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.
This is probably the most shocking sentence in the whole 67 step program.
I literally don’t know anyone who lives that way.
People try to succeed, try a diet, try this and try that… while their plane crashes in every area.
So what is the difference between who are like that, who are on their way to become that kind of person, and others who never ever land their plane on the landing strip?
Oh no! This video software that used to work doesn’t work any more. I cried out… This can happen to anyone. Technology changes so rapidly, keeping pace with it is both expensive and time consuming.
Sometimes there is an upgrade. Nowadays upgrades cost money… or the software developer simply abandoned you… and you are stranded with a software that doesn’t work any more.
I have been teaching what I teach for seven years. Teach people a world view that has been tested and true, and includes the invisible. This world view is sharply different from the accepted norms… but it works, instead of just being a nice theory like what psychologists and philosophers teach. Or even Landmark Educati
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.
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.
I have 2-3 conversations a day with my students, conversations that should be made public.
Here is one from today:
Him: Wow. I realized on yesterday’s call that there are memes and voices when I am on the call and they are disturbing me to get things more than I am doing. Or disturbing me t
I just learned something terrible about myself. A lot of people hear me as if I were their father.
You see, in my family I was the dunce… meaning stupid. And even though I had straight A grades, and I was good at everything I tried, I remained stupid for my family.
How this works I don’t know. But this seems to be the dynamic: people make a decision about you, and then they never really look at you again.
You take it on, as the truth, and freeze into it. You allow it to guide you through life.
With me it was a little different, because I am defiant. I am not defiant to the person who speaks it, I am defiant to the saying. I am going to prove them wrong.
“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