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The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.
…
A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. ~ Henry David Thoreau
But what is underneath?
I have written about the Kabbalistic concept of time, that says: time is there so you don’t immediately see cause and effect, forcing you to choose with foresight… consciously.
I love that concept.
One cousin once removed of that is how it takes something to actually see the invisible roots of a situation… a backward seeing. If the other is foresight, would this be ‘backsight?’ lol.
How does it look? How does it work?
A person sees someone successful… and can’t see what precisely went into that success.
Some think it is talent. Others think its smarts.
But what they don’t see is the tens of skills that each of those required hundreds or thousands of repetition to become skills you can build on.
I am an architect by training.
Architecture school is five grueling years, worse than medical school. And yet you come out of architecture school not having skills, but having the seeds of skills. So you have to work in someone’s office for little money for years before you have some skills worth mentioning.
Some people in my 96 people strong class went to technical high school: they had more skills when they entered university than I had when I graduated.
Other people are able to build the floor while they are stepping on air… but all in all: if you don’t have the skills that build, you won’t build.
Tech entrepreneurs create startups that crash… They use other people’s money to learn some skills… some simply gamble with other people’s money.
I have clients who dream about a successful business.
What they have in common is that they don’t even consider the business skills that are required for that.
I have found a close correlation between religiousness and this phenomenon.
And by religiousness I don’t mean going to church or praying five times a day. I mean believing in a deity, or a Universe, or a ‘law’ that helps you successfully get to places without using your own motive power… work and skills.
And because 91% of humanity believes in some force out there… the idea that there are eight billion underachievers is not so far fetched.
Unless you learn to see the invisible roots of everything… and then see it, accept it as that is how it is, you’ll always be a wannabe.
And if and when there is a gap between who you need to be to be successful, and who you are, that gap can kill you.
Even if you are in my challenges and pretend to be OK with how it is. You are not OK. Not OK with it.
The only way to get OK… aka complete is to either give up your dream, or actually start building some skills that can make the dream possible.
I see stupid memes converting impossible to I’m possible as if it were actually an unconditional truth. It isn’t.
Everything requires inordinate amount of diligence, work, effort, and maybe even suffering through. Suffering through the mistakes, the wrong steps, the clumsiness, the not knowing how, the no results.
If you are not willing, then you need to put the dream to rest, and start dreaming about something you are willing to work towards.
And if you are not willing to work towards anything then what? Then you are solidly part of the 91% who lives a life of quiet desperation.
That quiet desperation is a sign of no willingness.
In one of the latest books, the Slip trilogy by David Estes, some characters emerge from that quiet desperation. But it is risky. You risk your comfort, your friends, your health, your life, your worldview… you need to be willing to trade. And be willing to risk for the long haul… not a campaign, not a blip, not temporary.
I have made wild turns in my life… all lead to less comfort, less friends, worse health… before I found a place where I was my main ‘product’. And eventually I could create new relative comfort, and health. Friends? When you insist on friends, you’ll stay put… so probably no. Unless they are part of the new world you move into. Where you don’t live in quiet desperation.
I am friendless. I am very OK with that.
One other thing:
I have a client/student who has no skills. Why? Because in his worldview that only thing worth investing in is something that brings instant dividends.
This worldview has rendered him skill-less. He is in his 50s. So he was reporting to me that he sees no skill that he could start learning, because he needs something that gets him out of his rut. The rut he has been since who knows when.
Skills are interesting. They are a lot like knowledge island in the brain: they allow you to connect to them and build new skills because they don’t disappear as fast as a skill that has nothing to connect to.
I bet this didn’t make sense… did it?
When you plant one seed of grass… it will die. So you say: OK, ten seeds… and they still die. A thousand seeds… most die. They are all in the same stage: trying to stay alive.
But if you have a lawn with bare patches due to something, you throw seeds on the bare earth and those seeds will thrive.
This is how knowledge, this is how skills work… Anything that needs connections in the brain.
The 91 percent’s experience is that no seeds stay alive.
Does knowing how to strum your guitar a skill? No. Does writing songs occasionally a skill? No. I am thinking of a specific student… They aren’t… and therefore the student has no skill to connect anything to, even though he thinks he has ‘talent’.
Does knowing how to follow cooking recipes a skill? No. Does writing long-winded reports on whatever topic a skill? No. Does getting a degree in nursing a skill? No.
The student with the nursing degree – case study
But interestingly, the student with the nursing degree has some skills her brain uses… she has the skill of flower arrangements, and she has craft skills I have seen… she has sent me two birthday cards she made… very skillful.
If she knew that new skills use her existing skills to gain support to establish themselves, like the grass… she could build skills that she could become truly happy with herself.
So if you have no skills, in the Skill building challenge you’ll be building your first skill.
Pick something that you either need desperately, or pick something that you are uniquely qualified for.
You are uniquely qualified, I say, for skills that are inside your most used ‘modality’… you can be, they say, auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and abstract.
I built my first skill
I built my first skill that was auditory/kinesthetic… playing the violin. But it was somehow relying on a somewhat skill I developed in ballet class… controlling my muscles, controlling my movements.
I am certain without the ballet class I would have quit the violin in frustration.
Even tennis relied on the ballet to take roots. And swimming. And table tennis. And drawing. And many other physical skills I developed that are today make me able to do what I do: be a trained empath.
And this is how you develop yourself to have skills that can make you do what you want to do, the thing that cannot be done without skills.
My weakest skills are in marketing. In influencing. In making people interested.
Invaluable and necessary if you want to have a business… Or if you consider yourself a business… which you should.
Landmark Education has an evening seminar series: Money: From Concern To Freedom.
You, Inc.
It’s not my favorite seminar except for the idea to consider and manage yourself as a business. You incorporated.
Why is that my favorite aspect? Because just practicing that, you’ll start to see what skills you need to develop to sell yourself to others… Ethically. Without lying, pretending…
Why not lie? Why not pretend? Because both kill you.
Without integrity nothing works, and your life can’t work if you lie and pretend.
If and when you look at yourself as a business, you need to look if you have the three needed conditions for success, land, labor and capital. I won’t go into details here… if you choose this path to skill building, and if there are enough interested, I’ll do a class on that…
Here is a skill that, like every skill, has component skills. Unless you consider it that way, you probably will never get it to a skill level.
Skill: Connecting to Source…
Component skills:
- finding your tangerine spot without your hand
- feeling that it is active
- finding and activating your attention (eye switch)
- switching the will on
- keeping the connection on while your attention goes somewhere else outside…
- staying away from the mind while connected… it immediately disconnects you.
All these are necessary if you want to muscletest accurately… and they need to be practiced isolated from the rest of them, or they will never get to good enough.
And just like an athlete, you work to perfect every single element, every single component skill.
What will you find is blocking you?
So far, judging from this morning’s Connection Call,
1. You look to understand, you look to know, and you don’t use any of your physical equipment, perception organs to see, feel, and do.
2. Maybe you’ll think that it should be faster. Like the child who heard that the journey takes five hours, but starts asking ‘are we there yet?’ five minutes after leaving the house.
3. Or alternately you’ll think that you can pretend your way through. That you can run before you can walk… Unless you are really good at crawling, even walking is too early to try.
4. You have a worldview that you know everything, that you only need to make it conscious…
5. You’ll give no respect to learning the skill. like the student was late to the call, and was eating while talking to me.
6. And you’ll feel that you are beyond it… that learning a skill is below you… I am sometimes guilty of this one.
As you learn the skill you chose, you’ll obviously have to learn to control the mindset urges… 1-6 and probably more so you always learn two things at least at the same time.
You can’t control your mindset? This is probably why you have no skills… yet.
So that is what you need to develop first… self-control.
You can do it all in the Skill Building Challenge.
Your ticket to get out of desperation
