THE PERFECT SYSTEM: Finding Certainty and Fulfillment in the Science of Life

By SID KESSLER, Daniel Crack and Paul William Roberts

By the time he was thirty, SYD KESSLER was a millionaire many times over, the epitome of the poor kid making good. But inside him, a hollowness was taking hold, and later, in middle age, he fell seriously ill. In the dark days of a long recovery, Kessler explored the Kabbalah and the discoveries of quantum physics, developi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kinetics Design - kdbooks.ca
• Release date: Oct 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988360331

SID KESSLER

SID KESSLER, one of North America's top advertising executives, is a mentor and investor in new companies. He was the principal of the major advertising companies Kessler Productions, Kessler Music Inc., The Air Company, and Supercorp (with John Labatt Ltd.).

Book preview

1

First Thoughts

Fulfillment. We all want it, a sense of completion and contentment. And yet somehow, in the apparent chaos of our busy lives, fulfillment can seem unattainable. Between the demands of work, family, and relationships we find our energies scattered, and often we lose sight of our life goals and settle for quick fixes that ultimately leave us dissatisfied.

It does not have to be this way. For years I had all the optics and apparel of success but still didn’t feel fulfilled. I suffered from constant anxiety, frustration, and unhappiness. This is the story of what I did about it. I hope it is relevant to you today. To see how good the fit is, take a moment to look at the statements below. If any of them is true for you at any time in a typical week, then I know you will find value in this book.

•  Life and its events appear to be random.

•  You don’t feel at peace with yourself.

•  You don’t feel satisfied or complete.

•  You feel a little empty inside — unfulfilled.

•  A feeling of uncertainty permeates your home, your workplace, or both.

•  Even though you may have a loving partner and great kids and good work, you feel that you live in a chaotic, unpredictable world and you are one of its victims.

Anything sound familiar? To most of us, life is often chaotic. We read about it in the newspapers, we see it on the news, we hear about it happening to the people and friends around us, and we experience it ourselves. Someone is killed by a drunk driver. One day business is good, a month later you get laid off. Bad people keep getting richer, seemingly good people keep getting poorer. In my own case, my father dropped dead of a heart attack at forty-nine.

Such events, and the feelings of dread and impermanence that accompany them, permeate our homes and our places of work. Not many of us feel at peace with ourselves. We don’t feel satisfied or complete. In fact, if we’re honest, most of us have had at times the sensation of feeling empty inside and unfulfilled in life. We live in an unpredictable world and we are its victims — or so it seems.

I was baffled by the continual feeling of emptiness that permeated my own days — and it led me to ask these questions: What is it that I really want out of life? Why is all this mayhem happening to me? What do I do next? This book is for all of you who have asked the same questions and who have not yet found acceptable answers. In short, it is an explanation of how everything works — including us. I know that sounds like a boastful and insane statement but follow my story and me and then decide if I’m right or wrong. After years of study and contemplation, the conclusions I came to were life-changing for me, and I am confident they will be life-changing for you.

When I was starting to write this book, I had difficulty deciding whether I should focus on personal experience or on business issues. My learning was relevant to both. This decision, by the way, was purely marketing-driven. I knew that at some point my publisher would want to slot this book into a familiar self-help or business-information category. My problem in focusing on either one of these niches was that, in my opinion, they weren’t the story. The story is about my personal experiences and the wisdom I gained from them. I have never seen or created a separation between business and friendship, commerce and relationships. So in spite of the pressure to do otherwise, I stood my ground and did not worry about what niche this book would fit into.

This book is about life. And life, in turn, is about business and friendships and kids and family and pain and happiness, potentiality and completion. I believe that the contents of this book have real power — life-changing power — and this supersedes the notion of marketing niches. I also believe that although, superficially, my experiences may seem very different from yours, we all share the same highs and lows, ups and downs. It’s the meaning we bring to them — and take away from them — that counts and eventually creates the real value we are all searching for.

Let me now tell you what this book is not. It is not like one of those books or training courses in which a motivator, a positivethinking guru, teaches his audience a set of skills or techniques that will enable them to better themselves. Usually the instruction is coupled with a series of feel-good motivational exercises that leave people feeling positive about themselves. For a while.

As you have no doubt noticed, there is a whole industry built up around this yearn-and-learn paradigm. There are corporate, life skills, and relationship-training programs in all shapes and sizes. They are offered in all media and are plentiful and easily accessible. You can learn in a classroom, from a CD-ROM, a video, a book, or the Internet. Becoming increasingly popular is asynchronous learning, where you can journey at your own pace in the physical environment of your choice.

However, these programs all fail to provide what I think is the most important aspect of the total learning experience. They speak about the how to do and what to do but never address the issue of why to do. This is the reason why, although many people feel empowered by their new set of specific skills at the end of these courses, in the long term they are left feeling that much hasn’t really changed in their lives. For example, a person may have learned how to sell product X more effectively but is still confronted daily by tension and stress in his marriage. The mantra to think and act positive doesn’t seem to turn a sullen teenager into a model kid overnight. The exhortation to express love all the time isn’t potent enough to make a bad working relationship good.

Another problem: the motivational aspect of such training proves in the end to be specious. Talk to graduates of a motivational course a year after they have graduated flying high on motivation. Are they materially and emotionally more successful? In many cases, yes to the former and no to the latter. For the most part they are not satisfied with their lives. They are still unhappy. Their appetite for material acquisition or quick fixes, in spite of everything, is rapacious and they need to keep consuming. They don’t feel better off than they were before they took the course. The reason is that what we all really want out of life, in fact, has nothing to do with material goods or instant gratification. It is something else. And it is this something else that I will define and try to illuminate in this book.

The Perfect System uses a tool that can, almost miraculously, unlock all the answers to the questions you have been dying to ask all your life yet never found anyone to whom you could pose them. Other systems either do not adequately focus on or, in many cases, do not even offer this tool.

There is nothing mysterious about it. It revolves around the simple idea that we all have an inalienable right to ask the question Why? — and not to leave the room until we’ve received an answer that is relevant and makes sense to our lives.

All that is being taught in motivational seminars, continuing education, or corporate training courses is what to do and when and how to do it. But there is a more fundamental question to be asked: Why are we learning this stuff? Why should we treat the information we are learning with any respect? If we were honest with ourselves we would acknowledge that these courses are basically about techniques to manipulate people (buyers, colleagues, bosses, lovers, children) to do what we want them to do (buy more, like us better, give us a promotion, think of us as a team player) all for the sake of our personal achievement. These courses are given names like Understanding Teamwork, Becoming a More Motivated Seller, The Inner Male/Outer Woman, and so on. The problem is that if we don’t know the why, then the what and how have no meaning or value to us. Instead of thinking how you can improve your life, try asking yourself some why questions.

Why am I at this company working in this job?

Why am I in this marriage or relationship?

Why do I want more responsibility?

Why am I pushing myself so hard?

Why am I here? What is the purpose of my life?

Why am I reading this book?

The answer to the last question, I presume, is that something is missing in your life. And this condition is not acceptable to you — just as it wasn’t acceptable to me.

Only when you understand the why of a situation can you begin to have true control and certainty in your life. The why is just a key — but it is the key that will unlock the Perfect System.

And this system is based on nothing less than the totality of physical nature, along with the laws of the universe that govern it. It is based on the way things really work. Like scientists, when we start studying the macro we will invariably begin to understand the micro.

2

Big Bangs and First Causes

Writing this book is frankly frustrating for me because by its nature it is a monologue, and I am not a big fan of one-way broadcast experiences. I love dialogue, two-way interaction. It is much more satisfying. Because I am a nonlinear thinker, I am not one to accept what must be, so I have created a mindset that would allow me to feel more comfortable in this one-way milieu. I thus imagine that you are a long-lost friend and we have reunited after many years. I see us sitting at my diningroom table after a great meal. We’re no more than three feet apart, and during our supper conversation you have noticed that my eyes are softer, my movements less jerky, and my language more caring. You say, Something has changed about you. You seem different. What’s going on?

I answer by starting at the beginning . . .

I was born in 1946, in Dundas, Ontario, and grew up a goofy, normal fifties kid in a loving, lower-income Jewish home. I had wonderful parents, and I remember a lot of laughter in our house. My father was a truck driver, and when he died suddenly at the age of forty-nine I was only thirteen years old.

I don’t have to emphasize the impact of that one cataclysmic event on an impressionable teenager. My father’s death was the seminal, most defining moment of my early life. I became severely depressed and eventually dropped out of school. I spent the next five years working as a labourer — everything from toiling in the pits at a steel mill to being a brakeman for the CNR. At nineteen, however, I got into show business, which in Canada wasn’t so much of a business in those days — just as well, too, because I wasn’t much of a businessman. There were two reasons for this change of profession. First, I found myself at a family party and met a famous manager of a country star and figured that I knew more than this guy, so in short order I found myself a band to manage. Second, I was getting pretty fed up being a labourer and sensed that it was a dead end and there must be more to be had out of life. So with the combination of youthful hubris and dissatisfaction, and with the aid of some friends, I got my boys — don’t laugh, the Gass Company — a recording contract in Los Angeles.

As it turned out, I hadn’t spotted the next Beach Boys or the new Doors, but one thing led to another, though not for the band. I was an assistant engineer on a comedy album with a guy who thought he was W.C. Fields (this was L.A., don’t forget) and the guys writing the album were also the head writers of a new TV show called Rowan & Martin Laugh-In. This guy was so off the wall, as were the recording sessions, that I started throwing out one-liners while running the sound equipment. The writers were impressed with my wit and persuaded me to quit my job in the music business and think about being a comedy writer. I guess you could say they discovered me.

Confidence in hand, knocking on every door of opportunity, I finally landed a job writing radio commercials for what I subsequently found out was America’s number-one radio production company. A year later and with a couple of international awards in my pocket, I applied with twenty others for a job to develop a TV game show for ABC. I got the job, which lasted about six months, but all the while I kept my hand in radio by doing commercials freelance. It took me a while, but by the early seventies, I understood the business well enough to start my own production company in Toronto. By the eighties, I owned and ran the top radio and music production company for advertising in Canada.

At thirty years of age I was already a millionaire. By the time thirty-five rolled around, I was doing about $10 million yearly in sales. It was during this