A Successful Life

Introduction

If you had better problem solving skills, more creativity, and enhanced intuitive abilities, along with better health, enhanced personal interaction, and improved emotional skills, do you feel you would be more successful in your professional and personal life? Maybe I should ask, is there any way you could imagine NOT being more successful given your newfound advantages?

You can embrace these advantages and permit abundance to flow more freely into your career and your private life. The key to embracing abundance is entrainment—a scientific term originally coined in the 17th century that is regaining popularity due to startling recent scientific discoveries. If you have not heard of entrainment, you are not alone. I had no knowledge of the term or of how it could change my life until I became a volunteer at a hospice in January of 1997.

I went to help the dying as they prepared to leave behind lifetimes filled with joys, hardships, families, friends, and careers. As a volunteer, I was merely another person who could make beds, wash faces, feed patients, help change diapers, and, whenever I had the time, to visit and listen. In small ways, I helped these strangers-turned-friends as they exhausted the remaining days of their lives. Yet, I wasn’t doing the majority of helping; it was they who were helping me. Time after time, I found myself the recipient of their smiles, their stories, their advice, and their wisdom. I found people did all sorts of things to earn a living. I found there were other things of which they were more proud. I also found some secrets. Of most significance was what they said was the most important thing in life.

Realizing that one day I too would look back and judge the success or failure of my life—as my new friends were doing as they faced death—I decided to make some bold changes in my approach to work and life regardless of the consequences I was certain to encounter. Believing these changes would limit my success in my career, I was amazed to find the opposite. In reality, success became easier.

Imagine my surprise when in a relatively short time I went from the position of manager to director, then to vice president, and then to senior vice president in high tech corporate America. My income more than doubled in this short time span! I certainly didn’t understand how this could happen. However, with dedication, hard work, and some luck, I uncovered a number of unrelated new scientific discoveries in various social, biological and physical sciences that explained why these simple strategies derived from the secrets of the dying worked. New scientific discoveries prove that by following some simple guidelines, the human body and mind function at optimal levels. We actually shift the odds of success in our favor.

An Example of Entrainment

On its surface, entrainment appears to be as unscientific as luck. It is not. There is hard science behind how entrainment works. You can easily create the conditions necessary for entrainment to occur in your life.

In his best-selling book Men are From Mars, Women are from Venus, John Gray describes a situation that illustrates the concept of entrainment. John was working very hard to be successful in his career. He assumed professional success meant he could provide the material things that would allow both himself and his wife to be happy. John wanted to be a good provider. The harder he worked to create a better life for his wife and family, the more his marriage and his work seemed to struggle. Finally, he decided a new course of action was required. John’s busy schedule consisted of seeing eight clients daily. He decreased his work schedule to seven clients daily and reallocated the eighth client’s hour to his wife. For one hour each day he gave his wife the undivided attention he gave each of his clients. His plan worked miracles for his relationship with his wife and family. John’s plan to sacrifice his professional career for the sake of his family paid huge dividends in his personal life: he and his wife enjoyed renewed happiness while his work—well, somehow his work thrived. He was enjoying more success in his professional work, yet he was actually working less.¹

By focusing on his wife and their relationship, John Gray became more successful. So what happened? He worked less and became more successful while also achieving his goal of a better relationship with his wife. Was this luck?

No, it was not luck! John had unknowingly applied some of the principles of entrainment to his life. As a result, he had stumbled upon the secret of the ancient Eastern concept of do less and accomplish more.

Do not assume from this brief example that the secret to entrainment is not caring about your work. Caring is a critical element in living a successful life. A successful life is much more than just being successful in your career. It is about being successful in both your life and your work.

Joyful Living

Life would be much easier if we won the lottery—or would it? Recent studies show most lottery winners are no happier six months after they win the lottery than before they won. How could this be possible? It is possible because success is more than outward abundance. Inward happiness forms the other face of the two-sided coin we know as success. Thus, a successful life means success in many aspects of our lives: our emotions, our physical health, our spiritual life, and our material world.

Major misconceptions about success arise from the material world. Continually confronting us and seeking center stage in our assessment of the success of our lives, the material world creates an image of success in our minds, and we work for it, dream of it and wait for it to appear. Once realized, however, our happiness rarely changes. We may have achieved the new house, automobile, boat or whatever material thing that composed our image of success. However, we are rarely happier.

A recent study indicates that in creating happiness, money rates near the bottom.² Yet we remain enslaved to a material lifestyle that doesn’t allow us to fully experience and enjoy life. We obtain our material quests, only to set off quickly in pursuit of another one. This one, we are sure, will make us happy, but it doesn’t. We experience moments of exhilaration and happiness, but most of the time we are not fully satisfied with our lives.

We put tremendous effort towards our objectives (be it our work or our personal lives). We sacrifice our personal time so we can climb the corporate ladder, make our own business succeed, or chase the latest carrot dangling in front of our noses. Too often, we place our goals and objectives ahead of people. We sacrifice spending time with the special people in our lives: our families, our children, our girlfriend or boyfriend or our friends. We are willing to sacrifice a lot that we value to get ahead, but this is not success. If we sacrifice one thing of value for another thing of value, then we have not succeeded—we have simply made a trade.

Yet, there is another way, one that has brought more abundance in my life than I ever thought possible. It comes without sacrificing one thing we value for something else we believe will make us happy. A successful life arises when we optimize our skills so they work in harmony with one another. When we place our emotional, intellectual, physical, and spiritual realms in harmony with one another, we create a state of quantum synchronicity. A successful life means achieving abundance and happiness in work, in family, and in play—that is, in everything we do—without sacrificing those things we value.

New science shows us how we can increase our problem solving abilities, decision making skills, creativity, intuition, emotional intelligence and physical health. When optimized, these elements work in a state of harmony known as entrainment. This entrainment factor is powerful. Its application is simple and it does not compromise those things we hold dear in life. It enriches and brings happiness and abundance.

What You Will Learn

Lao Tsu, the recognized author of the Tao Te Ching—the 2,500-year-old ancient Taoist text translated more often than any book except the Bible—wrote that the essence of his teaching was, ‘a violent man dies a violent death.’³

The Golden Rule and the concept that you reap what you sow is the essence of Jesus’ teachings. I am amazed at the similarities found in the essence of our great religious teachers: Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Lao Tsu. Each speaks of the importance of how we treat one another and that what we do determines what we experience. Joining our great religious prophets, our quantum physicists are expounding the principle that we have much more of an impact on the world around us than we might think. The discovery of the uncertainty principle by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, allowed our physicists to conclude that the act of observing an experiment influences the outcome.⁴

Heisenberg’s Law of Uncertainty proved that an independent, neutral observer does not exist. We change the outcome of an experiment by simply observing it. We (and everything) are interconnected.

This interconnectivity opens up and enhances our natural abilities once we understand the basics of how our mind, our body, and the external world actually work. New discoveries by our scientific community in the social, biological and physical sciences greatly enhance our chances of being successful in all aspects of our lives once we understand how easy it is to apply them.

This book teaches what it means to be successful from a life perspective. Life is the foundation on which all activities rest; thus, it is the primary focus of this book. You will learn the meaning of life as seen through people who are facing death. You will learn the meaning of life as seen through the eyes of people who died and returned to life—the near-death experience. The five steps presented in this book reveal how to live a successful life, but you can apply these steps to any aspect of life, whether it is in your professional career or your personal life. I have included at the end of each of the five steps a section on how to apply the life concepts to any activity you undertake.

* * *

To help understand entrainment, Thomas Cleary tells an old Chinese story in his translation of The Art of War, an ancient Chinese text regularly studied in corporate America for its guidance on business strategy and philosophy. The story is about a Chinese emperor who, upon learning that his medical physician came from a family of three healers, asks who the better physician was.

The physician told the emperor that his eldest brother removes sickness when it is still spirit. As a result, his name is not heard outside the house.

The elder brother sees sickness while it is small, so he is known only in the neighborhood.

I massage skin and give herbs after sickness is easily recognized. Hence, I am widely known among the poor and the rich.⁵

This story depicts three success methods. The brother that massages skin and prescribes herbs parallels the concept of hard work, which was the prevalent theory and practice of the early and middle part of the 20th century. Our parents worked hard for the companies that employed them and were rewarded with the security of working for one company their entire lives before retirement. However, working hard at something is not always the most efficient or effective way of achieving our goals.

Working hard had been the default method that most people and managers turn to when facing looming deadlines. Henry Ford, a pioneer in productivity studies, showed that working five days per week produced the same amount of work as working six days per week. Thus, he created the 40-hour workweek.⁶

A hundred years of productivity studies confirm Ford’s results. For both physically intensive jobs and knowledge workers, productivity drops over time when working more than 40 hours per week. Less than 40 hours per week also produces less than 40 hours of productivity. In 1908, Ernst Abbe was the first to show an increase in daily output by reducing the daily work schedules from nine to eight hours per day. ⁷

Due to the phenomenon known as the fatigue factor studies show that initial productivity rises when initiating overtime, but quickly starts to decline. For example, an eight-week 60-hour workweek will show an initial productivity increase. By week four, the average productivity falls to only 40 hours per week and continues to decline each week thereafter. By week eight, the loss in productivity during the last 4 weeks cancels out the first four weeks’ productivity gains. Eight weeks at 60 hours yields an overall average of 40 hours of productivity per week.⁸ Extending a 60-hour workweek to 12 weeks yields an average productivity of only 19.5 hours per week.

Our minds cannot comprehend that working 30 hours per week for six months (even though this is 10 hours per week below optimum productivity) is far more productive than working 60 hours per week for six months. Getting an A for effort, but failing, is far more soothing to our work hard conditioning than going against conventional wisdom and finding a better way to be successful.

* * *

The middle brother, who cures sickness while it is small, corresponds to today's mantra of work smart, not hard. This brother is more efficient than the youngest brother; he figured out a faster way to accomplish the same amount of work. Working smart is a better, more efficient method than working hard.

I love to work with my hands, so I tend to do numerous home-improvement projects. Whether it is putting in a new floor, laying tile, putting up a wall, or installing doors, it usually takes me a little while to figure out the best method to do the job. Once I figure it out, I can repeat the process with speed and accuracy. This is efficiency. Doing something efficiently means doing it as quickly as possible. If a manufacturing plant can build 100 parts per hour, increasing efficiency means building 120 parts per hour.

Suppose carpenters can install 20 sq. feet of floor per hour, but at this rate the entire office building installation will take longer than scheduled. The first option that comes to mind is to schedule overtime: work harder. However, suppose that by changing to a wider board for the flooring, the same carpenters can now install 30 sq. feet of floor per hour and finish the job in the allocated time. This is efficiency and is often the second choice behind working harder.

Yet there remains a more effective technique, as illustrated by the eldest brother, which is doing less and accomplishing more. Many gains are realized when one shifts his or her perspective from working hard to working smart. Exponential gain awaits those who can shift their perspectives from working smart to doing less and accomplishing more.

Examine the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. Efficiency means doing something faster. Effectiveness, however, is different from efficiency. Suppose the flooring installed in the office building does not stand up to the daily grind of thousands of workers in the various offices. Within a year, the building floors are scratched and worn and in need of replacement. With a significant cost to replace the floors, the overall impact to the developer is a loss. While the developer was efficient in putting in the original floor, he was not effective, as the overall cost of replacing the floor now exceeds the proposed cost and wipes out the original profit. In this case, the developer was efficient because he found a faster way to install the flooring, but he was not effective because he installed the wrong flooring to meet the demands of the office building. Being efficient meant going faster to meet schedule, but being effective meant picking the right product to meet the needs of the building.

Picking the right flooring product, in this case, was more important than being efficient in the flooring installation. This principle is what we find in the eldest brother, who removes sickness when it is still spirit. Effectiveness means doing the right thing and doing it once.

As children, the way we play a game matters more than its outcome, but as adults, the final score is all that matters. Our Western way tries to control the outcome: the external, the outside, the observable, the obvious—what I like to call the consequences. For example, when undergoing triple bypass surgery for clogged arteries or chemotherapy for lung cancer, we focus on the outcome, not its prevention, similar to the last of our three Chinese physicians:

I massage skin and give herbs after sickness is easily recognized. Hence, I am widely known among the poor and the rich.

Fighting fires, a daily activity in corporate America, requires employees to work long hours and spend weekends away from their families to extinguish the daily emergencies, only to scurry off to the next fire as soon as the current one is under control. This model says a good manager is one who successfully directs his or her employees in how to handle these fires. A good manager appears to be one who can control the consequences.

Corporate America, and our society, rewards this type of behavior. Shouted from rooftop to rooftop are the names of hard-working employees who get the fires under control. Our newscasts rarely broadcast stories of those who prevent fires; quite the opposite is true. Our newscasts show the fires, the accidents, the tragedies, and those men and women who perform heroic acts when called upon.

Yet someone is starting these fires, so find the arsonist! Someone’s behavior is causing other people to spend tremendous amounts of time putting out those fires. In the corporate world, in many cases, the firefighter and the arsonist are the same! A better manager will search out the arsonist rather than spend his or her energy scattered among a thousand and one fires.

Behind consequences, we find some type of behavior causing the consequences. If we change the behavior, we can change a thousand and one consequences. It is better to find sickness when it is small, like the second of our Chinese physicians:

The elder brother sees