First Hack

I called my brother today. Well, I called my parents, but my brother answered the phone and my parents were nowhere to be found. So I talked to him.

My brother is about two years younger than I. He's fairly smart. He's doing the job I was doing last summer - beta testing a database for the financial planning company my dad works for. He works for the same people I did, with the same people I did, but he doesn't do nearly the kind or amount of work I did. Why is that?

It seems I have a habit - a pattern in my life - of doing a lot of work and not getting a lot of money. (In relationship to the people I work with, for you meta-modelers). I thought to myself, why is that? What haven't I learned yet? What needs to be there?

I work for a man named Carmine. Carmine trains people in NLP and Hypnosis. I maintain his website and do computer work for a plastic surgery center he's involved with. Now I came here to learn about NLP, because it's always been an interest of mine, and because he really impressed me at his seminar.

So I've come here to learn, yet I often wonder, what is it that I'm learning? Well, a great deal, actually. I've learned how to put a website together. How to run a network. How to write programs that interface with databases. How to create wide area networks. I've gained a lot of computer skills, to be sure.

But what about NLP? I was a reading teacher before I came here. I sat with kids, I taught them reading. I earned a very small amount of money for doing so. But I enjoyed it, and I got to practice my NLP skills, so I didn't mind. In a sense, I had more hands-on NLP practice before I came here to learn about NLP.

That's where I had to stop and ask myself a question. I had more NLP experience before I enterend an NLP-rich environment? Could it be that I'm simply organizing my experience that way?

Organizing. SHE says that's an important word for me. What Ross Jeffries would call a "trance word". It's one of those words that doesn't really have any meaning out in the physical world. You can't put an organization in a wheelbarrow.

So what might it mean for me to be organizing my experience so that I don't have as much hands-on NLP as I did before?

Well, it could mean anything. It's all in my head. It's not a content question. There's no pictures, no sounds, no objects. I'm not talking about anything real, that's for sure. So if I want to know what I'm talking about, one way to do it is to apply the meta-model. Restate it all in sensory experience.

I want to talk to more people. I want to teach them things.

A boy came knocking on my door earlier today. I opened it, and he stood there, looking down at my waist and holding out a big box of candy. He mumbled something about helping a football team, and asked me if I wanted to buy a candy bar for a dollar. I told him I was broke (which was true, or I'd have bought something). He said, "Okay, thanks." And walked away.

I thought about that conversation for a few moments, and then I went out to look for him. The kid was maybe thirteen, and I could guess from his presentation that he probably didn't make a lot of sales. Now I live with a salesperson. She closes 9 out of 10 clients. That 's astounding. I wondered how many ways I could teach this kid to be better.

Well, I didn't find the boy. If I had, I would have done a small session with him, right there on the spot. I'd have shifted some resources around, shown him how to engage people's imagination, maybe even have him install the munchies in someone before he asked them to buy. More importantly, I would have helped him build a better state for approaching people. A little confidence, a smile, charm. He's already got it somewhere, just not in that particular context.

All I would have gotten out of it was practice. That's when I realized I missed working with people. But I realized something else - I've learned a lot about NLP!

So when I called my brother, I asked him what he would do with his life after his summer job was over. He didn't know. I asked him if he'd go back to school. He said maybe, if our parents didn't kick him out first. I realized that my little brother - who used to beat me up when we were kids, who I'd always thought was tough and mean - really had nothing in mind for the rest of his life. And I thought about all the other people I grew up around, and I realized this was true for a great many of them. I thought about the people I work with. I had to wonder, how many of these people planned to work in a plastic surgery center? Maybe some did, but I bet a few of them just wound up there.

Did I? Have I just washed up here like a jellyfish on a beach?

I had a long think about that yesterday. I was waiting for someone to call, and I remembered visiting the ocean not too long ago for the first time. All that water. Wind rushing in. The ocean washed things up - shells, jellyfish, whatever, and the next day they'd be gone and something else washed up in its place. What a powerful entity, the ocean.

I wondered about what it must have been like for the first sailors. They must have noticed that some things float in water. Did they have meetings, contests, or did a few geniuses working independently put their all into inventing a boat?

It took a lot of imagination, anyway. And finally, someone hollowed out a tree and made a canoe, or strung several together and created a raft. Maybe surfboards came first. I don't know. But whatever it was, someone took the resources they had on-hand and on-land and created a way to tame the sea.

There's an old saying that says no man is an island. But I wonder about that, because I find myself standing on a beach. Behind me is everything I know - the familiar, the jungle - and before me is a wide ocean. For me, my learnings, my friends, all of these are resources I have available to me to explore my world. To conquer new islands, or visit them.

Call it free-association. Call it a reframe. Whatever it is, I've changed the way I look at the world. I've changed the way my whole neurology works.

So I told my brother he had a timeline. I told him he could put whatever he wanted on it, all the pictures, all his skills, and that he would get it. Consciously, he wasn't too impressed, but that doesn't even matter to me anymore, because I know I helped him change something.

So yeah, I've been a reading teacher, and I've been a computer guy. Now I'm ready for something different. I'm ready to make my mark on the world. To experiment, to try new things.

Would you like to join me?