Mortal inevitabilities will decide how long you have to work life out. You will never know in advance how long that will be. You have one chance to learn everything you can, give everything you have got, and leave the world a better or worse place than when you entered it.
I love you too much not to beg you: Do everything you can do to live your one life as extraordinarily as you can.
Focusing On Your Fuddle Cup
“Knowledge is not enough, Kids — you have to apply it in new ways if you want to create new solutions powerful enough to create change. Many people are not willing to do that.”
Every person’s Fuddle Cup is as unique as their finger prints. If a representative model should be rendered for each person, I imagine they would come in as many different shapes and sizes as do the people on Earth.
The one thing everyone’s Fuddle Cup has in common is the general structure; the seven separate, but connected cups representing basic aspects of life. This is our focus.
As we focus on each aspect of your Fuddle Cup, the object will be to achieve an understanding of the following:
Awareness
If you ask a doctor of psychological research what awareness is — which I have — they would give you an enormously long answer that would make your head spin several times around. Instead of burdening you with that, I offer a super-simplified formula: A=a+wm.
Awareness is attention plus working memory.
Awareness is the ultimate anti-compartmentalization agent [Say that five times fast]. In other words, if I build your awareness about something, it will create a powerful, subconscious memory that begins to recognize things in ways you may not have noticed before.
I tell a story about a wishflower in some of my seminars. In brevity, it is the story of me at four years old finding a dried dandelion flower along the sidewalk. To entertain myself, I decided that you should blow on it and make a wish. When you did this, I believed all the scattering pieces turned into fairies, who fly away to make your wish come true collectively. [The longer version of the anecdote was to point out the Power of Story in Legacy]
It was no surprise when your parents grew up noticing every wishflower in their path; fervently insisting we stop for it as if it was gold. What was surprising to me was the dozens of wishflowers I have received from seminar participants all over the country through the years, telling me, “They saw this and thought of me.” Most of the notes would go on to say something about how funny it was they never noticed this common weed before hearing my story. Now they see wishflowers all the time.
That is awareness. If we build awareness about the importance of the different aspects in your life, it will be much more difficult to compartmentalize them along your life path.
Definition
Once aware, it is essential for you to know what each of those aspects truly mean in your life. Incidentally, I did say know and not learn. To learn the information is an essential beginning, but you cannot utilize the information until you truly know it.
Take looking up a word in the dictionary, for example. When you look up a word, you have now learned the definition — what that word means — but are unlikely to remember it accurately or be capable of explaining it to someone else until you know how to use it in a sentence.
While the challenge of defining the different life aspects in this book is mine, the greater challenge falls upon you. Since it is not truly possible to know something until you apply it, the responsibility is entirely yours to use this information in your life. It is only then, that these definitions take on true meaning and value for you.
Relationship
Once the separate aspects are well defined in their own right, it will be time to examine how the cups are linked together, and how they affect one another. This is where you start considering your own valuable strategies to balance your life. Moreover, it is where you identify how to create advantages for yourself.
The relationships between the cups are the most challenging facets of the Fuddle Cup. It requires introspection, honesty, and good old fashion trial and error to create successful formulas for yourself. However, it is worth it. I am quite sure lots of people, such as Einstein and Pythagoras, would agree that getting the formula right is pretty darn important to succeed.
The information is intended to be a provocation for you — an enticement for you to think for yourself. As I mentioned before, this is not a rule book. The real value is in what this book prompts you to think about and create in your own life.
In my coaching experience, this is where most people stop short. Knowledge is not enough. You have to apply knowledge in new ways if you want to create new solutions powerful enough to create change. Many people are not willing to do that.
By the way, I am not sure if you noticed, but I just gave you the basic formula to learning anything. Your grandmother is a tricky one…
The Seven Separate Cups
The seven Fuddle Cup life aspects are as follows:
Purpose
Passion
People
Values
Body
Work
Unknown
A chapter has been devoted to each Fuddle Cup aspect. At the beginning of each chapter, you will find four categories. Here is a cheat sheet of what they mean:
Position of Cup: describes where this individual aspect is positioned within the entire Fuddle Cup using cardinal/ordinal/compass directions
Polar Cup: describes which individual aspect is positioned as the linear polar opposite to the current aspect in discussion within the Fuddle Cup. This will make more sense later
Definition of [________]: the ultra-brief definition of the life aspect in discussion
Main Contribution: the most positive, useful attributes the life aspect in discussion adds to the Fuddle Cup and your life
At the conclusion of each chapter, you will find a series of six cup influence comments. These comments describe potential positive and negative influences of the life aspect in discussion, in relation to the other cup influences within the Fuddle Cup. Here is another example cheat sheet for you — [Do not tell your parents I gave you cheat sheets — we will keep this between us].
[_________] Cup Influence: describes how the life aspect in discussion influences the particular life aspect named in the blank area
(+) [describes potential positive influences]
(-) [describes potential negative influences]
Ready?