“He who controls others may be powerful, but he who has mastered himself is mightier still.”
Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching.
Recently, I realized that variation Lao Tzu’s idea is everywhere.
NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) talks about how the map is not the terrain. That means, what is inside of you is not the real world. So if there is a mismatch between you and reality it’s your problem. Knowing this and being able to act is self mastery.
Napoleon Hill talks about accurate thinking in ‘The Laws Of Success.’
It’s been in all sorts of personal development materials.
It’s the reason that some people can take basic ideas and make a fortune with them, while others can’t make any money with them. Well it’s a big part of it.
We come up against this every day within our business and with our clients. Our personal programming has limited our growth. Our clients’ personal programming limits their growth.
Not too much more to it than that. It is why some people will spend 3 hours writing an article this long and another three hours polishing it. Mostly in the dire hope that there are no typos.
I’ve spent my entire life dealing with a part of myself that is afraid of being singled out and hurt. I don’t know why it was there, but it was – and I wasn’t aware of it until this year. The last 15 years I have been fighting with it and now it seems to be gone.
The path to happier more productive life is in dealing with your internal terrain. Unfortunately that is the hardest thing you can do. Battling your own inner daemons. As they say winning isn’t about what you know it’s about what you do.
If you are wasting time and energy fighting your inner daemons, that is lost productivity – getting that back is progress. If you are fighting yourself to make calls… write something… fixing the internal junk is going to have a bigger effect on your output than learning how the newest copywriting technique or internet marketing fad.
That is why people who are ‘less competent’ than you, succeed – less internal junk in the way. They can take what they have and implement it and be ahead of the masses. You might know more than them but you are wasting your own energy fighting your inner daemons.
My friend has a sign set as the background on his PC, ‘Sometimes I wrestle my inner daemons. Other times we just snuggle.’
It is far harder to do serious personal development and achieve self mastery than it is to learn the newest technique but it will determine more of your success than anything else. Embrace the challenge.
I’ve got a whole host of new ones to deal with.