The Secret Skill of Success

There is no shortage of information on what you need to know and do to be successful these days.  It’s timeless wisdom and there is no proprietary information involved.  Be consistent, control your mind through mediation, keep your body healthy, discipline is key….but its not enough(that’s not as contradictory as it sounds).  I could write a book on all of the success skills that you can use to start living a better life and there are many, many books that already exist. 

I will interject to define success in a better way than I have ever been able to come up with, I will borrow from Earl Nightingale whose definition of success is “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal”.  We are created for two reasons.  First we are created to grow; simply to continuously become more of what we are.  We are subject to the law of growth just like all other living beings around us.  Look around and tell me its not true……when anything stops growing it starts dying immediately.  This process looks different for everything but it is a fundamental truth of life as we know it.  But growth is meaningless on it’s own, there must be purpose to it.  Purpose is the second reason we are created and unlike the automatic processes of growth and death, purpose is something that we create, and in doing so we consciously give meaning to life.  

The progressive realization is constant growth while the worthy ideal is the destination that represents the purpose we choose to give to life.  Some people choose to go down this path in a linear or incremental fashion, one logical step at a time.  Some of us choose to push the boundaries of our logic and pursue quantum leaps.  If you are so bold as to choose the former then you must understand that you will need to become a completely new version of yourself.  Note that I said a new version of YOU, not that you need to become someone or something different.  You are perfect, and you are perfectly capable of achieving anything you can imagine but you will need to become an updated version with new capabilities.  This will require the secret skill of success. 

There is one skill that I have never heard to be correlated to success and I think it is absolutely critical for success representing anything beyond small, incremental growth. You must have the ability to act; to fully assume the role of the new version of you.  Anyone who is willing to get a little uncomfortable can go on stage and assume the role of a powerful CEO, a head of state, a mad scientist on the verge of a breakthrough, or a philosopher seeking the fundamental truths of our world. Anyone who has endeavored to try acting, even in a small town dinner theater as I have know that in order to be convincing in your role you must give yourself over to the character.  You do not mold the character to fit your personality or preferences, you do a deep dive into the character, their context and define in great detail how that character operates.  If you are to play Sherlock Holmes you must gain an understanding of what it is like to be a detective in London in the late 19th century, not just you walking around stage with a silly hat and magnifying glass.  Anyone can consciously pretend to be Sherlock Holmes and play the part for a time, but to be great you must subconsciously assume the character and feel what it is like to be Sherlock Holmes, playing the character from the heart.

If you seek to be successful in a big way you are going to have to step into a version of you that is currently completely alien to your understanding.  Having never been a detective in London 150 years ago, it is challenging to understand the role of Sherlock Holmes well enough to be able to feel what it would be like to BE Sherlock Holmes, but if one is dedicated enough to that ideal then through the use of both creative and synthetic imagination you will begin to get a deep understanding of Sherlock.  

It is no different when we are talking about the next version of you, the version that is capable of achieving your wildest dreams.  If the accomplishments of that version of you are well beyond your current state then you will have a lot of work to do in defining that role but the work is worth it as long as the goal is big enough to make the juice worth the squeeze. 

Defining the role is step one, now you will have to act as if you are that person.  But the work has already been done.  The work is in the research, the preparation and the persistence in defining not only what it looks like to play the role but what it feels like. When you start to walk around in your daily life, feeling as if you are YOU version 1.1 you begin to take actions that are aligned with your worthy ideal, you recognize the opportunities you will need and when you take action on those opportunities your new reality takes shape around you.  

It all sounds a little mystical, almost magical and I guess it’s not wrong to look at it that way but it’s as reliable as the gravity, it will work…….everytime.  As Einstein said “there are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle.  The other is as if everything is a miracle.”  Miracles look like magic, because they can’t always be easily understood.  It’s easy enough to attribute these mystical miracles to the power of God, but when you realize that you have the power of God in you and you have the ability to create and direct miracles everything changes.  You desire to break out of the box and seek fuller expression; you might even want to see what your fully capable of which is truly limitless.  You are only limited by the size of your imagination and the strength of your faith, start ACTING like it!