If you can only read one book in your whole life, read this book. Especially if you are a woman. But it can be very fundamentally revolutionary for a man as well, except I am not a man, so I can only guess.
We live as if things never changed. Even though we hear, read, that the only thing that is constant in life is change.
And yet, our minds, the machine-like part of us that cannot learn, won’t learn, and fancies itself YOU… our minds tell us, moment to moment, that life will remain the way it is in that moment.
Is that crazy or what?
When something bad happens, the reaction is not to the bad thing, but to the idea that the results of the bad thing are life-long.
When something good happens, the reaction is not to the good thing. It is to the idea, to the notion, to the ce
During the summer of 1966 I ran into a girl I knew from elementary school. Turns out she applied and was accepted to the same school I was going to start in that September.
We were having a chat. I remember thinking to myself: Compared to her I know everything… why am I going to school?
We both graduated. I am sure she still thinks she knows everything. My experience is that I know less and less as time goes by.
Whether you can identify with my 19 year old person, or my 69 year old person, and to what degree will be important, so jot it down.
This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Is a human like a assembled faucet? When it drips you have to replace the whole thing?
I energize my water in a 5 gallon (20 liter) plastic containers with a spigot.
The spigot is replaceable, but I am not strong enough to unscrew it. I have the replacement spigot… I bought it a year ago, but is still sitting on my kitchen counter. I still need to be mindful that the old spigot, which is just another word for water tap… still drips.
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
… if you are willing to look at see what is so about you and your life.
The truth. Naked. Ugly. Often shameful.
Here is a correspondence I had with a client today:
She said: “I’m interested in changing my context since it’s part of what keeps me stuck.”
“… answering the questions: what am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Unless you have done the work of identifying what you have been doing, and why you have been doing it, no way you can shift the context. You cannot catch what you can’t see. And you cannot change what you can’t catch.”
To the degree you are able and willing to do that, to the same degree you can change your life. ((
For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.
I remember saying to myself: my money is not good enough for you? and wept.
I had no idea how I “accomplished” that… in 20/20 hindsight it is still a little spotty.
What wasn’t clear to me, never even occurred to me, how my attitude effected the service provider. My “To what degree you think of yourself:” starting point measure was, at the time, 70%. From my behavior I would have guessed it was higher.
Mainly I overrode what they said. I argued, I knew better, I acted with contempt…
What I didn’t know then is that being a service provider needs to be a win, or no service.
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
It has nothing to do with the stuff, or the quantity of it. It can be great, it can be plenty… the context, scarcity or abundance will tell you what to feel, what to think, what to do.
Why? Because context is decisive.
You can have plenty inside the context of scarcity, and feel that you don’t have enough. Enough time, enough stuff, enough happiness, enough whatever…
…or the opposite, you can have little, but inside the context of abundance, you have what you have, and what you have is enough.
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
Most people smile a lot in their pictures, but I can feel their anxiety, their fear, their inner trembling.
One more thing that I haven’t said before, but given that we are working with memes: if you obey memes, if you repeat memes, if you try to fit in with memes, y
We throw about big words, and we pretend that we know them. Even “scientists” just pretend. If they didn’t, they would be explaining, clarifying the words, but they don’t.
In the Starting Point Measurements the vocabulary number is what indicates this. I originally intended to call this clarity, but then I decided that if it refers to words, then maybe it can be instructive.
It hasn’t been.
So this article will be, mostly, about words.
Whenever we say conscious awareness, we are talking about words. No words, no conscious awareness.
Whatever you don’t have words for, whatever you mislabel, whatever you just have feelings or emotions about, no accurate words… are not conscious awareness.
“It’s lonely at the top. 99% of people are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most competitive.”
-Tim Ferriss
Most people will never be truly successful.
The pull towards mediocrity is too strong. As David Schwartz once penned, “All around you is an environment that is trying to pull you down to Second-Class Street.”
Most people will never escape the pull.
Much of the thinking around us is small-minded. Most people are overly conce
If you can only read one book in your whole life, read this book. Especially if you are a woman. But it can be very fundamentally revolutionary for a man as well, except I am not a man, so I can only guess.
We live as if things never changed. Even though we hear, read, that the only thing that is constant in life is change.
During the summer of 1966 I ran into a girl I knew from elementary school. Turns out she applied and was accepted to the same school I was going to start in that September.
This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.
Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
We throw about big words, and we pretend that we know them. Even “scientists” just pretend. If they didn’t, they would be explaining, clarifying the words, but they don’t.
Most people will never become truly successful.