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You never know because you can’t know. So what you know is the problem…
- But if you keep on doing what you have been doing, exactly the same way…
- If you look at the same things the same way every day…
- If your cone of vision remains so narrow that when you look at yourself you can’t see anything and anyone else…
Then you’ll miss what could be your path to the life you were meant to live.
Interestingly, what I see is there when people come up with ideas that they can realize AND have real value is that they don’t have a PHD.
Not a doctorate degree, but what is more important the motivation PHD… poor, hungry and determined. Determined to have a better life.
You see, when you are comfortable, even if your life is a meh, even if you don’t like what you have, even if you hate many things… unless you have the attitude of the poor, the hungry, and the determined, you’ll not even look… or if you look,you’ll look the same way.
What is between you creating a life for yourself that others will wish they could have, between you getting great ideas and ‘take them home’ is this:
You look at things the same way as you have always looked. And you look at the same things as you have always looked at.
I am the same way, by the way.
When I was desperate, I was also determined. But my life is pretty good. And that makes me incurious.
So I need to manage myself, and between you and me, I don’t know what I am doing. It is not that someone I trust is guiding me. But I do my darned best to get input from people who are obviously not me… duh… who can lead me to look at things I haven’t…
A year or so ago I bought this story selling program, and never touched it.
Yesterday I had a hunch that I had bought it already, but couldn’t find the receipt. So I bought it again, and that helped me to find the previous purchase. It was $37, much less I would have paid to get my view unstuck… So it’s a good deal.
Anyway, I found that I bought a package of 50 stories I can use in my own articles, or emails. And among those I found some that took me to a different place… A place I had never been. That PHD place from where the world is my potential oyster.
You see, in my case the world looked like a desert. Like a place where there is no place for what I have to offer, so I spent a lot of my time in despair.
Of course despair is my homepage… If I were you, I would be frustrated, or angry, or sad, or resigned, or sullen, or up in arms… But my homepage is my homepage, yours is yours.
Your homepage
Do you know what is your homepage? Have you ever distinguished what you end up feeling when life isn’t working the way you want it to work?
I wrote about Billy Beane of the Oakland Athletics baseball team… the Moneyball.
Today I’ll share with you another PHD story, the story of the guy who quit school before he finished fourth grade.
You probably never heard of Richard Montanez. His story is attacked… because it makes everyone look bad. Especially the people who are attacking his story.
What did Richard Montanez have that you don’t? That the people attacking him don’t?
He brought beginner’s mind to a game. It was easier for him that for anyone else: because he was a beginner. It is much harder when you think you know everything…
OK, here is how the story went:
Montanez is the son of a Mexican immigrant. He never made it past fourth grade. He was the youngest of ten siblings. They lived in a one-room cinder block house in a migrant labor camp East of Los Angeles.
The family picked grapes. The money they earned wasn’t enough to live on. So Montanez took other odd jobs such as washing cars, picking weeds and slaughtering chickens.
Then he applied for a job as a janitor with Frito-Lay company, a ‘fun food’ manufacturer. Montanez couldn’t read or write, but he was accepted for the job.
His grandfather advised him thus:
Make sure that floor shines and let them know that a Montañez mopped it.
One day, about 10 years later, the CEO at Frito-Lay issued a video encouraging every employee to start behaving like an owner.
Cheetos are corn puffs with some flavor powder, mostly cheese on it. It is highly addictive, I hear. I myself have never tried Cheetos, but once my Instacart delivery person messed up my order, and delivered a bag of cheese puffs… and I ate them. Yes, I think they ARE addictive.
One day Richard found NAKED cheetos on the floor of the manufacturing plant, and took a bunch home. He took them home and experimented with different coverings that would be more interesting to the large Hispanic population of California.
With the help of his wife, he dusted them with the same sort of chili powder he had seen on Mexican grilled corn known as elotes.
Montañez decided to pitch the idea to the CEO over the phone and was given the OK to present the idea to the executive board.
By this time he learned to read and write… So he went to the library studied books on marketing and business strategies. He bought a necktie for $3. Filled 100 plastic baggies with his Cheetos, drew his own logo and design on every package.
During the presentation someone asked, “How much market share do you think you can get?”
Montanez replied by stretching his arms out and saying: “THIS much market share!”
That was it. The Flamin’ Hot Cheeto was born, a snack that would go on to become a multi-billion dollar asset for Frito-Lay.
So what is this beginner’s mind?
It is erasing, for the moment, everything you know, so you can look at things with a clean slate.
Me too. I manage to get into that state when I muscletest. When it’s about food. When it’s about truth value.
I haven’t been able to erase all I know about business, about the world, about people, about myself when it comes to my own life.
So as I am sitting here, I ask Source: is there an energy I could use that would do the job of erasing all that for a moment?
Yes. What would I say ‘erase’?
And in that moment it dawns on me that I used to have and use that energy… back in the day when I was doing the activation of the many feelings of the second phase.
I called it ‘ERASE!’
I never recorded it separately from the activators, so I’ll do that now.
Question: can YOU just say ERASE! and get the same result? Source says ‘no’. And if you are connected? Still no.
Bummer.
It’s a Source energy.
And to download a Source energy you need to connect at least on the second level of connection. And unfortunately people are not willing to practice connecting often enough to be able to do it.
OK, here is the ‘famous’ ERASE energy…
Fresh out of the oven. Use it when you feel blocked, when you know, when you are certain something will or won’t work.
OK… I just downloaded the energy three times. That is how I am going to record it.
I felt the tension and the pain melt away from my shoulders. But it was/is replaced with fear.
I am a resister… Innocence manifests itself, for me, as fear. Because the goal, the purpose of the resistance is to keep me in the comfortable know. Whereas innocence is not the blissful state everyone thinks it is… it is how innocence, not knowing is for YOU.
It is not the same for everyone. It depends, I think, on your personal history. My first incident left me with horrible debilitating fear.
Your innocent may be different. I am experimenting with some people who I know well.
Avoider 1 + Erase Erase Erase = grief
Avoider 2 + Erase Erase Erase = terror
Fighter/resister 1 + Erase Erase Erase = confusion
Fighter 1 + Erase Erase Erase = undecided
Fighter 2 + Erase Erase Erase = clear
and Fighter 3 + Erase Erase Erase = innocent
Allower + Erase Erase Erase = ready
So there is no telling what that will be like for you.
If trying something out is not your bailiwick, not your thing, do not get it.
But if you are up to something and what’s been in your way is that you already know everything, and yet… Then this may be the best thing for you.
If you are not happy, I’ll refund your purchase if you tell me what you experienced that you don’t like. And I’ll be even grateful.
Create beginner’s mind
