MAGIC PILL: Instant Health, Wealth, Happiness, Success, Peace, Love & Everything Else.

By Bill Cottringer

Time to throw away the doctors, financial advisors, psychiatrists, motivational gurus, marriage counselors and all the other would-be magic pill dispensers. Make room for the real magic pill. Okay, I realize you must be thinking, “what is this whacko-twit trying to sell? Nothing. I am not inclined to make the same mistake about my magic pill, that you will see I am preaching against, so this one is free.

So what is the real magic pill that guarantees instant health, wealth, happiness, success, peace, love and everything else? Simply undoing a harmful habit that is counter productive to getting these things. The harmful habit is making judgments that often turn out to be incorrect or at the least, incomplete, creating false expectations that can adversely affect outcomes in the wrong direction. Or as the Greek Philosopher Epictus eloquently said much earlier, “It is not the things in life that bother us but rather our opinions about these things.”

Consider the typical evolution of judgment. Good judgment is based on experience, and experience comes from bad judgment. Things would be okay it they stopped there but they don’t. Things keep going around in circles getting nowhere like a Tasmanian Devil. This is the infamous vicious circle that keeps us from appreciating what health, wealth, happiness, success, peace, love and everything else we do have. Instead, we usually make the judgment that we don’t have enough and need more of these things, which turns out to have the power to limit the perceived extent and value of these rewards which are right under our noses.

How do we stop this harmful habit of judgment that is so much of an integral part of us? We have to gradually think its utility right out of our minds. Before we can do that though, we have to be open to making a major thinking transformation, whereby we can accept the possibility that everything we believe we know isn’t necessarily so. That is how I got this idea that may turn out to have enormous positive consequences. Not being open to this possibility is what slowed me down from escaping from the jaws of failure.

In the meantime, here are some things to consider in preparing the way for this needed transformation.

• All judgments are tentative and incomplete, given the fact that the big picture is always getting bigger as we go. Put another way, what you see is mostly dependent upon where you are when you are doing the looking. Views change with viewpoints, getting bigger with bigger viewpoints. And time and distance alone can account for viewpoints changing significantly.

• Wrong judgments can have enormously bad consequences and the main challenge in life is to make choices that have good consequences. Lasting success is based on the formula of doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons to get the right results. Not making wrong decisions fits into that equation very neatly and the only way to get there is to avoid making judgments in the first place.

• What is the worst thing that can happen to you when you don’t make a judgment? Will you increase the likelihood of succeeding in a moment of opportunity or failing in a dangerous situation? Oops, that is a judgment in itself! Get the point? Whoever really knows with absolute certainty?

• As it turns out, it is possible to take the right action without making any judgment about the judgment’s correctness of the outcome’s rightness. Using the “right” formula of success above, the action and outcome become intrinsic rewards in themselves and no amount of external clues can really validate or verify those things, without the possibility of being incorrect or incomplete from a different viewpoint.

• If you insist on continuing with the necessity of making judgments, at least consider dropping the piggy-back component of expecting certain results or outcomes from your efforts. After all, sometimes seemingly negative events eventually turn out to have positive results, upon changing viewpoints as a result of time and distance.

• The power of judgment is over-taught, over-used and over-valued It may be purposeful for deciding moral choices, but that is about it. The trouble is that our psychological consciences have replaced our moral ones and it might be time to reverse that trend. Besides that, most judgments that end up with unhappy endings are based on the mythical, unattainable sense of “fairness” that we all inadvertently perpetuate.

Perhaps the magic pill is to focus less on making correct or avoiding incorrect judgments and getting more involved in acting in ways that our moral conscience repays us with an undeniable and unquestionable good feeling. This perspective is offering a positive vicious circle to replace a negative one. In other words, consider letting go and exchanging the frustrations of artificial psychological judgments for whatever your moral conscience tells you to do and just see what happens, without getting caught up in judging anything about that process.

If you can do that, your treasures of this article’s title will probably increase tenfold. What have you got to lose—not having enough of those things? Do less and get more—give up a harmful habit that makes you do more and get less. If this makes sense, you have already done that, but if not, I would like to hear about your resistance to a great idea with the possibility of enormous positive consequences.

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Belleview, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow Secrets. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net.