The End of Compromise

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.