Validate Your Life

Analysis of Discarding and Keeping

1. Pain Potentially Consequential of Discarding Clutter
   1. Cost to Repurchase something I discard — Repurchasing something I discard rarely happens.  Additionally, the cost of storing and transporting something is probably equivalent the cost of repurchasing but discarding it doesn’t have any of the psychological baggage effects.  TRUE!
   2. Time to refind the item to repurchase if feel need it after discarding the item.  – This is probably equivalent to finding the item amongst heaps of clutter, but true some items cannot be found but some items that discard, you don’t want to ever find again!
   3. Fear of discarding something unpleasant will cause me to repeat that unpleasant experience.  — This is the “vacuum” idea that if I discard the flyers from Los Angeles rubbish apartments, or psychology meetings, or the like, I will then repeat those to “fill the void” of that negative space.  This idea is that if I keep the unpleasant reminder, it won’t happen again.  To some extent this may be true, but it would be very painful to keep and so many unpleasant reminders that you dont’ get away from the spaces that caused the unpleasantness and make pleasant memories.
   4. Erroneous thought that discarding something may discard a “part of me”.  – This is unlikely because I put so much scrutiny into discarding items and it is illogical because some random book doesn’t define my identity.  True!
2. Pain Consequential of Keeping Clutter
   1. Physically trapped — can’t move as easily
   2. COST — cost of storage of keeping clutter and the cost of moving vans or even cars of moving clutter is abominable and gross.
   3. Overwhelm — massive stress simply from keeping track of all the clutter and sorting it and storing it and transporting it! It’s a massive headache and overwhelming source of pain!
   4. Doubt Self — Yes, keeping so many clutter belongings does cause self-doubt because you start to become uncertain if those past bits of rubbish are “me”, when of course they are not. If I pick up a book that turns out to be absolute rubbish, I am not that book.
   5. Anxiety and stress of keeping all the stuff.
   6. My digital files go neglected — THIS IS THE BIGGEST Incentive for eliminating clutter.  I live in my computer.  I’ve written a ton and I study and take tons of notes and almost everything is digital for me. If I have a ton of material space clutter, my digital files naturally (because of their being a constant amount of time in the universe) go

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The great Tony Blair once stated the truism:

“The art of leadership is saying no, not yes.  It is very easy to say yes.”

Indeed, when it’s so easy to become toxically riddled with guilt or shame, or simply having a bad habit of serving others requests at your expense, it can be very easy to say yes, and difficult to say no.  But a “No” is what is needed.

Brilliant article excerpt from earthlingcommunication on the different classifications of saying no, providing you with some options (This site had the same list, so I am not sure of lists origin.  Neither site properly cited.)

Variations of How to Say no

There are many variations of saying no. Each are suited to specific situations. Choose which one you think is best for the situation:

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I love Philleas Fogg, Meridians, Space Sciences, Concepts of Time (like Time’s Arrow the Time’s Arrow star trek episode wasn’t that bad either) and albeit somewhat pseudo-science philosophical concepts of physics such as reverse-causality, and all that time-based Dr. Who jazz.   Unfortunately, this article is very un-Dr.Whoesque and quite bland.  But nevertheless, the DST thign was something I wanted to scrutinize upon tinkering with some awesome desktop clock gadgets and wanted to make sure the nuances of time zones and how GMT is perpetually free from the daylight-savings insanity, was lucid.

It’s useful for me to frame things in temporal to London.  Chicago is always LondonTime -6 (because during this DST period, London is UTC+1)  In Spring to Fall, Chicago is London Time (BST) -6, only  because all clocks are moved forward.  And in Fall to Spring, London is GMT/UTC/Zulu And Chicago is that- 6 (because the London time goes “back” to normal), but of course so does every other timezone (Chicago goes back to GMT-6, Sydney to GMT+9, and so on.  During DST it’s a headache a +1 gets added to all those London GMT+1, Chicagy GMT-5, Sydney GMT+10).   Fall to Spring (non-daylight savings time) LondonTime (Chicago time being, now (BST) -6), and now London Time coincides with GMT.  I reckon it’s a good clarification and also headache that GMT timezone DST fluctuations never occur; zulu is always UTC.  In other words, right now, it’s BST 11:02am, CST 5:02am, and GMT 10:02am.  So it’s annoying that half the year all time zones deviate in their relationship to GMT.  London is GMT+1 or GMT, New York is GMT-4 or GMT-5, Chicago is GMT-5 or GMT-6 (in respective DaylightSavings and Non-DayLightSavings Months, respectively).

It’s interesting to note that time and time zones are mere derivatives of man-made sentience placed (or sort of dumped, rather) on longitudes.  And then again, longitudes are geographical trigonometric man-made units of measurement as well. (more…)

Here’s  the Translations of the fields of study that I eliminated to their present and future and these may likely slightly fluctuate but meh.

I’ve evolved my past 5 studies to more uplifting, validating, clarifying studies.  The transduction are as follows:

• Psychology —> Video Games!  Simply the opposite of psychology. Instead of imprisoning one self with self-dialogue “snares” , actually just doing things in a game or real world.  Escaping prison of mind.  This one’s complex and I fully don’t understand it honestly, but it’s something along the lines of gamers are a community, they’re a niche (or “we” are a niche really).  We help each other out.  Friends are the best shrinks, psychologists, coaches in teh world and better. So gamers are friends, thus gaming (via the community of gamers) eclipses psychology completely, replacing it with something progressive, fun, cooperative, exciting as, and full of tons of free expression within the uplifting confines of a great game.  There’s room for passion and interacting but always the forward-moving, measurable progression in game.  Both those (the progress and passion) create massive clarity and peace.  This sounds a bit “zen huey-looey” but hey, I reckon I take gaming seriously.  I’m serious enough about it and the gaming community to recognize that hte best “therapy” one could ever provide or receive occured with mates!  Heck, I even consoled a mate about his dad’s cancer on vent once!  Bloody hell! I don’t expect gaming community to be that intense, but video games are moving in the right direction: involved, not paralyzed behind a 4th wall, and not to mention fun and structured.  Most of all, I LIKE video games!  I get charged with a group of gamers cooperatively working together in a player verse player basis to meet a goal that can only be ascertained with such cooperation!  Rockin’ good time!
• Computers —>  Neuroscience and Mnemonics and NLP and a few “conditionals” to conduct social interactions.  Utilizing the mind with it’s far-more-advanced technology than a computer as if it were a computer that’s always with you! Mnemonics has been a massively reoccurring interest in my life.  I studied it extensively after returning from my trip in the Mexico Yucatan in 2002.  I had the lobes of the brain on my desktop throughout college (this is also because my computer(s) basically are my brain(s) haha!), and NLP can create some aligning visualizations and NLP is great for anti-persuasion, so I only make choices that are keyed in with what I want and need not because someone else is effective at sales or persuading me off center.  NLP has some interesting hypnosis trance stuff which I may be trying to avoid but at least learning about it is effective.  The computer science moving towards social behavior deserves some explanation.  In fact all of these transmutations, uncertainly deserve more explanation, but hey, one step at a time.  Using computer science for social conditionals would mean setting up, for example, and if statement so that:
  • if (xyz_conditional) {
  • do_abc_expression;
  • }
  • which would conduct and organize my social interactions producing more flow, greater ease, heightened simplicity, and less anxiety because it’s all “programmed”!  This could be imprisoning in once sense, but when you’re constantly worried about what to say or do, this creates a very stabilizing ease.  Excellent!
• Drama        —> Music, namely classical, and Math.  ufoMathematical, auditory, some music has “performance” but is so much more precise, it makes drama look like sludge.  A comparison I think would be a commercial is to drama as a great feature film i to music.  That aside, some talented performers are very musical in their performance even if labeled “drama”.  Drama, especially with Eric Berne’s “drama triangles” with social “transactions” is the exact rubbish that I am moving away from.  Perpetually hold the adult title and discard the time-consuming and confusing states of stagnation and stuckness that produce quagmires of social confusion.  Math and classical music are the respective left and right brains of crispness and clarity. Quality times.
• English       —-> Voice work.  Not stuck trapped communicating through keyboard-pecking and expressing self though voice but WITH the structured composition learned from writing is marvelous and unquestionably an advancement.  I just spent about an hour photographing for digital archive, my book…that I wrote…that was basically notes on self-help book rubbish…and (it was called Validate Your Life) and get this utter blithering insanity…I actually took notes and highlights and bloody MARGIN comments on my own book!  So I photo-scanned all that in and put all the crumpled paper in a bag to burn, discard or just rummage through for remembering of how pathetically stuck my life was in the past withe self-help rubbish and religion infecting my thoughts! Math, anatomy, games, all of these new transmutations have revealed to me that illusion spell I was under in writing that self-help rubbish which was just regurgitated self-help rubbish I had previously read.
• Politics        —> Honesty and Journal-writing and Sharing!  Additionally possibly aquatic, swimming workouts, health.   The antithesis of politics.  My goal is not to be invulnerable, but vulnerability makes you incredibly solid and strong and connected.  To quote an unsophisticated source, Ferguson says “if you’re honest, you’re bullet-proof”.  I’m interested imperfection.  Conveying my faults, my problems, my confusions, my anxieties.  That’s being real for me and that leaves politics in a pathetic useless mangled dusty pile of rubbish.  Journaling and sharing that is clarity.  Also I know a lot of aquatic fun is tied in with these transmutations.  Maybe swimming and aquatic snorkeling and whatnot would be the antithesis of politics because there’s absolutely no red-tape (assuming you’re allowed to swim where you can) and there’s no political sticky rubbish.

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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.

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Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists ever.   think the most provocative and admirable quality of Richard Phillips Feynman (okay more than one) is:

1. The fearlessness, humor, and outspokenness of his voice (when he speaks he just speaks his mind and he’s usually thought about what he says a great deal, so he just projects, barks it out and delivers truthful and illuminating utterances.  When he detailed how the O-Ring on the Challenger Shuttle lost resilience below 0° celcius at the Presidential Rogers Commission of 1986, he just dunked the ring in ice water and spoke this discovery.  It was the crucial key-pin discovery that explained the Challenger catastrophe, and he just opened his mouth and said it.  He didn’t conceal his words nor use trickery nor politics of any kind and it showed in his voice.  I aspire to do the same and sometimes recognize (albeit short) pronounced moments where I feel I have the same simultaneous clarity, boldness,and just naturalness of communicating as Feynman.  But his “communicational style” is not the interest with this point.  Don’t get confused. It’s the clarity, intelligence, self-integrity, and humility that he held that make his voice fearless and outspoken.  I think one could say he didn’t care about perceptions, but he was viciously committed to explaining how things worked to people. What I mean by this is if he wanted to explain the details of the weak nuclear force he would just say it like it is, no strings attached, no air of pomposity, no boasting, no bragging.  Indeed! That is the very most admirable quality of Feynman’s voice that he DIDN”T try to communicate.  See a lot of people, I guess you can bring Reagan, the Great Communicator, into this although he’s a bit of an acception being a pretty solid guy it seems.  But a lot of people try to communicate.  They focus on pronounciation and delivery and how to stand or when to say what or something and their message is hollow.  I guess it’s kind of like trying to build a house and all you do is focus on the where to put the house and the millions of details of placement and foundation etc but you never actually construct anything when you speak.  Feynman on the other hand, just seemed to think about things and then just “build the house” to follow this increasingly odd analogy.  In other words, he didn’t have an agenda under than making someone understand.  Now THAT is extremely, extremely rare.  Even people whom I met whom have that agenda, usually their’s some splinter of “I want to look smart so I’ll explain this” or ” I want to have some reputation of a good explainer” or something of the sort.
2. 2)His ability to Discover.  Feynman said  “The thing that doesn’t  fit is the most interesting!– (Feynman)” Because it means that that’s some new law of nature (or of the great grand chess game or something which he referenced as an example of figuring things out) and it menas you’re just spotted a hidden (and tip of the iceberg emerging) element of a whole other law of Physics or detail of Nature.   He talked about how he loved interpreting Russian and Mayan hierglyphics just because they were this awesome puzzle to work out.  I love puzzles because solving them is an accomplishment in itself.  ”The reward of a thing well done is to have it done”, wrote Emerson.  And Feynman’s discoveries and excitement to intellectually discover earned him man got-it-well-done rewards.
3. 3)His intelligence. The guy was wicked smart. Done.
4. 4)His adventuresome almost partying personality.  If anyone ever thought of the idea of a “Rock Physicist”, Feynman would probably fit the depiction.  He frequented a strip club now and then, played the bongoes like no other and played some excellent pranks, but still — first and foremost — held the dignified and well-qualified demeanor and hosted the cognitive abilities of a Nobel Prize winning theoretical Physicist.
5. 5)His total and utter lack of snobbiness.  He easily could have held the “I know how this works and you don’t” POV, but it he didn’t.  He told stories.  He was extremely kind (but not in the cheesy “look at my generosity” way), but in a sharp kind of way, mitigating the chances of his intelligence being exploited — of that I seriously admire as well.  He made attempts to explain these freakishly complex quantum topics to laymen.  He Shared a good laugh and was an awesome gentleman dude.

Man, this guy was just so indescribably awesome!  But I will attempt to describe.  He was a master of logic.  Things he says and describes are always clear and rock-solid in their structure and stability.  Meaning, when Feynman described something you also were getting a dose of logic, natural sciences, math, learning process-theory, and probably a dash of humor.

He was clear, pure, genuine.  The kind of person from which you could learn heaps of truly worthwhile stuff and trust that you’re in Good company.  I distinguish worthwhile learning (actually truthful knowledge of natural sciences and math) from unworthwhile learning (religion, subjective beliefs, New Age bs, most all of psychology — indeed Feynman condemned psychology as a crock, which it is — for starters) because what Feynman knew and taught – Natural Sciences, specifically theoretical quantum physics — was the undeniable truth and quintessentially, inexplicably “worthwhile”.  That’s how things worked.  That’s how and why the sun rises and sets (okay that’s more of the classical mechanics branch of physics).  But the composition of matter is the very stuff in which he explored and made breakthroughs.  If anyone thinks that kind of knowledge isn’t worthy to learn, they should get their head checked.  I guess he kind of new the underpinnings of matter and energy and as a result of that incredibly electrifying (couldn’t help the pun) knowledge, he always had that never-pompous, always humble, but joyful look in his eye of “I know how this works.  I figured it out, and if there’s still more to discover, I’ll enjoy figuring that out too.”. Indeed,  if there was any person who directly personified Emerson’s quote of getting a job well done, it was Feynman.  I don’t think Feynman saw things as work or play.  Of course not.  He couldn’t.  That capacity of not distinguishing between work and play is something I do (but of course on a much less advanced caliber than Feynman) and it definitely puts you at a different rhythm or cadence with the wolrd (most whom of which lives for the weekly paycheck and operates as a brain drone living paycheck to paycheck never bothering to discover why they don’t atomically sink through the floor when the particles of the floor and their own feet are mostly empty space).

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“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates,24 and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way.”

== Steven Pinker, MIT & Harvard prfoessor and cognitive scientist.

YES Finally, something that dissolves the pop-new-age ludicrous falsities claiming men and women are biologically different . They are not. They are very very similar and almost 100% identical, genetically.

This isn’t so much an interest in masculine/feminine studies, but rather a dissolution of fallacious belief, hyped by superficial media and pseudo-science.

Hearing Pinker’s wise words is not only comforting and alleviating from the intoxicatingly vile untruths I heard uttered to me by so many pop media feminists or people interesting in pointing out the “inherent superiority of one gender over the other”, but Pinker’s words move forward with dissolving untruths that clog, obfuscate, and blur our scope of reality.

I think the most concise and most lucid article that encapsulates this entire pseudo-truth-unraveling behavior is Dawkins’ article “Hall of Mirrors”, where he enunciates the validity of scientific truth.

Pinker’s dissolution of and illustrative evidence provision of the noble savage, blank slate, and ghost in the machine fallacious paradigms of human nature is brilliant.

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“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates,24 and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way.”

== Steven Pinker, MIT & Harvard prfoessor and cognitive scientist.

YES Finally, something that dissolves the pop-new-age ludicrous falsities claiming men and women are biologically different . They are not. They are very very similar and almost 100% identical, genetically.

This isn’t so much an interest in masculine/feminine studies, but rather a dissolution of fallacious belief, hyped by superficial media and pseudo-science.

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I am not you, and you are not me.  That is the way things are.  I like that.  As you ponder that, let me explain to you why I find tremendous value in that distinction.

Distinctions create boundaries.  Without distinctions, everything would be porous and absorbing this information or that information would generate confusion.  But that confusion is instantly absolved when we utilize distinctions.

There’s a tendency for people with whom I communicate to think that we have some connection, as-if they “know me”.  The way they communicate and the advice they give comes from the perspective of “I know this person in every dimension and in every aspect”.  But then I mention something that I have done that the person with porous distinctions has not done, like ran multiple marathons,  the person shirks back and immediately says “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”.  Instantly their slurring and blurring of our distinctions of you being me, and me being you –gets mutilated when an element of capacity enters the conversation.

You see, as you listen to this closely and intently you realize that intention should govern our behavior (and often it does when we are not being persuaded, manipulated, or under a hypnotic trance by the media), but  many times our perception of capacity limits our behavior.  When I mention to someone actions I have taken that they deem outside of their capacity (for example having written 4 books, or ran multiple marathons, or any other task of which people are incredibly capable of doing, but don’t believe they have that capacity to do so) who has a ruptured their perception of boundaries, what happens in their mind?  First they recoil.  They instantaneously have a thought process of “this person is not whom I thought they were and there exists a distinction in our capacity”.  Such distinctions are good.  Because in many ways, what makes you you, and me me, is our logical levels, which of course, include beliefs, identity, capabilities, and behavior.  If I am talking to you in person, we share the same environment.  That is it.  I’d say environment is roughly 3% of “who I am” and “who you are” at best.   Without logical levels, we are all practically identical twins because our only differences would be blemishes on our epidermal layer of our skin, hair coloration, simple, trivial distinctions bound into the same sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid.  So it’s truly our logical levels that spark this kind of Lamarakian

For awhile in my junior year in college I engaged this belief that we were all this spiritual, interconnected, “Universal One” person.  I enjoyed entertaining that belief because of many reasons.  Reasons for entertaining the “universal one” delusion: (more…)

The whole “work hours” thing is a foreign concept to me. Maybe because I just don’t make a distinction between work and play, or (most likely) I just always work.  Sometimes I wake up and start work at 2am. Sometimes I just don’t ever go to sleep and take a nap in the middle of the day.

It’s easier for me, I realize, to just say my sleep patterns (the times where I’m not working) than the times I am working;  I sometimes sleep around the 12ish to 3ish zone. I like exercising at night (moonlight runs).

So it’s strange, I work about 80-90 times harder and am more demanding of myself than I would have been if I worked for an employer other than myself.  This increase in work motivation, results, and demands is probably inherent to any freelance work or “business owner” work.  That’s an interesting pattern and managing the work that you do as an entrepreneur is what we’re talking about today. You have to develop this weird relationship with yourself where you’re the administrator who decides what we need to do (as a business) and then you put on the “employer cap” and do the stuff that you decided to do while wearing the administrative hat. Finally, you clean it all up by wearing, possibly a “customer hat” and test-running for the purposes of debugging your business feature.  This works with websites, products, services, expansions of any kind.

Having access to multiple outcome frames from multiple hats (points of view and angles) is a must for any entrepreneur. How do you do this? How do you don and even design the array of chapeaus you have to wear to be a successful entrepreneur? (more…)

Hear This In FULL as a free podcast! If you like what you hear. Be sure to check out the “Audio” page of http://www.validateyourlife.com for more inspiration and clarity!

People Categories

Categorize People in I’ve noticed those three distinctions VERY clearly in friends but instead of just categorizing appropriately the “friend” as a
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