The Desert of Arizona
Smoky 60 Degrees
We’ve had a forest fire burning in the area for the past week or so. It started with a lightning strike, I believe, and it’s being allowed to continue as a controlled burn.
So every day, we wake up to skies filled with smoke and the mountains hidden from view.
It struck me as funny this morning as this is exactly how it can feel in business sometimes. You wake up and the view of the path forward is just a wee bit hard to see.
In the past, long before I started working on the platform approach to client attraction, this was a serious problem. When you can’t see the right path forward, where are you supposed to place your next step? Well, who knows?
With the platform model, this is not such a problem. Because you still do the same thing whether or not you know what the next step is. You publish your platform, you add value to the world, you watch what happens.
What tends to happen, over time, is that you end up in great places, attracting great opportunities, without really knowing exactly how it happened.
As Bill Bonner of Agora fame said years ago: “The result is we don’t get where we intended to go but end up where we ought to be.” Kind of sums it up.
Bill Bonner has blazed a trail of serious success being open and honest with millions that he doesn’t know much about a lot of things. Will the economy go up, will it go down, will it crash? Who knows, he says.
He’s probably one of the few with the guts to tell the truth.
And that brings us to the one truth that anyone with an oversized ego and insecurity problem will never utter:
No one knows anything.
Will this work? Will that work? Should I do this? Should I do that?
Who knows?
When you accept you don’t know, you can move boldly in a direction with little expectation. When you accept no one else knows either, you can take the power you were giving to them back for yourself. Oddly enough, this is a smart thing to do. Because it allows you to focus on the work, to study the results or lack thereof, without getting yourself all mixed up in the emotional drama.
You can always spot a master teacher in just about any discipline. Music, martial arts, spirituality, whatever… The master teacher is the one who is not afraid to speak the truth.
The more mastery you achieve, the less you tend to know, the more you realize there IS to know. But all of the work you’ve done to achieve mastery has provided the proof so that you actually KNOW this truth. Makes you chuckle when you think about it.
Most people who aren’t at that level THINK they know something, which is why it’s easy to go through life completely blind.
The system trains sheep to NEED others to believe they know something.
The poor sheep. Little do they know this need is an enormous obstacle to ever discovering anything.