CFC Blog #73: There Is No Spoon In Our Life

I actually went to a couple magic shows this month on a cruise, and while the magician was "slicing" his hand and "changing" the faces of the cards and "catching" a bubble he had just blown, my sisters and I were trying to intentionally figure out how it was all possible and what slick processes he was using. But the next day we ended up concluding that there was no real explanation. Instead, we just realized that it was about accepting what our brain was naturally seeing due to the clever psychology behind the magician's practices. These astounding practices were exploiting limitations in how our brains work... and rather than forcefully trying to find out the answers or the steps behind it all, at the next show, we just allowed it to happen and allowed our brain to be enthralled by these illusions. And I tooo think this notion can be applied to countless areas of life. Thanks Rob! 

 - Amanda  

There Is No Spoon In Our Life

In the movie The Matrix, there’s a famous scene where Neo meets The Oracle. As he walks into her apartment, he sees a young boy bending a spoon with his mind. He’s fascinated. As he bends down and takes the spoon, the boy offers some advice:

“Do not try and bend the spoon. That’s impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth.”

Neo looks confused. “What truth?” he asks. The boy responds: “There is no spoon.”  Neo is even more confused. “There is no spoon?” he asks. The boy assures him, “Then you’ll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

The lesson for Neo is that manipulating objects in The Matrix isn’t about forcing, pushing, or bending objects to his will. As the boy notes, there’s no way he can change something that doesn’t even exist. He has to change himself.

Metaphorically, it’s all in is head.

So what can we take away from this?

Lately, as I build and scale my nascent business in this (yeah very) weird time in the US, I found that I’m leaning on bad habits. If some project was hard, I pushed harder. If some win came easy, I did more. If a client needed a new idea, I gave them EVERY idea.

Basically, I found myself pushing, shaping and grinding as a means of feeling good about what I was doing. And let’s be clear. I didn’t.  I was falling victim to that horribly ill conceived (and false) narrative of “no pain, no gain”.

Here’s what I found. Pushing works to a point. Grinding gets you there – to a point.  But what I’m discovering is something my grandfather used to try and tell me that I never heard until recently. ALLOWING is exponentially better than pushing.

Here’s the truth: There is no spoon.

We shouldn’t force ourselves to only push ourselves (pun intended), our product, our service, our relationships to fit some world view.  We can also allow for the fact that an expansiveness of our skills, our products, our company, our relationships can exist in something greater and deeper than what we can physically do in any one moment.

Did you know that it’s physically impossible to hit a Major League Fastball? Hitters only have 125 milliseconds to gauge the average fastball. That’s less than the blink of an eye.  How do they do it?

They know there is no spoon. They allow it to happen.   

We can focus on changing ourselves and how we see the world. That gives us the super powers to change the world rather than trying to continually push and force our way through it.