Archive for the ‘Success’ Category

By Steven Mills

Firstly, Hi to all of our new subscribers to Rebel Zen and for the great comments we have been getting for the latest posts. Both Seamus and I really appreciate your thoughts and feedback.

I wanted to write today about a concept that is all too common for modern, internet connected people.

Almost everyone I know these days seems to be living their life at a frantic pace, working far too much and not spending enough time on themselves. They are living life at a speed that would make even Led Zeppelin circa 1973 want to lie down and take a Nana Nap. Sure it’s not hard livin’, hard drinkin’ party all night style living, but attaching yourself to a computer screen for 12 hours a day can certainly take its toll.

There is so much media and connectivity simultaneously vying for our attention that the important things like personal development, exercise and spiritual practice are often let go.

We put it to the back of our mind, and instead of keeping our meditation times and going to our yoga classes; we put personal time to the side until the busy period is over. Which is a shame, because meditation, yoga, and any other time where you get to sit, center your mind and simply be is the BEST thing to do when you are crazy busy.

It’s what you should be taking the time to do at 3.00pm when your mind is completely fried from a hectic work day. If you start to feel the old brain doing back flips under the strain of another spreadsheet or word document take 10 minutes to stop, and refresh yourself the best way you know, and then continue.

But if we don’t do this, and continue to push ourselves past our limits without rest, then there is the risk losing our true selves to work. Our unique personality, the fun loving part of ourselves that makes us who we are, is often the first part to fade when we become overtired and too obsessed with the unimportant things in life. We lose our ability to connect in a meaningful way with those we love, or don’t find value in spending time just being. Do this for long enough and all that will be left are the boring, stressed out and grumpy parts of us.

You see workaholic types that have lost any idea of who they are and what makes them happy. They lose that spark that makes them who they are; they become someone that is just “going through the motions”.

Don’t let this happen to you, you owe it to your SELF.

3rd post in the three part Curly’s Law series by Seamus Anthony (here’s the first and the second)

This is a bit of a long post with two parts: 1) How the Mega Successful Use Curly’s Law To Achieve Greatness and 2) How To Discover Your True Life Purpose.

How the Mega-Successful Use Curly’s Law To Achieve Greatness

The great over-achievers of this world don’t just use wishful thinking or hard work to get to the top, they use the ‘real’ secret which is Curly’s Law. Curly’s Law states “Do One Thing” and is essentially the act of having laser-like focus on what you want. It is about identifying your One Thing and just going for that at the expense of other areas of interest. It’s about the power of mono-maniacal obsession, and if you want to achieve great things, then you can use this trick to get ahead in leaps and bounds.

The Richest Man in the World and His Great Secret for Success.

Long before Billy Crystal and his mates saddled up and rode of into the the sunset, Curly’s Law was known by some as ‘Carnegie’s secret’, after Andrew Carnegie, the old-world steel tycoon and philanthropist who advised people to ‘put your eggs in one basket – and then watch the basket’.

Carnegie, at one time the richest man in the world, and a self-made man, was said to have a ‘great secret’ about how to become rich. This was popularised by Napoleon Hill in his famous book “Think and Grow Rich”. The secret was not explicitly revealed in the book but was rather hinted at and the author said it was important that you figure it out yourself. People have since thrown a bunch of guesses around as to what the secret was, from the whole Law of Attraction thing to the less glamorous suggestion that you just need to get on with it and work hard. Searching around I found this quote, and as far as I am concerned it puts the stamp of authenticity on the worthiness of Curly’s Law and also puts an end to the speculation about what Carnegie’s secret was:

“Here is the prime condition of success, the great secret. Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it: adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it. This is the great secret…” Andrew Carnegie

I don’t understand the conjecture myself. the man’s exact words were “This is the great secret”. End of story.

All Great Achievers Use Curly’s Law to Make it Big

Whether they know it or not, I propose that all of the mega-successful use the Law of One Thing to get to the top of their chosen field.

Here’s an exercise: choose one of your greatest heroes and ask yourself this – do they have what you would describe as obsessive single minded determination, laser-like focus on what it is that they do?

I would be willing to place a bet that the answer would have to be ‘Yes’. Let’s take a few of my personal heroes as examples (in no particular order – and you may wonder why these people are my heroes but all I can say is, each to their own!).

• Jerry Seinfeld – obsessively cared only about and worked only towards being a stand up comedian for his entire life until he became the most successful stand up in the US and went on to become the wealthiest comedian ever.
  
• Steve Jobs (Apple Computers) – obsessively strove to achieve innovation in the world of computer design until he finally got it right and made Apple what it is today. (And tell me he didn’t lie up all night scheming about how to win Apple back when he got kicked out for a while!)
• Nick Cave – this guy has pursued a singular artistic vision relentlessly for his entire adult life and I’d be willing to bet that he’s artistically satisfied (although I doubt he’d admit it) and probably doesn’t get too stressed out about paying the mortgage off either.
  

Now these are just three of my heroes, and despite the twists and turns in their journeys, all three of them have always returned like a heat-seeking missile to their One Thing. They knew what it was – and they sure as hell weren’t about to let anything trivial stand in their way.

I challenge you to come up with a list of ten mega-successful people who achieved greatness by being wishy-washy, choppin’ and changin’, unfocussed, undetermined, people who could never make up their minds about what it was they wanted to do. I’ve never tried to do this, but I am willing to take a punt that it wouldn’t work.

Madonna: was obsessed with becoming the number one female pop star. Stephen King: wrote compulsively his whole life and only ever wanted to be a novelist. Bob Hawke: gave up alcohol so it wouldn’t get in the way of becoming Prime Minister of Australia. Abraham Lincoln, lost something like 8 elections before he went on to be President of the United States. The list goes on…

How To Discover Your True Life Purpose

But I can hear some of you already thinking “But I don’t KNOW what my One Thing is! That’s the whole problem!” and I don’t know either. But I have been through all of this and have some suggestions that may help you.

First get yourself into a contemplative, relaxed frame of mind. Have a bath, turn the lights down low and stare at the fire or go for a walk in the woods by yourself. If you know how to meditate, do some before you start this process.

There are a lot of techniques out there for discovering your true life purpose, but here is the one I used. It is deceptively simple but the key is not to move on to the next question until you have answered the one before it to your full satisfaction.

1. What do I want to be?

A very simple, short and open question. If you are in a relaxed, contemplative mood, the answer may come to you directly. Just like that. Your own voice in your head may just serve up the answer like a piece of pie on a plate.

Or it may not come for a while. If you don’t manage to hear your True Self straight away then it is up to you to simply wait. Wait for the answer. Wait for a number of days in need be but be sure to find quite time to contemplate this answer. Or talk to somebody you can be open with as this often helps you to unlock the inner workings of your own mind. Tarot cards or other oracles are also great for this kind of thing. They don’t tell you the answer they help your mind expand, provide the catalyst for the expansion of your consciousness.

When the answer comes you will know.

And here’s a hint. It won’t be about your career. By asking yourself what you want to be, the only honest answer lies much much deeper than that. We are talking about the true meaning behind your life, behind all of our lives.

I have to admit, my process was backed up by years of spiritual and personal development – reading, meditating and inner work – so if you’ve never gone this deep before, give it some time. Who knows, it could take years for the answer to come.

But listen very carefully to your inner voice when you first ask the question because it will without a doubt answer you straight away, without a doubt, but the question is whether you can be quiet enough inside your mind to hear what your true-self wants.

Once you know what you want to be, then ask…

2. “Why do I want to be what I want to be? Why have I chosen this as my main sub-conscious motivator?”

Here is where you will get into your own psyche and discover why you are who are why you behave like you do and why you want to be the person you want to be. Again, make sure you are quiet inside before you ask and then listen very carefully to the answer that will come directly from your True Self.

When you listen to the quiet voice of your True Self, you will not only know WHAT you want to be but WHY and this will be a great liberation to you.

If you listen softly enough, you just might be lucky enough to hear your own voice identify your true purpose in life. Good luck!

And remember what Curly the Cowboy said:

“Do One Thing … you stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit”.

Part Two of a Three Part Series (here’s the first)

By Seamus Anthony

One line from the cheesy 1991 movie City Slickers (yes, the one starring Billy Crystal) helped me to achieved absolute and total spiritual enlightenment in a blinding flash of inspiration.

And no, I am not kidding you.
Well, actually … maybe just a little bit

But the point is I did get something amazing out of that film and this is a thing that I later came to see being referred to as “Curly’s Law“.

Curly’s law states simply this: Do One Thing

Curly was the tough old cowboy character played by the late Jack Palance. Here’s the scene from the movie where Curly espouses his life philosophy to Mitch, Billy Crystal’s character:

Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?

Curly: This. [holds up one finger]

Mitch: Your finger?

Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean shit.

Mitch: But what is the “one thing?”

Curly: [smiles] That’s what you have to find out.

Now that little nugget of wisdom is so simple, that I dare say you’ve watched that movie more than once and never really gave that statement much thought at all. But I am telling you now that – unconventional source that it may come from – there is enough power in that little statement to change the world for ever, and to make the difference between you achieving your dreams or not.

The reason it blew my puny little mind so hard is because for years I had been struggling with the fact that I never seemed to be getting any real lasting results, either in terms of income or of artistic satisfaction, when I was always running around busy on a number of awesome projects. If I had so many great projects on the go, then why wasn’t i getting he pay off?

Well, when I watched that old cowboy hold up his finger I suddenly got it – I had a Zen-like Satori moment. Satori is a blinding flash of insight that brings instant enlightenment. I suddenly saw that my problem was that I wasn’t ever truly focusing with the kind of laser like intensity that I should have on just One Thing. I needed to discover what my One True Thing was and just do that.

But this wasn’t an easy thing to do. I am a musician who loves writing who loves entrepreneurship who loves personal development and spirituality – that’s four things! Which was I going to do? I tried to make myself just choose one but I couldn’t because this just seemed forced and I knew I would always be wishing I could write something if I just chose music or that I could start a cool business if I was only writing or whatever. So I decided to chill out and get to the bottom of the problem.

To cut a long story short I eventually came to the realisation that beneath my different interests lay a common factor – everything that I loved doing (career wise) revolves around media. If I am doing a music gig, well that’s about promoting my recorded work and it also leads to people being interested in buying my writing. And my writing is most often about personal development. And my personal development entrepreneurial ideas tend to be about selling media products designed to enrich people’s lives. So essentially my One Career Thing is media and the different aspects of that all complement the single main career purpose, so whatever I am doing, whether it be writing, making music, or working on my personal development business interests, I am always working away at my Career One Thing which is Media.

But What About The Meaning of Life?

Oh yeah, that.

Well, above and beyond the career question, I felt the need to go deeper and find out what my One Thing for my whole life is. My Definite Major Purpose as Napoleon Hill calls it in Think and Grow Rich, and as it is more commonly known, my True Life Purpose.

Whoa … a heavy question. In City Slickers, it is basically implied that Billy’s Crtsytal’s One Thing is his family, but to me that seems a bit one dimensional. Family is certainly one of the most important aspects of life to me but yet I still felt that there was something deeper, or higher, that underpinned everything like Family, Career, etc.

I had to go through a process to find this out (the complexity of which is beyond the scope of this article) but I did come to a realisation of my true Life Purpose, One Thing, or Major Definite Purpose.

I don’t believe it helps me to go telling every person in the world what this is, because it would read trite compared to the intensity of the the experience of discovering this One Thing and the power that keeping my focus on this thing brings into my life. But I am here to tell you today that if you can go back and discover what your One Thing is, well you will never look back and a lot of your problems and frustrations and confusion will dissapear into thin air once and for all.

So by now you may be thinking “Gee how did we get from a cowboy whose One Thing was simply ‘bein’ a cowboy’ to deep and meaningful shit like the above? And where’s the one-thingness gone anyway? You’ve been talking about all kinds of things…”

Well, to clarify: What I am saying is that when you discover what your overall One Thing is in your life, you will then find it easier to identify your lesser One Things, or if you like, your Sub-Things. For example, underneath your Major One Thing might come four headings “career” “family” health” and “society” (you might have more headings, or different ones, it’s just an example). And each of those could be broken down into smaller and smaller subsections, like in a family tree or the random company employee-structure diagram below that I grabbed off the ‘tubes.

And you can keep breaking these things down until you get to the level of your daily To Do List. And here’s where the power of Curly’s Law really kicks in on a couple of levels.

Firstly, you will know that everything that is on your To Do List is congruous with your One Major Thing, and that if it’s not, then you should just shaft that thing out of your life.

Secondly, when you are doing anything, JUST DO THAT ONE THING. Here’s where all of the Zen stuff you’ve ever read comes in. Zen masters say that true enlightenment comes from Present Moment Awareness which means only putting your focus on whatever is happening in this moment right now. That’s what the Zen dudes are on about when they are doing archery or flower arranging or of course meditating, they are just focussing on the thing that they are experiencing at this precise moment now.

And that’s how they find such contentment and fulfimment and inner peace. Think about it, when you are doing something that you enjoy so much that you are absorbed in the ‘flow’ of what you are doing to the exclusion of everything else that is there to distract you should you allow, don’t you feel at peace? Maybe you love knitting, and when you knit you just count and twiddle your needles and stare at the wall and become very peaceful because you are just knitting, you are not knitting while checking your emails, while wondering what you are going to have for dinner while talking to your husband, you are just knitting and that is why you are at peace.

Simplicity brings peace because it eliminates tension. Complexity causes tension.

Just Do One Thing.

The cowboy said it, the multi-millionaire said, and I am saying it.

Just Do One Thing and you will experience greater success and inner peace in your life than ever before.

“Wait A Minute? What multi-millionaire?”

I didn’t I mention him yet? Well you will have to wait until the next post in the series about Curly’s Law, where I show you examples of mega-successful dudes and how they used mono-maniacal obsession to get to the top of their chosen fields.

By Seamus Anthony

Part One in a Series of Three

Do you struggle to achieve mental clarity in a world of busyness, complexity and clutter? Do you find yourself chasing your tail, always busy but never seeming to get around to doing the things that are most important to you, like discovering your True Life Purpose, achieving your dreams, or devoting the time and energy to your family that you know deserve?

Wouldn’t you love to know what the secret is that the great achievers of our age use to move mountains? What it is that your heroes know that keeps them at the top, the thing you are missing, the thing that holds you back? How do they manage to churn out such amazing work, and rack up win after win while you chase your tail and struggle to pay the bills?

Well, despite the hype of recent times, the ’secret’ that these people have is NOT simply magically focussing on the end results that they desire. It is NOT simply a case of ‘ask, believe, receive’ or else we’d all be running around being fabulously rich and have all the time in the world to do whatever the hell we like (and look good doing it). Creative visualisation and the Law of Attraction are part of the overall process for success, no doubt about it, but there is another closely linked secret that gets overlooked.

And no, it’s not ‘hard work’. That’s an obvious, a given. Of COURSE you have to work hard – and don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise. (That doesn’t mean that some things won’t come easy to you, they can and will if you set yourself up to attract that, but my point is you’d be a gormless ninny to sit around and expect everything handed to you on a silver platter.)

No, the OTHER secret is called Curly’s Law, and Curly’s Law states simply this:

“Do One Thing”.

Curly’s Law is the concept of “One Thing”, it is a concept that can help you identify your life’s purpose and make all of your dreams come true. It is the power of Obsessive Mono-Maniacal focus. It is also one of the great secrets of spiritual enlightenment. It means that you focus on one thing at any one time, with laser-like intensity, until the job is done. It works on a macro and a micro level to move mountains or just clean up all those little molehills that keep getting in your way. You can use this concept to do anything and as I will show, the greatest characters in history have used Curly’s Law to achieve some of the greatest things ever in human history.

And the funny thing is: Curly’s Law, in all it’s glorious Zen greatness, was invented by a fictitious character. A Hollywood cowboy in fact!

Now if that ain’t Rebel Zen in action, I don’t know what is!

I will explain further in tomorrow’s post