Let me give you an example. I overheard a guy telling a group of friends, over drinks, how he had become fed-up with work. Guys being guys, they immediately started to come up with options to fix the problem – ideas like changing company and changing jobs. That was when the guy got all logical…
‘Yeah, but I need to pay the mortgage and my kid's education and we've got a holiday planned for the Bahamas and…'
I interrupted. ‘How much do you need?'
‘A hundred grand a year,' he replied.
‘What's more important,' I asked, ‘your happiness or the money?'
Of course he said happiness. Then he got all logical again. ‘But I can't be happy unless I can pay the mortgage and give my kids the best and have great holidays.'
‘How many hours do you work?'
‘Around fifty.'
‘And how do you feel when you get home?'
‘Tired.'
‘What would your kids prefer, a father who is worn out for forty eight weeks of the year but has four weeks to entertain them per year or a dad who is a real Dad all year round?'
The conversation went on, me questioning, him justifying what he perceived as logic.
Yet it's not logic, is it? It's not logic to deny your heart's desire to change life when it's hurting you. The mortgage, the kid's education, the holidays are just stuff. And, like most people find after a heart attack or a divorce or an accident, is that this ‘stuff' is not that important. What's important is something else…
The problem is we got “Conditioned Logic” – “logic” transferred to us by society: friends, family, schools, college, the media, religion etc. We took it all on and felt we had to behave in a “conditioned” way. The repetition of that conditioning is fine for a while, but when we end up doing something we don't love, each time we do it takes a little of the soul away. Let me put it another way.
What gives you the power to succeed is what you perceive to be logic. Real power is not necessarily doing what society dictates. Real power is often something else. It is that knowing that comes from nowhere to tell you, you must do something different.
It might seem logical to have the house, the car, the private education, the holiday, but is it powerful. What is powerful is, to say I am not happy and things must change; I'm not killing myself for forty-eight weeks just for four weeks of pleasure; I'm not excited by my work and I'm willing to live in a smaller home if it means I can have more peace, less stress and fall back in love with my partner.
It's not all about the stuff, is it? It's about happiness and love; happiness and love of your partner; happiness and love of your children and family; happiness and love of your work. If you have that then you have it all.
