A friend of mine asked for help in setting a goal. It wasn’t that he was interested in accomplishment. Really, he wanted to look like he was… Appearances.
Why am I so hard on him? I’ve known him for four-five years, and he hasn’t done anything, hasn’t accomplished anything.
He started a lot of things, talked about starting even more, but never actually took anything near a place where it would have worked, where it would have been either a failure or success.
Why? I guess, because appearing successful is seriously threatened by doing. Doing can mean, you fail at something.
I actually know a lot of people like him… so this is not personal.
People who don’t do anything new, even though they want the benefits it would bring, resist giving up their public image as smart, successful, OK people.
Successful people risk their image every step, I do. But I don’t care about appearances, I care about results, and the joy of doing.
I recommended that he sets a goal of failing at least ten times a day. But you can set a goal to fail a hundred times a day, if you want to become really present, really successful!
I recommended that he challenges himself to at least ten failures a day. He saw my point, but didn’t do it.
Today, by accident, I found an older article of mine, that defines success and failure differently, in a way that you can fail 50 times a day, or succeed 50 times a day, depending on how you do it.
Here is the article that teaches it, but I can’t resist copying here the part I am talking about
Wallace D. Wattles says it best in his The Science of Getting Rich. 1 He calls it these principles “Certain Way” and “Effective Action”
You should read and re-read the book, but here are some excerpts:
You cannot act where you are not; you cannot act where you have been, and you cannot act where you are going to be; you can act only where you are. In the herenow. Go back to the exercise I gave you yesterday, if you don’t know how to be herenow.
When you act and be, when your eyes and attention is on what you are doing, not what you are not, you start building the foundation of success and power.
It is really not the number of things you do, but the EFFICIENCY of each separate action that counts.
Every act is, in itself, either a success or a failure. Every act is, in itself, either effective or inefficient.
Every inefficient act is a failure, and if you spend your life in doing inefficient acts, your whole life will be a failure.
The more things you do, the worse for you, if all your acts are inefficient ones. (mulititaskers, heard that?)
On the other hand, every efficient act is a success in itself, and if every act of your life is an efficient one, your whole life MUST be a success.
.
You see, you can do everything you do either efficiently, or inefficiently. Even going to the bathroom, making scrambled eggs, making the bed, taking a note, walking down the steps… every act.
You have a thousand opportunities a day to be successful or a failure.
Start with observation. Start noticing that you are not present to what you are doing, that you are doing things without being quite there.
If you were all there, I bet you wouldn’t be on this site. You wouldn’t need it. You would be happy, successful, so why bother coming here? Right?
Now, being present is not easy. One of the problems with it is that you don’t notice it.
The moment you do, you have an opportunity, a choice to go back to where you were, or to snap to attention.
The Avatar State Audios make it easier to notice. But getting back to the herenow is your job, Go back to yesterday’s article and practice it.
Osho: Life has no goals, no purpose
- If you need a copy of this book, you can get it here: https://free-stuff.by-sophie.com/index.php
