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The Great Escape

Introduction

The elephant is trained from an early age, when its brain is still pliable enough to be influenced, in the art of limitation. Its trainers realise that if they are to control a beast that weighs more than a large car – dozens of times the size and weight of themselves – then they have to catch it very young. They have to make it believe that, despite its bulk and irrespective of its immense power, it is helplessly weak when tethered, even to a twig.
They achieve their aim by roping the young elephant to huge immovable objects, like very large trees, so that it is held back every time it tries to escape or to explore. The elephant tries so hard and so often – only to fail time and again – that eventually it believes itself incapable of escape. It develops what is known as ‘learned helplessness’. As a fully matured adult, weighing more than two politicians after a party conference buffet (pretty heavy!), it can be tied to a twig and it won’t escape, in fact it won’t even try.

As I explained in The Elephant and the Twig, we are often the same, and while our training in the art of limitation is often inadvertent or subconscious, it is no less restricting. As fledglings, our influences (people and environment) become our trainers and mostly they teach us what they know (which is not always much) and what they believe (which is not always true). Hence we tend to become a product of our environment, a mirror image of those who wean us.

As a species we have a great and natural knack of adapting to and even mimicking our surroundings, though this is not necessarily always healthy. If you don’t believe me go into a supermarket on any busy Friday when trolleys are bashing trolleys, children are crying and mothers are fretting in long checkout lines, and tell me that you don’t quickly make like the locals, pick up the pace and go into stressed-and-snappy mode yourself. Paradoxically, we drove through Barbados yesterday on the way to our cruise ship and the opposite occurred. Very quickly a bus full of hot and bothered tourists looking for an injection of calm after an eight-hour flight and an eighteen-hour (total) journey, quickly became natives and chilled. The guy driving the coach was the coolest man I ever met. He beeped hello to other vehicles we passed, even stopped the bus on several occasions just to speak with friends on the side of the road; he seemed to know everyone. I have never seen so many people relax so quickly and so completely. And why? Because the immediate influences were strong, and they felt compelled to fall into line, which in this case (unlike the Friday night shopping story) is fantastic.

Take the same bus of people to a place where high-stress and fast-pace come with the coffee and the chilled tourists would very quickly heat up to the temperature of their influencing surroundings and probably be swapping leather within minutes.

We adapt to our environment, it’s how we survive, and it is how we are taught. But it doesn’t have to be this way. You can unlearn the bad habits of upbringing, you can shed that old and weathered skin and you can re-educate yourself into a powerful, creative and very happy individual with the muscle to shape worlds (and uproot twigs).

Sometimes, when elephants get fed up of being controlled by trainers and when they tire of being tied to twigs (like the fellow on the front of this book), they decide to do something about it. They probably wake up one day and realise, ‘Hey, I weigh several tons. I’m massive! I don’t have to take this shit.’ And so they start by releasing themselves from their twig by giving it a determined pull, thus setting their souls free to contemplate the great and wonderful unknown (like the fellow on the back of this book).

We are products of our upbringing. If our early training was in the art of limitation then, as adults, we often feel disempowered. And of course if we feel disempowered we are, because it is our thoughts that dictate our world. What we have to realise is that, like the elephant who escaped, we are no longer captives; no one has the authority to control us any more. We have the awesome power not only to break that metaphoric but very limiting twig, we also have the muscle to snatch it clean out of the ground, mud, roots and all and to make our escape. The Great Escape.

As a species we have the ability to change the world, certainly our own world, and of this I have no doubt. In fact I am a living embodiment of my live-it-now do-it-all philosophy. I live my life in the creation business (I create my world) and I love every minute of it. Thus far I have managed to make manifest every desire I have set my intention on. This is not meant to sound smug. I see myself as a very ordinary person who has managed to liberate himself from a life of unnecessary toil. If I can do it, believe me, anyone can.

I measure my accomplishment not by the balance in my bank (though lots of noughts can be very pleasing), rather I measure my lot by the fact that when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed last thing at night I feel happy. That’s what makes me a success.

As a child I always dreamed of making my living as a writer, a wordsmith, a crafter of letters; as an adult that is exactly what places bread on my table from one day to the next. Success, of course, is very subjective. Your idea of nirvana may be – and very probably is – entirely different from mine. As long as what you do makes you happy and doesn’t harm others then it would be fair to say you are a success. It’s only when you spend your life doing the things you don’t like to do that the Monday-morning-feeling stretches through until Friday afternoon and then Sundays are a horror because they precede Monday (if you see what I mean). That’s when you find yourself thinking: is this what I really want to do with my life? Especially if you feel your nine-to-five is a must-do, and that you are only there because you feel you have no other choice.

People are forever telling me that they would love to write, to sculpt, to garden, to teach but they can’t because their life, their wife, the mortgage, the kids, their environment, circumstances or even God won’t allow it. The very statement ‘I can’t’ is one I used to death as a younger man and by its very nature it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is probably the most overused and certainly the most disempowering combination of words you could ever make the mistake of employing because it does exactly what it says on the tin. If you can’t because your wife says so then you give her all your power, meaning that until she says ‘yes’ you’re stuck where you are. If you blame the environment, circumstance or your upbringing you give all your power over to these intangibles because, again, it means that until they favour you, you’re glued to mediocrity. If you believe you are powerless then by definition you are exactly that.

The reason I know this is because I have fallen into the same trap more times than I care to remember. As a youngster I spent my days wallowing in procrastination, blame and self-pity – I hated my lot but, of course, my lot was never my fault (is it ever?).

So my motivation for writing this book is that I learned my lesson early on and made good. I feel suitably qualified therefore, to suggest that it doesn’t have to be this way, you don’t have to spend the rest of your life at the proverbial grindstone.

The answer is as simple as ABC; take back the responsibility for your own creative power. Admit ownership of your future then set about building a palatial existence that makes you happy, and by extension makes all those you love happy also. It takes bollocks of cast iron to take the reins, but if you want to trail-blaze then being in the saddle is where it’s at.

Think about the job you do for one moment. You probably spend two-thirds (at least) of your waking life in work. Two-thirds! Now if you don’t love the bones off your job, if you are not inspired to the point of exhilaration about the nuts and bolts of your employ, if they don’t have to drag you away from the office kicking and screaming at the end of each day because you want to do more, then you have to ask yourself: Why am I here? And just hope that your first answer is not, ‘The money!’ I am emphatic about this message so please don’t think me conceited when I tell you that I love my lot. I love being me – but it wasn’t always this way. I spent the first half of my life living other people’s idea of normal and I hated it to pieces. Now I enjoy myself so much I don’t want to go to bed at night, I want to be out there experiencing everything. You see, when you love what you do it stops being work, it’s fun. It’s unconventional certainly; unpredictable definitely; sometimes it scares the living poo out of me for sure. But I like unconventional, I thrive on the unpredictability and, if I am being honest here, I like being scared (admittedly the poo bit can get messy). I love being overwhelmed, even out of my depth. I have become comfortable with discomfort because it’s a sign that I am growing. I don’t want to be stuck in the middle of some cornflake-sized comfort-zone sweeping around an oily, cranking machine and praying for tea break – I want to be precariously balanced on some craggy precipice where I can see it all.

‘Yeah I agree,’ you may concede (followed closely by the obligatory BUT), ‘but it’s really hard.’

Of course it’s hard, it has to be hard. You can’t temper a blade without putting it through a forge. What’s the use of a ribbon when you haven’t run the race? It is hard, but please, let’s keep things in perspective here: carrying a hod on a building site is back-breakingly hard, working your brain into mush on a computer every day can be hard with a capital H. In fact any job – especially if you despise it – that entails bargaining two-thirds of your incarnation just to pay the mortgage is harder than a big bag of hard things. We all know about hard. It’s what we do on a daily basis. At least when your sweat is vocational, when you are hacking away in the right jungle, then you can sit down at the end of another satisfying day and think, ‘This is what I really want to do with my life.’

We are where we are in life through choice (even if it is just the fact that we do not choose to change where we are, or at least change our perception of it). If we don’t like it we have the God-given power to reinvent ourselves – the moment we think that we lack this power our thoughts make it so. Some dead famous person (so famous I can’t even remember his name) once said, ‘If you think you can or you think you can’t you are right.’
So go ahead; think that you can, and you might be pleasantly surprised to find that you are right.