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…every step of the way
Here are a few unexpected ways you keep yourself trapped in your misery:
1. You have a standard for everything and everyone but often not yourself.
How it should be, how it should go, what is right and what is wrong behavior, looks, everything.
You apply these standards to measure everything and everyone… and, of course, everything and everyone falls short… including yourself.
Standards are something that you invented, or alternatively bought into. You relate to them as if they were universal and mandatory for everyone…
It is all made up. There are no standards that survive reality: these are all made up reality, not binding to everyone, maybe not even to anyone.
They are showing, instead, to you and everyone who is in agreement, to how superior you are, how much you know, how special you are. You use your standards to make yourself higher and mightier than others… and you buy yourself the right to judge at will.
When you look, your standards are rigid, and pretty much impossible to fulfill…
In fact you, yourself, fail at each while every standard you tout as a universal rules for life.
Standards are a straitjacket. A standard binds you and it binds others around you… It is not the standards that actually do it, standards are normal, any industry is well to set some standards. No, your standards are a straitjacket because they keep you in the imaginary world of right and wrong, and out of reality.
They are part of the invisible reality, because they are hard to see.
I looked at my Playground students through the filter: do they look at the world through standards, and 40% do. They have a fixed idea
- how things should be,
- how they should be,
- also how their parents, co-workers, spouses, children should be,
…and they are miserable. and to boot, they cannot, for the life of them, see that there is nothing is EVER wrong in reality.
Even with the Seeing Reason DNA capacity.
The standards blind them, block them from seeing reality.
One other thing that is shared in that 40%: they cannot accept, they cannot appreciate that the way to get to a good solution is to eliminate the poor solutions.
They want to get to third base with every ball… they hate to strike out, they hate mistakes.
Every winner in history got to winning through lots of mistakes, lots of missed balls, lots of false starts.
But to this 40%, they cannot even hear it. They only care about right moves… and for the most part, wanting to do the right thing is a certain paralyzing agent. An immobilizer… and these people are underachievers.
Mind you, there are more than one single way to become an underachiever… but this is one of the main ways… trying to do the RIGHT THING every time.
2. Ideals.
Ideals, by their definition, are unattainable. They are pie in the sky perfection, flawless. Flawless does not exist in reality. It is beyond the realm of possibility. The earth wobbles. The weather changes. You are cold and then you are hot.
But for those who are trapped in measuring themselves or their lives against some ideal, reaching those ideals is a must… and because it is impossible they are miserable.
Desire trap is one of the causes and also one of the symptoms of this person…
Having ideals, unattainable ‘goals’… is the perfect way to do stupid things, and not amount to anything. The higher that gap between your desire number and your ambition number, the more you are trapped in this particularly nasty trap…
Smart means: being smart in your actions. Stupid means: being stupid in your actions.
It is what it is… as long as you have these things, these shoulds, and these rules operate, you can count on your action to be stupid.
3. Rule-making
Rule-making is as innate to homo sapiens as meaning making. First you make meaning, and then you make binding rule from it…
If this weren’t the case, religions would have no soil to take roots in.
If you are a rule-maker, I know you are a weakling. I know you are self-protecting, risk averse, an underachiever, probably cowardly.
And you hold onto your rules as if they were a life-preserver… while the truth about your rules is that they are preventing you from being able to become who you are… your Self.
All the rules are like pretenses, stick to you… and at best you can survive… and maybe provide us a good looking corpse.
The number one enemy of growth is your rules…
Enough said.
4. What about wanting to win every step of the way?
We hear that the path to success is through lots of failures, in fact the willingness to fail. Moreover, the intent to fail.
The Anna Karenina Principle, a real principle applies here: real success comes as the result of removing all the stuff, all the habits, all the moves, all the options that don’t work. Once you eliminate what doesn’t work, you get to what does, and then you win.
People who want to succeed, want to win, every step of the way, will never become successful. They either will be mediocre, or a failure because of no balls, because of no courage to eliminate what doesn’t work.
The once bitten twice shy… who filed all the past incidents into their future… and now they are hoping to get success by doing nothing.
