A Middle Piece (Part 1 of 4)

Part 1   |   Part 2   |   Part 3    |    Part 4

Imagine if you couldn’t tell the difference between a pen and your watch?  Or a key and a telephone?  Or your child and your boss?  If you couldn’t do these things you couldn’t live.  You’d be asking your child for a raise and your boss to pick up her toys.  This would result in an obvious loss of effectiveness in life.  And of course, there’s a whole world, a contextual world behind all of these things.  To use a pen effectively, you have to know how to write, which means you have to know letters, words, and sentence structure.  You have to know paper.  To use a watch effectively, you have to be able to tell time.  You have to know what time is!  My point is there’s a lot going on in the processing of life, but one thing that allows for you to understand and use all these different things is an ability we all take for granted – the ability to see one thing from another.

This may seem like a silly idea, but consider this – the areas in your life where you think you’re not effective (and are afraid you’re never going to be) result simply from the fact that you cannot see one thing from the other.  In this series, I’m going to delve deeper into this idea, but I want to be clear about something right from the beginning.  Any explanation is only intended to help you see one thing from the other.  Don’t confuse the explanation with the phenomenon itself.  As ridiculous as it may seem, we all have aspects of our lives where the way we live is like trying to tell time with a pen, or trying to unlock a door with a telephone.  We’re confused about what we’re dealing with, and it is this and this alone that leads to our inability to create what we want.  

And one last point, the immediate (and freeing) implication of this idea is that any loss of effectiveness doesn’t have anything to do with explanations like not being disciplined enough or smart enough or assertive enough or really “anything” enough.  In other words, you are not broken (and so you can stop trying to fix yourself)!  In fact, the more you try to work on these things, the worse you make it.  I’m not saying that people don’t have natural gifts and talents, as well as inherent deficits and weaknesses.  What I’m saying is that those things are not the source of creating what you want.  If you attempt to write a bestselling novel with paper and a spatula, it doesn’t matter how much talent you have as a writer.  You’re not going to write anything.  Explanations like “I’m not ______ enough,” while true in some cases, mostly have become the default explanations to compensate for the fact that we simply haven’t learned that the critical ability is the one that lies behind the talent – the ability to see one thing from another.

The good news then is once you begin to get a hang of this, it really will be as obvious as “Oh, I’m using a plunger to drill a hole in my wall.  Duh, let me get my drill.”  You’ll make the shift and boom, your power and effectiveness will be restored, and that world of default explanations and trying to fix yourself will be left in the dust, while you move forward creating what you want.

So just what is the one thing from another that we’re not seeing?