This article is about the inner workings of a human… that if you get it wrong, the price you pay for the error is your life.
Is a human like a assembled faucet? When it drips you have to replace the whole thing?
I energize my water in a 5 gallon (20 liter) plastic containers with a spigot.
The spigot is replaceable, but I am not strong enough to unscrew it. I have the replacement spigot… I bought it a year ago, but is still sitting on my kitchen counter. I still need to be mindful that the old spigot, which is just another word for water tap… still drips.
Everything you ever wanted is available to you, if…
… if you are willing to look at see what is so about you and your life.
The truth. Naked. Ugly. Often shameful.
Here is a correspondence I had with a client today:
She said: “I’m interested in changing my context since it’s part of what keeps me stuck.”
“… answering the questions: what am I doing? Why am I doing it?
Unless you have done the work of identifying what you have been doing, and why you have been doing it, no way you can shift the context. You cannot catch what you can’t see. And you cannot change what you can’t catch.”
To the degree you are able and willing to do that, to the same degree you can change your life. ((
For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.
I remember saying to myself: my money is not good enough for you? and wept.
I had no idea how I “accomplished” that… in 20/20 hindsight it is still a little spotty.
What wasn’t clear to me, never even occurred to me, how my attitude effected the service provider. My “To what degree you think of yourself:” starting point measure was, at the time, 70%. From my behavior I would have guessed it was higher.
Mainly I overrode what they said. I argued, I knew better, I acted with contempt…
What I didn’t know then is that being a service provider needs to be a win, or no service.
Oh no! This video software that used to work doesn’t work any more. I cried out… This can happen to anyone. Technology changes so rapidly, keeping pace with it is both expensive and time consuming.
Sometimes there is an upgrade. Nowadays upgrades cost money… or the software developer simply abandoned you… and you are stranded with a software that doesn’t work any more.
I have been teaching what I teach for seven years. Teach people a world view that has been tested and true, and includes the invisible. This world view is sharply different from the accepted norms… but it works, instead of just being a nice theory like what psychologists and philosophers teach. Or even Landmark Educati
One of the signs of the overwhelming inauthenticity ((My definition of authenticity is that there is nothing in the unsaid that isn’t consistent with what is visible… Authenticity is one of those big words that no one knows what it really means… so they go by feeling. The simplest way to define authenticity is that there is no pretense, no façade, no game playing. The person is the same through and through, whether he/she is seen or not.
Most people smile a lot in their pictures, but I can feel their anxiety, their fear, their inner trembling.
One more thing that I haven’t said before, but given that we are working with memes: if you obey memes, if you repeat memes, if you try to fit in with memes, y
Yesterday I used the free community van to get to two stores I cannot get to easily on my own.
Note: in the illustrations I am not taking sides. I am illustrating that there is confusion and disagreement in what is race, what is racist, what is racism, and what it does is it makes people rigid, lie about what they think, and vote for Trump… ugh.
The driver of the van, PhD in sociology, asked if it bothered me if he continued to listen to NPR radio ((National Public Radio)) . It was a public debate in Trump and if he was a racist.
I listened for at least half an hour, and observed that no one bothered to define what they meant by
How to Get Your Mind to Read ((article by Daniel T. Willingham (@DTWillingham) is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and the author, most recently, of “The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads.” Republished from the New York Times
Photo: Credit Lilli Carré))
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.
We throw about big words, and we pretend that we know them. Even “scientists” just pretend. If they didn’t, they would be explaining, clarifying the words, but they don’t.
In the Starting Point Measurements the vocabulary number is what indicates this. I originally intended to call this clarity, but then I decided that if it refers to words, then maybe it can be instructive.
It hasn’t been.
So this article will be, mostly, about words.
Whenever we say conscious awareness, we are talking about words. No words, no conscious awareness.
Whatever you don’t have words for, whatever you mislabel, whatever you just have feelings or emotions about, no accurate words… are not conscious awareness.
This week has been a success for Life, and a disaster financially. Everyone was spending their money on turkey, I guess.
So I am going to announce some sales for this coming week. I’ll make them good… so you’ll buy.
Now, about the successes that lead me to a huge insight.
All that people do is guided by memes, and they think they decided to do it. And you think they decided to do it from the goodness of their heart, from the badness of their heart, whatever seem to be the case. But in fact they never decided anything… It is the memes that are doing the deciding.
This is a totally different way to look at people, at life, and at what’s happening.
“It’s lonely at the top. 99% of people are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most competitive.”
-Tim Ferriss
Most people will never be truly successful.
The pull towards mediocrity is too strong. As David Schwartz once penned, “All around you is an environment that is trying to pull you down to Second-Class Street.”
Most people will never escape the pull.
Much of the thinking around us is small-minded. Most people are overly conce