There comes a point in your consciousness journey, where you recognize everything you have been through was perfectly designed to help you evolve in a particular way that supports greater service to the whole.
When my spiritual journey really got serious, I was a bit annoyed that it didn’t start earlier.
Why couldn’t I have just skipped the decade+ of trauma based hustle!?
Over time, as my awareness expanded it became obvious that I needed to go through all of that in order to grow and serve others in a particular way.
A decade ago, I would have thought that selling my company to Salesforce would be my crowning achievement.
In reality, it was just a setup to position me for the real game I came here to play: supporting human consciousness.
I could see how everything from having some business success, to being an athlete and even looking like a bro would make sharing information on consciousness more approachable to a particular group of people that might otherwise be resistant.
There’s also no way that I’d be able to support high achievers in the business world if I hadn’t developed the understanding and credibility by playing that game at a high level.
With this understanding, writing Conscious Accomplishment felt like my Magnum Opus in the beginning of the process.
I had gone through this crazy arc of transformation, and now I could others who were in a similar position that I was in – disillusioned by achievement land, yet unclear how taking your consciousness seriously could be done amidst the demands of modern life.
I assumed that this is why I was being guided to write this book. Alas, I had uncovered a big part of my purpose for being on this planet!
What I Eventually Came To Understand
The following sequence of events gradually helped me see that there was more to the story here…
Writing my book began with spending 2 months of writing 50,000 words of gibberish,.
At a certain point in my wondering, I realized that I needed to hire an editor to help me refine what it was I was actually trying to say. We came up with an outline and then I spent 8 months writing a new draft.
The first round of feedback was brutal. It brought up an incredible amount of self-doubt and helplessness. I guess I just spent 4-5 hours a day for 8 months, constructing a pile of chicken shit.
Taking my own medicine from Conscious Accomplishment, I decided to sit in these feelings and use the situation for healing work. It probably took a full week to process everything before I felt centered enough to resume writing.
I then spent the next 5-6 months reworking a new draft, focusing the entire narrative on the theme of Conscious Accomplishment which was previously just part III of the previous one. This time around, I decided to give it to some friends for beta reading in addition to my editor…
There was some positive feedback, but there was also some glaring weak signal. A few close friends clearly had stopped reading it, and when I asked them what they thought of it, they gave some elusive non-answer…I guess this response was easier than telling me my book sucked.
This experience brought up even more self-doubt, as well as patterns around needing to be special or “the one that knows.”
Needing to be the one that knows is when someone tries to achieve a sense of worth by being seen as someone who is awakened, wise, or ahead. It is a form of spiritual pride that usually is in response to an unconscious sense of not-enoughness.
This wasn’t the first time I had been confronted by this pattern, but I had no idea there was some of it underlying this creation. It was clearly not the main thrust of writing the book, but going into my reactions around the beta reading made it undeniably clear that there was some there.
Again, I spent a fair amount of time facing and working with this inner material before continuing to rework and improve the next draft.
Probably about 6 months later, I had my next confronting experience. I was taking a course from a well-known teacher who has a similar audience and has been on his awareness journey much longer than I have.
I never really engaged directly with his work before so I never thought much of our overlap. However, within the course he began to use many of the same metaphors that I was using in my book.
OMG because I’m taking this course, people are going to think I ripped off this guy’s material! For the next few days, my inner world spiraled at all the ways people were going to judge me as a rip-off and fraud.
I went into these reactions and realized there were still aspects of my consciousness that cared what other people thought of me. I spent time healing these complexes over the remainder of the course.
And in a classic paradox, this teacher ended up endorsing the book!
There were many more confronting incidents like this that came up along the way in writing the book.
What eventually became clear through all these events, was that the higher order purpose of writing Conscious Accomplishment was supporting my own awareness and transformation.
Yes, the book was a perfect artifact of everything I had been through in my life.
Yes, the book would help many people.
And yes, it’d likely also support many future initiatives related to my career and contribution.
Yet still, it was obvious that the primary purpose of writing this book was my own evolution.
There’s many reasons why I believe this. Perhaps the most striking was the perfect choreography between me facing and understanding the lessons, and the positive shifts to progress the book that followed.
A great example of this was after working with my confrontation in the course, I was spontaneously introduced to a new editor who helped me take the book to the next level.
I wasn’t seeking this out. It just fell into my lap.
Our Purpose Is Our Evolution And Our Evolution Fuels Its Expression
Our culture likes to look at some external achievement as the pinnacle of our life’s work.
I’m not saying this isn’t true, I just believe there’s more to the story here.
My view is that our magnum opus is who we become. The process of creation creates the conditions for our evolution, and as we use these circumstances, what we create moves to a higher level.
I guess when you write a book on this topic, it’s only fitting that the process be a perfect demonstration of this phenomenon.
I think life ahead is more of the same. Following the inspiration and desire to create, and using the reflections that this process provides in order to see things more clearly. This is an infinite game and just happens to be the one that I like to play the most!
If you want to learn how to go deeper on this topic and learn how to move up the spiral of expanded awareness, I encourage you to check out Conscious Accomplishment!
<3 Scott
This is the way. Proud of you man.
Beautiful piece. I had to get smacked off my accomplish horse really hard, in the public arena no less, to be able to see how much I'd been relying on external validation to feel worthy. Coming through that identity reckoning was a multi-year very painful process, a gift wrapped in barbed wire. I used to call it the big Ordeal, but now call it the Initiation because I am so much happier, more comfortable in my own skin, and kinder. You've probably seen the movie Mr Holland's Opus, which is pretty lovely and in line with what you've shared here.