The Home of Steven Barnes
Author, Teacher, Screenwriter


Friday, April 13, 2012

A little equation

Continuing study for the Sexual Transmutation project, there were a number of things that I wanted to do, including looking more deeply into Think And Grow Rich, ts most popular successors (arguably books like "Psycho-Cybernetics", "Unlimited Power", "the One Minute Manager" and "The Secret" and so forth) and what the critical path might be. Simplified sufficiently, you get down to that "pure energy" that masters of success are referencing when they make it sound "easy" to achieve at high levels.

After all--everyone knows how to win a fight: don't get hit, and hit the other guy really, really hard. Simple, right? Well...yeah, after a life-time of study of all the component parts.

And hey, writing is easy, right? Just read a lot, spend a few hours a week tapping at your computer, send it off to the right people and cash the checks, right? Well...yeah, after 10,000 hours of work, study, and savvy marketing, as well as flow-state management.

And nothing could be easier than love, right? Just meet Mr. or Ms. Right, speak your heart, and live happily ever after. Right? Well...after a lifetime of honest hard work (or zen-like heart-centered flow) you might accept your humanity, embrace your mirror, and neither aim too high or accept too little...in which case love can be as easy as rolling off a dog. So to speak.

But for anyone who hasn't reached the level of "unconscious competence" in the core disciplines of clarity, habit, keeping your word to yourself, telling the truth no matter how it hurts, and separating yourself from the voices in your head, these "easy" things can seem impossibly complicated.

All I can do is present different models of what "the thing" is from my perspective, and offer ways to maximize chances of success--because nothing can guarantee success, while there are plenty of things that will pretty much guarantee failure.

To that end, boiling down a huge amount of this stuff, a way of looking at that "guaranteed failure" thing came up when I realized that a particular equation was very useful in communicating the process (I experimented with this over the weekend.) Basically, the equation goes:

C (clarity of goals) x F (faith) x A (ceaseless action) x G (an attitude of gratitude and joy)= maximum chance of success.

Each of these can be broken down into countless sub-strategies. But the most important thing to grasp is that this is a multiplicative, not additive, equation. That means that if you give yourself a "0" in ANY of the four categories, you totally screw your chances of reaching your dream.

There is a lot of truth in this, and from the perspective that we are looking for the simplest ways of expressing complex concepts, I think I want to play with this a bit more before moving on.

Steve

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