This concept applies to our personal lives, as well. We don’t need a goal for how big a house we’re going to have. We don’t need a goal for how much money we’re going to make. If we really want those things, then what we really need is a goal for how good a job we’re going to do right now in this hour we are living in.
We can allow the results to emerge in the world outside of us if we take care of our world inside. And there’s so much less stress. You never need to be disappointed when you have a “down month” in results. Down months happen. There’s nothing wrong with them. But if your quality of work keeps evolving upward, better and better results over the long run will show up. They have to. The universe cannot resist that. It can’t help but reward that.
A friend of ours who was a banker said once that banks should not resist high interest rates and economic downturns, because it provides a chance for them to retrench and retrain their people, build new branches, and grow their human capital—in other words, to flow with reality rather than oppose it. Then, when the market turns, they are positioned to take full advantage of the opportunity.
Imagine a life in which you breathe out but you never breathe in. Imagine a life in which you’re awake all the time, and you never sleep or stop to rest. Such a life, both physically and mentally, could never work. You have to have your ins and outs and ups and downs. They are part of the dance of life. Down time and up time are both good.
There will be times when you go all out to keep up with the activity. And then there are slower times. One time supports the other. It’s the rhythm of life. But people want to make the down time bad and the up time good. That’s what throws them off their rhythm and creates professional stress and failure. Rather than resting during down time, they stress out, and a stressed out person does not perform well.
Everyone knows that you are more productive during the day if you get your rest during the night. Everyone knows that if you get a certain level of exercise and a certain level of nutrition, you have the ability to perform at a higher level, because you feel better.
That’s all we’re talking about here. Allowing success is merely learning to be the kind of person who feels better! Get your rest. Focus on inner things that produce results, then let the results show up naturally. Take away the expectation of outcome and just let things show up. Your every act of relaxed kindness to others will connect down the line.
Throughout this process it helps to allow yourself to see and realize the inner connectedness of all things. To see how one thing relates to everything else. As Duane says:
When you sell a home, it affects not only the person buying it, but also their family, the people who come to visit them, and the subsequent owners of that home. It affects the people who work for you who get to build it, the subcontractors, the people who work for them, the city that provides the plan reviews and the inspection process, and the utility companies that deliver the electricity, telephone, and cable TV. So many people are affected by that one, simple transaction. It’s amazing.
In this success process as it applies to an organization, it’s very helpful to eliminate all forms of internal competition. You’re not in an organization to do better than the guy two doors down from you; you’re in an organization to work with the person two doors down from you.
Duane had someone ask him once, “You’ve been pretty successful inside of a corporate environment; I wouldn’t have expected that, because you were self-employed for 17 years before you went there. How did you do it?”
“You know, it was amazingly easy,” Duane replied. “I thought of other companies in our industry as my competition, not other people in my organization as my competition. I just chose to focus on how I could do a better job, not on who was getting more attention than I was.”
Most people compete internally. They focus on who’s getting more recognition from their boss than they are. They obsess about who got a raise that they didn’t. They want to point out who took more vacation time than they did. Who left for lunch early.
Whereas to really succeed all they would have had to focus on was: What can I do to help us be a better company? They would then be the ones getting all the raises and all the promotions.
All you need to focus on to get ahead is: What can I give? Recognize that this isn’t a competition, it’s a cooperation. You get further ahead by working with people. You honor your imagination and theirs. That’s how you create results—in this new global society more than ever before!
“The sun is setting on the Information Society,” writes Rolf Jensen in The Dream Society: How the Coming Shift from Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business: