When something isn’t working consider that it’s because there is something that you don’t know.

Whether the something that isn’t working is money, love, health, business, school… the answer is always “there is something you don’t know.”

The brilliance of this statement that turned a broke loser, a serial nebbich, Harv Eker into a multimillionaire T. Harv Eker. The brilliance is that because you don’t know what it is that you don’t know… you need to open yourself up to looking. At everything. And a lot… Expose yourself to seeing stuff. He did it, and he is now rich. This one sentence, this one statement, this one habit.

This isn’t what he teaches, because this statement gives you all the power, and you don’t buy stuff when you have the power… He is so rich because no one understand this statement… But why?

Because you hear: you have to look for what you don’t know… ugh.

But what works is not looking for… It’s looking. Staying present, staying open, staying aware. ((Remember the article: the best predictor of success is the level of your awareness… ))

“Looking for” presupposes that you know what you are looking for…

But you don’t know, do you?

Of course the internet cesspool will give you potential answers with a price tag or free. You read, you listen you watch, and everything looks like an answer, maybe even THE answer. And thinking that you have found your answer will always stop you from looking.

But I promise you that what you don’t know and need to know is a bottomless pool… if you found one thing a day that you didn’t know, the knowing of which makes a difference, you could continue for many years and never empty the pool of things that you don’t know that would make a difference for you.

So don’t look for. Look.

But don’t look, don’t search  in your mind, mind you… it’s not there.

Now, I have been saying all this forever and none of you have been following the advice, with the exception of maybe two people.

Are you belligerent, are you resistant, are you dumb?

I actually don’t know why you are not looking.

I do have a hunch though: one current meme for success is that you need to focus on what you want to have, and then success will come. Not true.

You see, you can do an awful lot for what you want, and still have no success. Why?

There is something that you don’t know.

I hate to be repetitive, but in the narrow trench of your life, you probably don’t ever think that there is something that you don’t see, that there is something that you don’t know.

You don’t think you have a blind spot either…

But what separates successful people and unsuccessful people, in any profession, is how wide their “trench” is…

Widening your trench is what I call “looking”.

The narrow trench is being a one-trick-pony, the widened trench is being a well-rounded human.

But to be able to see your life you have to look outside. You will not find what you don’t know looking at your life your life as you have always looked, you have to look outside and you have to look differently. With curiosity.

Get out of your trench

Coaching is often the best way to venture outside of your trench. And my 67 step coaching program is designed to force you to go further than a regular coaching program would: hundreds of new principles and areas get revealed to you if you can look outside of your trench, outside of your agenda.

All you have to do is keep your eyes open, and look. Not through the mind: “I like it/don’t like it” “I agree/I don’t agree” “I do that/I don’t do that” “I knew that/I didn’t know that.”

Just look and allow the mind to chatter but do not allow it to take over.

Because if you leave it up to your mind… you won’t see anything new. You won’t even look. You’ll watch it like television… passively. Like entertainment.

And nothing in your life will change.

Now, truthfully: to the degree you are willing to look, and the further you are willing to move from your agenda, the more things you’ll see, and life will start to work better, without you having to do anything much.

You don’t even have to know what you saw… It is enough that Consciousness saw it and Consciousness knows it.

But your normal mode of listening to anything is through your agenda.

Your agenda makes even the desert or the savannah a tunnel. Or a narrow lane.

You’ll make the same mistakes you’ve always made, feel the same feelings you have always felt, because nothing has changed… you haven’t seen anything new.

And this has been your life. To the T.

Why rats are smarter than humans?

Using a rat experiment analogy: you once found cheese in one of the tunnels. Next time you go there: no cheese. But there has to be cheese, you say, and you run in, run out… No cheese.

So you start to decorate your tunnel, move in… and live without cheese, hoping that one day someday it will be there.

A rat will run through all tunnels until he finds cheese… a rat is smarter than you.

Maybe because the rat isn’t living in his mind. You do.
Maybe because the rat doesn’t expect reality to match his idea and expectation of it. You do.

Hey, stupid as the stupid does.

Forrest Gump wasn’t stupid… he was brilliant. Because brilliant is as the brilliant does.

But good news…

“Consider how hard it is to change yourself and you’ll understand what little chance you have in trying to change others,” wrote editor Jacob M. Braude. Normally I would endorse his poignant counsel, but for the foreseeable future I am predicting that the first half of it won’t fully apply to you. Why? Because you are entering a phase that I regard as unusually favorable for the project of transforming yourself. It may not be easy to do so, but it’ll be easier than it has been in a long time. And I bet you will find the challenge to reimagine, reinvent, and reshape yourself at least as much fun as it is hard work.

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