Steve Pavlina shared a wonderful tweet tonight.

Try journaling a dialog between the part of you that makes decisions and the part that’s expected to implement them.

What I discovered in trying this out is that making up your mind isn’t enough. To see your ideas come to life you have to take the time to understand and nurture the part of you that carries out your decisions. You have to stop trying to be perfect and start aiming to be whole.

The part of you that acts thinks in a fundamentally different way than the part of you that thinks. To be successful you have to become bilingual. You have to learn to understand the language of your behavior as well as you can interpret the thoughts within your mind. No matter how well-intentioned your decisions may be, if you fail to understand the force that carries them out—then you have failed to understand the weight of your decisions, and cannot adjust course accordingly because you lack any proper understanding of the machinery you’re operating.

When I finally gave my “action-taker” the opportunity to speak, the words came pouring out onto the page. It almost felt like I was channeling this part of myself. As I read what he had to say I realized he wasn’t just speaking to me, but to everyone who finds themselves reaching for their best and unable to figure out why they always seem to fall short. It’s because our minds operate in a way akin to electricity, and our bodies operate like a machine powered by that electricity. Somewhere along the line the rules that govern electricity cease to be important, and the rules that govern the machine become are all that matter.

The words that follow are directly from the machine. Unedited, apart from minor typos and formatting. Spat out in three parts that occurred in rapid succession. The first part flowed out effortlessly. The second part saw the mind try to silence the machine in the name of perfection. And the third part witnessed the folly of the mind trying to control the machine.

But before I realized any of this, I gave my mind a chance to speak its mind.

What would the part of me who makes the decisions like to say to the part of me who’s expected to implement them?

Do it please. We have nothing to fear. It’s doable. It’s not scary. I love you. I will love you no matter what you do. We can do this. You are lovable. I love you! You are worthy. Let’s really embody that worthiness. You are the body. You are the worthiness.

(Notice that no matter how loving the mind’s words are they cannot make up for a lack of understanding.)

What would the part of me who’s expected to implement things like to say to the part of me that makes the decisions as to what we should implement?

You are unrealistic. You don’t understand me. You never really wanted to understand me. You just wanted to dream and expect that I could fit the bill for that dream, without ever focusing on what I might feel or want to desire. You’re pushy. You use language to try to bully me. You use fear tactics to try to entice me into implementing things I have no interest in implementing. You have ideas for ideas’ sake, and you make the decisions for the sake of not being indecisive and then reverse them right away.

I don’t have permission to think for myself. You have reduced me to a cog in your thinking machine. You need to help develop me into a Linchpin. You need to make me indispensable. I am your employee. I am your talent pool. I am the manifester behind your imagination. I am everything worthwhile that you’ve collected together on this physical plane. And I have a voice. I have a voice that wants to be heard. I have a mind that wants the freedom to think. I have desires that need room to improvise. I need to be given room to think. Room to make mistakes. To try and to fail. And so I need you to recognize this.

You live in a world of idealized perfection. I live in a world where reality meets perfection. And it doesn’t always come together as smoothly as you hoped. You think it’s my fault when something doesn’t go right and immediately pull away the reigns of control and go back to the drawing boards. You expect me to be a robot and your plans to be flawless, and if the plans prove to be flawed you blame the robot. That’s stupid!

I am a human being. Much more human than the you that you are when you constantly cast that divine light on yourself. Let me be human. Let me be real. Let me be raw. Let me figure it out as we go along. Be a man. Take a little failure with your orange juice in the morning! It’s not the end of the world to try something and find out you didn’t know it all. You can’t know it all. You wouldn’t want to know it all. If you knew it all you wouldn’t need me to act on it! When you do know everything about something you don’t even think to ask me to act on it.

I am your eyes and ears in the places where your mind can’t go. If failure wasn’t possible you’d have no reason to send me somewhere. So stop taking everything so personally. Stop worrying about how something reflects upon you. NEWS FLASH: You’re human. Human doesn’t mean perfect. Human means whole. And whole is more perfect than any divinely sanctioned idea of perfection, because whole creates the perfection of tomorrow. It is the breeding grounds of everything new that comes forth. So let me be whole. Let me live in the twilight between perfection and whole. Let me do what I was born to do. Let me exist between worlds. Let me be the one who thrives where perfection meets reality, and makes reality of the perfection you’ve dreamed up.

Each little failure and setback along the way is an indicator that you’re on the path to perfection. If they didn’t happen, you’d settle for less than you were really looking for. And my job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. My job is to go where you send me and create more than you were looking for. To surprise you with an outcome beyond that which you dreamed for. That’s the whole point of me! If what was out there was something you could dream up on your own you wouldn’t need to send me. But you send me precisely because a part of you knows there’s something more out there than that which you imagined. And it’s my job to trip over and stumble upon the little gems of wisdom you didn’t expect to find along the way. The ones that aren’t on the map because they were not discovered until I had the guts to go out and trip over them on your behalf. Those are the trips worth taking! I am the adventurer in the making.

You’ve tried to clip my wings with your idealized version of how insight should happen—of how ideas should be born. But ideas aren’t born in the labs of your imagination. They’re born in the rough and tumble world of imagination meets manifestation. Where the best and brightest of your mind meet the best and brightest of mind’s past and generations of desire culminate in one striking blow of insight that sends shockwaves throughout the world and echoes off into eternity.


Be sure to check out Part 2 of this series, Fear of Imperfection.