Appreciating What The People In Your Life Bring To The Table

Pic of the crew down at the FN Superconference in Australia.

Man I wish I was there...

Anyway wanted to get into a really important article, and while it may not come across as climatic, if the title has grabbed you on any level I recommend you read it carefully all the way through.

Maybe you know this stuff already, and in that case it's a reminder.

Or maybe you've been walking through life without a map like this, and it's really what you need to hear.

I want to talk about a tendency today that I've watched friends and foes alike use to destroy their own lives and happiness.

This the tendency of failing to appreciate (or perhaps better stated -- to *forget*) what the people you surround yourself with are bringing to the table.

We're talking classic self-sabotage here.

Screw Your Life Up 101.

We all do it to various extents, it's just a matter of how much we're able to recognize and keep it in check.

I've seen it over and over, especially in situations where people's lives are about to hit a "next level".

Here is my opinion of how and why this occurs.

Basically we all have a concept in our minds about how much success we're supposed to have in life.

Most people think that success is a positive event that they would welcome.

That's not entirely true however -- or at least, life doesn't tend to be that simple.

In reality any time your quality of life starts to accelerate past your mind's unconscious concept of where you're "supposed" to be you are now leaving your comfort zone.

When this happens, you slam into what's known as a "success barrier".

And what happens next??

The good old "RAS" (reticular activation system -- the psychological mechanism that makes you FOCUS on certain events and SCREEN OUT others) kicks in and starts playing tricks on you.

Rationalizations deluxe.

You start to focus on petty bullshit, lose sight of the big picture, and forget just how far it is you've come.

(Not to mention how far down you'll fall when you return to your old situation).

Oftentimes this comes in the form of allowing disputes to escalate with the people in your life who are most helping to move you forward.

Why??

Because it's those valuable relationships that your mind recognizes as being the easiest leverage-points to sabotage and bring you back down to your previous life.

"So-and-so doesn't really appreciate me..."

"They have no idea what I'm bringing to the table, they'd be so lost without me..."

"The biggest source of stress in my life is so and so...I could be so much happier and do so much better on my own..."

Etc etc.

Now sometimes this is actually true.

To be a winner in life you need to recognize the people who are polluting your mental/spiritual space with negative influence and allow them to go their separate ways.

At the same time, the key to remember is that if you got involved with the person in the first place then surely there WAS a good reason for it at one point.

Moreover, the brutal reality is that oftentimes you need to look at YOURSELF.

Because if you're failing to get along with one person then there's a decent chance that the same dysfunctional tendency will rear it's head in your next relationship as well.

I can say personally that whenever I've fought with my girlfriend I've always had to take a pause and ask myself some hard questions like (and these sound easy -- but they're a lot tougher than just letting your mind go off into it's indignant default state):

"What's causing this??"

"Even if it's her, is this behaviour totally independent or is it a mirror of something I'm putting out there??"

"Realistically if I broke up would I wind up in the same type of argument with my next girlfriend as well??"

Being in a relationship when your job is to take out guys to pick up other girls on the weekends is not easy.

But just by asking these types of questions I've been able to do what no other "POOOAH guru" I'm aware of has done successfully -- maintain a relationship for nearly 4 years.

One thing you'll notice about me is also that I've never spoken a negative word publically about anyone I've ever been involved with.

Obviously that's because it's second-class behaviour and I expect more from myself.

But more importantly, it's also because I recognize if I've had a falling out with someone that it's more important to focus on what I can learn from it than it is to run around trying to rally people towards my opinion so my ego can say "Look!! Everyone agrees with me!! I must be right!!"

The way I see it is life is a learning-curve.

You always have the option to keep evolving to the next paradigm for as long as you're interested -- which means becoming a better person and more fit to live in the world with every single year of your life.

For me, every relationship -- whether with business or women or students or friends -- is an opportunity to become better at relating to people.

I know in my case in the first few years of running RSD I allowed a lot of relationships to go sour.

In the following years I learned from it and probably managed to cut that out of my life ten fold -- where now even with a 100+ person staff and over 100 times more clients who I come into contact with, I've learned to relate to people on a level that I know is Win/Win.

Will that always be the case??

Of course not. But it's continued to improve.

I know with Papa (AKA Nick Kho -- CEO of Real Social Dynamics) and myself there are probably no two people who are more opposite on this earth.

That's both in terms of our personalities as well as our 180 degree different visions for RSD.

We communicate differently, we think very differently, we look at the world ENTIRELY differently.

Any day of the week, if you know us both, you can look at RSD as an organization and figure out which element was Papa's decision and which one was mine.

But we work through it and we compromise -- and that's why the organization has weathered adversity for all these years.

It reminds of a few years back reading the epic "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

Instantly I related to how the lead character, Dagny Taggert, had the brother who insisted she produce her usual stellar results despite that he was cutting her off of from the resources she needed to do so.

The brother would yell and scream to get what he wanted -- thinking he could "shut his eyes to reality" and make enough of a stink that the world would just magically alter itself to accomodate his unrealistic ideals.

At the time, and as a guy a few years younger than I am now, I felt like that was Papa and I.

Contained in my own personal myth was the idea of myself as the creative guy who produced the programs that we were known for.

Nick was the guy who wanted me to keep creating more of these at the same high calibre -- but at a faster rate because he had no concept of the time and effort that was involved.

With more experience, however, I began to grasp the old self help principle of "Seek first to understand, then to be understood."

The more realistic perspective of the matter is that both Nick and I slipped back and forth between the various roles.

On one level, with only 16 waking hours in a day Nick wasn't realistic to think I'd produce the type of material RSD is known for at a faster rate.

At the same time, one thing I didn't realize was that in many ways the person who was acting like Dagny Taggart's brother from the story was ME.

In insisting that product quality match my vision to the most obnoxious extent (far beyond what 99% of people could even recognize or appreciate), I was ignoring the reality that Papa was being forced to pull nerve-wracking highwire acts to find the venture-capital to keep us afloat.

RSD is an entity far larger than myself, and it is not my personal empire to make meet my every creative impulse any more than it is Papa's to use as a personal piggybank.

My rigidity nearly bankrupted us several times over the years, and that put Nick under a stress that I could never understand without having been in his shoes.

It is very easy, for example, to say "Fuck anyone who's in it for the money."

But there's also a harsh reality to money, and unless you've been in the situation where you're forced to come up with it out of thin air like Nick, your opinion really doesn't mean shit.

So see, in the same way I'd read Atlas Shrugged and thought "If Nick read this he'd instantly understand where I'm coming from" if Nick were to read the same book (which incidentally he has recently but we haven't talked about it) he would very likely think in reverse the same thing.

We are ALL the heroes and justified individuals in our own personal mythology.

We're in the right, God is on our side, and everyone who doesn't see that is just fucked.

But in reality, or at least as close to it as we can get, the people we surround ourselves with often bring more to the table than we can possibly realize unless we pause and take stock.

It is extremely easy to forget, and a very hard thing to focus on when we're feeling self-justified and looking to lay the blame.

(Especially in the same neurotic detail that we focus on the other person's bad sides when we're in a "mood").

I mean really, how often do you stop to be appreciative for what you get out of your relationships in comparison to how much you spend thinking about the downsides and the bigger and better deal??

But that's unchecked human nature in all it's glory...

Our inflated delusional egos which seek to give us confidence that we don't need anybody -- maybe serving the purpose of allowing us to put on a front so people won't think we need them too much -- which causes us to make these bone-headed moves.

And you know, probably a good 50% of people reading this are engaged in a self-dialogue right now where they're saying "This overly optimistic bullshit doesn't apply to me, I don't get into "moods", blah blah blah."

Of course it's not going to get them anywhere, but at least it will keep their belief systems temporarily intact.

In the meantime, I'm trying to focus on what's good about the people in my life, and bringing more of that energy in my direction every single day.

Have fun!!


Tyler