The best way to experience the power of fundamental choices is to make them.
In business, what distinguishes leaders from laggards and greatness from mediocrity is the ability to uniquely imagine what could be.
Efforts to reform are often met with resistance because the system always tries to fall back to the status quo and what is comfortable.
The historic period in which we live is a period of reawakening to a commitment of higher values, a reawakening of individual purpose, and a reawakening of the longing to fulfill that purpose in life.
One of the most important results you can bring into the world is the you that you really want to be.
In the absence of a great dream, pettiness prevails.
It’s not what the vision is, it’s what the vision does.
Creators start at the end. First they have an idea of what they want to create. Sometimes this is idea is general, and sometimes it is specific. Before you can create what you want you want to create, you must know what you are after, what you want to bring into being.
In the creative process you do not make choices about what you do not want. You make choices about what you do want.
There’s nothing like surrounding yourself with people who actually like you just the way you are–people who are not trying to improve you, change you, manipulate you, save you, etc. There is a line. On one side of the line are those who will give you the news–good, bad, and indifferent. They care about you and your success. On the other side of the line are those who do not actually care about you and have motives other than true support.
Faith was the excuse you used if you didn’t have a good argument.
If the creative process is so powerful, it would be natural to wonder why many artists have difficulties in their lives. It is because they do not know what they know.
You got to where you are in your life right now by moving along the path of least resistance.
Hector Berlioz’s witty comment, “Time is the great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all of its students.
You love your child for who the child is, not as an extension of your identity or as an example of your good parenting or even as a companion.
Some people choose “to go to college” rather than choose “to be educated”, or choose “to eat health foods” rather than choose “to be healthy.” Because this kind of choice invests undue power in the process, the result is inextricably tied to the process, and the ways in which the desired result can come about are limited.
In the orientation of the creative, once you have consciously made the choice to be healthy and you are attracted to eating certain foods and following certain forms of exercise, you are involved in an organic process. The structural tendency of this organic process is for you to be attracted to those processes that will be particularly beneficial to your health. Those processes might include the usual, expected ones, such as health food and exercise, as well as unexpected ones.
Often, the person reaches a point where there is a choice between two conflicting interests: reducing the emotional discomfort or seeing what is really going on. The person needs to make a value choice at this point. Which is more important to you, seeing reality or feeling okay? Almost always, the person chooses to see reality, and therefore, to let the emotional chips fall wherever they may.
Once a structure exists, energy moves through that structure by the path of least resistance. In other words, energy moves where it is easiest for it to go.
One basic principle found throughout nature is this: Tension seeks resolution. From the spider web to the human body, from the formation of galaxies to the shifts of continents, from the swing of pendulums to the movement of wind-up toys, tension-resolution systems are in play.
When you merely choose a process, you do not establish structural tension, and you do not make energy available to complete the creative process.