Tagged from Business Advice Daily by Dave.
Here are my Simply Successful Secrets:
1. When I think I can’t do something, I go ahead and do it.
Anytime when you feel like you can’t do something, you’re usually listening to the voice of people in your past who has convinced you that they know better about what you can and cannot do than you know about what you can and cannot do. When you go ahead with an experiment to prove the validity of their persuasion by doing the “impossible thing” in question, you’ll find that you actually can do what you know you can do and what people say you can’t do.
An additional benefit of you doing something is that you may open the door for someone else who looks up to you to have the courage to conduct an experiment with other people’s voices in their own minds about what they can and cannot do. Everybody wins… except for those people who spends too much time pulling down those around them because they do not want to feel alone in their self doubt.
2. I honor my own working pace.
This is a benefit of directing your own future and working for yourself: you exercise the privilege of honoring your own working pace. This means you take the breaks that you need and you work at the rate that makes you most effective.
Notice that I didn’t say “most efficient” or “most productive.” I used to be an efficiency and productivity junkie, especially when I was measuring my self worth by productivity. The more accomplished, the most to-do lists checked off, the better I thought I’d feel. After a while, I had a stack of completed tasks and accomplishments alongside questions about purpose and meaning and inspiration that were left unanswered.
Recently I conducted an experiment. I had a 2500 word article due, of which I had written about 1200 words. In the final days of the due date, I wrote in spurts. I would write a paragraph then close the document and do something else. When I felt like I wanted to return to it, I’d open up the document and continue writing. I also wrote modularly – by splitting the article into sections and writing the sections that I felt like writing about. I sent the completed article off before the deadline and was less stressed than I was when I forced myself to work in the document until it was done.
3. I am committed to my transformation (beyond personal development).
I’m currently enrolled in a one-year program called Authentic Thinking for Creative Evolution. One may consider this a PhD-level program on the study of consciousness. I was originally not prepared for the level and depth of reading that we do for the class. I struggled with the reading assignments, I rebelled against the meditation practices, and I rationalized about deviating from my commitments.
My turning point was my decision to go to the very first book we had to read and taking my time with each and every word until I understood the sentence. Then I would take my time with each sentence until I understood the concept. When I finally understood, for the first time, what Rudolf Steiner was talking about in his preface to Philosophy of Freedom, I felt what Helen Keller must have felt when she finally understood that the sign “water” meant the substance “water”. We are half-way through the program, and I’m still working on the first book while concurrently reading at my snail’s pace other reading assignments, but my commitment is what will get me through a journey that can be easily given up for easier paths.
I added a qualifier “beyond personal development” because I see what I’m engaged in right now is different from the personal development activities I had engaged in the past, and in which I was quite proficient. To me, transformation requires an ability to truly see the world as the world is, to truly see oneself as the self is, and to truly experience the timelessness and spacelessness of “now”. Transformation requires me to know where my thoughts come from, whether my thoughts are truly my own or adopted from someone else’s information, whether my actions are guided by my own thoughts, and how I could tell the difference. I want to know what Albert Einstein wants to know – God’s mind.
This requires tremendous effort on my part, beyond just reading a self-help book or attending a seminar, or watching sensational DVDs on the law of attraction. It requires a systematic breakdown of belief systems, analytical and synthetic frameworks of understanding, and a ridiculous amount of discipline. I’ve said elsewhere and I’ll say it here; there is no “Secret”, but whatever is supposed to be “the” Secret has remained a secret not because it is unaccessible, esoteric, or mysterious, but because it requires a level of commitment and trust that the ego is all too happy to rebel against.
There are many tips and tricks that you can get to success. What I’ve written above guides my life (number 3), optimizes my journey (number 2), and cures a mindtrash poison (number 1).
