The important thing is to identify the “future that has already happened.”
Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. Everything a forecaster predicts may come to pass. Yet, he may not have seen the most meaningful of the emergent realities or, worse still, may not have paid attention to them. There is no way to avoid this irrelevancy in forecasting, for the important and distinctive are always the result of changes in values, perception, and goals, that is, in things that one can divine but not forecast.
But the most important work of the executive is to identify the changes that have already happened. The important challenge in society, economics, politics, is to exploit the changes that have already occurred and to use them as opportunities. The important thing is to identify the “future that has already happened”—and to develop a methodology for perceiving and analyzing these changes. A good deal of this methodology is incorporated in my 1985 book Innovation and Entrepreneurship, which shows how one systematically looks to the changes in society, in demographics, in meaning, in science and technology, as opportunities to make the future.
The spirit of an organization is created from the top.
The proof of the sincerity and seriousness of a management is uncompromising emphasis on integrity of character. This, above all, has to be symbolized in management’s “people” decisions. For it is character through which leadership is exercised; it is character that sets the example and is imitated. Character is not something one can fool people about. The people with whom a person works, and especially subordinates, know in a few weeks whether he or she has integrity or not. They may forgive a person for a great deal: incompetence, ignorance, insecurity, or bad manners. But they will not forgive a lack of integrity in that person. Nor will they forgive higher management for choosing him.
This is particularly true of the people at the head of an enterprise. For the spirit of an organization is created from the top. If an organization is great in spirit, it is because the spirit of its top people is great. If it decays, it does so because the top rots; as the proverb has it, “Trees die from the top.” No one should ever be appointed to a senior position unless top management is willing to have his or her character serve as the model for subordinates.
The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth Steve Pavlina
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About This Book
The goal of this book is to teach you how to bring all areas of your life into alignment with these universal principles. This requires injecting truth into your relationships, aligning your career with love, and bringing power to your spiritual practice. This is what it means to live as a conscious, intelligent human being. The more your life aligns with these principles, the smarter you become.
This book offers you a new way of thinking about personal growth from high-level concepts to practical actions. You won’t need different rules for maintaining your health, building your career, and caring for your relationships. The core principles of growth don’t change from one area of life to the next, nor do they vary from person to person. Once you understand how they work, you’ll be able to use them to improve your results in any endeavor.
In order for your spiritual practice to be truly authentic, you can’t compartmentalize it. You can’t be a spiritual person for an hour each weekend and then put that part of yourself on hold when you go to work on Monday morning. An intelligent spiritual practice is a holistic one. It integrates with all parts of your life, including your career, your finances, your health, and your relationships.
According to the principles of truth, love, and power, the highest level of spiritual attainment would be perfect alignment with those principles, which implies perfect intelligence. The ultimate ideal of any sound spiritual path is to be infinitely truthful, infinitely loving, and infinitely powerful. By extension, this also requires infinite oneness, infinite authority, and infinite courage. The ultimate spiritual pursuit is to strive to live congruently with all of these.
In today’s world, it takes courage to think for yourself instead of blindly swallowing what others want you to believe. It’s up to you to hold yourself to the path with a heart and to follow it wherever it may lead, regardless of how others judge you for it. In the end, your spiritual practice must be immensely personal and consciously chosen.
As you progress along your unique spiritual path, you may experience periods of prolonged confusion lasting several weeks or longer. During such times, you may feel distant and disconnected. Reality suddenly makes very little sense to you, and you become uncertain of everything.
The principle of authority makes it clear that yielding control of your spiritual life to someone else is a mistake. You must be the ultimate authority in your life—not God; and not some guru, master, or teacher. Your spiritual practice is yours to direct. Feel free to consult with whomever you wish, but don’t forget that you’re in command. You can’t delegate your spiritual authority to anyone else. Ultimately this is a quest you must pursue for yourself.
In order for your beliefs to be aligned with authority, they must be effective. This means that they must ultimately satisfy the following eight criteria:
1. Accurate. Effective beliefs must be consistent with your observations of reality. Your beliefs can’t contradict any facts you know to be true.
2. All-inclusive. For your beliefs to be effective, they must collectively address your entire field of experience. If you experience things that lie outside your beliefs about reality, then your belief system is incomplete, and an incomplete belief system can never be fully trusted.
Since we’re all inherently connected, we constantly influence each other by the spiritual choices we make. Consequently, our spiritual practice isn’t merely an individual issue. Our personal spirituality has a collective impact.
When I (Steve Pavlina) was about 12 years old, I met another boy who was an atheist. I assumed that meant he must be misguided or evil in some way, since that’s how I was taught to view non-Catholics. He didn’t believe in God, so I concluded there must be something terribly wrong with him. Why else would he be doomed to spend eternity in hell? However, as I got to know him, I discovered to my surprise that he was actually a very nice person, and he and I remained friends for years. As hard as I tried, I could find no evidence that he was evil. This was confusing to me because it conflicted with what I’d been taught all my life. My beliefs encouraged me to disconnect from this boy, but I chose to align with love and connect with him anyway, thereby experiencing an important step on my path of spiritual growth.
One of the most empowering choices you can make is to decouple your spiritual beliefs from your identity. Despite how firmly held your beliefs may be, they can never define you. If you change your faith, you’re still you. A fixed belief system can only limit your ability to grow; it’s like permanently closing one eye and denying yourself access to your natural stereo vision.
Personal attachment to beliefs, especially cultural and spiritual beliefs, is unfortunately very common. While experiencing a belief system from the inside is generally a wise choice, equating your identity with any fixed notion is a disempowering mistake. As the principle of truth reveals, beliefs are lenses through which you can view reality. Every lens reveals some aspects of reality while hiding others. The more lenses you experience, the more complete your understanding of the whole. Even if you become incredibly attached to one particular lens, it remains simply a lens and cannot define you. Attachment to one specific view of reality limits your power and curtails your ability to connect with people who hold different lenses.
