This is paraphrasing the famous Leo Tolstoy quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This is the Anna Karenina principle… As all principles do, it applies to many, maybe even all areas of life. A principle is the same as a distinction… I say.
But truth is, if you know distinctions, if you know patterns, there are only about 50 different ways to get stuck… and your way is just one or two of those.
I got lucky today. I got to see something I haven’t seen in a long time.
It’s been many years that I “shared” with anyone.
Sharing is a Landmark Education distinction: you talk about some gain in your life, in a particular way, and if you did it well, the other person gets a tiny bit more than just a whiff of what you are “sharing”; they get a taste of it. A taste of your gain…As if you’ve given them a bite of your triple chocolate fudge cake… lol.
We were both early for the exercise class, and she was really relieved that she wasn’t going to be the only student…
As I was changing to shorts, and gym shoes, I asked if it would be OK with her if I bragged..
Let’s see how you write… and then we’ll see how you live your life.
Most people first-draft-people… they never re-write. Others carefully craft the format, but don’t touch what they said… the content. And then others wait until they think they have something profound to say… and that is rarely.
All good writing is re-writing. Both writing literature and “writing”, crafting your life, your story. ((Most people never re-write. They present their first draft in everything. A real good secret of how not to amount to anything or much)) If you are not willing to write badly you are not willing to write well either. And if you can’t see that your first draft is bad, you will never look at it again.
The most important thing I never learned in Landmark… that allowed me to grow
In 1967 I applied to participate in a 6-day on site advanced program in Landmark… it was still called Werner Erhard and Associates at the time.
I was denied. The staff member for admittance told me: Until you learn the difference between thinking and doing, you can’t do the course.
I had no idea what she meant. But I wanted to do the course… so I called her daily. And tried different ways to prove to her that I knew the difference… I got in by mistake.
Parents are not trained educators. They don’t allow you to be a child: they only care about themselves… not you, no matter how much they pretend, even to themselves. You, as a parent, are the same way…
You would be better off living in a children’s home where everyone is trained in personal growth.
Because parents are much like those fraudulent personal growth, get rich, get well and thin, “take a tablet and become forever young/pain free/etc.” marketers.
Why? I guess a stupid person cannot teach another to be smart.
What is smart? It is smart to Learn from Life. Life has been around, successfully, way longer than you and me.
With some movies I ponder for years why I liked it.
One of these movies is The Princess Bride. Why do I love The Princess Bride? Why do I watch it a few times a year, especially when my energy level is low?
Because, for me, the movie is about persistence. It’s about working towards something remote and maybe even impossible, and yet…
There are a ton of amazing quotable sayings in that movie… here is one:
Buttercup: You mock my pain!
Man in Black: Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnVY2zpVTNg
I like everything in the movie, but get especially energized by the Spaniard. Afte
The current state of human intelligence… and I mean the overall intelligence, can be easily tracked on detective movies… British ones are more honest than American movies.
As you may know, I like to watch those… I learn from them as much as from any course, while I am entertained as well.
The quality of a person’s life, your life, boils down to actions… and each and every action is a result of a choice.
The accuracy of your actions is a function of how many patterns you recognize in the world.
It’s perplexing to watch humans trying to eat soup with a fork.
Because while industry, science have advanced, humans, the race, has gone backwards.
As a race.
Backwards in intelligence… intellect, emotional, social, relationship, etc.
And obviously in vibration.
Pam Ragland‘s theory was (is?) that it is negativity that is doing it.
But I watched the 26 people in her course, where she wiped the negativity, and people’s behavior, their affinity to learning new tricks, growing, did not change.
I worked as a friend and coach with some of them, and I can tell you: wiping aw
People make the changes, the tiny, near invisible changes in what they see, what they do, how they do it, because it is their choice. ((In health, wealth, love, and fulfillment.))
What does this mean?
When you make a change because you saw that you needed to, then that change can become permanent. It becomes part of who you are.