The Practice of Your Life

The Exercise and Pursuit of a Consciously Created Life

Self-Help Courses as Entertainment

Jun 21
2009

“Taking any course that cannot translate into a practice that you incorporate into your life is like going to a movie.”      Francis Wade

Francis Wade is a fellow philosopher, entrepreneur and a good friend of mine. He said the above quote in a conversation I was having with him about my philosophy of living life as a practice. I was telling him about the book S.H.A.M. – How the Self-Help Movement made America Helpless by Steve Salerno – which highlighted the cultural phenomenon of “there’s something wrong … especially with me, and there’s one thing that can fix it, all I have to do is find it.”

The book SHAM talks about how people go from course to

Learning to love the “plateau”

Jun 24
2008

George Leonard has a book called “Mastery” that is essentially about living your life as a practice, and in it he talks about the nature of developing mastery in any chosen endeavor. According to Leonard, you develop in fits and spurts characterized by periods of apparent no-growth or “plateaus” as Leonard calls them. This I think is a fundamental concept that must be fully understood and integrated into a life practitioner. It is simply not possible to experience constant progression when you’re growing. It is the nature of growth and development to have periods where you experience no-growth or even decline.

Leonard points out that this doesn’t mean that you’re not growing, but rather that it takes some time before the growth you are undergoing manifests itself.

Therefore the challenge… Continue reading

Mastery and why you shouldn’t try to attain it

May 07
2008

Going through the personal growth or self-help sections of books stores or looking at the course titles at places like the learning Annex, I’m struck at the ridiculous promises being made. “Master relationships/money/career.” “How to earn a fortune in real estate, how to make her beg for more.” The list goes on and on.

Not to say that you couldn’t earn a fortune in real estate, or make her beg for me, it’s just that these promises imply that there’s some ultimate point that you can reach. Do you really think that if you make her beg for more once, you’ll always be able to make her beg for more?

You could make a great argument that this is the case, that you could reach some “best” point, especially if it’s a… Continue reading