The Art And Science Of Success

By BOB LANCER

All forms of achievement or accomplishment represent forms of creation and result from the activation and completion of a creative process.

Whether you are interested in creating a work of art, a business, a garden, a relationship, a plan, a vision, a consensus, or the accomplishment of any goal that you can imagine, there are certain definite natural laws involved in the process of its eventuation. 

Consciously working with these laws minimizes the amount of resistance that you face, ensures that you expend the least amount of time and effort in the accomplishment of your objective, and therefore expresses what we can call Natural Order Wisdom, the wisdom working with the laws that govern creation. 

The term "order" is important here, because it implies that you need to follow a series of steps in just the right sequence to work with these laws.  Just as you need to plant a seed before you can harvest its fruit, you need to proceed in an orderly way, doing first things first, to achieve any objective in the natural order way - that is, in the smoothest, least costly, most advantageous way.

Achieving success as efficiently as possible, then, depends upon aligning your actions with the natural laws governing creation. One may do this unconsciously or consciously. To rely upon your unconscious to succeed makes goal-achievement a crap-shoot. To learn about the natural order laws governing creation, so you can apply them consciously, turns the process of creation into a science.

But even science has its limitations.  There is always more going on than we can comprehend and control.  So creating or succeeding is also an art, because it involves following your intuitive feelings, risk, trust and acting on inspiration.  Art flows with what happens; it accepts, expects and trusts surprises; it surrenders to the limits of control.

A poet, for example, opens his mind and heart as he writes, jots down the words that happen to occur to his conscious mind, and works with the verbal happenstance, all the time trusting that a work of beautiful profundity will somehow emerge from this process.

So there is a feminine and masculine side to the natural order process of success or creation.  The feminine side works in the artistic dimension of the process, where one relies on the unknown, upon what lies beyond control, and upon feelings, trust, openness, flexibility and adaptability.  The masculine side works in the scientific dimension, where one relies upon the known, upon the powers of self-determination, decisiveness and control in pursuit of an intended outcome.

The science and art of success therefore involves trusting in both the limits and the power of your control. It involves the marriage, if you will, of trust and determination.