THE WILL TO GROWByBill Cottringer There is one particular motivation that has a significant impact on the quality of your life; it can result in varying degrees of happiness and unhappiness, success and failure, peace and turmoil and good health and ill health. This single motivation shows up as your place on the continuum of the will to grow—from a passive denial of the need to grow to a relentless, active drive and commitment towards growth. learning and improvement. Why do some people not even see any need to grow, some follow the path to growth as the ultimate goal in life, while the majority of others see a need but don’t do much about it? Is the will to grow genetic, do things happen to us in our lives which influence it one way or the other, or are both these things true to one extent or another? These three categories of people have been described as pessimists, optimists and realists. The glass is half-empty, half-full or just something to drink. One group acts, one reacts and one does a little of both. Each group goes about its own unique way to try and influence others to come over to its fundamental view of the world—negative, positive or neutral. Oddly, the degree of influence a particular group has is closely related to the particular viewpoint it has. Maybe that isn’t so odd. Stop. What is wrong with this picture? Your brain is over-simplifying things by convincing you that everyone is in one category or another and that your particular viewpoint is better than the other two. The reality is that we are all lazy and resistive to growth to some extent or another. The problem is that you tend to think your level of laziness is better than most other people you know. This is false pride based on and reinforced by the bell-curve conspiracy. The bell-curve conspiracy was an artificial statistical method developed by highly intelligent but lazy mathematicians in order to make complex infinite reality conform to what normal brains could understand. Who actually cares if it is right or wrong? That’s not the point. This theory has held us hostage for too long in schools, workplaces and everywhere else. All it does is compare people to other people and keep us all resentful and lazy. Like most great inventions—it has served its purpose and it is now time to move on. Stepping outside the bell-curve, you can see what you need to see—that we are all too lazy in growing and improving, that laziness is a “sin” and growth a “virtue,” and that you can do something about becoming less sinful and more virtuous. Then when you shift your focus from others to yourself, you can begin to compete against yourself with everything you have to reduce your laziness and increase your growth, make progress, feel satisfied, and demonstrate your success for others to see and learn from. Yes, there are many realistic justifications that restrain and hinder your will to grow. You may have gotten an unfair start in life through poverty, lack of parental love, a swipe with the anti-beauty stick, unfavorable metabolism, getting in early trouble with the law, or being disabled by mental or physical challenges. Or other adversities and traumatic events could have happened along the way to tip your balance sheet, dampen your optimism and get you stuck in a vicious circle of expecting failure, then not trying so hard, getting more failure and becoming less confident to keep on trying—round and round and giving up. But why is it that some people who may be 13 short of a baker’s dozen in the personal assets and lucky breaks departments, still seem to exercise their will to grow and succeed despite such odds to the contrary? This question becomes an answer. The most happy, contented, successful and healthy people in life have stepped outside the artificial reality of the bell curve and given up the senseless, useless activity of competing against others or some imaginary absolute, unachievable standard. They don’t talk about what they are doing—they just accept the reality of their laziness and get on with doing whatever it takes to stop being lazy and grow forward. Their actions always outspeak what others are saying about what is wrong with the world. They are too busy doing their part in making things better. The only thing that could possibly be “wrong” is your laziness and lack of commitment to do something positive about it. You are not bad or inferior for being lazy; you are just being normal—loitering, wasting time, and disappointing yourself. And if you are already busy growing, you know there is no ceiling. In the journey of life, things are often oddly reversed. You often fail in order to learn how to succeed. And you have to experience enough failure and discomfort from your wrong basic approach to life to change it for the better—from being too passive and not believing in your power to being active in applying your power Having this insight is a very large and open door to growth and it is available to anyone at anytime, anywhere. John Lenin was right. There are no problems, only solutions. Just go through the door and see reality. One step forward can change everything. But just like the AA folks, you gotta step up to the plate and say, “Hello, I’m Bill C. and I am lazy.”William Cottringer, Ph.D. is a business success coach, college teacher and writer from Bellevue, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, a book that gently pushes you to grow by wisely suggesting little things that get BIG results. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net