It’s quite amazing how I tend to look for the most complicated books or retreats to work on improving myself but the most important is already here, right now. I guess I had to do all that consciousness work to find the obvious I always had, we always had. I “just” see it differently now.
THIS is very important: Imagination
If you believe your life is horrible it will be. If you see yourself suffering all the time, then you are just going to suffer more and more. If you complain about everything and how the world sucks your life will be more and more miserable.
When Elon Musk started to go into the space business he said “building rockets can’t be THAT difficult” then it wasn’t. Just find a good team of physicists and scientists, right? Eckart Tolle calls it “manifestation” but frankly you don’t have to read all his books to find-out it’s just imagination.
Entrepreneurship is imagination made reality
Raising money for a businesses is just about “making it real” and then sharing these “dreams” with investors who believe in those dreams. Entrepreneurs make it real and just communicate their imagination through a business plan. Then it becomes a success or a failure, but at that moment, it is real. The imagination became the present.
I watched the two first episodes of “We Crashed” on Netflix, the actor who embodies the creator of WeWork shows very well how he closes deals based on his imagination. Even if the company “crashed” it is still an incredible achievement where a founder had a clear huge vision of what he was going to do and was incredible at sharing his vision with investors or his team. I recommend watching it, it’s quite entertaining.
You will never hire talented people or raise any money by communicating poorly a “boring” dream.
We did our conference in Paris in a few weeks considering it was done. Fear of failure or worrying about anything bad that could happen are just bad distractions. Focusing on the end result we imagine just made it happen: 35 countries showed-up in Paris in 8 weeks (replay of the event here for free).
Using imagination for self-transformation
Avoiding the negative, again. In the jungle the Chief Nixiwakà Yawanawà was always repeating to me
“never talk badly about yourself”
In other words “imagine you are that highest version of yourself you can imagine”.
It’s very simple, instead of imagining the business I could build I apply this to myself instead and I can just imagine the person I think I should be and “I am that”.
The most important is how you imagine and visualize yourself.
Imagine yourself always having problems and you will always have problems. Think you’re always stressed and you will always be stressed and get sick from it. Think that you are addicted to something, say coffee, and you are addicted to coffee. The truth is that you aren’t strong enough at that moment to not take another coffee because you think you are not.
All it takes is deciding you are strong enough. Of course then there is what the substance does, coffee or alcohol are addictive and modify our bodies which makes it harder and we need even more strength and imagination.
This is very different to me than what motivational speakers such as Tony Robbins repeat in all their talks (I have randomly seen Tony speak in person twice, he was always very entertaining). They basically say “think positive”.
Here I am saying imagine the best version of yourself you can be and just decide you are it, right now. It’s quite different.
Push back any bad thoughts about yourself “this is too difficult”, “I can’t do that”, “I am not good enough”, “I suck at that”, “I am always sick”, “I have an addictive personality” etc etc.
If you imagine and say that about yourself, then you are that, the guy that can’t do it.
No need for anything you do not already have.
My “Oracle” Greg I wrote about recently just reminded me of that, I have always used it in business but in my personal life, it’s new, I had to go to the Amazon forest to find it and you don’t have to. Remember the kid we all were, we had plenty of imagination and dreams. They are still there.
P.S.
-What is the first book you should read if you want to be more conscious?
The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment Paperback – Eckhart Tolle
I wrote about in 2018.
-First talk from PAWA Paris posted.
the “Religion of No Religion” from Zach Bell
-Meditation
We did a meditation and talked about meditation with Soren Gordhamer in Community call every Tuesday 18h, we don’t always record it, but this one we recorded, check it out it’s really good (Soren always is).
-the pleiades always make me dream. When I see them I always stare at them for a loong time this is why I chose this photo today - photo credit - Soumyadeep Mukherjee
-someone tweeted a slidedeck I posted in 2017 How to think like a startup fun to look at it 5 years later. Makes me think I will do a new “deck” on consciousness.
Thank you 🙏🏻
58 - The Power of our own Imagination