This
“You get one lifetime to live. You have one shot to live out your purpose, in one body, with a lot of compartments in your life that need to work together.”
Now I am going to get a little personal. Specifically, I want to talk to you, about you as a person. Note: I said ‘a’ person — that is singular.
Compartmentalization does not just affect what you choose to think about, it affects how you act. Many people change themselves to suit whatever area of life they are currently dealing with. They are one type of person at work, and then have an entirely different code of ethics elsewhere, such as home. While this is a wide practice and may be deemed as normal by many, there is nothing healthy about this approach to life.
Different situations bring out different parts of one’s personality. That is to be expected and is very healthy — I encourage that. However, if someone practices situational ethics — meaning, they change their definition of right and wrong depending on the situation and who they are with [or when no one is looking] — this is a false person. They will have trouble finding real happiness and peace because they cannot be real themselves.
Whoever you are, Kids, own it and be that person in all situations. You will hurt and cheat people otherwise; no one more than yourself. You will also lose your grip on who you truly are. Whoever you are, be proud of it. If you cannot be proud of it in your own soul, and feel you need to hide it from certain [or all] people, make the necessary changes so you will never have to hide it again.
Promise me this. If you remember nothing else in this book, remember this chapter. I implore you to read it as many times as you must until it becomes part of your bones. It is that crucial to living a life worth living.
You get one lifetime to live. You have one shot to live out your purpose, in one body, with a lot of compartments in your life that need to work together.
No matter how hard you try to compartmentalize your life, all aspects of life will spill over into the others. No matter how hard you try to pretend harmful elements, influences, or practices in one aspect of your life are contained to that aspect alone, they will infiltrate every area of your life and everyone involved.
As long as you are going to spill all over yourself and everyone else, make sure it leaves a positive stain otherwise known as: a legacy.
One action will influence every aspect of your life. No matter how hard you try to be a different person to different people, in different situations, remember: “Wherever you go, there you are.” ~Confucius.
You can try to keep a secret to yourself, but you cannot keep a secret from yourself. You have one reflection in the mirror that accounts for the culmination of everything you think, say, do, and do not do, in the different areas of your one irreplaceable life.
Mortal inevitabilities will decide how long you have to work life out. You will never know in advance how long that will be. You have one chance to learn everything you can, give everything you have got, and leave the world a better or worse place than when you entered it.
I love you too much not to beg you: Do everything you can do to live your one life as extraordinarily as you can.
Focusing On Your Fuddle Cup
“Knowledge is not enough, Kids — you have to apply it in new ways if you want to create new solutions powerful enough to create change. Many people are not willing to do that.”
Every person’s Fuddle Cup is as unique as their finger prints. If a representative model should be rendered for each person, I imagine they would come in as many different shapes and sizes as do the people on Earth.
The one thing everyone’s Fuddle Cup has in common is the general structure; the seven separate, but connected cups representing basic aspects of life. This is our focus.
As we focus on each aspect of your Fuddle Cup, the object will be to achieve an understanding of the following:
Awareness
If you ask a doctor of psychological research what awareness is — which I have — they would give you an enormously long answer that would make your head spin several times around. Instead of burdening you with that, I offer a super-simplified formula: A=a+wm.
Awareness is attention plus working memory.
Awareness is the ultimate anti-compartmentalization agent [Say that five times fast]. In other words, if I build your awareness about something, it will create a powerful, subconscious memory that begins to recognize things in ways you may not have noticed before.
I tell a story about a wishflower in some of my seminars. In brevity, it is the story of me at four years old finding a dried dandelion flower along the sidewalk. To entertain myself, I decided that you should blow on it and make a wish. When you did this, I believed all the scattering pieces turned into fairies, who fly away to make your wish come true collectively. [The longer version of the anecdote was to point out the Power of Story in Legacy]
It was no surprise when your parents grew up noticing every wishflower in their path; fervently insisting we stop for it as if it was gold. What was surprising to me was the dozens of wishflowers I have received from seminar participants all over the country through the years, telling me, “They saw this and thought of me.” Most of the notes would go on to say something about how funny it was they never noticed this common weed before hearing my story. Now they see wishflowers all the time.
That is awareness. If we build awareness about the importance of the different aspects in your life, it will be much more difficult to compartmentalize them along your life path.
Definition
Once aware, it is essential for you to know what each of those aspects truly mean in your life. Incidentally, I did say know and not learn. To learn the information is an essential beginning, but you cannot utilize the information until you truly know it.
Take looking up a word in the dictionary, for example. When you look up a word, you have now learned the definition — what that word means — but are unlikely to remember it accurately or be capable of explaining it to someone else until you know how to use it in a sentence.
While the challenge of defining the different life aspects in this book is mine, the greater challenge falls upon you. Since it is not truly possible to know something until you apply it, the responsibility is entirely yours to use this information in your life. It is only then, that these definitions take on true meaning and value for you.
