RAPPOPORT CONSULTING
JUNE 2, 2011. I’ve been working with individual clients for a number of years now, and I continue to gain insights into how that work can be done.
People inquire about becoming more successful, of course. In general terms, that’s what everyone wants. But each person is unique, so generalities don’t really cut it.
Here is something to consider. This civilization has become obsessed with perceiving and solving problems. It’s an unhealthy extension of a method that sometimes works when technology is the issue.
Think about inner cities in America. For decades, governments at all levels have been pouring billions in tax dollars into solving poverty, drugs, crime, broken families, low school-graduation rates, and illness. Those are the key problems.
How’s that going? How is the great solution working out?
By any standards you want to apply, the answer is:failure.
There are many reasons for the failure, but let’s look at the approach itself. What’s the missing key?
Government is determined to be the SOLVER.
Suppose, for a pittance, in the area of education, research was done to isolate ONE inner-city school in America that was ALREADY a roaring success?
And then, the government sits at the knee of the person who made that success happen and LEARNS. Learns how he did it.
Stop solving. Find the person who already knows the answer and has proved it.
Hire him to teach others how he did it. And then let them open schools.
It’s so simple, it’s ridiculous.
The same idea applies to an individual. Instead of striving to help him solve all his problems, the trick is to jump ahead and see what success would really look like, FOR HIM.
This requires an understanding of his true desires, because success by any other standard is going to fall short.
The map is basically a road from true and deep desire to a picture of what fulfillment of that desire would look like. Then you can fill in a description of the road.
I’ve worked with a number of artists. With enough time, some extraordinary things have happened.
But it’s all based on going beyond the immediate solving of immediate problems. It turns out that, without the map I’ve just described, there will always be more problems, because they are continuously generated in the absence of the arrow that moves from true desire to its fulfillment.
We are actually talking about manifestation here. And also creative consciousness. These are the factors that are developed if a person follows that arrow—and in the process, he will also deal with the current crop of problems that are distracting him.
A society could succeed in this fashion as well—if there was a common notion about what the main desire was all about. In America, that was once individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Yes, there are generalities in that formulation—but then, society is a generalization to begin with. However, individual freedom has been eroding in America for a long time. And with its erosion has come this obsession with perceiving problems everywhere and solving them…and it hasn’t worked. It’s become a hindrance, in fact. And so the pursuit of happiness has lost intensity, too.
Fortunately, the individual still exists. And for him/her, the future is still alive and open.
JON RAPPOPORT