CREATION IS SUBTRACTION
Creating what you want is a game of deduction and subtraction. A detective and maths equation. One that must be played on repeat, ad infinitum, for the rest of your days.
It’s a game that only the most intellectually rigorous and intellectually honest people will win. Problem is, most people don't know what this means.
You have to have the mind of winter. Stripped bare, COLD and clear to the eye.
If you want to create (new identity, career change, true love, a body of work, more money, whatever) you need to ...
a) deduce who/what you are… and what you want
b) ruthlessly subtract everything that doesn't fit that vision
I'm kind of obsessed with deduction and subtraction (and I may tell you why another time).
I have a client, a HNW entrepreneur in his early forties, who started with me in December 2018. He circled around working with me for about a year before that. He is handsome, smart, successful; a true Alpha – and he has been lost for years. He admitted he had been adding things to his life compulsively and without true discernment, all in the quest to find purpose and create what he wanted with the days he has left. He was planning to ADD MORE to his life as he began work with me (I won’t mention what these things were because it’s private, but they were significant). He was feeling quite frantic and yet also so paralysed.
After two weeks of working with me, he sent me a message saying that he had progressed more in those two weeks with me than he had in two years with his life coach and psychologist.
I’d imagine this is partly because I don’t tiptoe around the illusions that my clients are labouring under. I’m ruthless about pointing them out (aka I show genuine compassion). And it’s also partly because I think people over-complicate what is, in fact, a very simple thing.
It’s really simple to transform your external environment when you are clear on the internal environment – who you are and what you REALLY are and want.
I do not believe that creating change – which demands, before ANYTHING else, that you find out who you are and what you want – takes time, or requires adding things. It’s like adding more hay to the haystack in order to find the needle. Madness.
But my client did not know who he was or what he wanted. This is the first work that needs to be done.
The work of the Magician.
I fully believe in a person’s ability to completely and (almost) immediately alter their experience – what they create with their life – based on their mastery of their internal and external Magician (the alchemist archetype). I do it every day, have been doing it since my earliest memories, and although it’s natural for me and it’s my particular area of genius expertise, it’s also not ‘hard’ for others to master it.
To be clear:
The internal Magician = unconscious/subconscious truth about who you are
The external Magician = your conscious ability to create tangible results in the world
SIDE NOTE: The Magician archetype is seen throughout society and history as the powerful co-creator of his/her experience in each and every moment (think of Ferris Bueller – he’s a classic Magician).
So, first you must access the subconscious/unconscious. Then you need to tools to alter your perception, behaviour, thoughts and actions in order to put number 1/subconscious into play.
To repeat – to transform your world, the two things you need:
1. Know who/what you are
2. Know what you want (based on number 1)
Resist the urge to work these out by adding things to your life. Men, women, awards, degrees, board appointments, designer clothes, volunteering commitments…
Society will tell you the answer to all your troubles is to add.
But. Just. Resist.
(As I wrote to my client: “You must stop contracting out the 'soul/spirit' grunt work. You must suck up the fact that it can only be done by you.”)
This year, I have cleared a lot off my plate in order to focus on my writing.
When I whittle “it” down to the essence of who/what I am and what I want; when I am 100% honest with myself about the thing I’d regret most on my deathbed (and that could be tomorrow, or 50 years from now) – what I am left with is the need to find out where a complete dedication to my writing, with me as a ‘channel’, would lead me.
So, I have applied – over and over and over again – the technique of deduction (coming to the conclusion of what I want, based on who I am) then subtraction (removing what doesn't fit that picture). In order to create what I want.
And this deduction and subtraction never ends. It’s my real life’s work. And I’ve married myself to it, like a nun to God. Committed.
There is no other path.