Some people will learn… and others, won’t, but will be sure. Cocksure 1
Everyone I know feels smart, or at the minimum smarter than the next person.
But does the quality of your life depend on how smart you feel?
The fallacy that has somehow replaced looking at how much people see accurately, what they do, what results they produce in the world, with how they feel about themselves.
When you look at the world, your world, the world at large, you mostly see what you recognize (rightly or wrongly, from the past), and maybe, occasionally, you are forced to notice stuff that you don’t recognize. Rarely.
The woman, our PhD in one of my stories, the PhD whose car stopped working on the highway without warning… may be smart, but she is ignorant. She may not know.
But this incident, if she allowed it, could teach her the level of ignorance she has.
The story goes like this: the car stops working, she pulls over to the shoulder of the road, pops open the hood, and looks under it, after all everyone knows that the car’s working part is under the hood. She sees a mess of greasy, dusty, shapes…
One after the other men stop their car and ask if they can help. One by one they distinguish, by pointing out, different components that you can see under the hood: the carburetor, the cooling fan, the engine, the oil tank, etc.
And even if 15-20, a hundred people stopped to help, the woman would not get much smarter: knowing the name of things won’t make you able to diagnose and correct your car trouble.
Being able to know things deeper than throwing around names takes work, and a profound understanding the relationships between things you can name…
Smarts will not get you far in life, no matter what you think, or how cocksure you are.
Only learning and profound understanding will.
Your arrogance, your cock-suredness is based on a mistaken belief that you can see what there is to see to know (diagnose) what’s going on.
Everybody is upset about the 10,000 hours it takes to get some level of mastery in any given field. They are even more upset by the 10 dark years other people suggest that you have to get through to mastery.
I am surrounded by people who think that reading a book, or watching a video, or doing a short course will get them to a place where they can make a living with something… like stock trading. Or e-commerce business.
By the way: stock trading is probably the trickiest of all things to learn…
People’s favorite way is to watch someone else make money with it, and they think that it will teach them something.
But just like with the PhD woman and the stalled car, when you look under the hood, an expert sees one thing and you see something else.
You cannot duplicate what someone sees, because it requires knowledge that you only get when you put in the work, the research, and get to a correct understanding. When you can connect individual dots accurately. When you can see deeply and widely.
Until then you’ll see what you see, and half of what you see, the interpretation, will be faulty.
One process I teach to people is how to energize their water.
Everyone is at a different level of misunderstanding. And when you misunderstand, you don’t know that you do… you think you understand things rightly. You don’t have doubts… therefore you don’t have questions. Or you keep on repeating the same questions that are not relevant to what you are doing.
The most interesting thing about energizing water, is that many people follow the instructions first to the letter, and then when they get comfortable, the actions coming from misunderstanding the world surface and become self-evident… to everyone else, but not the person who makes the mistakes.
In my coaching, health consulting practice, I use this simple activity as the test if I should work with you or not.
Most of the time, it still turns out I should NOT have taken you on as a client.
Why am I such a stickler for only taking on people who can keep their cell hydration above 30%?
Because if you cannot, that also means that you will not get ANYTHING accurately from the expensive coaching you signed up for.
There is a saying: bring beginner’s mind to everything.
What does it mean? A beginner (unless they are too conceited!) brings “I don’t know… I better pay attention” attitude to the “new” thing they are attempting to do.
When it doesn’t work “out of the box” they ask questions so they can find out what they misunderstood.
Beginners bring a certain humility to their new actions.
When someone has succeeded, especially if they are told so, they suddenly know everything… and their arrogance makes them make unfounded assumptions that compromise their results.
This beginner phase lasts a month, on average.
The person who comes to everything without any doubt that they misunderstand anything is hopeless… the change being trained with me is too jarring, too irritating, too hard for them and for their inflated ego to cope with.
A full 60% of the people who buy the water energizer cannot fathom that they misunderstood anything… so they never get the water fully coherent.
30% of the people who buy the water energizer get it right in the beginning and then lose the beginner’s mind and botch it up. And then they already “know” and will not ask or accept guidance.
And 10% of the people who buy the water energizer will be able and willing to do the simple steps to keep their cells hydrated so they can grow.
With a low cell hydration you are always in scarcity mode, and can’t grow.
Why? Because your low cell hydration leaves you in scarcity mode.
One of the symptoms of scarcity mode is wanting to be sure… without doing the work it takes to verify, test, clarify, think deeply and strategically.
These activities are literally impossible in scarcity/survival mode.
One could say: cocksuredness, arrogance, is the sign that too little of your brain is available to do good work.
The gap between your attitude and your actual results is a dead giveaway to everyone who can read the unmistakable signs, the obvious signs.
Of course to read the obvious signs, you need to get out of scarcity mode and into growth mode.
One of the things that allowed me to get through this five week long ordeal with the poisoning, and the eight month (so far) of being attacked for hours every day by the Dark Side Practitioner, is that my cell hydration never dropped under 30%.
I never went into scarcity mode where you are either arrogant or hasty or in a hurry or needing to fix whatever looks wrong to me.
I managed to stay inside the abundance mindset where things are the way they are supposed to be. Often painful, disturbing, jarring, weakening, disrupting, etc. Even death, that at some point looked imminent, was something that was supposed to be. I manage to maintain “sober eyes” and put my attention where I had full power: my attitude, what I do, muscletesting, thinking, looking, observing, witnessing.
It got me through the hardest five weeks, and will get me through the rest of time that the Dark Side Practitioner is using me for target practice and a punching bag.
My job is to be well… no matter what. And I am well. Thank you for asking.
- Definition of cocksure
1 : feeling perfect assurance sometimes on inadequate grounds
2 : marked by overconfidence or presumptuousness : cocky
— cocksurely adverb
— cocksureness noun
