A similar idea comes from buddhism: Your goal in life is to reach enlightenment by dissolving all your karmas. Karmas not being some future things as many in the west believe, but just like Freud: relics of the past. Every time you acted or reacted to anything you build up new karmas. All those karmas at some point will come back to you – so, in order to diminish your karmas you are supposed to meditate to witness them (notice the thought or sensation in the body) but not react in any way, not even with another thought.

Both these and many other traditions, especially Hinduism but also Islam and Christianity with their believes in a judging god have similar ideas, which all result in just one thing: By your own actions or by outside influences something happened and in order to fix your life (or death) you will have to make sure that it disappears.

So, Freud’s solution is the therapist. But contrary to the depictions in movies and the like, where the therapist asks questions the actual idea is a different one: The therapist is supposed to be like a canvas, on which the patient can project his or her feelings, thoughts, memories and ideas. For that reason he sits out of the patient’s view! – So the patient can e.g. project a trusted person onto him and solve his problems with this help. Also, the therapist is not supposed to say much, only occasionally noting things that the patient might have missed himself (e.g. body language) and supporting and encouraging him in the task to unravel his past.

But there is a cheaper, more flexible and easier way to achieve a similar result. The canvas does not need to be human! Obviously it’s easier if you occasionally can get another person’s perspective on your memories, but writing them down will already enable you to read them again and be your “other perspective” yourself!

Most people think a diary ought to contain notes like “Dear diary, today I ate breakfast, then went shopping, then met…” – but despite maybe helping you to remember what you did all day (which is good memory training!)  there is not much of a purpose in them. That’s why we all laugh about the poor little fellow that feels like noting his every action in a book. But there is another aspect in our lives that we forget far easier: our thoughts. Also, as Heinrich von Kleist noted in an essay titled “Über die allmähliche Verfertigung der Gedanken beim Sprechen” (free pdf, German; “On the gradual development of thoughts in the process of speaking” Wiki abstract, English translation (Amazon)) we often tend to lose our track of thought or don’t think it until the end. He realised that when he was telling his sister (who was uneducated) about his scientific or literary thoughts he would immediately be able to sort them better.

So, I propose a simple concept that helped me a lot in the past: Regularly write down your thoughts. Get a good notebook, e.g. a Moleskine – I prefer squared ones – and put a very slim pen or just the refill of a ballpoint pen inside and always carry it with you, no matter where you go. This for once enables you to always write down random, small thoughts that just came up and evaluate them further when you have time, and also this makes you feel safe! One of my main concerns always was that my notebook contained very private thoughts that would surely harm my reputation if all my friends got to know them. So, not willing to tell these thoughts anybody I wrote them down, carefully labeled with date and time. And as they were never to be seen again by anybody but me, a friend labeled the book “Guantanamo of thoughts“, as the inmates that were originally brought to Guantanamo rarely got out at the time. But, if you always have your book with you you don’t need to be scared – nobody can read it without you being nearby! And, well, you can lock old ones safely away… – so you can be 100% honest and say even those things that you are even scared to acknowledge to yourself (and I bet there are a lot of them for everybody!).

I am very convinced that starting my “thought diary” as I label it was a major contribution to shaping my character in the direction I want. Total honesty and freedom in expression is the only way to really get to your inner core, and I believe there are many things you wouldn’t even tell a therapist! So, use the cheaper, easier, more flexible and maybe even better way to dissolve your karmas, overcome your childhood traumas, avoid eternal punishment or stop the cycle of rebirth or whatever you intend.

You will soon realise, that with your thought diary you discover your true inner self, increase charisma, willpower and inner strength. You feel better, more secure and as negative states of the mind also influence our body, get healthier. I guess that’s worth a shot, huh?

K

P.S.: I really recommend the Moleskine series (that apparently a lot of now-famous persons used), as they are of really good quality and will stay in good shape forever but still “feel” good. Don’t go for cheap as the book will contain your deepest secrets!! My personal favorites are the squared large and the squared “pocket” versions, but you might prefer the ruled large or ruled “pocket” versions. I personally totally mess the blank ones up, so I think you should buy one of the above!

P.P.S.: Check out my twitter-quote-feed and the according amazon store for wisdom (or here)

Related posts:

1. Technique: How to remember EVERY number.

The result: If you want to lose weight you have to focus on two things: 1) control your food intake – no fastfood, sugary or fatty stuff, few meat -but loads of ballasts! 2) avoid elevators and buses/cabs/… – try to walk as much as possible in your normal life.

Read my choice of the most valuable parts below, or the long full source here: TIME: Why exercise won’t make you thin.

Scroll down in my post for links to the original research and further reading!

“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

…

[A study]: The findings were surprising. On average, the women in all the groups, even the control group, lost weight, but the women who exercised — sweating it out with a trainer several days a week for six months — did not lose significantly more weight than the control subjects did. (The control-group women may have lost weight because they were filling out those regular health forms, which may have prompted them to consume fewer doughnuts.) Some of the women in each of the four groups actually gained weight, some more than 10 lb. each.

What’s going on here? Church calls it compensation, but you and I might know it as the lip-licking anticipation of perfectly salted, golden-brown French fries after a hard trip to the gym. Whether because exercise made them hungry or because they wanted to reward themselves (or both), most of the women who exercised ate more than they did before they started the experiment. Or they compensated in another way, by moving around a lot less than usual after they got home.

…

You might think half a muffin over an entire day wouldn’t matter much, particularly if you exercise regularly. After all, doesn’t exercise turn fat to muscle, and doesn’t muscle process excess calories more efficiently than fat does?

Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.

…

Self-Control Is like a Muscle
Many people assume that weight is mostly a matter of willpower — that we can learn both to exercise and to avoid muffins and Gatorade. A few of us can, but evolution did not build us to do this for very long. In 2000 the journal Psychological Bulletin published a paper by psychologists Mark Muraven and Roy Baumeister in which they observed that self-control is like a muscle: it weakens each day after you use it. If you force yourself to jog for an hour, your self-regulatory capacity is proportionately enfeebled. Rather than lunching on a salad, you’ll be more likely to opt for pizza.

…

Gortmaker and Sonneville found in their 18-month study of 538 students that when kids start to exercise, they end up eating more — not just a little more, but an average of 100 calories more than they had just burned.

…

Actually, it’s not clear that vigorous exercise like running carries more benefits than a moderately strenuous activity like walking while carrying groceries. You regularly hear about the benefits of exercise in news stories, but if you read the academic papers on which these stories are based, you frequently see that the research subjects who were studied didn’t clobber themselves on the elliptical machine. A routine example: in June the Association for Psychological Science issued a news release saying that “physical exercise … may indeed preserve or enhance various aspects of cognitive functioning.” But in fact, those who had better cognitive function merely walked more and climbed more stairs. They didn’t even walk faster; walking speed wasn’t correlated with cognitive ability.

There’s also growing evidence that when it comes to preventing certain diseases, losing weight may be more important than improving cardiovascular health.
…
Some research has found that the obese already “exercise” more than most of the rest of us. In May, Dr. Arn Eliasson of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center reported the results of a small study that found that overweight people actually expend significantly more calories every day than people of normal weight — 3,064 vs. 2,080. He isn’t the first researcher to reach this conclusion. As science writer Gary Taubes noted in his 2007 book Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health, “The obese tend to expend more energy than lean people of comparable height, sex, and bone structure, which means their metabolism is typically burning off more calories rather than less.”
In short, it’s what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight. You should exercise to improve your health, but be warned: fiery spurts of vigorous exercise could lead to weight gain.

Mentioned original research that I could find:

• Minnesota Heart Survey
• PLoS One: Changes in Weight, Waist Circumference and Compensatory Responses with Different Doses of Exercise among Sedentary, Overweight Postmenopausal Women
• American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association Guidelines
• Psychological Bulletin: Mark Muraven – Mechanisms of Self-Control Failure: Motivation and Limited Resources
• International Journal of Obesity: K R Sonneville and S L Gortmaker – Total energy intake, adolescent discretionary behaviors and the energy gap
• Gary Taubes: Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health
  

You should also read at least one of these books:

.

Related posts:

1. You can beat food cravings by eating other stuff…?
2. Some self-improvement rules

The problem is that your brain doesn’t know numbers. It just can’t use or understand them! That’s because numbers are abstract symbols, which our brain is unable to represent. So what we have to find is a way to get them into our head – or else there is no way to remember them! (despite with pure repetition. Yak!)

Now, to make numbers more “brain-friendly” many Mnemonic Systems have been devised, the most famous one being the following: The key is to transform numbers into things that mean something for us – words and images! So, first of all there is a simple rule:

Each number is represented by a group of similar consonant-sounds, for english e.g. this list is quite good:

0 – s, z, soft-c – remember as ‘z is first letter of zero’
1 – d, t, th – remember as letters with 1 downstroke
2 – n – remember as having 2 downstrokes
3 – m – has three downstrokes
4 – r – imagine a 4 and an R glued together back-to-back
5 – L – imagine the 5 propped up against a book end (L)
6 – j, sh, soft-ch, dg, soft-g – g is 6 rotated 180 degrees.
7 – k, hard-ch, hard-c, hard-g, ng – imagine K as two 7s
rotated and glued together [Note: I would add "q"!]
8 – f, v – imagine the bottom loop of the 8 as an eFfluent
pipe discharging waste (letter image of F in
alphabet system)
9 – p, b – b as 9 rotated 180 degrees.

from Mindtools – The Major System, Remembering numbers

for German readers I recomend the following

0 – s, z, ß
1 – d, t
2 – n
3 – m
4 – r
5 – L
6 -sch, ch, j, weiches c
7 – k, ck, g, hartes c [hier würde ich auch "q" und "qu" hinzufügen]
8 – f, v, w, ph
9 – p, b

aus Gregor Staub: Mega Memory – Optimales Gedächtnistraining für Privatleben, Schule und Beruf

The technique is now the following: if you have any number, e.g “15″, you translate each individual number (1 and 5) into consonants and then “fill” vowels (and “h” which doesn’t have a number) in to create a word that means something for you. So, for 15 we take D, T or TH AND L – so, we could make words like toll, tall, tell, doll, dull, ideal, …- vowels and h can be anywhere, in front, behind or between all consonants. And most people also ignore double consonants and count them as one, so you just have to search for the right sound (so, “buffer” is not 9884 but 984, but if you want you can change that rule for yourself) and not the right spelling.

The best way is to create non-abstract nouns, means: Such that you can create and visualise it in your head and it will lead you directly to the word. So, for the example 15 I could take for example  “toll” (imagining a toll-booth), “tall” (imagining someone tall, but this might be misleading as you later might think the word was “person”) or “doll” or a long list of other options.

Now, to remember the number associate the picture that represents it, e.g. the doll, with the thing you want to remember the number for, e.g. if you’re on page 15 of a book you can imagine the book with a doll in it, or a doll sitting on it, reading it, you reading the book to a doll, you cuddling the dog while reading, you sitting on a massive doll while reading, … – the more emotional and unusual the picture is the better (so, it makes sense to include e.g. sexual images in your pictures… they just shouldn’t distract you from what you wanted to remember and it might be bad to do that if you include other persons in your pictures because that might bring you some nice Freudian slips…)

Training this technique will incredibly improve your memory for numbers, but also increase your command of language (as you have to find words for the numbers), your creativity (as you have to make sentences or meanings) and your imagination (as you create the picture). This is verified over and over again by many people, so really give it a try!

Now you might wonder what to do with long numbers, e.g. a birthday… let’s take the 24th of december 1981. It depends on how you write it, but for me it would be 19811224. I surely don’t know a word for that! Now there’s three options:

1. The in my opinion best version is to split the number and create a picture, make for example words for 19 (tape), 80 (foot), 12 (dane), 24 (near) and then picture in your head a tape that is wrapped around a foot that belongs to a danish man that is near… death? So, there is a danish guy falling off a cliff with his foot in a role of sticky tape. Now, that’s in your mind! If you know the code above (sorry, you have to learn the coding – but there’s memory hooks for each, and you can just put a small note in your wallet!) you will have instantly know which words were important (if you choose wrong ones it “looks odd” to you) and can easily remember the whole thing.
2. Or you can try to create a sentence with only the numbers (which is easier if you do it in the first place with the number, but I can’t find a good one for the number above – that’s why I prefer version 1!) – either you take the number and make a sentence (”The BuFfeT DoNe NouRishing” if you know it’s a bday you can easily add consonants at the end or you can even make it a rule for yourself to ignore common endings as “ish”, “ing”, …) or you can decide to ignor filling words like “is” which will make sentences much easier.
3. Or finally you can create a sentence and take each consonant as the beginning of a new word. So, you create a sentence like The “Bread For The Dead iN Normal Rations” (remember, the more unusual, the more memorable! Our mind is crazy for new (=unusual) stimuli.)

Any questions or comments? Let me know! And you should definitely try it, at least for a week – I promise you this technique will make your whole life a lot easier! For me, a person who forgets nearly everything it works like a charm, and I can only recommend it! (I promise you even your money back, but since you didn’t pay any to read this that won’t be too much! – and obviously I won’t pay for your buying books…)

Oh, and since you read till the end, a little bonus: here’s an amazing free tool that I just discovered (via SelfDevelop.info):

2Know is a small tool with extensive dictionaries for English, German and French – you enter a number and it gives you a matching word! This technique has never been easier!

But, still, I recommend to train as much as possible creating the words yourself – this will train your brain. And you don’t always have a laptop with you…

Enjoy your newfound memory.

k

Related posts:

1. From science: Why it’s wrong to reward yourself after you’ve done something that you don’t like.
2. A diary saves you the therapist (and religion)

You crave for certain foods [sugars, ...] because your body needs some other stuff. E.g.: B vitamins are essential to metabolise carbohydrates into glucose. [Glucose is the stuff that your brain needs, so btw., if you do a sugar-free diet you're not starving your body but your brain of the stuff it needs!] So, if you crave for sugary stuff, maybe the thing you’re actually lacking are B vitamins to convert the carbohydrates you eat [bread, pasta] into glucose.

[This could mean that if you eat sugery stuff you're just adding more calories to your most likely already sufficient diet, resulting in weight-gain.] The solution then is to eat more nuts, whole-grain cereals, fruits, leafy green vegetables, rice, eggs, … – because they include the chemicals your metabolism needs to work correctly, instead of the things that you crave for. And, if you keep it up, this then should also prevent you from craving them in the future.

he goes on to talk a bit about antidepressants and PMS.

Quite an interesting idea, that the source of your food cravings is not actual need of the nutrients that you crave for, but a need of other chemicals that would allow your body to make them itself. This might be a bit too simplistic and he doesn’t give any sources, but there is definitely something about it.

I would say that for most food cravings at least one of two psychological imbalances is more important than a physical need: Either eating becomes a habit (e.g. if you have food next to your keyboard you are far more likely to eat) or you eat as a substitute for emotional insufficiencies – for example chocolate activates the same receptors as seeing the person you’re in love with, so you are likely to eat if you want to feel good. Also, sugar gives you a short-time “high” on energy (leveraging your blood sugar levels) so we tend to eat sugary foodstuff when we are in a “down” mood. (As a sitenote: Your body reacts by increasing insulin levels in your blood, resulting in a long down after the short sugar high!).

But, to give Job the credit he deserves: His point is absolutely valid, there is evidence that people eating a balanced diet are usually more healthy, more happy and less likely to be overweight than people with an unbalanced diet consisting mostly of carbohydrates [sugars], fats and processed food. Eat a salad with every meal, and maybe an apple instead of a Snickers – and you’ll feel much better!

Related posts:

1. Exercise won’t help you lose weight.
2. From science: Why it’s wrong to reward yourself after you’ve done something that you don’t like.

2. Use self-imposed word limits.

3. Accept all forms of criticism and learn to grow from it.

4. Read what you’ve written over and over, until you can’t find any more problems.

5. Show what you write to a trusted friend for feedback.

6. Outline. And then write to that outline.

7. Edit, and edit again.

8. Live with passion.

10. Take a break between writing and editing.

13. Write in different genres: blog posts, poems, short stories, essays.

26. Make notes of your (fleeting) brilliant ideas.

36. Write for publication, even if it’s only for the local newsletter or a small blog.

42. Comment on your favorite blogs.

44. Use a journal to sort out your thoughts and feelings.

45. Keep it simple.

56. Designate time to research.

60. Read Zinsser’s “On Writing Well” at least once a year.

66. Deconstruct and analyze books and articles you enjoy.

70. Make a note of ideas for further development before you leave a piece for tomorrow.

72. Take risks – don’t be afraid to shock. You are not who you think you are.

Related posts:

1. A diary saves you the therapist (and religion)
2. Why this project: why would somebody need help to help herself?

*Stop thinking and feeling as if you’re a failure, because you’re not. How can others accept you if YOU can’t accept YOU?

…*When people feel so down and low about themselves, help them move up. Don’t go down with them. They’ll pull you down further and both of you will end up feeling inferior.

*The world is a large room for lessons, not mistakes. Don’t feel stupid and doomed forever just because you failed on a science quiz. There’s always a next time. Make rooms for
self improvement.

*Take things one at a time. You don’t expect black sheep’s to be goody-two-shoes in just a snap of a finger.
Self improvement is a one day at a time process.

…

*Little things mean BIG to other people. Sometimes, we don’t realize that the little things that we do like a pat on the back, saying “hi” or “hello”, greeting someone “good day” or telling Mr. Smith something like “hey, I love your tie!” are simple things that mean so much to other people. When we’re being appreciative about beautiful things around us and other people, we also become beautiful to them.

…

We should always remember that there’s no such thing as ‘over night success’. Its always a wonderful feeling to hold on to the things that you already have now, realizing that those are just one of the things you once wished for. A very nice quote says that “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” We are all here to learn our lessons. Our parents, school teachers, friends, colleagues, officemates, neighbors… they are our teachers. When we open our doors for
self improvement, we increase our chances to head to the road of success.

There’s not too much more, but take a look! Buzzle: Self-Improvement and Success (I realised the article is hundreds of times all over the web, I hope this is the original. If not please let me know.)

Related posts:

1. Why this project: why would somebody need help to help herself?
2. The biggest mistake you can make in life is to wait for opportunities.
3. From science: Why it’s wrong to reward yourself after you’ve done something that you don’t like.

Let’s take the example of learning: Imagine you are a student and have to regularly learn things for a certain subject, e.g. psychology. You will usually work in the same style, e.g. read a book, take notes and reread the notes. Now, for simplicity reasons let’s assume you do that every day for around 30 minutes at the same time and same place (as it is recommended: always learn in the same environment and around the same time, that primes your mind for learning!). And every time while you’re learning you reward yourself after you finished your 30 minutes, because that’s what you’ve been told. Let’s say you eat a piece of chocolate.

This is the wrong approach for two reasons: First the anticipation of the piece of chocolate will make you work more inefficient: You are not focussed on what you’re doing, because you’re not learning for the sake of learning but you learn because you get rewarded for it.

Now, there were many studies that conducted, I will just describe one of them[1]: The citizens in two Swedish villages were told that a new waste disposal facility was planned in their village. The scientists initially asked both villagers of their approval ratings for such a project, which was about equal. Then, in one village the citizens received the information that they would get a compensation if the facility was built in their village. The others were told nothing further despite a thanks for their sacrifice. A week later the citizens were asked again for their approval ratings. In the second village, where no compensation was offered the approval rating increased: the citizens accepted the necessity and felt it was ok that it was in their village. But in the first village, where the people were offered a compensation the approval rating massively decreased, decreasing around 70%. So, those that were offered nothing approved, those that were offered compensation disapproved! The first one felt the necessity and accepted their fate, but those that were offered a compensation felt that something negative would happen to them – why else would they be paid for it?

The lesson is: If you get paid for something you like it less! So, if you reward yourself for working on something the work, that you initially might have liked, suddenly looks like a burden that you need to be compensated for. What might have been fun reading (most people say they want to and like to learn!) So, in the first place, if you know you will be rewarded (and be it by yourself) for your work you less enjoy doing the work, and thus you are a) less likely to do it and b) learn less (as a positive attitude is one of the major factors for retention).

But a second point might be even more important, which does not stress the reward itself, but the timing:

A basic rule for neuroscientists goes as follows:

Neurons that fire together wire together!

That means: if neurons are activated at the same time, especially if that happens a lot, they connect and from then on work together – when one is activated the other fires too! For example naturally humans and apes have different brain areas control different fingers. Now, if two fingers are forced to always move the same and always receive the same stimuli (in the study they were sewn together [2]) the brain areas that controlled them, which were formerly separated, now merged to one area controlling both fingers at the same time.

And that is the case for all action in your brain: What happens together is linked. That is, e.g. if you always do the same actions together (e.g. listen to the same song while reading a certain book) they become associated – this is not just the case for memories – actually the neurons that are responsible for doing certain actions connect if they often are activated together (that is, if you always hear similar music while reading this type of music gets associated with reading and helps you to do so).

So, when you finish your 30 minutes that is a certain stimulus. If you now reward yourself with chocolate when you finished your session the chocolate (which is known to activate “happiness” receptors) you do the following: You reward yourself not for learning, but for stopping! So, in the future, when you keep this habit up, every time you learn you want to finish as fast as possible to get that pleasant feeling that you get only when you stop learning! The more often you do this, the less you enjoy and concentrate on the learning, as you only look forward to the end.

The trick then, if you want to reward yourself at all, is to reward yourself while doing it. E.g., instead of eating chocolate after you finish, eat it while you are still working, for example at minute 10,20 and 25. This way the feel-good effect of the reward will not be associated with finishing, but with the learning itself. That means, in the future you will like and enjoy the learning, not to end learning!

So, even if the first point didn’t convince you completely, remember to never reward yourself for finishing work, but for actually doing it. If you do so, you will maybe feel good for the moment, but the next time you work you will enjoy it less.

So, two points to take home:

1. If possible avoid “bribing yourself” for doing unpleasant things. In general your reward system will make you feel good anyway after something hasslesome is out of the way, so don’t support that further.
2. If you do reward yourself, do it not for finishing something, but for doing it. Also remember that e.g. the happy-effect of chocolate takes a moment to kick in, so leave at least 5 min. between the last reward and the end of your session.

Enjoy your work!

k

Related reading:

Boston Globe: Studies find reward often no motivator

Citations:

[1] The title and date of the study is in my psychology textbook which I don’t have with me right now. I will deliver the link as soon as possible.

[2] S. A. Clark, T. Allard, W. M. Jenkins and M. Merzenich. 198. Receptive fields in the body-surface map in adult cortex defined by temporally correlated inputs. Nature, 332(6163):444-445 and T. Allard, S. A. Clark, W. M. Jenkins and M. Merzenich. 1991. Reorganisation of somatosensory area 3b representations in adult owl monkeys after digital syndactyly. Journal of Neurophysiology, 66(3):1048-1058

Related posts:

1. You can beat food cravings by eating other stuff…?
2. The biggest mistake you can make in life is to wait for opportunities.
3. Technique: How to remember EVERY number.

While both of those definitely are helpful in achieving great things – and are definitely better than to ignore opportunities and don’t let other ideas into your hear – they both still face a dilemma: If you wait for opportunities you still bind you destiny to whatever happens outside of you. You rely on others to create those opportunities (or for yourself to stumble across them). This means: You are not the master of your destiny but a slave of everybody and everything around you!

Although there are many “success stories” out there that show how a life can be changed by a single instant, a single accidental event, most people’s lives are determined by their own choices and decisions. By their own path. Now, if you take the same path every day, if you do the same things with the same people everyday, how high are the chances that suddenly s great opportunity will pop up somewhere in your usual plan, if there was none before? Pretty dim!

There was a study by a US business school, tracking a whole bunch of people in a smaller city [Sorry, I forgot the source, I will deliver it. It was mentioned by Keith Ferrazzi in his book.] The scientists looked asked a bigger sample of them how they found their jobs. As it turned out, the majority of people did not get their jobs by applying to companies that advertised their opportunities (”looked for opportunities”), but they found them via their network – and most of those in turn found them not through their closest friends but through people that they meet only occasionally. The point being: The more people you know, the higher the chance that one of those will provide you with a great opportunity. If you only have a small circle of friends the chance that one of them will be the one with the opportunity is small. – So, to create more opportunities for yourself, e.g. to find a good job (and everything else!), the most important thing is not to scan the newspapers for advertisements, but to have many friends that you can ask if they can help! Making friends = creating opportunities! (and it’s fun!) This sounds a bit simple, but does being simple make it wrong? Think about the steps you took in your life and how many times of those it was some personal connection that helped you ahead and not just your CV.

And this is not just the case for people and jobs – this is valid for any aspect in life, be it love, vacation, projects, the book you always wanted to write – all of them: If you rely on an outside source to give you the setting and start the you will never get what you want. Maybe you get something, but you will never get all those things that you could have gotten if you had looked for yourself! Do you wait until you see the right advertisement to decide where you go for your holidays? No, you actively search for something that you want! And that’s then why you get it! You should do the same with every aspect in your life:

Whenever and wherever you are, it is important to be aware of what you want and to know at least partly what you have to do to get it. If you want to become a pilot you surely have to get a pilot license. Now, is it better to wait for somebody to offer it to you on the corner near Starbucks, or will you need to look for yourself and find a school, complete a course, pass a test, …? We all know this intellectually:

If I want to get something I have to do something for it. Nothing comes for free.

But the sad thing is that we don’t act on it. We know it, but we still stay passive and wait for others to offer us our the life of our dreams – but we know that will never happen! We still drift through our lives without heading for our goal, without looking for opportunities! You want to go into politics? Join a party! You want to find a girl-/boyfriend? Go out and meet people! – Or would you prefer your parents selecting one for you…?

So, never in your life wait for opportunities! If they come, be aware and see and grab them as they come up – but, most opportunities want to be sought out, want to be fought for. Don’t wait for them – go out, meet people, start a project, volunteer, read books, take courses,… If you do that with an open mind: opportunities will come to you. You will get more of them than you ever imagined.

And, to get you started: Right now, while reading this – if you even just agree with me in the slightest, take a sticky note and write on it a short goal for the next day, be it meeting new people, starting the first page of your book or just calling an old friend that you haven’t spoken to in two years. Write it down – now! And now stick the note somewhere where it will remind you the whole day tomorrow what you committed to. Congratulations, you are on the way to greatness!

Go and grab your life!

Bliss & happiness to you,

k

Related posts:

1. Why this project: why would somebody need help to help herself?
2. From science: Why it’s wrong to reward yourself after you’ve done something that you don’t like.
3. A diary saves you the therapist (and religion)

Now you might be wondering what it is. To put it simple: A page devoted to the many things that are usually labeled “self-help” or “self-improvement“. There are as many areas that I could mention now as there are flaws that people tend to see in themselves and others, and since that is a near-endless list I won’t even bother you with it here, I will introduce topics as I blog along!

So why am I, and should you (!) be interested in something like “self-improvement”? To again make it overly simplistic: Because it is a common thing that people don’t like themselves. Actually, there are even people (scientists?!) who claim that nobody actually likes him- or herself. That’s for a reason I’d like to show you: Everybody, wherever and whenever in life, wears a mask and tries to show off all those things that she* thinks others expect of her. We could label this “politeness” (e.g. when once  again you pretend that you know that person that just greeted you with your name…) or self-protection or whatever. But fact is: Everybody wears a mask for most of the (non-alone) time.

So, since everybody does it, there is an interesting effect: In turn, everybody only sees people that she thinks are better than her. Those people are nicer, look better, have better memory, use their time wisely, can play better golf or soccer, have more friends, earn more money, … – well, at least they seem to be.

The result?

1. Everybody wears a mask, making her feel false and insufficient for not having those abilities and social status that she tends to have
2. Everybody also always encounter people that somehow seem to be better or better off in so many things, making her feel worse than them

You can guess what I’m heading for: Social encounters en masse can hit you hard and make you feel bad. This is not to say that social encounters are bad, in the opposite, they are what defines us and life without them wouldn’t be worth living! But the way it is, every time you go out there and start comparing yourself (which seems to be instinctive) you realise the things you are lacking instead of those that you have. It’s seldom that someone acknowledges your abilities, but far more you internally see somebody else’s ability and skills and success and happiness and you want to have the same.

So, we already have quite a few lessons:

1. Others are not always as good/sexy/successfull/… as they seem
2. You are worth far more than you think, it’s just that you just look more at your ostensible lacks and failures than all your real abilities and successes.
3. Whenever you note somebody’s talents and successes internally - let them know. That’s not to throw 500 compliments a minute at somebody, but when you notice something exceptional, tell the person with true honesty and appreciation – you “help” them and that will somehow pay back! And you slowly break the cycle of unhappiness.
4. When you lack something you should go and get it.

I think the first three should be pretty self-evident. Number four then is, where this blog kicks in (and billions before it… and even more books).

Whenever at some point you think you lack something that you should have, there is an easy series of question to go through:

1. Can I have it? – if not: Forget about it, don’t worry or curse or whatever. If there’s no way making yourself feel bad for it won’t help! Just forget it.
2. Do I really want it? – often we just think we want something, out of the moment, but on reflection we realise it is something we actually don’t really care about or that might be even bad for us. An example: Most people want to be famous. They want people looking up to them, and money, and photoshoots. But do they really want to have a crowd of 20 reporters and cameras around them 24/7, taking pictures through their windows, stalking their family, scaring friends away, hate rages on the internet, bad rumors about them, their private life in public, not a single quiet minute… It is clear: Many things that we think we want are actually by far not that want-worthy!
3. How do I get it?

If you arrived at number 3 without stopping – then you are in the right spot. Whatever you do from that point on is what I would label “self-help”: You do a course, you read a book, you train something at home, you work out, you change your diet, even changing a relationship – all that is a sort of self-help – you notice a deficit and you take ACTION to change it. You go and do something for yourself – that’s self-help!

Now you know what it is and I might take the guess that you also know that it is something that you should not laugh about or think of as weak or whiny, but that it is something that you, that everybody wants, should do and does on a daily basis. This blog is devoted to giving you the techniques, information and inspiration to make it better.

Why another page? Isn’t there enough out there?

I know there are many blogs and websites on the topic out there, but I always felt a lack of objectivity: Most of the pages that are labeled as self-help or self-improvement (which sounds much nicer by the way!) actually only try to help themselves – to your money. Most sites have a bunch of sometimes useful articles, but most of those have them for just one reason: To get you to the site and buy something that the author has written (like a book) or has an interest in (like affiliate links). So, in the end, it’s just shameless promotion.

I personally hate don’t like searching my way through such pages, but i’ve been doing it for a while – and, well, I think now I have quite a good feeling for them. I read a lot of books on the different topics, even took an intense ten day meditation course, and most importantly: Personally tried a lot of stuff. So I guess I am as much or as few qualified to write and judge on the topics as most of the people out there that call themselves self-help-trainers or whatever.

And I have three more motivations for doing this project that you should know about: One is that I finally want to start blogging again – I had several projects before, my most successful one being a political blog with at it’s high a number of 150-200 readers every day, and the last one a more private blog about my 4 1/2 months in India. I felt I wasted a lot of my time, and I think blogging about one of my passions will focus me and help me dive deeper into the topics! I also hope to meet more great people and get to broaden my horizon to include even more areas. Further, I have a deep desire to help other people – I just love knowing that I helped somebody else even in the slightest, and I feel that with this project I can change a lot of lives to the better – by the way, I would love to hear your story!  And lastly, I have a very selfish reason: I want to learn more. There is not a single better way to learn than to teach – and I think if I write here, explaining concepts and techniques, the one that at the end of the day gained the most insight will be me! (If you’re wondering why I don’t mention money: For once at the moment I don’t need any, but more importantly I’m not that deluded to believe that this project could actually pay for the work I put into it. If that happens – great! But to hope for it or even do it solely for that would be plain stupid.)

So far so good… but what will happen here?

Quite a few things! First of all, I will mostly quote from and link to good articles – sort through the stuff that’s already out there and guide you to what you might find interesting – because I think it is. Obviously, feel free to recommend things! This will be the main section of this blog, as I don’t have the time to write well-researched own articles every day.

Second, I will try to compare different approaches or solutions to a problem (e.g. there is a whole controversy around affirmations and that they might actually be bad for you).

Third, I will try to occasionally post techniques that I learned along the way (e.g. for NLP or meditation). We will see how much that will be.

Fourth, I will occasionally reviews books and audiobooks (and other products if I actually find some that are useful) and tell you how to get them. I will use “referal links” ( which means if you buy that stuff I will get a small proportion of the price you payed) when I link to Amazon or the like, for the sole reason that I don’t see why I shouldn’t: Referal fees are not taken from the buyer but from the seller, so they won’t increase the price for you but give me a small reward for my work. Sounds fair to me, if that sounds corrupt or biased or anything else to you then please ignore those articles – but don’t skip the rest because of it!

Fifth, as a student I have access to several scientific journals and I intend to occasionally sum up scientific articles and research and try to show what they mean for us in daily life. (Please let me know if you find anything interesting that I should read, especially if you can’t access them yourselves!)

And lastly, I will occasionally let out my own ideas – I am a student of Philosophy with Psychology and have a general interest in “how we humans work”. So, I often have my own concepts and ideas, which I like to present to you and you may or may not find them useful.

Well, to be honest I’m surprised you read until here… quite long, huh? Don’t worry, I intend to keep future articles as short and tasty as possible!

So, then, once again, welcome to this new project – I am excited and I hope you are too! Please let me know if you have any questions, suggestions, find typos or factual errors (shock! sadly I’m not perfect (yet).) and whenever you’re bored just drop me a line, usually even if I’m stressed like crazy I will still find a moment to answer – I love to talk!

And, there are many ways to contact me…

For once, you should follow either the project twitter feed here – or if you want to get some of my random thoughts and ideas and a lot of links as well you should follow my personal feed on twitter here!

If you want it even easier, you can use the no-signup contact form. And if you want it even more easier – how about leaving a comment with some feedback on how I’m doing with a simple click left of this post?

Can’t wait to see you here again!

Konstantin

* in this blog I will use “she” for neutral “people” terms. For once most of the authors that I will refer to tend to be male, so the she instead of he makes it easier to separate and secondly I’m male myself, which would make it somewhat obnoxious to use “he”. Also, I will occasionally use “everybody” as a sort of singular person-term that refers to everybody, but, well, just one of them us.

Related posts:

1. The biggest mistake you can make in life is to wait for opportunities.
2. From science: Why it’s wrong to reward yourself after you’ve done something that you don’t like.
3. Ways to train your writing skills