Rendition   
Joe Ferguson, PhD | October 23, 2009

     My current infatuation is with video editing. You can now get software for $129 that makes the special effects in the original Star Wars look like Charlie Chaplin, and it is great fun! If your original video quality is deficient, you can improve it with effects that might alter every pixel of each one of those 30 frames per second. When you decide that your video should look 20% brighter, or that your subject should dissolve in the pattern of a flushing toilet, the software works through the billions or trillions of pixels that might be affected by your decisions. This takes time, even on a serious computer like mine, and it is called “rendering.” Rendering makes it happen, in the background, by playing out the consequences of your decisions while you are moving on to the next scene.

     Your potentially purposeful life is like that. You can make important decisions on the basis of your insights, and then you have the opportunity to play out the consequences of those decisions in your actual life while you are moving on to the next scene; or not. The infamous New Year’s Resolution is the classic example of not. The persistence of the perfect secret agent in executing her coded instructions behind enemy lines, despite enormous obstacles, is the classic example of inexorable rendering. And then there is your own personal process. Of course, you need to carefully consider the quality of the decisions that you make before you render them, but it is pointless to have excellent insights or to make momentous decisions unless you do.

     Some celebrity motivational speakers state or imply that all you really need to do in order to actualize your dreams is to visualize them with sufficient vigor and the universe will somehow bring them into existence to accommodate you. This process may be portrayed as a Secret that has been recently recovered from an ancient South American civilization, or some other such nonsense. This is a great product if you can sell it and it is clear why many people want to buy it, but this is not how it works. Clear vision is necessary but not sufficient for self-actualization. You have to render your visions like my video editing software has to render mine. The systematic and reliable rendering of your personal decisions and aspirations is a capacity that you can cultivate, and I recommend that you do. Call me.