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The best symbol of restriction is the chimney. And Forrest Gump
They are, I say, the symbol for growth… Only one way… up.
There are nations like a lake, a stream, a river, a puddle, and nations like a chimney. Most nations devolve into a puddle-like environment for the individual. No growth inspired, no growth encouraged, no growth praised.
So if life, what is ‘normal’, the expectations don’t restrict your activities, behaviors, then how can you reach excellence?
You either put yourself in an environment where it is the norm, or you self-impose restrictions by discipline.
But what happens if your child genes, if your entitlement genes are still on?
On deeper thought, one of those entitlements is designed to turn off when you go to school… real school, not kindergarten.
And the second entitlement gene was designed to turn off when you find out that you are on your own. It is supposed to turn off then… but if the parent, or society insists on not letting you ‘sink or swim‘ the gene won’t turn off.
If your entitlement gene didn’t turn off… you have a hard time self-imposing restriction.
- If your idea of the good life is that you can do whatever you want whenever you want, and avoid anything that you don’t want, then you insist on being a puddle, and you’ll never amount to anything…
- And if you are a descendant of people who were slaves then you may have a fixation on not being a slave. And everything shows up for you, appears to you as slavery… or making you a slave… so you resist it, run from it, or get yourself off the hook.
You yell inside: I am not going to be a slave. You think freedom is getting out from under pressure, any pressure… Getting off the hook. For you the hook is slavery. And you miss out on a life meant for a human: accomplishment. You live the life of a fish…
- If everything anyone says seems to tell you that you are not OK then you’ll focus will be on being right and remaining how you are… lest you make them right. And you remain small, and self-righteous… and you won’t be able to grow.
- If the focus of your whole existence is to be better than the other, then you’ll talk talk talk. He who talks is in control… You’ll dominate. No restriction, no sight of something bigger or better… you can’t look while you talk, can you?
Where your life is heading is determined by what restriction you resist. If you want to change that direction then you need to stop resisting the restriction and dive into it.
Freedom is recognizing and using your limitations.
Limitation is another word for restriction.
Intellectual giants, or any high achiever did just that. USED their limitations.
Either used the limitations imposed on them by nature or nurture, or created them.
So what kind of restrictions, what kind of limitations can you impose on yourself to enter the strait and narrow… and start growing yourself or your skills?
Judging from the forceful resistance my students demonstrate…
I put people in a program, the Hero program to drive that resistance up. The program and its requirement of three daily tasks that are designed to take you or your life to a much higher level.
The requirements are restrictive.
- post twice a day.
- Once when you set the three tasks and preferably the purpose of those tasks and the context. The purpose and the context are not the same.
- And second when you do ‘powerful debriefing’. You report on what you actually did.
- Use Foresight
Foresight is a restrictive action. It is seeing the consequences of your actions. And seeing the consequences is restrictive: you won’t want to do stupid things… but if you can claim that you didn’t see it… you will. And you do.
So to set the three daily tasks so they can cause your life to grow you need to have foresight…
Instead, people set actions that are inconsequential to the future… actions that don’t build anything.
Homework attitude
I am sure that the habit is the schoolchild’s strategy to get off the hook, to survive, and get away with not learning anything.
There is no desire to know, there is no desire to absorb, to see more, be more.
Instead: there is the homework attitude.
Curiosity, the desire to know is missing.
Curiosity is also a restrictive force. It doesn’t allow for the kind of existence a puddle has. Curiosity makes someone an arrow. Straight and powerful.
Model after Forrest Gump
When I look who to bring up to model yourself after if you want to use restriction and limitation as the source of your power, I ultimately settle on Forrest Gump.
He was restricted by his low IQ. He was restricted by bullies. But inside the restrictions life provided, he consistently found the strait and narrow through which he could be exceptional.
Running, saving his trenchmates’ lives, ping-pong, anything.
He moved towards the light. Not towards the width and breadth… but towards the strait and narrow.
I am a lot like Forrest Gump in that I do best when I have narrow limitations. I am most creative when there is barely enough room on my desk to put down my teacup.
When everything is open, when everything is possible, then nothing will get done.
There are really three ways a person will prevent themselves from growing:
1. they resist.
2. they move out of the way.
3. Or they say everything is open and possible… so they never choose
Choosing is a restrictive action.
ALLOWING
The most important thing you can do, be, have is allowing. Put aside your self-concern… put aside wanting to be right, even to look good, wanting to dominate, wanting to justify, and just allow.
Allow the restriction, allow the limitation to be more important than you. More important than what you fancy is most important to you. Allow it…
My father, one of the 1000, said to me when I was a child: don’t resist. It will be that much faster over. I don’t remember the exact words in Hungarian.
But it served me all these years. I accepted the limitations.
By the way: coaching, guidance are limitations. Restrictions.
And instead of becoming putty in the coach’s hand, I see people become resistant and belligerent.
If you see that you’ve chosen a coach whose view of success and the path is unacceptable to you, then don’t be coached by that person.
That is what happened to me. I was in the Profit Pirates coaching program. When I looked at my coaches I was appalled. I didn’t want to be like them. So I quit.
If you resist my coaching what you are telling me that you don’t want to go where I can take you.
And if you are ‘habitually’ resisting: stop it. Use the restriction I place on you… until you get strong enough, until you develop a strong enough desire to place the restrictions on yourself yourself.
But until then I am your solution to a society that wants you to be a puddle.
A sidenote:
the polarized nation where people are willing to turn to weapons to annihilate anyone who is opposing their agenda look like using restriction… But freedom is using your limitations is not that. Using your limitations is going toward self-realization, not through killing the restriction (anyone who doesn’t agree with you) but through using it.
The separatists, the protesters, the truck drivers, the Putins, the Hitlers on one side, the woke, virtue signaling liberals on the other are all killing Life. They are all motivated only by ‘desire to receive for the self alone’ the only evil there is.
Your job as a human is to become who you can become.
Not to have more toys, not to have more comfort, not to get prettier, not to have more people under your thumb, nor to be the only one who is right… No, your job is to grow to become the best you can become in a lifetime.
If this is not what you want, then why the heck are you reading my articles? You want to know what the enemy says? Yeah, some of you.
The future
I’ve just finished reading a fantasy thriller by fellow Hungarian, Steven Konkoly. It’s a prequel to another writer’s trilogy.
The story plays out in 3508. A group of people went into suspension about two thousand years earlier.
What they find is humans who devolved into predatory animals.
In my feeling, and obviously I am not a fiction writer, that is not the direction humanity is moving. It is moving towards self-annihilation.
This theme, restarting humanity, is in quite a few books that I have read. A manufactured epidemic kills everyone but a restricted group of the rich and powerful. New Eden, etc.
That is not a likely story either… because just because someone is rich and powerful, it doesn’t mean they are not evil inside… au contraire… just the opposite my dear.
So looking there, at that future, it is even more important that you become all you can become. After all you only have one life.
Karma may be real, but reincarnation isn’t. Afterlife isn’t. The virgins in paradise isn’t.
But unfortunately, unless you use restriction, use your limitations, you cannot become the best you can become.
And few are ready to use self-restriction, if my observations are accurate.
So put yourself in a program that can do that for you. Unless you are a 27. Or a 25. or a 23. These are soul-correction (tikkun) numbers.
There may be more soul corrections whose desire to get off the hook is stronger than the desire for anything else.
Your soul correction is a restriction, a limitation that either keeps you puddle-bound or can catapult you to soaring.
It depends on your actions, on your relationship to restriction.
- If your fundamental issue (complaint) is that you are weak and that you are a ragdoll (32’s) then listen to this: everyone who is strong got strong through working with restrictions. No matter what you want to get strong in, you work with the restriction to see if you win or the restriction. Push, pull with all your might… If you avoid it, you’ll remain weak. Ugh.
- If your issue is that you are not accepted the way you are (26 and 35) your best revenge is to show it to them and become the absolute best… My father was a 26… That is what he did. He had a broken face. He was poor. He was an orphan. The least likely person to succeed… until he was at the top, against all odds.
- And maybe your issue is that other people want you to do whatever you don’t want to do… (18, 27, 36) your saving grace comes from integrity: honoring your word as restriction that takes you to freedom. Not likely, but you can.
As you see, your soul correction is both a blessing and a ‘chimney’… that you’ll either use or resist.
In the soul correction workshop we examine this…
Get your soul correction strategy
When you go to the shopping cart you’ll see an option to add a live session… If you are serious about finally starting to grow, make sure you come to the live session. This whole idea that soul correction is a useful restriction just occurred to me. Source says I am right on… Until this morning I didn’t know.