The person who is most adaptable and willing to change is going to win in life
Changeability, adaptability: what prevents you from being changeable or adaptable so you can win?
Darwin may have said: The species that is most adaptable wins the genetic lottery. Humanity’s, society’s emphasis is on smarts, but smart people are often losers.
Groups of people survived in history if they could adapt to the changing environment, the changing of the world successfully.
This is also true for the individual who wants to be successful and live the good life. (Success in one area does not translate to the good life, where you are successful in health, wealth, love and happiness equally).
Adaptability means: giving up something that you feel is true, or the only way, or the only comfortable way. Move when staying is more comfortable, stay when moving is more comfortable. Adaptability is being willing to choose NOT comfortable… definitely a TLB more than 1. The higher your TLB score, the more adaptable you are.
My TLB score is 50… I am still attracted by comfortable, and I am still gripped by the confirmation bias, a cognitive bias. 50% or the time.
This article is about how I cause my own adaptability and when.
I have been experimenting with adaptability: I first observe the lack of it, and second I look what it would take to be adaptable in the same exact situation.
The interesting thing about principles (this is a principle: the way to win in life is to become more and more adaptable) is that no matter what you are doing, no matter where you are, who you are, what your life looks, the principle in action can be detected.
Mostly in reverse…
Sure sign that you need adaptability is Thwarted Intention
I do have occasional “thwarted intention”… that is when I bump into a wall… and I can see that I got to a permanent stop.
But how do you become adaptable when there is a wall? The wall says: “there is no road leading beyond here” When the direction you’ve been moving, thinking it’s the winning path, is finally closed?
Entire companies went out of business for not acknowledging the wall they hit. Motorola, for example. When you hit a wall, your job is to do what it takes to become changeable and adaptable… or you become extinct. Roadkill.
Humans are uniquely qualified to do work in their head, projection, thought experiments. They don’t have to do it in reality, they can do it in their head, on paper, with models, etc. Trial and error is too time consuming… by the time you are done, you are dead.
I use Freecell as my training ground, my thinking ground. I do my best thinking while I play game after game of Freecell to test out processes.
Freecell is a great model for your projects. You have a general direction: you want all the cards cleared off the deck.
The moment you make a move, the moment you move a card, you have chosen the specific project, a specific path.
If you don’t move a card… you’ll play in your head… and you’ll never win. You can only win by playing… on the board.
If you move a card too fast, sometimes you win, but more often you don’t… and the game may be a struggle.
And like me, you play and re-play a game to see which direction will take you fast to the empty deck.
When I have a principle to internalize, a principle to demonstrate, which is always, I play inside that context.
The context: the purpose to win and lose inside that principle, inside the principle of adaptability.
I am writing this article after I’ve gained a few insights:
- 1. Sometimes that path leads through heavy losses in the beginning. It makes no sense, and your life hangs on a thread. But if you have the courage, and if you have the experimenting mentality, it will take you to winning. It’s risk but it’s calculated risk.
- 2. My pedestrian nature wants life to be 1-2-3, linear. You do what you do, and at the end you harvest.
The linear method requires no TLB above 1, it is clear cut, and you just have to go through the motions.
No losses until you lose it all. Dangerous, but seductive. Comfortable. No thinking is required.
You can grit your teeth and go through it for the reward at the end. But the end is not close, so you plod along and hope for the best.
It rarely turns out.
Changeability, adaptability are not needed… the only skill you need to master is licking your wounds at the inevitable outcome: it is painful.
The non-linear approach: The art of backtracking:
When you find yourself at unworkability, you need to backtrack… you need to go back far as needed.
In my experience I find the wrong turn that was guided some thought, some moment of brilliance, some great idea… mostly an “ooh ooh… I can do this… or I can do that.” impulsive move. The excitement of some clever turn makes you incoherent, makes you forget the rules, the principles, the true and tried, and you always end up at a wall…
Yesterday I had a webinar on the Energized Water, the science, the background, and the practice.
- One person on the call did not make any false moves, any clever turns, and her hydration is where it needs to be. She started to get hydrated the day after she set up her system.
- Another person was hydrated for years… and suddenly she isn’t. She says she hadn’t changed anything… but something must have changed… She needs to go back (backtrack) and find where she had a “good idea…”Finding the wrong turn is a job for Sherlock Holmes, and not all of you are Sherlock Holmes…
Sherlock Holmes never allowed preconceived notions to blind him. You do. And often you can’t see what you are blind to… even in the backtracking process.
- Another person has a system that even on the pictures sent in for the Water Energizing Contest, you can detect the wrong moves, the clever moves. It is a hodge podge of clever moves.If you have a personality that revels in you being clever (I do) your life is full of wrong turns and running into walls. Your solutions are more about you than about making life work for you.You may have to go back, disassemble everything, and start over. Without all that cleverness.
Examining the foundation, the original idea
My business is based on the assumption that you want to grow.
Given that it is the basic assumption, and given that I am finding you that you don’t want to grow, I now have to go back to the very beginning, and see if I even want to continue doing what I am doing…
I know I have a “commission” from Source to find the methodology that can turn humans into human beings, and I have found it. I have delivered what I promised, and I can declare myself free.
Becoming an expanding human being, living from the Tree of Life takes work, and only when people are interested in a certain path all the way to the end, that they are willing to do the work.
I have found that people are not interested. They hope to rig the game. They hope that they can have a life on the Tree of Knowledge and on the Tree of Life at the same time… but that is not possible. You need to choose: outward rewards or inner rewards. You can have money, health, business success, love, and happiness all at the same time, only on the Tree of Life. On the Tree of Knowledge life is lived in the either one or the other.
I am not sure what I’ll do. But continuing on this path, teaching people who don’t want the results of the learning, is not a winning path. I may be able to eke out a living, but barely.
Reformulating… that is what I am going to do.
And you should too.
There is a Hungarian saying: when you buttoned your shirt wrong, the best path is to unbutton it an button it correctly this time.
Examine the foundation of your life. You can only build one kind of life on a given foundation.
The 67 steps coaching program teaches you to go back and create a foundation based on the principles that can create a good life.
It takes you through hundreds of principles… and gives you plenty of opportunities to see where your own principles are not in line with the life you want.
Sometimes you have to go through the program several times before you can do it.
It’s taken me the sixth or seventh round to see where I am not changeable, where I am not adaptable. I had seen that you weren’t… but about myself: I saw it for the first time. Painful as it is, I am grateful.
PS: There is inner growth and there is outer growth… The inner growth facilitates the outer growth.
While I have been growing for years now, today was the first time that I had the inner growth match up with the need of outer growth.
Saying no to some circumstances, where the no means inevitable hardship, new beginning, the kind of change I was not ready to make all these years.
The opposite is being taught, the opposite is being promoted: do something different and your insides will change with it…
This is not how it works.
The happier people I have the fortune to observe, don’t make changes just because it’s a good idea. They build up their virtues, their capacities, their health to be the kind of person who can make the change and be successful with it.
Impulsivity is not changeability. Jumping from one thing to the other is not adaptability.
First the inner and then the outer.
