by Marc Allen
Enjoy the scenery along the way. Enjoy each step as much as possible. It is an essential part of your journey.
Enjoy the journey.
There is beauty and wonder in each eternal moment,
here and now.
Here’s a simple way to put it: Enjoy your life! It’s not such a difficult thing to do — every child does it. We did it for years as children. It’s good to remember what every child, every animal, every plant knows: enjoy the present moment.
ANOTHER KEY
We’ve been very active in this Course, making plans, listing goals, affirming those goals. It’s time to consider another important key to success: Counterbalance your activity with a good healthy dose of relaxation, rejuvenation, laziness, and even (yes!) wasting time.
Our lives, our world, the whole universe is an endless movement of great polarities. Winter follows summer. Night follows day. Don’t forget to follow your activity with inactivity and rest. Most of us are products of a Type-A, workaholic culture. Most of us are very good with the active side of the polarity, but neglect — or at least don’t fully appreciate — the part of the polarity of life that includes loafing, relaxing, recharging, meditating, and resting.
Here’s a key to take to heart:
Don’t neglect your laziness.
This Course is a lazy person’s guide to success, written by a lazy person. I love being lazy. There are days when I’ll get up (usually quite late, between 9:00 and 11:00 A.M.), say a brief morning prayer, have a cup of coffee, and go back to bed. Often in the afternoon or early evening I lie flat on my back for half an hour, or an hour. Sometimes I fall asleep, sometimes I just deeply relax, and sometimes I have wonderful creative meditations. I find that after I allow myself to be as lazy as I want, I’m inevitably filled with the energy to go out and do something.
Embrace the laziness within you — be fully, enjoyably lazy, as much as you can. Most of us have already fully embraced the other side of that polarity: we are active, almost all the time, the result of a workaholic, Type-A educational system and work world and society in general.
We leap out of bed and immediately start doing things. Most of us can’t even take a vacation without turning it into another series of places to go, things to do and see. We come home from a vacation needing time to rest and recover from the vacation! Most of us don’t need to be taught to be more active, we need to be inactive more of the time.
It’s a good homework project for us all: Find more time for creative loafing. And uncreative loafing. And sleeping. And doing those things that are such an enjoyable waste of time — whatever that may be for you.
Spend time doing nothing. It brings energy and focus to the times you’re doing something. It brings energy and focus to accomplishing your goals. There are times to make clear goals, and times to completely let them go — not to forget them, but to recharge, revitalize, and renew. As they say in the New Thought churches and Twelve-Step programs, “Let go and let God.”
Take breaks as you read this book. Stretch. Talk to yourself. Take a walk. Meditate. Stare at the clouds. Do nothing for a while.
Then when you’re ready to move ahead, you will do it with much more energy, clarity, and effectiveness.
SUMMARY
• To build anything, you need a blueprint. What is your plan?
• For every major goal, write a short, simple business plan. Summarize it briefly on one page. Add it to your folder containing the other things you have written: your ideal scene, your list of goals.
• A one-page plan is powerful, because it turns your desires into intentions and sets your powerful subconscious mind in motion.
• If you want to raise money from investors, a longer plan may be necessary. It is not that difficult to write; take it one page at a time.
• There are endless creative ways to finance a company; the keys to successful financing are (1) write a solid plan — build it and they will come — and (2) create a win-win arrangement that works for you, your investors, and your company.
• Quite possibly the most important key to successful business, and a fulfilling life as well, is to learn to live and work in partnership with others.
• Plan your work and work your plan. Have a clear goal ahead and a clear plan to achieve it.
• At the same time, don’t forget the other side of life: Balance the active with the inactive. Let yourself be lazy at times. Balance your work with some loafing and quiet time. Periods of inactivity bring energy, clarity, and effectiveness to your activity.
If you advance confidently
in the direction of your dreams,
and endeavor to live the life
you have imagined,
you will meet with unexpected success.
— Henry David Thoreau
* From The One Page Business Plan by Jim Horan (see Recommended Resources).
LESSON 3
DISCOVER YOUR VOCATION AND PURPOSE
THIS KEY SIMPLIFIES EVERYTHING
Vocation and purpose are powerful words. Discovering our vocation and purpose can improve our lives, quickly and extensively. Becoming aware of what those two words mean in our lives can help us cut to the essentials, to what is important, and avoid spending years of our precious lives going nowhere. It can give us a satisfaction and fulfillment in life in a way that perhaps we haven’t even yet dared to imagine. These two words give us a key to our conscious evolution.
It takes only a few minutes to reflect on this key, and to write it in a brief paragraph.
The few simple questions in this part of the Course help us focus our creative minds in the right direction. The answers to these simple questions help us make the choices that build the architecture of a fulfilled life.
Each of us is different,
each of us has a unique purpose for living,
and each of us has unique talents and abilities
we were naturally given to accomplish that purpose.
It’s the truth, and we might as well not hide from it: We all have natural gifts — we were born with them — and we are all called to express them in some way.
We all have a natural vocation and an even greater purpose in life.
VOCATION
YOUR VOCATION IS IN YOUR IDEAL SCENE
You may have to look for your vocation, or it may be obvious to you — perhaps it has been obvious all your life. It was Kent Nerburn, the great writer, who made me aware that vocation comes from the Latin word for calling, which comes from the word for voice. Somewhere in your ideal scene, your vocation is calling to you.
Kent Nerburn expressed it beautifully:
Think of work as “vocation.”
It should be something that calls to you
as something you want to do,
and it should be something that gives voice to
who you are and what you want to say to the world.
It is, above all else, something that lets you love.
— Kent Nerburn, Letters to My Son
A longer version of this quote is at the end of this chapter, in big, bold display type. They are words to the wise.*
PUT YOUR VOCATION IN WRITING
Think about it. Put it in writing. It might be brief, a short paragraph, or it might fill a page. Take a sheet of paper and write “My Vocation or Calling” on the top. Then write whatever comes to mind. It is, above all else, something that lets you love.
Add it to your collection of pages — your personal power kit, your Millionaire Course, your magician’s tool kit, whatever you want to call it. It is one of your keys to success.
A FEW GOOD QUESTIONS
It is certainly worthwhile to ask yourself some of these questions as well:
• In what ways are you creative?
• In what ways are you unique?
• What things do you fantasize doing?
• What do you fantasize having?
• Who do you dream of being?
• Who are you envious
of? (This usually indicates we have the desire — and ability — to become what they have become.)
Here are a few more things worth asking:
• Do you feel a spiritual yearning of some kind?
• Are you frustrated or anxious much of the time?
• Do you wish to be more serene, more content with life?
• When you reach the end of your life and look back on it, what is the most important thing you want to be remembered for?
• What are the most important things for you in your life today?
Within your answers are both your vocation and purpose in life. Both are always something you’re passionate about — and that is a key: follow your passion. As Joseph Campbell said, in such a concise and beautiful way:
Follow your bliss.
— Joseph Campbell
Isn’t that great advice? Work with passion. Do what you love to do.
Oprah Winfrey has emerged as one of the greatest teachers of our time; she gave us a great reminder when she said,
If you don’t know what your passion is,
realize that one reason for your existence on earth
is to find out.
— Oprah Winfrey
PURPOSE
You have a purpose in life.
We all have a purpose in life, and it is even greater, more expansive than our vocation. Once we realize our purpose, our lives are clarified and simplified immensely.
So many people have difficulty with the word purpose. You might want to find some other word for it. Whatever word you use, it’s good to ask yourself this question: What is your reason for being? We have these miraculous bodies, we have a life span of however many years to express something, to do something, to be somebody. What is it?
It may require some reflection. It may take some time. But it is extraordinarily valuable to consider this question. It may be the single best thing you can do in your life.
James Allen had tremendous insight here:
Until thought is linked with purpose
there is no intelligent accomplishment.
— James Allen, As You Think
You have a unique purpose for living, and you have been given unique talents and abilities to accomplish that purpose. When you realize what that purpose is, it can change and simplify your life. It can help you make major decisions you may not have even considered before, and even help you take a quantum leap ahead in your evolution and fulfillment.
Your purpose is always greater than just making money, of course. If you believe your purpose is only to make money, you will not make the right decisions, and you will never be genuinely successful. You might very well make a certain amount of money, but you’ll still be unfulfilled. You will never find the contentment and fulfillment and joy of life you really want, underneath it all, for those things are only available to you when you realize you have a higher purpose in life.
THE POWER OF PURPOSE
When you discover your purpose, you marshal all kinds of forces around you and within you that support you in fulfilling every goal that is aligned with your purpose.
This is a great key:
When we live and work in harmony with our purpose,
we are taking care of the inner work,
and the outer world unfolds easily and effortlessly,
bringing us the fulfillment of our greatest dreams.
Our purpose is individual and private. It is sacred. It is something to ponder, even if only a little while, and put into writing. It is something to discover for ourselves, and then do our best to remember and live by. This is the only way we will ever find real satisfaction and fulfillment.
Take a sheet of paper and write “Purpose in Life” at the top. Then write whatever comes to mind. Make it as expansive as you can. It is your great work. It is a very important part of the map to success you are creating in the pages you are writing as you work through this Course.
There is nothing new in this, of course; this part of the perennial philosophy was summed up beautifully by one of India’s greatest writers, Patanjali, over two thousand years ago:
When you are inspired by some great purpose,
some extraordinary project,
all your thoughts break their bonds.
Your mind transcends limitations,
your consciousness expands in every direction,
and you find yourself in a new, great,
and wonderful world.
Dormant forces, faculties, and talents become alive,
and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far
than you ever dreamed yourself to be.
— Patanjali, Yoga Sutras ca. 250 B.C.E.
You have taken another powerful step. You are focusing your creative energies in the highest and most effective way possible. You are becoming a powerful person able to manifest your dreams.
A SIMPLE, ENJOYABLE EXERCISE
FINDING OUR VOCATION AND PURPOSE
This simple exercise can help us find our vocation and more clearly see our purpose in life. It’s very similar to the ideal scene exercise we did before, when we asked ourselves what we would do if money were no object. This time make it more specific:
Imagine you just won the lottery. Imagine suddenly having millions and millions, all the money you could ever want or need. Now answer these questions:
What would you do with the money?
What kind of life would you have?
What kind of person would you be?
Now affirm something like this:
I am now creating the life I dream of.
I am the person I dream of being,
right here, right now.
Feel free to change the affirmation to find the words that fit your unique personality and life situation. Affirm that you are now the person you would be if you had suddenly attained everything you wish for in life.
When I did this little exercise, I imagined I had just won twenty million after-tax dollars in the lottery. I’m not greedy: twenty million is all that is necessary to set up my most expansive dream (at least at this moment), and that includes giving more than half of it away. I know that, for a lot of people, one million would fulfill their dreams; and many others can live a dream life on a fraction of that.
I asked myself, What would I do with the money?
The answer came quite quickly — it was fun, exciting to imagine it: I would give half of it away to worthwhile causes and people, leaving me with $10 million. I would put $3 million into real estate, buying my dream retreats for my wife and myself; and $3 million into liquid assets, mostly stocks and mutual funds, and work with a few different money managers to earn at least 6 to 10 percent per year — a passive income of $180,000 to $300,000 per year. I would spend about a million turning my house into my fantasy environment, and over time I would spend and give away the other $3 million.
I fully imagined the life I would have then: My dream home, my retreats in my two favorite spots in the world, enough passive income so I wouldn’t ever have to work.
Then I asked myself, What do I want all that stuff for?
It’s a good question to ask. The first time I did this exercise, I answered, “Peace and power.” The second time I answered with a phrase I had read in The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle: “Grace, ease, and lightness.”
As I thought this through, I realized I was still under the delusion that all that stuff I fantasized about would bring me a life of ease and peace — even though I knew from experience that achieving financial goals doesn’t bring any kind of lasting peace at all. It brings moments of satisfaction and joy, but they quickly pass and you find you’re exactly the same person with the same core problems as before. Money takes care of some of those problems, but it also creates some new problems of its own — and, essentially, your emotional experience and your life in general doesn’t change one bit. This is a depressing fact for anyone who believes that money will make them happy!
When I did this
little exercise, I had already achieved everything I had dreamed of in my first ideal scene. I had a successful business and a family and the big white house on the hill. I was a multimillionaire. But these things had not brought me the ease and peace that I thought they would when I dreamed them up in the first place.
So I came up with this affirmation:
I now have peace and power.
I now have grace, ease, and lightness.
Don’t underestimate this little exercise. It made me realize something important:
Every millionaire discovers that being a millionaire
is not the important thing in life:
The important thing is to live the life you dream of living
and to be the person you dream of being.
Whether you believe it or not, money has nothing to do with any kind of lasting happiness. Perhaps you will have to make a lot of money before you truly realize this, but if you can understand it right now — regardless of your financial situation — it can save a lot of wasted time and effort.
YOU DON’T NEED TO WIN THE LOTTERY
You don’t need to be a millionaire before you can be at peace, or even before you have the power to do, be, and have what you want in life. And finding what is meaningful in life has absolutely nothing to do with our bank accounts or real estate or anything else out there in the world. We can find peace and satisfaction to some degree in the outer world when we learn how to live and work in loving partnership with others, but we can find real, lasting peace only within, because that is where it is. It surpasses all our understanding; it is unchanging and eternal, forever waiting for us to discover it.