The Act of Creation. Step 1: Set Your Intention

I’m sitting in a coffee shop (in an 1880’s farmhouse) this morning with the day off…and have been thinking about what is around me, the people that lived here once and the world they had created for themselves…and the one we’re creating for ourselves today.

This place makes me think about my great grandfather John Borsch. He was a merchant in Minnesota who set his intention to create a business that would grow, sustain his family and be a vehicle for wealth.

The picture you see here is his store. It was located near a railroad depot and the men who worked the railroad (and passengers) shopped here regularly. He also found out from some of them about distressed merchants in other cities. John decided to create opportunity for himself, traveled to these cities, bought up the distressed merchants property, crated it up and returned to Minneapolis. Liquidating much of the inventory in the big city before taking the remainder back to this store in a smaller town 20 miles away (which now is a close-in suburb!), John was able to accumulate wealth fairly quickly.

He retired at 45 and moved to Minneapolis with my great grandmother (Clara) and became a builder. The Depression hit and he owned many houses, and his son (my grandpa) encouraged him to kick out the freeloading tenants and get paid renters, but it was John’s intention to have pristine properties and allowed the tenants without jobs to stay for free in exchange for sweat investments. His houses were immaculate while others during the Depression didn’t fare so well or sat without tenants for years.

Step 1: Setting Your Intention
Spending time with my good friend George Johnson and having him be my “coach” a few years ago, we have had several conversations about the universal truths that intention contains and how that impacts creativity and realizing the true essence of oneself. He consistently smiles when I profess to be “so close that I can taste it” in aligning with my essence (I suspect he knows I’ll discover it eventually and utilize it) but I’m not quite there yet.

One of my favorite speakers and authors is Wayne Dyer who speaks and has written about The Power of Intention. Dyer makes the case that *everything* touched by the hand of humans has been created. I buy that. He also talks about the power of God and tapping in to universal truths and, most interestingly, how once you’ve set your intention, things begin to happen that seemingly and automagically line up to drive momentum behind your intention. My head is there too.

It works. I’ve tried it again and again but just for little stuff as I’ve been reluctant to leap off the cliff with the really big stuff (George would have a knowing smile about this statement too). George has created the 7 Entrepreneurial Skills to coach people that are driving toward fulfilling their intentions and aligning with the essence of who they are. He can already recite success stories of people that have set their intention and created their future by following the steps outlined in the 7 Entrepreneurial Skills. You know this stuff works. Who among us can’t point to dozens…even hundreds…of people who have set their intention and created companies, products or services out of seemingly thin air?

What does this have to do with your Connecting the Dots blog Borsch?
Think about what I blog about: the brain and brain chemistry; physics; technology; nanotech; audio/video/text blogging and how it’s already created grassroots journalism; the collective consciousness of the internet and its morphing into something like a “super think tank”; atoms vs. bits and so on. If you consider the enabling “dots” that can be connected in all of these different fields — and how inventions, change and development is occurring due to some person or group’s intention and creation — I find it fun to try to understand how they intersect and think about what could be.

Is there a dark side of intention and creation?

Without *positive* directed intention and creation, we might end up with something we don’t want. When Bill Joy wrote his warning article in Wired magazine in April of 2000 about our creation of technology driving us toward a future where humans are obsolete, it created a firestorm of writings, commentary and debate about what our future holds. I was delighted with it since it asked a fundamental question still unanswered: What do we intend our future to become? Rather than rush headlong in to developing everything that is possible and unleashing technologies without some form of governance and risk assessment, Joy submits that it is a fool’s errand to not set intention and co-create our future with our eyes wide open.

One thing I do no for sure: each of us is in the act of creating our own respective futures right now and together we’re creating our collective future. Moment by moment…step by step…intention by intention…creation by creation.

But what future do you — and we together — intend to create?