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Are you secure enough in who you are to look at things that are of no personal relevance to you?
That sounds like a ‘so what?’ question, but it isn’t.
You see, one of the most important measures in predicting your happiness and success in life is your cone of vision plus your about-me score.
Ultimately the two measures, combined, give me how much of all-knowledge you are willing and able to see… so you can navigate life, the economy, relationships, health, successfully.
The smaller the combined measure is, the less you are willing to see. Your reaction to it: ‘it doesn’t apply to me‘ and you just block it out. You don’t even entertain it for a moment. (I can see it in your 67-step reports clearly. Or in what articles you open… or not)
And then when life brings you similar issues, or when anyone, life wants you to grow to maintain what you have, and it will, take my word for it, you won’t have any direction to go, any information to guide you, because you were only taking in stuff that you already knew, that confirmed how good you are, how smart you are, how well you do what you do.
No learning. No expansion. You are not able to adapt and change… because you are not open to what is outside of what’s about you.
People smarter than you said: ‘prepare for the rainy day because the rainy day will come‘
What are they saying?
What they are saying is that people will change. Society will change. Financial situations will change. Needs and wants will change. Health services, health threats will change. The climate will change.
And unless you are prepared, you are screwed.
What does preparation mean?
Preparation means ‘doing now what will be necessary later‘.
Meaning: do it before it is necessary. Before it is anything more than an idea. Before it would fit inside the ‘it applies to me’ category…
Really.
Most things that will be needed in the future need to prepare, need to learn, need to establish what you can NOW when you still don’t need them.
What will you do when you won’t be able to afford a car. How will you get around? How will you pay your bills. Get your groceries? Can you cook? Cook nourishing tasty dishes with what you have?
How and what will you eat when the only things you can afford in the grocery store are processed starches and raw ingredients that need cooking? Like pulses. Like root vegetables.
I read the Monday Morning Memo this week.
It talks about foresight… Roy H. Williams is in advertising. Specifically radio advertising.
Businesses, business people think advertising (like everything else) works well as a campaign.
But most advertising doesn’t do much for about six months, and its effects last at best another few months…
He says: to get a rocket off the ground you need to burn a lot lot lot of fuel. Whereas a rocket already in flight needs only a little bit to keep flying.
What Roy says is true about everything. If you live your life in campaigns, and most do… If you start contemplating digging a well when you are already thirsty… When you need new clients, patients, new money, it is already too late.
That is the mistake I made.
It is easy to be sure that you are doing the right thing.
Explain away the early signs of decline in business (or in anything, including your fitness!, in your relationships!!).
Arrogance. Overconfidence. Being closed.
Or, like I did, seeing what needs to be done, and not feeling like it. ‘I don’t want to‘ I said, you say, and you don’t. I didn’t.
The only thing that is constant and unchanging in life is change. Things change. People change. Societies change. The climate changes.
The most important measure of intelligence is the ability and willingness to change.
Intelligence is also learning from others’ mistakes… It is what we call simulation… You get intimately familiar with the mistakes the mistake-maker made, why and how they made the mistake you want to avoid, even though you haven’t ever thought that you would ever be so stupid to make that mistake… But you would…
Like my mistake of thinking that people would want to do what it takes to become all they can become.
The signs were there: people, clients were never willing to do the work… What they were willing is to change if it required no work… if I did it for them, waving my magic wand. (Landmark Education, my alma mater, is in the same place where I am, I think)
Magic, OK. But doing? It has been beyond everybody’s willingness even to completely understand and see what changes they needed and why.
You don’t think this applies to you?
But my business is not different from other businesses, or not really. You’ll do best if you offer people what they are already buying… just make yours better, or seem better.
But be aware: what people are buying changes… people are fickle. People are sheep. People are suggestible. And people don’t want what they need… they want what they want… even if it is bad for them.
I know this is a long article, but if you got this far, keep on just a little bit longer.
A century ago only rich people were fat.
Today 70% of humanity is fat.
What happened? What is the difference?
The difference is that what people consider food, eating, has changed.
I was nine years old when our last live in maid had to go. So my parents enrolled me in the after-school program, that meant lunch, and doing homework in a classroom.
I was introduced to the kind of dishes skinny people ate. I LOVED IT. Every single dish. About 50 dishes… very different from how my mother cooked.
My mother was from a wealthy family, so she cooked like wealthy people ate… the fat ones.
When I look back at my life through weight, I was skinny and naturally skinny when I ate what other people ate, and fat and struggling, starving myself, when I ate like rich people. Rich food. Snaking.
So about a month or so ago I started to make the exact dishes I ate in the after school program, or in the office cafeteria when I still had a job, back in Hungary.
I have lost three sizes since. And I haven’t been hungry. When I am hungry I eat. Eat more of what I cooked.
I don’t stand in front of the refrigerator looking what I could eat, fast, to satisfy my hunger. No. I eat what I had already cooked.
Notice that ‘already’ as a returning theme? Yeah. I am prepared. I have prepared.
What don’t I eat? I stopped eating sandwiches. I stopped eating overly rich food, like restaurant food, diner food. And I stopped snacking… almost 90%.
And I have rarely if at all eat anything that is fully processed, ready to eat. Except saltine crackers… and ramen noodles.
But, of course, if you don’t know how to cook, then you can’t follow my example.
I eat Hungarian dishes…
You should eat what ‘normal’ people eat in your country of origin. Whatever that country. If you are a mutt… follow the thin parent’s lineage.
Or ask me for your food list… just please know, the first list that comes up is reparative… Repairing the damage the rich food had caused.
About a month later, if you stuck with the reparative diet, you can get your real diet.
Of course if you didn’t follow it tightly, because you know better, then you are screwed… AGAIN! You are your worst enemy.
Get your food list
