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Step 61: “Don’t force your mind. Better seduce your heart »
The 88 rungs of happy people
In this chapter of “The 88 Steps of Happy People” I explain a formula of exceptional power to achieve goals
This Step is going to give you a formula of exceptional power to achieve goals, to overcome laziness, not to fail yourself and to remain persevering. It is applicable to a number of specific areas, and in these we could say that it is relatively infallible, so knowing and applying it is something of high value for you and for your Inner Success.
There is a word in English whose meaning is of great value, but which cannot be easily translated into Spanish. That word is ‘accountability’. Dictionaries usually translate it as “responsibility,” but what they don’t explain is what responsibility it is. It refers to the responsibility of the one who fulfills before others, and that is where the force of the secret of this Step lies. If we have to be accountable to ourselves, our level of accountability goes down. But when it is before others, go up. I will explain it with an example.
Imagine that you want to learn to play the piano. Curiously, what you need is not a piano teacher, since in the 12.00st century there are thousands of courses on the internet, many of them really good. What you do need is willpower to follow them. You make an appointment with yourself on Saturday at XNUMX, and you reserve the next two hours to have the discipline to search for the course that suits you, sit down to listen to it and follow it and put into practice absolutely everything that professor tells you that neither is he with you, nor is he seeing you. There is a problem: that if you do not comply, absolutely nothing happens, since the only person in the world who knew about that date was yourself.
What was the solution?
Hire a private teacher and make that 12.00 noon appointment with him instead of with yourself. Why? For its worth? For everything he’s going to teach you? No. He could be the worst teacher in the world, and yet you would still be interested in making that appointment. The reason is that if of a value of 100, your skills as an instructor only represented 1 percent, the power of accountability would represent the remaining 99. Its value is not in the fact that it teaches you, but in the fact that it drag, that is, that you adopt an external commitment. If it takes you 100 classes to start playing the piano at least (I argue that it can be achieved with only eight), the difficult thing is not to obtain the information about the classes, but to sit down and do them.
Alfredo is an eighteen year old boy. His dorm room is a mess. Everything is so messy that you can’t see the ground. There is nowhere to step. The room has been in that state for several days and it does not seem that Alfredo can find enough discipline and motivation to tidy it up and clean it. Suddenly he says, “Drag!” He’s gone out on a couple of dates with a girl who’s got him dazed. She is the last person that he would want to see his room in that state, and therefore the one that he would least want to invite into that room. What did our protagonist do? Just the opposite. Invite the girl to play her latest video game in her room the next afternoon. And how do you spend every minute before your arrival? In cleaning and cleaning every corner of your room. For him I would not have picked it up. For her, yes. Just used the power of drag.
More drags…
Are you convinced that meditation can help you reduce stress and anxiety but you can’t get up earlier to do it? Commit to doing a streaming meditation session with a friend first thing every day (online videoconference) and you will no longer be able to not get up and default.
Have you been putting off a course for a year to increase your Inner Success and get up on Belt? Buy yourself the materials and advance all the tuition money (and there will be no going back).
Do you want to plan a retreat in an Asian country to grow as a person but you are lazy? Just buy the flight now (and you won’t be able to back out from everything else).
Do you see now why dragging is the best kept and least used secret?
# 88StepsPeopleHappy
Don’t force your mind. Better seduce your heart »
@Angel