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Distinction is the currency of intelligent life.
Huh?
Without distinctions there is no intelligence, there is no intelligent life. Without distinctions there is only animal life.
And ultimately most humans have no distinctions.
Distinction is the essence of everything, even while most people only see what is on the top… the surface.
The genius of people like Newton is to undress, to peel off the surface and see what is common… what is different from everything else… the distinction.
I only teach distinctions. And obviously if someone cannot see a distinction as a distinction, then nothing I teach makes a difference for them.
Distinction is like the skeleton.
The skeleton on which specifics are hung… Whether they are dynamics, ways of being, behavior, or things. So the distinction does not include the specific, instead it allows the specific. The specific in the case of a human would be the flesh, the shape, the clothes.
I risk saying: distinction is like framework… no matter what you hang on a distinction, it doesn’t change the essence of the thing. No clothing, no pretense, no lies… The essence remains the essence.
In yesterday’s Office Hour this issue came up. A distinction. An invisible dynamic, that everyone has.
Specifically the dynamic when your life got decided.
It was an incident. It was the first time you felt you were not OK. That there was something wrong with you because of how people related to you.
Something happened, and you were left with a sense that unless you X, you’ll face Y.
The X can be a lot of things… we call X the ITCH.
Unless you are smart. Unless you hustle. Or unless you are important, they love you, unless you belong, unless you matter. Everyone has their own specific and PRECISE X… what they weren’t, what they didn’t do in that original incident.
It happens always the exact same way…
…and it is the skeleton of the human condition… the distinction that can tell me how you are going to live life.
It’s also the birth of the first pretense.
Unless you know exactly what it is, i.e. you distinguish it for yourself, you doomed yourselfto live a horrid life.
Every invisible dynamic leads back to this one… And then each dynamic is still a distinction on its own right, because with the same base ‘unless‘ you can still do a lot of differently miserable lives.
The Anna Karenina Principle says that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That is: each family member does sordid, sorry, stupid things because of their ‘unless’.
It is impossible to lead a fulfilling, enjoyable life without distinctions.
The more distinctions you have the happier you can be, the more productive, the more at peace.
I teach distinctions of life. Tai Lopez teaches distinctions of business, social interactions, learning… many distinctions I don’t teach.
The big difference between the eight billion and the 1000 is that the 1000 has many distinctions.
You can have distinctions in your profession, and still be unhappy, because you don’t have distinctions of life, of health, of human interactions: the invisible dynamics.
Because you don’t see the forest for the trees… You only see the specifics not the common, not the general.
And if occasionally you succeed, it will be an accident. You’ll stumble into success… but won’t be able to repeat it. One hit wonder…
Very few people are of the caliber of an Einstein or a Isaac Newton who could distinguish new things.
Us, mere mortals need to LEARN the distinctions, and then see them everywhere.
I learned a bunch of distinctions but could not see any new ones for many years… until 1996…
So what you need to do is NOT reinventing the wheel… but to use the distinctions you can learn to navigate life effectively.
Admittedly you need your IQ to be high enough for that… at this point 100 above works. The average IQ of humanity is 70.
The people who read my articles but don’t GET why they should do the Reality Challenge: I know one thing about them: their IQ is probably below 100… because they can’t see the distinction…
Having a high enough IQ is not a guarantee that you’ll ever get distinction.
If you habitually only look at the specificity of anything, and can’t or won’t look deeper to get to the skeleton, you won’t get distinction.
And, of course, you are struggling, because life is like a soup and you don’t have a spoon. The essence of a soup is that it has lots of liquid in it. You either drink it or you spoon it…
Soup is a distinction.
Distinctions are exact… and they are the currency of life. The more you see life through distinctions, the richer you are as a human.
If you think distinctions are just words… you are mistaken.
Each distinction has a very clear definition… exact.
Here is what the dictionary says about soup:
Soup is a primarily liquid food, generally warm or hot (but may be cool or cold), that is made by combining ingredients of meat or vegetables with stock, milk, or water. Hot soups are additionally typically made by boiling solid ingredients in liquids in a pot to extract the flavors, forming a broth.
Soup was first known as ‘sop,’ which was a medieval dish of a thick stew on slices of bread to soak up the liquid.
Yesterday another distinction came up unrecognized: the distinction of hustle, hustling. Again let’s go to the dictionary
- force (someone) to move hurriedly or unceremoniously in a certain direction:
- obtain by forceful action or persuasion:
- busy movement and activity:
One of my students, after she won a race running, was told by her father that she didn’t run fast enough… meaning: she didn’t hustle.
She decided that unless she hustles she will be not enough…
So she hustles. Forces. Pretends to be busy. Hurries. For the sake of hustling…
But all the hustling doesn’t get her what she wants, because life is not a hustle… You cannot get any distinctions if you are in a hurry.
So you can see, her life was decided when she was in preschool… and didn’t hustle… Simply ran. And won.
Today she hustles and never wins.
That hustling became her life… basing it on a stupid remark her father said… a remark that was misunderstood.
She, today, hustles 24/7, thin as a rail, and guess what? Unhappy.
Interestingly when you get ONE distinction, your first one, it opens the door to more.
But until then you’ll have no distinctions, and everything will be skeleton-less… no substance.
- When people ask me how to allow, I know they don’t have the distinction.
- When people ask me how to keep their attention on what they are doing. I know they don’t have the distinctions, likely none at all.
- And when people ask me ‘what little voice?’ I know they don’t have distinctions…
In the Reality Challenge you have a chance to look deep To distinguish for yourself the voices as not you. Distinguish choice for yourself. And also distinguish allowing…
Distinguish yourself as the captain of your ship… Distinguish choosing…
Priceless.
The ultimate result is, of course, awakening. Coming out from the deep fog, from slumber.
No magic wand, it takes time.
Here is to awakeningIt is a lack of distinction: cause and effect. The question doesn’t even come up: am I trying to fix the effects or am I attending to the cause?
Trying to fix the effects is trying to fix the apples on a tree, because you hoped for pears. You can’t. The cause is that the root, the tree itself is an apple tree.
Money is a result. Your cell-dehydration is a result. Your bad relationship, your bad breath, your insomnia, your misery are all results.
Doctors, lawyers, government aren’t interested in cause… there is no money in it. So they direct your attention to effects…
