Specific Knowledge

Do you ever notice how in your dreams, no matter how weird things are, they seem to make perfect sense?

I was taking a nap earlier and woke up in mid-sentence from a dream I was having. I had started out  saying " As long as we keep attacking these one point buildings..." and then I woke up. I know that I was suggesting a strategy and that I was leading a team. But, whether or not we were playing a game or fighting for our lives, I could not honestly say.

The point is, I was directing the group with perfect clarity. Our clothing, specific location and individual attitudes all made sense. I knew the people that I was working with and that I could count on them.

But, if I had just woken up in the body of  this person that was doing the leading, I think it would have been a completely different story. Because right now, in the full light of consciousness, I have no idea what was going on. The circumstances, overall choice of dress and even the demeanor of my team seem to clash with one another.

My current point of view contains no real frame of reference for what was going on.

It reminds me of how people who have no idea what is going on often like to tell the experts in a field how wrong they are about the solution to a given problem. Most of the people living in my home do or have done technical support at some point in the past.

And we all have "horror" stories about customers that call up and tell us what is wrong and what we need to do to fix it. They are aware of the symptom that they are having, and due to either their own scant experience or the word of friends and family members they make up their own mind about what is wrong and latch on to whatever they think the fix is as being what we need to do. Ninety-five times out of a hundred, the customer is actually not correct about what the problem actually is, hence their solution is wrong also.

They do not understand computers or how they work and most of what they say and think about them is wrong. You can't just tell them that though or they get angry and ask to talk to someone who actually knows about computers, thus dragging the process on even longer without getting any results.

And the sad part is its the same in pretty much every field, not just computer tech support. People act the same way towards experts everywhere, telling them that they don't know what they are talking about when the truth is in fact the exact opposite.

It just does not make sense to me. When you have an illness you go to a doctor. The doctor does some tests, tells you what is wrong, and sends you home with a prescription to solve what ails you. Only an idiot tells the doctor that he is wrong and ignores his advice. When and if you argue with the doctor, you look like an idiot to him and everyone else that sees what is going on. You may know more about your body, but who knows more about medicine? If you knew what he knew you wouldn't need to go see him. You would write your own prescription fill it and go on about your business.

Well, an auto mechanic is a car doctor. A computer technician is a computer doctor. The account rep that you call when there is a problem with your cell phone is a cell phone doctor. Each one of them knows more about their specialty than you do. When you call them, you aren't telling them what the problem is. In almost every case, you do not have the knowledge or experience to make an informed decision about what the problem actually is.You are telling them what the symptoms are. They then use their much larger pool of knowledge about that particular thing to determine what the actual problem is and what needs to be done about it.

Realize that reason the other person is there, on the other end of the phone, is to diagnose, troubleshoot and fix whatever it is that you are calling in about. Also realize that you telling them what is wrong and what they need to do to fix it, just gets in the way and makes the problem take longer to resolve. The best thing you can do when calling for support is to admit, to yourself at the very least, that if you could fix the problem you wouldn't need to be calling for support. Then do your best to follow the directions of the technician so that things can be resolved as quickly and sanely as possible.

Everything is true from a certain point of view

"...you're going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view."
 Obi Wan to Luke in Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.

We go through our lives deciding what is true and what isn't and then live and make choices based on what we have decided. What we think about a thing does not change whether or not it is true. But, information given to us in a specific way or order can convince us otherwise.

From the point of view that this pepperoni pizza has all of the four basic food groups in it, we could say that it is a well balanced meal and is therefore good for us. Or if you compare it with eating something like raw sewage, it is actually good for you.

We all know that terrorists are bad evil people attempting to destroy many of the things that are good about this world. But they do not see things this way. They feel that they are doing the best thing they can to make the world the way they think would be good.

So the next time you go to condemn a person for acting vastly differently than you think they should, spend some time getting into their shoes. Find out why they think their way of being is the right way. Perhaps, once you understand you can see the flaw in their thinking and set things straight. Or perhaps you will see the flaw in yours. If they are doing what they are doing for a perfectly logical reason, hatred or anger towards them is just likely to cement their belief that you are in the wrong.

In a previous post, I shared proof that the world is full of retards. I also have one that proves that women are evil which I will share with you now. It is of course not what I truly believe, just an example that if you look hard enough you can find a way to prove anything you want to be true.

We start off with a partial biblical quote "...money is the root of all evil". Or in math terms.  $=√evil.

Now success with women involves an investment of money over a period of time, which can be expressed mathematically as W=$*T. 

It has also been said and proven repeatedly that time is money. So, T=$

And if T=$ then $*T=$².

This gives us W=$²

Now let's go back and look at the start of our proof  $=√evil.  Now what happens when you do something to one side of an equation in math? That's right you have to do the same thing to the other.
So, if we start off by squaring one side of the equation we have to square the other right? Let's go ahead and do that.

$²=√evil² or $²=evil

We already said W=$². So when we replace $² with W we get W=evil.

And there you have it, women are evil. Should we kill them all and prevent future human life on this planet from existing? Of course not. We should look at circumstances and people on an individual basis and not automatically judge based on a person falling within a specific stereotype. The stereotype exists because it is true for a certain percentage of a given population, not because it is always true.

What's the story with history?

If all of the people on one side of a war are killed, the whole story can no longer be told. That is where the statement that "history is often written by the victor" comes from. With the unbalance left by only one side being properly represented, it should become obvious that history is not overburdened with facts. If you are old enough to read and understand these words, then surely you know that there are many different ways to describe any given set of events.

A factual accounting of things rarely if ever truly happens. Why is this? Well, first of all, because in just about every case, it is just super boring to only relate exactly what happened, just the way it happened. Also, most of the time what becomes "history" is what society remembers of a given incident. A great deal of history is verbal not written. Most of the time what is written and what society "knows" to be true about an event are vastly different.

There are those who were physically present for a given event. Then there are those that were not. Often those who were there tell the tale for those who were not. But, when those who were not there relate it to others something is lost because they did not have the experience themselves. The best they can ever hope to do, without repeating the story verbatim, is to relate their understanding of what happened.

What a person thinks about a given thing tends to color what he or she says about it to another person. More and different emotion gets added to the story with each new telling. Each person gives just a little of their own color to the story until at last someone who was actually present for the events being described may not even recognize the story as their own.

Most people aren't even aware though that the real tainting of a story happens before they share it with anyone else. Our own memory of a given event is often colored by how we think of ourselves, whether as hero or villain, empowered or victimized. Then when we share our story with others, we tend to put a spin on the story that makes us look the way we perceive ourselves to be. Sometimes we are embarrassed at our role in a given scene and may slightly alter the telling to make ourselves look more dashing or less foolish.

Other times we refuse to admit to ourselves that certain things took place. We may be afraid of what others will think if the whole and exact truth comes to light. Or we want to make some other person's role seem more villainous than it actually was. So when we share the tale, we omit certain details or tell things out of order.

All of this leads to our history being filled with falsehood.

There isn't really anything that one can do to change this since you do not have the power to control what others do and say. You can however decide at any point to have the courage to be completely honest, first with yourself and then others. Choose for yourself to remember things as they actually happened, not the way you wished they had. Memorize the boring old details and separate how you felt from what actually happened. When asked what happened, tell it just the way it was.

When your boss asks why you were forty minutes late, tell the truth. You woke up late, hence you got to work late.

Feel free to make up a dashing, daring tale, full of villains and fair maidens, dragons and knights. Imagine. Embellish. Create. Blame. Exonerate. But save the big beautiful lie, the faerie tale, for story time.

Are you a visionary or a dreamer?

Imagination.

It is an awesome powerful tool that has been used for countless things by billions of people for the last few thousand years.

Imagination has kept us entertained through the creation of literally millions of plays,books,movies songs and works of fine art. Nearly every great invention throughout history has been the direct result of imagination.

Without imagination nothing new could ever be created, well not intentionally anyways. A person first must conceive the seed of a new idea and then continue to use their imagination to cause that seed to begin to grow into the thing which they see within their mind's eye, so that their vision of the thing can become real.

It is the tool that is used the most by people who want to change their lives for the better and by those that want to make the world a better place. But there are really two main types of imagination and it is important to know the difference between them.

There are visions and there are dreams. Vision includes plans of action, goal setting, seeing an end result and working towards it. Vision is about your mind disagreeing with the world around it, about the way things are as opposed to the way it should be and deciding that you are going to do whatever it takes to bring about what you see in your  mind. It is a powerful force that bears with it the seeds of change.

On the contrary, dreaming has no power behind it. There is no drive to change the way things are. Dreaming includes hoping,wishing,wanting,desiring. On its own it is essentially a waste of time and even though the dream may be a beautiful one, it really only causes us pain if there is no intention of putting in the effort to make any change. Don't get me wrong a dream can turn into a vision, but until it does it is useless.

Men of vision would be people like Gandhi, the Wright brothers, Thomas Edison or Alexander the Great. And although he is famous for saying "I have a dream" Dr Martin Luther King was a visionary. He saw the world as a very different place than the one he was living in and set out to make his vision match reality.

Visionaries make the world into their image. Dreamers pine over the fact that the world is not how they envision it. People who have vision, while not satisfied with the way things are, are generally happier than people who spend their time dreaming. This is because even if it takes a long time to succeed they are making their dreams come true rather than waiting for someone else to come along and do it for them. Being a visionary empowers you. Being a dreamer disempowers you.

Which are you? Which would you rather be? How different would your world be if your dreams became visions, if you actually spent the time and energy to make your dreams come true?

Time flies when you are having fun

That's what they say at least. I know it's true for me. Whenever I find myself doing something I enjoy, the hours seem to speed by. Often when playing a game, spending time with my son or reading a book, I need to be reminded how much time has passed and what I am "supposed" to have already gotten done for the day.

How does that happen? Well, in actuality, the clock does not really move any faster. But, when we are doing something that we really like, our focus is entirely on what it is that we are doing and none is spared for clock watching or wondering how much time has passed. We are more interested in what we are doing presently than anything else that we could be doing at that moment.

Now what happens when you get to work? If you are like most people, you start off by dreading getting up, then you force yourself to get dressed, maybe have some breakfast and then head off to the job. By the time you get there you are ready to go. But, no, you have hours of waiting and clock watching until you get to go back home. You either don't like what you do, you don't like who you do it for, or you don't like the conditions that you do it under. Or some combination of all three. And the time just drags by, every minute seeming to get longer and longer, especially if it is not all that busy.

Some days at work are better than others, but none of them go by as quickly as when you are doing something you want to do. It doesn't seem fair does it? Our days aren't all filled with things that we enjoy doing. There is only so much time to parcel out to each thing. And the things that we like seem to whiz by in an instant.

But, what can you do about it? Well there's a couple of things. The first is to truly live in the moment whenever you are doing something you enjoy or spending time with someone you love. Be fully present in body and mind. Intentionally shut out distractions and really get the utmost out of every second, knowing that the time is fleeting and will be over much sooner than you want it to be.

And second, when working or starting out to do anything that you are not really fond of, find a way to flip the script, so to speak. Find some part of whatever it is that you are doing that you can make into something that is enjoyable. The idea is to literally make time fly for the things that you don't like, so that you can get back to the things that you do.

If you do a repetitive task, challenge yourself to find ways to make it more efficient, to cut corners without cutting quality. If you have downtime at work don't spend the time idly staring at the clock. Come up with new ways of doing whatever it is that you do. Figure out why your company does things exactly the way they do them and see if you can find a better way. This will serve to assist in alleviating your boredom and will show your employer that you have an interest in seeing the company do well. Find some way to make what you do a game, one that you can have fun with and of course win.

One of two things is likely to happen. Either, time will go by faster while you do the things you are not so fond of. Or many of the things you didn't used to like will become things you don't mind so much. Either way is a win-win for you.

Social Unification Through Widespread Dissemination of Information pt2

We are about 2/3 done forming a household of like minded people. While it may be a good idea, this gradual growing of a physical community limits the amount, speed and ways in which our tribe can grow.

With the advent of the internet, people of like minds need not live in the same communities, or in fact, even the same countries as one another, in order to share their ideas and thoughts. We need to no longer be limited to physical location, like the Indians were.While most of the tribe may be centered in one area, seeds of growth can pop up all over the world.

 That subject line should have deciphered itself by now.

 If we want to change the world, why not do it on a global as well as a small scale? We can focus our attention primarily at home, but share our philosophies and ideas with other people around the world that want to see the same kind of change that we do. Those that disagree with the ideas can just choose to ignore what we have to say and those that agree can speak up and join the tribe.

 It might take decades using the mindset of the one household at a time type expansion, from our tribe's current center to affect places like Africa, Europe or Asia. But, through the sharing of our thoughts and ideas over the internet, other people can take it upon themselves, right now, to form a local branch of our tribe within their own community.

 I do not currently do a lot (very little ever) of social media type stuff. But some other members of my tribe do. And I plan to start doing more. A major change for me is that I will probably start putting this blog on my Facebook page, so others who know me and have no other way of contacting me can see where my mind and heart are at and so those who do not know me personally can get to know me and my tribe.

We are about empowerment, positivity and personal growth. We have a vision statement that describes what we stand for as individuals and as a community.It is as follows

[We the people of  "Grok the Planet " are committed to changing the world, one soul at a time. Our goals are to constantly continue to grow and improve ourselves emotionally, mentally, spiritually, financially as well as physically and to encourage others to do the same. We will achieve these goals by each one of us being a leader, living in excellence, being impeccable with our word, making no assumptions, taking nothing personally and striving to do our best in all things]

 The idea is to perform positive personal change and to encourage and support others in doing this as well. If these goals and ideals match yours, please join our tribe. I am co-creator, general idea guy, and somewhat spiritual leader for the tribe. To find out more about the ideas and philosophies of Grok the Planet, please, read the rest of my blog. It is chock full of the beliefs and examples of our way of being.

Decide for yourself, if you want to be part of a group that changes the history of the world, by changing the way people interact with one another. If this is your cup of tea, shoot an email over to darkg0d@hotmail.com . Interested parties only please. Flames will be ignored.

See you tomorrow.

Social Unification Through Widespread Dissemination of Information pt1

That sounds like quite a mouthful but what does it mean? You'll see as we get further along. If you've been following for awhile, you probably know that I have a vision of a very different world than the one we now live on the surface of. Oh, make no mistake, it will still be the same planet you live on, with the seven continents and oceans and all that.

There will still likely be politics, wars and ambitious people striving for power. But what will change is social interaction. People will stop poisoning the air around them with their contagious negative attitudes. We will accept one another as brothers and not as strangers to be feared and mistrusted. Just as Dr Martin Luther King died before his dream was fully realized, I do not expect to be alive when the work is through. That is not because I expect to die anytime soon, but instead because of just how much there is to do.

Now, there are many different kinds of social groupings with many different monikers. After a long and thorough series of thoughtful hours upon the matter I have decided that group, organization, mob, army, family, club, community, society and company, for various different reasons, all do not really work to describe the intended type of mindset and plans that I have. All of them have elements of what is desired, just not the whole package. Family and community were very close though.

And as it happens, I was listening to a network marketing presentation recently. The speaker mentioned the word tribe and started to describe all of the meanings and ramifications of the word. At that moment, all the thoughts I had been having about the social grouping that I am creating, screamed out at me "that is the word. There is no better description"

See, the native American Indians called their communities tribes. It is a word that implies togetherness, community and family. Not everyone in a tribe is an immediate blood relative but they are all still family. They follow the same philosophies and live their lives by the same rules. An outsider cannot attack one member of the tribe without incurring the wrath of the whole society. They protect their own.

While the Native Americans were hunter gatherers, they still mostly stayed in one area and only met with members of neighboring tribes when they happened to cross paths. Sometimes their area of influence would increase through inter-tribal marriage or war. But for the most part it was static. The area they could affect with their philosophies and ideas was limited quite literally to where they lived.

My original idea was to start with myself, to spend time and energy forming myself into the kind of person that I thought people should be like. Then to form a household of like minded people and then to gradually grow a larger and larger community, first by getting a bigger house and then maybe getting another house close by or an apartment building or two. With the idea being to continue expanding until the growth in one area became explosive.

For the most part, I am the way I feel people should be. I am still not perfect. The journey is never-ending, but the corrections and adjustments to my way of being are smaller. For me, now it is more about fine tuning than massive change. Simply because it has come up several times before, I want to make it clear that I do not think people should be clones of me or do exactly what I say and do. But it is natural that people using the same general lines of logic will come to the same conclusions and take many of the same actions.

Communication breakdown

What is happening to our language?

 I was born at Blunderstone, in Suffolk, or 'there by', as they say in Scotland. I was a posthumous child. My father's eyes had closed upon the light of this world six months, when mine opened on it. There is something strange to me, even now, in the reflection that he never saw me; and something stranger yet in the shadowy remembrance that I have of my first childish associations with his white grave-stone in the churchyard, and of the indefinable compassion I used to feel for it lying out alone there in the dark night, when our little parlour was warm and bright with fire and candle, and the doors of our house were—almost cruelly, it seemed to me sometimes—bolted and locked against it. --quote taken from Charles Dickens novel David Copperfield

If this same thing were to be written today it would most likely go something like this. I was born in Scotland. I never met my father because he died while my mom was pregnant. In my youth, I visited his grave site often and got an odd sense of separation anxiety when in  my home at night.

It just isn't the same. The meaning is similar, but the picture painted by Dickens is just so vivid and powerful.

"...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security..."

"...Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends..." --quotation taken from a transcript of The Declaration of Independence

The average man living in America today is much more likely to say something akin to "Yo, where the bi***es at?" than anything anywhere near as eloquent or meaningful as the words of our forefathers.

There are often dozens of synonyms for a given word each having slightly different meaning based on context. But most of the time, one uses the first word that comes to mind out of a sense of expediency, out of some need to spit out how we are feeling at any given moment. It is more important to us that we express how we feel, rather than taking the time to properly communicate the point we are attempting to make with all of the subtle nuances that would correctly draw the exact picture. Our world has become one of generalities and not specifics.

I shudder to think of what the Declaration of Independence would look like if it were written today.
 As was mentioned in the movie National Treasure, people just don't talk that way anymore. But they should. Is it sheer laziness? A failure in parenting or teaching? A total lack of interest in society and culture in general?  Any one of these things could cause the gradual disintegration of our language and a tendency for one and two syllable words to be the norm and not the exception. Unfortunately, the problem seems to be all of the above.

I wonder how long it will be before it gets to the point where we give up on English altogether and go back to the grunts and groans of the caveman.

Does fear run your life?

Fear.

It's such a simple short little word. Yet it can evoke some pretty scary nightmarish images within our minds. Many people's lives are nearly completely run by their reactions to it. The things they do or avoid doing as part of their daily routine are tailored specifically around the things that they are afraid of. With all the horror movies and Fear Factor type TV shows, it is certainly a topic that we as humans are fascinated with exploring.

Fear is a perfectly healthy, natural response to things that have the potential to be harmful to us.  It is what tells us to run when we are in the wild and encounter a bear. In that case fear is both useful and appropriate. But when the fear reaches a certain level our logical minds shut down and we just start randomly lashing out and reacting in whatever way we have to in order to get away from the object that we fear. Or worse yet it can literally cause both physical and mental paralyzation, complete shutdown.

Neither of these responses is helpful or good. What can be done about this?

To start with we need to realize that fear can be a useful tool in surviving our world. In order for that to be true though, we need to master it. We get to understand that what it is that we fear does not need to be logical or make sense.

A lot of people are afraid of the dark. Some are afraid of open spaces. Others still are afraid of the number 13. No matter how much time you spend attempting to reason with a person, sometimes, logic alone will not conquer fear. There is no logical basis for believing the number 13 is ever going to bring you any harm. Most intelligent people agree with this statement, even quite a few that are triskaidekaphobic.

If reason is out what does that leave us? Experience. Wait isn't experience what got us the fear in the first place? Not exactly. What actually happens is we have an experience and then our reaction to that experience determines whether or not we have a fear response in similar situations from that point on.

For example, take a man who has an irrational fear of all dogs. When he was a child a friendly dog, say a collie, may have jumped up into his stroller while his parents were taking him for a walk. The dog was highly excitable and smothered the infant with kisses. Even though the dog was not in any way hurting the child, he still got overwhelmed by the situation. The dog took up nearly his entire field of view, slobbered all over him, and there was nothing he could do. Panicked, he began screaming. Ironically, this scared the dog who then went away.

This example happened to the child when he was maybe two years old. From that point on he never wanted a dog and avoided all contact with them completely. He never had a dog as a pet while growing up and still fears and dislikes them to this day. If is walking down the road and sees someone coming towards him with their dog, he will cross to the other side of the street to avoid confronting his fear.

But avoidance, just like logic, does nothing to make the fear go away. The next time a dog appears the fear is back full force. It doesn't matter if it's a puppy, a poodle or a bulldog. The fear is the same.

So what kind of experience am I talking about? It's called immersion therapy. The only way to really deal with the fear is to have multiple positive experiences with and around the object of your fear. Now you wouldn't take the man in our example to the Humane Society and surround him with dozens of dogs all at once. Not in the beginning. That would just serve to reinforce the fear.

No, instead, you would put him in a controlled circumstance with one small, relatively docile dog. And to start with you would have it maybe twenty feet away and gradually decrease the distance until it could be close to him, without him freaking out. You get him used to the one small dog just being around over an extended time period. A few days perhaps. Then you would gradually introduce another dog to the equation, maybe  a little bigger.

At first the man would likely be terrified and not want to go through with it. But with each positive experience it gets easier and easier for him to deal with the fear, until eventually he can completely control it and maybe even enjoy having a dog as a pet.

Are there irrational fears that you have that prevent you from enjoying life to the fullest? Wouldn't you like to master them and take back control?

There is enough time.

I know I talk about time and efficiency elsewhere but it really seems appropriate to discuss it again just a week before Christmas.Time waits for no man. Time is the one resource that you can never get back once you spend it.

Around the holidays people are always rushing around frantically attempting to get as much done in as little time as possible. Often we hear that there just isn't enough time in the day to get everything done.

For the most part, that just isn't true. We tend to spend(waste) a lot of time doing things that are not absolutely necessary. Or we do things in extremely non-efficient ways.

Part of this is due to the subconscious routines that we get into over time. We get used to going to place A and then place B and then to place C before moving on to place D. When a new thing comes up we just naturally decide that it will get handled after we are done with the other stops. It becomes place E.

It takes us four hours to do things A through E and we start to scream about how there's not enough time to get everything done. But then we realize, or someone points out, that place E is actually between A and B and D is between B and C. If we switch the order of operations to A, E,B,D,C we can actually save thirty minutes to an hour of time due to the fact that we are not constantly backtracking past areas we have already been.

There is also all that time spent waiting to do things. Don't know what I mean? How about in your car while traveling from place to place for Xmas shopping. Or the commute to work.

What is it that you've always wanted to be able to do but never seem to have the time for? How about learning another language? What about developing a skill to be better at your current job or possibly even to replace your job? Instead of wasting all that time while traveling from place to place by listening to tunes on the radio, you could be feeding your mind. Listen to motivational speeches or books on tape, things that will assist you in changing the way you think so that you can be ever more successful in life.

How much of each day do you spend in front of digital media, the television, computer, tablet or whatever, just mindlessly going from one thing to another? If you cut that time in half you would surely have more time for things like making a list of what you need to do that day and perhaps figuring out the best way to get each thing done, so that you have more time left over at the end of the day to spend as you wish.

The more efficiently you can do each task the quicker you can complete the list.  It isn't that there is not enough time. It is that you are doing something the wrong way. Correct that, whatever it is and rejoice at the extra time you suddenly find you have.

We all have a limited amount of time and should make the best of each moment. How many other ways can you think of that you could put your time to better use?

Technology. How much is enough?

According to a lot of alcoholics and a famous Ozzy Osbourne song too much is never enough. The idea for healthy successful living is supposed to be everything in moderation. When it comes to food, sugar, salts, protein, carbohydrates, none of them taken in small doses are actually bad for you. In fact, your body needs all of these things. And in moderation even alcohol is healthy and good for you.

The problems come when we focus on one of these things to the exclusion of others. Then we get things like atherosclerosis, diabetes, heart disease, liver poisoning and a host of other issues.

A few decades ago it was believed that we would never need more than 640k of memory for our personal computers. Now anything less than a couple of gigabytes is considered unacceptable. That is an increase of more than one thousand times what we had then.

Computers used to take up enormous rooms all by themselves. Now a complete computer, one that is many times more powerful than those, can fit in the palm of your hand. In fact, telephones used to be big and bulky and the only purpose they could serve was verbal communication. Today cell phones are more compact, have better reception than phones originally did, and they serve many of the same functions that people would previously buy a computer for. You can use them to check your email, record and send pictures and photos, download and play games and browse the internet.

There was a time when Microsoft said that it would never be upgrading to a 32 bit operating system. The current iterations are 64 bits.

At first people used to have to physically travel to a location to obtain data about a thing. Then we learned to write letters to the people that knew the information and wait for replies. Following that we came up with the brilliant idea of storing groups of documents in single buildings called libraries. Now, we have the most fantastic idea ever for storing and sharing data. The internet. With this amazing tool we can find data about nearly any topic we can imagine, from anywhere that has an online connection, which is practically, everywhere

Computers didn't used to have hard drives because what could you possibly need to store? The first computers with hard drives had kilobytes of storage. Terabytes are common storage units today. The sum total of knowledge accumulated on different forms of media around the world was estimated, in 2007, to be about 295 exabytes. It goes, gigabyte, terabyte,petabyte, then exabyte. So an exabyte is about a billion gigabytes of data or a million terabytes.

 We've gone from bytes to terabytes in a few short decades. It might be just a couple of more before we get to exabytes. So... once we have expanded our data storage to the point where we can hold about 300 million terabytes of data on one drive, are we done?

Of course not. Then there will be some new and even more spectacular goal like micronizing it or direct neural interfacing to make all that data available to us without the need for bulky hardware. There is always some new frontier to cross when it comes to technology, some way to make it faster, stronger, smarter, or somehow just plain better.

The sad fact of the matter is that in nearly every case, we have yet to realize the full potential of the technology we already have, before the next big thing comes out to make it even "better".

And every year as the new devices come out we devour them with an avarice and appetite that is truly frightening. We lose nearly all sense of humanity and care for our neighbor and gain some kind of mad lust in our frantic rush to go get the new shiny thing. A practical feeding frenzy over the new I-phone or the latest game. 

And that's not all. There's internet addiction..An inability to relate to people or real world circumstances due to too much time spent online. Cancers related to too much cell phone usage. Accidents caused by digital media distracting drivers and many other problems and diseases that come from relying too much on today's technology.

If you are one of those people that thinks too much tech is never enough, maybe you have a problem and should look into some lower tech ways to live and enjoy life. Go outside once in awhile. Meet real people. I am not saying get rid of the electronic goodies, just realize that life can still be good without them.

Perfection and the learning process.

My wife and I, have a disagreement, that comes up from time to time, about whether or not I am perfect. She asserts rather strongly that I am. While I know, in no uncertain terms that, I am not even close and never will be. But, my goal is to do the best I possibly can at whatever I set my mind to.

And in many cases, with many things, I do actually do a better job than most other people. Many of my successes can be attributed to failure and negative feedback. How can this be you wonder?

Well you see, negative feedback is more than just insults and name calling. Negative feedback is a tool that can be used for course correction, much like a ship captain sailing by the position of the stars. In its simplest form negative feedback would be something like, your goal is that way, or this way is not the right way.

Imagine for just a moment that all forms of negative feedback just vanished from the universe.It suddenly would be impossible to tell someone that they are not doing well, or that they are heading in the wrong direction. If this were to actually happen, people would still fail, but nobody would be able to express why. In fact, the rate of failure would skyrocket because nobody could correct their errors in any way other than random guesswork.

If you are always winning or succeeding you are never learning. The way that we learn is by making mistakes. When we make mistakes we find out what things do not work in getting us to our goal. At first, we make great big mistakes that are wrong in so many different ways. With negative feedback we can be told exactly how far off our last attempt was from success. We compare our failures with one another and see which ones were closer to our goal and which ones were further from it. We do more of the kinds of things that brought us closer to success.

Gradually we begin to move in the right direction and make less and less mistakes. By being told that we are doing the wrong thing and just how wrong it is, we learn to zero in on the right thing.

Whether the source of negative feedback is a mentor, the reading of a map, a walk-through(for a video game) or the image in our mind of what success will look like, it works the same every time. We compare where we are with where we want to be and use negative feedback to adjust our course.

Without negative feedback we could never learn anything new or get better at anything that we already know or do. Succeeding at anything would become completely random. With no way of improving people would stagnate. Life would become completely chaotic and uncertain with no hope of ever changing it.The earth would spin out of control and we would all explode.

Okay, so maybe that last part is a small exaggeration, but you get the idea.

Strive for perfection. Celebrate imperfection.

Hell or Paradise?

In order to avoid a seeming eternity of never ending pain and suffering, could you, would you, do and say nice things to, about, and for everyone else around you? I hope so because that's what it takes to endure the time in peace and happiness.

But, I am not talking about the afterlife. No, whether or not you live in hell or paradise here on Earth, is entirely up to you. How is this possible?

Well for the most part, you get back what you put out. Most people have the impression that others are out to "get them". This really could not be farther from the truth. The average person is just going through life trying to survive, looking out for number one, so to speak. They aren't conscious enough about you and what goes on in your life to spend the time or energy to intentionally make things difficult for you. People generally do not do things to hurt you. They do what is best for them. And sometimes that means doing things that are not good for others. But they are not out to get you.

Most people are actually completely neutral towards those that they do not already know. Now think about this. If you are neutral towards a person who starts out being neutral towards you, you will get very little back but at least it won't be negative. Now if you are hostile towards someone who starts out neutral towards you, what happens? They become hostile as well. And if you are good and kind to others who have no previous impression of you, they tend to be good and kind in return don't they?

Imagine a person sitting in their easy chair in front of the fireplace waiting for the heat to come out. They never put any wood into the fireplace but they are demanding warmth. Do you think they will ever get it? Of course not. It just does not work that way. In order to get the warmth you first need to supply the fuel and start the fire.

We all want warmth and good will from others. But, in order to get it we need to be warm and good to others. We get to start the fire and make sure that it has plenty of fuel. Then in nearly every case, we will get warmth and good will reflected back to us. The best part of all is that this method is both reflective and additive.

As you build up your relationship with each person, you each tend to mirror the others outpouring of energy towards one another. With each reflection the strength of the bond and the energy between you continues to grow. You send back the positive energy that the other person sent towards you, plus a little bit more due to your current happiness with the way things are turning out. They receive your warmth and return it back, plus a little extra to reflect their own happiness with how things are.

This is the way that nearly all great friendships and romances start and is a wonderful recipe for eternal happiness and peace. We do decide every day of our lives, whether we realize it or not, whether we are going to live in hell or paradise, right here on Earth. There is no need to wait until you are dead to have the rewards of a good life. Why torture yourself and others all the years of your life by acting out of fear and hatred when you could instead live in paradise?

Do you concur?

Just today, while doing some reading, I came across a bit of data that I find to be true from past experience, but have never really thought all that much about.

When I was probably around ten or so, my local rec center had this game called Super Pac Man. It was basically Pac Man with a slight twist. IF you don't know who or what Pac Man is, please buy a ticket back to the '80s. I promise it will be worth the cost.

The game had both regular and "super" power pellets. The super pellets made Pac Man much larger and let you munch your way through some barriers and basically ignore the ghosts. If you consumed both of the power pellets one after then other then,for a brief time, you became an awesome, enormous, dot munching, ghost crunching, unstoppable force that zipped around the stage wreaking havoc and destroying barriers. After which you returned to the standard mild mannered, ghost fearing, dot muncher.

I was always pretty good at Pac Man so when Super Pac Man came out, I was determined to be the best. But not having a large allowance, I couldn't play as much as I wanted to make that happen. So, I did all the research I possibly could. Hours were spent reading up on the best patterns to use on each board and how to "fake-out" each ghost to make them stop chasing you.

Being a kid, I spent my allowance on various different things. So, some days when I stepped up to the machine, I was able to play more games in a row than others. Over time I found that, the games where I scored the highest were generally the first or second that I played in a given day. Each day that I played, I was better than the previous, but more practice on any given day did not really make me all that much better that particular day.

Although I played it on the Nintendo, rather than in the arcade, I had a similar experience with Tetris. The first game or two I played each day were generally the best for the day. Other games played usually averaged better then previous days, but while I was directly focused on the game, I wasn't learning anything new about it. And actually, I quite specifically found that I scored significantly better if I was somewhat distracted, letting my subconscious mind make some of the choices for me.

Throughout my life, this has happened in many different areas, not just with games. The reading that I was doing today said that various examples in both psychological studies and the practical experience of many world famous inventors shows that, we actually do our best at a task when we are not directly focusing on it. Many of the ideas behind some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs and inventions have occurred at a time where the genius involved was on a break or out of the office.

This data suggests that the best way to solve a problem is to first do as much research as you possibly can about the subject at hand. Learn all you can. Focus your conscious mind as hard as you can towards knowing all there is to know about this one thing. Think with all your might about finding a creative solution to the problem. Then, drop it and go do something else.

Later on come back to the issue and pick up where you left off. When your conscious mind walks away from the problem, your subconscious mind will engage and often either solve the problem completely while you are "not looking" or will come up with the seeds for the idea that will solve it.

If I had just read this concept around the time I was still playing Super Pac Man, I may have had my doubts. But due to a lifetime of experience, I concur.

Do you see examples of this happening in your own life?

English is fun

When I was a kid I once played a game called Which witch is which. Now I have no recollection of how the game worked at all. I just remember that it tickled my funny bone to be able to have a complete sentence where three of the four words sounded the same.

Since then I have become something of a wordsmith, able to use words to my advantage more than most people that I know. English is my native tongue and the more of it that I learn the more fun I have with wordplay. English is one of the largest languages there is and due to its nature of borrowing words from other tongues, it is ever increasing. It simply fascinates me all of the different ways that a thing can be said as well as how subtle shifts in spelling or choice of expression can change things up.

 My grasp and command of the English language is vast yet not perfect. And while true mastery of the language may never occur, I do not fall into most of the grammar and spelling traps that many others do. One of my best friends, who wants to be an author and for now will go nameless, because he will know exactly who he is if he ever reads this, both saddens and amuses me with his struggles with the English language. I seldom find myself without the exact wording and spelling to fit a given situation.

Changing the spelling of a word by a single letter can completely change the context of a sentence. For example, I am hungry has a slightly different meaning than I am Hungary.

Other words sound similar but do not mean the same thing. In such cases context is the only real clue what a person is talking about. When spoken out loud, they're puppies, their puppies and there puppies all sound the same.

Connotation, detonation, volume, vocal tone, inflection, pitch,dialect, accent and emphasis can all change what something means. One can infer,insinuate, and imply a whole host of different things using these tools. It is even possible to use one or more to mean two things different things at the same time with a double entendre.

Phrases like, it is my pleasure, can be said in such a way as to mean two totally different things (and imply several others) without changing the actual wording at all. Try it out for yourself. Say the following words out loud. Say each exactly the same way, except put more emphasis on the fully capitalized word in each sentence.

IT is my pleasure.
It IS my pleasure.
It is MY pleasure.
It is my PLEASURE.

See. It is the same sentence with exactly the same words, but the meaning completely changes just by using only one vocal tool. Imagine what you could do with three or four of them all used together!

I have heard that some other languages have just as  much wordplay possibility as English. In Japanese, many of the individual kanji have dozens or more meanings. This would seem to make for nearly infinite opportunities for, wordplay mischief. It is my hope to one day increase my understanding of Japanese to the point where I can do with that language what I can do with English.

Until then, I will amuse myself with all the different ways that simple English words and phrases can be torn apart and put back together in mischievous, deadly, harmless,ridiculous,flattering, insulting, frustrating or just plain funny ways.

What wordplay amuses you?

Evaluation or Judgement?

Although they are grammatically similar, there is a massive difference between the next two sentences. I do not like strawberries. I do not like black people.

For starters, I'd like to point out that both statements are generalities and both statements are false.
Strawberries are one of my favorite fruits. But I prefer some over others. For example, my preference for strawberries is that they are large and overly ripe, just short of going bad.

Those are the sweetest best tasting strawberries in my opinion. There are plenty of strawberries that I don't like though. Some are too ripe or have mold on them. Others aren't ripe enough or a rich enough shade of red. Others still host small creatures that eat them from the inside out.

Although I pick and choose which are acceptable to me and which are not, it is completely okay for me to make the blanket statement that I don't like strawberries. The reason is because it is just fine if I decide that strawberries have no place in my life, no value for me.Strawberries are similar enough that evaluating them on the whole as useful or not is okay. I can judge strawberries as worthless and nobody cares.

People, regardless of color are a different situation altogether. First off, if I make a blanket statement about race, gender or religion, you will probably immediately react by stating how you feel about my "prejudice" . Just like with strawberries there are rotten and deliciou... I mean good people of every color. In all actuality, to me, black people are no better or worse than any other race of people. There is much variety, but we are all people. And I love people.

Each person is different enough between their knowledge, experiences, skills, talents, thoughts and feelings, that it is unfair to judge any whole race or social grouping unless we have had experience with every member of that group. A case by case basis is needed to decide the value of a person within your life. 

And that's another thing. Several of my previous discussions here have centered around how we should not judge people, that it isn't our right or our place. You might be feeling by now that I think we should just implicitly trust everyone and let them run rampant all over us because we aren't "allowed" to judge them.

That is quite different from how I really think. A distinction needs to be made here between evaluation and judgement. When I talk about judging a person, what I mean is weighing their overall worth as a person, deciding whether they are "good" or "bad" and worthy of our love and respect or not. When I talk about evaluating, I mean looking at a person and determining if they have the qualities and skills to fit within a certain niche. Their worth never comes into question, just whether or not they fit certain criterion.

I think an example is in order.  A mildly unstable person who has a habit of pulling out a fist full of knives and juggling them whenever he gets bored is probably not the best person to hire as a babysitter for your three year old. He might be a great fit for the circus though, or anywhere that a high degree of manual dexterity is needed. 

Just because he isn't good for the one thing that you need a person to do, does not mean that he is not good or even spectacular in other areas. We tend to not have the time, nor the inclination to learn enough about a given person to know them intimately enough to ever fairly determine their true value as a person.

Judgement is unfair and wrong because all people have value even if we fail to see it. When we judge a person we deem them useful or useless. When we evaluate a person we deem them useful in this particular circumstance or not useful in this particular circumstance. It is disempowering to ourselves and the people we judge when we do so. Evaluation on the other hand is fair and just and necessary if we are to get by in this world.

Do not judge. But if you must judge, judge fruits. Evaluate people.

Are you on an insane trip?

To start things off, today, I'd like us to play a little game of make-believe. It may seem a little silly, but I promise, it is relevant.

First, let's imagine that you and all of the people close to you in your life decide to take a trip together. Now, there are quite a few of you, so you decide to rent a bus. You agree to take turns driving so nobody gets too fatigued to enjoy the journey.

You handle all of the normal life complications like time off and house sitting and all that. You get packed up and start away on this wondrous journey. Everyone is all excited to be going on vacation and there is this huge air of anticipation for all of the fun you are going to have.

At first things seem to be going great. People are getting along together and everyone is having fun. Then you notice something is wrong, but at first you can't quite put your finger on what it is. So, you decide to observe what happens and see if you can figure out what is wrong. After foregoing sleep for a couple of days you finally discover the problem.

You notice some differences in the habits and patterns of the drivers as each one takes their turn. Some are using a road map and others just seem to be taking random turns as if they have no idea where they are going. That doesn't seem to make any sense so you start to pay even closer attention to what is happening.

Each driver, when it is his or her turn, sets off in a completely different direction than the one before. You catch a glimpse at some of the maps and see that one driver is heading to Tijuana, Mexico and another to Las Vegas, Nevada. Two others are going to Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Buffalo, New York.

What would happen at this point? What would you do?

By now, I am sure your logical mind is screaming at the lunacy involved in all this and declaring that this would never ever happen in real life. People would never go on a journey like this without agreeing on their destination or destinations ahead of time. With any large group of people surely more planning would go into the trip to ensure it was actually possible to get where you were going.

That certainly sounds reasonable. Yet, I submit to you this question. Isn't life a journey? Isn't life a journey that you take with all of your friends and loved ones? And aren't most of our lives run pretty much exactly like this insane example?

How much time have you spent planning out where you are going and how you are going to get there? Are your friends and family aware of the direction you are travelling in? It really doesn't matter how much planning you do, if those around you have their own mutually exclusive plans. You will never get anywhere that way because you can't lead every minute of every day. And when it is some other person's turn to lead, they are going to go in their own direction if you don't have a previously agreed upon course to follow.

Essentially, there are three main choices available in life. Go it alone. Be lonely but have total control on your direction and velocity. Endure the insanity above. Or take the time to involve those that you care about in coming up with a plan that enables all of you to move together in the same direction.

Which sounds like a better choice for your life?

Choose now. Be a Sleeper or one of the Awakened.

Sleepers. Zombies. Sheep. The Uninitiated. Average people. There are lots of creative names that "Awakened", somewhat enlightened individuals tend to apply to those who have not yet made the decision to take command and control of their lives. But, regardless of the moniker chosen, the reference is to a person or people who are not really living.

The world is filled with people just trying to survive. They have their 9-5 jobs, their evening routine of dinner and television/spending time with the kids and then heading off to bed to start it all over in the morning.

Surviving is just getting by, still being above ground when the sun comes up the next day. Living is about so much more, like enjoying what you have, planning for what you want and then actually getting it.

What really separates the survivors from the living? Simply put, it's awareness and willingness. Both the Awakened and Sleepers are often unhappy with their lives. The difference is, the Sleeper either doesn't know or doesn't care that it is within their power to change their life for the better. The sleeper will complain about his or her life, but will do nothing to change it.

An Awakened soul is one that is conscious of the fact that they are in the driver's seat. They have accepted that they can and are willing to steer their life in whatever direction they want.

The first step is observation. Both types of people realize that their lives follow certain routines and patterns. The Sleeper is comfortable(even if unhappy) with getting by on autopilot, letting whatever happens happen and knowing that each day will be much like the one before. The Awakened, however, looks for those patterns and routines in life, determines how they feel about each thing that happens and then decides to modify their behavior so as to get different results. They keep experimenting and changing things until their lives are exactly the way they want them to be.

Sleepers suffer and complain. The Awakened forge powerfully positive happy lives. Sleepers are losers. The Awakened are winners even before they start to win.

The Awakened soul is an adventurer that leaves the village, always looking to discover something newer or better than what they already have. The Sleeper looks no farther than what is outside their front door.

The Sleeper blames everyone but themselves. The Awakened all know that they are responsible in one way or another for everything that happens in their life.

The Sleeper gets by but is guaranteed to have a mediocre life. The Awakened are the only ones throughout history that have ever accomplished anything of note. Every inventor, explorer, athlete, celebrity, musician, politician or successful person in any position has made conscious choices about their life that a Sleeper is incapable of making, until they make the one choice that matters. To wake up and start steering the bus.

If you had a choice, and you do, which would you choose to be? Would you rather be the person that is just barely scraping by, unhappy and looking forward to a few more decades of unhappiness before kicking the bucket? Or would you rather be someone doing something about the things they don't like and forging the kind of future that you do want?

It's up to you.

Do me a favor? Fix the world.

It is generally agreed upon that the world's overall state of being could use some improvement. Just as the world is filled with people, it is filled with problems.

If there were a magick wand that could be waved to fix all the troubles that would be just great wouldn't it? But as we all know, such a thing is probably not going to happen.

Have you ever walked into a place, a bedroom, an office, or the recent site of an explosion and seen just chaos and confusion, with things strewn about everywhere? You may think to yourself, how is this ever going to be cleaned up. How does one go about making this place fit to be seen by others, or ever even used for its original intended purpose?

While you are taking it all in as one whole thing the task of maintenance and repair seems impossible. Your brain just wants to shrivel up and hide. There is too much going on all at once.

With all of the wars, famine, corrupt politics, piracy, racial prejudice and a seeming limitless list of other "fun" things going on in the world, it seems that "cleaning up" our world is an impossible task.

But what is it that our world shares with countries, that countries share with states, states share with cities and cities share with homes? What is the common denominator in all of them?

That's right. People. Everything that is right or wrong with the world can be said to be the work or fault of people. If the world is to change in any positive way, it requires the people living within it to change.

So what I want you to do, right now, is to get up from where ever it is that you happen to be reading this and go out and change every person in the world. Go on. Go do it. Right now!

What's that you say? It's too big of a task? I must be insane?

Well maybe, but I talk about that in a previous post.

Now with that super messy area we discussed earlier, the only way to get things done is to break up the task of cleaning it into a series of lesser tasks, each on a smaller scale than cleaning the whole room or area.

The world is the same way. The task of changing the world for the better must be scaled down into smaller tasks and worked on one area at a time. Each person only has a limited amount of influence that they use to get people to think and do as they say. Most people do not influence others on a global or even country wide scale. Even within a single city very few people have the influence to get everyone within its limits to do things their way. But a single person can and should hold absolute sway over what they themselves think and do.

The best thing you personally can do, to change the world, is to change yourself. Become the person that you think epitomizes the traits that our world should have. Once you have become that person or once you are well on your way to becoming that person, encourage others in your home to do the same.

Then use your home as model for other homes in your community. Show how you manage to handle and conquer many of the problems that exist within the world and why they are not an issue in your scaled down world. Gradual expansion can and should occur. Over time the influence of your way of being will grow. More and more people will see through experience that your way is a better way and they will begin to follow it.

Just as with that messy room, when there are two or three people with a million tasks it takes forever. But when there are a million people with a million tasks, the work is quickly done.

What is really real?

People go through their lives interacting with one another and calling each other out for one reason or another. This thing was good or that person was bad. All are convinced that they know the truth of what did or didn't happen and that they are right and others are wrong.

There is all this stuff that goes on in a person's head. Thoughts, feelings and emotions. Judgements on our experiences. Beliefs on how a thing should have happened. There is the spinning of the tale to make us look like the hero, or the victim.

None of that stuff is real. It is all what we make up about what happened. Everything that happens inside our head is imaginary, literally created from our imagination. Even our interpretation of what happens is not real.

Only what happens in the world, outside of our mind, is real. Our understanding of it is not real and neither is our memory or feelings based on it.

Any given thing is neither good nor bad. It is simply a thing. What is is. It is what you make up about that thing that is either good or bad. You personally, subconsciously, apply a value judgement tag to each thing that you see, think, hear or feel. Then you use thousands of these tags together to make up a framework about how life should or should not be. Once this has been done you compare your life with the way life "should" be and become either happy or discontented with things based on how closely things match your vision of what should be.

What you think remember or feel about your neighbor's dog is not actually the reality of the dog. It is only what you think remember or feel. The dog is the dog. Just as your value judgement of a person is not the person. Is is merely your judgement. And it is completely unfair to hold either a dog or any person to your feeling,thought, belief or memory of them.

We are not our neighbor's dog so we cannot truly know it. Our experience of the dog limits our understanding of it. With greater experience we can make more accurate predictions about how it will behave in a given circumstance, but never with absolute certainty. And just as we are not the dog, we are not any other person but ourselves. We cannot know or even properly understand any other being.

Nearly everything that we think, feel, and remember is, to some degree, incorrect. Because these things are based on our interpretation of what we experience.

Everything that we think, feel and remember is made up. It is something that we made up, based on something that happened in the real world. Everything is a story. It is all part of our story. The tale of who and what we are. The filter that we choose to apply to everything that we experience determines whether a thing is good or bad. Let me say that again. We choose the filter. It is a choice.

If this is so why not make your story beautiful and positive instead of negative and nightmarish?

Delete the first impression

What is it about first impressions? They are the tool most commonly used to judge the overall worth of a person. We tend to meet a person and then based on a brief interlude, one where the other person might not even speak, we decide where that person would fit within our life, if at all. How does it happen?

We look at such things as facial expressions, clothing and fashion choices, hair style, body posture, attitude and overall demeanor. If they do speak, we judge their elocution, volume, vocal tone, pitch, accent, grammar, connotation and detonation as well as the content of what they say and how they say it.

All of those things are compared, weighed and measured, against all of the other people we have ever met or heard about. Each of those factors gets set up in our mind as either a positive or a negative and some weigh more heavily than others. We remember experiences with other people that have had similar traits.

Then we commit a crime. Or at least I think it is one. We tend to decide after comparing that person to memories that we have whether or not that person has any value within our life. This is both unfair and harsh.

First of all every person who is not criminally insane has value and can add positively to your life if you are willing to take the time to find out how. Second, have you ever heard the saying don't judge a book by it's cover?

Isn't that exactly what a first impression is? It is just the outside skin of the onion, the very top layer. Often, the facade that people show is nothing like who they really are inside.

Have you ever seen a poster for a movie and seen something about the poster that made you excited to see the movie, but when you actually took the time to see it you were disappointed? The poster was your first impression, seeing the movie was you taking the time to find out the truth.

Or how about pictures? I am sure you've seen pics of a guy or girl who was all dressed up and rocking the night club scene and you think wow they are really something. But when you meet them in person it is often a totally different story.

A first impression works the same way. It is simply a snapshot of that person's life, one single instant, whether it's a couple of minutes or even hours. People have extremes in both directions, good and bad days. It is not one single encounter that really tells you what a person is about. And often, many of the things that you will assume to be true about a person based on that first impression are actually false.

None of us are really qualified to judge the value of another person. We can decide based on their overall traits whether or not we want them to be a part of our life. But it is not something that should be done based on a snapshot, unless the person is obviously violent to themselves or others around them. Each person should be given several chances as we build our database of information about a person and then test that information for accuracy.

Take all of that information that you get from the first impression and set it all aside as a whole stack of maybes. Then we get to ask questions to see if the things that we think are true. Usually some of what we think will be true and some will not. Don't discard information just because it does not match what you originally thought about the person. Modify your beliefs about them based on whatever turns out to be true.

After all, if you made a non favorable first impression, wouldn't you want a chance to clarify the things that went wrong and make up for it? You should give others the same opportunity.

Philosophy, Business and Fast Food

About a decade ago, I read Plato's Republic, which is a rather long story about government and society as a whole. The story is essentially about Socrates discussing what he believes to be the perfect form of government at a dinner party, hosted by someone who opposes his point of view.

In the beginning, unbeknownst to him, the host mentions the possibility of an "accident" happening to Socrates. Gradually as the story goes on each person at the dinner party begins to agree with the logic of the philosophy being used. They are led one by one from their prejudiced viewpoints over to his way of thinking.

Socrates relates in his opinion, all of the things that must be necessary in order to have the perfect form of government and how it could never really last for any length of time. This is because it would have to be a caste based society where people were not equals and it could not be possible to ever change from one caste to another. People in the differing levels would have different amounts of creature comforts, some having little or none. Nobody would ever volunteer to live their whole lives in the lower levels of this system, especially with no hope of it ever getting better.

He goes on to say, however, that the same thoughts and ideas that go into making the perfect way to rule a city, would work perfectly fine for a man to rule himself. So while the perfect form of governing the masses cannot exist, the perfect way to rule oneself does.

Yesterday, I was talking about how countries are like large businesses and I was thinking that nearly every business has trouble with the way it is run. I eat out a lot so when thinking of business, my mind quite often turns to fast food chains. I like to find evidence to support or detract from whatever theory I am currently working on. Can a government(a business) truly not be run by the same set of rules that a man could use to perfectly govern  himself?

A list started to form in my mind of all the large chains that I have eaten at over the years. McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King, Taco Bell,KFC, Dunkin' Donuts,Subway, Charlie's Steakery and Miami Subs just to name a few.  And at every single one of them, I have had at least one mediocre to disastrous experience.

Owners and managers do everything they can to make their restaurant as pleasant and appealing as possible. They want your dining experience to be the best it can possibly be, so that you will continue to give them your patronage. The idea is that the employees are bright, shiny, smiling people that practically exist just to serve you and your dining needs.

But, at every single one of those places I have at one point or another encountered a person who just did not get it. Somehow the manager had failed to govern them properly. My appearance in their place of work, was apparently all that needed to happen to ruin their day. I made them suffer just by showing up. And they decided to do as little work as possible in an effort to get me to go away, so that they could go back to doing whatever it was they were doing before I arrived. 

And then an exception occurred to me. I am not clear if it is the exception that proves or disproves the rule in this case though. Every single Chik-fil-A that I have every been to has been super clean. I have never seen a frown, or even a neutral face on any of the employees. They are all bright, shiny, happy people.

Maybe it's drugs. Maybe they pay $40 an hour. Maybe they all have huge orgies in the back room whenever it's not busy. I don't know what it is. But every experience I've had there has been great. The food is good quality. The waiting is short even when the lines are super long. The employees are happy to be doing what they are doing and it shows. You ARE doing them a favor when you come up and order your food. If it wasn't for customers, they wouldn't be in business. Why are they the only chain restaurant in creation that acts that way?

How many of the "rules" in Plato's Republic are actually being followed by the management of this one company? Probably none of them word for word. But, I wouldn't be surprised if the spirit were there in many of the company policies.

We know someone that used to manage one, perhaps I will go and ask him

Is buying foreign goods harmful to our country?

There are a great deal of patriotic Americans that believe that we should always buy American products and that going anywhere else to get our goods and services feeds the overall downfall of our country. Many of those people feel we should close our borders and not do business with anyone outside of our country. While the hearts of these people are generally in the right place, their viewpoint is a bit shortsighted.

Our country, in fact any country, is really like a single enormous business with many little subsidiaries. The purpose of any business is to make money. Often a business can not produce all of the raw materials that it needs to make a finished product.

In such a case the business needs to seek outside sources for those materials. Countries operate the same way. Buying raw materials from one country at a low price and selling the finished product, at a premium, to any other country or even back to the same one that sold us the raw materials helps to ensure our financial success.

 Also, in any closed economy, that is one where you do not do business with others outside of a given area, there is only so much room for improvement. If there is no money coming into the economy it can only grow so far.

One might argue that as long as money can be printed the economy can grow. And that is true, up until a certain point. Every printed form of money is backed by a physical thing of which there is only a certain amount of. The collective amount of every dollar printed can not equal more in value than the physical amount of the thing backing it. Once that physical limit has been reached however, the value of each dollar printed actually decreases.

But, the currencies of each country are based on different physical things and differing amounts of those things. Trading with other countries allows for a larger total amount that we could have within our borders as part of our economy. It is actually better for our economy to have foreigners buy from us than it is for us to buy our own goods.

Still don't see it? Think of it this way. Let's say the world only has ten countries in it. And each country has ten people within it. If each person has 100 dollars, then the total amount of money available in each country is one thousand dollars.

As long as each country has a closed economy and no way of producing more money, no country can ever have more than one thousand dollars. No matter how good our technology gets or how efficient our methods become we will reach a stagnation point.

But if we buy raw materials from one country for a dollar and it costs us another dollar to turn those raw materials into something that we then sell to another country for five dollars, we have brought three extra dollars into our economy. That may not seem like much but when it happens dozens or even hundreds of times per day it certainly does add up quickly.

With an open world economy, as long as we get what we need from other countries at a competitive price and produce a good quality final product, we will continue to get wealthier and wealthier.

So you see, we actually need other countries to both sell us goods and to buy the goods and services that we have to offer in order to continue to be able to make improvements within our own country. Foreign trade, as long as it is handled correctly, is a necessity for our continued growth.

Pay it Forward

It seems kind of sad to me that when most people think of  Haley Joel Osment they really only remember this young kid saying "I see dead people" Don't get me wrong. The Sixth Sense was a great movie that I enjoyed very much. The twist at the end even kind of surprised me.

But that actor played another role just a year later that was much more impactful and inspiring. This second movie only did a fraction as well even though it had a much more more powerful message. In Pay It Forward, Haley Joel Osment plays Trevor McKinney, a young middle school student. His teacher, played by Kevin Spacey, challenges his class to come up with and put into action a plan that will change the world for the better.

His classmates each come up with their own ideas, donating money to charities and starting food drives and things like that but nothing out of the ordinary. It seems like it might be an impossible task. After all if you were eleven years old and your teacher asked you to change the world, what would you do or say?

Unlike his classmates, Trevor actually comes up with something that has has the potential to change the world. He puts the plan in motion and throughout the duration of the movie, in just a few short days, the lives of hundreds if not thousands of individuals, living in his hometown of Las Vegas, are made better by his idea. The film does not go on for long enough to determine if "world" change occurs but he certainly does make an impact on his community.

What was this idea? He called it "paying it forward". Trevor decides to do a favor for three people. Instead of letting them pay him back, he then asks each of them to "pay the favor forward" by doing favors for three other people. Each of those people is then asked to do the same until it creates an ever expanding tree of good deeds.The one other rule is that the favor must be something that the receiver of the favor can not do for themselves.

Can you see how truly powerful that idea is? The way our world typically runs is every man for himself. People are often only willing to do things for other people for either an immediate reward or immediate payback of whatever favor they do. Often, people in need never get any help because they can not do anything for the person offering them the assistance.

But, just about everyone knows at least three people that there is some way they could help out if only someone could help them out of their own rut. Imagine how different things would be if every time someone did a favor for anyone that person paid it forward, to someone else truly in need. I spent a lot of time thinking and wasn't able to come up with a better way of changing the world. Whenever possible, I don't let others pay me back when I do something for them. I tell them to pay it forward.

 What would you have done if you had been in Trevor's class? Do you have an idea that will change the world. And if so what stops you from implementing it?

Do not take my word for it.

After over six months of sharing my life lessons with you, it occurs to me to mention something that should have been posted on day one or two. I urge you not to believe a single word that I say. Does that sound insane?  Perhaps some explanation is in order.

Most of the posts in this blog are an accumulation of literally thousands of hours of research and experimentation on how to live a happy life. It is the skills and ideas that have taken me from an angst ridden frustrated angry person to one who is happy, enjoys life overall and has a great sense of inner peace. I have looked at hundreds of problems from countless different angles and whittled down the massive numbers of potential solutions until I have found the one or ones that will work the best.

After seeing that my life works for me and that I am happy, many other people take what I say on faith, without testing it. This is foolish and to some degree saddens me. Still confused?

The way that I do the things that I do, work for me. There is no other person on earth that I can ever understand or know as well as I know myself. When I am attempting to solve a problem, generally, I am looking for solutions that work the best, for me. The only person who has all of my past life experiences is me. The only person with my specific mental condition is me. The only person with my memories, thoughts and emotions is me.

Changing a simple variable in an equation usually changes the outcome. Life, not being simple and black and white, throws curve balls into every situation. When it comes to solving real world problems often changing a single variable adds or removes other variables, making the equation an entirely different one, with different options and possibilities to consider.

Just because something is true for me, or works for me, or some other person that has decided to copy that aspect of my life, does not mean it will be true, or will work for you. When I say what I think is best, I am telling you what has worked for me and other people who have attempted it.

It is not in any way my intention to tell you that my solution will work for you. I am merely suggesting that you may want to look at an example that has proven effective in a similar situation. You may want to attempt to follow my way to the letter, or you may want to modify it to fit your specific circumstance.

But do not take what I say on faith. Do not just blindly accept it as true. Realize that it is my experience that causes me to say that one way is better than another. However, I am not perfect in any way. And I have not had every experience possible, not by a long shot. A different experience may show you a better way. Or my way may not fit your situation at all.

If there is an area where I am successful and you are not, there is probably something that I know about that particular thing that you do do not. Though, that does not necessarily mean that what I do in that area will work for you. Feel free to use my knowledge and experience to make finding your own solutions shorter and easier. But test what I say at every opportunity. Look for places where my way works and look for places where it does not.

Find out what works for you and what does not. Implement what does and discard what does not.