The Editor has it Now

The book WILL be done soon. Here are three more excerpts.

Life is serious business and whether you know it or not, and whether you like it or not, your personal systems are the threads of the fabric of your life. The sum total of all your personal systems adds up to you. And if you are like most people, you negotiate your days without seeing the systems of your life as the singular entities they are, some working well and some not working so well.

In the complexity that is your life, what if you could see each of these systems distinctly? Then, what if you could reach in and pluck a not-so-perfect system out of that complexity, make it perfect and then reinsert it? What if you could perform that system improvement process with every system that comprises your life?

What if, piece by piece, you could engineer your life to make it exactly what you want it to be without having to rely on luck, providence, blind faith or someone else’s largesse?

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There it is, the Work the System process of seeing the world as a collection of systems that are to be isolated and made perfect, and once perfected, visited routinely so they can be updated to conform to the new environment, whatever it might be.

Here’s the no-brainer that eludes most of us: In the course of a day and in the course of a life, each move that we make is a single step in a linear sequence of steps intending to accomplish something. Each thing that we do is a single component of a system. Pare things down to base mechanics and see that each of our lives is a dynamic matrix of independent systems, each composed of specific components.

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I realized suddenly that both my business and my life were chaos not because I was some kind of loser or unfortunate victim of circumstance but because many of the simple systems of my business and my life were not working efficiently. Added together, a group of inefficient sub-systems would create an imperfect primary system.

And why were the systems inefficient? It was because I had not seen them and therefore could not see their inefficiencies. And why were the systems simple? First, because they executed themselves in a linear, step-by-step protocol and, second, each was dedicated to reaching a specific and isolated goal. Once separated from the complexity, each system stood alone in stark simplicity as it attempted to accomplish its own purpose.

Each system, examined separately, was simple enough to understand – the antithesis of complexity and chaos.

What would happen if I repaired the individual systems one by one? What would be the result of that?

It was elementary. There was no mystery to any of this. Now that I could see the real makeup of the business, I could immediately employ a new master strategy, an offensive tact that would deal with the game’s flawed components – the components that I was seeing for the first time. I would no longer manage the results of flawed systems. Instead, I would expend my energies on repairing those systems – and the results would take care of themselves.

It was all about systems! For 15 years, although the simple reality had been floating right there in front of my eyes, my frantic wheel spinning had made this simple yet earth-shaking reality invisible to me!

My life’s condition was not a result of being lucky, or good or bad, or about karma, or about education, social class, political or religious points of view, intelligence or how hard I worked.

          My life’s condition was about simple mechanics.