Everything Comes From Nothing!
Every now and again, a phrase or quote has a profound impact on me! It tends to hit me like a ton of bricks and often causes me to launch into my own inquiry.
As many of you know, I do my best to expand my thinking, learn new things and challenge the conventional aspects of my thinking about business and life! My personal inquiries have not only changed my way of thinking, but have helped me focus and channel my thinking towards creating the major breakthroughs of my life!
Please take a moment to ask yourself these three questions:
- When do I do my best work?
- When am I most passionate and creative?
- When do I feel the most free in my mind?
The following three questions all relate to a specific state of mind and insight.
Everything in your life comes from nothing!
Examine a time when you found yourself in the moment, filled with passion, focused, driven and ambitious. Picture this in your mind; the first time you spoke on a stage, your first football playoff game, your first time at Disney world or your first day of a new job! Stop and examine your thinking – you were clear-minded, focused, determined and filled with anticipation and joy!
What I’ve learned is that in order to do my best work, be passionate, be effortlessly creative and feel the utmost freedom, I must first do one thing. To get my mind to a state of nothing, or said another way, to get my mind clear! Another easy way to understand this concept is with an analogy with a glass of water. Get a glass of water and fill it to the rim; you must fill it so that if another drop hits the glass, the water will overflow. The glass in this case represents your mind and the water droplets are your thoughts. If your mind is full, you can no longer add to the glass! You cannot build or expand any further.
How do we get to a state of nothing in order to start creating everything?
You can attempt to slow down your mind by using techniques such as meditation, exercise, yoga and journaling to name several. The key is that you really don’t even need any techniques. A quiet mind is innate. It’s our natural state unless we disturb it with our noisy thinking (mind chatter). One of the easiest and simplest ways to achieve nothing (a quiet mind) is through sleep. When you fall sleep, all thought ceases. It’s like a reset button on your computer. When you awake, you start from a fresh and blank state.
Be more intentional with your thinking when you’re awake. Most of us wake up and try to remember what we were worried about yesterday (starting up all that noisy thinking again) or all the things we have to do today. Insight and new thinking can only come from a quiet mind. It can never come from noisy thinking. The next time you need to prepare for a big talk, start a new job, lead powerfully, think bigger, challenge the status quo or want to make a dent in the universe; get to nothing first!