CLOSE YOUR EYES tightly! Close your eyes for a minute! No Peeking! Keep your eyes closed! Now while your eyes are closed tell me what you see or when you open your eyes tell me what you saw. The only answer to this question that is not exactly wrong but may not bode well for you is that you saw nothing!
Close your eyes tightly once again. Take a deep breath in and a deep breath out. Now with your eyes closed listen to your heartbeat and become one with your body. As that happens let your mind drift freely and focus on the images or scenes it created.
Slowly open your eyes once again inhaling and exhaling while trying to re-conger up what your mind out before your eyes as they were closed. What meaning can you find in what you have just seen? Have you learned anything about yourself during this brief time that you did not know before? As you have added another piece to your life’s puzzle try to foresee where it all fits.
I have a friend who has an Elementary School age daughter who is growing up so fast they can hardly believe it. In fact she now has a crush on some boy bands. If you do the above exercise with her where you ask her to close her eyes and leave them closed for a minute or so and ask her what she sees or what she saw she will bubble with many excited exotic stories of what she saw.
Show her a rock and she sees a million different things other than just a plain rock. Her mind is filled with wonder at the world around her. Everything is new and exciting and brimming with possibility. Even the disappointments disappear quickly as some new thing or phenomenon has replaced the feeling of down for whatever did not work out the way she hoped.
We cannot move ahead in our careers, our businesses, our personal lives since we have stopped being able to see with our eyes closed or our eyes open. The child like enthusiasm has been replaced by a robotic mundane attitude where if something is possible we don’t dare dream or bother to stop and think “what if” or “if only I could” or “I wish I could”. With 20/20 vision we can barely see the wiggling of our fingers in front of our faces. We have eyesight but not the ability to see anything.
Of course in “adult life” not everything is possible and somethings are better not tried but what if we could recreate that childlike need to know. That super charged ionized magnet that pulls in more information in a few precious minutes than we pull in during the course of days, months, years. Imagine what we could accomplish if we could use those ions to galvanize our lives once again so that our life breathes life into itself.
What is out there that you want to do? For some the dream maybe to move away from the stress of corporate life and believe it or not go into something simple. Knowing what your day will bring every day and when it will end. Silly as it sounds some people would love to take steps back to a simpler more even tempered world where ebbs and flows are as even as the tide rolling in and out. If you can describe to yourself in detail what this fantastic world you are trying to create for you to live in looks like with you in it and how you feel being in that world.
Imagine yourself at the top of your own mountain. Except this mountain was born out of dream and in that dream you said to yourself “if only I could build that mountain and make it the very best mountain I could ever hope to climb.” Take yourself back to the day where you picked up a rock and looked up at a mountain and told yourself you are going to take that rock to the top of that mountain.
That mountain can be a business you always wanted to build surrounded by people who share your sense of wonder of this mountain (business) can be like. How you took this rock and in your childlike wisdom saw this rock for all it can be. You took this rock and built something that was in your image and mirrored your values. This vision brought to life not only sustained you financially but emotionally as well.
For you that’s just you hoping to find what you are meant to be or all that you hope you can be or anything in between. Once again close your eyes or gaze at the stars above as they illuminate the evening sky and let your mind go. Think, dream, wonder and when your moonlit path is before you start down that road.
Some of our most noted inventors, physicists, etc. started out with a dream or a wanting to know or a burning desire to create something that was good. If you can take that spirit and move yourself in the direction you want to go. Don’t hold back and don’t move forward with tentative steps. Of course don’t do anything that has huge risk potential or danger to life and limb but don’t let yourself leaving you to wonder “what if.”
Is the fear of failure holding you back? These men fail numerous time but their failures added fire to their dream until they succeeded. So what about you? So what about the collective you? All the inspiration you need is found in a playground filled with children. Watch how they play, create, invent, and change along the way. The never stop along the way to wonder if what they are doing will fail. If they should fail they simply go back and recreate something else and perhaps even better.
We are forever saying and hearing that children are our future and we should follow their lead. Take their lead (not literally) and follow in their creatively made foot prints they leave in the sandbox or the images they draw in the snow. Be guided by that longing to reach beyond what is front of you now.
Close your eyes tightly! No peeking! Open your eyes and reveal to yourself what you saw.
Joel – Such an important message – at times, we need to close our eyes and return to the fearless days of youth where dragons coud be tamed, the bad guys never won, being a superhero meant always doing the right thing, and nothing was impossible. When we allow ourselves to go back to these simplier times in our lives, we are able to put the “real world” in true prospective and realize it is our dreams that keep us young and able to see how we find joy in the simple things that make life a wonderfully exciting experience. Thank you for taking us back. With that, I close my eyes and say to you, “Tag, your it!” 🙂
Len, these are wise words that were written by a very wise man.
If you really want to accomplish something you have to imagine it. You have to imagine how you will do it. You have to imagine what success looks like. Imagination is a gift that we are all born with. It is a tool we can use to envision what the future may hold. This is a great Article and cuts through all the information we have to digest and gives us one simple tool to use. Imagination. Absolutely brilliant Joel. Thank again for sharing your knowledge and wisdom with us. Great storytelling.
What an inspirational story Joel! I wanted to second this too Chris and Larry – children envision without those ‘barriers’ we tend to establish after we’ve grown up and met the real world. Yet, it’s through the gift of our imagination, creativity, and the gifts we innately possess that deserve to be shared with the world.
Yes, every single renowned leader, inventor, or creator failed [a million] times before ‘nailing it’. How are we going to perfect what our imagination has presented us without trying? Giving up is risking the opportunity to offer our gift to others. Wonderful story Joel, wonderful story 🙂
Larry, Let me express my gratitude to you for your very well articulated comment. Please allow me to thank you as well for your generously kind comments. I am happy that you enjoyed reading my article and that it meant something to you. I look forward to your continued readership in addition to more of your very enlightening comments.
Chris, You are one of the most creative thinkers it has been my pleasure to meet! Thank you for your engaging comments!
A message to all you men out there — you manly men — sneak out to a Toys R Us and pick up a bunch of those toys you played with as a kid. Buy those G.Is, transformers, or stuff toys. When you do, you will rekindle the child in your self, the man-child creative side of your self.
Then all you need to do is to create.