Scott Free Thinking

Imagine for a moment how a police officer might deal with facing an angry mob. You might even imagine that you are that police officer and you are forced to make a decision as to how to either get them to settle down, or if your own life is at stake: should you combat them? It can be easy to sit as an activist and claim that the police are overstepping their bounds with brutality, and often times they might be, but imagine this particular situation is different. These people have become violent and you must make a choice. The fact of the matter is, every single crowd of people often times have either one or more leaders. If you can find a way to neutralize the leaders you could probably find a way to at least get the crowd to step off. Or perhaps there’s some words you could say: “Wait for the toasted cheeseburgers!” and if they all hear you then they may stop for a moment to ponder what it meant, where you then have a chance to escape.

Either way, the rest of the crowd can be very confusing to what it is you are trying to achieve. This is a bizarre analogy, but I would like to go ahead and use it for the purpose of this article. Your life is filled with obstacles, but everywhere you go, there is always a way to own your situation. There is always a way out, always a way in, always a way up. The only thing that you have to do is to use the correct creative problem solving method to determine what your course of action should be.

But it’s hard. Distractions are everywhere. Much of the time you have to sort of squint your eyes a bit, knuckle down, see through the fog of any given situation. When I think of this, I think of the word entropy, which is actually a word in science used to describe the constant chaotic disorder of the universe. Everything is inevitably leading toward entropy, or disorder, and it takes some particular force to come along and restore that disorder to something that seems to make sense. Your life is doing the same thing, and this is where the illusion of not being in control really comes into play. People around you are going to be making their own decisions without your consent. The world is going to keep operating with or without your presence and when you wake up every single morning, there are new developments that have occurred that you may or may not know about.

In my own life, I have come to experience a heavy amount of entropy, and if you think that entropy is something that does not affect your own consciousness then you are gravely mistaken. There are always things coming along to shift your current state. Heck, even your own body is dying off and rejuvenating itself several times over during your lifetime; your cells completely die and are replaced gradually about once every seven years. With that sort of concept it is incredible that we are even able to retain as much as we already have.

But it happens. I remember whenever I first joined my film making production company back in 2002, we had entirely different goals back then. Not only that, we had totally different ideas about what the direction of our group was to be. We never would have imagined when I had first started there in 2002 that we would not release our first DVD until 2006, or that we would end up where we are today. I mean, I’ve talked to many of the original members of the company and a lot of them have said that they’re amazed they’re “still here.” Or I could also consider what happened with the book that I was writing over the course of many years. I wanted originally to send it into publishers and get the thing into stores. Then, years later, I decided to not even try that and then my goal was to build my own businesses and simply attach that book to my repertoire of products and services.

Things change. Plans change. Or how about your relationships? How many different people have you been with, if romance is a part of your life? Or, how well have you kept the bonds and ties you’ve always had with your family? Some things, focus is easy, other things - the focus gets scattered.

And this is where things get interesting. If your life has had particular changes that never stop changing in some areas but in other areas things seem to sort of have always been the same - it is incredible to think that you are actually making that choice. But you are. If your goal is to get into better shape, how focused have you stayed on that goal? Focus is simply nothing more than unwavering persistence.

One day at a business meeting we are were all talking about what our long term goals were for the company and why certain things we set out to do never happened. A friend of our’s, named Chester, kept repeating a simple idea, but it began to sink in just how important it was even despite its simplicity. We even began an initiative within the company: “Project Focus” to help us be reminded that we must stick to the same goals over a long period of time if we really want to see the results that we’re looking for.

I’ll go ahead and take a quick moment to talk about my own goals. Right now financial freedom is one thing that I am heavily working toward. One mistake I have made in the past is that while I am finding some solutions to generating more income, these solutions require too much time. The necessity of automation is something that, especially at this point, I cannot emphasize more heavily. At the time of writing this, I’ve lately been conflicted with the belief that perhaps there are only so many businesses or so much energy that can be expended without the aid of existing money that even can be automated. But what am I saying? I’m a guy who is an internet blogger - automation is the name of the game when it comes to what it is I do here. I work with a computer all day and what does a computer do? It operates off of automated commands all day long.

Automation is something that you are surrounded with in the world, and with the rest of the world automation is also something that is happening all the time whether or not you are there to administer it. Automation can happen in the form of entropy or it can happen to a focused point that results in your own benefit. It is up to you to figure it all out, however, and this can be the challenging part. It is here that when I think through this whole thing I begin to say: Well, I know that thinking there are heavy limits set upon my businesses is just not true, but what is preventing me from thinking of solutions? What sorts of feelings do I have in relation to my current actions?

Mistakes are something you are going to make, but that is no reason to simply lose focus, give up, and move onto something else. There is nothing wrong with deadlines, so long as they are reasonable, and there is also nothing wrong with placing other sorts of time constraints on your endeavors. For instance, some people would recommend that you wait at least 3 to 5 years before you decide that a business is not profitable. You should give that much time for profitability from your initial investment. To me, 3 to 5 years is an amount of time that seems completely unnecessary in the scope of the universe and yet we all give a bad reaction to the phrase: “get rich quick.”

Before I go any further, let us examine the central concepts to the very directive of focus. We know there are obstacles. We know there is entropy. We know there is choice. We know limits do not truly exist. We know time seems to be a factor. But what is the answer to the puzzle? From what strange little sector of thin air must we pull a solution to our problems from? Depending on how far you have come, you can either follow a pivot system of where to go to next, or you can begin throwing your game board dice. And here is what I mean by that:

A pivot system from where you are right now means that you are essentially examining everything from a warm approach. ‘Warm approach’ is a term that many salesman use, and it essentially means that you already have developed a strong connection and good rapport with your target customer. You are approaching them with warmth and already have an improved chance of selling. The same thing applies to the decisions you are making in your everyday life. For example, my friend Stephen often gets girlfriends by simply networking through the other people he knows to meet the girls that already exist in a social network. He does not just walk up to any random pretty girl and begin talking to her.

If you are a car salesman, the first thing you may want to do to start working your way up is to figure out other solutions to income that are steady so that if you fail in sales you have a backup plan. If you are a writer and want to write the next great romance novel, you might start by reading some of the best rated existing romance novels. Whatever the case, a few traits hold true throughout any situation: the options are presented to you without your seeking them out, they are logical progressions, and they are done in direct relation to whatever it is you’re currently doing.

The second approach of ‘throwing your game board dice,’ is really just another phrase for cold approach. You are going completely out of the norm, out of your line of sight, and probably totally out of your comfort zone to expand and explore for new options. There is a very famous time in history when an entire nation set this sort of initiative, and it goes back in history to when Spain was looking for a better trade route to India and China and they did not want to go around the very bottom of Africa or go along the existing high-tax trade routes. They took a huge chance, believing the earth to be round, to simply start sailing west to eventually curve around to the other side of the world. To a primitive being, this logic may have been foolish, even stupid.

And of course, they found the “new world,” or America, and what they got there was an enormous amount of gold from conquering the Aztecs and for the time became the richest nation in the entire world. What if they had had a bunch of uneducated people running their country and instead did not try anything at all for fear they’d “fall off the planet?” You have to try, and you have to throw yourself into the middle of things at times. For me, my knowledge of film production and running an online store have proved invaluable to my progress here on this blog, and similarly the knowledge I’ve obtained from this blog has also helped in the other areas immensely.

When it comes to the practical aspect of conscious creation, or for that matter, the law of attraction - you have to be using both methods, cold and warm, similar to the same way that you have to do in sales. Here’s a quick example of how the warm flow process might work:

Situation:You work at McDonald’s and your goal is to get a higher paying job. You have a few different options:

• Search for a different job that pays similar, but higher pay. You think you remember a friend of yours mentioning that Best Buy pays a higher hourly rate.
• You could find a way to pay for college by either roughing your way with a McDonald’s earning rate, or go get some sort of technical certification at a 2 year college to allow you to get a new level of income while pursuing your higher goals.

In this particular case, you choose to combine these immediately visible options available to you by first getting a higher paying job at Best Buy, and then getting a 2 year technical certification as something like an x-ray technician so that you can begin working on heavier goals.

And the cold approach put to use:

Situation: You’re an unpublished author and you’re seeking to get that first book out there on major store shelves. You have no idea how to do go about doing this and you’ve tried sending in your manuscripts to various different publishers. Few of them even gave you a reply.

• Feeling down, you start hitting up bars, nightclubs, and public parks. This leads you to meet people everywhere. In the back of your mind, maybe there is occasionally the desperate hope that you will soon encounter a rich guy from a publishing firm.
• In the town in which you live, there are no publishing houses at all. No one from the publishing industry even works here, and your irrational socialization is leading nowhere. You develop the far fetched notion of doing something crazy, like moving in right next to the area in which Simon & Schuster headquarters is located.

You pack up your bags, and using your astute social skills developed off of desperately talking to people out in public everywhere, you move to the town in which Simon & Schuster is located and start working there as the mailroom guy. For months you do nothing but polish your manuscript. After 6 years, you eventually get your manuscript through the door and your book gets published.

To some, this whole thing seems kind of ridiculous. But the cold approach logic is not unfounded or unproven at all. Certainly there are no guarantees that the outcome would be successful, but don’t you think the guy living and working with the publishers is actually going to have a much better chance of succeeding than the guy who isn’t? Wouldn’t the guy who interacts with tons of people on a daily basis be a lot more bold in pursuing his dreams and have a much higher chance of meeting important people than the one who is simply the shy writer locked away in his house all day? Essentially, the most logical and practical approach in this whole ‘practical conscious creation process’ is to start with your warm contacts and options, then move to your cold. The side result is that you will probably develop skills that will help you in a variety of other areas in the process.