THE ONE THING

THE ONE THING

By

Bill Cottringer

     I have come to believe that we all have one very important thing in common; and the less we focus on this commonality (by not sharing suspicions about it with one another), the further we get from where we want to be—more full of happiness, success, meaning, contentment, wholeness and fulfillment than their unpleasant opposites. Many of us are living a quiet life of desperation, not even dreaming of thriving because we are too busy trying to survive. We are all on a treasure hunt, have been given our own treasure map piece, but we aren't using it for one reason or the other.

     In my own life, I have made one huge mistake that has brought extremes in success and failure, joy and sadness, and peace and turmoil. My one mistake was my insatiable smorgasbord approach to life in constantly seeking endless variety and intensity of experiences. This wind road was full of lots of laughter and smiles, but came with just as many bruises and broken bones all the way to the light at the end of the tunnel turning out to be a freight train. Oddly, a pessimistic student of mine, who later turned out to be an optimist in disguise, suggested I hop on the freight train and ride it out of the tunnel, which I did. I hope he got the police chief job he was aspiring for. He deserved it.

     Thomas Szacz, a renegade psychiatrist in the sixties, exposed a profoundly simple insight that separates the thin line between mental illness and mental wellness: When we start noticing what we have failed to notice all along, we finally begin to make progress being okay. What I was failing to notice was that I had missed "the one thing."  That's because it was hidden away in all the distracting chaos and was too hard to see beyond a blur.

     For me, "the one thing" was aptly reflected in the stained-glass memorial window at St. Mary's Church in Haddon Heights, NJ, that was lovingly dedicated to my mother by her husband and my father. The beautiful window memorial was the biblical parable of the many talents, which was the one thing that both my parents wanted me and my two sisters to see, understand and live, through our  family's three paramount virtues of patience, hope and tenacity

     What this parable is all about is understanding and doing one thing in life—knowing the talents you were born with, developing them fully, and using them 100% to learn, grow and improve your ability to help others to do that too. By doing this you are using your treasure map piece effectively to help yourself and others find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. What more is there? How can any of us live a better life in giving back thanks for the opportunity to be here? We are all meant to enjoy an abundant harvest, but we all have to work hard for it.

     So as it turns out, I seemed to have wasted much time in living life all my own way to establish my uniqueness selfishly.  But is that really true? What am I failing to notice about that possible conclusion? Or has this one mistake delivered me to the one great solution—to realize what I have to give others and get busy doing it?  In a sense I feel really stupid taking 62 years to finally discover an important truth: Life rewards us for using what we have to help others get more of the same thing, whether it is health, wealth, faith, knowledge, wisdom, hope, creativity, compassion, love, happiness or comfort (or something else of immense value that I have failed to notice!).

     When we slow down long enough to notice what we have been failing to notice, we realize two things: (a) we really are making progress in our journey to close the gap between where we are and where we want to be (b) there really is no limit to the progress we can make within ourselves. But these realizations have to come from within and too often the focus is more on noticing how others are doing and getting more or less than us. We are stuck in this vicious circle until we notice that we may have placed our ladder up against the wrong building. It may be time to climb down and get a wider view. What we will probably see is the wisdom of learning to compete against ourselves and cooperate with everyone else. But this transformation may require a major re-evaluation of the way parents, schools, employers and everyone else perceives as the correct way to reward us in evaluating our "performance" against some imagined absolute standard, or against each other in the Bell Curve.

     We all know one valuable clue about being successful, but we aren't taking advantage of that clue: Real success is driven by intrinsic motivation, or doing something just because doing it feels right and good in and all by itself. Nothing external is involved. The one thing I know that reflects such intrinsic motivation, that is always more powerful and longer lasting, is the one thing—Knowing the talents you were born with, developing them fully, and using them 100% to learn, grow and improve your ability to help others to do that too. There is no better way to find your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and you will never get tired of doing this or running out of energy to do it. What are you waiting for? There is no better time to act than now. Find your one thing!

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sport Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too and The Bow-Wow-Secrets: How Dogs Live Simple Lives & People Don't. He can be reached at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer@pssp.net