101 things I wish my dad taught me, this one, Infatuation leads to resentment is brought to you by the universal law of rhythm and harmony, law 4.
Lets start today with a poem from 1611. That’s a long time ago and if it’s still spoke, must have, unlike the self help on the internet, stood the test of time.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
Anonymous (1611)
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
It also became a very popular song. Little did people realise how profound that music was and I certainly wish my dad had taught me this. I think in many ways he did and maybe I was just a bad or unwilling student.
somehow I got the impression that the good times roll. That the more good something felt the better was. I got the impression that good people were good only, bad people were bad only. It’s ironic because my own personal journey through my childhood and use proved this completely wrong. You learn that friends betray you. You learn that people don’t keep promises. You learn that mates are not always loyal. You quickly learn that things turned nasty when you thought they were going to turn good. Do you even learn from parents that people don’t walk there talk. But somehow through all this there is a nursery rhyme playing in the back of your head that Santa Claus is still true, perfect people exist, Superman is real, and the Princess just needs a kiss to wake up. Somehow there is a fairytale woven into the thread of our consciousness that keeps us believing that infatuation is true.
some people aspire to mediocrity. They try to bring kids up in the world who are subservient and compliant. They get ticked off when the child pushes back and says fuck off. They want submissive children and they want a submissive world so that they themselves can aspire to mediocrity. They want a nice house with a nice car with a nice driveway so that they can be happy they achieved mediocrity. They aspire to do mediocrity at work to. But they don’t aspire to have a mediocre relationship. They want an infatuated relationship with a mediocre life. They live safe and dominate their children if they themselves start to get an infatuated life. This paradox is driving many people into stress clinics, psychiatrists and behavioural therapists. But it is, really sad that the solution to their problems, not aspiring to mediocrity in their life and therefore not trying to dominate their children to be mediocre, so that the children can be the champions in life and they, the parent can have mediocrity as their highest goal. But we don’t settle for mediocrity in relationship which is where it might be just the best thing ever.
before I continue with this chant, let’s just understand the mechanism of infatuation. Infatuation is the stockpiling of information about something until such time as the positives are at least seven times as great as the negatives. We all know this feeling when we get our new car or even if you wish to say it meet a new partner and have some fabulous sex. We gather all the data on this and suddenly it’s a no-brainer. As soon as there are 7 to 1 ratio of benefits to negatives we are compelled to purchase. Especially if you listen to the late night infomercials where you will listen carefully to the advertisement for a person who cannot sleep. The advertisement will sell self-help types, it will add a benefit such as a set of saucepans, it will then add some stay sharp knives, it will then add a cookbook, it will then if you ring now add, free delivery and money back guarantee, it will then add at the very last minute a second set of saucepans for a friend. By the time this infomercial has finished there is in simple terms infatuation generated in the mind of a sleepy person. The real advertisement was for the tapes. But the tapes are just the tip of the iceberg. And once you are online, the sale add-on begins. 7 to 1 makes people compulsive.
there are a certain type of person who are vulnerable to the marketing of infatuation and impulse buying. They are, at heart, discontent with their life and I looking for a solution. If you were to say to this person there is a balanced program of tapes for sale they would be not interested at all because they need 7 to 1 ratio in order to act. If the same person goes to the pub and wants to meet somebody for the night they will be looking around and will be surprisingly choosy who they a are attracted to. I have often been out with people I would consider to be best to be not so choosy in choosing someone to go out with or date but they are extremely choosy. What they are actually saying is they need to be infatuated to act because they are relatively in a mentally desperate state and that state needs a 7 to 1 ratio before it will allow them to act.
if you now apply the universal law of balance, merge it with the fourth universal law of nature which is the law of rhythm and harmony, you will know that there are two sides to everything. So an infatuated person who sees the ratio 7 to 1 positives, will eventually experience the opposite which is the 1 to 7 ratio. In other words eventually they will see more negatives than positives. Now the truth we all know is that there is a one to one ratio of positives to negatives in every single situation in life. Your children have a 7 to 7 ratio of positives to negatives. It won’t matter how many times you discipline or punish them or criticise them or put them down or try to subdue their little spirit, eventually they will reveal it. Because, they are human.
at the bottom of the consciousness cone we aspire to a ratio of 7 to 1. This is the bipolar state of got to thinking. Bipolar thinking leads to gambling, bipolar thinks miracles can happen. Bipolar thinking is very stressful to the autonomic nervous system. Bipolar thinking leads people to make rash choices. The whole Internet is designed for the bipolar got to thought process. And therefore you can appreciate the fact that there are a very large number of people who are being either taught by their parents or the parents themselves are living in the got to, bipolar state of mindset. There are seven levels of thinking, this is the consciousness cone, got to is the bottom and the most hungry for infatuation. Infatuation is a good that only has a molecule of doubt built into it. Spontaneous decisions, knee-jerk reactions, judgements and criticisms come from this level of thinking and bring people to a side track. Remembering that poem? If the tide comes in the tide must go out. To everything there is a season. So the disappointing life of a person living in a bipolar state of got to thinking, is that for everything they try to do there is a push back.
there is no place for this level of thinking in business. Unless the part of the business you working is marketing to others in which case you must generate that bipolar thinking in product delivery delivery and marketing promotion if your client base is in this level of thought. But if your client base is not in bipolar thinking, desperate or emotionally vulnerable, you would be wise in your marketing not to appeal to that level of thought. With sophisticated product design you might be dealing with people in a much higher state of mind. For example if you are dealing with people at the fourth level of mind, we call this one too, the ratio has reduced down to 4 to 1 ratio for positives toward negatives to induce a spontaneous purchase. If you are dealing with people who have risen to a higher level of thinking you may even just need to present a 2 to 1 ratio of positive to negative to induce a spontaneous purchase.
I mentioned earlier that there are people in the world who aspire to mediocrity. These people are trying to infatuated with their children and their children keep proving that they are a balanced human being. The parent can quite often judge their own children and the ratio varies between 7 to 1 ratio positive to 7 to 1 ratio negative. That swing of emotion can take place in 30 seconds between the child doing what is asked and their homework and complaining that things aren’t what they want or that they want more time on the iPad. This emotional game that the parent is playing by chopping and changing their feelings toward the child’s behaviour, reveals an individual who is aspiring to mediocrity and therefore operating their own life in a state, stuck somewhere between lost Hope and dreams, and therefore infatuating the child one minute and resenting the child the next. Is a very sad reality that we can project our own required responsibility for our life onto a young one and in someway bypass honesty with ourselves. Such a situation cannot be maintained without an enabler.
this person who aspires to mediocrity will also come to work and be one of your employees. If you are reading this blog then you are not a person who would ever aspire to mediocrity because you will have no doubt done your own vision, your vision will not have the names of other people on it so you are there for Unfuckwithable, you have a clear mandate about what you stand for and therefore, you do not have to live vicariously through the behaviours of others and can operate with love rather than infatuation.
this childlike behaviour of infatuation is really important for those people who struggle with reality and sometimes reality gives people a kick in the bum so hard that infatuation is the only route out of it. But any such person will eventually become exhausted. They will build their hopes up that something is going to happen that will change the universe, or at least change the universe, and next thing you know they will fail and they will have to face the brick wall all over again. Vacillating between infatuation and resentment cannot happen unless there’s an enabler. And you as a leader must not become that enabler. Reality is balance. Yes we have emotions, those emotions feel fantastic when they go up, infatuation, and they feel terrible when they go down, resentment, but those two are inseparab. So when we make a high hopes promise that we cannot fulfil to a person we are building their infatuation and then we must also be accountable for their resentment. Love is balance. Inspiration is balance. Vision is balance.
I’m going to insert a video here by a guy that I’ve had a lot to do with over the years his name is Derek Sivers. When I first started producing audio and material for the Internet I contacted Derek in the US and he started a separate chain of product development from music which was his core product. From that we created online audio facility for people to download and bu mainly we would send them a CD. That’s how long ago this was. After Derek sold the business he became obsessed with teaching the world about being good. One of the things that Derek really advocated was keep your goals to yourself. And he uses well-founded research to demonstrate that by sharing your goals and your achievements toward those goals you D motivate yourself and reduce the probability of progress. The foundation principle of that science is that because you infatuated yourself without achieving the goal, you infatuated yourself just by talking about it, a lot of the incentive to achieve the goal goes out of it. In other words a lot of people tell you how great it’s going to be when they get some promotion or get some business achievement, and the physiological experience of getting the outcome is already spent in the telling. And they tell Moren more people about how great it’s going to be and so when the real event comes if it ever comes, they are disappointed because they already lived it. Postnatal depression is a great example of this to. Where people infatuated the birth of the new child and the life they’re going to live but once the child is born it’s a whole new ballgame and they’ve already experienced the euphoria of the birth and the new child through telling and talking and telling and talking and telling and talking to enablers. Here is the video. For those of you just listening to this you can look up Derek Sivers on TEDTalks keep your goals to yourself.
I remember my first business partnership when I first finished my MBA and started consulting. I had known a second tier accounting firm for five years and had no doubts about the infatuation or resentment with these people. And so I walked into that partnership with open eyes and a great foundation for the future. However at the Uni, while finishing my first year I met a second year student and became very close friends with him. I didn’t know him well except that when I had run my business, he had been the project manager on a project that we had one a very large contract to supply air-pollution control systems to. He remembered me very clearly because we only found out about the tender date a day before the tender closed for $500,000 contract. I flew from Melbourne to his Sydney office and asked permission to spend the entire night in the office preparing my tender. By the morning I had a printed document on his desk and submitted our tender and we won the project. So I knew him loosely from a business point of you but I didn’t know him well. When he asked to join the consultancy as the fourth partner I agreed. I guess I was infatuated with him. After six months that infatuation turned to resentment. It wasn’t personal it was simply his motiv and his way of doing business was completely out of step with what I wanted to build and so I after a trip to Europe snow skiing in Austria, I flew back to Australia and sold my shares. Infatuation always leads to resentment.
when you walk in the front door of your house after a great day at work you are infatuated with the day or yourself. Your partner will then tell you what a dick head you are for not being considerate or for something rather less important than you think you are and they, as nature will intend them to do will bring you down. Infatuations always attract people to pull you down. Whether you’re infatuated with your day, week or year, whether you are infatuated with yourself or the people you have brought into the world, someone will bring you down because natures intent is just like that poem above. What goes up must come down. When you see the up and down at the same moment, you can say you are inspired or better still, in love, real love. And therefore, as I said earlier it may be better to aspire to mediocrity in your relationship because that is what we call the ambivalence added to gratitude we called love. Mediocrity in relationship is not a bad thing. It is absolutely unconditional. And if you are aspiring to greatness in your life having a beautiful caring loving kind warm soft space called a relationship to come back to is a miracle in itself. But if our expectations are unrealistic, that if we think we should aspire to mediocrity in life itself and have a spectacular sexy all day fucking relationship, we are in for a very rocky road.
that is the end of this episode.
with love and wisdom
Chris
