What if:

To whom it may concern:

Today, I am too well to spend this beautiful day confined within a prison-like building, giving my precious time and talents to someone else instead of my own creations.

Today, I am too well to believe that the only way I can survive in this world is to spend 8 hours of my precious day performing menial tasks and following someone else’s rules.

Today, I am too happy to feel the despair of the emptiness inside those moments in which I remember that I have passions, unfulfilled, dwindling in apathy because they have been starved as I nourished my fears.

Today, I am too loving to fear my failure, success, abandonment, pain and hardship that I have been told would ensue with either.

Because today, I know that abandoning my true Self in order to conform to a “norm” is the greatest pain and hardship I could ever experience.

Today, I am too open to be shut down by disapproval or cautionary tales, convinced by my misdirected beliefs that facing my good will ultimately end in my embarrassment, alienation and failure.

Today, I see the truth, and it heals me.

I am just calling because I won’t be coming in today.

I can’t “work” today.

I am too well.

Now, go to the gym!

-Eli

I had to answer this question recently and learned some valuable lessons. My partner and I are currently in our second course of the Keys to the Kingdom course. In this extremely valuable guided course, the participant is walked through a series of steps to raising his/her prosperity consciousness. As we went through this program the first time, I dealt with some of my own money demons, that of the victimization attitude that nothing ever works in my favor, as well as my distrust in my own ideas.

With our second start of the Keys course, we experienced the same thing that happened the first time. A pay cut! I was not surprised at all, but was extremely shocked by the amount of the pay cut – 23%! That night, I went home and as I meditated on what I should do, the thought came to me, almost of righteous indignation: I deserve $10,000 by the end of this month! As crazy as this sounds, I decided that was what I deserved and here are the things I am doing to realize my goal.

1. Believe that God/Spirit/Universe will prompt me to take whatever steps I should take. [1]
   1. I am a pretty sharp guy, but I believe that my genius is such that I am a part of a universal mind. The belief in this is what allows me to be open to the creative power of infinity. See Elizabeth Gilbert speaks about Creativity.
   2. I started writing down all of my best ideas.
2. Trust that all is well
   1. Worry has never added a cent to any one’s bank account.
   2. And when that thought doesn’t help, I affirm the good in my life. [2]
3. Act Upon Whatever Prompting I Receive
   1. No matter how unlikely or unorthodox. For me it worked like this:
      
   • I had a gym membership that I wanted to keep, but it was costing me $65 a month. Something prompted me to call the Gym and put it on hold. I felt hesitant, but I knew to follow my prompting. So I called and who answered? The owner. What did the owner do after I related my story? He gave me two months free!
     Total savings: $130.

   • The pay cut was only lasting two pay periods, but these pay periods were desperately important because of some things in my budget. So, I just trusted. Sitting at my desk at work, a co-worker fairly runs up and says, how about changing your exemptions from 4 to 30? It works! I already have a decent tax return coming, so I will end up just taking a bit out of my tax return early.
     Total savings: $885.

The key to remember is that, in the words of R. W. Emerson in Self-Reliance:

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.”

One final note: Don’t fall into the lack mentality trap of nominalizing your blessings when they come. Each blessing deserves your full and complete gratitude – this is the secret of raising your prosperity consciousness!

Notes

[1] Spirit - For me, the power of being tapped into a universal mind gives me the power to know that my best ideas are yet to come.

[2] Affirmation - Some people call this prayer, some people call it treatment, I call it changing my mind.

To some extent this is about what Leo Babauta from Zen Habits is doing in Radical Transparency, but it’s more than that. In some way or another, all of us hold some of this internal dialogue, self talk that beats us down and tells us that we are hypocritical or not authentic. My mentor calls this the “monkey-chatter” that totally absorbs our minds and keeps us from actually taking the steps that will create change in our lives.

So what’s the challenge? Well, one of the greatest ways of inspiration is to see not only the progress that others make in their journey of self renovation, but also the struggle. We are on this journey together, we are the same species. Let’s run it together!

The Challenge:

Minimalism?  Blog about it, and include a picture of your living room, your bedroom.

Financial guru? What kind of debts are you dealing with? Has your income improved since you began your financial journey? Share the information.

Self Employment? What has changed in your life since you started working for yourself? Publish the contrast.

Is it about health for you? Tell us about the progress you’ve made – give us the contrast of the before and the after. Let us know what you are still struggling with.

This challenge is about:

1. State your Lifestyle Design Focus.
2. Show your current state.

For me, this will look something like this: (in summary form)

My LifeStyle design focus is becoming healthy and proud of it.

My current state is:

1. I have been working out for the past 3 weeks.
2. I have begun to eat healthier.
3. I have not lost the weight that I would like to lose.

My cardio exercise has suffered at the hands of my weight training.

Now this is just a summary of what the Lifestyle Design Challenge post will look like, but I think you get the point.

If you decide to take this challenge, post a comment here so that we can share together! I will be following this post very soon with my Lifestyle Design Challenge post on Health.

Not exactly true, no. But what if?

Such a project would certainly change perspectives by:

1. Present a highly coordinated image that appeals to consumers and media.
2. Make the story believable and highly supported.
3. Highlight the power of media (true or not) to influence our assigned wants.
4. Bring new media into respect as a force for the dissemination of ideas (true or not).

In many respects, I recognize that new media has come into it’s own. But I think that many people underestimate the power of the collective new media. What about a blogging corps organization?

Ideas are free.

Just to review, I spent nearly a third of my life *reading* about how to live a full life instead of actually experiencing it. I was successful in my career but nowhere else – including my relationships, family, health or happiness, and I lacked an overall sense of well-being.

I’m reminded of a story that I recently heard about a wealthy family man. This man was so plagued by a desire to better know his creator that he abandoned his family and worldly goods in search for the house where God lived.

For years he searched the world, asking everyone, “Where is the house in which God lives?” Yet, he never met a soul who seemed to have any clue where God lived.

Finally, his journey took him to Tibet where he happened upon a monk tilling a field. He called to the monk, “I have been on this quest for years. Do you know where the house is in which God lives?” The monk answered pointing towards the horizon, “Everyone knows that the house of God is right over that hill.”

The man was elated! He thanked the monk and ran off quickly. As he crested the hill, he could see that, indeed, the house in which God lived was in plain view. His journey was complete. He took one look, and nodded satisfactorily, turned on his heel, and left.

Now, as my intelligent readers, you already know that the house is really your heart and the journey is your “self development”. And the point is, a lot like me, this man lost himself in his journey. He identified himself as a seeker, and not a finder. Like him, I had forgotten that the point was not self development, but self realization.

The purpose of self development is to create a life experience of yourself. Other than that, the stuff you are reading is just information. We want to experience a certain way of life and not just information and the only way to experience something is to do it. We’ve all seen the “Bucket List” there is a reason it wasn’t called “The bucket of information list.”

People call the process: self development. However, it would be better described as self renovation. The very qualities we possess at birth are the very qualities we are seeking in death. That is to say, that the authenticity, joy, openness, and faith, these are all innate to a newborn, and now, as adults we realize, hey, I’m gonna die! So we rush to reclaim what’s essentially already ours.

The only way to experience something we are missing is to do it. If you want to experience being confident, then you have to do something that’s going to scare the bejeezus out of you. If you want to experience adventure, then you might have to cut in line at the post office.

It’s not about losing 30 lbs, starting your own business, writing that novel, or reading those 10 books a year. It’s just about that one split second where you actually decide to take the next step and then doing it. Remember, writing a novel doesn’t start with writing a chapter – it starts with writing a word. Apply that to your life. The simple, succinct law of action.

On the subject of how children already have this figured out, check out this post from Upgrade Reality.

One of the virtues of being very young is that you don’t let the facts get in the way of your imagination. ~Sam Levenson

The glint in her eyes was unmistakeable. I could see her inner child so at home in her body, waiting for that moment to come. I pressed the accelerator to the floor and our car-mini-van sped down that country backroad hill towards the peak of the next hill. 50, 60, 70 miles per hour and then we hit it. One perfect instant of balance when there was no up and down, no speed or stopping, frozen in time.

“WooOoOO!!!” She let out a yell.

I couldn’t wipe the grin off of my face, “I haven’t done that since I was a kid!”

And here we were, two “grown-ups” just driving for the sake of it.

This is a principle of life that I am truly learning.

Money, gadgets, vacations and events. They all are exciting and fun and something we aspire to have/do. But the simplest joys in life come from that which is free. An hour earlier I was racking my brains for something fun to do, something exciting that we could really enjoy. But I looked at the trees and the leaves were turning, fading into oranges and reds. (How is it that the leaves know that they will one day possess all the qualities of being the same leaf that was green but now is brilliant red??) I knew in an instant what we would do and we took off down winding country roads feeling more free than I could remember in a while.

Live wild, in the moment – and you will be free. Apply this to your waking life, and heck, why not your dreams?

I began in an entrepeneurial spirit at an early age. I remember being 11 years old and making these plastic keychains and I would walk around the neighborhood giving my sales pitch. I remember the pride I took in laying them out on a piece of black satin fabric that my mom had given me to create a shadow box. A few years later, at the age of 14, I created a social site that was targeted for young people of faith, and it ended up reaching thousands of people with memberships of above 10,000. This site brought me not only financial benefits but also sparked my geographic relocation and the establishment of some life-long friendships.

I remember getting a copy of “Good To Great” when I was about 16 years old, during the time that I was doing web design, and running a social network. By 18, I was married and decided to start a business with my brother and a co-worker who worked at my dad’s computer store. I was inspired in part by the story of Autodesk (http://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/www/autofile.html) and we forged ahead on our business which was a short term disaster and ended shortly after it began, primarily because we didn’t have the financial support or the time to dedicate to it.

I decided shortly thereafter that it was only these great ideas that I wanted to pursue, so I started gathering a small collection of self help volumes, and pushed my time into making a living. I was very successful in the corporate world, moving from a technician to Manager in 4 short years. I felt pretty great about myself; no college degree, no certifications or formal training, and I was managing a corporate IT department – at 25! Unfortunately for me, I had ignored all of my dreams, as well as my own health and I found myself sitting in a doctor’s office being told that I had a chronic, debilitating disease called Crohn’s Disease.

Suddenly, the pieces started to fall together and I realized that I was 25 years old. It had essentially been 10 years since I last did something “great” (my social networking site) and I was being asked if I did or did not want them to take out pieces of my intestine. Talk about a wake-up call!

Basically, my life worked like this: When I walked in those doors in the “glass tower” (so to speak) at my corporate office, my life made sense. I called the shots, and got paid well. But the minute I walked out of the doors, my life lacked meaning. I was unhappy, lonely, and I lived my life as a victim. So it was no wonder that it took a medical catastrophe to wake me up to that fact. From the outside, it appeared as if I was very successful!

It was at this point that I realized that all the self help books and articles I had read or believed in had only done damage to my life because of my *limited perspective*. My focus on Self Development had resulted in:

1. A stark comparison to my life and immobilization.
2. A sense of being overwhelmed by all that I need to change.
3. Living in a patty-cake world of in-authentic optimism.
4. A false idea that self esteem was about telling me that I was “OK!” where I was at.
5. An arsenal of tools that I did not know which to focus on first.

In summary, I got the idea that I should focus on the “positive” (my success in the corporate world) and my superior power of deduction got the false idea that meant the “negative” did not matter.

This is not to say Self Development is bad, I will continue in Part II on how Self Development can ruin your life.

Stay tuned!

To all the above,
Eli

So when I started posting blog posts, I was incredibly excited. Finally, I felt my momentum gathering and could see the progress there in black and white. It’d been 12 years since I had that experience of writing and posting for all the e-World to see; and un-like when I was 15, pulling in $7k a month in advertising revenue, I felt needy! So I began posting whatever I could think of so that people would come.

Thankfully, for not only myself but for my readers, nearly 5 years ago, I met a crazy redhead (now my partner) who challenged me on this. The other day, I asked her about what she thought about my recent posts. She complimented me on my writing, but had something else to say.

“Be fearless,” she proclaimed, “Remember why it was that you created EpicDoo, and that was to talk about what it takes to TRULY do epic stuff! Don’t write just to write mediocre things, but write stuff that is Epic!”

This kind of dialogue is truly invaluable; that is, having partnerships with people who are not afraid to challenge you to the down and dirty tasks which you proclaim you are about.

“True friends stab you in the front.” – Oscar Wilde

So what have I done to make change in this area? I’ve called myself to task on the day to day stuff that I neglected before this point as follows:

* My life no longer has room for entertaining doubts about my abilities or possibilities.
* Writing about truly epic stuff has nothing to do with being revolutionary, but instead bypassing the “fear filter” and writing anyway. That’s the only true gateway to revolutionary ideas.
* Action. I will follow this up with my next post, but to summarize, 5% of us are successful and its based upon belief and action.

Here’s to authentic truth!

To all the above,
Eli