don’t like non-fiction books any more. But I can tell you: what puts you in that magical flow state is diligence. The thing you have never though of practicing.
Diligence is being fully engaged with the intention of getting better.
Like water for the fish, it is invisible for the person who has it. I am diligent. Profoundly diligent.
One of the non-fiction books I have read is Altucher’s, forgot the title… where he says that if you set out to get one percent better every day at everything in your life, meaning bring diligence: (being fully engaged and the intention of getting better), your growth will be phenomenal.
In addition to that: you’ll live in flow.
Now, there is a difference between setting out to get one percent better, and achieving it.
One percent doesn’t seem like a lot, but it is.
If you got better at everything by one percent, you could become the best in the world.
Anything that improves by one percent a day, doubles every 72 days… about two months.
Doubling. That is why deliberate practice, the intention to get better with the practice, is so rare… I think. because doubling in 72 days doesn’t sound much… instead what sounds much is that it takes 72 days.
So instead of what doesn’t sound too exciting, people do exciting things that don’t make any difference.
The student who likes to play computer games, never gets better at playing, and never gets better at anything… and yet he doesn’t know what he could do differently.
What I hate about productivity advice is this: they are all written with the homework attitude: get it done because you have to…
It is literally the opposite of diligence.
It looks at the result which means it isn’t looking at the doing… Diligence is being fully engaged with the intention of getting better at the doing… Your attention is on the thing you do, with wide cone of vision so the improvement can come from different places. Improving the how, improving the when, improving the speed, improving the method… Put all power (attention) on what you are doing with a twist. You don’t just want to get it done. No. you want to be doing it. you want to get better while you are doing it. So you are constantly looking to do it faster, more precisely, with more grace, with more elegance, with more organization…
Can’t be done with a homework attitude.
Deadline pressure often leads to homework attitude. It lets go of being complete and thorough… it cuts corners. It doesn’t do a good job.
The other day I downloaded the Unconditional Love Activator as a gift on my Talk-to-me webinar. It’s a tricky process. It contains 40 affirmation-like statements. The mind focuses on those. They are mighty confronting. You can’t, you don’t agree with them. They don’t reflect the truth about you as you know it. This is the surface though. In the background I download the energy, the activator itself, 40 times.
I used to get bored about halfway through doing it. I just wanted to get through it. That was the homework attitude.
This time I was surprised when I got to the last page of the affirmations. I had been putting all power in all action… into each of those 40 downloads, focusing on what I am doing, instead of, like before, focusing on the resistance participants had. Resistance triggered by the statements… the confronting statements.
So, you see, no matter how long you have been doing a thing, and I have been doing the Unconditional Love Activator download for I think seven years, you can get better at it, and it can get more enjoyable too.
OK, this is long article… without a clear point.
What is my point?
Given that you author your attitude with words… (not your feelings, not your emotions, but your attitude!) my suggestion is that to have a productive and enjoyable life, you want start becoming diligent and growth oriented.
Diligence is obviously an attitude.
To the degree you can bring it to every area of life, to every action of your life, to the same degree you can grow yourself, your can grow your life satisfaction. Really.
If you just achieve one percent increase overall, you can double yourself, your overall results, your overall life satisfaction every 72 days. And even if your life satisfaction is very low now, it can go through the roof in a year.
In my Playground program I listen to the participants doing the exercise I prescribed to them once a week on a partner call.
One percent improvement is hard to detect, but the one percents, after a while, become noticeable.
I am experiencing a jump with every participant this week…
Where does the one percent of the week come from? Does it come from the exercise? Sadly(?) it doesn’t… none of my students have diligence, complete and thorough down pat. Some have it more than others, but most never considered the concept.
The one percent improvement comes with the daily small inputs of my articles, and the slightly larger input of my audio feedback to their performance on the partner call. And the doing and the feedback on their 20 or 30 day learning/skill building challenge.
52 weeks, about 200 tiny inputs, result in a doubling, tripling, quadrupling of students’ life satisfaction.
This is why the program is so darn effective.
I have been looking to turn it into a flat weekly fee type of membership. Why?
Maybe it is easier for me to manage? Maybe it is easier for you to see that it is incremental… you put your energy at and where your money goes.
So here is a new price structure for the Playground
- You can pay 26 dollars a week
- or you can pay $115 a month
- or 1200 a year… which means a 180 dollar discount for paying in advance.
Unfortunately for me, I measure my prices by looking if I could afford it myself.
Not a good vantage point to look from.
Instead I could look at what you get.
- You get Growth.
- In your earning capacity.
- In your capacity to be happy,
- fulfilled,
- to have empathy,
- to love,
- to transform your relationships.
- For life satisfaction.
You can use the program as you want… You can actually achieve a one percent increase a day. Or a one percent increase a week.
Some of my students didn’t get the point in the first few months of their participation. But the moment they did, the spark started to fly.
And two people never got the point. Why? Interestingly, these are the people who refused to pay for the weekly feedback.
There are no accidents. How you do anything is how you do everything. The attitude you bring to one area of life is the attitude you bring to every area of life.
The attitude of not wanting to pay for what you get is called the attitude of the con artist. The attitude of entitlement. And the attitude of entitlement will prevent you from diligence, from putting in work, from wanting to get better.
I just measured my students for the level of willingness to do work for what they want with the intention to grow… The opposite of entitlement.
The numbers are between 1% and 10%… No one is higher than 10%. The students that didn’t get the point, didn’t want to pay, had scores between 1% and 3%
One student has 8%, the rest 10%.
The one student with 8% is, unfortunately, partnered up with a 3% student, who encourages her to be sloppy with the exercise you are asked to do every partner call… the opposite of complete and thorough.
One fundamental rule in the partner calls is to give zero feedback. Any feedback from a partner, during the doing of the exercise won’t work. Nor any sounds that would be, could be considered feedback to the other person. Any and all feedback comes from the desire to dominate the other person, from the partner’s desire to assert his or her superiority over the one who is doing the exercise.
Very counter-growth…
One person, I haven’t partnered with anyone yet, is doing her calls by herself. Her growth got jump-started. The same happened to another participant whose partner was on vacation for a week: he did his call and recorded it. This just one perfect listening, perfect echo, pushed him up to growth as much as he had grown in the previous months altogether.
Why? Because some people, when they are on a call with an impatient person, can feel the energy, and become hasty, and enter a “homework” attitude: they just want to get through the exercise. And the result? No result. No growth. No insight. No glimpses of the invisible.
Anyway…
If you want to start playing on the Playground where you can become a happier, freer, more productive, more loving person… one percent at a time, here is the button to do that.
You’ll get access to whatever you need to get started instantly.
https://offers.by-sophie.com/playground
Start playing on the PlaygroundDon’t understand why it is called Playground?
We want to return to the most effective method of learning: play. Children play and that is how they learn life, learn about themselves, about their boundaries. Learn to play with others.
The Playground learning is not like school. Not like any course. You play with each other. There is no set curriculum. There is no grading. There is no little gold stars. There is only play and more play. Life, other people, your results give feedback.
You, and everyone fears and hates feedback.
You don’t want to find out that you are no good, that you are worthless, or whatever you have been telling yourself. You’ve been craving unconditional acceptance, you’ve been craving to be noticed, to be valued, and so far your environment isn’t giving it to you.
In the Playground you get to find out what about you that isn’t earning you what you need.
What you can do about it. How you can unload your baggage one partner call at a time. How you can become more courageous, more trusting, more at peace with what other people do and what you do.
Priceless.
Do it if you like what’s available… even if you’ll feel uncomfortable for a while… and you will. Unavoidable… all new environments make you scared, or weird. I tend to get weird… or bossy… or bratty… or funny… none of them is comfortable.
And eventually I fit in. Big sigh. Nothing to prove… Peace.
Here is the link to do that.
Start playing on the Playground.
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| Keywords: | Description: |
| entitled |
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| entitlement |
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| entitled to | you are entitled to your opinion but you are not entitled for it to be accepted, welcome, or consider it to be true. Opinions are like assholes… everybody has one. |
