Michael Moore is Losing His Shit… No Reason for You to Lose Yours
Tips on Surviving 2020
You can smell the panic in the whiffy air when Michael Moore loses his sh… It’s that time, when people meltdown and lose their poopshuby in the lead up to the big day. And then on the day, as one of the great athletes I’ve long worked says, “They shit the bed.”
A strong Bernie supporter for years, Moore has recently screamed that we have to CRUSH!!!!!!!!! Trump, and to do it WE need the other Obama. But and this is just a detail, Michelle isn’t in the race and while she may not have been asked, she still ain’t in. Bernie is.
This is Michael Moore violating the 2nd Rule of the Olympics — “Don’t go outside the inside.”
He’s also breaking the 1st Rule of the Olympics — “Don’t think about the medal.”
Rule #2 is about trying to do more and in doing so, doing a lot less. Leading into the Turin Olympics I worked with an athlete who was taking 18 steps before loading into the sled when he needed to be taking 16 steps. The extra two steps — the more — actually resulted in less. In this case speed. On those two extra steps he was “being strung” and the sled was pulling him rather that him pushing it.
It took a fair bit of effort to convince him to take just 16 steps and load. Why so difficult to pull back to 16 steps? Because he’d elevated the importance of the event to max.
In situations where it’s the most important performance in [pick a timeframe] the head is pulled into trying to do more and thinking that more is better and often that more is critical to the WIN!!! This is going outside the inside. It’s not where high-performance is found.
Taking just 16 steps — and staying on the inside of the performance parameters — he was very, very fast. Outside those parameters, just two more steps, he was slow.
When you are in a key performance situation, where you absolutely must get the biggest performance out of yourself, there is a massive tendency to try to do more and to take your performance outside of the inside of that performance.
Michael Moore is going outside the inside by calling for Michelle Obama to run and win the nomination. Panicking due to ratcheting up the perceived importance of the event. This is a clear case of violating Rule #2 of competing at the Olympics (read any hugely important performance).
Rule #1 is tricky because we, in this society and in our overarching high-performance narrative are all about WINNING.
Last year asking a group of high-performance grade 7’s what do you do before a big competition the answer came back, “Think about winning.” NOOOOO…..
When the thought/focus/mind goes to the win, the medal and the pop of a bottle(s) of champagne after a Trump defeat in 2020 or conversely onto the immanent, putrid, inevitable defeat at the hands of the Little Hand Pussy Pulling Man our thought/focus/mind ain’t on the business at hand, that of ‘doing the thing.’ The thing here is to do whatever it takes to beat Trump in a highly rigged election. To do = action.
When the importance of, and the consequences of the result becomes large/huge the mind is pulled out of a performance focus into a result focus. This is performance death.
‘We have to beat Trump’ becomes a WIN focus, and the head of the performer moves away from the detailed performance focus needed in order to lay down the performance that will give us the by-product of the performance — the result. In this case beating El Turmperino.
The details of ‘do the thing’ in this collective enterprise come down to the individual.
Say you are door knocking. The drill down ‘into’ the performance. Here it is in the art of the negotiation that you engage in at the door. This is your performance. Are you doing everything you can to get positively influence your interlocutor at the door?
If your performance task to beat Trump is door knocking, are you doing everything you can to lay down the best door knocking performance you possibly can? Focus on that, not on the election night win/loss. Do the thing — your thing. And commit to laying down that performance.
The result, the win/lose is a by-product of your performance. Stay into your performance and keep your head off the result. Drill down into doing the thing.
There are number of other must-dos with a massive performance, especially with a tough and treacherous opponent.
Don’t focus on what he’s doing and lock yourself up in performance paralysis. Trump and his evil acolytes are going to ratf’ck the election however they can. They are going to ‘game the game’ and cheat. And they have a natural edge with the Electoral College.
In the face of Trumptopians gaming-the-game, the question should be WHAT AM I GOING TO DO? Answer that and do it. Act.
Do something, go deep into the performance of that something. Execute on your commitment to go deep into your performance. Build a list of voters that you’re going to drive to the polling station, door knocking, calls, fund raising, emails, tweets, Facebook posts into hostile territory, whatever — go deep into your doing the thing. Keep you head onto what you’re going to do.
Also, the brain-fuck crap cloud will paralyze you if you let it. The news gurus ain’t gurus and they will not, no chance of this, keep their shit together. In 2016 they lost it completely.
It wasn’t that the result in 2016 was not predictable, it was. But the chattering class got into narrative lock and fit the evidence(?) to that narrative. The narrative was way wrong, so where the pundits.
Right now, some gurus are calling for the Democrats to go centrist because they will lose on the left. Ah, no. If they don’t go with the Bernie platform, which is quite centrist, they’re not going to get the core base out and bring the big numbers to the polling stations. Go corporate centrist and they lose…. Again.
Also, we’re into a just in time performance scenario. Big performances are fraught and fraught is what we’ve got in this election. The performance, our collective do-the-thing, will look like it will go up in flames until the very last instant. And then it just might not.
It is going to feel like and look like Trump is going to win. There will be panic in abundance. The pundits will poo themselves.
Here and with this fog, as always, do the thing. Get on with ‘your’ performance and leave the results to be counted after you’ve done your thing.
Then, and also then…, the election is not over even when it’s supposedly over. There will likely be two post election fights: one, over the count and who actually won the election, and two, the eviction. These will be fights and they will be brutal. We can not let the Dem’s go soft on these fights thinking that winning the election is crossing the finish line on this defenestration project, and so, we need to set up our heads to be ready for these happenings.
This latter point speaks to the headset. Headset is critical at the start of a huge performance project. In the headset the head is setup and prepared for the all the predictable or potential obstacles and ratf’cks that can or should come at us.
We know that the GOP cheat, right… So this is no surprise and it won’t through us off course when it happens. We stay with doing the thing, our thing.
Then add to your headset the unforeseeable circumstances that will certainly, enviably arise and prep for them. Build up your resistance to these circumstances by anticipating them, even if they are unknowable, and committing to fighting these unexpected happenings when they occur.
It is impossible to know how exactly the next year will go. So, so…., you set up your head to be ready to fight when some unknown and unsuspected ratf’ck or horrid circumstance clips you behind the knees.
You can be sure that there will be a few of these coming your way. And in lieu of them actually happening, the brain-fuck crap cloud crowd will make them up and call them NEWS!
Setting this up in point form:
1. Don’t fixate on the win and/or the importance of the win. Action: Keep your head on your performance in pursuit of that win. Do the thing.
2. Don’t panic and try to go for the Hail Mary, change horses mid-battle, or try to be fancy. Action: Do the thing, lay down your performance and go deep into your performance.
3. Don’t worry about what Trump is doing. Action: Focus on what you’re doing, commit to doing it and do it.
4. Don’t succumb to the brain-f’ck crap cloud that will engulf us all this year. We are not going to get even reasonable work out of the media. Not a chance. Their work of 2016 will likely be better than their work in 2020. This ain’t good, but that’s what you’ve got. Action: Don’t take their stick as true or accurate. Do the thing — your thing.
5. This will look bad right up to the last instant. We’re into a just-in-time scenario. Action: Hold on and stay in there doing-your-thing through election night and onto the battles over the legitimacy of the results and the eviction.
In all high-performance situations, the key is to strip down the performance to the essence and commit to doing the thing that is the essence of that particular performance. Then go deep into those things that make up the performance. Keep your head on the performance and off the results. This is the #1 Rule of Competing at the Olympics.
It’s do-the-thing time. Act. And then, when the smoke clears, see if you’ve won or not.
Performance issues going to the Olympics time and time again repeat. At this level of performance all performance is the same, the same issues come up regardless of the performance platform (the type of performance, art, politics, sports, etc.)
What you learn on the road to many Olympics applies to Americans staring down the kleptocratic tyranny of Trumpelstiltskin. The key to any performance is to identify the actions that must be taken to lay down a performance and then do the thing.
