When you decide to go out to achieve some kind of goal there’s one of two possible outcomes. You either achieve it or you don’t. Maybe you regroup and try again or maybe you give up. But the reason for every failed strategy is that you reached what I call the breaking point.
photo credit: Emily VanWormer
The breaking point is either the point in the strategy that for some reason no longer fitted with who you are or what you wanted to do. And so you jumped off course before reaching your goal.
Or it’s the point where the design of the strategy proved to be flawed and so failed to reach you, your goal, even though you followed it’s lead.
Most of us live our lives by default and so we become overwhelmed by trying to satisfy a number of contrasting demands. This strategy doesn’t work so we get stressed when we hit our tolerance level for coping. That’s the breaking point for that strategy.
Maybe you seek to be loved by pleasing others. The breaking point for this strategy is when you have to choose who to please or when pleasing someone else means sacrificing your own happiness.
A robust strategy that will always work is based in purity.
Google’s unwavering dedication to providing more and more relevant search results works. Other search engines lost because they became less pure as they balanced the need to cash in.
Tiger Woods has been dedicated to winning at golf all his life. Nothing has got in his way and distracted him from winning. I’m sure there are other Golfers potentially as talented, but who had more balanced lives.
Dominoes Pizza stood out from countless other competitors because of their pure focus on speed of delivery.
photo credit: stu_spivack
Buddha focused only on enlightenment, overcoming the distractions of both comfort and self denial.
When you have a strategy that works, if you follow it purely, you will succeed. If you dilute your strategy, you will fail.
If your strategy fails, you learn from it and redesign a better, more robust strategy.
For example, we commonly think of strategy as something to be used in a military, business or team setting.
An army can seek to outnumber, bombard, siege or exhaust an enemy.
photo credit: pingnews.com
A business seeks to be the cheapest, the best quality, the most accommodating, the most convenient or the most advanced.
A sports team can aim at having individual skills or being a solid hardworking team.
photo credit: Lori Greig
But the quickest way to failure is to try to do them all.
What does any of this have to do with you?
Well you want to be loved, admired and respected, don’t you?
Not only that, but you want to be the most loved, admired and respected by certain people, such as your Parents, Partner, Children and Boss etc, don’t you?
And to be loved, admired and respected, you have to stand head and shoulders above all others for something. You can stand out as the prettiest, the most understanding, the brightest, the most fun, the most romantic, the most loving etc.
But if you follow the herd, which most of us do, trying to be as good as John at that or as naturally whatever as Jane at this, you’ll end up mediocre at a lot of things and blend into the anonymous crowd.
You have to have a strategy for life. Not because you’ll get the girl, or because it will fill the gap for the way your Father never loved you. But because it is what you are.
You were built and designed to fit into the mosaic of life. But we are all so busy, trying to make ourselves copies of some other square that the space we would complete lays empty.
photo credit: johannesfreund
You are what you are. Not by mistake. But by design.
If you are unhappy with what you are, it is only because you do not see what you could be. What you could be cannot be seen in the world, because otherwise you would not be. What you can be can only be found by looking within.
Purity, by which I mean the integrity between what you feel and what you do, is the way to find you. Compromise is selling your soul for a trinket or a compliment. Stay pure and you will find your way to the edge of evolution and you will find behind you a crowd who love, admire and respect you as the leading example at whatever it is that you are designed for.
But by then you will not care about the love, admiration and respect for you will understand that purity has it’s own reward, with a value far beyond anything anyone else can give you.
Want an example?
Jesus pushed the strategy of only responding with love beyond all limits.
Now what is your strategy that you can follow with equal zeal?
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
I really needed this today. I don’t comment often, but I appreciate your thouhts.
Thank you,
Heidi
Hi Rob
I’ve been reading everything and it makes sense to me.
I want to live my life with integrity and peace. I’ve left my husband recently, not because of your teachings, but it has helped me to focus myself. Now here is the question I’ve reached breaking point but now my husband is hurt. Why do I feel guilty for hurting him when he was the one that through his actions drove me
away. When do you stop feeling selfish for making the
right decision for your own happiness. Is that selfish?
This is the one idea for me that seems to push through the challenge of “understanding the truth” and being able to stay focused on it in any situation. I needed to hear it again as well.
A short time ago it dawned on me that just asking myself in any given moment what choice brought the most integrity (purity), could immediately clear the clutter in my mind over any issue. I haven’t developed the habit yet to do it automatically, but when I do it always works effortlessly. It’s such a simple way to stay on track and I think it’s as close to a magic bullet as anything.
P.S. to Teresia,
I think as Rob said when you truly follow your heart out of integrity for what you must do, even the most affected by it will ultimately understand.
When my wife broke the news to me last year that she was leaving, my knees got weak and the pain flooded over me, but in that moment I immediately felt an overwhelming sense of respect for her that I did not have up until that moment. It was undeniable.
It did not take away the pain and one year later I am just coming out of it, but in a letter I wrote her a couple months after her announcement , I told her the same thing I just told you. The “integrity” of what she did was irrefutable and I am now a better person for it.
Thanks Rob for putting a light on something so important.
Heidi,
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
Brian,
Thanks, your comments always add something valuable.
Teresia,
To live with integrity means that you accept life. All of it.
You can be true to yourself or try to please others.
Pain is caused when our idea of what we are, what we want and our general philosophy of life clashes with life.
So if your husband is hurt, then he can either adapt and grow so it no longer causes him pain or continue, in his illusion as he is, until the pain becomes so acute that he becomes motivated to find relief.
It is unfortunate, but few people will learn without pain. Therefore we mostly learn that the fire is hot by getting burnt.
To adapt what you do to avoid causing someone else pain is to attempt to shield them from truth. Which is to help them live in illusion as opposed to truth.