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Impermanence - VIP Commentary

Hi, this is AJ. Welcome to the commentary for this month’s lesson. Let’s talk more about this…I don’t even want to say idea of impermanence. It’s really more of a fundamental truth. You know it’s one of those basic fundamental truths of life that things change.

Everything changes. Things just change at a different rate, some things very slowly so we don’t notice them.

I mean as we know from geology, for example, mountains change, right? They weren’t always mountains. We can’t see it in our lifetime so much, but even things like mountains, planets, stars, galaxies, they all change and evolve. None of them are permanent over a long enough time span. Now, human society and everything related to it changes at a much, much, much faster rate and this is happening even faster now in our lifetimes, especially because of technology. Technology is accelerating this aspect of our lives, in certain areas at least.

So we talked about these sorts of steps about how do you handle this because it can be scary? It is. It’s scary. It’s scary because if something is good in your life you don’t want it to change, right? I mean that’s natural, none of us do. You know if you’re fabulously rich and you’re job is wonderful and everything is great you don’t want it to change. You don’t want the economy to change and your company to start losing money and then eventually you get laid off and have to go find another job. That sucks. That’s not good, right?

We don’t want that. That’s impermanence that we don’t want, but the truth is it could happen. How likely it is to happen depends on, of course, the job and the career and lots of other things, but I think the deeper point is that we have to be ready for it to happen, at least psychologically. We have to acknowledge that just because something is true right now, even if it seems really solid and it’s seem very permanent, we have to acknowledge that at some point in the future in could change and just be being mentally aware of that and accepting that we’ll adapt better and we’ll be more ready too.

See, if you resist things…this is a good example because it’s so clear, this idea in economics, you know in jobs. So let’s say everything seems great. You’re working for a company that’s doing fantastically well. Let’s say the evil empire Google, for example.

You’re working for Google and everything seems great. Your company is dominating the world. It just seems like oh, you’ve got this great job that nothing can change.

Everything is gonna be perfect and you don’t want it to change.

If you hold on to that idea you could be in for a huge shock in the future. Three years from now, five years from now, 10 years from now, especially in this kind of online business world things can change super, super fast. So if you try to resist that idea, you don’t think about it, if something does change and let’s say something changes in and a competitor comes up and Google suddenly drops and they start laying people off or let’s just say online business in general starts dropping, well you could be in big trouble if you never even acknowledged that this could happen, if you never thought about it.

But if you are open to this idea, if you realize nothing is permanent, you’ll be more ready and if things start changing you’re more likely to recognize something is changing.

Maybe I better be ready. Maybe I better start looking for a different job now before it becomes really bad. Someone who is resisting change they’ll deny it. It’s called ‘denial’ in psychology. ‘Denial’ just means that you ignore the truth. You see it, but then you ignore it. You purposely pretend it’s not there and this happens so, so, so many times.

So that’s one example of this.

You know we’ve seen this, in fact, in the computer world. I remember a time when Microsoft seemed like it was the global empire that no one could ever challenge, that every computer ran Microsoft software and it was like this empire that would go on forever and then now, as I’m making this video right now, Microsoft has dropped considerably. They have been challenged by Apple, these online companies, Google and Facebook. There are a lot of other computer companies in software and in hardware that are challenging them and they are no longer super dominant. They’re still a big strong company, but they’re not the complete total monopoly that they used to be.

So we see this happens in business and I think most businesspeople do accept this, especially people who own businesses or are working at sort of the higher levels of the business. They feel it because they see it every day that the business world is changing constantly. I think the problem is that a lot of times employees are the ones who fail to see this and who sort of can be in denial. We say ‘in denial’. It means you’re purposely ignoring something. They can be in denial about this. You’re in your comfortable job each day and you don’t want to think about losing it. It’s not fun. It’s difficult. It can be a huge shock.

I think I was personally lucky because I just constantly quit my jobs. So I didn’t wait around to get fired because I constantly wanted to travel and I got bored really easily so I just would quit. I kind of got used to this idea of impermanence in jobs and careers simply because of the lifestyle I wanted. So for me it just seemed natural, but then I look at my dad, for example, my father. He worked at IBM, the same company for decades, so when IBM changed and the world changed it was a really, really hard shock for him.

So you know eventually he got let go from that company and it was a hard, hard, hard transition, much more difficult for him because he didn’t see this impermanence and wasn’t quite as open to it I think. I don’t know if he would tell you the same thing, but that’s sort of my observation. So we have to really accept it and we have to cultivate our flexibility. We have to develop it. That’s another good example.

This was not in my mind at the time, but by constantly leaving my jobs because I was bored or because I wanted to travel I was, in fact, cultivating – developing, growing – a lot of flexibility in my career. I just got used to this constant change, constantly changing jobs. Not only constantly changing jobs, but totally changing the field I was in.

I worked in social work for a while and then for a few years I would be a social worker sometimes and then I’d get bored and then I’d travel to another country and I would be an English teacher and I’d teach English. Then I’d come back to the United States and I’d do social work again. I flopped back and forth between them, switched back and forth. Then later I just focused on English teaching.

The point is I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was really training myself to be super flexible, to work in lots and lots of different kind of places, to be very comfortable with changing jobs and I developed really good job hunting skills because I was practicing it all the time. I was looking for jobs constantly because I knew that well, in one year or two years I’m going to get bored again or want to do something different so I had to become really good at that. It really developed that flexibility and I look back and I realize that that has been a really useful skill for me.

Well, we can develop this flexibility in all parts of our life. With our relationships, again, it’s an important and often difficult area where you can develop flexibility, but you have to kind of push yourself to do it. It’s not something that naturally comes to us. We naturally I think instinctively want to hold on and everything to be comfortable. So to embrace and to pursue flexibility and change requires a little bit of motivation. We have to push ourselves a little bit.

The next step of this is to learn to enjoy it and that’s where you really become more effective. First, we tend to resist impermanence and change. The second stage as I’ve been talking about flexibility is we kind of push ourselves to accept it and to become better at it, but we’re not really enjoying it. It’s kind of willpower, but the third stage or the third step is where you really start to see the benefits of it.

Tony Robbins talks about this all the time, that if everything was always the same every day, you always knew what was going to happen all the time for your whole life, you would die of boredom. It seems like its safe and it’s nice, but too much of this, too much permanence leads to total and complete boredom and, in fact, too much permanence is death because with no change at all our bodies can’t even work.

Our bodies are constantly changing. Our societies are changing. We need the change.

If nothing is changing that means nothing is moving, nothing is happening and things actually decay and die then or they just become rigid, as I said, they become stiff.

Nothing moves. Nothing happens. That’s a kind of death and, of course, physically that is exactly what happens when we do die.

So there are actually good parts about change, right? We can change for the better.

Things can be better than they are now. We can actually improve. When things are changing, especially if they’re good, we tend to become fearful immediately. That’s our instinct. Often times when we have something great happening and it starts changing our first thought isn’t wow, it could become even better. Instead, we start focusing on all the ways it might become worse. Oh, my God, ah! The truth is no matter how good it is in your life right now it could be better. We’ll use a financial example again because it’s just so easy to see.

Even if you’re a multimillionaire right now you might be thinking this is great and then things start changing in the economy and in your business. One choice is to become scared of that. Oh, no, I might lose all my money, but another thought, and this is what a lot of great businesspeople do, the other thought might be wow, there could be more opportunities. I could become even richer! Maybe I’ll become a billionaire now. That’s a healthier, more fun attitude to have. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to focus on becoming super rich, but what is good to focus on is that the change might be fun and there might be a lot of opportunities in there and that maybe change can be an adventure.

I’ve used this metaphor in the past. It’s like if you’re rafting on a river. You’re in a little rubber raft and you’re going down a river. Well, if the river is super slow it can be kind of boring, right? You’re just sitting there and you’re barely moving. That can be relaxing for a while, but eventually it can become kind of boring. The really fun part is when the river starts going fast and there are all these rocks you’re going over and you know it’s kind of scary, right? You get the adrenalin. There’s a little bit of fear, but it’s also exciting. It’s fun. It’s interesting. It’s very challenging mentally.

As living creatures, as human beings, we need that to feel alive. We need a little bit of fear, a little bit of danger sometimes, a little bit of change or even a lot of change. It can give us that sort of awareness of living, so it’s super important and it can actually become addictive. There are some people who are addicted to this feeling. They get super bored if things stay the same too long. I’m a little like that. I know people who are extremely like that.

The point is that this idea of impermanence can eventually become something that is fun that you will see in a super positive way and that’s great and so what I want you to do then is to kind of bring it all around to something practical. This month I want you to look at all the major parts of your life and to see them as impermanent, to really sort of sit and just think about how is this impermanent, how might this change and just become comfortable with that idea.

Then the next thing I want you to do is to actually try to create some changes in each of those areas. Of course, hopefully in a positive way, but try to develop your flexibility and then, finally, I would like you to try to do so in a way that you might see as enjoyable, to try to imagine ways that each of these areas of your life might change that would be exciting, that would be fun, that would be interesting and then I want you to share those thoughts and ideas on our website so that we can all encourage each other and inspire each other to have more fun with this idea of impermanence.

All right, that’s the end of our commentary. This should be fun. It might be scary in the beginning when you think about things changing, but then I think if you go through this process you’ll eventually at the end of if will feel more excited, more alive and more fun.

So I’ll see you on our website. Have a great day, bye-bye.