Validate Your Life

I was on a live coaching conference call talking about different brain changes and patterns with some other coaches and I thought about the prospect of sharing a personal story.  We were discussing how adolescents can sometimes be sensitized to things that other people may deem as unproblematic, like, for example, not having someone to sit with for lunch.  Yikes!  I instantly communicated the effect of delivering a bit of personal history with the purpose of galvanizing the conversation, session, and communication.  On the topic of offering personal anecdotes….ANYWHERE!

• in coaching
• in consulting
• in friendship(s)
• in conversations
• in romance-seduction
• in rapport-building
• in relationships with anyone!

I propounded ever-so eloquently if I do say so myself that offering a personal story could be helpful for four good reasons.  A personal anecdote can: (more…)

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…)

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.

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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.

safe plastics healthy ocean article. My questions. what plastics are safe? Other than buying unwrapped produce, how can I as a consumer not contribute to ocean toxic waste and help the environment? If I have to buy plastic-wrapped items is there any kind that’s “safer”? I’m a HUGE fan of reusing containers and I do. yogurt containers, coffee cans, protein containers I rarely ever discard and reuse around office-work-homespace as a recepteacle for something else. How do we not become plastic paranoid?! I like buying strawberries from the grocery store but they come in that clunky plastic container that I’ll discard! There should be a cool way to get solid good inexpensive food and items without resorting to plastic. Like a BYOB method. At grocery stores I simply don’t ask for bags because they’r clunky and cumbersome. NOT having plastic is smoother easier and simply…for you as an individual and with the external ecology check it’s MUCH healthier for hte environment. The fact that that ratio of plastic-to-fish-weigh had skyrocketed so much was frightening and saddening. We’ve got to seriously change this and the interviewer dude is right, I think it does start with “not-marketing” not doing outrageous prepackaging stuff. It’s actually a cool feeling ot get back from grocery shopping and having got primarily almost all produce, and to reuse the peanut butter containers, and maybe some plastic wrapped around fish, but it’s simpler and much safer for the environment. Everyone should have to read that awesome, harrowing, but poignant Earth Island article interview with the chemist-captain dude. Just to get a sense of where we’ve got to start moving for environmental conservation and healthy environmental experiences to cherish our Nature!

Like I have to go pick up a printer ink cartridge and that has plastic wrapped in it. I like Hansen’s soda, but it comes in a can. I need to pickup this xyz product and it only comes wrapped in plastic. I feel pretty unsettled and think this “scare” articles are Great. Hey, it worked. I’m scared and saddened by the amount of plastic infestation in our oceans, but they need to attach a solution to this. All these articles always end with the tone of :”This is royalled F$@%ed up..and we’re working on a solution.” There needs to BE a solution attached to these articles because when a normal person (like me) reads them, they want to do something but can’t really take any kind of action except feel saddened, frightened, and maybe frustrated by the foul pollutants in our oceans, in our fish, in our very food. So where’s the solutions man? The solutions that individual can take on their own? This is a group endeavor but everyone can contirbute. I mean I can avoid purchasing plastic-wrapped items but sometimes it’s a necessity and reusing plastics, too. But yeah, freaky stuff.

Also from a global POV yeah this a MASSIVE dangerous, harrowing, freak-out-city problem! But from a consumer POV. Where are the people marketing CHEAP, INEXPENSIVE products that have no environment-contaminating plastic wrapper and such? I know there’s tuna brands that don’t harm dolphins…great. But where’s the equivalent of that kind of product that I can purchase instead that doesn’t contain harmful plastics (that will ultimately recirculate back into our own body! Plastic goes into ocean, eaten by small fish, eaten by larger fish, we eat the larger fish that contains the plastic. F$@!ed up!)

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!

Machinist
INteresting b/c He has to seperate himself from all “potential relationships” (the hooker gf, the “quasi-friends at the plant, etc” so he can do himself justice and turn himself in. His compulsion for honesty is was intuitively causes him to sever all those relationships subconsciously. The severings (chopping off arms, throwing dishes at the gf) were harsh and uncooth, but those relationsihps would hinder him in his commitment to do justice.

And that’s so interesting b/c in life he was a lawyer, the early references to various labor acts and rights in the factory allude to that. So he’s inherently living a contradictaion of agenda. If he tried to protect the guilty (or innocent) in life, then when he becoms the guildy after the hit and run, half of his brain has been trained to conceal his guilt and protect himself but then the moralistic self emerges after years and his commitment to personal justice seeps tshrough as he finally admits what he did and in a way “does himself justice”. Very GREAT allusions. At the end he was wearing a “justice brothers” t-shirt. The movie was about finding a compromise between the legal protect guilty or innocent and the emotional moralistic “what is right” doing good from a belief point of view. In the end he got to know “both justice brothers” — both complementary components of his psyche, moralistic honesty and judicial prudence. He suppressed the moralistic honesty part and it just seeped through in ugly ways.

Now that is siimilar to me in junior year. I severed ties with people and that was SOME part of me seeping through. I had to seperate myself from those people as a commitment to them would inhitibt whatever was seeping through from getting recognized. The question is “just what is that”? Couldn’ve been anger, dislike disgust, mostly it was knowing tons oabotu people emotionally and wanting to share it? to teach? not sure. but the schism that occured was similar int voialteit so that’s ggreat to know whatever needed to get out has! now i’m just mregingoete .

So most of hte movie was literally hallucinations. The french woman, ivan, all of that was hallucinations. Ivan representethe moaralistic “doing good” side of him maybe.

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Are they production? Are they for film or productions? Who produces tv or film? How do they handle copyrights or distribution?

Why would anyone want to know this? Or who the hell cares? I DO!! If you’re watching film and have half a brain to think about the process of “How the hell do I have this DVD or how am I able to watch this footage of actors in this theatre?” or better yet, if you’re life me and interested in the production, editing, acting, film creation process and steps, knowing who the heck who is who and and how all that production jazz adds up is not only inspiring and illuminating, but essential data! So conclusively this is very valuable information to understand for any connection with creating or to galvanize a greater appreciation of creating (or watching) great film!

I always wanted to know what the deal was with that whole seemingly messy or confusing smorgasbord of film studios that flash their little animation and brand before the feature title and credits roll. The research aimed at clarifying this obfuscation proved to be very rewarding!!

• Miramax — (Walt Disney)film production and distribution (originally in NY now purchased by Walt Disney)
• Touchstone Pictures (Walt Disney)– a film label of Walt Disney (est. 1984) it has the more mature themes of features released under walt disney; noteworthy productions: Dead Poets’ Soceity, Pirates of the Caribbean: Black Pearl.
• Walt Disney Company — one of largest media and entertainment corps on world
• Walt Disney Studios — centered around animation
• Warner Brothers (Timewarner)– film and tv production (subsidary of Timewarner! LOL cool!)
• New Line Cinema (Timewarner) — film production and distribution (subsidary of Timewarner)
• Icon Productions LLC (Mel Gibson)– film production (Mel Gibson’s film production company; founded 1989; started when mel was trying to finance hamlet); noteworthy productions: Man without a Face, Braveheart, What Women Want).
• Imagine Entertainment (Ron Howard) — film and tv production (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer; 1986; noteworthy productions: Arrested Development, Beautiful Mind)
• Dreamworks LLC (Paramount: Viacom)– film, tv, and game development, production, and distribution (started Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen; 1994; 11 years later sold to Paramount Pictures, under viacom,)
• 20th Century Fox Film Corporation (News Corporation) — film production and distribution (6th largest in america; located in Century city; started 1933).
• Paramount Pictures Corporation (Viacom) — film production and distribution (oldest running movie studio in hollywood (beating Universal by 1 month only! LOL!; located on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood; subsidary of Viacom)
• Plan B Entertainment — film production (started Brad Pitt, Brad Grey, Jennifer Anistion; noteworthy titles: Jesse James, Departed, Charlie and Chocolate Factory, Troy)
• Universal Studios — (subsidary of NBC) 2nd-longest running film studio on San Fernando (Paramount being the oldest.

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Astronomy: The Phoenix craft of the “Mars Scout Program” to mars is a $475 million mission to launch and land the Phoenix spacecraft on the surface of Mars and explore it. When you consider the massive undertaking of such a project, NASA’s slim budget of $475 million is extremely frugal, pennies really, but despite it’s relatively slim budget, it’s been an incredible success. The Phoenix lander was set to explore Mars for 90 “sols” (Martian days, or about 92 earth days). But instead of lasting a mere 3 months, it lasted almost 5, and only lost transmission to the approaching harsh Martian winter. Phoenix broke the barrier setting a lot of discoveries in previously uncharted territory.
The Phoenix included a set of ovens to heat minerals and materials it picked up as well as an electronic “wet chemistry lab” to run various experiments on the substances it sampled. Phoenix was the first spacecraft to ever “break the surface” (pun somewhat intended) and dig beneath the ice of another planet. This technological advancement revealed that the northern plains of Mars are more habitable for life than expected. Instead discovering inhospibility soil acids, Phoenix discovered alkaline soils, which could be actually conducive to potential plant life!!! It may not be green aliens with three heads and phasers, and rather possible microbes, but the Phoenix has come the closest mankind ever has to discovering life on another planet!

The Future of the Mars Scout Program will include an exciting “SUV-sized” Mars Science Lab (MSL — and yes, and actual “laboratory”) hehe. Like its predecessors Spirit  (January 4, 2004 landing) and Opportunity, (January 25, 2004 landing)  the MSL will have vehicular mobility.

Athletics: Roger Bannister, born almost 80 years ago, in 1929, was the first human ever to run a mile in under four-minutes. He accomplished this amazing feat in 1954 during a track meet in Oxford, UK. The winds were high at first, died down, Bannister ran, and when the announcer announced his time of “3…” the crowd went mad. His official time was 3:59.4.
That’s a great achievement but what was even more fascinating that the psychological barrier was shattered. Instantly after Bannister did a sub-4, other runners believed it was possible and consequentially more and more sub-4 miles were accomplished. John Walker went on to run 129 sub-4 miles, alone, and Daniel Komen of Kenya, in 1997, doubled up Bannister’s original record to run a sub-8 minute 2-mile (two sub-4 miles back to back). So all this “breaking the barrier” business in athletics — or any arena of accomplishment — has a big emphasis.

Certainly, three sub-4 miles back to back resulting in a sub-12 minute 3-mile race is certainly a goal for some, but an even more prominent goal is the sub-2-hour marathon barrier. People have gotten close, but no one has ever run a marathon in an amount of time that begins with “1-hour”…x minutes, x seconds. Right now, the person to do that most likely is Gebrselassie, an amazing Ethiopian runner. You can read the full article, but basically prior to Haile Gebrselassie’s race in Berlin about 2 weeks ago a 2-hour 4-minute marathon was a barrier. Gebrselassie went on to break that with a 4:44 mile pace to get 2:03:59. There are skeptics and optimists of the 2-hour marathon barrier, but if anything, Gebrselassie brought the world a whole lot closer to the accomplishment of shattering such an outstanding barrier.

Bottom-line: Gebrselassie pushes the sub-2-hour marathon record.

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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.

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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

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