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Or how to go from drifting to achieving…In this article I am going to give you the secret. The secret to success. The secret to a good life. And you probably won’t hear it… and ignore it.
How do I know? I have been doing it long enough that I finally distilled the secret down to the one issue that if it is there, you cannot be successful. AND you can’t hear me. The two are connected.
It’s not that your IQ is low. Not that you have no skills. It is not very complicated. It is just that it is invisible to you. And even when it is visible to everyone else, you can’t see it.
Tai has a step, it is step 64 of the 67.
It’s called ‘forgetting who is in the room’.
Tai thinks that it is the result of some bad experience, but I dare to differ.
I think that it is the scenario well described in the book ‘The Art of Hunting Humans‘.
And instead of calling it ‘forgetting who is in the room’ it should be ‘forgetting who is the captain’.
That book should be on everyone’s bookshelf, that book should be treated as the Bible. because if you want to become better, and everyone claims they do, you need to know, intimately, precisely, why you aren’t.
The book is brilliant. It shows nearly everything that holds humans, holds you, holds humanity back.
Instead of trying to pile on, add on, and learn more things that you won’t use, you should simply eliminate what holds you back.
So without learning anything more, voilà you are better.
And because this is such an effective tool, no one or hardly anyone does it. So with simple elimination you can become a 1000. a superior. a success.
But first you need to hear all that noise, and identify it as not you. Identify it as not important, as useless. As opinions of the crew of the ship.
The particular stupidity this step and this article is concerned with is the battle ship analogy from the book. The ship where every single crew member considers themselves entitled to say whatever they want to say. Suggest, demand, command, question. Have ideas and voice them.
And, of course the ship is not going anywhere.
No captain. There is a dude there who wears the captain’s hat, but he is not doing his job: he is just a figurehead, like the President of the United States.
In a successful person the captain knows where the ship is going, because it is him, the captain is who gives the orders.
The captain sets the ship’s direction ahead of time, and all the actions come from that direction .
In real life a direction is the result of long conversations. Conversations when one decides where one wants to take their life.
It is a direction. It is preferably not a goal. Direction is like the horizon.
The problem with a goal is that it’s attainable. and when it is attained the ship will be, again, directionless.
The best direction is about all of life not just about some result. And when it’s based on a principle. When the direction is really about a direction, something unattainable, but worth going for.
In spite of or maybe even because of the obstacles.
Once you have the direction, there are obstacles.
For example, J. a client wants to live a life where what she does makes a difference. She wants to live a life she loves, a life she lives powerfully.
There is no point where this is done, so it is a perfect direction.
But can she start moving in that direction? Yes. Can she pile up knowledge so she can? Yes.
But her only way to really move in that direction is by removing the first boulder, the first huge obstacle.
She is in the Reality Challenge, and she is seeing the many voices in her head spouting many ideas of what she should do…
Once she sees that those voices are not useful, she will get to the next big obstacle.
In her case that obstacle is that she lives in her head. She sees everything through her eyes, sees everything as personal. and can’t see it in the big picture. because for that she needs to see it from the outside and see herself as part of the landscape, not all of it.
But she can’t. Yet.
This leads us back to the crew and the warship.
In the ship that is her life, she hears the crew jabbering, and because she feels like she is just one of them, because she cannot see the ship from the outside, she cannot be the captain, because of this inability. So the ship is pulled hither and tither, and is going nowhere.
The captain would know where to go because the captain would already have an organizing principle. She, the captain, would have taken her time to decide on the direction to go.
The organizing principle is the direction, set for the ship, and it includes the current obstacle the ship needs to get through. Rocks, storms, too shallow water, for a real ship.
In J’s case the rocks are her inability to see the big picture.
To be able to see the big picture she needs to mute the crew. or if that is impossible, ignore the crew’s good ideas.
In the Reality Challenge the first phase is to hear what the crew has to say. And hear that everything the crew says comes from a lack of seeing the big picture, comes from not knowing where the ship is supposed to go.
No direction, no organizing principle. Anarchy.
I am realizing that even you just want to hear the crew’s good ideas as irrelevant, you really need to have decided on a direction…
Let’s take any person. really, anyone from the eight billion, and see if they have a direction, an organizing principle for their life.
So far I haven’t found any. They may, like J. have a yearning. but a yearning is not a direction.
So if you have been gathering and noticing your crew in the Reality Challenge, and you haven’t quite seen why we are doing this: you are where you are mainly because you haven’t seen the big picture, because you haven’t set a direction.
The direction can be as simple as B’s: have a life where you express yourself. It sound simple, but it is potent.
Without a direction set, your life is a ship without a captain. going nowhere.
And if you are going nowhere, everything sounds like a good idea.
This is why you listen to the crew shouting out that you should do this and you should do that!
If you don’t know where you are going, every road will get you nowhere, because where you are heading is nowhere.
And when you are heading nowhere, you don’t see any reason to learn anything, to listen to anyone smarter than you, to learn any skills.
Because nowhere is not a very attractive place, is it?
So the way your life is, captain-less, you won’t hear, you won’t listen to anyone but the crew.
And the crew is shouting…
This is why being a teacher, being a coach, being an advisor is the shittiest jobs in the world.
Because the client, the student will not listen. Will not be able to listen.
They hear what you say with giving exactly as much weight to what the teacher says as to what any of the crew members says. not more. They give you not more respect.
Even when they pay you the big bucks.
No matter how much a client knows, how low or how high their IQ is, they will not listen.
They can’t…. not until they can completely silence the crew’s voice.
It is not that the crew won’t talk. but then they’ll hear their own voice louder than the crew’s. And they will be one voice.
And then, if and when they hire a teacher, an advisor, they will hear two voices. And they will become teachable, trainable, guidable, coachable. And they MAY succeed.
But until then they cannot tell what is speaking, who is speaking, because they could only hear that accurately from the outside. hear it from the outside of their head.
In the sideways view.
In the movie ‘Stranger than fiction‘ the main character wakes up to what he is doing by hearing the narrator speak in his head about him. About what he is doing.
That is what we call sentience, not what the stupid scientists call it. That is what we call self-awareness. not what you think we do.
Unless you can see, hear what you are doing, the voices in your head from the outside, you are not sentient YET.
Homo sapiens is not sentient yet. Not intelligent.
We have the hardware, but we are not using it.
The only way to have a life that goes somewhere is to have a direction, and overcome the obstacles.
It’s the only way.
Do the best you can until you can do better. Then when you can do better, do better.
Every obstacle that you disappear will allow you to do better.
The more of those obstacles you disappear, the happier person you’ll become.
This is the essence of the strait and narrow from the Bible, or the Anna Karenina Principle:
Every happy family is happy the same way, Every unhappy family is unhappy in their own way.
And the first step is to disable the influence of the crew on your actions. As long as the crew has any say, you are deeply in unhappy territory.
We do that through the process of the Reality Challenge, through several phases, so you can finally become successful.
The Reality Challenge cost money. How much? $20 a month.
Why would you want to pay for it?
Two reasons:
- 1. Signing up and paying for it would express your desire to elevate yourself. Elevate yourself from the beach ball meandering on open sea to the captain of your ship.
- 2. Participating creates a track record where you can see that the crew members’ every shout is worthless, even if you don’t act on them. Instead of steadily moving in the direction you set, you feel pulled from every direction. so much that you are experiencing no power of your own at all.
So we can safely say: the Reality Challenge is a process to empower you to become the captain of your ship.
Join the Reality Challenge
