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I was reading a Lee Goldberg book, Fast Track, about illegal car racing in Los Angeles. (In the movie it is some German town, not Los Angeles…)
One of the drivers says: it is not how fast the car is… it is the driver that matters.
It is not how fast you can drive, it is the turns that make the winner.
It is a principle…
An object already in motion can change direction. But an object at rest cannot be easily turned into the ‘right’ direction.
I have been experimenting in doing Freecell both ways… and although it needs a tad more skill to win when I started randomly… it takes a lot more skills to choose a ‘winning direction’… by far. And patience. And more ambition. And more everything…
Most students of mine never start.
Doing something for three days and then stopping cannot be considered starting.
And therefore most students of mine will never get to where they would like to get: having a life they love and live it powerfully.
Occasionally I get my hopes up…
One student took on a project of learning the basics of vegan cooking. Her food list was very straightforward: she can’t have any animal product. Luckily her live in boy friend is the same. So she started… and then she stopped.
Start and stop is the pattern of most unsuccessful, never do well people… the ones that at least start occasionally.
I now have a student who has started. Then came a huge ‘opportunity’ for her to stop. A life circumstance. I was holding my breath. I was prepared to grieve… again.
But this morning she sent one of her daily reports, reports of which I hadn’t seen for two weeks, and she analyzed why what she was doing in the previous three months were not what she now sees would have been taking her where she wanted to go, and now she has an opportunity to self-correct.
That takes us to the second step in every project: course correction.
When you start the project you think you know everything. But especially that the way you started will take you to the Promised Land.
Nothing is further from the truth… for anyone.
When I look at high achiever famous people, the high achievement and the fame never came from the original part of the project. It came from what the project became after several iterations.
Iteration is a good word. It means correction, basically. But correction can be correcting the direction, correcting the method, can be everything about the project… after it started.
But the methodology of iteration is looking at what seems to be working, what seems to not working, what new elements to start, what old elements to stop, and what old elements to continue. Easy and intelligent.
What you need for iteration is flexibility.
To consider the project not in the right/wrong paradigm, but in reality.
If you consider reality where things can move in a straight line, you won’t allow iteration, because in the right/wrong paradigm it makes you wrong. In the lowest paradigm an intention to iterate means you have already failed… It means to you that the project is dead.
The students who wanted to learn to cook lives so fully, so deeply in the right/wrong paradigm, that she hasn’t been able to see even a little bit above it. She hasn’t been able to see that it is a paradigm issue that is stopping her.
Her entire identity is vested in being right and in not being wrong… In her identity she’ll be dead if she is not right.
She cannot see project as a vehicle, because project, any project will go patches of ‘not right’… or it is not a project. In the higher paradigms where things can be more, better, different, iteration is an indication that the project has a future, and it can succeed.
Unless she can, like the fish, jump out of the water long enough to see that she has been swimming in ‘water’, she cannot be helped. She’ll be stuck in the paradigm where no joy is possible, where no growth is possible.
I once had a ‘friend’ with the same forceful ‘I am right’ soul correction.
She had been living in a house without paying rent, for 33 years. The owners wanted to sell the house, so she needed to find another apartment. Begrudgingly she did.
She moved, but she moved the mindset, her identity, her superiority with herself. She was the only person who mattered, and no one mattered, especially me, at all… So when my birthday came, she didn’t wish me happy birthday. I reminded her a week later… still nothing. So I said good bye.
The question that I ask myself: do I have a reliable method to get people out of that right/wrong paradigm?
The most important cornerstone of that paradigm, interestingly not the right and the wrong. It is the view of life where something can be fixed. The word for that is ‘is’.
In reality nothing is fixed. Fixed means ‘forever’. In reality everything is moving and changing all the time. And in reality you can also see that looking at the same thing from the side, from behind, makes the thing look different. So which one is ‘the truth’?
In reality there is no truth that you can get access to. Maybe there is truth, but we, humans, having access to only 10% of reality at the best of times, we cannot tell if there is a truth or not. It is not in our power.
This is, by the way, why humans made up entities, gods, angels, people to channel…
…so they can tell the certainty seeking humans some invented bullshit… to calm them down.
It’s a lot like I use furniture to make sure I don’t fall on my way to my bedroom, or back to my office. I hold on to the furniture like people hold onto their god.
But it is flimsy… And yet I haven’t fallen and haven’t killed myself, even though my balance is pitiful… occasionally.
Back to the original statement: it is in the turns that a driver wins the race.
I have read the book ‘Inside Steve (Jobs’) mind.
He is a prime example of the winning turns… even though he was very rigid: the same soul correction as my student, as my one-time friend who moved. 28 (Soul Mate).
He and his friends started in a garage, and had one plan. That morphed into what it is now, Apple… the Mac, the ipod, the iphone, and whatever was in between. Morph is a word for change… for iteration.
Steve Job’s flexibility was a puny 10%… but that was enough.
My non-growing students’ flexibility is 0%…
They are inflexible, rigid about their world, about their worldview. And as our last call attest, they are also unwilling to consider turning…
In that movie, Fast Track, one of the drivers drives through a wall and falls from the second floor and perishes.
Life, nowadays, is not that cruel, and not that fast. Instead, today, if you are not able to turn, life leads to a meaningless, joyless existence… The quiet desperation Thoreau wrote about. Thoreau didn’t see the right/wrong paradigm and the inability to escape it as the source of that quiet desperation. Why? Because he himself lived there.
You cannot see your own paradigm for what it is, you see it as the entire world.
You can’t see why some others are happy and you are not.
The same can be said about intelligence. I just finished a book ‘The curse of high IQ’. Can the author of that book see that the cause of all that lack of intelligence is the paradigm of fixed, right/wrong universe? That that is what the schools encourage, that is what society endorses?
No, he can’t. Because unfortunately looking through that filter needs to be taught.
That was the genius of a man who escaped from Nazi Germany, (not Jewish despite the Jewish name), Robert Hartman discovered.
Discovery, the word, means: it was always there, covered up. He was the first person to see it, and he was the first person to measure it.
Some religion and therefore some ethnicities are more rigid than others.
Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Native American religions are 100% rigid.
Genghis Khan’s religion, Judaism, are not rigid.
If you have ever wondered why some ethnicities seem to be smarter, better adjusted to life, here is your answer.
I am Jewish. There is no right and wrong in Judaism. Whaaaaat? Really. There is what works and what doesn’t. There is intelligent behavior and not. But no right and wrong, unless you consider the newfangled ‘born again Jew’ sects… Those are definitely more similar to born again Christians than to other Jews.
Scientology is also 100% rigid…
Muscletest says that even newfangled Peak Potentials is rigid.
Positive thinking is RIGID. Capitalized the word to communicate to what degree they are rigid.
Law of attraction is rigid.
If you look, the only word these rigid ‘religions’ share is the word ‘is’. Meaning: IT IS THAT WAY! The exclamation mark is important there.
All those religions claim that there is a fixed point in the universe, and thus the universe is fixed. What is good is fixed. What is right is fixed.
Bah, humbug.
You are entitled to your own opinion, but not to your own facts.
Once you manage to get that what you are pouting, touting, claiming as the truth are mere opinions, you’ll be confronted a lot, but you’ll have released your anchor to the right/wrong paradigm.
As a fish, you’ll continue floating about, swimming about there, or you’ll have the courage to swim up, and get out to dry air, grow legs, and make a life for yourself.
And that is the job of The Work…
All I can provide is the distinctions, and some guidance. Coaching when you are on your way. The rest, the doing part is up to you.
Flexibility is a capacity. A DNA capacity. Terrifying, I hear. From whom? From some students who are experimenting with flexibility as if it were some hallucinogenic drug…
Unfortunately experimenting will not get you off the anchor. Or if you are a fish: off the hook… the hook of rigidity, the hook of certainty.
The scary part about flexibility is that it is not solid. It is not fixed. It is not certain.
I am re-reading a novel by Roy Williams of Monday Morning Memo fame, Destinae: Save the Beagle.
It has characters, logic, intuition, faith, hope, fear, terror, panic… As long as our heroes follow the only unmoving point, the North Star, they will get to the Promised Land, to Destinae.
The North Star for humans is the Original Design. The human DNA. When you look there, you have your Polaris, your North Star: you know where to go. And on your way your soul correction is the activity you need to do. To perform your soul correction without a project is impossible, so you need to set a project that will naturally go through many iterations. The goal is to have something to work on… or you are only talking about the North Star… and talk is cheap.
I am thinking of a different way to approach MY project: taking a few people to the Promised Land… the fullest expression of the DNA, the Original Design, to Expanding Human Being level.
The ticket to this program, if I ever really settle on doing it, is a project that has the seed level of a project that can be sustained, through iterations, forever.
Arriving is not the goal.
A project designed to arrive is not going to be suitable. Unless there is always a lot of ‘east’ to go, unless the project is for a horizon, it will fizzle out once you arrive.
When you look at people who sustained fame and notoriety in any area of life, that is the kind of project they have been running. No arrival… because there is no place to get to.
If you just want to be a little bit happier, a little bit more prosperous, a little bit less of a loser… you don’t qualify.
At this point I don’t know anyone in my circle of power who qualifies.
Anyway, for now you could find out a lot about yourself with your Starting Point Measurements.
And you could listen to the recording of the fateful Soul Correction call…
You could join me and a few others in the Moneyroots workshop
Or review the courses you already have.
Do you have enough tools to grow yourself? And if you don’t, how you can grow some?
I’ll write more about this project way to grow yourself and your world… all the way to the Promised Land.
If you’d like to participate in an almost free webinar with me to see if at this point I see you as a potential… to see if at this point you have enough energy to go for it, and if you do what you should do now so when the time comes you’ll be eligible… I’ll have a ‘talk to me’ free webinar on Thursday at 5 pm EDT… sorry I can’t go later in the day because of my sleep schedule. You can come and ask questions or just listen. I’ll have a conversation with you to see where you are at and how this ‘life plan’ would fit you.
We can talk about the elections too… Don’t forget to vote! Please.
Let’s see what’s in your toolbox…
