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…)

…and not watching movies. (This is in reference to non-fiction books, btw — and quality reads, not crap).

1. Movies leave you under a spell; an illusory haze so you cannot see. Books give control of the haze others are under.
2. Movies manufacture illusion without you knowing it, while books allow you to choose experience illusion, without decoupling awareness from experience.
3. Books enable to you to explain and teach about illusions and reality, placing you at “cause” instead of at “effect” where you are a victim of illusion. You’re in the driver’s seat reading and writing books.
4. Books clarify and provide understandings. Movies merely create suspence and foreshadowing. Movies are hollow, they foreshadow and build suspense, but they leave you empty with no treasure, no gem. Books have the gem. Books, sure, create suspense, intrigue, and connection. I remember countless “on the edge of my seat” reads of Sherlock Holmes and bawling at the end of Where the Read Fern Grows in early elementary school. And just in 2008, I was completely engaged and in awe of the adventure created by Jules Verne in around the world in 80 days. Those fiction reads provided massive suspense, BUT BUT BUT, unlike movies, the books also provided incredible value and understanding!! I learned so many lessons from those books above. For example, inductive observational skill from Doyle’s book (Sherlock Holmes), the touching experience of pet comraderie (from Where the Red Fern Grows), and the necessity of time, precision, and the cool collected travel making things happen skills of Mr. Fogg from Around the World in 80 days. Because I READ those experiences as books as opposed to watch what was blasted at me with pixels from a movie, I experienced them more wholistically and I acquired the lesson and understanding, with the entertainment and fun of a very absorbing and exciting read!
5. You think more clearly with a book because your brain gets neurological activity firing that is congruent with the logic of the book. Kind of like a “mental-cerebral” version of “if you smile, you’ll feel happy”. If you read a smart book, you’ll think more intelligently. Movies trick and obfuscate intelligence.
6. Books, you have total control over the pace, and “order you read”, movies (unless you fumble with FF and RW buttons, you do not have the same control.
7. Books, your vision is the movie and you are the director; movies lack that customization.
8. Books teach and entertain and create more cohesive thinking; movies, merely entertain with an inkling of “teaching”.
9. Both movies and books inspire, but books provide an inspiration that is more enduring beacuse it is “your own version” of the inspiration.
10. Finally, books don’t need electrical outlets, high-tech dvd players, surround sound and the like. Books are portable; you can bring them anywhere. Laptops are fixing that with movies, but with a book, you use your “built-in” surround sound, imax, widescreen mental imagery vision, which is infinitely more crisp, alive, and exciting than a movie screen.

I’m a former movie junkie (thousands and reruns) and have rediscovered the joy of reading!

(more…)

John Kuczmarski

11/16/05

Professor Coleman

Hinduism

Hold Your Breath or Embrace the Process:  The Bhakti and Moksha Feast of Rama, Rhada, and Ramprasad

In March of 2002, “vengeful Hindu mobs burned Muslim homes” and ended up killing over three hundred people in Gujarat, India (Dugger 1).  In 2002 Muslims launched a terrorist attack on a Hindu train traveling to Ayodha; Hindus responded with retaliatory riots.  These Muslim attacks on the Hindu train, however, were retaliatory in themselves; because Muslims were responding the demolition of a “16^th century mosque that was razed by Hindus in 1992” (Dugger 1).   This ping-pong game of back-and-forth retaliatory destruction has become detrimental to both religions by destroying the presence of safety as well as sanctified temples and buildings.  Is it possible that such violent outbursts could be prevented with a greater emphasis on dharma and, more specifically, bhakti in the Hinduism faith?

(more…)

just woke up, just water, wore black (Great), no food, no coffee before, energizing awesome convo. good. I saw a darren brown and david tennant clip (for darren’s tv show) and I relized that they went out into public to have a woman draw a picture and david was supposed to have predicted what she’d draw, but the interesting thing was how it almost seemed like david and darren were competing for the woman’s attention to impress her! LOL these two HUGE awesome dudes and names (darren brown and david tennant) with huge massively successful careers, were almost primarily focused on this woman’s attention. I mean i have a ton of respet for david, but my reverence for darren (he’s just so gnalry) is off the charts, so seeing both these two extraordinary guys doing very unextraordiariny stuff (trying to impress a woman and have
vulnerability in that — or maybe that is extraoridinary too!! ;D) was an eye-opener.

I mean Tennant is THE Dr. Who! How much more cool and successful and impressive is that from a sci-fi POV. And Darren….well that guy’s just unfathomably cool and he represents the apex of all the skills in which I have been and currently training. So DB just operates on this unimaginably awesoem level of success. But so here were these two amazingly successful people whom I have massive respect for, doing something very common and normal — kind of “flirting with a woman”!! These guys were just doing what any normal guy would do — flirting with this woman! I mean I guess I figured at some level of success I erroneously thought you wouldn’t have to worry about those htings (flirting, courtship, etc) but while I’m sure those guys don’t worry about them, they still DO them. Romance is alive for every person regardless of their level of success. In many ways I htink romance is kind of the common denominator that makes someone’s career or their image etc, operate from a baseline: yeah we are all human, we all have human emotions. Cool! But it was something to which I could relate. I could only look up to their careers — wow, db’s nlp skills insane! etc — but when I saw them flirting with this woman, I was like “Hey!! Hey! Hey, I’m on the same level with them in that regard at least!!”

(more…)

I like to swim upstream. What this means? Life is a circular mote flowing downstream. Life’s a gigantic circular mote. Most people float and surrender to the currents’ of life’s river. And the unaware people don’t pick up on the fact that it’s merely one gigantic circle they keep revolving in. I’ve surrendered. I’ve let life’s river take me, twirl me around, slosh me into addictions and fixations incredibly dangerous places, and spit me out on the bank of nowhere with Nothing. I’ve touched my shadow. I’ve done all the truly challenging, heroic, adventurous stuff in the circular river of life by surrendering. I understand now that surrender is a waste of time. Because life is a circular river. Once you understand the cyclical nature of life, you realize that to truly live you change your relationship with the flow of the current. You can’t change the current, but you can change your reactions to it! Focusing on the destination is about as intelligent as focusing on getting your toothpick at the end of a 5-course gourmet meal. To me, I understand life is the meal; life is the journey, not the destination. And I grow by swimming upstream. Swimming upstream does not mean fighting and experiencing toil and randomly jumping into dangerous situations in life; i’ve already done that. Sporadically jumping into the danger is the surrender. And I’ve done that so frequently it’s become bland; Swimming upstream is just the opposite. It resembles smoothly growing stronger and simpler and simultaneously more aware internally. Swimming upstream is how the intelligent aware people change because they know how you approach the journey, the circular river of life, is all that matters. So while many people “surrender” to the flow of life and preach the wonders of that magnificent “ease”, I’m going to be doing what I well and best and that’s swimming upstream and that means I’ll become a MUCH better swimmer than those who aimlessly surrender (as I have already done).

My future will consist of my past. Reconnecting with my past — people from my past, events from my past, past memories — will be moving forward. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve reached the end of life. But I did it too quickly. I skipped parts. I still have to finish my high school soccer and swimming and chemistry. There’s friends from elementary school I skipped over, relationships from college I sliced by to get to the finish. I have uncompleted work in the past and I’ve completed all the work in the future. Every time I move forward in life it will be because of successfully completing my work in the past. (Note: This is not everyone’s relationship with life. Most people do “new” things to move forward.) Their exist no “new” things for me. Ask someone who knows me well. It’s true. There exist no “new” things. I’ve done everything. The “newness” of life emerges in a shocking and galvanizing adventure from connecting with and completing those exciting joyful fragments of my past! The further into the future I’ve gone with my life, the more diluted and nihilistic my life became. Poignancy and meaning become instantly interjected into my life upon connecting with my past, however. My future is connecting with my past.

(more…)

Finally, the best article on (anti) Christianity that I needed to read to reaffirm my new intentions, emerging beliefs, and values (Basically I’ve realized that all religions are just clever cult-worshipping myths. They’re just elaborate myths, fables. Jesus isn’t any different from the Hare in the tortoise and the hair or Buddha isn’t any different from Prometheus (the god of fire from ancient greece). Religions are myths. They are not true. Jesus, Buddha, Allah…they never existed. That however is not condemning hope and faith. Hope and faith are very strong great things and MANY myths teach the lessons of hope, faith, discipline, etc. Religion is merely a myth. It’s astonishing how BLIND so many people are in regards to how obvious it is that those figureheads truly did not exist, but they blindly go on believing…people that easily duped (i.e. devout christians) are frankly quite frightening because if they could be deluded into believing that a mythological figure like Jesus had as much evidence for existing as Paul Bunyan (see this great article on that) then…wow.

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!

“A state is our way of being in any moment It comes from our physiology.
thinking and emotions, and is greater than the sum of its parts. We
experience states from the inside, but they have external markers that can
be measured from the outside, like a particular frequency of brain waves,
pulse rate, etc. But none of these can tell you what it is like to feel angry
or to be in love. “
Oconnor.
SOOOO TRue. so awesome!!! OMG so helpful.

My baseline state changed in 00 (after meeting the devil worshipper bitch maya). Before I had different energy level, different representational system. My newer state became more chaotic. I held different values; predominant emotion of anger or so! I am blue energy (knowing what’s up with people emotionally, highly emotionally, easily overwhelmed a bit) so definitely good to stay connected with personal history, journals, etc!

GREAT general rule. Experience pleasant memories in associated experience to get the most out of them, and unpleasant memories in dissociated state to avoid bad/unpleasant feelings and to avoid getting overwhelmed. COOL. This is like a protector or integrater. If you’re in life and feel overwhelmed,just pop into dissociated state! If you’re doing something and you realize “hey, this experience rocks!” pop into an associated state to soak it up and get all the good emotions to generate a more uplifted state!

The human race is vagrant. It’s designed to be vagrant. We originated in Kenya. We’ve traveled, we’ve roamed. We’re itinerant. Vagrancy shouldn’t have a negative connotation. And neither should rogue – someone without a master, without consistent income, without land, without legitimate trade, but is healthy. A rogue can sound like freedom. The human race by nature is evolving rogue.

We’re moving more and more into transitioning towards alternative habitation other than earth! ARTICLE . People on Maldives are planning to relocate due to rising sea levels from global warming Already!!!!

The Endeavor LAUNCHED? DAY and successfully will deploy a home-warming kit hehe on the space station, adding an exercise room, bathroom, kitchenette.

Religion, mostly Christianity, if for people who fail to use deduction and logical reasoning. The entire composition of Christianity is circular arguments. Just talk to one of those bumbling jesus-freak fanatics. He dies for my sins and he said so in the bible, therefore I owe it to him”. Utter crap. You might as well make the argument: “The sky is purple, it says so in this made-up story book that I’ll say is true, therefore I know the sky is purple.” Christianity is founded and perpetuated upon perverse and non-existant logic. lol

If there’s one thing I have to say about electronic organization, it’s this: close open loops FAST! I’ve surfed the net many a time and accumulated 8 open windows, and over 30 tabs in less than an hour. That’s a lot to sort through. Just develop the habit of executing lightning-fast decisions to quickly archive, capture, delete, discard, dismiss, are do things that catch your interest. In fact, the general rule of thumb should be “nothing should catch your interest for too long!”

Okay, I speak a lot about soft-copy containers. Do that, that’s great. I believe you should start extremely low-level so you develop patterns and experience how a structured GTD program could expedite stuff you already do. If you just jump into a program, you’ll likely never learn good core GTD practices. However, after working with .txt files for awhile, the program I recommend jumping into is “Things”. It’s exceptional and amazing; possessing the fluidity of omnifocus but without omnifocus’s cluttered, superfluous “junk” options. You’ll use just about every feature in the program. The hotkeys for tags and the unstructured fluid concept of tags makes adding tasks seamless and fun. Additionally the fact that each task as a max of only 4 highly useable components (name, tags, notes, due date) makes this app intuitive and simple. No need to go into an in-depth explanation of how it works. 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…)

Here’s a desk I painted my Junior year of Highschool.

And this was the year-long art project of (I think) 4th grade and 6th grade, respectively.

I’d done pinch pots, but The canvas one was an amazingly cool effect (painting over your masterpiece black and then scratching off to reveal color)

(more…)

[2)Some solutions people have have just so much absence of logic and lack of practicality imbedded in them it's hilarious.] Cont…

I’m seriously thinking of submitting “Stupidest Productivity Ideas” to some kind of segment for the Jay Leno Show. I hear people rave and talk about how these “productivity systems” work so magically well, when they’re really wrought with stupidity and inefficiency. One of my favorites of this category is Google Notebooks.

Laughing at other methods. Here’s a “genius” method I’ve seen people raving over. What is with it with these people? I just start laughing at how much infuriation they create for themselves (and I’ve experienced it by trying out their system with my own tasks) with such idiotic systems! Here’s a brainbuster: loading all your tasks and projects into numerous Google notebooks. Why this works: it doesnt’. Why this doesn’t work: Endless reasons, but some important ones are: What do you do when you don’t have internet access, genius? All of your tasks and projects are inaccessible. Never a state you should ever want to come across. Secondly, the loading delays: waiting and extra 5 seconds while google loads information for EVERY task I update? I don’t think so, mabye if I was an 80 year-old grandmother who liked watching the “colors pop up” on the computer. Productivity needs to be electricity-like fast and google notebooks doesn’t cut it. Finally, advertisements. Period. What kind of moron delights in seeing countless advertisements when he’s trying to go into a zen-like mode of organization and productivity? There you have it, I dub “google notebooks for productivity” “mind-bogglingly dumb” because of Inaccessibility, Loading delays, and Distracting advertisements.

But it astonishes me how someone could not only deem such a “mind-bogglingly dumb” system not only “efficient” (when it’s anything but) but worthy of sharing with others. I couldn’t believe when that the author of that productivity post actually thought he was helping people providing obtuse methods.

(more…)

Thus begin the first installment of the Productivity & Organizational Progress (POP) Suite. Stay tuned for the next 5 (or more) installments detailing everything from organizational mastery within email, on the homefront, within your office, how to douse email insanity, and get clear and stay clear on your todos…

This may be one of the most curmedgeonly posts in the history of blogging. Okay, that’s a little extreme, but this does have a critical flavor to it.

One of the most brilliant “insulters” of the 20th century was Roald Dahl.

While I think South Park has become the 21st century internet-infused electronic “Roald Dahl” of sorts, he definitely has a knack for clever insults.

(more…)