There is a wonderful thing that happens when someone carves a saying into pure marble. The saying is usually pretty darn good. There is no magical property that marble has; it’s all about effort. If you are going to take the time, patience and money that it take to carve something into marble, you’re going to make sure that it is worth carving. Rarely do we ever see a beautifully carved masterpiece that reads: “Pick up the kids at 3.”

(insert picture of “pick up the kids at 3″ carved into marble)

How, then, do we get an idea worthy enough to be written in marble? There is a process called distilling. Distilling is the process of separating out material to enrich the good stuff and make it more pure. Good writers do this too…like Plato, Sun Tzu, Shakespeare, and maybe even John Grisham. They distill ideas until you have their essence, then clearly communicate them. They takes a buffet of ideas, and turn them into a beautiful meal.

There are fabulous books in which ideas are distilled to the perfect amount. It’s like making a key lime pie. If you don’t put any lime in it, you’re basically eating egg and sugar. If you add too much lime, it’s too sour. If you make it just right, it can be fantastic and tangy; and the beautiful thing is that if you’re careful and observant, you can figure out the ratio, and for the rest of your life you can produce the most beautiful pies…or even ideas.

What you can do for yourself:

First, keep a notebook or journal on you all the time if possible.  Every time you have an idea, good or bad, write it down. Not only will you not lose the idea, but now you know that the idea is down on paper, and you can think more about it when you have the time. Then you can focus on what you have to do at that moment.

Every few days, go through your journal and sort it out. Find out which ideas you want to take action on, and which ones are just interesting. The action ideas are the ones you do something about, obviously.

Put the ideas that are just interesting in a big file. The computer is great place for this file because you can key-word search it.

This is handy for 2 reasons.

1. Themes: You will discover themes in your random notes. If you find that you keep writing down notes about painting a mural, then that is something you should look into. In fact, you should make a file that has all your notes about murals in one place, take all those good ideas, distill them, and go out and do it.
2. Plagiarism: You can plagiarize your own ideas. When you are writing to a friend or co-worker and you need something funny or interesting to say, you can just plagiarize your own notes.

If you want to change the world for the better, the best thing to do is:

1. Distill what you know into a neat little package so that you understand it backwards and forwards.

2. Translate that distilled material into something that people are going to want to swallow (highly relatable stories and stupid jokes work well.)

3. Make it easily available to the select people who would be likely to benefit from the use of your ideas.

Over the last 100 or so years, we as a people have been going back and forth as to what, exactly, the subconscious is. Many have devoted a lifetime to this, yet there is still no conclusive answer. We have, however, learned a few neat tricks along the way that are worth knowing.

One of the most common analogies is that the subconscious is much like a super computer. It can process things at an unbelievable speed, but it just can’t make up its own mind. If you have ever gone to a large group-awareness training seminar, you will have heard the genie analogy. In this analogy, your subconscious is like a genie that grants wishes. You think to yourself: make me a million dollars. The genie says “ok.” The next minute, you think to yourself: this is never going to work. The genie says “ok.”

It’s not this black and white, and many people confuse this biological process for “The Law of Attraction.” The prevailing view is that you do not have superpowers that let you control the universe as a whole. You do, however, have the ability to trick your brain into doing some pretty amazing things. For example, when you are thinking about buying a new car, suddenly there are new cars all over the place.

Remember, we learn by emotional impact or by repetition. So if you want to become a millionaire, you have two options: You can have the love of your life break up with you because you don’t have enough money. (Make sure that she makes a big, dramatic scene about it and that you are utterly devastated.) Or you can repeat to yourself 100 times a day “I am millionaire.” It should be noted that this is no guarantee. All that these two techniques are doing is convincing your subconscious of what you want. Your subconscious will then devote quite a bit of brain power to getting you what you want…until one day you wake up and find a very clever way to make a million dollars. This is why so many things have been invented in dreams.

(insert picture of a man repeating to himself “I am a millionaire” and a picture of a woman walking out the door saying “you’re too poor”)

Before you traumatize yourself or repeat some goal until it and you are one and the same, be warned that you can accomplish anything to the exception of everything else. It is unfortunate to be rich without love, and inconvenient to be in love with out money.

One thing that some of the greatest speakers always say is “admire successful people.” This isn’t just so that you learn from them and buy their same speech on CD at 10 times the price as you can find it on ebay. The admiration of success is a powerful thought, if you make it part of your very existence. If you truly admire successful people, what you are telling your subconscious is that to be successful is a good thing: “I would like to learn how these people have achieved their success, and I would like such success for myself. I would like to abandon the notion, which many of us were brought up with, that to be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise is a bad thing. It is a good thing if I am more successful. Then I can use my success to help myself and those around me.”

(insert chart of good things a person has cut off by success ceiling and the things they could have if they broke through it)

There is an obstacle called the success ceiling. Your brain has a defensive mechanism that prevents you from taking too big a risk. Your subconscious does this by finding a capping point (a ceiling) at which you should stop. At a certain point, your brain thinks “Ok, at least I am well fed. That will have to do. Let’s not do anything stupid that will get us back to being hungry.” What you want to do is convince yourself that it is easy, and not at all risky, to strive for something greater. If you successfully achieve this, your brain will be on the lookout for the next great thing that will make you even more likely to survive. The trick is to have no excuses. Never say to yourself that because you are white you can’t be an amazingly successful rapper; or that you can’t be the best golfer ever because you are black; or that you can’t write a book because you are dyslexic.

“Don’t do it, I wouldn’t recommend it.”  Your brain does not want to change its mind. Getting your brain to change its mind is like trying to change around the transportation system in a city. They say it’s going to be better in the future, but right now you don’t care about the future because you are stuck in gridlock.

Here is how your brain works:

Your brain is already wired the way it’s wired because you are you, and you have had the experiences that you have had. Your brain does not want to change, because thus far you are alive, and why would it do anything different unless its survival was threatened? So, changing your mind is an arduous process of convincing yourself that you will have a higher opportunity of survival / success, should you think and act a different way. Good Luck.

We change our minds through two methods: repetition and emotional impact. If you’re interested in quickly changing your mind, these are ways to do it. But be careful, the last thing you want to do is change your mind about something that doesn’t need changing.

Changing your mind with emotions is the quickest way. Neuro-linguistic Programming is an interesting thing to look up on the internet. The long and the short of it works like this (only read this next part if you plan to quit smoking or never want to smoke):

Your brain works by association, so here is what you do…associate smoking with something disgusting. Picture  your favorite cigar, or cigarette, with a pile of vomit. It’s really important to visualize the vomit’s texture, smell, flavor. Have an emotional reaction to this. Throwing up will significantly help with your success rate. Picture your cigarette. Vomit. Cigarette. Vomit. Cigarette. Spend some serious time on this. You want it so that your mind is genuinely confused about which one is which. This will, of course, ruin smoking for you for the rest of your life. It will probably also make you think of cigarettes every time some one throws up.

Repetition is the other way to change a habit. If you make a special point of making your bed everyday for 90 days, you will be in the habit of it and find yourself making your bed each morning without even reminding yourself to do it.

(insert a picture of a man saying “must drive safely, must drive safely” rubbing his temples. Another picture beside it of a guy in a fender bender. Both will get you to drive safely as the caption)

Wouldn’t it be great if you just knew when something was true? You knew that beyond a shadow of a doubt you weren’t being lied to, or tricked, or just plain told wrong information? You knew for yourself that you had the situation figured out, and you understood exactly what was going on? Wouldn’t that make you confident?

What is true? In everyone’s own mind, the conclusions they have come to are 100% certain. This is reality for that person, until proven otherwise. They have chosen this reality because out of all the things they have tried, it produces the most successful results in their life.

A man knows that fire is hot and will burn him, causing him much pain. This is a reality: the concept that fire is hot and dangerous is only a concept in his head from his own personal experience. Because he has this concept, though, he has saved himself from being hurt many times.

So can we know anything for certain? No. What is incredible, though, is that we can know things with such certainty that we are willing to stake our lives on them.

Let’s compare the statements “fire is hot” and “the moon landing was fake.”

(insert picture of fire and moon landing, drawn)

Well, there are two ways to tell whether or not these statements are true.

Inductive reasoning: the ability to notice that patterns have been formed and to make a reasonable prediction as to what will happen next.

Using inductive reasoning, I can compare the statement “fire is hot” to my own personal experience. I have noticed in my life that every single time I have encountered fire, it is indeed hot. So I would say, from my inductive experience, that it is a true statement. The statement “the moon landing was fake” is false in my mind, because my own personal experience of people is that large groups of people can not successfully keep secrets.

Deductive reasoning: The ability to know exactly what the root cause of any given effect is.

Deductive reasoning leads me down a slightly different road. The statement “fire is hot” can be compared with my knowledge of chemical energy and energy release.  I know that when energy is released, especially chemically, the result is often thermal energy. “Fire is hot” is a true statement based on my knowledge of physics and chemistry. The statement  “the moon landing was fake” can also be analyzed deductively. The inconsistent lighting that most conspiracy theorists point out can easily be explained by the reflective nature of dust on the moon.

You’re probably not likely to run across many people who question whether or not fire is hot, but you may run across a few people who genuinely believe that  “the moon landing was fake.” It’s important to understand that they have come to that conclusion based on the life experience they have had. Moreover, if it does not matter, let them believe what ever they want. If, however, they are applying for a job at NASA, you may wish to offer them new life experiences…ones that they will experience and know to be true, and they can then examine their own conclusions against their new experiences. You will find that this is a much more effective way to get someone to agree with you than yelling at them. Some people, though,  are very stubborn.

Am I right about fire or the moon landing? I don’t know. It’s just my experience. If I was shown compelling data to the contrary, I would have to take a good hard look at my conclusions. So, my mind can be changed.

You thought you were going to know something for certain, right? There is a simple method of how to know something is worth doing. Imagine that you need to make a life-altering decision and you think you might have all the facts, but you’re worried. Ask your self this question: “If my knowledge was how to put a parachute together, would I jump out of the plane?” If the answer is yes, then you are certain. If the answer is no and it’s a really important decision, you should do more research.

Let’s say you want to buy a used car. This is a pretty big decision for you, but not life or death. How do you know whether to buy a car? Well, you know the salesman has a good reputation (that’s inductive reasoning, you know from other customers that they were happy with their cars.) You also know a little bit about cars. You know that the engine sounds right, and that nothing is leaking, and the pedals don’t seem to be worn. This is deductive reasoning based on your knowledge of automobiles. Now the task is to take your knowledge of the salesmen’s reputation + your knowledge of a working car and ask yourself: “If that knowledge was the knowledge to pack a parachute, would I jump out of a plane with that pack?”

When you jump out of a plane with a parachute that you packed, you know you know you know. There is no such thing as pretty darn certain.

I am sure you’ve heard people say that they are just not good at anything. That is not true. I know some excellent TV watchers. They are so good at it, they know exactly what is on at what time and the name of all the characters in the shows. Furthermore, they know the emotional and character pitfalls of every single repeat character.  It’s actually quite impressive. There is an interesting finding that points out that if anyone spends 10,000 hours on anything, they will become a master at it.

Everything you’ve ever learned is from personal experience, one way or another.  So be very aware of where your energy goes. I’m sure you have heard of financial budgets.  The same idea can be applied to your time and energy. If you’re up for it, here is an interesting experiment for you: Write down exactly how you spend every moment of the day. People  tend to break their day into 15 min increments.  15 minutes is about 1% of your day. Some people spend 30 minutes getting ready in the morning. Some people even spend a full hour and a half driving each day. I can’t believe they spend a full 6% of their life driving. Keep a log for one week, as people’s habits seem to revolve around a weekly schedule. Then break down the whole list, maybe even into a  pie chart. (Pie charts are so cool, they can prove anything.) Ask yourself, “Am I comfortable aimlessly browsing the internet with 4% of my life?” It’s a harsh experiment. Not many people take a good, hard look at how they spend their life.

So what do you put your energy into? Your passion, of course. The thing that you where built for. If you’re a hand model, well damn it, put as much energy as possible into being a hand model. Obviously, you still need to eat. That’s why you need to figure out a quick and efficient way to get food. Waste as little of your time as possible on life’s little errands, like paying rent, going to the dentist, or begin stuck in traffic. That time you spend studying to get a pay raise isn’t about the money. No! You want free time, because God knows you were put on this earth to be the best hand model ever. And if you can make more money, you can work less, and that gives you the opportunity to spend hours practicing wearing watches while gesturing just the right way. In fact, everything you do, from unclogging the downstairs toilet in the morning, to making love in the afternoon, becomes about fulfilling your ultimate purpose.

“I am so Smart. SMRT…. I mean SMART.” (Homer Simpson.) Have you ever met a really smart person, a doctor or an astrophysicist, that was just a plain idiot? I mean, how can a man with that many letters after his name not know how to pump gas? It’s just not that hard. It’s incredibly hard to convince someone that you have a firm grasp of string theory while your fly is down.

Well, as it happens, your mom was right when she told you in high school that different people are good at different things. Unfortunately, this was usually after a particularly embarrassing and/or traumatizing event. As it turns out, a bunch of philologists came up with the idea that there are 7 different kinds of intelligence (a few of which you are probably pretty good at using.)

7 Intelligences

• Verbal – the ability to use words
• Visual – the ability to see things in your mind
• Physical – the ability to use your body well
• Musical – the ability to understand and use music and rhythm
• Mathematical & logical – the ability to apply logic to systems and numbers
• Introspective – the ability to understand thoughts and feelings in yourself
• Interpersonal – the ability to relate well to others (people smarts)

The best way to get to the bottom of this is simply to point out the kids in your high school who were good at different things.

Verbal – This is the kid in the drama club, the kid who actually liked Shakespeare and didn’t have to lie about it just to impress girls. This is the kid whose yearbook quote referenced someone you have never heard of. He’s on the debate team, and actually does fairly well with meeting girls. He grows up to be a story teller. Sometimes people really like him, sometimes they don’t, but he knows just the right words to describe them all.

Visual – This is the artist. He’s in the audio visual club, if not the president and founder of it. He is very good with spaces, and knows how long something is without having to measure it. He might grow up to be an engineer.

Physical – This is the athlete, the jock, the guy who used to pick on me. Now, it’s not that their muscles are bigger than mine, or that they are more flexible, although this didn’t help me either… It’s that their brain is actually wired a little better to make them know exactly where every part of their body is at any given moment. They know where and when they have to place their hand in order to catch the baseball just past third base and get the girl. These guys are also really good dancers, although sometimes they won’t admit it.

Musical – This one is pretty obvious. He’s in the band. He also has a very good sense of rhythm in speech.

Mathematical and Logical – Dorks! Nerds! Man, I was one. I still am. I learned computer programming just for fun. This type of person is obviously very good at math. They are the engineers of this world. They are the astrophysicists.

Introspective – This is the Goth kid. They know exactly what and how they think. They spend a lot of time thinking about their own feelings, and they are self-motivated…typically a leader of themselves.

Interpersonal -This is the class clown. This is the kind of kid that the teacher can’t help but think is funny. He knows just what to say to weasel himself out of trouble and get you into it. He is pretty good with girls. He has the ability to coordinate other people to do his work for him.

You probably noticed that you are good at 3 or 4 of these and really good at 1 or 2. Excellent, now you know what comes easily to you. So, the secret is this: take what you’re not good at, and turn it into something you are good at…and be creative.

Let’s say you have to memorize these peoples’ names: Jim, Bob, Eliot, Samantha, Carmon, Jill, and Ian.  This is how people with different talents would chose to remember the names.

Verbal: Makes up a creative story about all the people and their names, or uses a gnomonic device. J.E.S.B.I.C.J. Just. Eat. Salad. Because. It’s. Crunchy. Juices. Or Jim, Eliot, Samantha, Bob, Ian, Carmon and Jill.

Visual: Pictures a creative and beautiful scene/ picture with everyone and their names put together.  Like picturing Jim with J.I.M. written in stencils on his forehead.

Physical: Pictures the people in a specific location they were standing and their name hovered around them. “When I met Jill she said ‘Hi, I’m Jill.’ Then she flicked her hair to the left and shook hands with me with her right hand with a very soft grip.”

Musical :Makes up a creative song with all their names. Bob is a slob. The name Eliot has an interesting rhythm when said out loud.

Mathematical and Logical: Comes up with a mathematical system to memorize names, like Samantha has 8 letters and S is the 19th letter in the alphabets: thus 8-19. This is easy to memorize for this sort of person, because 8*2+3= 19. Then take the outside numbers of this equation and you get 8-19. 8 letter name, 19th letter. Samantha.

Introspective: Associates the person with the feeling they get from that person. Jill makes me feel anxious.

Interpersonal: Associates that person with something funny or interesting about that person, like Bob has a stupid hair cut, but a good sense of humor.

This particular system of 7 Intelligences may not be the beginning and end of how people think. The important thing to know is that different people think in different ways. They look at problems from completely different angles. Fortunately, problems themselves can be solved in more than one way. We learn from this not to treat two people the same way, and not to look at one problem in only one way.

People are different. No two people have the same DNA. No two people think the same. No two people even smell the same. You will probably use a combination of things to learn. Feel free to experiment with different methods and make it your own.

If you’re interested in more tricks for your memory, mind mapping is worth googling, the book “Your Brain the Missing Manual” is worth buying, and speed reading is always fun to brag about at parties. Something they all share in common is that they use emotion. That’s the way we learn, by being afraid, angry, happy or excited. The last thing you want to do is memorize something and not care about it. So when you’re memorizing the Gettysburg address, feel strongly about it. Connect with the sights and sounds and places of it. Listen to the rhythm of the words. Love the fact that Abraham Lincoln used the word “score” when he could have just as easily said 87. Feel what Lincoln must have felt, and know what it must have been like to stand in a crowd and listen to this speech for the very first time.

It is always interesting when you meet someone who is unwilling to learn.  They are like someone who refuses to acknowledge that  their car has a trunk. One day, they decide to listen to what all their friends and family have been telling them. “Wow, this would be a great place to put groceries.  Holy moley, there is an extra tire in here, how convenient!” Constant, never-ending education is the surest strategy to succeed in life.

At the end of the day, your brain is a machine whose purpose is to keep you alive and to benefit the progression of the species; not necessarily to keep you happy. Bummer, right? This makes perfect sense if you think about how evolution works. This also sucks, because you really want to be happy, but your brain can work against you on this one. Your brain is constantly tricking you into being motivated. We are usually mostly interested in the short term, and in the short term, planting crops does very little for us. In fact, it’s a fairly tiring process.

Your brain gets you to think about the future by messing with your dopamine levels. (That’s right.  If you’re the least bit successful, you’re on drugs. Don’t tell your mother.) When you do something that makes your brain think that it will last longer… lets say, eat an apple…it will give you an immediate benefit by upping your dopamine level (umm, drugs).  Eating an apple really does nothing for you while you’re eating it. In fact, it uses up energy to start the process of digestion. You won’t see much physical benefit for about 20 minutes. Your brain, however, is clever enough to trick you. When it senses that your tongue is tasting something sweet, it interprets that as a positive thing, and you get an immediate sensation of pleasure. Your brain is also smart enough to know that it shouldn’t give you the same amount of pleasure on your next apple. This is why your fourth serving of chocolate cake is never as good as your first. Of course, you can always trick your brain into thinking that it needs something like cigarettes or expensive shoes.

I bet you’re happy just looking at it.

Warning: do not eat. Website is made of pixels.

Everyone in this life has been born into rich abundance, absolute poverty or somewhere in between. We all have different resources at our disposal.  The funny thing is that most of us are unclear about what we have use of. We somehow think that if we don’t own it or we haven’t used it before, then it is not for us to use.

Example: A woman was helping with a volunteer project to build a brick house for the underprivileged. She and her twenty friends spent an entire day just transporting the bricks from the location where they were dropped off to the job site. All this time, the locals sat on the back of a pickup truck and watched. At the end of the day the off-site supervisor showed up and asked her why she didn’t get more done. She explained that they had to move the bricks first. The supervisor laughed and asked why she didn’t get the locals to help, especially because they had a pick up truck and would have been more than happy to.

If you have use of a plane, there is really no reason to own it. In fact, it’s better if you don’t own it. Why would you need to own anything if you could use it whenever and wherever you want? People think they need to own something because they are paranoid about it being taken away. If you have earned the right to use something, though, then you know how to earn the right to use it again. You have that liberty.

Make a list of all the resources you have: the things you own, things you have use of, and the things you can beg, borrow or steal. On top of that, you have resources that aren’t physical. You have social connections, money, time, energy, physical strength, emotional endurance  and the knowledge in your head.

An abundance of one resource can make up for a lack in another. Free time can always get you money, just like physical strength can save you time. At the end of the day, time is your most finite resource. You can buy more stuff and get more money, but each day only has 24 hours in it, and the greatest people on earth accomplished their great deeds with the same 24-hour limit to their days.

You may have noticed that there are several other people wandering around this planet with you that want essentially the same thing that you do. The question is, how do the choices you make in life affect those other people? Do you want to help them? Do you want to hurt them? Do you care? Like it or not, every action we take tends to have an effect on someone else. Eating the last piece of pie makes it so that no one else may have that slice. Creating a better way to bake pie makes it possible for many more people to enjoy even more pie.

Every choice you make has benefits and consequences, both short term and long term effects for you and for other people. You can outline these effects for huge decisions like whether or not to invade another country, or even whether or not to go get a taco.

Review: The rules of the game

We are all playing a giant game, the game of life. Its been played for countless years already, by countless others. Patterns occur all around us. The same thing seems to happen time and again. From these patterns, we can learn concepts that can be applied to more than just the current situation. In this game there are rules, like physics and human behavior. Things are always changing. We are all trying to survive and thrive. Our brains might not be the way we want them to be, but they can be improved. Our brains have imperfections, but these can be compensated for. There are benefits and consequences, short term and long term, and there is me and you. This is the world we find ourselves in. This is the game we are playing, and if you know the rules and are prepared to put in a little bit of work, it can be great fun.

The goose that laid the golden egg. This story has been told so many times to so many people, it’s hard to imagine why it’s not an integral part of our society; but for some reason it’s not. The story goes like this: A man finds a goose that lays golden eggs every day. He is happy for a while, then quickly becomes impatient and cuts the goose open, hoping to find lots of golden eggs; but there are none. His greed cost him a lifetime of wealth and stability.

 NOW!

So you may want a new car, and it didn’t occur to you a year ago when you forgot to mail in a few credit card payments that you might want to buy a car. As a result, your credit score is not what you thought it would be. It’s a shame. We are impulsive sometimes, and end up with a new car anyways, but it certainly is disappointing that our interest rate is that high. We are creatures that demand immediate gratification. We want what we want, and we want it NOW! I horny I want sex now. Two hours ago when I was ignoring my wife, it didn’t occur to me that I would want sex in the future. I was wasting my time aimlessly browsing the internet, not even for boobie pictures. No, I was looking at stuff I had no intention of buying. Had I the foresight, I would have excused myself, gone to the store, and purchased flowers, a nice bottle of wine, and maybe even a Mars Bar for her. (This, of course, is simply to improve my chances. All of life is a cost/benefit analysis with consequences and benefits and hints of risk.) Then I would have rushed home to make dinner and clean a little. (Chances improving.) At this point she would have figured out my carefully devised strategy , and chances being what they are, gone along with my master plan…but no. “I want what I want and I want it now!” with no forethought to the future and what I might want next. So I just ask flat out and take my chances as they are, those chances not being very good.