Here’s the inspired idea from which all other ideas flow: A successful life exists in everyone. It’s not something you have to go search for in the outside world. We are born to be functional and fulfilled. Everything we need has been given to us (including the ability to add whatever else we want to add): We don’t have to go search for how to breathe. We don’t search for how to see or how to hear. We just accept that they’re a part of what we have inside of us. Success is in there, too. It’s programmed from birth because it’s the way of the universe. Evolution is inevitable and just the way things work. Why would it not include personal and financial evolution?
Your innate instinct exists for all the things that will make you successful. All you really need to do is challenge the false concepts that convinced you otherwise. By virtue of the very reason that you can breathe, you have life. And life means potential, potential to be better and better in your work.
Surprisingly, many people resist this simple truth.
Martin was a classic example. He had become a masterful skeptic. When he was told that he already had it in him to be successful he said, “Look, I’ve tried to go there in the past and I’ve been disappointed.”
Martin then recounted how some New Age spiritual version of “trusting life” through mythological symbols was ultimately disappointing. He’d been to seminars that got him high and then he crashed. Martin had this experience confused with what we were asking of him: to go to life itself, not somebody else’s version of “how life was meant to be,” but your life right here, right now.
And even though people claim to have been disappointed from trying to follow a conceptual version of this, they’re not disappointed when they do a real-life version. The real-life version works.
Disappointment and mismatches
The world has laid out a false description for us of what it means to be successful. Most of the books you’ll read that define success associate it with becoming an admired leader, becoming financially abundant, finding an ideal partner or spouse, or living for a long, long time. But those pursuits are all comparison-based in their definition of success. They focus as much on one-upping or excluding others as they do on inner peace and happiness.
In the hands-off understanding of allowing success, it’s useful to find a more inspired idea of success. Most people who are open to inspiration arrive right here in the present moment. And their “success” becomes doing what they love right here, right now.
Of all the false gods of success, wealth has to be the worst. Of all the least inspired ideas, extreme money-making is king. And most people who are wealthy will tell you, “Yes, I’m considered successful. But I’m not happy. I have a real missing piece in my life. I feel an emptiness. I feel a craving for more.”
An extremely “successful,” very rich man we know was recently asked, “You have hundreds of millions of dollars. Why do you keep working so hard? How much money is enough?”
He replied, “I don’t know. But I know it’s always more than what I now have.”
That’s what success becomes when you make success about attaining or acquiring something outside of you. You’re always racing toward an unattainable, frustrating, just-out-of-reach future. How widespread is this futility? Pull up a chair in a sidewalk café in any major city and watch the people rush by. Hurrying away from the present moment trying to get to their own futures.
Whenever people make success be about “how much” or “how often,” they can never have enough. Because no matter where they arrive, they feel there’s still more to be accomplished. That’s why managers who use money as a motivator never get the great results they want. And it puzzles them.
Working with Angela, who runs a small business in Boston, we would often hear her say, “I don’t get why Janet isn’t producing for me. I keep adding incentives and potential bonuses to her sales plans and she still never achieves her plan. Do you think I should put her back on a base salary, or should I make it more commission-based to raise her fear of failure up to where it can finally really serve me?”
Most hands-on micromanagers are focused on money this way. Fear is a motivation they understand. But it leads to frustration, low productivity, and turnover. The human system can only take so much fear before it cuts and runs.
But what if success simply became the process of growing? The same sense of growth a flower feels as it reaches for the sun? Here you are in this moment: improving, evolving, and progressing. How does that feel?
What if success were nothing more than the satisfaction you get right now from doing a little better than you did yesterday?
As you learn hands-off management, you can return your future-addicted people to the present moment. You can show them that being in the here and now is not hard to do. It’s returning their focus to the one thing they are doing instead of “all the things I have to do to this week.” It’s taking them out of feeling swamped and overwhelmed and returning them to a time-management system that has them doing only one thing. Their consciousness is now being used to see what they can do to merely take the next step. It’s not straining to see what life will be like when they have finished everything or when they have more and more money in the bank. It’s helping them see what they can do to move forward one more step right now, in this moment, today.
That’s the hands-off approach to managing life: Don’t do everything; just do the one good thing that’s next.
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