A New Kind of Expert

When people ask me what my book A Life Worth Living is about, I tell them it’s a book about how changing your life will save the world.  Typically, when we hear someone talk about “changing our life” or “saving the world,” just one can sound overwhelming.  “Change my life?  My god, I barely have enough time to live my life.  And forget about saving the world.”   Imagine if “changing your life” meant experiencing more joy and ease now.  Imagine if it meant experiencing more happiness and doing more of the things you want to do in life today.  Imagine if the road to these things wasn’t paved with struggle and effort; instead, the road itself was a new road in and of itself – one designed not to just get you to more of what you want one day, someday, but actually designed to give you more of what you want today.

“Alright Bill, sign me up.  But … I don’t see how me having a better life will the change the world?”  When most of look out at the world, we see a lot of struggle and effort.  There seems like so much to overcome and we almost forget that we are a part of the world.  It seems so big, so daunting and the natural response is to question whether our life actually makes a difference.  We’ve become so used to reporting on the state of the world, we forget to take into account how we arrived here today – by many, many people – people just like you – making choices over time of how to live.  What’s missing isn’t another Jesus, or a Mohammed, a Mother Teresa or a Gandhi.  And it’s not because their message was inadequate, it’s simply because there are more of us than them.  To change the world will take the same thing it took to build the world we have – many people living life a different way.  If you can take a step back and see the world as an outcome of design, then you can begin to see that what’s missing is a new kind of expert.

We’ve come to believe that all of the wonderful things we want to experience in life come as a result of hard work and struggle, and it never seems to occur to us that thinking that way has resulted in us becoming experts in the “field” of hard work and struggle.  We are hardcore experts in the field of overcoming that which we’ve created, but that expertise has come at the expense of becoming experts in the things we really want.  It’s kept us from devoting our time, energy and focus to becoming experts in the “fields” of love, joy and fulfillment.  We know how to struggle to find love, but do we know how to ease into love?  Or flow into fulfillment?

The road to becoming a new kind of expert is not a mystery.  You become an expert in these things just like you become an expert in any field: you study it.  The biggest barrier to our education is the barrier between “being and experiencing these wonderful things” and then “living real life.”    “I’ll get to learning something about love, but right now I have to deal with reality.  I have bills to pay.”  Unfortunately, who you are in your “real life” is who you are.  Each moment of life you demonstrate your expertise.

So to begin, examine your life and ask questions like, “What does my life teach people?  What does my life say about what “fields” I’m an expert in?  Am I an expert in how great life can be?  Or does my life demonstrate an expertise in making life a struggle?”  Once you understand where you expertise lies, then you can choose.  “Do I want to continue to be that type of expert?” and if the answer is no, then it’s simply a matter of asking the question, “How do I begin today?  How do I begin today to be the type of expert, the type of person that I really want to be?”

Ask new questions and you will become a new type of expert.