Posts from — February 2010

Do you compromise your ideals and standards?  If you live in our culture chances are you do.  Now this might seem like a harsh judgment, but it’s really not intended to be.  Most of us have learned that compromise is good and sometimes life just won’t meet our expectations.  One of my commitments in life is to put an end to that way of thinking.  Yes, I am committed to the end of compromise.  Be clear I’m not saying an end to collaboration.  I’m not suggesting an end to people helping one another.  I’m declaring an end to the compromise of our ideals and standards.

In my experience, people compromise for one fundamental reason – they’ve bought into the current reality.  They’ve forgotten that they have the power to create something else.  From a design perspective, the only purpose of current reality is to be used as a reference point for what you want.  As a reference point, the “job” of current reality to reveal what you don’t have that you want.  It’s also, of course, is going to be screaming really loudly that you cannot have it.  Why?  Because if the current reality supported you having what you wanted now, you’d either have it OR you’d believe that you could have it, and so not having it in this moment, wouldn’t occur as a problem to you.  It would just be something for you to handle.  Certainly, you wouldn’t feel the temptation to compromise your ideals and standards.

Wherever you are sitting right now, imagine some simple you’d like to have.  Imagine you want a glass of your favor wine or imagine you’d like a piece of chocolate cake.  Chances are you don’t have some melodramatic story for why you can’t have that simple thing.  Notice how clear you’re thinking is – there’s the current reality (no wine, no cake) and there’s the future, the reality you want to create (wine, cake).  If you held those two simple visions in your mind, the relationship of where you are to where you want to be, you would very naturally take action toward what you want to create.  You’d get up and uncork a bottle of wine, or go to the store and buy one.  You’d heat up the oven to bake that chocolate cake.

“C’mon Bill, life isn’t just about wine and cake.  It’s much more complex than that.”  The problem isn’t that your other goals are more difficult and complex that leads you to compromise, your fundamental problem is you don’t think of your other goals in this very simple way. We make it more complex and act like the fact that we think life is more complex means that life is, in fact, more complex.  Robert Fritz, author of The Path of Least Resistance, calls this force – the force that exists between where you are and where you want to be – structural tension.  Structural tension is healthy and when you clearly identify where you are relative to where you want to be, your mind starts to resolve the tension naturally by moving you forward toward your goal.  That is provided you don’t put anything in-between to muck up the works.

I’m not suggesting that because you want something guarantees you’ll get it.  The point is that whether you get it or not, the fact remains that you want it.  And so the reality is that either you’re moving toward it by creating or you’re living a life of compromise.

Maybe just maybe, the real juice of life comes from how you live it instead of whether you always win.  Notice I said whether you always win.  Getting what you want is a part of the creative process and so it’s both whether you win or lose and how you play the game that matters.

Have you ever noticed that there is always a tremendous amount of evidence for why things must stay the same and very little evidence for why they can change?  We throw phrases around like “In reality,” as if those words have somehow endowed us with the power to speak the ultimate truth.  What often goes unnoticed is that the only reason we can cast dispersions on the current reality is because we also have a concept about how life should look.  Without the picture of what you want, there would be nothing to compare the current reality to.

Having this picture of what we want is extremely powerful, but often we use it to make the current reality wrong.  “It shouldn’t be this way.”  “You shouldn’t be like this.”  We beat ourselves and others up for not living up to our pictures rather than using our pictures to create our future.  What if you started interacting with others from your vision of who you want them to be.  Doing this will likely not make them change overnight, but  stop and think about what it’s like to be around someone who only sees the best in you.  Doesn’t it feel great?   Doesn’t it make you want to grow, become more, become better?  There’s something truly magical about being seen this way.

What is that magic?  It’s space.  It’s space to be who we are now and more importantly, it’s the space to grow and become more.  You’re always going to have two pictures – the picture of how life is is AND the picture of how you want life to be.  Transformation begins when you stop using your picture of how you think things should be to make the current reality wrong, and start using that picture to create life how you want it to be.  Just because there’s little evidence to support your future doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.

That’s the mindset of a designer - being able to see past how things are to create what’s next.  This possibility, this magic is available to us at every moment in every situation.  Some might think that this point of view is naïve; that we can’t just deny the possibility that sometimes bad things happen.  A designer of life doesn’t deny anything.  A designer knows that bad things might happen.  A designer knows there are risks to creating.  A designer knows that failure is a possibility.  But what a designer of life also knows is that picture of what he or she wants isn’t going anywhere.  It’s here to stay.  It’s part of who they are.  It deserves to be honored and used in a way that will actually make a difference for people.  Either that picture will be used to crucify the current reality or it will be used as the source for making life better.

How are you going to use your picture of the future?

Last week, I wrote a post about the idea that life is not personal.  This week I want to delve more deeply into this idea and give you more power as a designer in your life.  So here’s the next piece of the puzzle: You are not the things you design.  I know on some level, this seems obvious.  I’d like you to consider that each of us personalizes some of the things that we have created and are creating in our lives.

Imagine a young man or woman who is looking to find love in their life.  They want to find a lover, a soul mate, a mate, etc.  This person might start to think something like, “How do I find someone?”  “How do I find someone who’ll like me?”  “I guess I’ll have to start asking people out?  I hate that.  It’s makes me feel so uncomfortable.”  “It’s so hard to meet people.  I go to work; I come home.  Where am I going to find this person?”  This individual has made finding that special someone all about them.  More importantly, they’ve made the “game” of finding a mate contingent on their limitations and worldview.  Predictably, this person will formulate strategies for finding someone that are not based on what works; instead they’ll be based on what the person does or doesn’t like to do, how comfortable they feel taking the actions, etc.

If we approach the “game” of finding a mate from the perspective of true design, we’d begin with questions like, “How does one find a mate?” or better yet, “What’s the nature of the game?”  The nature of finding someone essentially involves product development, communication, marketing and sales.  Now when I say product development, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be true to who they are.  This is not about being phony.  At the same time, the “game” of finding someone is to make yourself as attractive to the world as you possibly can.   So rather than judging and evaluating yourself, “I’ll never find someone to love me,” one could begin to seek out feedback from others on their personality and their physical presentation.  Again, this isn’t to make you into someone that you’re not, but these are legitimate non-personal questions that are relevant to the game of romance.  Imagine if Derek Jeter wasn’t open to feedback about his swing?  Or if Robert DeNiro wasn’t open to input from his director on how to deliver a line?  When you take on the mastery of something and can see it as separate and distinct from you, you naturally want to know all the different facets that would make you excellent, and you become open to feedback.

When you can see that finding a mate involves on some level marketing yourself, you can begin to think about how that can be done?  Who can you enlist to help you?  If you find that you’re awkward in conversation, you can create a training plan around this so you can develop yourself over time.  You may never have the true gift of gab, but finding someone doesn’t mean that you master all the elements of the game; it just means that you maintain a certain level of conscious proficiency about them.

The point here is whether we’re talking about love or golf or building a business or being a manager or any aspect of your life, the thing you are creating has it’s own nature and requirements.  Yes, there are a countless number of ways to build a business or find a mate.  Yes, there is much room for an individual to be innovative and creative in the pursuit of what they are designing.  In fact, you will be amazed at how free and creative your mind becomes when you stop resisting the nature of the things you want to create.  That’s what all the ruckus is about.  Your mind just wants to know that you are taking care of it, and doing the things required to move your life forward.  When you don’t honor that, your mind goes berserk and it can start to berate you, berate others, become very loud and unsettled.  As annoying as it can be, your mind knows when there are holes in your plan.  When you can let it know that you’ve thought it all through and are covering all the bases, it will let you be.  Even if you consciously decide to not take on an aspect of the “game,” it will know that you’ve made that decision and still have a plan to take care of it.

Designing your life doesn’t guarantee success.  It doesn’t mean that you will always win.  It does though put you in the driver seat.  The most important thing to remember is that it’s not you that you are designing; it’s your life.  You don’t confuse baking chocolate chips cookies for you.  You don’t mistake growing a garden for you. You don’t mistake building a house for you.  If you don’t personally know how to build a house, you don’t come up with some warped strategy of building a house that is limited by your knowledge and skill.  You go find someone who does know.  Your focus is on the outcome itself, not whether you can personally do it.  It’s not personal.

“C’mon Bill, building a house is not the same thing as finding true love.”

I know but … imagine if it was.