Overcoming Obstacle to Success

Epiphanies.

You’ve had them and hopefully will have many more. These “aha” moments of realization are experiences of sudden psychological/spiritual awareness from the maturing of your mind. A previously unconnected idea fits into the pattern of your conscious model. The cause of that realization? It has arisen into your reality and is but one tile in the mosaic of your life. Your mind becomes incrementally aware through theory, experiences, and inspiration. You learn theory from others, you cement the tile of that knowledge through experience, and you connect larger whole pieces into your overall model through inspiration. This re-modeling process of theory, experience, inspiration are not separate and distinct, but dynamically interrelated.

Cause…Dynamic…arise.

What will be the cause of your success in life? The idea of causality presumes there is an actor initiating an action and the result comes to follow – cause and effect. Success, that self-defined location of happiness and well-being, would result from sustained actions by the actor towards the goal. But you can instantly see that the complexity of that goal in the environment of life requires that the actor adjust to circumstances – that the goal, the actor, and the process are all dynamically related. This destination/journey question speaks to the maturity of purpose. It would be too simple to connect life’s success resulting from the cause solely from the actor’s efforts. A life is more than the aggregate culmination of myriad causes and effects. So although success requires your initiation of effort, there is more to it than that – obvi.

You arrive at a party (cause) and instantly are in relationship with everyone there (dynamic). Your arrival affects others and you are effected by them at the same time, instantly. If the party is your love life, your work life, your health life, and even your mental life, then you affect others as they effect you, at the same time. This dynamic exists whether you think so or not. If your mental model is more in line with cause and effect, then your thinking is too simple. You are underestimating the impact you have on others and others have on you. Your very existence has an impact. Period. A dynamic model is more complex and closer to reality.

But dynamism is too simple as well. Your success will not arrive solely through your initiation of effort and the dynamic interrelation amongst you and the actors of your life. It’s clearly part of the model for success, but too simple of an explanation. And of course you may already know that. You may know that the tile pieces of your life’s mosaic (experiences) are handed to you in a seemingly random fashion and yet, in retrospect, they fit a pattern. It takes time to see the patterns in your life, to discern truth from your own experiences. So theory and inspiration help you form a more correct model to follow. But who’s theory will you follow since there are many out there. And inspiration, is that reliable? Where does that come from? The tiles of your experience, if they result in a pattern that is unique to you, is there not a Tile-Giver that underlies the whole process? Seems so to me.

In the last Letter I asserted that the biggest obstacle to your success is you, or rather more fully described here, the mental model you have of reality. Your current model is insufficient for you to have a life that will fulfill you. It will change, as it must. However, the more energy you apply in changing the model, the more theory you can gather, the more experience tiles you can collect, the more likely you are to be inspired to higher levels of thinking which results in a more developed way of being. Epiphanies arise from the Tile-Giver to encourage and energize your efforts to push forward in life.

So what do you do with this theory of mine? This theory that states that God creates the mosaic of life in little tiles of experience laid down in a pattern unique to you. I am not evangelizing. I am describing my model. It is incomplete. So I am still on the journey to add to, refine, and attempt to articulate my model. So what should you do to overcome the obstacles that confront you on your way to a wonderful successful happy life? Be aggressive in 2018 in taking on life so that you interrelate ever more pieces of the mosaic into your understanding.

To more tiles.

Dave Marr