Distractions Case Study: 1 of 3

Our story from an ancient text continues. Remember that our main characters, Adam and Eve, were attendants to a beautiful garden. Eve entered into a conversation that served her ambitions well, but left her and Adam confused. They both lived in this garden, content with themselves and the garden except for an insistent desire for knowledge. The text emphasizes that both were naked and felt no shame.

So, Adam and Eve consumed from the tree that they were forbidden to touch. The first result of this insistence on consuming is not in any action or observation. Of interest is the immediate loss of that sense of contentment. A constant nagging, a feeling that something was missing replaced the contentment. Whether you take the story as truth or not, you too have that longing. But, as with much in this life, the longing is not the problem. What you do to fill the longing, though, could be problematic.

The goal should be to identify what your contribution will be to our team. It really does not matter what activity you engage in. When you are clear about your contribution, you see value, gain knowledge, and notice complexities in what others may see as frivolous. But, know that I will challenge you to compete. It is not self-conceit, but positive competition. I will question your entertainment, whether it is productive recreation or self-medication. As you gain the knowledge that you desire, I will expect you to contribute your best and grow even greater contributions for the future.

Distractions: Social Contracts and Political Correctness

Up to this point, I have focused on describing your options as an individual. You have often been deceived. You have also been distracted. Institutions have standardized your deception allowing you to hide behind the plausible deniability of corporate conformity. The more clearly you understand your own identity, the more inconsistent the world appears. This may tempt you to give up on agentic success—achievement conceived by self-reflectiveness, self-reactiveness, intentionality, and forethought. But, take heart. We can overcome the distractions.

Institutions maintain your deception by distracting you from addressing your lack of sustainability. Instead of figuring out why a choice did not work out as you had hoped, you are lulled into a sense of comfort with disappointment, surrounded by people who support this passivity.

If only you would look within yourself. Reflect on your goals, your actions, your reasoning. Determine the origins for your choices. Evaluate your will to succeed. The institutions suggest that to focus on you is to deny community. Yet, this supposed altruism is not consistent with the other messages the institution espouses.

You are told to measure your success by your consumption—if you are the best, you must have the best. You are told to conform so as not to stick out from the crowd—it is conceit to proclaim your giftedness and heresy to pursue an alternative inquiry. You are told to apologize as a reflex in order to avoid conflict—it is better not to make enemies of people you do not know. Standards are relaxed in order to save the feelings of the mediocre.

Distractions: The Next 3 Chapters

Consumerism is the institutional method to medicate through entertainment and recreation. But, you think it is the frivolity that weakens the production focus. It is not the activity that is the problem. The problem is that you are not clear about your contribution. You risk shutting me out because you cannot see the opportunity for our collaboration.

Shame is the institutional tool that seeks to deny individual giftedness in favor of the collective identity. The expressed goals are to maintain order, to be fair, and lend predictability to chaos. To bow, conforming, to shame is to stunt the chaos that motivates change and inspires growth in you and in me.

Guilt is the institutional source of choices that attempt to fix past failures. Rather than achieve goals based in principle, the guilt reflex suggests that you apologize because the goals may offend the sensibilities of another. The distraction is the quest for politeness, rather than the quest for success. Clear communication gives way to political correctness.

The End of Wanting

Too often, you look at the success as the finished product of the producer. You conclude that you cannot achieve the same success. You fail to see the time, the habits of mind, the schedule, and the discipline the producer put into achieving her wish. You only see the end result. If you do glimpse what it takes to achieve, you are overwhelmed. Take heart! Though the process seems overwhelming, it is a process. This means that the beginning of a complicated success begins with that first simple action.

Be sure that you are planning actions based on an honest view of the habits of the producers that you would like to emulate. Recognize that producers rarely are able to articulate what they have done in order to achieve success. They sometimes inflate the time or romanticize the actions they performed on the way to their goals. They either over estimate or dismiss the help they received from others.

For example, the producer, when asked how he achieved, may say, "You have to work hard each day and read a lot." When asked if that was his process, the producer admits, "Oh, no. I don't really read that much." If you could have been a fly on the wall throughout the producer's process, you would have observed a process of idea formulation and commitment to product that spanned multiple years. Even the producer is not aware of how each choice, each rehearsal, each class, was a contribution toward the final product. The producer does not intentionally mislead with his responses, but the achievement of success sometimes reframes the journey as a function of destiny rather than a result of determination.

Understand that all sustainable success—the end of wanting—is the result of your determination over time to work, to lead with purpose, to incorporate new knowledge and relationships, and to risk being wrong. Maintain those habits. Connect those dots until patterns emerge and habits result in products.

Faith: The Final Frontier

Faith is the self-fulfilling prophecy spoken by your actions. It is your confidence in what you cannot see, combined with the preparation and sustained action toward what you hope to achieve. It is also a balance between fool-hardy wishful thinking and reality you can touch and take to the bank. Yet, faith is not the abstract, metaphysical wish, it has tangible elements. It just takes creativity, vision, and perseverance to connect the dots represented by those elements. Faith is as real as your will to live that reality.

Perhaps an example will help. You want to be a writer. You recognize that writing takes practice. You know that, each day, writers spend some time writing. You know that you need to improve your vocabulary. You know that you learn best by reading. Connect those dots to achieve your vision as a writer.

Set aside time each day to write. It could be in a journal, a computer, a notepad—as long as you are able to get your thoughts on paper and able to go back to read what you have written. You could even speak your thoughts into a tape recorder and transcribe them later. Subscribe to a magazine about writing. Read the articles to learn what others have done. Discover new ways to plan your time and organize your plot lines. Invest in a vocabulary builder, a dictionary, and a thesaurus. Play games with your friends where you identify a word of the day or use a new, similar word to replace a common word you always use. Now, you are on your way to achieving the vision of being a writer. After all, you are doing the things that a writer does. Continue to produce. Self-fulfilling prophecy… Faith is as real as your will to live that reality.