A plan is a thought… Man thinks and god laughs. But why does God laugh at the sight of man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him.
There are plans. And there is planning. Big difference.
Why? Because planning is practice. Most people never do it.
If you live from the mind, you know little, and you recognize even less.
You don’t recognize things you need… because you don’t see them. You don’t even look for them.
And you don’t see that you’ll need them. So you don’t do planning… you have a plan… and god laughs.
When you live from consciousness, you are lead to strange activities where you may be given what you need. And often in an unexpected environment, and often in an unexpected form.
Consciousness recognizes what you get as what you need.
I was taking a break after lunch, reading as is my custom. I was reading a novella playing about 2000 years or so ago.
One sentence struck me: ‘Planning is practice…‘ Said in another way, planning is preparation.
Hah… I have been watching people plan, and the way people plan is nothing different from a flight of fancy.
First I’ll do this, then I’ll do that, and here something magical happens and then I’ll be there…
And they do that everywhere.
And unless it’s as simple as making tea, it will never happen.
I read a lot of mystery, spy, assassin novels. If for no other reason, I do that because those people plan. They plan for what you can’t plan for, but you can be prepared. For EVENTUALITIES.
And any spy, any assassin worth their salt spends an inordinate amount of time and attention on preparation. To be able to open any lock, they spend the time and the money to practice opening any commercially available lock, fast. With their eyes closed, to imitate darkness.
You? You hope for an open door.
To make sure that they are safe, the assassins spend hours, maybe days to look what possible ways the opponent is going to think to take them out.
Normal humans instead get killed, one way or another.
They walk around with no idea what is, what could, what might be going on.
This is so bad, this lack of context, lack of foresight, lack of ability to hold more than one thing in their brain, that when I ask them to do the ‘What are you building with that?’ exercise that could be part of preparation, they have nothing to say.
Or if you have anything to say, it is jumping from nothing to everything. nothing in between, no challenges, no achievements, because you do it where you live: in your mind. And the mind doesn’t know about steps…
The mind doesn’t know about steps…
There are a ton of things you can practice before (in the timeline of the project) you get to where it’s useful. If you look and if you can see it. Expect it. Know that it will be needed.
For example, if I wanted to write interesting articles, interesting books, I would practice the first 50 words. Or the first two sentences…
I am borrowing it from a Sean D’Souza: The boy got on a bus. He would never get off.
How much practice do you think it takes to write that way?
Many. But only if you focus ONLY on the first two sentences. Drama. practicing drama. Drama pulls people in.
Or if I wanted to make a living as a realtor, selling houses, I would practice creating drama there, by showing what they probably won’t want, and then what, in the contrast, they will suddenly love. I would check out the competition. Or maybe pretend to be a potential buyer, and let a good realtor show me many houses I could buy. But I would not be there to buy. I would be there to feel. To see. To experience. And to ultimately see what works in what the agent does and what doesn’t.
Or volunteer in a realtor’s office. Find the best salesperson in my area and ask them to mentor me. I would compensate them for it with a lot of work they don’t like to do. Or canvasing for them. Or whatever they need, even picking up their dry cleaning.
In a previous life…
…I volunteered to be ‘leader support, a bag man to Landmark leaders. I would pick them up in their hotel, take them to the course’s location. Do errands for them. Prepare their food. Invaluable preparation for myself when I am leading classes.
I would learn that leading is not only what happens on stage, but what happens in between. And more often than not, what happens off stage is the most important thing.
To see that I am not built for long, day long classes. That I get fatigued. That I don’t quite know how to rest in the breaks. And that clearing my head and keeping it empty is the way to do it.
In another previous life I delivered one route on my magazine distribution, a different one every issue, to see how people in clubs relate to me and the publication.
What I didn’t do is lay out the route, so I wouldn’t get lost.
I slept on the side of the road countless times: I could not find the entrance to highways, especially in Upstate New York. one of the tricky routes.
Planning is practice. Planning is preparation. And also: Planning is doing it in your imagination. Thought experiment.
A lot like war. 90% planning.
But if you consider life where you can’t fail, probably because failing is bad!? and you can, and will, and more often than you like, you can’t prepare for it.
Back to the assassins: What if they get caught? tied up? Is their job over? Yours would be. But they expect it, and they are prepared and have the tool hidden to free themselves.
You wouldn’t know that there could be a tool, without preparation.
Planning is practice. meaning you cannot plan without knowing that you can do every step, and in a timely manner. Without being able to foresee what the steps are, including what missteps can happen, what obstacles you may encounter, and what to do when you do.
So planning is not a process map, unless you know how to do every step in the process. and you even know how long it takes.
This is an extraordinary way of living, as opposed to the winging it, getting killed, mauled, or crushed in the process, you have been practicing…
Planning is practice…
…instead of hoping that when you get to the step, then you’ll know what to do and how to do it.
When you watch people like I do, you’ll notice that planning is not cool. People follow the current memes: just begin it. Without planning. Without foresight. Because YOU CAN DO IT! Bah. Humbug.
Some do, some plan to begin it, but none of them do the work ahead of time.
They want their enthusiasm to carry them to the peak, but enthusiasm is fickle. you need energy in the moment to maintain it, and its vulnerable to lack of speed.
So people in general don’t do anything, and definitely don’t do anything long enough to be worth it. Mastery? forget about it.
And all this no accomplishment is because planning is not cool? More like people don’t know, because they were never taught how to plan.
I am going to share here some of the things I know to be useful and most people will never teach you.
The most important element of any project, maybe any action, in any area of life is the context.
Context is the why? The big picture. The horizon. Why it’s worth it. The purpose. The ultimate payoff.
Why do you want to do it? What is the purpose? What is the outcome that unless you set it up ahead of time, it will never happen?
In Landmark Education they call this possibility. The possibility of the project.
When you call it ‘the possibility of the project’ you immediately start looking at it different.
Often you need to ask ‘why’ five times, or more, to get to possibility. To go from the personal to the universal. To go from the small picture to the big picture. To go from stingy to abundance.
When I first ask ‘why’ you look at what you want to fix, what you want to get, for yourself.
To get what you want needs strong energy, maintained. Energy to fuel your actions.
What you want is emotional. Anything emotional is ever changing, and often dies without ever blossoming. Die on the vine.
Possibility, when crafted well, has a much longer life, because it is not all about you. You can share it with others, and they will feel included. That they will win if you accomplish what you set out to accomplish. And unless they do, your ‘possibility’ isn’t a possibility, it is still about you.
They need to get inspired, inside, by what you say. That is the only way they will feed back energy to you.
I said ‘possibility/context crafted well’.
Among others, the purpose of the context, the purpose of the possibility is to set out the strait and narrow. So you won’t be all over the place. So you’ll know when you are on purpose, and you know when you are off purpose.
Context needs to be crafted, built like a precision machine, or it won’t do the job…
One job was to keep you on purpose. Another job is to keep you inspired, empowered. Because even if you, like a good little soldier, continue doing the actions, without an empowering context even the most amazing work becomes a chore, a burden, and you run out of juice.
The grind
The reason people don’t like the grind because they never invented a context to anything.
I do a lot of work that is grind. It makes my back hurt, my eyes hurt. True. But I never consider it a chore, because the context is decisive. For example the past two nights, I couldn’t sleep. So I slept a total of three hours between the two nights.
Writing an article is my self-expression. The way I go to the edge and come back with distinctions to share to cause your transformation. That is my context, that is my possibility for writing articles.
Do you think I am empowered? You bet your sour ass I am. Sleep or no sleep.
Or cooking. Cooking is a chore. But if you cook for someone you love, it is not a chore: you cook as an expression of your love for them. And often that someone is yourself.
Victor Frankl invented a context was a survivor of the Holocaust. He called that context ‘meaning’. A meaning that allowed him to sail through concentration camp without inner bruises, unlike most. He invented that meaning, carefully. It was, if I remember well ‘living with dignity, no matter the circumstances’
And dignity, the strait and narrow, is magical: as you hold your head high, with strait spine, there is no room for self pity, hatred, blame, whining, complaining.
Many of you would benefit from taking on ‘living with dignity’ for your life, you know who you are.
Where do you get your light from?
With context, you get your light from the inside. With context, with possibility, you glow. Without context you are like a planet: only when the sun shines on you, you are lit up but only on the side that the sun is.
When people smile at you, you are happy. When people frown at you, or admonish you, you shrink and whimper.
You know who you are…
Poorly crafted context is too wide or too narrow. Or too prosaic.
A well crafted context is inspiring. When you say it, everyone hears that god is in your words.
When I ask people why they want to join my coaching program, they say they want to grow. No god in the words…
God is in your words
The most important words in the New Testament is that god cares about you, that good sees you. So you feel included.
So the test of any context is: Is your listener included? Everyone? Is it important and for whom?
If a context is personal and exclusive, i.e. it is about you, then there is no god in the words, and people won’t get excited.
You may start with ‘I want to make a living’. And it is, of course, all about you, and no one gives a flying fig about you or you making a living. But if you want put it is a larger context, ‘Everyone has the right and the opportunity to make a living, and a life for themselves’, now that resonates with most everyone: because it is not obvious that people do. I think this is what Jefferson meant by the ‘pursuit of happiness’ in the Declaration of Independence.
Living with dignity, not matter the circumstances is one of the most inspiring set of words I have even heard. It makes me want it for myself. I feel my spine straighten, my head rise, my eyes set higher. I want to weep.
But when I ask you: why do you want to participate in my work and you say: ‘I want to grow’, It does nothing for me. And guess what: if it does nothing for me, then eventually it will do nothing for you. Or maybe it already isn’t… 🙁
No echo. Doesn’t echo in you, doesn’t echo in me.
Echo is when your energy comes back to you doubled, tripled.
But if the energy you send out is whiny, wanty, needy, the echo sends it back doubled, tripled, etc.
You are like a wet blanket, and no one wants to be with you.
Common language calls this negativity. Negativity is not in the words you speak, it is in the context in which you live…
Most people who complain about negativity, don’t know that they are getting back what they are sending out.
As I said, context, is the very first step in creating a plan for anything, including your life, a project, an event. And it needs to be a piece of art, needs to be crafted.
The What’s Missing Workshop has, so far, two important jobs.
1. finding what is the Promised Land for you, that puts you in the driving seat, providing for yourself what was, what has been missing all along. What you were denied when you were three years old.
2. the possibility of that. not just for you, but for everyone.
The third important job, finding out what you need to practice so you can turn this possibility into reality, is going to be another workshop. Not scheduled.
Of course, like every course of mine, this is an experimental course, where I am working out the bugs. This is why it won’t cost you an arm and a leg to participate.
Once it’s ready, it will cost closer to what it’s worth. But not yet.
You are co-creating it with me, and I appreciate your work in it, on it, your work will serve you, me, and all the future participants of this course. Thank you.
Let’s get you startedYou can do it many times. If I were you I would. Every time you’ll establish the possibility deeper and deeper, so it empowers you longer and longer.
