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Dr. Kalinda Rose Stevenson
How Do You Get To Easy Street?
Welcome back!
“Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win.”
Nadia Comaneci
I got an email from a friend this week. She has started work on a new business venture but has gotten distracted by family matters. One phrase in her email stood out. “This is not as easy as I had planned.”
Her words got me thinking about the expectation that doing something new should be “easy.”
One of the biggest of the big lies of our times is that success should be easy. I did a search on Google on the word “easy.” Google brought back 2,490,000,000 websites. Look at that number. Almost two and a half billion web pages using the word “easy.”
The expectation that success should be “easy” has been drilled into us by too many get rich quick schemes, too many promises of instant success, and too many sales claims that some product will make things easy for you. Easy, easy, easy.
This is especially evident on the internet. We hear too many stories about 24 hour promotions leading to a million dollars in sales, without knowing how many years lay behind that instant success.
Speaking for myself, I’d like to find success on the road named Easy Street. Unfortunately, taking a stroll down Easy Street does not usually lead to success. Easy Street is usually a dead end road, leading nowhere.
If success is so easy, why do so few people succeed? The truth is that success is rarely easy. Most successful people attribute their success to hard work. And hard work is not easy.
“If you like things easy, you’ll have difficulties; if you like problems, you’ll succeed.”
Laotian Proverb
I used to teach Biblical Hebrew to theological students. Hebrew is not an easy language for English-speaking adults to learn. The alphabet consists only of consonants. Vowels are noted with a system of lines and dots. And words are written from right to left. One of my students approached me one day after class early in the semester, and with great frustration asked, “How can I ever learn this stuff?”
I knew that Mike was a professional pianist and singer and had left a successful career as an opera singer to start theological seminary. I asked him if he could read music. He seemed a bit annoyed that I would even ask such a question, and said, “Of course.” Then I asked if he knew how to read music the first time he looked at a sheet of music. He looked startled and then I saw a flicker of awareness in his eyes. He got my point. I didn’t have to say anything else.
Reading music had become so easy for Mike that he no longer had to think about it. Learning to read Hebrew is no harder than learning to read music. It is also not easy. Learning any new skill involves hard work and it also takes time to learn. Stephen Covey traces the stages of development from unconsciously incompetent, to consciously incompetent, to consciously competent, to unconsciously competent.
Mike had already reached the point of being unconsciously competent when he read music. This is another way of saying that he had reached mastery. In contrast, after two or three weeks of studying Hebrew, he was consciously incompetent in Hebrew, and frustrated with himself because he was not already a master of what he had barely begun to study.
“What is easy is seldom excellent.”
Samuel Johnson
The word “ease” is related to the word “easy” but they are miles apart. What is ease? Ease is what happens when you have reached mastery of whatever it is that you set out to do.
The quotation from Nadia Comaneci says it all. Nadia awed the world with her gymnastics at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. She made it look easy, as she flung her tiny body around the parallel bars. But that skill came as the result of years of grueling work in the gym. That is the real sequence. From incompetence to mastery by way of hard work. Hard work got her there, and she made it look so easy because she had reached a point of ease.
This is the very definition of mastery. When you reach a point where you make the difficult look easy. The price Nadia paid, the price any truly successful person pays, is hard work.
“Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.”
Seth Godin
But even hard work is not enough for real success. If one of the biggest lies of our times is that success can and should be easy, the idea that hard work leads to success is equally misleading.
If Easy Street is a dead end, traveling down Hard Work Street is no guarantee that you will find success at the end of it. In fact, Hard Work Street can be as much of a dead end as Easy Street. Hard work by itself is not enough to lead you to success.
Why? Because sometimes you are on the wrong Hard work Street. Just working hard is not enough. You need to be working toward something that is authentic for you.
One of the reasons that so many of us work so hard with so little result is that we are working at cross purposes with our true selves.
So the real question is, Are you working hard to master a craft or skill that is the right craft or skill for you. Are you trying hard to be what you are simply not meant to be?
Hard work would not have been enough for Nadia to succeed as a gymnast if she didn’t have some sort of natural facility and body type for gymnastics. This is why you don’t see female Olympic-level basketball players who are five feet tall and gymnasts who are six feet four. No matter how hard she worked, tiny Nadia would never have stunned the world as a basketball player.
My student Mike could read music, play the piano, and sing with an amazing trained tenor voice because he worked hard to develop his innate talents.
And so, my friend was onto something when she commented, “This is not as easy as I had planned.” Success is not easy. Success requires hard work. But hard work doesn’t have to feel hard when you are doing something that is authentic for you. I’m going to give the last words to Alan Alda.
“You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover will be yourself.”
Alan Alda
This article was originally published April 11, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-04-11.htm.
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Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D.
Author of “No Money Limits For Real Estate Investors: Discover The Money-Making Secret In The Monopoly Game That Will Turn Your Money Struggles Into Money Abundance
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kalinda@nomoneylimits.com
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Collecting Abundance In A Bucket
“Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it.”
Rabindranath Tagore
I listened to a recording recently of two men having a conversation about the nature of abundance. In their conversation, the dominant metaphor for abundance was water. They said that we are like fish swimming in the ocean, not recognizing that we are immersed in abundance all the time.
As metaphors go, this is an intriguing insight into the nature of abundance. I have no idea of the consciousness level of a fish, but I imagine that fish don’t analyze their surroundings much. They live in water, but have no consciousness that they are swimming in water. And this is the point of the metaphor. We live in an abundant world, but don’t see abundance because it is the medium of our lives.
But there is a missing piece to the metaphor. The missing piece turns scarcity into real abundance in our lives. The missing piece involves a bucket.
Instead of the thinking of yourself as a fish swimming in the ocean, think of yourself in a rainstorm. Rain is on my mind these days. I am writing this in the middle of a heavy rainstorm. The jet stream from Alaska has dipped down farther south than usual, bringing rain and rain and more rain. The San Francisco Bay Area just broke the record for the number of rainy days in March. So far in April, it has rained every day. Forecasters predict the rain will continue for the next two weeks.
And so with rain on my mind, I ask: How is it that you can live in an abundant universe and not increase your own abundance? The answer is simple. You aren’t holding out your bucket.
If you want to collect rain water, you don’t just stand in the stuff. You do something to collect the water. You take along a bucket. You set up a cistern. You use water tanks. You dig reservoirs. Otherwise, the water rolls off you as water rolls off a duck.
“The world is full of abundance and opportunity, but far too many people come to the fountain of life with a sieve instead of a tank car… a teaspoon instead of a steam shovel. They expect little and as a result they get little.”
Ben Sweetland
And this is what sets apart those who live in abundance and those who live with lack. Those who live in abundance do something to collect the water. They take a bucket with them. They build cisterns, water tanks, and reservoirs. Those who live with lack just stand in the rain and get wet.
“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”
Acts 20:35
In other words, the ones who live in abundance know how to receive. Those who live in lack don’t.
One of the real reasons so many of us struggle with lack in our lives is that we internalized the words, “It is more blessed to give than receive.” This Bible verse, taken out of context, sets up a value judgment: Giving is better than receiving.
I’m not going to do the critical work involved in telling you what the Greek words mean, or putting in these words in their biblical context. Let’s just look at the words themselves and ask what is wrong with this kind of universalizing statement.
“If you want greater prosperity in your life, start forming a vacuum to receive it.”
Catherine Ponder
Consider breathing. You breathe in and you breathe out. Somehow, we all got the idea that it is okay to receive when we breathe. What if you decide that it is better to breathe out than to breathe in? You can’t live very long before you realize that breathing is a cycle. If you want to continue to live, you need to receive air into your lungs as much as you need to breathe it out.
Even the rain itself is a cycle. The rain falls on Earth, runs into the creeks and rivers, flows back into the ocean, gets picked up into clouds and falls on Earth again. Breath and rain are part of life’s cycles of giving and receiving. But when it comes to Bible verses, this awareness of the cyclical nature of life often gets replaced by categories straight out of Greek philosophy.
The ancient Greeks, especially Aristotle, divided reality into opposing pairs, and then attached value judgments that one element of each pair was better than the other. So “reason is better is than emotion.” “Male is more human than female.” “A free man is a more moral being than a slave,” and on and on.
Christian theology picked up many of these same value-laden dichotomies, and imposed them on biblical statements and stories. As a result, many Christian people learned to think in dual categories, with value judgments attached. One example is that Christian theology has taken this one verse: “It more blessed to give than to receive,” and turned it into a one-sided rule for life.
From this simplistic notion, many of us learned that giving is better than receiving.
The obvious question is: How can you give what you don’t have? And if you give all you have, how can you give any more? To give, you have to have something to give. And to have something you have to receive it first.
“Asking is the beginning of receiving. Make sure you don’t go to the ocean with a teaspoon. At least take a bucket so the kids won’t laugh at you.”
Jim Rohn
Giving and receiving together are part of the cycle called abundance. Abundance is a dance, involving give and take, back and forth, ebb and flow.
And so, if you are wondering how to create abundance in your life, claim the metaphor of rain as abundance. If you are standing in the rain, hold out your bucket.
This article was originally published April 4, 2006.
http://www.abundantlyalivenow.com/archive/AANN-2006-04-04.htm.
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