Why am I always sharing someone elses work?

By now, you may have noticed that a lot of the things that I tend to talk about are direct quotes from movies, books or TV or are things that I think about those things. You may be wondering why. Don't I have any original thoughts? Can't I come up with my own ideas?

Wise King Solomon said there is nothing new under the sun. As far as inventions and creature comforts i disagree. Science is coming up with new things that we never had before all the time. But when it comes to traditions and philosophy, you know, what we think, how we think it and how we choose to run our lives, he was right on the money.

Right and wrong. Morals and ethics. Ways that one can behave. There are millions of them and they don't change over time. All there is is all there ever was or ever will be. Although it may not seem like it sometimes, all things are reflections of other things. And in every little thing is at least one lesson we can learn about life. It may be how to improve ourselves or our lives or things we can suggest to others, but everything no matter how small is important.

When I was in school, I was never a big fan of history because I didn't care about what happened in the past. I just cared about my future. I learned with time that the events of the past are important to know, if we don't want to be doomed to repeat them. It still isn't really important to me exactly when certain events happened just that I have a general idea of which happened before what and what caused those events. Knowing what happened isn't important if you don't know why it happened.

The world is full of a great many bad things such as, ignorance, hate, depression, angst, pain, war, terror, destruction, disease, famine and starvation to name a few. It is not all that hard to get swallowed up by the negatives and washed away into that sea of madness.

I know that focusing on the bad leads down that long dark spiral and that it is a lot harder to climb back out than it is to just keep moving up from where I am. So I look for tools of harmony and balance in everything I do. I am constantly on the look out for some new way to do things that is better than what I have done before. I endeavor to learn and experience and grow. And because it is what I am looking for, it is what I find. Everywhere all around me I find examples of how to live better and do better. Most importantly I learn what does and doesn't work in safe environments.

From role-playing games I get to create characters that have some of the same impulses that I do and see how those impulses play out without the harsh consequences of the real world. I get to be people that I might have been if I had made different life choices.  In ccg's I get to learn more about  strategy and the psychology behind meta-gaming as well as politics and social dynamics.

Through  books, movies, comics, blog posts and TV I get to see things from other people's perspectives. I get to see into the minds of the writers to understand the way they think as well as the way their characters think. I get to put myself into the shoes of each character and figure out what I would do in their situations and see how it differs from what the writer has them do or what the writer says.. I can reflect on the differences and learn why there are discrepancies between our points of view. I learn new ways to see old things or better ways of describing things that I have always said and done.

The world is not just a place of darkness. It is a place of light as well.There are just as many positive things as there are negative. Look for the love and the light and you will find it.

I believe that each person should live their life by example. What this means is that you should say and do the things that you believe people should say and do.  So when I quote someone else or share with you my thoughts on something that someone else has said or done these are things that I have taken into my life and made my own. I am suggesting that you do the same, but only if you think those things will work for you also.

I think it should be called the dis comfort zone

While growing up, we learn things about the world, things that help shape who and what we are. We have all these different experiences with relationships and environments and based on those experiences we make decisions about what is and is not possible, about what can and cannot be done.

After getting burned a few times by life, our lives begin to fall into a certain pattern. A general routine gets formed and from that point on we pretty much blindly follow the pattern day in and day out for the rest of our lives.

That pattern is called our comfort zone and it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks there is to our growth as a person. It is called our comfort zone, even thought it is not necessarily a place we enjoy being, because it is what we are used to. It is familiar, comfortable. In our comfort zone life still happens and things are somewhat random, just in a way that we have control of.

Our comfort zone includes all of our beliefs, traditions and habits. Once we learn something new and accept it into our way of being, it becomes part of our comfort zone. And sadly once that happens our brains pretty much turn off and we live on auto-pilot. We don't think about that thing anymore. It just is.

The problem with this way of being is, life is dynamic. Things are constantly changing. What was true one minute may not be in another. In order to be as successful as we possibly can, in order to get as much out of life as possible, we need to constantly be testing our boundaries, checking for new ideas and testing to see whether old ones are still valid. There is nothing wrong with tradition or routine. What is wrong is blindly following without making sure that what was true once is true still.

We make snap decisions based on environment and negative reinforcement all the time that are true in that moment or that circumstance but not true overall in life. And it hurts us, in ways that we often do not realize.

 For example after a string of relationship rejections we might decide that there is nobody out there looking for someone like us. The truth was that those particular people were not looking for someone like us. But we decide to give up on being in a relationship based on those examples. There are billions of people on this planet. Deciding after ten, a few hundred, or even a few thousand rejections that there is no one out there for us is just stupid.

An experiment was done where a group of college students were assembled in a room. They were told they could leave whenever they liked. Immediately one of them tested the door and found it locked.

A few minutes later loud unpleasant music began to play. This was followed up by the lights flickering on and off intermittently. Then gradually all kinds of horrifying discordant sounds were added.

Several hours later all of the students were still sitting there in the room. After the experiment was over they found out that the door had only been locked for the first five minutes.

The one student had checked the door, found it locked and shared that information with everyone else who from that time on just accepted the "fact" that they were locked in even though it wasn't true.

They all suffered for hours just because of one thing that they made part of their comfort zone.

You might say if you were in that circumstance you would make a different choice, and perhaps you would, but we all make thousands of similar blunders throughout our lifetime.

How can this be avoided though? Get out of your comfort zone. Test the boundaries.Don't accept anything as permanently true. There is no need to be belligerent or mean spirited, but always be inquisitive. Find out why a thing is the way that it is, how long it's been that way and whether or not it has ever been different.

Be open to change. Either because things actually have changed or because new information causes you to find that things you thought were true were not.

Puzzles

Have you ever seen someone that you know struggling with an obstacle or challenge that you see a very clear simple solution to? Sometimes you can share your solution and just like that the problem is handled and that person can use that solution to assist them in solving future problems. But more often than not that is not the case. What normally happens is that the other person argues and tells you all the reasons why they feel that solution is not a good one. Why is this?

We all have different experiences during the course of our lives that make us who we are. Based on our inherent talents, our skills, memories and things that we have learned we all solve problems in different ways. Our methods of problem solving come from a variety of things that include both nature and nurture, what we have learned from and about ourselves and from and about our environments. Since none of us have exactly the same experiences in life we do not see things the same way.

Often, even if there is only one solution to a problem there are many ways of getting to that solution. As much as we would like to just give our friends and loved ones the answers to all their problems, it simply is not feasible. Even if you could just give people the answers, it has been proven many times that people tend to place much more value upon something which they have earned than something which they were given.

What you can do however is to learn enough about the people you care about to have an understanding of how they make decisions and then work backwards from your solution, down their line of reasoning to where they are currently then lead them step by step to the solution. This is not always an easy thing to do, but if you find yourself capable of doing it stands the highest chance of them seeing your solution as the right one for them.

Another more commonly chosen way is to describe yourself in their situation. Explain what is was like when you had the same challenge to overcome. Empathize with the issues that problem created. Discuss how you felt and what you were thinking at the time. Then logically walk them down the path you chose showing them how each step you took led to the next step until eventually the issue resolved itself. This method will only work if the other person is open to learning from your experience.

Sometimes a person will prove to be exceptionally stubborn and insist on solving the problem with no outside influence.  You need to and get to accept the fact that some people want things to be hard. Some people want to suffer as part of the process of overcoming difficult circumstances and nothing you can say or do will change this fact. As difficult as it may be, in that case all you can do is stand back and wish them luck.

Personally I would rather learn from others as much as possible.  I want my life to be simple and fun. So when I see other people go through things that I have difficulty with, I learn as much as possible from their solutions. It is important to note though that just giving someone a solution does not help them grow as a person. It gets them past that obstacle but does not help them if the exact same circumstance does not occur again. The key is to teach one another why the solution works for a particular puzzle because that is what leads to learning how to more effectively solve similar but not identical issues.

Don't give a man a fish, teach him how to fish.

Learning

Have you ever taken a martial art and wondered why it seems like you do the same few moves hundreds if not thousands of times? Or you may have noticed that in role-playing games, either computer or pen and paper, a lot of what you do is the same thing over and over? Travel to point A. Fight just about everything you encounter. Loot the corpses. Then rinse wash repeat for points B through Z? Or how most songs are a few lines of verse then a chorus and a few more lines of verse and the chorus again. Repeat ad infinitum.  In school grammar and arithmetic are pretty much the same thing year after year from elementary to high school.

Do you know why all those things operate under the same general principle of repetition?
In martial arts the theory is that if you do a thing thousands of times it will become a part of who you are and after awhile you will no longer need to be afraid in dangerous situations. You will be able to protect yourself and those you care about by instinct.

Songs generally have a chorus so that there is a part that will stick in your head and be memorable.
Role-playing games have you follow the same formula over and over to simulate what happens in real life.  No you probably don't travel around in real life brandishing a claymore, slaying tons of monsters and equipping yourself with the items they drop when they die. But you do use the experiences that happen in your life to grow stronger as person just as you do in a role-playing game.

And last but not least you do the same things year after year in school building just a little bit more each time on what you learned last time, because that is how we as people learn, through massive repetition.

That's right all of these things are connected because they tap into how we accept new data into our lives. When we are children we learn to speak a language by hearing countless tens of thousands of conversations going on all around us. We learn the alphabet by being told over and over what each letter is. Once we learn what letters are we learn what words are by seeing the letters of the alphabet shaped into words again and again. And we learn to read by seeing the printed word and being told what words make what sounds repeatedly. We learn through repetition. People that learn faster need less repetition. But very few people ever learn anything all the way through the first time.

Have you ever read a book then had a couple of years go by and then read that same book again and got something completely different out of it? It's not because the book changed in any way. It is because you are not the same person that you were when you read it the first time.

When you find yourself doing some repetitive task that you think is boring and you just do not see the point, instead of tuning out, try asking yourself, what could I possibly learn or be learning from this experience?