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NENYE1999 wrote: ↑October 8th, 2023, 7:24 pm
I so much loved all that you have achieved. My question is how did you manage to get all parts of your life in order while en route to success. It seems like you had everything all planned out.
Hi,
NENYE1999,
Thank you for your question!
It's true that when going after goals and dreams, and dealing with life in general, I tend to treat it much more like chess than checkers. I do my best to stay many moves ahead.
If you compete with me (meaning this human we call Eckhart), you'll often have lost before you realize the game even started.
When two great chess players are sitting at the board playing, the games they are playing are not the ones we see. They are in a superposition of the future games they are playing. In the game they are playing, the checkmate often happens 20 or 30 moves before the onlookers notice or before anyone says "checkmate" aloud. I notice the checkmate and say, "checkmate", in my head to myself, 20–30 moves before my mouth says the words aloud.
You can lose the game by not thinking ahead sufficiently or 'underthinking', so to speak.
However, clever strategizing isn't the only requirement to win, and if done beyond a certain optimal point, it can hinder your chances or even become the reason you lose. Many people would call that "overthinking" or "over-strategizing". Indeed, you can imagine a chess player so obsessively overthinking and over-strategizing that he never actually makes a move, and the clock runs out and he loses as a result.
Humans are beautifully diverse, but I'd say about 99 times out of 100, a human is going to be more prone to overthinking than underthinking, meaning more prone to over-strategizing than under-strategizing.
In my topic,
Man Is Not Fit to Govern Man, I wrote, in part,
"The reality of humans isn't that they are bad at designing diets, but that they are bad at sticking to their own diets".
What good is an otherwise good plan if you don't stick to that plan?
Some people falsely idolize the plan and the planning.
It's like baking a cake. There are several ingredients you need. If you are missing any one, you can't make your cake. Avoiding both underthinking and overthinking is one ingredient (or two ingredients, depending on how you look at it). Another key ingredient is actually
executing the plan and being consistent. You might need eggs to make your cake, but if you put in more than the optimal number of eggs, you mess up your cake, and if you falsely idolize the plan and the planning, it's like making a cake with only eggs. It's not even a cake at all; it's just an eggy mess of anxious thinking, typically called "overthinking".
However, in the lingo of my book, the kind of
dedicated consistency that leads to great success might better be described as
teamwork. That's because, in the lingo of my book, your so-called past and future selves are just as much of an
'other' as your others in space (e.g. your brothers, sisters, children, co-workers, neighbors across the street, etc.).
Thus, breaking the cyclical nature of addictions and abusive relationships (including self-abusive ones), and thereby achieving what is commonly called 'dedicated consistency', is really simply a form of loving, loyal
cooperation between your selves over time, namely the older and younger versions of the human you see in the mirror. If Saturday-you and Monday-you are not on the same page about what you eat and drink and do, you will find yourself in a cycle of addiction, meaning in a toxically codependent abusive relationship with your selves over time.
Thus, we can rephrase my earlier question:
What good is an otherwise good plan if your team isn't on board and refuses to execute it?
Without consistent cooperation and loyalty between the different-timed versions of your self, the plan is useless.
You cannot make up for lack of execution with better planning, but, in contrast, you can typically make up for poor planning with more consistent, dedicated, and loyal execution of the plan. Generally speaking, a mediocre plan that's executed beats a great plan that isn't executed.
If one person on a team has a great plan, it's useless if it's only an idea the rest of the team refuses to follow. Even if you are the only human on Earth, you are on a team—a big team—with your selves over time: Saturday-you, Sunday-you, Monday-you, Next-Year-you, etc.
Loyalty, consistency, addiction-transcendence (i.e. spiritual freedom, a.k.a. self-discipline), and love (especially self-love) trump great planning.
Thus, life is not merely like chess; rather, it's more like a mixture of chess and a marathon. You don't need to be the fastest runner, the best runner, or the smartest runner/player; none of that matters if you are more consistent, meaning if your team is more loyal and dedicated and cooperative with each other.
For example, consider the simple common goal of weight loss. You don't need to design the best diet to be the best at dieting. Generally, any diet works if you stick to it. Even with an exceptionally unsophisticated and/or exceptionally poorly designed diet, you will outdo 99.999% of dieters if you simply have consistency, loyalty, dedication, and self-discipline (a.k.a. spiritual freedom). That's just one fun example of infinite. Whatever your long-term goal, and thus whatever success means for you, that is the main key. Coming up with a super-great plan is
not the main key. Planning, strategizing, and thinking in general are not the most important things. In fact, most humans' roadblock is so-called overthinking, not underthinking.
In short, the main key isn't the quality of the plan you create right now; it's whether or not you actually execute that plan and how consistent and dedicated you are, meaning how well and loyally you cooperate with your selves over time, in the sense of true love and free-spirited loyalty, without abuse, oppressive imposition, freedom infringement, or toxic co-dependency.
That subject is the main subject of my book,
In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All.
So, for those looking to have a more cooperative loving relationship with their selves over time and thereby become an incredibly more consistent, dedicated, and successful human, my advice is to read
my book at least twice.
If you understand every sentence of that book as I do, and you truly believe every sentence of that book to be true as I do, and you do your best to implement all of the suggestions in the book, namely the 11 numbered suggestions at the end, then I am sure you will quickly feel like your life has a type of divine plan to it. You will succeed at even wild huge goals with infinite ease and grace. Then, other humans will be asking
you how
you managed to plan it out and organize all the puzzle pieces and how you managed to so perfectly line up your stars and consistently achieve such incredible results in so many different fields and aspects of your life.
You can do it.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
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In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.
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