Coping: Millennial’s Book 11: [keyword: Execution]

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Reader Note: If you are just catching on, each Thursday we’re are doing a chapter each week of a book I’m writing for Millennials – teaching the insights that will (hopefully!) allow them to live long and prosper – and be around to clean up after us Old People who made a mess of getting civilization this far.

There are three sections to each chapter. Something you can read to children, a general reader part, and the advanced/business section.

Here’s where the book has explored so far:

We established in the first chapter that there is RECIPE for everything we do.

Chapter 2 involved understanding (and owning) PROCESSES.

Chapter 3 discusses recipes and processes of INVENTION.

Chapter 4 looked at FLOW  The reason we do management reports is so we can spot problems and head them off at the pass.

Chapter 5 considered “WORLDVIEW” and how that “place we stand in our minds” determines what happens in the strange land “outside our heads.”

Chapter 6 focused on “TRAVEL” and considers the importance of travel as a way to more deeply understand worldviews since people with similar problems will come up with surprisingly different answers to the problems of Life…

In Chapter 7 “Matrix 512” is discussed as a unique way of keeping your worldview consistent and how to use it as a tool for clarified thinking in an every increasingly complex world.

In Chapter 8 we discussed the keyword “MAKE” and how it is that what we produce really is a large measure of our value in the world.  Being natural DIY’ers, humans love their tools and what they can “make” with them…

Chapter 9 discussed the the LIFESTYLE tradeoffs we make when a certain lifestyle is chosen for one’s time on Earth. What, after all, is “living well?”

Chapter 10 considered our PURPOSE in Life.  And in the process, we found the recipe for plugging into unlimited energy for those lucky enough to have their attention totally arrested by a great purpose in Life.

Today as we begin to wind up the series (and book) we’ll look into one of the most important aspects of all:  EXECUTION (Doing). 

No point to having a recipe, process, or any of the rest of it if you’re not going to step up and put it to use, is there?  So we begin there…

For all Readers

Little John looked all over the King’s Kitchen trying to find Tom the Baker and Kitchen Boss – a title recently bestowed on him by the King.

Unable to find him, Little John set out on a search.

He asked the maids-in-waiting and none of them had seen him.

Neither had the stable boys.

The King’s Physicians hadn’t seen him either.

As he was standing in the town’s square looking, an old man came up to him and said “I suppose you want some worms, too, then. Little John?”

“Excuse me sir, but whatever would I need worms?” Little John wondered.  He’d seen the man a few times – he was the town worm-seller.

“Why to go fishing like your friend Tom the Baker fellow. He picked up some great big night-crawlers about an hour ago and said he was going fishing. Even said I might see you when you came looking for him…

What a baffling remark:  They hadn’t made plans to go fishing, yet here was the worm-seller….

Little John thanked the man, and said “Sorry, I don’t need any worms, but if you could tell me exactly where Tom went…”

He know the place so with that, Little John set off for Trout Lake.

It was a fair hike, about 4 miles from the Castle and the township, so it took just over an hour to reach it.  Little John was walking briskly.

As he arrived and surveyed the shoreline he spotted Tom the Baker leaned back on the west edge of the lake and staring toward the middle of the lake..

“So THERE you are, Tom,” exclaimed Little John.

“Hi Little John,” replied Tom. “I came out here hoping to catch a fine trout for the King’s dinner. But now that I am here, I am watching the frogs and learning much about management.”

“Management?” said Little John. “What can frogs possibly teach you about Management?” he asked.

“A surprising amount, particularly when it comes to execution of plans or manifesting our desired outcomes.”

Tom went on to explain that there is a subtle difference between a PLAN and Execution of a Plan – the DOING of it.

A PLAN, he explained, is a collection of steps or small recipes designed to achieve a certain goal.

In order to reach the goal, the smaller recipes must be executed in order…

As he was explaining this, Little John interrupted with a question: “Tom, why must a PLAN be Executed (or carried out) in a certain order?”

“Electricity is new to our Kingdom, Little John. At first, we didn’t know how to work with it. When the first electricians worked with electricity, they were not clear on how switches worked and why it was so important to turn off all power before doing any wiring.”

“How did they learn?” asked Little John.

“Some electricians were injured – a few gravely so – because they didn’t understand that the plan to install wiring must always including turning power off at the beginning of a work recipe – and even installing a sign so other workers would not turn it on by accident.  Once the work plan was done, they could safely turn the power back on again and do the needed testing at the end of a project.”

Little John nodded. “So if I want to do something new in the Kitchen, I need a plan, right?”

“Exactly. You need your ingredients – all the things that go into the recipe – but there are assumptions  made all the time because of social customs. You need to be on the lookout for these.”

“Like what?” Little John was becoming quite interested now.  He’d never thought that how his thinking worked had been formed by the people around him – the television shows he watch, what his friends said, what books he read in his space time, and so on.

“I’ll give you a simple example,” began Tom “When you as instructed by a recipe to ‘Bring Four Cups of Water to a Boil’ what do you do?”

“Well, I get out a pot – about yea big – (he held his arms out to indicate the pot size he would pick) and then I would boil four cups of water in that.”

Tom nodded. “Right.  But did you know there are many parts of recipes that are unwritten but commonly understood Little John. You could boil four cups of water in a dozen, or more pizza pans, Right?”

“Why that’s just silly, Tom,” interrupted Little John, laughing at the thought.

“But seriously, you could boil the water in a baking dish or even a bread pan.”

“But that would be silly, too,” said Little John. “Who would be so stupid as to do that?”

“What if you had never seen a pot before?”

“Everyone has, Tom!”

“Not so.  Some of the people in the Kingdom only has a single very large cooking pot to go over the fire.  Someone who has never worked in the King’s Kitchen before might never has seen pots.”

Tom paused for a moment before continuing.

“The reason I was thinking over this problem was because one of the older stable boys wants to become a worker in the King’s Kitchen. Bright lad, but he’s from a one-pot family.  What I was thinking about was not so much how to teach him the recipes. I’m more concerned about the common sense part.  The part where I have to teach him the unwritten recipes that run our lives and tell us – among other things – what size pot to select in the kitchen.”

By now, Little John was seated on the edge of the lake.  He was deep in thought.  As always, talking to Tom was opening him up to new ideas.

“Oh, boy, do I know that one,” Little John laughed. “Do you remember the first time I cooked potatoes and I cooked almost 100 of them? I kept thinking I was still cooking for Robin Hood, all the Merry Men, Maid Marion, plus Friar Tuck and a few dozen interlopers from Sherwood Forest. Back then, I almost could not cook too much, no matter how I tried. But now that I am working for you in the Castle, I know to make exactly 48 potatoes. That serves the King, the Royal Court, the jesters, Chief Physician, and the kitchen help plus the Ladies in Waiting….”

“Common sense!” declared Tom. “It’s a foolish name for it because it is not really  “common” until it is learned. When I began cooking for the King, I only needed to make 17 potatoes…the King’s empire as grown. But did I ever tell you that?  I learned one day when the King himself came in and demanded more potatoes be cooked.”

Hmmm…both men stared at the Lake.

“Little John, let’s watch that frog for a minute. He sees there is a cloud of flies out by the farthest lily pad from shore. But it is much too far for him to jump. Let’s see if he can come up with a plan…and then how he executes it.”

As they watched, the frog looked to his right and far down the lake. After a few minutes he turned to the left and looked up the lake. He was sizing things up…

Then he did a most unusual thing: He jumped to the right as far as he could. He landed on a lily pad and looked around some more.

Presently, he took another mighty jump to the right and landed on another lily pad.

Next, working back to the left, three more jumps to the left now and he alighted on the lily pad covered by flies. Pleased, he began to eat them which is what hungry frogs do..

“That Little John is how planning and execution go hand-in-hand: The frog had a plan to eat the flies. But he needed the smaller recipes – jumping from pad to pad in a certain order –  to achieve his goal. By executing – or carrying out – the smaller recipes – those half dozen jumps – he made it to the final lily pad where he sits before us eating his fill of flies.”

Little John was quiet for a moment before asking “Is that why some people are successful and others are not?” he asked.

“I’ve traveled the world Little John, and it seems to be so. Everyone dreams about success and most people TALK about it as though it was REAL.”

Tom took a deep breath before continuing.

“But remember our Frog? He did more than just talk. He looked for the specific steps – in his case the specific lily pads – that he could jump to. Then he executed a series of very good frog-jumps to successfully reach his Feast of Flies. Not one of those jumps was particularly difficult all by itself. The magic was this frog saw that it would take six steps – or jumps – to get where he wanted to go.”

Little John nodded his head as Tom went on.”

Now look over yonder to our left. You will see another frog who was looking-on the whole time while first frog was working things out. This other frog didn’t see a way to reach the flies directly. While he was wasting him time plotting an impossible jump, the frog that got the flies simply began to execute a number of smaller steps. Each one of them doable and he won the prize frog dinner of flies.”

Suddenly, a mighty trout tugged on Tom’s fishing pole. In a few minutes a large trout  had been landed – big enough for the King and many in his party.

Suddenly, the fish were really biting well!  With an hour, both men were on their way back to the Castle with a dozen such large fish. Tom carried his pole and had loaded down poor Little John carrying the whole catch of fish.

“I never thought we should have such a fine catch for dinner,” said Little John.

“There was never any question about it, Little John.  What I didn’t tell you up front was that I had a plan, I had used that recipe to catch first before, and I executed everything else I needed to do in order to have it work out perfectly.”

“But you didn’t tell me where you were going,” complained Little John. “Would it not have been common sense to tell me?”

“Oh no! If you knew, you would not have come looking for me exactly when you did,” explained Tom, who then began to laugh so hard tears rolled from his eyes.

“What’s so funny?” demanded Little John.

“Look at you…you’re carrying all the fish for me…and, I would point out, doing most of the work.  That was my Plan all along,” said Tom between gasps of laughter.

“I hope you today you have learned a little something about how Management works.  The whole point of Management is to use the efforts of others to get their Plans done, Little John. Step lively with out fish!”  Tom was still smirking and pleased with himself.

The weeks to come would be busy for both Tom and Little John because a far-away King by the name of Machiavelli was coming for a visit.

The whole Machiavelli family had a terrible reputation for manipulating people to do their work for them and Tom wanted to teach Little John a lot about how foreign Kings might behave.

For General Readers

This will get fairly deep, fairly quickly, but it’s worth the time to ponder if you want to become a high energy/high output human.

The magical part of being Human is having the ability to take a thought and turn it into something tangible – outside of your head – in the shared Reality we inhabit together.

It was a question I never asked myself – “How do thoughts turn into Things?” – until a fateful day in 1970 when Max Sartori (later Maxanne Sartori of WBOS-FM in Boston) lent me a book to read while she was on the air at KOL-FM.  Her studio was the next door down from the KOL-AM newsroom where I worked for 13-years following.

I lost track of Max years ago after she went to Boston (always wanted to return the book), but somehow it was like I was meant to keep the book.

It was H.P. Blavatsky’s “A Treatise on Cosmic Fire” in which things like the role of the Solar Logos – nuts and bolts of how Creation worked – and much of the early 1900’s Theosophical Society beliefs were laid out.

It was a fascinating book because it attempted directly explain this problem of how “thoughts” become “things.” It’s a non-trivial pursuit; it’s a quest that has taken a life-time of ultra slow-motion research to pursue. Habits like eating and living get in the way of our spiritual interests, regrettably.

Even today, the question is still very much on the minds of Theosophical Society members. In a February 2010 page (The Mystery of the “Ring-Pass-Not”) it is said that ““The full Initiate knows that the Ring ‘Pass-Not’ is neither a locality nor can it be measured by distance, but that it exists in the absoluteness of infinity.”

“Ring-Pass-Not?” you’re thinking…

Imagine a thought in your head. It is a beautiful thing – and quite perfect therein. But how does it become energized sufficiently in your Mind to smoothly transitioned to outer Reality?

Going back to alchemical times, it was to alchemists as though there was this “ring-pass-not” – a kind of spiritual speed-bump system – that prevents what we think casually from becoming what we have in the physical realm.

Some application of brakes seems reasonable when you think about it.

Not that Blavatsky (and other Theosophists) were entirely correct. Creation – or more properly co-creation with Universe –  is an equation with an assortment of solutions.

For example traditions of magick such as Aleister Crowley were advancing the idea of the Seven Veils that keep thoughts from becoming objectively “real.”

“Seven are the veils of the dancing-girl in the harem of IT.

Seven are the names, and seven are the lamps beside Her bed.

Seven eunuchs guard Her with drawn swords; No Man may come nigh unto Her.”

The simple “ring(s)-pass-not” or “seven veils” were born of a time (before quantum mechanics) when it was not entirely clear that magick and science would ever meet. Hence Crowley and Blavatsky were products of the great schism between science and religious philosophy.

The good news more recently, however, is that we are fortunate now to live in an era where the schism is beginning to close, and not just quickly but gracefully.

It remained, nevertheless, for an obscure book – P.D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum ­– (The third Principle of Thought) – to enlighten my quest a bit further.

I will never forget the briefest of instants when – while reading Tertium Organum, I fathomed the fourth dimension. Touched for the shortest fraction of an instant it was (and still is) very much like the big fish that got away.  Except for one other occasion – what would be called a “moment of Grace” – it continues to elude me even now.

Still, over the years I have evolved a simpleton’s recipe for turning thoughts into things – a recipe which I offer for you to tinker with and which comes with no warrantees implied.

You need to look not so much at those who articulate belief systems like Blavatsky, Crowley, or even Ouspensky – though such teachings are worth study. Instead focus on what I think of as the “General Recipes” that run Life.

One of these is what I call the “Grand Farmer’s Recipe.”  Works on all kinds of problems.

It holds – simply enough – that to move something from the mental Realms to the Physical, we need to treat ideas as those they were seeds of plants or young children. (Yes, brain child fits!)

The first thing a farmer does is INTENTION. He or she intends a fine garden. In order to have a perfect garden in the physical, however, each and every obstacle to its realization must be addressed and overcome within the Mind.

Only when the idea is intended and rendered as perfectly in mental space as possible, can one go on to the next step.  Rule 1:  Each step must happen in order.  Plan the garden, get seeds, then till, then plant, then tend, and finally you get a harvest.

Let’s drop back to the second step of the garden is to find the right seed. Although it seems obvious, it is never so when dealing with how thoughts become things. It’s why the story of Tom and Little John looking at those two frogs is so important.

One frog, you will recall, focused on the single long leap. The other cut the overall task into easily achieved smaller tasks. That done, success came quickly and easily.

With seed in the ground (the initial steps taken to materialize the idea) we next need to offer what any farmer would: Water and nutrition. Rain and fertilizers.

Generalize this and it becomes resource. Resource applied regularly leads to the harvest.

A point about Gurdjieff and Ouspensky are worthy of note – and I believe it was in Crowley as well – the matter of sexual energy. As Wikipedia notes:

“Ouspensky also provided an original discussion of the nature and expression of sexuality in his A New Model of the Universe; among other things, he draws a distinction between erotica and pornography.”

The existence of an “orgasmic energy” is not something restricted to beliefs of Ouspensky, Gurdjieff or perhaps Crowley. Rather it is well dispersed and was the core behind the work of Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone – a kind of orgasmic energy that rules (among other things) health and weather.

This was taken even further when it was postulated by Trevor James Constable that UFO’s were a kind of gaseous organism. Wikipedia picks it up from there:

“After reading about radionics and Wilhelm Reich’s orgone, Constable became convinced that supposed UFOs were in fact living organisms. He set out to prove his theorem by taking a camera with him, fitted with an ultra-violet lens and high-speed film. The processed pictured showed signs of discolouration, which Constable insisted were proof of amoeba-like animals inhabiting the sky.[1]

Reviewing his new found ‘evidence’, Constable was moved to write in two books that the creatures, though not existing outside of the “infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum”, had been on this Earth since it was more gaseous than solid. He claimed that the creatures belonged to a new offshoot of evolution, and that the species should be classified under macrobacteria.[1] According to Constable, the creatures could be the size of a coin or as large as half a mile across.[4]

The biology of the creatures supposedly meant that they were visible to radar, even when not to the naked eye.[4] To explain supposed cattle (and occasionally human) mutilations, Constable theorised that the use of radar angered the organisms, who would become predatory when provoked.[4] At a later date a crypto-zoologist officially classified these supposed creatures as Amoebae constablea, named after their discoverer.[1] Constable wrote a book entitled The Cosmic Pulse of Life in 1975 that outlined his ideas…”

Also of interest is the re-issue of “They Live in the Sky: Invisible Incredible UFO’s around us.” All of which sounds like hokum until you go look at rods and cones which have been catching world-wide and are chronicled in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhTlin0S-us ).

Whew…you can see how the logical following of questions like “sexual energy needed to fertilize an idea into a reality can quickly lead down a rabbit hole of speculations?

So instead, returning to my simple “farmer paradigm” we simple pile enough resource on until the “idea” “materializes.”

Usually, time, money, and physical resource (steel, concrete, six-layber PCB boards or yet-another C# library ) will handle most conventional objects.

A Word About LUCK

There is one more part about Execution of a Plan – that takes an idea and materializes it: Luck.

I’ve gone to great lengths to study Luck. Two of the best books on topic are by Max Gunther: The Luck Factor: Why Some People Are Luckier Than Others and How You Can Become One of Them.

Gunther also wrote The Zurich Axioms: The rules of risk and reward used by generations of Swiss bankers . Both deserve a read.

There is a flow of energy all around us, of course, and it’s easily thought of as the flow of coherence.

Luck (or coherence within randomness) is at the core of the Princeton University Noosphere / Global Consciousness Project and the Princeton EGGs. This is a worldwide network of random number generators linked to spot periods of “coherence.”

Among recent coherence events you can look at the Inauguration of Donald Trump, or the International Women’s Day event.

In the case of the latter, it was clearly not as impactful on global coherence (think of this as luck) as was Trump’s taking the Oath. In comparison, the effect of Muslim Ban demonstrations arguably had very little impact on coherence.

When you have some time and want to see how this all works – this global coherence and luck stuff – all you need to do is get a good software poker package and experiment by hitting “Deal” when coherence is running high.

Over time, like me, you may get a sense of how “luck runs” but unless you have patience, don’t quit your day job.

In order to have a good day job – and to be perpetually moving up, there is a simple, easy to learn key: Execution.

Figure out first what it is that your “job” is all about. Spend some time trying to optimize what it is you do so that no one else in your organization can do as much in as little time.

Then move your sights up the next step of the ladder: Figure out how you can help your boss do their job better. Taking care, naturally, not to do so in a threatening way. The notion is that if someone is working for you – and they make your life easier so you can move up the food chain – they are exactly the person you want to promote when you move up.

The Plan of the Day

Theory aside, we each start every morning where that fly-hungry frog began: On the side of the lake ready to jump in.

Take about 15 minutes each and every day to plan what you need to accomplish to make your personal Plan of Life come true. Reduce it to one of two essential tasks that when done will move you along. Then resolve to stay up and work on these problems until they are done.

Each and every day there is a new lily pad to jump to, but if you didn’t jump to a new one yesterday, you may be too far away to make the jump today. So commit to making daily progress.

Once you have this, you may be broken as some point in your life, but you will never be poor.

The distinction is that “broke” is a temporary state of your cash resources. “Poor” on the other hand is a state of mind. Money is never long gone from a person of prosperous thoughts. But money and success will NEVER appear long for a person of poor spirit.

It is all part of the magic we share as co-creators of the Reality around us. Science and religion are moving back towards a middle ground and there are some dandy books on the topic.

One that I can recommend is Kim Romainer’s book “The Science of Making Things Happen: Turn Any Possibility into Reality.”

For the more academically inclined “Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation (Oxford Studies in the Philosophy of Science)” might seem overloading but some learning styles are that way…

Romainer’s book deals with the science that is filling in the gaps which used to separate magicians, business leaders, and the hard sciences.

I think you might enjoy it because becoming a master of co-creation with the forces of Universe is a totally empowering experience.

The final step to “birthing an idea” is the delivery room, analogous to the farmer’s harvest.

When you do, be sure to hold a party and celebrate the completion of a fine project. Your team will appreciate it and few things in life can be done totally alone.

For Business Readers

Become an expert with Microsoft Project and leverage your teams using online tools like GoToMeeting.com, BaseCamp, SmartSheet, ZOHO Projects. or others.

If you’re a young business reader, the sooner the better on project software and tasking programs.

must always do.

Figure out, like Tom,  who you want to “carry the fish.”

Reader Note 2: This book was going to end here, but I’ve had a request to add one more chapter to close it out.

So next week? [Keyword: Mating]

Write when you get rich,

George@ure.net