In case you’re stuck – distinctions can come to rescue you, to liberate you, to save the day, save your sanity, save your money, save your life.
You can get stuck, seemingly, in many different ways. You get stuck and things remain the same, your past, your opinions, your truth, your reality… meaning: your occurrence.
Occurrence is a combination of what happens, what truly IS, observable by others, even a Martian, plus your commentary, your meaning, your interpretation.
My Playground program is about taking you from that stuck view of your life, your world, to being able to see what is actually real in your view, and what isn’t.
In my experience, 10% in all your stories is real, and 90% is made up. Made up by you, or borrowed from other people, who either made it up themselves, or borrowed it from others.
This interpretations, those meanings, those stories are likely, but aren’t true. Likely stories, likely meanings… but they never actually happened.
It feels like performing surgery on your belief system… but I give you tools. Actually I give you lots of tools, so you are not left you your own devices.
One of these tools is “distinctions”…
What are distinctions?
A great way to define a distinction is that it is a property of something that sets it different/distinct from anything else that is alike.
A lady of distinction is a lady who’s not like everyone else somehow, better, more, above them.
A different way to examine distinctions is that it is a concept or maybe even abstraction. (abstraction definition: a general quality or characteristic, apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.)
I am going to speak about this latter manner of looking, where distinction is a concept. Only showing up if you look in a particular way… through the distinction, through the concept.
A distinction is hidden from view if you look in the ordinary way.
We could say that distinctions can behave oddly: they won’t present themselves at all to you until you have seen them, and from that point on, you can experience the second part of oddity: they are everywhere. You can see them everywhere.
If you don’t see them everywhere, you haven’t really seen them. I can see this in the Playground: certain distinctions go right over people’s heads, even if they are looking at it in a certain context, but they cannot really “have” the distinction until they see it everywhere.
How many distinctions do I teach? About a hundred…
All distinctions live in the part of all-knowledge that you don’t know that you don’t know.
One of my mentors, T. Harv Eker tells the story how he turned his life around. His father’s millionaire friend told him, that when things are not working, there is something he didn’t know. Obviously he was talking about some distinction, the odd stuff, because T. Harv turned his life around and he is now a multi millionaire.
Distinctions are like the vocabulary of an expert… Like the tools of a surgeon. Exact. Precise. Sharp. Cutting. Cutting away the bs. Cutting away the interpretation, meaning, the story.
Another illustration of distinctions is an incident I had back in 1999.
I had been renting a car, but renting is expensive, so I decided to buy a vehicle. I wanted a second hand car, and I was sure I preferred a red color car. As you can tell, I didn’t consider many details concerning vehicles. Lol. I may be an engineer of sorts… but who cares what car. A car is a transportation device. Takes me where I need to go? Good. Little upkeep. Even better. Cheap: Fantastic.
I visited a client of mine who traveled to car auctions to buy cars for used car dealers and I put in a “purchase order”: I would like a red vehicle and I want it to cost around three grands.
In a few days he phoned me and told me: We have three vehicles that you should take a look at. I went to his location and saw three cars, all different shades of red. One of them was a little bigger than the other cars. What make? I did not know. What model? I didn’t know.
I picked out the shade of red
I picked out the shade of red I liked and he prepared the vehicle for me. Cleaned it up, shined it, gassed it up… whatever you do to prep a car for a new customer.
I asked what make of vehicle it was and he answered it was a Nissan Maxima. I felt pleased. I had never seen a car exactly like that, I didn’t even know Nissan was a car maker, therefore I was feeling very unique and privileged. I like, have always liked to be different.
I drove the car off his lot. My first journey in the new vehicle was on the freeway towards a big supermarket in some distance, about four miles. I saw 14 Nissan Maximas on this 4 miles long stretch of this road. It looked to me like every car was a Nissan Maxima. I even spotted a few more parking in the street, below the highway.
By buying the car I obtained the distinction: Nissan Maxima, and finally I could see it all over the place.
That’s the dynamics of distinction. You don’t see it, you don’t see it, you still don’t see it, you see it on the thing in front of you, then you really see it, see it as a distinction and a whole new world opens up for you.
I teach through distinctions.
Why is this approach useful for you? For the reason that nearly all learning is much like this: you stare and you aren’t able to see it. You are staring at the thing you want to understand: and you can’t understand it. And in a crucial moment you begin seeing it. Then you ask: “So why didn’t you tell me?” or “This is what you meant? Wow.”
In any area of life, you are able to identify only the things that you already know. Unfortunately, given your track record, that was not where the missing knowledge is. Distinctions expand your universe and give you capacities to unstuck yourself and keep moving.
