I remember once I played a game with a group of highly educated, professional ESL students I was teaching. I’ve heard this game called “Chinese whispers,” or the “telephone game,” or other things. I even remember playing it once or twice as a kid. And even with a group of kids that are fluent in the language in which this game is being played, it is still funny to see.

Basically you get the group into a circle, and choose a simple enough phrase, and whisper it into the ear of the person on one end. The rules are that they can’t speak the phrase out loud, and they have to repeat it to the person next to them as soon as they hear it. You usually start out with a phrase like “banana ice cream,” and end up with something like “purple gorilla.”

It’s really fun to play with ESL students (English as a second language) because the end result often times doesn’t even qualify as an English word or phrase. But as a teaching tool, it helps to give students an opportunity to really practice their listening skills. The goal, the ultimate goal is to develop listening skills so that even passive listening will yield some understanding. I’ve you’ve ever studied a foreign language, and have listened to a dialogue or conversation that was even slightly above your comprehension level, you know how quickly you can get tired.

On this particular group, I started out with the phrase “blue truck.” Everybody got a kick out of the final answer, and it proved an interesting point.

Moving something from conscious competence to unconscious competence can take time, and come in stages, so doing this particular exercise is one drill, out of many, that can help to speed this process up.

I remember once I was at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, a friend of mine and I had just seen what we thought was going to be a Pink Floyd laser show, where they play a bunch of cool music, while you sit back and look at light show performed up above on a special dome. Only we misread the newspaper, and it was a classical music show instead. It was still worth the money, as a combination of good music through a really fantastic sound system, coupled with some skilled laser “shapes” that move around in sync with the music is pretty mesmerizing.

But afterward we noticed outside, on the grass they had some sort of meeting of a local astronomers club. There were several telescopes set up, all pointed at different celestial bodies. I’m pretty sure that was the only time I’d actually seen the rings of Saturn firsthand. After I looked, I had a question, something to do with the rings, and when they are visible. They owner of the telescope gave us a well informed and easy enough to understand answer (although I can’t remember exactly what it was.)

Later on that evening, as we were still wandering around, I heard somebody else ask the same question that I had asked a few minutes ago. With the answer still fresh in my short-term memory, I spit it out as if it were common knowledge. After we were out of earshot, my friend gave me a hard time for pretending to know something that I just learned only moments before. Bu then he made an interesting point.

“Isn’t that all knowledge is anyway, passing on information from one person to the next, in some long chain of people?”

You can spend a lot of time digging into that idea. When we are born, none of us know anything, other than our pre wired instincts, one of which is to learn as much as we can. Obviously, that comes second to survival, getting food and staying safe, but most of us are fortunate enough to grow up where our life doesn’t hang by a thread, so we have the luxury of motoring around and figuring out as much stuff as we can. (Which is really cute to our parents, until we learn to walk, but then it’s a completely different story).

But most of the stuff that we know today as adults came from others. Mathematics, science, history, rules of grammar, most of us didn’t invent these independently in our garage laboratory as children. We were taught these by other people. Who in turn were taught by others. I guess it’s lucky for most of us that ever generation, there are a few brilliant people like Einstein and Edison and Curie that spend their lives trying to figure out new stuff, instead of figuring out how to apply the old stuff.

I had a friend pose an interesting thought experiment to me once. He was giving a toastmasters speech on the illusion of civilization that we live in. None of the stuff we have is inherently known, as discussed before. Each generation passes on information it learned, and that information is filtered through the education system loosely made up of teachers and books and libraries.

But what would happen if all that were destroyed? What would happen to the human race if the only way we could transmit information was by word of mouth? No writing, no video, no audio. Only word of mouth. We still had all the same technology, but everything had to be built according to information passed on only face-to-face.

His theory was that we are really only a generation or two, at most, away from a complete and utter breakdown of society. With no books to refer to, most of the information we take for granted would quickly be lost. I think his underlying point was that people were completely evil, and we would quickly revert to the futuristic world of “Escape from New York” or any other futuristic movie where society breaks down and only the most barbaric can survive. I’m not so sure, but I am sure that we do depend on information passed down from generation to generation. So much so that some believe this has as much effect on human development as the day-to-day survival pressures that shaped human evolution thousands of years ago.

And the interesting concept that my ESL group illustrated was how much quicker digital information is passed than analogue information. Once one of them latched onto a phrase that she not only understood, but could easily repeat well enough to be understood, that phrase quickly passed unchanged to the last person. It was interesting to watch the spread of information. Before that moment of recognition it was slow, and unsure. But as soon as she latched onto that one phrase (which of course had nothing to do with the original phrase) it flowed like water.

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The other night, I decided to go out for a walk. I recently moved to new part of town, and decided to go and check things out. The sun has been setting later and later recently, and I had gotten off a little earlier than normal from work, so I figured I’d just go wandering about and see if anything interesting happened.

The first thing I noticed was this big park on the other side of my apartment building. Bunch of kids playing, lots of toys based on animals. Big gorillas, zebras, elephants that were made into slides and other playground equipment. I stopped to watch, as there were a few benches, and there was this huge grass area adjacent to the playground, so it was a pretty good spot to chill for a bit.

One thing about kids is when they play, they really play. They don’t play, but at the same time worry about their homework or whether or not their shoes really match the rest of their outfit, and if not will anybody notice. They seem to be pre set for a couple things, which seem to be completely opposite, at first glance.

On the one hand, they are pre wired to be automatic learning machines. The amount of things a kid learns between the age of two and ten is simply staggering. If you tried to learn the same amount of information in the same amount of time, you’d be a nervous wreck. They learn an entire language, complete with tens of thousands of new vocabulary words, in about five years. Any that has attempted to learn a foreign language as an adult would be lucky to retain five new words a week.

But on the other hand, they completely forget everything they are “supposed” to learn when it’s time to play. When they see a cool slide or a gorilla swing set, proper subject-verb agreement is the furthest thing from their minds. You’d think that as adults, the extra stress and worry we put into learning new things would help. But it doesn’t seem to. It seems to have the opposite effect.

They say that a kids learning capacity is different simply because they are a kid. That learning a language is easy for kids, but hard for adults, due to some pre wired brain structure due to millions of years of evolution. Some window of opportunity that once is closed, is closed for good. While that’s interesting from an objective biological point of view, it doesn’t sound too promising from a human potential point of view.

This is observable in other animals. Birds will “imprint” to their “mother” within a certain time frame, and they can be tricked into “imprinting” on an imposter if done at the right time. Certain birds learn to sing, but only between two weeks and two months old, and only if they hear another one of their kind singing. If they aren’t exposed to another one of their kind singing during that critical time period, they’ll never learn to sing properly. (Of course when I say, “sing properly” I mean sing well enough to attract a mate.) As for myself, I can only sing properly after sufficient alcohol, and a high-end voice synthesizer, but I digress.

The Jesuits used to say, (and probably still do) that if you give them a child when he is born, he will be a soldier for Christ for life by the time he’s seven. What this really means is that kids can be taught any number of beliefs when they are young, and can take a lifetime of effort to “unlearn” them. It takes a significantly life altering event, to cause an appreciable change in religious beliefs in most people. Not too many people who grow up in strong fundamentalist Christian households decide later in life to worship Zeus.

If I had my druthers, I’d like to conduct a language learning experiment. They say kids can learn languages much better than adults. Two, three, even four languages are a snap for kids so long as they are exposed to them early enough. It is assumed there is some kind of genetic “switch” that makes it harder to learn as adults, but I’m not so sure. Enter my experiment.

Take a bunch of adults, and separate them in three different groups. The first group has to learn the new language the regular way. After they finish their day job, they go to their once or twice a week at some local junior college, and then study the language whenever they have free time. Weekends, during commercials, whenever. These people are only exposed to the target language when they are in class, or they are listening to language tapes, or when (if) they bravely seek out native speakers of their target language.

The second group gets a free pass from work for a year. They are told they still have the obligations as an adult, they have to cook for themselves and maintain their household, but they get a stipend that will allow them to study on their own, along with the use of whatever material they think will help them. They of course, are only exposed to their target language when they organize their environment accordingly. Language tapes, private tutors, whatever they can afford. But when they go shopping, or watch TV, everything is in English.

The third group, I think, would be the most interesting. They are surrounded only by their target language. They never hear English (which in this case is assumed to be their native tongue.) They are surrounded by helpful speakers of the target language who buy and cook all their food (and whatever they want provided they know how to say it), drive them everywhere they want to go (provided they know how to say it), and give them massive amounts of happy praise, including generous physical, non-sexual touching and caressing (like quick back massages and what-not) whenever they speak the target language correctly. They never criticize for mistakes; only give continued encouragement to keep you going. Their only job is to learn the target language, and follow their “keepers” around whenever they go out to buy food and take care of normal, everyday housekeeping matters. And plenty of time for playing, so long as it’s in the target language (video games and what-not).

I think these “experiments” would show that there is a lot more to the change in environment, from child to adult, which makes learning harder rather than some genetic switch that makes it mentally impossible.

Obviously, as adults, unless you are super rich, you can’t really afford to learn things as described in group number three. But you’ll notice some similar advice given by various gurus who teach learning to be successful in any endeavor as an adult.

Surround yourself with people that are already proficient in what you want to learn. Give yourself rewards for every little success, no matter how small. Don’t put too much pressure on yourself, and go easy on yourself when you make the “mistakes” that are absolutely necessary for growth and improvement. And give yourself time to play. The only real difference in being an adult rather than a kid is you’ve got to nurture yourself. Try it and what happens.

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The other night I was flipping around the TV and I came across an old episode of Seinfeld. It was the one where George decided to do the opposite of everything he’d normally do and he suddenly had fantastic results. He would walk up to girls and tell them he was unemployed and lived with his parents, and he would have startling success. It was pretty funny. I hadn’t watched a Seinfeld episode in a couple years, so it nice to get a dose of that style of humor.

For some reason, it reminded me of this seminar I attended a few years ago. It taught of a strange mixture of skills, from NLP to hypnosis to a bunch of other stuff. While it was only a three day seminar, there were several speakers who came and gave lectures, and did demos, and showed us how to do some pretty cool stuff with language and intention and all sorts of metaphysical style exercises, like throwing energy balls at each other and stuff. It was remarkable how well that stuff seemed to work.

One of the speakers was talking about how prolific metaphors are in daily life. He referred a couple of times to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work on metaphors, starting with their groundbreaking “Metaphors We Live By,” and how most of our language is shaped purely by metaphors.

For example, when you say something like “I’m in a meeting,” why do you use the preposition “in” instead of on, for example? According to Lakoff and Johnson (and many other linguists) whenever we use an intangible noun, we have to fit it into a category, in our brain, of a tangible noun, so we know what words to use when we talk about it.

For a meeting, it falls under the “container” metaphor. The beer is in the fridge, the pizza is in the box, and I’m in a meeting.

Another example is that in English, “up” is generally good, and “down” is generally bad. Things are looking up. Why do you look so down, etc. This guy at the seminar said that it goes much further than that. He said that our brains are hard wired for up to be good, and down to be bad. As an example, he had us stand up, hold our heads level, and look up with our eyes. In this position it was quite hard to think unhappy thoughts. On the other hand, when we stood, heads level, and looked down, it was pretty easy to think negative or depressing thoughts.

I suppose this could be explained going back to our evolutionary past. If you were looking down all the time, you might miss out on some food, or get eaten by a tiger. So people that developed an aversion to looking down lived longer, reproduced more, and made more people with the same aversion to looking down.

Another thing he talked about was more vague and far-reaching metaphors. He said that we have two basic strategies in life. One as children, and one as adults. Back in the old days of tribal style nomadic living, there was a clear boundary between the two. If you were a kid, you were a receiver. If you were an adult, you were an achiever and a provider. If you were an adult, and didn’t achieve or provide, you either didn’t find anybody to mate with, or you were outcast from the group. It wasn’t a very good strategy back in those days to be a freeloader.

He said that women made the metaphorical transition from childhood to adulthood pretty naturally. When they had kids, they naturally switched from being a receiver to a provider. Of course that required that they do a good job of selecting their mates, so they would be stuck raising a kid by themselves. There’s a pretty good “thought experiment” regarding different scenarios in Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene.”

But men, on the other hand, unless they were actually forced out on a hunt, in a live or die situation; they would stay in the childhood “give me” mode of thinking. That’s why societies developed those coming of age rituals for males but not for females. Females had them by default whenever they had kids.

But in modern society, it can be extremely difficult to go through that coming of age process without forcing yourself into it. He said that what makes it even more difficult is that you can do pretty well for yourself simply by expecting to receive.

One trap that people fall into is that we expect to get things because of “who we are,” instead of “what we do.” This guy said that the “who we are” is based childhood thinking. We want something; therefore we expect to receive it. That only works until you are about ten years old. After that you’ve got to start getting stuff on your own. But many people never fully break out of the “because of who I am” mindset.

This is confusing, because there really is no “who you are.” Every day you have new experiences, which affect your beliefs, which affect how you see the world. Even on a molecular level, you are constantly changing. Since you are always in flux, there really is no “way you are,” or “who you are.” Sure, there’s that self-awareness at the center of all this, but that awareness is simply that. You who are aware of your constant changing and updating state of being.

He said that it can take a long time to switch from the “give me because of who I am” to the “obtain because what I do” mindset. But when it does, it can seem uncomfortable, because the world can seemingly flip upside down. Things that used to work don’t any more, and things that you would never have dreamed of even trying only a couple weeks ago are working like a charm today.

The greatest part comes when you completely release the “because of who I am” mind set, the fear of rejection, in all situations, completely vanishes. Since there is no “who you are” to reject, everything simply become strategies and how effective they are. “Who you are,” doesn’t factor into the equation at all.

And once that happens, you can pretty much get anything you want out of life. You’ve just got to figure out the right strategy, and it’s yours.

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Once there was this guy that was a well-known mechanic. He was pretty well respected in his community, and people would come to him whenever they needed something fixed. He’d opened his shop many years before, and had slowly gotten a reputation as somebody that could look at pretty much any machine, and within just a few minutes, know exactly what was wrong with it.

He was one of those old school guys who firmly believed in the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” Often he would look at a piece of machinery or equipment, and depending on the size, listen intently to the owner describe the problems they were having, as he turned it over in his hands or walked around it depending on it’s size.

One thing people always found particularly intriguing about this guy was that he seemed to many questions, some that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the piece of equipment or the problems they were having with it.

For example, once this relatively young homeowner brought in a large gas operated lawn mower. The mechanic spent a good twenty minutes asking the homeowner various questions about when and how often he mowed his yard, as well as things like what kind of grass it was, weather it was there when the homeowner moved in or did he plant it himself, and even if he had any plants surrounding the grass, or was it just grass in his yard. The entire time he asked these questions, he examined the lawnmower intently, from several different angles.

Once somebody asked him why he asked so many questions, and he said it helped him to “get a feel” for the particular piece of equipment, that it helped him to “understand its personality.” People didn’t usually complain, because he almost always fixed it within a few minutes, and he usually didn’t charge very much. He wasn’t one of those “five dollars for tapping, and five hundred dollars for knowing where to tap,” kind of repairmen that always seem to figure out a way to convince people to give them a lot more money than they’d expected. This guy was smart, quick, and extremely affordable. He rarely needed to keep a piece of equipment overnight.

Another fascinating thing about this guy was that he had hundreds and hundreds of tools. He was the first to admit that he loved acquiring and using new tools. Some say his income that he generated from fixing things must be nearly completely spent on buying new tools. His workshop was huge, and had tools in every possible place imaginable. What’s even more, because most of the time he got the root of the problem relatively quickly (at least when he finished asking all his seemingly oddball questions) he would use a tool that most people had never seen before? Then with the tool, he would reach in and make a minor adjustment, and the machine would be running smoothly again.

But it wasn’t always that way. When he was younger, much younger, he was under the impression that only a few tools were required to get the job done. Once after he was finished fixing a vintage printing press (in under an hour) that had been inherited by yet another young homeowner, he was asked how he got all of his tools.

He explained that when he was younger, he knew he liked fixing things, but he was very poor. All he could afford was a basic tool kit. His dad would let him play with things in the garage, and before long he knew he had knack for taking things apart and putting them back together again. But whenever he bought tools, he would only buy them in sets. And because sets were so expensive, it took him quite a while to save up enough money.

He was very impressionable, and he would only buy tools that had a specific purpose. Screwdrivers were for driving screws. Hammers were for hammering nails. Saws were for sawing, and so on. In order to fix something, he had to have a tool that was designed to fix that particular problem. As a result, he could only solve problems that other people had already figured out how to solve, and had designed tools specifically for that purpose.

This, of course, limited him in his abilities to solve problems and fix things. Because he could only do things in a way that was already determined by somebody else, there was always somebody that was better than him, with more experience, that could usual get the job done quicker and cheaper. This was always a source of frustration. He didn’t know how those people got to where they were. He supposed it was just the natural course of life. You always learned from others, and then when you were older, others would learn the same things from you. He wasn’t quite sure who and how people came up with new ideas.

Until one day, this fellow brought in a small piece of equipment he’d never seen before. When he asked the fellow who brought it in, he seemed reluctant to explain it’s true purpose. Because the mechanic was so intrigued by the new machine, he kept asking various questions about it, some that were answered, and some that weren’t. After a while, despite not knowing the true purpose of the machine, he got a pretty good idea of what was wrong with it. But it wasn’t a problem that he’d ever seen before, and therefore he didn’t have any tools that were designed for specifically for that problem.

He was puzzled, and then had a thought. Since this was a machine that he’d never seen before, why not use a tool that he’d never used before. He suddenly had a flash of insight, of recognition. Not unlike Edison felt when he finally found a filament that didn’t burn out, or when Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light. He had what alcoholics refer to as a “moment of clarity.”

He rushed inside, and got a hole punch and a nail file. The hole punch he’d used only once before, as a gift he’d received. Something about making belts that he was completely uninterested in. The nail file, was a nail file. When he brought the two unrelated tools back into the workshop, the particular customer was immediatley intrigued. While he didn’t know exactly what the mechanic was going to do, he could tell by the look of his face that he did. And only five minutes later, this contraption, whatever it was, was working perfectly. The customer was astounded.

And ever since then, the mechanic refused to be constrained by mainstream logic and accepted methods of doing things. By asking questions, and trusting his instinct, he found that he never failed to fix any piece of equipment presented to him.

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The other day I was talking to a friend of mine over a cup of coffee. We had met while we were out shopping, not really met, more like bumped into each other. We both had a few minutes to spare, and there happened to be a coffee shop nearby, and so we decided to have a cup of joe and a chat.

We started talking about mistakes, and big mistakes that we’ve made in our lives. I don’t know how we got on that subject; I think she was concerned with her current relationship, that it may not be the right one for her. She is getting close to 30, and some girls feel some pressure, both internal and external to find somebody serious by then. I think she is wondering if she chose him because he was “Mr. Right Now,” instead of “Mr. Right.” I didn’t really want to get into some prolonged discussion about her boyfriend, but since she was veiling her conversation about him through general life mistakes, I was game.

Sometimes you can solve problems by addressing them structurally rather than specifically. If you get too involved in the particulars of a problem, you can lose the forest for the trees. That’s how therapeutic metaphors work. You hear some story that has the same structure to your problem, and by vicariously going through the metaphor, you can figure out a solution to your problem, oftentimes unconsciously.

That’s how Milton Erickson was able to heal people. He was a therapist that invented a strange kind of conversational hypnosis. People would come in and give him their problem, like bed-wetting or fear of elevators. He would them tell them a story that was completely different in content, but similar in structure, that had a happy ending. The people would leave, and discover a couple weeks later that their problem had been solved.

For example, if somebody was afraid of elevators, the traditional approach would be to talk about elevators, how they became scared of elevators, or to try and convince them of how safe they were using statistics. But a metaphorical approach would ignore elevators altogether, and focus on somebody who was afraid of doing something, and then by changing his focus on the positive outcome, rather than the thing he feared, he was able to overcome his fear. And after he overcame his fear of whatever it was, he realized how insignificant his fear really was.

Which is kind of what I suspect my friend was getting at. She wanted to discuss the possibility that she was making a mistake with her current boyfriend, without actually talking about her relationship. Talking about mistakes in general, I got the impression she was trying to find out if there was a general way to tell going into a potentially troublesome situation if you stick it out, and hope everything works out, or eject as soon as possible.

Sometimes you don’t need to make that decision, as certain actions are short lived. If you are playing on a particular golf course for the first time, and you choose a pitching wedge instead of an eight iron, you might come up short. You could consider this to be a mistake, but it is one you can learn from and do better next time. If you ever play this course again, and have the same lie, you’ll know to use your eight iron.

Those that study learning and brain development suspect this is how all learning takes places anyways. We make all kinds of small mistakes, and automatically correct them as we go along. A baby’s way to learn how to speak is to move their tongues around and make a bunch of random sounds until they figure out which ones get the right responses. Same with walking and learning all other motor skills.

However, some choices have much more impact than choosing a club. Like choosing a job or a marriage partner can have horrible results if you don’t choose wisely. And since most of us don’t get married a bunch of times or go through ten or twenty jobs in our lives, it can be tough to “learn” how to get married or choose the right career the same we “learn” how to walk or talk or approach the green.

The question is, and this is what I think my friend was getting at, is how do you know if your intuition is telling you that you’re making a bad decision, and how do you know when you are just nervous? If it were easy, nobody would ever get divorced or find themselves in a job they hate. But many people get divorced, or are stuck in terrible jobs or terrible relationships.

So the topic of the conversation was mistakes we’d made, and how we knew they were mistakes, and how we rectified the situation. One thing I learned, or one concept I was exposed to, was to future pace. If you are in a situation, and you think it may be a mistake, project yourself out into the future a few years, and see how it comes out. Imagine the best possible scenario, and the worst possible scenario, and the likelihood of both coming to pass. This is where intuition can be very powerful. Sometimes it’s impossible to make an accurate prediction of the future, but your intuition can usually do a pretty good job.

Project yourself out in the future and do a “gut check.” Is it an overwhelmingly good feeling a bad, feeling, or a “blech” feeling? If you’re make a decent decision and are just nervous, you’ll usually get a good feeling if you’re honest with yourself. But if you immediately think to feel repulsed at a possible future, the chances are you’re making a huge error in judgment.

This can be difficult, as many times we are afraid to look into the future, and only pay attention to the immediate pleasures of the present. My friend didn’t particularly like the idea of facing 30 and being single, so that was keeping her from facing the future at 35 or 40 having lived with this guy for that many years. But when she did take a peek into the future, her gut told her that it didn’t look good. So she was faced with making a tough decision.
Break up with her boyfriend, and accept an unpleasant present, or get engaged to him, as she suspected this was where her relationship was leading, and face an even worse future.

As emotionally uncomfortable as it is, many times the lesser of two evils is the obvious choice. But sometimes something pretty cool happens. By making a strong choice in the present, however uncomfortable, the future suddenly looks a lot brighter, giving you more resources and peace of mind in the present than you thought you had.

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I had this pretty cool revelation, or idea, this morning while I was out walking that I’d like to share with you. It’s one of those ideas that make perfect sense until you try to explain it to somebody else, and then it sounds like utter nonsense. Hopefully this won’t happen here.

It’s based on some basic ideas from biology as well as some concepts from metaphysics. It is also based on the underlying assumption that all of the interactions between matter and energy in the universe obey specific laws all of the time. There is zero room for randomness. Of course, often times we humans with our limited range of perceptual abilities and logical reasoning are ill equipped to deal with most of these laws, so many times they can appear like some kind of voodoo black magic or white magic or law of attraction or however you like to describe your favorite metaphysical laws.

It’s also based on the idea that smaller systems, which follow certain rules can collectively make up larger systems which may or may not appear to follow the same rules. For example, the laws of Newtonian physics are vastly different than Quantum physics. Of course, they are different sets of systems on two totally different scales. So the laws are the same, they are just scale dependent. Like a speed limit in a small town is vastly different than on the interstate, they are still laws enforced by the same entity.

Ok, where was I. Oh yea.

DNA. This is the building block of all life. The core of life on earth. Billions of years ago, there was no life on earth, and then something happened. Either by an intervention by a deity, or aliens, or a random strike of lightening, DNA was created. And it started to reproduce. Again and again. Every strand of DNA that exists today, in every living entity, is a combination of strands that came before it. Humans get half from mom, and half from dad. Some other organisms, like some simple plants reproduce themselves exactly. Nevertheless, all DNA is copied and pasted from one or more of its predecessors. All the way back to the original one.

How exactly does DNA work? It is this long strand of chemical, shaped like a twisted ladder. They call it a double helix. Then somehow, it untwists, so it looks like a normal ladder. The rungs of the ladder separate, and expose their raw ends to the inside of the cell soup. And within that cell soup are certain amino acids that come up and link together with the raw ends of the ladder. The amino acids link individually to the raw ends of the ladder, and then join to each other. Then they collectively uncouple or detach from the ladder. The ladder then re attaches to itself, and coils back up. The new protein, formed from the single amino acids that came down and joined together is now floating off to do whatever job it was made to do. DNA is incredibly long, and it has four different types of “rungs.” So whatever small stretch of the DNA decides to uncoil, will make a different protein. DNA is like blueprint for your body. Your brain.

DNA uncoils, and exposes its raw “blueprint” for the protein to be made. Then the protein is filled in by whatever is available in the surround cell fluid, or soup, or whatever you call it on that microscopic level.

Ok, now here’s the part that seemed to be much more insightful on my morning walk while the sun was just peeking over the mountains. Suppose your personality behaves like your DNA. Whatever part you decide to open, or expose, will be filled by whatever is around you. If you expose fear and anxiety, you will create fear and anxiety. If you smile and wave at people, you will receive smiles and waves in return. If you are growing in the womb, and your DNA is continually unraveling a blueprint to create brown eyes, that is it is “attracting” specific amino acids to link up into proteins to build brown eyes, you will have brown eyes.
If you continually expose part of your personality that builds happiness, you’ll be surrounded by happiness. So how do you do this?

The things that link together to build the proteins for brown eyes are the amino acids that link together in a specific order. There is nothing mysterious or esoteric or metaphysical about it. You put the right amino acids in the right order, and you’ll get the same effect again and again and again.

What about happiness? If happiness is the end result, what are the building blocks? What are the smaller “bits” like amino acids that when linked together, will create the exact same happiness, again and again and again?

Behaviors and communication. A specific strand of DNA exposed in the microscopic soup will attract the right amino acids to make the right protein.

A specific collection of behaviors and communication, when exposed to the world around you, in the right order, will produce the same happiness again and again and again. When your DNA wants to grow some hair, it unravels that part of itself, attracts the right amino acids, and they hook up together to make some hair in your hair follicles.

When you expose the right behaviors and communication in the right order, you will attract the right responses from people that when linked together, will build the same result every time.

Now, of course, people aren’t robots who will respond automatically the same way every time, but you’d be surprised how repeatable most of our behavior is. If you scream “fire” in a crowded movie theater, nobody is going to come up and shake your hand. If you offer a genuine smile and say “hi” to a stranger, they aren’t likely to punch you in the face.

Most people will respond pretty much the same way to the behavior and communication you project. So if you want a different result than you’ve been getting, change up or experiment with your behavior and your communication a bit, and see how the results you create will differ.

Probably the biggest take away from all of this is that you are largely responsible for the world you live in. By changing your behavior, you can drastically improve the results you’ve been getting, whatever they are, or whatever they want them to be.

And just as DNA is so fricking long it has taken scientists years and tons of money just to list it’s sequence, your personality is much more complex and abundant. If one part doesn’t work, you can easily try on something else.

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Once I took this class in cooking. Actually it was two classes, and it was a specific kind of cooking. Kind of a vague kind of specific cooking. The class was Asian cooking, which sounds specific, until you realize there’s just as many different Asian styles of cooking as there are Asian countries, which at last count was plenty.

The reason I took two classes was I took the first class on a whim. I got this catalogue in the mail for a local adult education center in my city. It had a list of all kinds of classes that working people might enjoy taking at night. Cooking, yoga, meditation, all kinds of hobby type classes like photography. Since I like to eat, and where I was living at the time had plenty of Asian communities, and consequently many different Asian restaurants available, I figured I’d give Asia cooking a go. It was only about twenty bucks, and met once a week for six weeks, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

We learned to make a lot of stuff, but for some reason the only thing I can remember is how to make kung pau chicken from scratch. They have those kung pau chicken flavored sauces you can buy at the supermarket, but we made it completely from scratch. And it came out pretty good.

Because I thoroughly enjoyed the class, when the new schedule came out, I took the class again.

But the instructor was different. Completely different, with a completely different outlook on looking. The first instructor was very, very strict. We had to prepare the ingredients in a specific way, in a specific order. And we had to wash all the utensils in between steps to ensure there was no cross contamination. I got the impression that this lady was the kind of person who’d complain if they got a plate of cake and ice cream with the ice cream touching the cake.

Never the less, the stuff she taught us was fantastic. When the class was over, we had learned six different dishes, and I wanted to learn more. Hence the second class.

The second instructor was completely different. Same as before, middle aged Asian female. But she was completely different than the other instructor. She would give us the basic instructions, but completely vague. Instead of saying something like:

“Add one quarter cup of soy sauce, stir for thirty seconds, then slowly add 1/8 teaspoon of sugar over the course of one minute, while stirring at a constant rate,” like the first instructor would say, she said something like:

“Ok, put in some soy sauce, about this much (holding the thumb and forefinger in the international sign of a “a little bit”) and stir it for a bit, and then put in some sugar, about this much (smaller measuring unit of thumb and forefinger), but don’t dump it all in at once.”

Now both of those instructors were fine instructors, and taught us some good recipes. But they both had completely different teaching styles, and I suppose there are students out there that have two completely different learning styles, at least on the continuum of the specificity of instruction.

For example, whenever I cook from a recipe, and almost never measure the ingredients exactly. I just read it over to get a general idea about the general proportion. Then if it comes out lacking a certain taste, I’ll try and remember it and adjust for next time.

And even thought the first instructor was completely specific, and made sure we followed her instructions to the “T” during the class, when I reproduced them at home, I reverted to my non-specific eyeball measuring technique.

Others that I know are completely and strictly by the book cooks. They need to follow everything to the exactly specifications to the recipe, or it just won’t work.

Which is better? Of course neither is better neither is worse. Two completely different strategies to get to the same outcome. A good bowl of kung pau chicken, or whatever you have simmering on your stove.

The take away from all this is to simply realize that everybody has different ways of doing things. If you are teaching somebody, either by being a formal teacher, or explaining something to someone, realize they will figure it out according to their own style They may follow your instructions to the letter, or not. The goal is to focus on the outcome, and think of your method that you are teaching them only one of many ways to get there. They may follow your example exactly, or they may choose their own path. The important part is that they get there, however way they choose.

Similarly, if you are learning something from somebody, don’t think you need to do it exactly the same way. Just think of it as them giving you one of many examples on how to get from point A to point B.

To make things even more confusing, I’ll throw together three different metaphors that may not even go together, just like when I add peanut butter to my nikku jaga.

1) There are many ways to skin a cat.
2) All roads lead to Rome.
3) The road is better than the Inn.

Now get out there and cook some kung pau spaghetti or something.

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I remember once me and a friend of mine decided to go hitchhiking. Neither of us had ever hitchhiked before, and we thought it would be fun to go camping that way. We both lived in the dorms, and our college was about fifteen miles away from the coast. Between the college and the coast were several businesses, industrial and residential areas. But on the other side, it quickly turned into pretty much nothing. A few rolling hills here and there, and small pockets of residential neighborhoods, and then desert.

Our plan was to hitch hike east until we found a place that didn’t have very many houses, and then camp out. Of course we prepared ourselves with plenty of water, food that didn’t require cooking. And beer. Lots of beer. After about three hours of hitchhiking, we finally found a suitable place to camp. Or drink until we passed out. Our only requirement was that it was relatively flat, and that it was far enough away from any houses so nobody could see our campfire and call the cops.

I took this seminar once on a weird type of speed-reading. It was called photoreading, and it taught you how to read an entire book in about 3 or 4 minutes. You slowly flipped through all the pages, and let the information soak into your brain without consciously reading it. Of course, you weren’t reading it consciously; you were reading it with your unconscious mind. Then later you could dig into your unconscious memory and pull out any required information that you needed. This was particularly useful for studying, or reading a bunch of books to do a report on something.

One of the things we needed to learn was to state a clear purpose for reading a book.

“I want to read this book to learn specific skills to improve my public speaking.”

“I want to learn specific techniques to nineteenth century Spanish architecture into my building designs.”

“I want to improve my fluency with daily use of French verbs.”

That way when you photoread the book, the elements that addressed your particular needs would stick better, and be easier to retrieve later when you needed them.

A particularly useful skill that we learned was photoreading a bunch of books on one subject, and then allow your unconscious alone to figure out how to incorporate those skills into your daily life. You never had to go back and try to “activate” some of the information if you were going to take a test or write a report. The new skills and behaviors would kind of just “show up” wherever you needed them.

There were a few people at the seminar that were repeat participants, and had used this technique with wild success. One lady photoread a bunch of books on painting techniques, as she was a beginning painter. After that her friends started commenting that her paintings were looking much better, and assumed she was taking lessons, or learning some advanced technique from some master or something.

In reality, all she was doing was photoreading a bunch of books on painting techniques, and the new techniques were just showing up in her paintings. She merely continued to paint as she felt, and the results spoke for themselves.

But before we learned how to do any of this stuff the instructor told us the importance of setting your intention before reading a book. What most people do is they read a book with only a vague hope that it can help them some way. It’s no wonder they have trouble applying what they read. They don’t really know what they were after in the first place.

He told us a funny story to emphasize this point.

There used to be this airline that was really cheap. You didn’t need reservations, and the planes always had seats available. They had several flights a day, so you could pretty much hop on a flight whenever you wanted. They were more than willing to sell you a ticket. The only problem was you never knew where they were going. The reason the tickets were so cheap was that the airplanes navigation systems were messed up. The pilots didn’t know how to program the destination. They sort of fiddled around with the buttons, and hoped they ended up somewhere decent. Sometimes they did, but other times they ended up in the middle of nowhere, and the passengers were left stranded on some frozen cornfield.

Of course, the airplane is you, and the pilot is your goals and choices. If you sort only know where you are going, with some vague hope that it will turn out ok, then maybe you’ll be ok, or maybe you’ll end up stranded on some frozen cornfield. Which we can all agree would pretty much suck.

I learned a lot from that seminar. They do have a book you can get at Amazon, called “Photoreading,” or you can get the home study course from Learning Strategies Corporation. Or you can take the whole seminar, like I did. It cost about three or four hundred bucks, but it was well worth it. Once you take it, you can take it as many times as you want after that, for free. If you Google “Photoreading,” you’ll find lots of pages to help you.

And probably the coolest thing about my hitchhiking camping trip is that after we finally got to our spot, and camped out without any problems from the cops, we started hiking back towards the highway to see if we could hitch a ride home. And this guy in limo picked us up. No joke. He had just dropped off a client, and was driving his limo back to his shop, and picked us up along the way. That was a fun trip. You never know how you’re going to end up with you start out like this.

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The other day I was having this conversation with a neighbor of mine. This guy is pretty old, and was talking about well his kids were doing. He had three sons, and they all went to university, got decent jobs, and are now married with kids of their own. The guy seemed to be bragging about his kids, but I could detect a little bit of sadness. The guy’s wife died several years ago, and he lives alone. Hence his frequent chats with me and all the other neighbors. The guy is lonely. But he somehow knows when to cut a conversation short; he seems to have a sixth sense of doing this just before he starts to wear out his welcome.

But not a bad kind of lonely, like some old people. I had this neighbor once that was always eager to talk with you, but she gave off this really strong vibe of desperation. As soon as this lady started talking to, you had to figure out a way to make an escape. If it were up to her, she would talk to you for hours on end. Sometime she would knock on my door with a really weak excuse, when it was obvious that she was looking for somebody to talk to.

Reminds me of a story that people tell sometimes about Milton Erickson, who was a world famous hypnotherapist back in the fifties and sixties. There was a woman, in her sixties, who was old and lonely like the two people mentioned above. She went to Dr. Erickson for help, and he gave her some advice. It was a variation of the old “if you want to make a friend, be a friend,” advice.

Since was particularly fond of a type of flower, African Violets, and grew quite a bit of them, he had a pretty interesting idea. Her assignment was to read the Sunday newspapers, both the obituaries, and the announcements. If somebody that lived in her neighborhood passed away, she was to bring them a bouquet of African Violets as a condolence. She wasn’t supposed to hang around very long, or try to make friends. Just show up, give her condolence, offer the flowers, and leave.

Likewise, if she saw a good piece of news in the announcements, such as a wedding, or a graduation, or a new baby, she was to put together a bouquet, and bring it over as a gift of congratulations. Again, the assignment wasn’t the same. Show up, give her congratulations and the flowers, and split.

She was to do this every week, at least once. Keep in mind this was back in the fifties, when it wasn’t uncommon for neighbors to do this kind of thing. If you tried this today, somebody might call the cops or something, depending on the neighborhood.

At first she was incredibly nervous and worried that she would be rejected. She was afraid that people wouldn’t want her, or her gift. So the first couple of times it was very hard. But once she got over her nervousness, and realized that most people are generally very friendly, and will happily accept well wishes from strangers, so long as they don’t have any ulterior motives.

Pretty soon she was doing three, four, even five trips every weekend. As the weeks and months went by, she found her self very busy with her little operation that was actually getting quite big. It didn’t take her very long for her loneliness to disappear as she learned one of life’s most valuable lessons.

The best way to help yourself is to help others first.

Of course had Dr. Erickson told her this as some vague platitude, she would have agreed, and not changed much. But he broke it down for her into a simple task, so that she would discover this lesson for herself.

And years later, when she died, thousands of people crowed at her memorial service, and she got quite a write up in several newspapers:

African Violet Queen Mourned By Thousands

Not bad for a lonely old lady. Just goes to show what a simple effort to step outside of your comfort zone just a little bit can do. To see what you can offer to others.

It’s important to remember that she never hung around after she gave her bouquet of flowers, expecting immediate thanks or gratification. Erickson was explicit on this. Let the reciprocity slowly build throw the strange effects of karma.

For some reason, it reminds me of a movie called “The Tao Of Steve.” A movie that is particularly popular among those that would like to me master seducers of women. It was about this guy that was poor, overweight, and not all that attractive. But he was wildly successful with women. His motto was simple.

Be excellent, be gone.

Meaning never hang around waiting for people to say “thanks,” or tell you what a nice person you are. Do good things for others simply for the feeling you get for doing them. Then get the hell out of Dodge. If you are patient, your rewards will come. With much more magnitude and much more significance that you could ever imagine.

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Have you ever been really curious about something, I mean like really insatiably curious? Like maybe when you were a kid, and it was a couple days before Christmas, and you saw a big box under the tree, and you couldn’t help but to wonder what exactly was inside this?

Or maybe your birthday was coming up, and you could tell the people around you were behaving kind of strange, like they were planning something really big, but were trying their hardest to pretend that everything was normal?

Curiosity is a huge driver for discovery and self-growth. Of course sometimes it can be dangerous, which is why the expression “curiosity killed the cat” somehow made its way into our collective unconscious.

But is curiosity really that bad? Curiosity was the spark that caused Edison to try and try again until he found a filament that worked in the light bulb. Curiosity is what sparked the Wright brothers to keep at it until they reached success.

When we are kids, we are insatiably curious, about every single thing. We want to touch, feel, look at taste everything around us. Whenever I see kid on the train, they are always looking around at all the people, out the window at the passing scenery with a look of complete astonishment and wonder.

The adults, on the other hand, almost always have their heads down, as if they are terrified of making contact with another human. They usually have their heads buried in a book, or staring intently at their cell phones, as if they are anxiously waiting for the results of the World Series or something.

Why does that curiosity stifling expression about the cat make it’s way into our consciousness? Why, or how, do we learn that it’s dangerous to want to explore and find out about new things?
If you have kids, you know the reason. At first it’s cute when a little kids running around checking things out. But if you are a normal adult, and aren’t financially well off enough to sit and play with your kid all day, you’ve got other things to do. And like any normal adult, you love your kid and would be horrified if he or she came into any sort of harm.

So the natural response then, is to chastise and admonish kids whenever they start to behave in a way that may prove to be dangerous, or messy, or cause problems.

Don’t touch that!

Put that down!

Don’t put that in your mouth!

Clean that up!

While this may be making our lives more convenient as adults, it is killing our kid’s creativity. Buckminster Fuller once said that every single person is born a genius, but 99.99% of us are de-geniused by the time we grow up.

The point here is not to let your kids run amuck and create all kinds of damage that you, as the adult, will have to fix. There likely isn’t any better way, unless you are super rich, and have no hobbies, or any other interests other than following your kid around all day and fostering their creative genius.

No, the point here is for you reading this to reach inside and find that insatiable curiosity that you gave up on long ago as too dangerous, too embarrassing, or to scary to express, for fear of incurring the wrath of the adults around you.

You are the adult now, and you can choose to listen to those who may criticize you, or you can choose to ignore them. You can reach inside to that little kid that still lives deep in your unconscious and let them know it’s safe to pick things up and examine them. It’s safe to look at things in different ways; it’s safe to explore your world.

New and better ideas, even those that work are not always accepted at first. Some are outright rejected, and can take time before they build momentum. Many a creative genius gives up all too soon simply because the rewards aren’t immediate and immense.

Sure, for every ten new ideas you come up with, 9 of them might suck. But that one out of ten will make it all worthwhile. Progress is not made by people sitting around waiting for others to figure stuff out. Progress is made by those willing to take risks and to try new things.

When most people get the wisp of a new, creative idea in their heads, it is quickly silenced by fears of “what if it doesn’t work,” or “what if I fail?” or even “that’s stupid.”

The secret is to train yourself to think like President John F. Kennedy, and not ask yourself “what if it doesn’t work,” but instead to courageously ask yourself

“What if it does work?”

And let your creative genius run wild with the possibilities.

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The other day a friend of mine and me were talking about how different people deal with adversary. His girlfriend is currently going through a crisis at her work, and the people that are employed there are having some difficulties.

Because of the economy, it is quite obvious to everyone that business is slowing down, and although the owner hasn’t come out and said anything, changes are coming, and they aren’t likely going to be pleasant. It is a small operation, and they don’t have a lot of reserves to fall back on. Lately it has become evident, at least through the company grapevine, that making payroll every month is getting more and more difficult for the owner.

Now my friend’s girlfriend has a side business that she has been secretly cultivating for a few months, and she is almost at the point where the income from her side business is the same as her salary. So she has the luxury of being an observer without running around trying to protect her livelihood in any way possible. And she has noticed some startling, or perhaps not so startling things about her coworkers.

She said they basically fall into two different categories. The first category are the people that have faith in their abilities and skills to find employment elsewhere if need be. Then there are those that seem to be getting more and more terrified as the days go by. These people have been working for this small company for a long time, and don’t know how they will survive if the company has to start letting people go, and they are one of the people.

An interesting paradox is that the people that seem to be most relaxed and confident in their skills seem to be doing the most to try and help the company stay afloat. They are the ones putting in extra hours, trying to come up with creative solutions to generate more business and income. The ones that seem to have the least amount to lose if the company goes under seem to be the ones that are trying their best to keep it going.

The second group, on the other hand, is doing the opposite. They seem to have the most to lose if the company goes down. And paradoxically, their behavior more on pure self-preservation rather than trying to help out the company. They seem to be more worried about positioning themselves so they aren’t the ones that get laid off. And she says they are doing so in really underhanded, and less than professional ways. Backstabbing, gossiping, spreading rumors that are not true, banding together to smear the reputation of others. Their behavior seems to be making the problem worse.

I remember reading a book about human behavior many years ago. There are things called paradoxical problems that pop up frequently in the human experience. As we move through life, we encounter all kinds of problems, in various forms and levels of severity. How we deal with the problems that come up can define our lives and how much pleasure we can experience. Usually we come up with familiar problems that we’ve overcome before, so they can be a valuable learning opportunity to foster growth and the development of useful skills.

Other times, however, we encounter problems, and for whatever reason, our best response to the problem, one that we think we help, actually makes the problem worse. And the more we try and solve the problem, the worse it gets directly as a result of our actions. And of course we respond with more of the same, which makes the problem even bigger.

Of course, we rarely realize the problem is getting bigger because of our actions. We usually blame some other, seemingly external cause. Our situation, the behavior of other people, some general state of society, likes the economy or whatever. These paradoxical problems will persist until we “step out” of ourselves and view our behavior and the problem as if we are completely on the outside looking in.

The method described in this book explained how to do this. You need to figure out your objective, take some action, then step back and judge your actions from a third party perspective and see if they effected the situation in the direction that you wanted. Then adjust accordingly, until the problem is overcome.

The reason this can seem difficult is many times our response to situations are unconscious, and we really aren’t aware of what we are doing. For example, if you wanted to lose weight, and you decided to try a new diet. Through sheer will power you kept on the diet for a couple weeks, but then gave up.

After giving up, you felt dejected and depressed, and you turned to the one thing that usually gives you comfort. Food. This of course makes the problem worse. You’d likely keep it up until you decided to diet again, and of course the same thing happens.

The solution is to decide upon a clear objective. Losing weight is kind of vague; it will help to be more specific. How about losing while enjoying the benefits of good food? That might be easier. So next time you try a diet, you’d step back periodically and ask yourself if you are meeting all the criteria of your objective. Are you losing weight? Are you enjoying the food you eat? If both answers are yes, then you’d likely continue your diet, and you wouldn’t fall of the wagon, and get dejected.

If you were losing weight, but weren’t enjoying the food, then you’d simply adjust to a different diet plan, until you found one that satisfied both requirements.

By doing this, you’ll learn a valuable lesson about yourself. You are much more resourceful than you think, and you can overcome any obstacle you come up against, providing you look at it with the right mindset.

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The other day I was sitting in a bookstore talking to one of he girls that works behind the counter in the coffee shop section. It seems that many bookstores these days have a full-blown coffee shop inside. Which makes sense, because what goes better than hanging out in a bookstore and reading books?

One of the cool things I like about bookstores is how many completely ideas different people have about certain things. Even if we confine ourselves to the measurable physical universe, there is still an endless supply of things known and unknown to talk about. Even things we can see, touch taste and feel we have really no idea of the underlying structure and substance.

Many quantum physicists have dramatically questioned the nature of reality after discovering the incredibly illogical subatomic world. Many have gone on to write philosophical books on the subject.

Even you wander into the religion section, you are in for a wealth of different ideas, beliefs and opinions regarding who we are, how we got here, and where we are going.

There are some really interesting books that lie on the border between religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. I never cease to be amazed at the sheer variety of thought that is available in bookstores. And those are just people that sat down and wrote a book and convinced somebody to publish it and sell it in a bookstore.

Imagine all the incredibly diverse thoughts in people’s heads that are just walking around and waiting to get out. Many times we make the mistake and assume that because someone may not be so eloquent with words that their thoughts are therefore inferior, but that is never the case.

One of the most prevalent theories of human existence is that every single human shares the same DNA. Not that we all have the same parents, but the structure of all human DNA is the same. It’s not like some people have more chromosomes than others.

So it stands to reason that everybody’s brain has the capacity for thinking up new and wonderful ideas. Speaking skills may not be their Forte. Even the great Moses called up his brother Aaron to do his public speaking for him. Can you imagine if you tried that at work?

“Uh, yea boss, I’ll give the presentation at next years shareholder meeting. But I pretty much suck at public speaking; in fact, they kicked me out of toastmasters. So I’m gonna have my brother come in and give the speech for me, ok?”

So as I as talking to this girl that worked behind the coffee counter, she started telling me her story. She is originally from Laos, and her family escaped to Thailand during the seventies. She said she remembers being shot at as they crossed the river from Laos into Thailand. Then in Thailand they had to live in this “reeducation camps” for a while before they figured out a way to get to the United States.

She was very young when all this happened, so she doesn’t remember much other than what her older brothers and her parents told her. She was six when it happened. Imagine getting shot at trying to escape the country of your birth at six years. I don’t know if I even learned to tie my shoes when I was six.

I couldn’t help but be amazed at the incredible amount of stories and ideas and experiences that everybody is carrying around with them. And most of them will be more than happy to share with you. All you need to do is ask.

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I was having lunch with a friend the other day. He was this guy I used to play soccer with. I was never really any good at soccer, so I only played because my friends played. I don’t think I ever would have played had it not been for them. I just sucked too much.

It’s kind of weird when you find yourself in this kind of a situation. You are doing something for reasons that don’t seem like the ones other people would guess by looking at the situation. Like if you really like this girl for example, and she wants to watch a romance movie. You’d likely go with her, not because you wanted to see the movie, but simply because you enjoy being with her.

Or maybe its Friday night and you’d planned on hanging out and catching up on some Lost episodes that you’d TiVo’d, but the your buddies call you up. They are going to some club, and convince you to tag along. You don’t really want to go to that club, but hanging out with your friends is usually a fun experience wherever you go, so you decide to watch Lost some other time.

That’s what it was like when I played soccer. As soon as my friends quit, I quit as well. Well not quite. I decided to play one more game after they had quit. It was not a fun experience. The only thing left was me and my cruddy soccer skills. That was the longest game of my life.

So as we were talking about various things, my friend tells me about this seminar he just went to on dating. It was mainly for guys (although they claimed that this particular technique could be applied to girls also) and how to pick up and score with girls. When I say score, I don’t mean like playing soccer. I mean score as in having sex.

Now for those of you that think this is some underhanded seminar in manipulation and how to lie to girls to get them into bed, hold your horses. My friend just isn’t that kind of guy. I think perhaps you need to understand something about marketing.

In order to convince people to sign up and pay for three-day seminar, you need to make it sound really compelling. A three-day seminar is a huge commitment, both on your schedule and your wallet. So of course they need to make it sound like you’re going to get some superhuman skills of seduction and persuasion.
Like you’re going to learn some secret Jedi skills to beam your thoughts at girls and make them squirm in lust for you.

Of course, we all know the differences between the marketing of a product and the actual product. Some are completely different, and some marketing material is pretty close to the actual product. I guess it depends on the mindset of the person that is selling the product or seminar.

But my friend never seemed like the type of guy that would go to a seminar on how to learn Jedi mind tricks to covertly seduce girls out of their panties and into your bedroom. He always seemed to be pretty self confident, and relaxed and easy going. And I’ve never seen him hesitate at all to approach and talk to a pretty girl, so I was a little bit curious as to why he decided to go to that seminar.

He told me that the secret is always learning, and to be able to learn from as many sources as possible. He said some people only feel comfortable, or only can learn from one or two sources. He said those people are stuck, because they are only limited by the insights and model of the world of their particular guru.

And even, you’d have to study under a guru for a long time to get as proficient as your guru. Not because whatever your guru is teaching is so incredibly hard to comprehend, but because there is a lot more to it than most people imagine.

Your guru, whoever he is, is able to do what he can do largely based on his own personal experience, beliefs, habits, frames of reality that he holds, and a host of other unconscious filters that he wouldn’t even begin to be able to describe.

The actual content of what is he or she is teaching is likely not that complicated, but it’s setting your internal filters and belief systems to that of your guru is what takes so long. This is the point that most people miss, and have a hard time with.

It can take a long time to shed old beliefs and pick up new ones, especially if you aren’t aware that this process is always going on. When a guru teaches some breakthrough technique, and only ten or twenty percent of his followers can reproduce that technique, that doesn’t mean the technique itself is flawed, by that most people simply don’t have the internal frames and filters and beliefs required to implement the technique.

My soccer-playing friend told me that by always studying from as many different gurus as possible is a great way to continuously improve yourself. You may only pick up one technique from one guru that resonates with you in a way that you can go out and do it yourself. When you figure that out, you can simply go and collect as many worthwhile techniques from as many guru’s as possible, and continuously build up your set of tools in your toolbox and conquer life.

I asked him about the idea that jumping from guru to guru is a waste of time. There is a strong belief that you have to choose one guru until you master the system completely. If you jump from guru to guru, you’ll never master anything. You’ll be a jack of all trades, and master of none.

He said that is complete nonsense. He said that is a myth propagated by gurus to keep people coming back for life, even if they rarely find success. He said this is a great meme, as it gives people a reason to keep spending their money on guru’s products without ever seeing results. They have this belief that if they switch gurus; they’ll be starting at square on again.

My soccer-playing friend said it’s best to check out a guru, see what you can learn from him or her in a reasonable amount of time, and then switch to the next guru. Every time you’ll learn something new and pretty soon you’ll be master of your own world, and not copying some guru.

So I asked him what the Jedi mind secret to attracting women was. He told me it was to simply give a girl honest appreciation for whatever it is you appreciate about her. And to combine two powerful things. One is to be as open and honest as possible with your appreciation for her, whatever it may be. And the other is to be completely detached from the outcome. That is let her feel your appreciation, as much as she is ready to experience, without expecting anything back in return. And the more she feels your appreciation, the more likely she will automatically reply in kind, which of course, will quickly lead to sex. Because when you put a guy and girl together that feel open enough to show their appreciation for each other, sex is a natural outcome. There are six billion examples of that on Earth, at last count.

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A reporter asked him how it felt to fail ten thousand times, to which he replied:

“I never failed once, I merely found out ten thousand things that didn’t work.”

Now I’m not sure if that conversation ever took place, usually when you see some kind of quote like that, which was supposedly made many moons ago, there is a strong possibility it has been embellished over the years.

Nonetheless, it is a magnificent attitude to have. Of course it is an extremely difficult one. I’m sure that if you marched into your bosses office and demanded a raise, you wouldn’t likely feel elated about discovering yet another way that wouldn’t get you any more money.

People generally have three responses to “failure,” and two of them are not so helpful. I’d like to share with you one trick that can help at least make some progress toward Edison’s positive attitude.

The first response, of course, is to accept failure, and stop trying. You ask your boss for a raise; he says not, you label yourself as a failure. This is likely the worst response (and unfortunately the easiest) because it pretty much shuts down any possibilities for future endeavors.

This is the main reason so many people are afraid of public speaking. When we are born, we naturally scream our lungs out whenever we want attention. As we grow older, we “learn’ that many times, screaming will bring bad results, in the form of angry parents or teachers, or people simply ignoring, or even worse, laughing at our requests.

Because we “fail” so many times in getting our needs met, we develop a deep anxiety about expressing ourselves. When we reach adulthood, it’s no wonder that most of us list public speaking as far and away the number one fear, even higher than death. Our response to failure is to learn to be afraid of trying.

The second response to failure is to blame others. A guy asks several girls out, and gets rejected. After a while, some guys develop a deeply held and sometimes unconscious anger towards women in general. They’re all whores, bitches; they manipulate men to get what they want, etc etc.

Or if you start a business and don’t do so well. It’s easy to blame the customers, the economy, your competitors, and your employees.

This response is equally bad as the first. In the first, you label yourself as incapable of success. In the second, you label your environment, your reality, as an environment in which success is impossible. Both of these responses make it difficult to keep plugging away like Mr. Edison.

So what’s the best response? How do we cultivate the perseverance (or “perspiration” which, I believe, Edison said comprises 99 percent of invention, next to one percent inspiration)?

By asking ourselves the right questions:

What can I do next time to get a better response?
What can I try differently next time to get a better reaction?
How can I present myself differently next time to improve my chances?

The magic about this is you don’t really have to come up with an answer. If you get into the habit of simply asking yourselves these questions whenever something doesn’t go your way, you brain will start to look for answers when you are busy doing other things. And believe it or not, next time you are in a similar situation, you’ll somehow get a different “idea” of what to do. This is a result of the powerful processing capacity of your unconscious mind. When you ask a question, it gets to work on finding an answer.

Many people ask themselves questions like “Why do I suck so bad?” And the brain will happily answer it for them. But when you ask yourselves open-ended questions that point you toward more resourceful behavior, your brain will just as readily answer them for you.

Of course, like any new habit, it’s best to start small, and allow yourself the time to build up your new behavior. Start slow, and build up your soon to be automatic habit.

Like if you overslept, instead of saying “Why am I so lazy,” ask yourself, “How can I wake up automatically?” If you always hit your golf ball into the lake, ask yourself “What can I do to keep it on the fairway?” If you take a test and don’t do so good, ask yourself, “how can I remember this stuff easier?”

The secret is to ask the question, and trust in your unconscious to provide and answer of some sort. It may take some time at first, but an answer will come.

When you make these questions automatic, you will be amazed how many ideas that seemingly come from nowhere. When you start to act on these ideas, your successes will be automatic as well.

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But when you are doing things that are much more personal, and much more subjective, it can be hard to tell if you are making any progress. This is largely due to how the brain processes, stores and uses information. This is also the reason that when people successfully apply things like the “Law Of Attraction,” it seems like the world has magically fulfilled their wishes.

No matter what changes you’ve made, small or large, they will seem normal.

Let me explain.

Lets say you are terribly afraid of elevators. Every time you approach an elevator, your palms get cold and clammy, your heart starts to palpitate, you imagine plunging painfully to your death, and then decide to take stairs. All this is happening inside your brain, due to your own particular history and how you’ve decided to code your experience. This is all normal for you.

Then you go and see a hypnotist, or watch some guy on Oprah who helps people overcome irrational fears, and are vicariously cured. Or maybe you even see some seemingly disconnected event that helps you to unconsciously reframe whatever past experience gave you your fear. Whatever the reason, suddenly you are not afraid of elevators any more.

Now the first time you approach an elevator, you might notice a difference. But more than likely, what has changed is your idea of what is “normal.” All of a sudden it will just feel “normal” to get on an elevator without any feelings of fear or anxiety. You will obviously remember taking the stairs before, but you won’t likely remember the actual fear, since it’s gone.

To get an idea of what this is like, try and remember first learning how to read. Try to remember the feeling of looking at a bunch of squiggly lines on a piece of paper, or on the board at school, and having no idea what they mean. Or try to remember riding bike for the first time, and not being able to keep your balance.

While you may remember the actual event, sitting in a chair at school, or riding your bike for the first time, you’ll likely have a difficult time remembering the feelings of confusion, difficulty, or anxiety that often comes with learning.

As you become more skilled, your brain simply readjusts what is “normal.” It continually updates your definition.

The upshot of this is that you have an unlimited capacity for learning and improving skills in virtually all areas of your life. The drawbacks to this is that in many life skills, (social skills, public speaking skills, writing and persuasion skills) you may be improving drastically, by leaps and bounds, but it doesn’t feel like it because you are always “normal.” This can lead to frustration if you aren’t seeing specific results, like when you improve your T shot, or free throw percentage.

The best way to keep your motivation high is to figure out some way to measure your progress. This can be done by soliciting the advice of people that can be objective.

For an example of public speaking, Toastmasters is really good for this. They have a system where after every speech; you are critiqued objectively by a sometimes-complete stranger. So you can be sure that any feedback you get is useful and helpful in drastically improving your public speaking skills in a relatively short amount of time.

Feedback is perhaps the most valuable thing when you are improving anything. One of the traps of feedback is that many people avoid it, due to a fear of being judged, or rejected, or having their deepest, most secret fears laid bare. Many people feel that if the feedback they receive isn’t one hundred percent positive, then it means they are a failure. This attitude only keeps you stuck in your present level of skill.

But in reality, feedback is simply feedback. It only has meaning that you give it. And when you consistently use feedback to help you improve, you’ll be light years ahead of most people on the planet.

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Usually the local festivals have some sort of tradition which centers around the local Shinto shrine, which in turn is based on whatever gods they worship in the area. I’m not sure how it works out, but it seems to be a little bit similar, at least in structure to the patron saint system of the Catholic Church.

The Church has different patron saints for different vocations, or travelers, or people that are sick. Pretty much anything you can think of, you can safely assume that you’ll find a waiting patron saint to hand deliver your prayers to the Big Guy (Or Gal) upstairs.

One of the frequent complaints about Catholics from non-catholic Christians is that they pray to saints, or pray to Mary. What is really going on is they are literally asking Mary or the saint in question to put in a good word for them up the chain of command.

I don’t think whatever org chart they have in the Shinto tradition compares as far as levels of authority and command. I think maybe that each particular deity is pretty much a free agent. But I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before.

So this guy was telling me about his daughter, who is taking entrance exams for high school. Private high schools are plentiful here, and there is a great deal of status on getting into the right high school. So the poor kids in junior high school have to start studying and hitting the books if they ever have a chance. Or at least that’s the way it seems.

It’s amazing when you can step outside of something you are familiar with, like your own culture and see how many similarities there are when you are looking from the outside in. I guess it all depends on how you sort things.

There is a meta-program called similarities-differences. This says there is one important filter that people carry around with them, and they are either looking for similarities, or looking for differences. Like when you see somebody preparing for something important, you can find similarities in their methods. Even if the thing they are preparing for is something completely different than anything they’ve ever experienced, you can look at their strategy and learn from it.

It’s always interesting when you look at things with a curiosity to find ways you can apply whatever you see to your own life. I heard a myth/rumor/urband legend about the origins of Kung fu. Some soldier was watching a preying mantic, and developed a whole new fighting style from it. Not likely true, but it’s a great example from being extremely flexible in who you can learn from.

So when this girl gets into the high school she wants to get into, her dad told me that she wants to get good enough grades to get into a good engineering school in Tokyo.

And I’m not sure how many deities they had at that festival, but the food sure was tasty. That’s probably my favorite part about going to local festivals, is they have some really good locally grown, and locally prepared food that you just can’t get anywhere else.

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This, of course, caused the townspeople, at first, to become even happier, as they imagined that the discovery of this resource would bring a lot of additional money and business to the town. But the problem was that the deposit of minerals were on different parcels of land, and they were difficult to get to. The legal ramifications were relatively complex, so in order to build the railroad, the railroad company simply opted for another town with fewer problems, and left the townspeople and the various iron miners to sort out there differences.

Just when all this was going on, people started hearing stories of the gold that you could find in California. There were all kinds of stories of people striking it rich every day, and all you had to do was to show up and find gold and all your problems would be solved. There were other stories of people finding diamonds, and oil running in streams in some mountains, and all the businesses that needed to support the gold finding industry.

So these two guys, without knowing each other, each decided to sell everything they had that was worth anything, and head out to California. They hitched rides on trains, wagons, walked for several miles, and after several months of traveling, they finally made it to the hills of San Francisco.

They both began in earnest looking for treasure, but they each had a different strategy. The first guy had been studying all about gold, and talking to people along the way. He had a clear idea of exactly what he wanted to find. Because he knew exactly what he wanted to find, he could easily choose the right equipment. And he listened very carefully to stories of people that had found exactly what they were looking for. He made sure to study their methods, study where exactly in the hills they went, what kind of landscape surrounded their findings, the exact kind of river and every detail he could get his hands on. He kept a notebook of all this detailed information.

Naturally, when he got to the hills of San Francisco, he began in earnest. He panned for gold in the exact same method of those who had already became rich. He stayed in one spot only long enough to determine, based on the amount of gold dust that he found, whether it was likely he would find a large amount. He kept this up, until after a short while, he had found enough gold to easily retire wealthy and happy. From his perspective, he thought it had been fairly easy. He looked around at all the people running around not sure what they were doing and wondered why they hadn’t become rich already. Then he bumped into the fellow from his small town.

After they recognized each other, they exchanged greetings. When he asked him how he had been doing, the other guy was upset.

“This whole place is a scam. I’ve looked for everything, diamonds, silver, rubies, and all those stories I heard are all made up. I think they are made up by the people that want to sell you the material to find this nonsense with.”

“What did you say you were looking for?” The first guy asked.

“Well, first I was looking for diamonds, because I heard about some guy who came here three years ago and found one big one. Then I heard another story about a family that had discovered rubies in the root of a sycamore tree, so I started digging up sycamore trees. Then I heard that the real money is in finding oil, but I haven’t found any of that yet.”

“Hmm,” said the first guy, stroking his chin. He wondered if he should tell him that in order to find what you are looking for, you first have to know what you are looking for. Then after you know what you are looking for, the best way to find it was to do what other people had done that had already found it. And the next thing to do is to simply decide to keep looking, until you found it. Because other people had found it, you could be sure that if you did the same thing they did, of course changing it to suit your own personality, you would find the same thing.

But he decided against it, as he suspected the old timer would figure this out on his own.

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If you’ve ever seen a person like this outside of their your normal meeting place it’s always kind of weird. You either don’t recognize them, and wonder where you know them from, or you recognize them, but you both feel kind of awkward because you are away from your normal comfortable meeting place. Maybe I’m paranoid, but sometimes the thought strikes and makes me wonder if all those times they are being friendly is because of their job or not.

One thing about this amusement park always scared me. It was the haunted house. I had only been inside twice when I was a kid, and both times scared the crap out of me. I only went in because my friends and I all dared each other. Of course I didn’t let on how scared I was, and I suppose my friends were all the same, to some extent. But I can’t forget how scared I was both times. The place was dark, you couldn’t see where you were going, it had this weird smell like an old doctors office that hadn’t been cleaned in a while, and there were these weird sounds that you couldn’t really tell where they were coming from. It seemed like no matter which way you were facing, the sounds seemed like they were behind you and getting closer by the second. I couldn’t get out of there quick enough. Probably the thing that terrified me the most was at one point I almost panicked, and had to leave, but I couldn’t find where the exit was. There were no exit lights anywhere, and all I could hear were those sounds like some old lady breathing right behind me, and everywhere I turned seemed to be a dead end. I almost fainted from shock.

One time used to hang out in this bookstore once a week, and it only took the people a couple weeks to realize that I ordered the same thing every week. Pretty soon when they saw me, whoever it was, they would just smile and say “large iced tea?” right away with raised eyebrows just to make sure. I remember seeing one of the girls that worked there in a total different environment, and before any of those uncertain feelings or questions came up, she said “large iced tea!” with a smile, instead of this time, saying it like a question, she said it like a statement of recognition. It took care of all my concerns in one fell swoop.

I visited my friend a couple weeks ago that lived in the town where they had that amusement park. I was sure that it would be torn down and replaced by affordable housing or something, but it was still there. Just for fun my friend and I went to that haunted house, and I’ll admit I was a bit nervous going in, but boy was I surprised. It smelled like some incense you buy at a car wash, and the sound they had piped through was completely laughable. It sounded like some old woman who had been smoking for too long, but it was on this crappy loop that lasted only about four seconds, and kept repeating. There was an obvious gap when the tape repeated itself, which gave it an odd cartoonish feeling. And even though the exits weren’t marked where they normally would, because they had to have them noted by law, they had decided them to write them on the ground. So all you had to do was look down and see where the arrows were pointing to leave. The exit was never more than a few steps away. I couldn’t this pitiful haunted house had caused me so much fear earlier. I guess that’s what happens when you let your imagination run away with you.

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But there was a time in your life, whether or not you can remember that now, I don’t know, when you couldn’t tell a “b” from a “d,” and maybe you even thought that an “a” was completely different and unrelated to an “A.” You just looked at all those squiggly lines, the same lines you are looking at now and understanding completely, as something completely incomprehensible.

Take a moment and imagine what that was like for you. You moved from a stage in life where something was completely obscure and inexplicable, and moved to now, when you can look at these letters as a normal part of every day life.

When you realize that this potential of yours, from moving from confusion to mastery, it not something restricted to your young years, but something that you can tap into on a regular basis, you will really notice pervasive changes being made in your life at an unconscious level.

When you really accept the idea the brain was really developed to be a life long learning machine, you can really start to appreciate the power that you have between your ears. Sure you can always choose to shuffle through life like most people, doing and thinking the same things every day, but you don’t have to.

You can choose to live in harmony with Infinite Intelligence, which is an all-encompassing ever-expanding expression of creation. When you accept this as your truth, you will naturally find yourself looking at the world a big differently.

People throughout history who have made this realization are the real creators of societies of old. Every time you choose to remember this truth, you will connected to intelligence far greater than you ever could possibly imagine.

You may think that this is a bit far fetched, but as you start to look around and find evidence of this, you can start to realize how much potential you really have. And you will learn how to exercise and apply your potential, just like you learned the ABC’s so easily when you were younger.

And one of the greatest things about new learnings and experiences is the profound impact they have on your identity, you self esteem, and your self-confidence. You really get an experiential knowing of what you can accomplish.

Of course, it’s not important to fully realize these truths now; you can decide to let them become part of who you are in your own time. There’s no rush. Infinite Intelligence has been around for quite some time (some might say even since before Infinity) and it will wait for to realize the truth of who you really are.

You can either choose to take these ideas immediately into your awareness, or you can choose to simply allow them to happen in their own time. Either way you are in for a profound change of viewpoint.

The question is how soon you will really begin to appreciate who you really are to the point of sharing your beautiful truth with others? Because the more you share, the more you receive. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

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We started talking about the benefits of continuous learning, and how the smartest people in the world are the people that make a decision to always be learning something. People can, for instance, learn pretty much anything at any stage in life. There is a general misconception that we can really only learn things when we are really young, say under five years old. You don’t have to go very far to find somebody to tell you that you can’t learn as easily as you can when you were younger. But then again, you don’t have to go very far to find somebody who will happily tell you that you can’t do whatever it is you want to do. It seems that some people spend all their energy trying to find as many reasons as they can why something is not possible.

You may already have started to become aware of the times in your life when you’ve been able to really learn something new. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the greatest things you learn are the things that sneak up on you, and take you by surprise. It’s a sad fact that many people spend their whole lives avoiding the unfamiliar, effectively shutting themselves off from future learnings and experiences. I don’t know exactly some of us got into that trap, but when you can find a way to get around it, you will find that the world is a lot more forgiving than you think. I’m wondering if most of the things that we think we are afraid of are really just things that we make up in our minds. How does it feel when you face something you are afraid of, only to discover that simply by facing it, the fear completely disappears, and all you are left with is energy and excitement?

Maybe you haven’t gotten around to doing this consciously yet, but I’m sure you can find some opportunities to take care of this sooner or later. You won’t have to go very far to find an opportunity. A great place to start is at a public speaking club like toastmasters. Because almost everyone is deathly afraid of public speaking it is a great place to realize that those fears are completely imaginary. It’s not like some hungry tiger who just escaped from the circus is going to jump out from behind a potted plant during your speech and eat you, although I admit that might make for an interesting news story.

Fear is probably one of the reasons many people don’t take classes at the learning annex or at their local community college. Of course people won’t come right out and say “I’m afraid,” they usually come up with excuses like they are too busy or something. When you realize that everybody else that takes those classes are just like you, you can really enjoy discovering how wonderful it is to embark on a journey of life long learning. What happens when you take something you’d like to learn, but up to now have coming up with excuses for not learning it, and imagine yourself five years in the future having studied it as a hobby for the last five years? How does it feel to have developed such an advanced skill set by only approaching it as hobby? How much better is your life? How many other things can you imagine yourself doing, now? How does that feel?

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I feel sorry for those who have never set foot into a bookstore, although I understand books can be intimidating to some people. The great library of Alexandria wasn’t burned to the ground by accident. Ever the printing press and books were invented; the written word has had an almost magical power over people. I remember a great line in a movie I saw recently, and two different characters were talking about the difference between the printed word and the electronically displayed word. They had just broken a fantastic story, uncovering a big conspiracy. They were debating on publishing it in their newspapers print version first, or on the newspapers blog. The blog writer conceded and said “People need to have ink on their hands after reading this.” I thought that was a great play on words.

It is generally believed that the Germans first invented the printing press, and the world has never been the same since. And for a long while, it was the people that controlled the printing presses that controlled the thought and beliefs of society. Who knows what would have happened to Western Society had the owners of the printing press been Moslems of Buddhists. You can certainly appreciate the wonderful effect words have on your daily life, can you not?

Once a society has words spread throughout, they can never go back to their previous beliefs and way of living. The first thing that occurs in a society when a printed word is introduced is that there is a subtle shift of power. And nothing is more powerful that a printing press to sway the masses. Can you think of anything as persuasive as a well-written piece of work in your very hands?

Again and again, great religions and governments throughout time have referred to the written word to propagate their power and influence. It’s not wonder that the Gideon society replaces their hotel bibles every so often. And it’s not only the Gideons, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons and other religions have relied heavily on printed material to promote their faith.

When you really stop and start to realize the power and prevalence the written word has over every aspect of your life, you can’t help but to wonder what life could have possibly been like if you could only rely on word of mouth, and stories past down from generation to generation to keep ideas alive. And when you really become aware of your own power to create and promote your own written words, you will really feel a sense of awareness of how much power you have, literally at your fingertips.

Luckily we live in day and age when it is fairly easy to set up a blog and write several times a week or even several times a day to get your ideas out there. Should you not realize how powerful this concept is, just count how many blogs there are today versus how many there were five years ago. And when you think of how much money you’d be making today had you started blogging a few years ago, you can really feel motivated to start now.

How many ideas do you have that are worth sharing with others? How many ways can you imagine putting your figurative pencil to paper and getting your thoughts out in the collective consciousness to literally change the direction of society? Are you not just as worthy as some other random blogger out there? Who cares if nobody reads it or not, there is still a plethora of benefits to writing down your ideas every day and publishing them for all to see. I wonder if you are no already more convinced of this than most people. Because when you leave behind your old ideas of what you used to think was possible, you can really enter into a whole new reality, a reality of your own construction.

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I’m sure you’ve eaten several different ethnic dishes in the past that you’ve thoroughly enjoyed. Just sitting there now, reading this, you can remember some of those dishes now. Maybe you ate them recently, or maybe it’s been a while, or maybe you’re even planning on eating soon. I think one of the greatest things about living a world with so many opportunities for cultural interchange is the incredible variety of food that you can enjoy. Realizing this can really give you an appreciation for different cultures. Most women know that the path to a man’s heart is through his stomach, but most people aren’t aware that the quickest way to the heart of another culture is through their kitchen.

When you realize this you can automatically begin to feel a great sense of appreciation for the other wide variety between cultures that is available to you, right here, right now. In this day and age, it is easy to understand this. And by eating the food of other cultures, it allows you to find other avenues to explore.

I have a friend who is a seasoned world traveler. She tells me the cuisine of a particular country has a great impact on her overall opinion of the place. Her favorite places are where she enjoys good meals. I don’t know if you can feel the same way or not, but when you understand the vast richness that cultural exchange can afford, you can easily begin to understand the benefits of world traveling.

Many people have realized that traveling is the best way to enrich your life. I was at a seminar a few years back, and the instructor was saying that people who have been to other countries tend to have an easier time learning new things. When you go to another country, and find yourself surrounded by people that look and dress and talk differently that you, you can find those things that you thought were important starting to drift away, making space in your mind for new and better ideas and beliefs. Of course, while few people have the time and resources to travel abroad extensively, everyone can find ways to expand your mind in your own neighborhood, even if it is going to an authentic restaurant, or studying a foreign language in your spare time.

Studying foreign languages is much easier than most people expect. People feel that can’t easily learn something new, but they realize that they can, you can begin to wonder how you may apply new ideas to increase your skills. And when you do this, you might be able to realize how easy this is.

Of course, most people realize the importance of learning. The understanding that most people don’t have yet, and you are receiving now is that learning never stops from occurring. There are those that say the biggest block to learning is education, because it removes your natural ability to learn things on a regular basis, so that you may easily and consistently improve yourself. You can understand this, can’t you?

One thing that can make the most pervasive changes in your life in several areas is the idea of continuous and conscious learning of new things. Whether it is of new cultures, new food, a new language, expanding your mind will always benefit you in the long run.

Now, back to my burrito.

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They were telling me how their daughter was just learning to walk. She just turned two. She is at the age where you just become really curious about everything. You see something new, and you want to discover what this is. The only requirements are that you haven’t seen this before. You spend your whole existence, exploring, and walking around. Touching things, smelling things, tasting things. Many neuroscientists think this is the greatest resource of humanity, the power of curiosity. To seek new things. To search and discover simply for the sake of searching and discovering. You will never know when you will find this useful and interesting.

It’s like sometimes as adults, we can just let go of any expectation, and just let our curiosity lead us. We are old enough to stay away from danger, and to know this is a resource when we see something we like. Many of the great discoveries that we still use today came from when people were just able to let go of expectations and ask “What if?” Life can seem dreary and repetitive when we forget to do this on a regular basis. Let your curiosity lead the way.

They were telling me their happiest times (so far!) of being parents was to watch their kid find something she thought was exciting, and just feel good for discovering this. Like you can really feel a sense of accomplishment when your curiosity has led you to something cool like this. She was telling me that she likes to follow her kid around in bookstores, just like the one we were sitting in, and watch her daughter go through the joys of being able to learn something new.

Which is why he was telling me that although they were a bit nervous about leaving their comfortable small town, with the same people and the same shops and the same restaurants, they were really excited about moving to the huge metropolis where they were going. He said that he jumped on the opportunity when it presented itself. I’m sure they will do fantastic in their new life.

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The problem is, few people have the discipline and the willpower to even create a visualization of a realized goal, let alone charge it several times a day with white hot burning desire. There are several reasons for this that I’d like to explore, and to come up with ways to help you create a goal, and charge it with sufficient desire in order to make it a reality, instead of some pie in the sky wish.

Imagine what it was like back in the old days. No, I don’t mean the old days before the Internet, I mean the really old days before agriculture. Many scientists believe that mankind lived in our present physical and mental state under the conditions prior to agriculture for at least a hundred thousand years. Living in groups of fifty to two hundred, life was tough. There wasn’t a consistent source of food, so we had to wander, and follow whatever we could to eat. Because humans are generally considered omnivores, meaning that we can eat pretty much anything, we generally took whatever we could find. Plants, animals, roots, each other.

In each group of hunter-gatherers, there was generally one “Alpha” male. Several studies done on chimps show that the alpha male gets most of the food, and most of the sex. The rest of us hacks had to fight for ours. Imagine what it was like living in this state. Always hungry. Living with desire as a constant companion, reminding us to always search and creatively think of ways to get our basic needs met.

Fast forward to today. When we’re hungry, we just stumble over to the fridge and shove food in our mouths. When we are thirsty, we drink. When we want sex, well, there’s always the Internet, if you catch my drift. We have come to think of any desire as a temporary inconvenience that needs to be quickly gotten rid of in the quickest way possible.
Is it any wonder so many people today are overweight, and underpaid? It is any wonder that so many of us drift through a life of mediocrity, never summoning the courage to demand from life what we really want?

The first step then, is to make friends with desire. Focus on the feeling of desire itself, instead of any frustration that comes up when it can’t be immediately pacified. Learn to live with desire. Hunger is your friend. It keeps you motivated to shun short-term sugary fixes, and focus your energies and creativity on more worthy, long-term goals.

The first step, of course, is to follow any good procedure to create well-formed goals. You can google “well formed goals” or search this site for ways to do this. When you have a well formed goal, the next step is to create three or four rich visualizations of what you will see, hear, feel, smell and taste when the goal is realized. Driving your new car, enjoying your new house, seeing and feeling the new paycheck. Choose three or four rich, descriptive, fully associated pictures of your goal. Once you have a few pictures, you need to charge them.

Whenever you feel a desire, pause for a few moments before rushing to fulfill it. Breathe in the desire and experience the feelings in the now. Let go of any thoughts about the future, or imaginations about the past. Fully feel your desire. Now while you are still feeling the emotional now feeling of your desire, focus on one of your visualizations. Focus on your visualization until the physical/emotional feeling of the desire subsides.

Experiment with putting off the short-term satisfaction of your desires. If you desire is for food, wait a few moments before eating. Realize that your feeling of hunger can be tapped to power your desire of your goal. If your desire is for water, pause, and imagine the desire as your goal. When you eat or drink, imagine your desire as being fulfilled. Practice as well with your breath. Exhale completely, and wait until you feel a real desire to breath. Before inhaling, experience your visualization. As you inhale and feel the sweet breath fill your lungs, see your goal being achieved as well. There’s a reason those who have achieved greatness describe their success and “eating drinking and breathing their goal.”

If you want to really turbo charge your desires, experiment with your sexual desires. Feel the sexual desire, release any imaginations and feel only the physical feeling. Then while feeling and appreciating that feeling and desire, visualize your goals. The more often you can do this, and the longer you can charge your goals each time, the better. Napoleon Hill devoted a whole chapter to this in “Think and Grow Rich.” You an google this as well and read the entire chapter, or even the book, online for free. I would recommend keeping your own copy handy to refer to when you are waiting in the dentists office or at Starbucks.

Desire can be a source of fantastic power, or daily frustration, all depending on how you use it in conjunction with your mind and imagination. Many people throughout history have known this, but few have been able to truly tap this power for incredible success. There is no reason why you can’t start now to create the life of your dreams.

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So I was on this bus ride, and I was sitting next to this guy who was reading this book on esoteric philosophy. Just judging by the way he was reading the book, it seemed to be a deep subject. He would read for a few moments, and then look out the window, as if in deep thought. Then he would get his look of recognition on his face, and then turn back to the book. He did this several times, until I finally got up the courage to ask him about the book. I could only see the partial title, and I’m not even sure then if I could make out the title correctly.

He said it was a philosophical book about human emotions. The particular section that he was reading, and kept looking out the window to digest, was based on some writings of some ancient Indian scholar. He said the name a few times, but for the life of me I can’t remember even how many syllables it contained, let alone how it was pronounced. But he said that humans are basically transmitters of our emotions. That when humans come into contact, we communicate long before the first words are spoken.

If you are in a particularly high vibrational state, that is if you are holding “good” emotions predominantly in your body, like confidence, acceptance, appreciation, you will be primarily attract the emotional energy of others, as it matches your emotional energy. The converse is also true. If you hold more “negative” emotions, like fear, anger, jealousy, and judgment, you will attract those emotions as well.

He also said that if you have a mix of the two, negative and positive, like most people do, whenever you come in contact with another person or a group the “average” emotional energy will generally win out. He said that the transfer and commingling of emotions among people could be treated almost as a science. The secret to attracting people in your life that you want to support and help you, is to first become that which you want to attract.

He said that many people fool themselves into thinking they are emitting positive emotions, when in reality they are emitting emotions of need and lack, and they have convinced themselves otherwise. That is why this is such a hard concept to understand, because of our strong ability at self-deception.

He said that the real secret is to first understand yourself, and your emotions before trying to worry about those of others. Once you get a hold on your own emotions, the rest is easy. Because once you dig deep enough, and hold your emotions positive, that is all you will attract, and the rest will disappear. I asked him exactly how to do that, and he said that he hadn’t gotten that far in the book.

I told him that you should keep reading, until you can discover the secret here. Then find me and tell me about it. He just laughed and went back to his book, as if he knew something that the rest of us don’t, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see. If you have any secrets, please share them, so we can figure his out.

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He stated telling me about this interesting problem he was having. It seems there was a new manager at his job. She had been brought in from a different division. He worked for a manufacturing company that made large parts that were then sold to various automobile manufacturers around the world. They were largely non-moving, machined metal parts, that were very versatile, so they could be sold to a number of different companies, both domestically and internationally.

The problem he was having was that his new manager had no real experience in this particular area. She had worked in the head office her whole career, in the accounting department, and really didn’t know anything about the companies operations other than what she saw described on a balance sheet. Because of recent economic problems, she was brought in to see if there were any areas where they could save money, so the company could still remain profitable. My friends company sold to a diverse enough group of carmakers than the collapse of one, two, or even three major U.S. manufacturers wouldn’t necessarily cause their business any harm. So she was brought in just to make sure that they could stay in the black, and nobody would have to loser their job.

The problem began, when she came in, thinking she was helping out, which she was from a larger standpoint. The overall health of the company is important. But the workers, all the guys that reported to my friend, didn’t see it that way. They saw her as somebody coming in to tell them what they were doing wrong. One thing they didn’t like was they she was what they called a “pencil pusher,” or a “desk jockey,” who couldn’t begin to understand what it was like machining parts on sophisticated machines, all day. Two, she was a woman. And this kind of job had always been a traditional, male dominated job. So straight away they was a large feeling of enmity between them, before they even got a chance to meet.

So my friend had to figure out how to explain to them that criticism isn’t always bad. Sometimes criticism is to help you, even to make your life easier in the long run. He wanted to tell them that those that can accept criticism with an open mind will really benefit in the long run. Many successful people have realized early in their career that criticism does much more good than harm, if taken the right way. You can take other peoples criticism of you, even if it’s mean spirited, and extract from it useful information that you can use to improve yourself. Most people can’t see this, and see criticism only as a personal attack. Few people don’t realize that even if you do receive criticism as a personal attack, you can always “erase the emotion and save the data” to learn something. It’s always important to realize that in almost every interaction, you can learn something constructive.

So what my friend decided to do was to speak with her, and suggest that she come to them with questions, and then let them answer them. She will describe how she is representing corporate headquarters in a quest to save ALL their jobs, and she needs their help in figuring out to do that. Kind of an “us against them” mentality. To figure out a way to work together, without any criticism, and let them not only explain to her how they do their jobs, but to elicit their opinions on how the could do it better, and cheaper.

I thought it was a pretty good plan, and I’m curious to see how this turns out.

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One of my friends that I used to go bike riding with used to have the same experience. We used to go riding up these really long and windy hills where I used to live. The kind of hills where when you look up, you think you can see the top, but you’re not sure. Then when you get to where you think the top is, you go around the bend just a little bit and BAM there is another hill waiting for you. Unless you’ve ridden those course several times, it’s really easy to forget where you are and hope that you have enough energy to keep on going, hoping you won’t pass out before you get to the top.

Which is cool because on top is this really big park, next to one of these new age churches. And there is this pastor at the church who sometimes sits in the park when he is not busy counseling people. The park has a fantastic view of the city. It’s amazing what you can see from a different perspective. Sometimes this pastor talks to us and tells us these crazy stories. Once he gave us a lecture about the meaning of life. He said when you are a child, and think in childish ways, you expect other people to give you things, to provide for you. He said that the true measure of an adult is someone who has decided to make the transition from being a receiver from others to become a giver to others. He said the middle part is what is difficult for most people, because it can sometimes take a few years to get through, if at all. Many people get stuck in the middle part, and never get out. It’s so confusing because you are a grown adult with a job and maybe a family, but you still have a little bit of “what’s in it for me” kind of mentality. He said the amazing thing about life is that when you fully release dependency, you will become aware of the abundance of resources that you can gather with your the energy you’ve freed up by becoming fully human. He said that is what St. Paul was talking about when he said that stuff about putting away childish things, and how love is really a verb rather than a feeling. The guy also had some other stories which I hope I can remember this later.

But the other good thing about this hill is on the other side, is a fantastic, long road that looks as though it was built for cyclists. Even though this park is about twenty miles from the nearest body of water, you can see the ocean. And the road kind of curves to the left as it goes down, and there are no intersections for about two miles. So all you have to do is wait at the top until all the cars go by, and you can pretty much ride down the middle of the big, wide road without worrying about cars. And the bottom is long and flat, so you have plenty of time to slow down. The fastest I ever went down that hill was just a fraction over fifty MPH. That was an incredibly exhilarating experience that I’ll always remember.

The funny thing is, once I get past the one hundred page mark, I usually can’t put a Ludlum book down to save my life. All the characters and the story just springs to life. It’s really weird that way. All those feelings of doubt and worry that I had before about wasting my time or whatever just seem to mysteriously vanish. Which is one of the reasons I love to read. Reading gives you a great perspective on things.

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That’s what I was doing. In retrospect, I wish I’d have known about the show on Rome earlier. It was about the Roman Military,and their military strategy, but it wasn’t only about Rome. It was kind of a overview of history of countries or empires that had world dominance from a military standpoint. And the angle of the show was how whoever had the most technology, had the edge. It didn’t matter exactly how high or low the technology was, so long as you are better than your competitor.

Like for example the Egyptians were pretty much top dog, until the Romans came alone with their slightly superior fighting style. And that’s one of the interesting things about Rome’s military advantage. They didn’t really have a lot of sophisticated weaponry that other countries didn’t have. The one thing they did was develop incredible discipline. Their soldiers were extremely well trained, and together they fought like a well oiled machine.

It reminded me of a book I read a few years ago. It was a novel of historical fiction, of which type I hadn’t ever really read up until that point. That novel was a kind of a power struggle/drama/ love story based in ancient Phoenicia.  It was really interesting once I was able to naturally get into it. Reading books have always been a great pleasure of mine. One of the great things about books is that you can take them anywhere you want to escape from the boredom of everyday life just for a little bit and lose yourself in something.

I didn’t use to like books, because I thought they were kind of boring. It isn’t until you really take the time to get into this that you can really appreciate what’s here. And when you read with that kind of mindset, a whole world opens up for you. It’s like you see something that was there all along, just waiting for you to realize this. You can really find new ways to enjoy this, you know?

The book itself was pretty interesting, and I was able to dive into it so deep that I had to keep checking wikipedia to make sure that this was factually correct, because it was so incredibly interesting. It was about a couple of brothers, one younger and one older. And the older was going to inherit the fathers kingdom when he died, but the younger one was better suited to rule the throne. And they both happened to fall in love with the same woman. So it was kind of a love story, power struggle for the throne kind of story. At least the power struggle part was fairly accurate. I don’t know about the love story part. I guess authors need to embellish a little bit to make history come alive enough to make this interesting, you know?

So anyways, it turns out that particular show was a series in military strategy or something. Each week they would highlight a different empire or country, and focus on their particular talent which made them stand out. Which I’ll definitely make the decision to come back to and watch it again and again, because naturally, I find this incredibly fascinating.

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Or do you struggle? I remember when I was a kid learning long division for the first time. It was horrible. I had no idea what those stupid boxes were for, and how in the heck did my teacher know what numbers to write on top? Have you ever tried to learn a foreign language? You hear a word that means something, then immediately forget it after you say it a few times?

Most people experience a mix of the above styles of learning. You can learn easily in some subjects, and sometimes it takes a little effort to learn other things. Most people assume that it’s the subject matter. You might hear people say that they are good in math, but terrible in English. Or fantastic at playing the trombone, but absolutely horrible at juggling. The truth is, there is a lot more that goes into learning than most people realize.

Teachers, environment, diet, how much sleep you got the night before, your own preferred learning style all play a part in how well you can learn things easily. Something that I’ve started really learning about recently is the difference between structure and content. In the above examples, the content would be the actual subject, like long division, and the structure would everything surrounding how the content was delivered.

Believe it or not, the same content can be really easy, or really difficult depending on the structure, or how the content is delivered to you. For example, if you are operating on a good nights sleep, haven’t eaten any high sugary foods recently, are sitting in a comfortable position with your back fairly straight, and learning from a teacher that is speaking slowly and clearly, you will likely to learn fairly easily.

However, take the same subject and try to learn it while you are hungover, next door to a construction site, and the teacher has just been dumped by their significant other, you might have some problems.

Similarly, your mindset can have a profound effect on your learning capacity. Whether or not you think something will be hard or easy. How motivated you are to learn. If you only focus on the positive benefits of knowing the material, or if you are only focus on the difficulties you expect.

Ask yourself a question, and pay attention to the answer. How good of a learner are you? Or you can try it this way. Say the following and pay attention to any internal responses: “I easily and naturally learn things quickly with little conscious effort.” How did that feel? Did you hear a little voice saying “No Way!”

If you did, don’t worry. Most people only focus on the material, and not the fantastic realization that as you change your mindset about your own learning, you can change how easily you can learn something new. The more you realize that changing the structure can have a profound effect on how easily you can learn the content, the easier it will be to learn anything you want.

Of course changing external structures like described above (being hungover next to a construction site) are fairly straightforward to remedy, but what about your internal learning structure?

One fantastic way that I’ve gotten fantastic results is from the Personal Genius Paraliminal from Learning Strategies. Listening to that CD sporadically over the past several weeks has given me a fantastic new way to look at reality itself. You can use the CD two ways, either for a specific learning task, such as a new language, or learning a sport, or learning how to operate a new piece of machinery. Or you can use it in a general sense, as I have been doing.

Personally I’ve become very interested recently in being able to switch back and forth between content and structure for different aspects of life. This CD has been a fantastic godsend. Like the other Paraliminals, it uses a hypnotic technique called dual induction, along with some other technology to lower your brainwaves into a receptive state. Then it proceeds to deliver the message that will help you to wrap your mind around whatever particular learning opportunity you find yourself presented with. I highly recommend it.

If you’d like to read more, you can check it out here.

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It’s weird when that happens. You’ll be talking with somebody, and you’ll make all kinds of inferences about what was said, but you don’t really don’t pay attention to the underlying intention of the conversation. Like somebody will mention their boyfriend, and then they’ll switch topics completely, and you think they are still talking about their boyfriend, but they’ve switched referential indexes completely so you don’t know exactly who they are talking about.

Like once my other friend was explaining to me the grammatical structure of the Laotian language. They generally don’t use grammatical modifiers, like past tense or familial references. Everything is modified by context. If they start talking about something that happened last Tuesday, everything in that conversation from then out is referenced from Tuesday unless otherwise indicated. I suppose in different languages you develop the ability to pay attention to different levels of intention.

Which I guess it’s a good reason to learn several things, like languages, because they can really help you to develop a rich outlook on life. It’s been proven that an easy way to really have the ability to see things from a different perspective is to learn another language. And not only just words, but to actually think that way. They’ve shown it actually creates new neural pathways that are used differently from other ones. Some of the smartest people in the world can speak several languages. And one tends to wonder, do they speak several languages because they are smart? Or do you become smarter than you already are because you can speak several languages?

Well, at any rate, I hope my friend can get along well with her new boyfriend, regardless of how the fish and chip restaurant pans out.

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