DISTINCTIONS: FOR INTELLIGENCE AND CLARITY

Many years ago I learned an especially important principle, a principle that provided an unique insight, which in turn changed my life. In a sentence that insight is this: Mastery is in the details. Every true expert in every field is an expert because he can distinguish critical details that others overlook. I discovered this insight originally when I was modeling wealth creation. And in learning it, I discovered the principle of meta-detailing. To create wealth, you have to pay attention to the details. You also have to know the game that you’re in and how it works. Both are important and important simultaneously.

Sudden this distinction became a life transforming one for me. I used it to inform how I went about my own wealth creating strategy. Then I used it in every modeling project I undertook. As a result, that led me to wonder, “If I have not been paying attention to and focusing on the critical details, what was I paying attention to? Where was I focusing my attention?”

Meta-Detailing as a Critical Distinction “What is meta-detailing?” It is the ability to see the big picture and to zoom down to take care of the necessary and critical details. It is a synthesis of global and specific thinking patterns. It gives you the ability to not get lost in the details (especially irrelevant details) or lost in over-generalized dreamy concepts that are up in the clouds.

With meta-detailing, you learn to operate from a higher sense of where you stand with things, what you are doing, why you are doing them, what you seek to achieve. This keeps your work with details clean. Otherwise you might forget where you are and what you’re doing. Otherwise you might go off on tangents and side-alleys and get lost. You would not be able to discern a trivial detail from a critical one.

The meta-state of meta-detailing enables you to stay focused, directed, insightful, and persistent. It enriches your abilities to make decisions. Having a higher sense of how various details play into the larger picture enables you to operate from an almost intuitive “knowing” about what is truly important and what is not. Meta-detailing also saves you from living in the clouds with great plans and tremendous visions, but without the practical knowledge involved in how to take care of the details. Visionaries suffer from this one. They can develop a “bad relationship” to details. The person who says, “I’m a global person; I don’t do details.” will also be a person who probably will not develop expertise and excellence in their field.

A Distinction to Live Your Life By Here then is one distinction and it did for me what distinctions do for anyone who makes them

—enable you to not confuse different things. When you do not make a distinction that you need to, when you fail to distinguish between things that differ, you create confusion in your mind. That is, you fuse two or more things together (con), hence confuse. And when you create confusion in your mind about things, it is almost impossible to make correct decisions or to act in an effective and efficient way. Given that, here are a set of very personal questions for you: What distinctions do you need to make in your life? What distinctions are you not making which are creating all sorts of problems for you? Do you know how to go about learning to make new and critical distinctions? Would you like to?

But What if I’m Unconscious about Distinctions? Great question. That is indeed one of the big problems about distinctions. You and I are mostly unconscious about the distinctions we need until we learn to make them. Wow! Talk about a Catch- 22 of consciousness! This explains why an expert is an expert in an area where you are not an expert. That expert is making distinctions you are not and you’re not even aware of the distinctions she is making.

But here is a saving grace. At the heart of “thinking” itself is making distinctions. To think, after all, is to discern. It is to discern what a thing is and what it is not. It is to discern what it does and what it does not do. And in every field there are what we call “critical success factors.” But if you cannot discern them, if you cannot distinguish them, if you cannot set them forward in the foreground of your mind and focus on them—you will not be able to make use of them.

Distinguishing things that differ is the secret of success, of mastery, of expertise, of thinking. Bateson argued at the General Semantic Conference in 1950 that “difference” (distinctions) is what gets onto the map and that this is “the difference that makes a difference.” Korzybski warned about the danger of identifying and identification. He wrote, “If we identify, we do not differentiate. If we differentiate, we cannot identify.” (Science and Sanity, 1933,p. 404).

To this end, with this article I begin a new series of articles: Distinctions for Intelligent Clarity. Over the next weeks and months, I will be presenting a number of distinctions that make up the content of NLP and then others which we have made the heart and soul of Neuro-Semantics— distinctions that make for sanity and for expertise. This will help you be a more critical and discerning thinker, empowering you in your everyday life.