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I watched Dodgeball the movie yesterday.
I am watching The School or Rock today…
…and I had a huge realization… It has been hiding under the surface…
I had never seen this movie, and I didn’t think much of it, but today I am watching it, and I am looking at it from two unique vantage points: the students’ and the other teachers’.
And both: I can relate to.
As a child and young adult I played in a band, I sang in a band, I performed pantomime, I played my guitar on stage…
Most of my classmates were only doing their school and homework bit… they were boring, and I didn’t fit in.
But when it comes to life: nothing beats having diverse experiences. nothing beats having an experience of sticking it to the man… whoever the man is. Whatever the ‘man’ is.
Priceless.
And when I am looking at my underachiever students: most of them haven’t done much in their lives. No experiences, None, or hardly any.
Sports, music, art, languages, reading, debating, photography, even cooking, baking, gardening…
The Edge Effect
Life is most abundant at the commingling of different ecological areas, like the meeting of the meadow and the forest, and if you add a lake too… even richer.
The same is true for people.
If what you have to offer in exchange for people’s money, friendship, or company is your PEP=Personality+Experience+Perspective, if you only have one area, even if you have a PhD, what you are offering is thin…
Let me look at some of my teachers and mentors
T1… grew up on a farm. Played the piano. Was an exchange student in a South American country (language, experience), Navy, schooling, construction, software. You see that his PEP is interesting and probably extremely valuable. He can do
T2… bicycling champion, wrestling champion, pizza delivery man, Marines, champion salesman, teaming up with high profile marketers, motivational speaking. As you can see his PEP is highly sought after… He can give his unique perceptive so the other can do.
B… graphic novels, aka comic books, MLM, marketing, marshal arts, avid reading. He did the least, so he has to work the hardest.
Is it too late for you to add something to your life so you are not boring, bored, colorless, experience-less?
It is never too late.
So what does it take?
First you need to make time… and it is always time that you have already given to something else, so you need to stop doing something, or you need to do less of it, so you can give that time to this new thing.
If I felt the need to make myself more interesting, or to increase my value, I would first look what activities I do that contribute the least to being interesting.
I read 4-5-6 hours a day. Books. I can move one of those hours, and maybe watch some movies that can connect me to other people’s experience more than with the books they probably haven’t read.
Hey, I actually think I need to do this… Thus is my new an hour a day movie watching… It is not a habit yet… two days don’t make it a habit.
Now, why haven’t you done this, I ask. I ask because you probably haven’t. You already know you haven’t.
What is the energy that keeps you from living a full life, doing things that don’t do much more than make life more enjoyable and more interesting?
What is the energy that if you don’t see it will lead to something, like money, you won’t even think consider doing it?
I have found that it’s the Vine Bach Energy… the energy that robs you or your creativity, spontaneity, and ultimately of joyous living.
I say: the stronger your Vine energy,
- the stronger your ‘my way or the highway’
- the less personality you have,
- the less variety of things you have done in earnest, and even when you did it, you did it to win…
When you do things to win, not for the experience, you are not really present. Your attention is on the winning and not on the doing.
When, for a few years, I swam competitively, I was not very good. But had that mattered to me, I would have never learned to get up at 4:30, run downhill to the swimming pool, learning to not fall and be present to the magic of almost flying on the cobblestone streets of the old Turkish neighborhood… I would never have learned that I can fly… Who cared if I won in swimming… lol. Or in anything.
Or when I competed in singing, or on the uneven bars (gymnastic), or in Math and Physics… I didn’t care to win. I still don’t. Why?
When I read, I occasionally get hooked on wanting to know what will happen in the story… and stop wanting to read what is happening in between. And even if I dutifully go through the words… I am not there… I’ll miss it. I’ll reduce life to starting and finishing, nothing in between.
And most unaccomplished people do that, not only when they read, but all the time… Eventually they end up gathering hollow victories, but no life, no experience. No joy.
I myself have to be mindful of not becoming boring… When you feel bored it is a good indication that you are boring.
My hunch is: I read that many hours nowadays because I am bored… consequently I am becomng boring.
When you want your entertainment to come from the outside… it is a sign that inside you are impoverished. Your own activity, your own life is becoming empty.
Your job is to put life into your life…
My understanding of people is growing in leaps and bounds.
Vine, the energy of ‘my life my way’ is the energy of the Selfish Gene. I have another half-written article about the Selfish Gene and the predatory genes… I am not certain yet how they interact… yet.
But for now, it seems to me that the moment we can weaken that Vine energy to where it won’t make you miserable, we pull pulling the root of the ITCH that keeps you, like a pinball in a pinball machine. You bounce from one misery to the other, one injustice, one shame, one inadequacy to the next.
The goal is to be able to be who you are where you deal with life and people how life is, how people are. The goal is for you to see that in reality there is no such thing as ‘I earned it’ or ‘you owe it to me’ or ‘I am good and therefore I’ll get’.
Life, reality doesn’t have any of that. You have been playing this game, life, reading from a rule-book that you wrote. But in life, like in any game where you don’t know the rules, you get creamed…
I watch my fellow students in the coaching calls… Most play with a different rule-book than me… and when I say things, they all laugh or look mortified expecting me to be ejected, and they don’t understand why… They are all meek little sheep, dutifully ‘respecting’ the coach… and get mighty little… Allowing the ‘coach’ to pontificate and have the whole hour to talk about themselves…
Once we de-fang the Vine… once we pull its fangs, we’ll see what is the energy that keeps you complacent, meek, and wanting entertainment while you pretend to pay for growth…
When I coached the Self-Expression/Leadership program, many years ago, I asked each participant if they wanted the $100, $1,000, or $100,000 course.
Was the course going to be different depending on what they said? Hell yeah… Not the content delivered, but what they got out of the course.
What was being said was the same for every participant, but what they heard was different for each, depending on what value they aimed at.
Would you eat a $100 piece of chocolate with one bite? Probably not. You’d probably savor it… allow yourself to be taken to Paradise by it…
But you think that it is the chocolate, wouldn’t you? Because you don’t realize that you are the main determinant of your experience. And guess what energy robs you of using that power? If you guessed the Vine, you guessed right.
Vine is a demand on life, on other people, on food, on the weather, on everything, and it keeps you dissatisfied, not present, not authoring your experience… it leaves you feeling powerless.
So for now, we’ll work on your Vine: in these articles, in this Saturday’s workshop, and you using the Bach Energy of the Vine.
Each Bach energy sells for $50, but today you can buy all 48 for the price of just one. Why? I want you to continue after you tackle the Vine… There is a whole beautiful and unforgiving world out there, that plays best with people who are flexible about how they play.
You play by life’s rules, reality’s rules, and you’ll have fun. No? Life tends to crush you.
And you probably know what I am talking about. In fact I am sure you know what I am talking about.
You can also get the energies in my mobile app… and pay only $5.50 a month for 10 months.
Get your Bach energies
