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.