Validate Your Life

I’ve given Goal-Setting a lot of thought….and experience…..and saw it lead to a lot of failures…and occasional successes….but ultimately I’ve learned tha goal-setting is a fail agenda and a behavior that denigrates clarity and induces self-doubt all while unnecessarily increasing otherwise-avoidable stress.

Some of these may sound like semantics, but it really isn’t.  These different ways of looking at achievements changes the way your brain interprets goals and then achieve the outcome(s).

Here’s Why and How Goal-Setting is Fail:

• Inadequacy.  Goal-Setting is BY DEFINITION intrinsically and inextricably intertwined with INADEQUACY!   If you say “I must achieve xyz goal”, you’re setting yourself as someone who needs something, who currently isn’t complete.  Sure, improvement is an essential part of any success and progress, but this act of “goal-setting” is like sitting around and constructively moping about a state, thing, attribute, or quality and it pinions you in a state of inadequacy from the get go.  Bad times.  There’s many ways to improve without making oneself inadequate.   Just acknowledge your investment in achieving an outcome.
• Inefficacy.  Goal-setting, the very process and act of goal-setting just doesn’t bloody work!  Here’s a fantastic example: David Tennant.  Brilliant british actor possibly most known for his character the time lord Dr. Who in the television series by the same name.  Did Tennant land that role by goal-setting?  No, he became “absurdly single-minded” as he said in his own words about achieving that outcome he wanted, the outcome that he achieved.  And he OWNED his outcome.  The Dr. Who television series has  been on-going for over 26 years casting over a dozen people in the main role.  Tennant was by far the best Doctor.  People achieve things by occasionally focusing on them and working gradually towards them or being absurdly single-minded.  None of those achievement approaches involve goal-setting.
• Implies no plan.  This is related to programming.  If you want to achieve something, you’ll need a plan.  A procedure.  A sequence of steps, if-statements, and a sequence.  Goal-setting seems to make someone think they’re done when they decide on the outcome.  If you abandon goal-setting, you’ll put more time into devising the plan, sequence, intermediary progresses, and the programming to achieve an outcome.

(more…)

Top Reasons Why People Find it Difficult to Let go of Hurtful People

• Fear of Rejection
• Strange, but true. Fearing to cross someone off your list means you somewhat fear rejection from others. Don’t ever fear rejection; you must interpret everything merely as feedback!
• Fear of People Attacking Back
• You may fear people retaliating. For me I feared the people cutting off financial support, supplies, and “material things”.
• Fear of New Behavioral
• Old habits die hard. Period.
• Top Most inefficient ways that People Exclude what They Don’t Want
• A lot of this works subconsciously….
• Do things to make them unattractive.
• Outrageously insane, but, yes, true. Some people gain weight, tarnish their image, purposely (subconsciously) look disheveled to “repel” people and things they don’t like, but don’t know how to exclude.
• Punish themselves

Yep the old, “it’s my fault” line creates a lot problems.
Get out of their mind and into yours. Your mind is a colorful, alive, limitless place – trust me, you want to go there!
Every people-decision in life opens a door and closes another. YOUR spirit and existence would benefit greatly to manufacture precise actions that open the door of Welcoming of exhilaration, romance, joy, jubilation, honesty, clarity, and quality, precision, freedom, strength, and grace, while closing the door of Misery of repulsive vilifications, confusion, frustration, angst, and pain. So many of us close the Welcoming door and open the Misery door. Don’t do that! You either welcome the right, good, quality people and events into your life that make you feel sincere, calm, and energized and feel warmth from the world, or you let in the infectious people, situations, things, and habits that taint your worldly perspective obfuscating your weltanschauung with bleak misery. Your interpretation of the zeitgeist reflects whom you welcome or do not welcome into your life. Do not even give yourself the choice to not close Misery doors and open Welcoming doors of genuineness. Just develop an instinctively intrinsic validation system to always slam shut the Misery door and fling open the Welcoming door.
This sounds simple, but, often the simplest things need the most alignment.
Let me know if you think this sounds too harsh, haughty, or haranguing, or if you have related ideas.

(Modified-Reconstructed 2007 Post).

Triple-Boot OS, Syncing Archived Mail.App, Emails, and Calendars from Different Platforms

I just wanted to share this bit of tech uploading/syncing bit of utter craziness partly for my own records, so I remember how I set this up, given that it’s so complex, and for anyone else attempted such a technological, mult-operating system juggling act.

First off, I’m working with Linux Mint, Winows 7 64-bit, and Mac OS 10.6.3.  I’m migrating away from the Mac OS (because it’s a waste of time, did very little constructive, and might be okay for self-therapy file/photo reviewing, but othe rthan that it’s pretty much rubbish imho).

I tinkered wtih refit, and an enormous amount How-To articles.  Lifehacker was tremendous help as were ones written by various other authors.  Eventually despite all of the “don’t install boot camp to triple boot!” messages I eventually did install boot camp via boot  camp assistant.  All of this was on imac8,1.

The hard drive partitioning was incredible complex and I forget some details but I definitely partitioned the 500gb internal hard drive into a: (more…)

I’ve given this a tremendous amount of thought.  No, more.  I’ve written chapters in books to this topic. No…More.  I’ve devoted many years of my life to interacting with people and trying to treat all people as equal of equal intelligence.  My mantra, rubric, guideline, personal manifesto, what have you, was something along the lines of this (outlined in the 8th chapter of the complete rubbish book I wrote, Validate Your Life):  “Everyone is of equal intelligence; we all simply channel our intelligence cultivate intelligence rather into different areas.  Meaning that someone watching tv beomces “an intelligent couch potato”, someone who studies manifolds and topology, becomes an intelligent mathematican.” Right, sounds elagitarian, equal,  all for one one for all nice humanitarian perspective of the world and the minds it, right?

You are not a leming.

(more…)

• Main Validate Your Life Podcast
• John’s NLP Course

Basically this specific part is messy and infected with a lot of David Allen’s GTD muck. Frankly GTD is too bloated of an organizational system; you take on a lot of crap you don’t need if you use it. It has some great concepts but as a whole the system sucks. So I’m on the process of writing up details of my own system. For computers, it basically uses all online documents, almost all documents on hard drives are backups. It consolidates consolidates consolidates!! All like files. It gets all your outcome project files in one spot. My system really works, and it goes where GTD failed to go and takes you to place where you end up just jotting stuff down you need to do and doing it instead of all this WF, M-S (when the frickin hell am I ever going to look at a maybe-someday list to see what I maybe someday will do? That list is a bunch of crap), crap it just has a simple todos projects and you don’t need seperate folders for project,s that’s like kids r’ us. I have one online file accessible from my phone, laptop, or desktoop that has things to do and if it’s complex, an outline of how to accomplish it all in THE SAME ONE FILE. The file is organized into “computer” “videos” “books” projects because all outside tasks I keep on a ZenBe lists. So yeah, basically what i wrote last year is practically 80% obsolete and the new organizational system is much clearer, sharper, and most important — SIMPLER!

Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about Email Organization.

Here’s my two cents on email productivity.

THEGoogle’s Recommendations for IMAP Settings”> source for clarity on [Gmail] A video demo has already been done.

A solid GTD must be simple, intuitive, and not add to clutter in your life! MANY GTD apps actually increase clutter because of the multiple annoying, superfluous, patheticall useles check boxes and extra options for each tasks (Omnifocus does the extra clutter method perfect, so don’t use that). Things has the speed and extensibility to get a LOT organized quickly but it still has all the geeky awesome GTD features to shift around tasks automatically and structure them via tags. If you’ve used mailtags, you’ll feel at home with Things, but it’s far better than Mailtags. It’s definitely an exceptional program where you aren’t locked into “contexts” but have the freedom to tag based on context or whatever you choose. While omnifocus is rigid and annoying, Things offers dynamic flexibility with tags. I tried Actiontastic, Omnifocus, and others, and this definitely takes the entire cake. Nothing is better than Devonthink for file structuring and truly limitless database organization of todos, but nothing is better than things for Task management. Together you’ll have the most potent gtd system possible. But Actiontastic is great, simple, and intuitive (and free) as well.

But starting off low-tech is best! It may be tedious, but you’ll discover patterns and trends of how you structure them enabling you to fully customize a GTD app later on so it works for you instead of you working for it. One example is “watcings”, “listenings”, and “readings”. No GTD app has those categories (yet, I may try to craft one!) and I wouldn’t have had awareness that I like to structure things that way without that knowledge gained from doing low-tech GTD. You learn very useful knick-knacks of your own organizational sysytem very quickly from doing low-tech first.

(more…)

Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about electronic organization.

We’re jumping straight to the nitty gritty here. In today’s age, “paper-based organization” is an incredibly small percentage of the organization management we conduct; mostly all of it is electronic.

I think the best first step in structuring and organizing your electronic management first starts with “contexts” of electronic. By “context” in e-management we do not mean “store”, “house”, “office”, etc, but rather applications! Just capture all your contexts for these types of information

Rss Feeds
Email
Web Bookmarks
New Notes
New Tasks
Projects
Reference Files

(more…)

Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about just an overview of notes that sparked a lot these organizationally productive practices.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of where the “REAL” organization needs to occur and delve into sub-topics like email, I think we could use a little insight from our friend Merlin Mann.

This guy is chock full of invaluable, priceless tips on Mac-based organization. In fact I, and many others, likely consider him THE mac-based productivity/organizational guru.
Here’s some notes I took on his Google Speech.

(more…)

Welcome back to the Productivity and Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Today we’re talking about Approaches to Organization.

First off, time for a little reminiscence…High school and elementary, oddly enough, carried the most structured time in my life. Towards the end of high school and definitely in college my sense of “To-dos” “What I was committed to getting done” and “organizers for getting those things done” deteriorated. I erroneously misperceived that I was simply required of less (far from the truth, I had greater, more demanding, and more copious demands) so I stopped thinking I needed to keep track of things I was trying to get done. Wow. Bad move. Horrible move. Do you have any idea how much your anxiety levels, your very physiology, alter and drastically change when you decide to operate under the delusion that “I don’t have that much going on, I can keep it all in my mind!” I can assure you from experience, you get pretty stressed. And someone consistently stressed does things differently; they eat too much or too little (never in balance), have over-excercise or never have an established exercise routine (no balance), they over-communicate or never communicate about their position (again, no balance). Get my drift. You lose balance of all kind when you’re consistently stressed, and storing your entire life’s to-dos, plans, projects, and lists in your head quite swiftly mutates you into a hyper-stressed wreck. Therefore, not having a capturing device for your to-dos and choosing to store them in your head, destroys and annihilates all successful balance in life. And balance is a prerequisite for success, so don’t plan on being successful without balance, and don’t plan on having balance without zero stress, and don’t plan on having zero stress without a solid organization capturing system!!

So, you see why we’re gathered here today to learn more about Productivity Organizational Progress: success, balance, and zero-stress! Onward!

This section of the POP Suite focuses on methods of productivity and organization and different approaches.

(more…)