e-volved living

One of the key components of being successful is persistence.  I picked up Do It! Let’s Get Off Our Buts at A & M’s casa and found a lot of good advice, including a reminder that persistence is a necessary ingredient in living the life of our dreams. You can be talented and intelligent, but without drive your accomplishments will be limited and unsustained.

I really like the process he breaks it down to:

1. What’s the next step?
2. What’s in the way of taking that step?
3. Remove* the obstacle
4. Take the step
5. Go to 1.

*In many cases, the word Remove can be replaced by Disregard or Ignore

It really is that simple.

Interestingly, I was reading the list of other (many) books the author, Peter McWilliams, wrote and saw Ain’t Nobody’s Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. Jeph’s had that book as part of his collection for a long time and as soon as it is out of storage and back on our bookshelves I plan to dig into it.

I went to Wikipedia to read about McWilliams and learned that he grew up in metro Detroit (where we are at present) and studied Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), among other things.  So I continued on to read about REBT and am finding this method of training the mind particularly intriguing.  Here is one passage I pulled from the Wikipedia entry:

There is usually no way to get better and stay better but by: continual work and practice in looking for, and finding, one’s core irrational beliefs; actively, energetically, and scientifically disputing them; replacing one’s absolutist musts with flexible preferences; changing one’s unhealthy feelings to healthy, self-helping emotions; and firmly acting against one’s dysfunctional fears and compulsions. Only by a combined cognitive, emotive, and behavioral, as well as a quite persistent and forceful attack on one’s serious emotional problems, is one likely to significantly ameliorate or remove them — and keep them removed.

Did you see our word for the day “persistent”?!

I really like that it is rooted in the Now:

REBT differs from other clinical approaches like psychoanalysis in that it places little emphasis on exploring the past, but instead focuses on changing the current evaluations and philosophical thinking-emoting and behaving in relation to themselves, others and the conditions under which people live.

So this book which caught my eye led me down quite a rabbit hole of synchronicity and filled my plate with  food for thought.  Thanks A & M for spurring on the opening of doors and providing a refueling station.