Category Archives: Beliefs

Ancient Laws for Instant Success

Achieve incredible results easily and effortlessly. Become known among your friends and others as somebody that they want to be like. Express your desires and have them magically appear. If you’ve read my other articles, you’ll realize that I am always looking for ways to learn new skills and improve results. The following is a quick, short list of ancient secrets you can put to use today to safely and naturally get exactly what you want out of life.

Law Number One:  The only failure is when you ignore the lesson.

If you focus too much on getting exactly the right result, you won’t notice the things that you can learn from any interaction to easily improve yourself.  Anything you can learn will be beneficial in some way. A great example is getting feedback from others. I gave a speech once to a Toastmasters group. I was nervous, and dropped my cue cards, and lost my place a couple of times. After the speech, you usually get feedback from a helpful experienced member. She told me my strong points, and some specific things to try to get better next time. Had I expected to give a perfect speech, I wouldn’t have been open to her kind suggestions.  This naturally leads to the next law:

Law Number Two: Detach from results.

This might be an easy to understand and often repeated concept, but sometimes it can be tough to put this into practice. The easiest way I’ve found is to go into every situation with an open mind. All you need to do is remember to focus on the process, and not the outcome. For example, if you want to start a conversation with an attractive member of the opposite sex, by focusing on the enjoyment of the conversation rather than the outcome, it allows you to be more relaxed.

Law Number Three: Allow yourself to want what you want.

Sounds simple, but how many of us want stuff, but are afraid to ask for it. We feel we need permission and somebody to give it to us without asking. It’s ok to want whatever you want. Did you think Bill Gates or Waren Buffet got where they are by waiting for their desires to be approved of by others? If you are unsure when asking for what you want, any strange reactions are not from the thing that you want, but from your behavior regarding that thing. When you proclaim proudly what you want with expectation, people will give it to you.

Law Number Four: Think big.

That’s right. You have a limited time on this chunk of rock orbiting around the big ball of fire. Don’t waste it on small things that you can get easily. Stretch yourself. Use your imagination. If you can think it, you can get it.

Law Number Five: Say good things to yourself.

We all have those voices in our heads, put there by well meaning parents and teachers. One of your jobs as an adult is to take charge of your own brain. Get rid of those old voices telling you to play it safe, and replace them with voices telling you how wonderful and powerful you are. Brian Tracy recommends that the first thing you do when you wake up every morning is to say “I like myself” over and over. If it sounds strange, do it anyways. Pretty soon, you’ll really believe it. And if you like you, other people will naturally follow your example.

All successful people, whether they know it or not, have applied these simple laws in one way or another to their lives. And the more you start to realize that they can improve your life, the sooner you will be able to do just that. And not only will you notice people around you treating you differently, you will also notice that because you are smart enough to understand these concepts, you will be able to powerfully make them work for you.

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Can You Let Go?

That man was scared. He had won the cruise in a company raffle. His wife couldn’t go, because she was needed at her work, and couldn’t find a replacement. She told him to go alone, even though he refused. It had been a long time since he’d had a vacation. “Go and have fun! You deserve it!” She said. Finally after much consideration, he decided, what the heck. You only live once. And it was only a three day, two night cruise along the Mexican Riviera.

But now he was wishing he could go back in time. Now he was wishing that his wife had not been so understanding. Now he’d wished somebody else won the stupid raffle.

The storm was horrible. Pitching back and forth. The lines holding the life rafts had snapped. Half of the people waiting to board the life rafts had washed overboard already. He was sure he’d be next.

The boat lurched, he was pitched forward, tumbling out of control. He reached out for something to hold on to, something to grab. Too wet. Too slippery. He knew he was going to die. Finally his hand rested on something cold, metal. He grabbed it with all his might. His hands slipped down the end of the chain, and found the anchor at the end, which had been thrown from its holding place on the deck of the ship.

He gripped the anger with all his might, wrapping both arms around, both legs. “Please God, I don’t want to die.”

He held fast to the anchor. He saw more and more people being thrown overboard. “Please God, not me,” he prayed. After several minutes he thought he may actually have a chance. Another five, another ten, he was sure he would live. As long as he held fast to his anchor. As long as he didn’t let go. He began to cradle the anchor, began to think of it as a friend, a savior. “Thanks, buddy,” he whispered to it.

The boat lurched. The anchor flew, so did the man. They both hit the water, he didn’t let go of the anchor. It was still his only hope. The chain loosed and the anchor started to slowly sink.  Surely the anchor wouldn’t let him down, would it? The anchor sank deeper and deeper, the poor man still clinging to it, not knowing what to do. It helped him before right? It wouldn’t be right to just let go, would it?

The anchor finally came to rest on the bottom. The man’s arms now lifelessly held fast to the anchor. The man, unable to let go, was dead.

What are you holding on to?

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Snakes on a Slope

This morning I was walking down the steps from the temple where I do my morning Qi Kong exercise, when I noticed a large snake stretched across one of the steps about halfway down.  It was almost, but not quite stretched out perfectly straight, as if he was seeing if he could stretch from one side of the step to the other. He hadn’t quite made it when I almost stepped on him. I paused and waited for him to finish his trek across the step. I wasn’t sure where he was going, but as I wasn’t in any rush, I didn’t ask him to hurry up. I’ve never really had any fears of snakes. Although once I was at a place called “Snake Alley” in Taipei, Taiwan, which is a street with a lot of weird shops. Some of which are shops which specialize in snakes. (Hence the name.) There was a woman standing outside with a rather large boa constrictor trying to entice customers to enter. I had just finished my second shot of snake blood liquor, (at least that’s what they said it was) when I decided to ask the woman if I could take a picture with her.

She didn’t speak English, and I don’t speak Chinese, so she misunderstood me. She didn’t realize that I wanted to take a picture with her and the snake, and thought I wanted to take a picture with only the snake. As I stood next to her, and handed my camera to my snake blood liquor waiter, she proceeded to take the rather large boa constrictor and drape it around my neck. As I stood smiling for the snake blood liquor waiter to take what seemed like several long minutes to figure out my digital camera, the snake started to explore the side of my face with it’s tongue.  Finally, the waiter snapped a couple of photos and that was that.

I have a friend that would pass out cold if something like that happened to him. He is deathly afraid of snakes. Yet he is an avid skier, and the only time I went skiing with him, I was petrified to follow him down some of the jagged rock exposed, triple diamond runs he went on for fun.

He has been able to develop a skill which allows him to see a potentially dangerous situation as something to use to have lots of fun. He has gone on that particular run so many times, that his experience tells him that everything is ok. I, on the other hand, haven’t yet been able to develop good experience with respect to skiing, and perhaps I never will. For me, it is just too scary to think about being able to put in the effort in getting good at that so the good feelings naturally outweigh the bad.

It’s interesting when two people can look at the same experience and have two completely different interpretations of it.  It’s not like either of the snakes really had the time to decide whether they wanted to eat me or not. Besides, I don’t even like snake meat.

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OH BABY!

I was sitting in a coffee shop yesterday, minding my own business, when a young, happily beeming woman walked in carrying a very recent addition to the human race. Tightly bundled in a comfortable looking baby sling, his head poked out and his eyes looked around, ceaselessly amazed at the colors and lights and sounds and activity. Imprinting his fresh young brain with stimuli to later categorize into learnings and beliefs and ideas about who is he and how he fits into all this amazing unfolding of stuff that is always presenting itself to us.

I tried to think back to when I learned something, really able to truly discover something and give it meaning. Through some slippery power of thought, connect cause to effect. When I first noticed that when you turn that round thing on the door, that other part that looks like it’s the same material goes in and out of the side of the door.  Or when you are holding those sort of round white things, and you open your hands, they fall and crack open on the ground into a yellow gooey mess. Or those squiggly lines that my first grade teacher wrote on the board, and made us copy over and over, that had no meaning at the time, but later, through some voodoo magic that I am still trying to wrap my mind around, became letters with which I could build words and sentences and express complicated ideas and desires and plans that were inside my head, waiting for me to give them life.

But then I realized that something happens to us as we grow old. For some reason, we stop being able to see the world as an exciting unfolding of learning and discovery.  We somehow learn, or believe, or pretend, that once we get to a certain level of knowledge, the learning stops.  We trick ourselves into thinking that instead of being people who always find new and exciting things to learn about, we slip into the comfortable habit of doing, instead of becoming. Does it have to be that way? Do we have to give up any idea that we are able to continuously learn and grow and change? And if we do change and learn, does it have to be to satisfy some external requirements by society? Can we not set our own course of our lives so that we can not merely serve others, but to serve others in a way that can benefit us both?

As the young woman sat down to join her friends, they all took turns holding young child. A child who has a long journey ahead of him. Clearly enjoying the support of the caring adults around him. Well equiped by nature to pull from his environment all the resources he will need to survive and thrive. In his young mind the few, yet to be voiced thoughts soon to be joined by many others. The thoughts we all too soon let go of. The thoughts we should never forget, as they can help us to master our reality in any stage of our life.

What is this?

What does it mean?

How can I use it? How can I share it?

I like it! How can I get more?

 

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Follow The Yellow Brick Road

“Yea, but I’m not sure if you understand what I mean.”
“I think I have a general idea of what you mean.”
“I’m starting to think you really don’t.”
“So tell me again, what is it exactly that you think you mean?”
“Ok. I went into the bank.”
“Did you want to get a loan?”
“No, no, that was last week.”
“Did the loan come through yet?”
“Well, yea, I mean, no, not yet, but it’s guaranteed.”
“You mean like guaranteed, guaranteed?”
“No, not like that, I mean, I should get it, it’s just a matter of time.”
“I got ya. So what’s the problem. What happened today?”
“Well, I was about to ask the teller about the hair thing she was wearing…”
“Hair thing?”
“Yea, you know, those things they wear in the back, like some giant pony tail clip, but it has like a design on it or something…”
“Yea, I know what you’re talking about. I bought one for my girlfriend once.”
“Lisa?”
“No, no my ex girlfriend, from like three years ago.”
“Oh, yea, ok. I remember her. Cheryl, right?”
“Charlene.”
“Oh yea. You still talk?”
“No, not really. Not like we’re mad. The split was cool and everything.”
“So you never see her?”
“Sometimes, I saw her at the club a few weeks ago.”
“The club? I thought you said you quit that a long time ago? Too loud or something?”
“No..no… I saw her at the gym.”
“Got it.”
“So tell me about this girl with a clipboard?”
“A clip, man a clip.”
“What, a paper clip? You got yelled at by a girl with a paper clip?”
“No, dude, one of those clips in her hair.”
“Oh, yea. Ok. So why’d she yell at you?”
“I don’t know. That’s the thing. On the hair clip were all those old wizard of oz dudes.”
“You mean like the lion and the scarecrow, and that other metal guy?”
“The tin man.”
“Yea, the tin man.”
“So which one is your favorite?”
“The lion, dude, the lion.”
“Why the lion?”
“Cause he always had his courage inside the whole time, and he finally figured out.”
“Yea, that is cool. So what did Miss Oz say to you that upset you so much?”
“Well nothing really.”
“What do you mean, nothing really?”
“Well I was just going to tell her I liked her head clip oz thing, and she turned and said ‘HANG ON!'”
“Did you ask her what she meant?”
“I didn’t get a chance, because she hung up the phone and stormed off.”
“Um, wait a sec. She was on the phone?”
“Well, yea.”
“So she looked at you when she said that? Pointed at you or something, right?”
“Well not really.”
“So how did you know she was yelling at you and not at some guy over the phone?”
“She yelled at me the exact same way my mom used to yell at me when I was a kid.”
“And you think she went out of her way to research your past and dig up some secret recordings and listen to them and practice screaming just like your mom used to, and then sat there and waited, and pretended to be on the phone? And..”
“Dude…”
“And she even found out you liked the cowardly lion so she wore that specific hair oz clipboard thing on purpose just to lure you in so she could lower the boom on you and then stomp off without even waiting to see how you’d respond?”
“Well when you put it like that…”
“Dude, you should go offer an apology and an invitation to go see The Wizard of Oz, there’s a special showing tonight over at The Triplex.”
“Dude, really? Tonight? The Triplex? That place over the Anderson’s?”
“No, dude, that’s the duplex. You want the Triplex, over on 17th.”
“Hmm. Yea, that’s a pretty idea, man. I think I’ll do that.”
“Well you better hurry up before whatever guy was on the phone changes his mind.”
“Jeez, you’re right. See ya around man. Thanks.”
“Later.”

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Good Job!

“I don’t know man, I just seem like I’m, I dunno, stuck or something.”

“What do you mean stuck?”

“I mean everything I try, it just seems like I’m in the same place. Like I keep running and running and I’m not going forward or anything. Like if I stop, I’ll fall behind or something. It sucks.”

“So what would you like it to be like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what would you like it to be like. If you could snap your fingers, and magically make everything the way you want it, with regard to this thing, what would you see or feel or hear that would be different than it is now?”

“Well, for one, my boss could tell me I”m doing a good job.”

“Are you doing a good job?”

“Of course.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know what my job is, and I know when I’m doing it right, and when I’m doing it wrong. I’ve been there for over five years, you know.”

“I know. I know. So when you do a good job, and you know you’re doing a good job, how does it get better when your boss says something to you?  Do you think that he doesn’t know you are doing a good job?”

“No, if I wasn’t doing a good job, he would know, and he would ask me what was wrong.”

“He wouldn’t just yell at you? Tell you to do it better?”

“No, he knows I know what I’m doing. So if I started slacking off, he’d think maybe something was wrong, something at home or something.”

“Wow, sounds like a pretty good boss. I wish my boss was like that sometimes.”

“Yea.”

“So maybe he doesn’t say ‘good job,’ because he knows that you know, and that would mean that he really respects your opinion of yourself. Do you know how rare that is today? For somebody to know you well enough, and know and respect your own opinion of yourself?”

“Yea, I guess that is pretty cool.”

“So maybe you should tell him, ‘good job,’ huh?”

“Hmm. Maybe I will. Maybe I will.”

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This Mind For Rent

I had an interesting thought this morning while I was out for my daily walk. I make a trip through the neighborhood, and then finish up on a small hill hear a temple where I do my daily Ki Qong. As I was on my way back home, I passed by an apartment complex,  with a big sign out front saying “For Rent.” For some reason, it immediately reminded me of a line from the song Tom Sawyer, by Rush:

“…though his mind is not for rent, to any god or government, always hopeful yet discontent…”

Which naturally caused my mind to drift, as it usually does after a nice walk, to thoughts and where they come from. I’ve read and heard form a variety of sources that fully ninety percent of our thoughs are a rerun of thoughts from before. Yesterday, the day before yesterday, and so on.

I started to think about memes, which are thoughts but follow a certain set of rules, or patterns. They were first described by Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene.” Memes can be described as self replicating bits of information passed on from person to person, or even to a whole culture.

Religious doctrines, political propaganda, cake recipes, and even The Macarena are examples of memes. Ideas or concepts passed through different levels of groups and culture. There has been much debate on what makes a good meme.  What makes some memes replicate, what makes others die off quickly. What makes some easy to believe and keep in your brain, and others to seem foolish and ridiculous. How much thought have you given to your thoughts? Are they yours? Do they really serve you? Do they make your life easier? Do they make your life happier? Where did you learn them from? Who taught them to you?

We are all born with a semi blank slate. (There is much debate on the blankness of that slate.) As we grow, we learn much from others.  Thoughts, strategies, languages, gestures, what is important and not important, what is scary and friendly, what we are capable of and not capable of.

There comes a point in our lives, though, when it becomes important to make a decision on what we accept in our brains, and reject.  It becomes evident that you need to stop blindly following others, and choose your own path.  Problems can occur if when we become adults, we still rely on the “I’ll let other people do my thinking for me” strategy that was useful as a child. If we cling to this way of thinking, it can be severely restrictive as we get older. What was a blessing early in life can be a burden later on. Not to say we should immediately reject all other thoughts that aren’t are own, but perhaps we should at least give them a quick once over, and hold them against the scrutiny of our own chosen direction in life. Are they helping us move forward, or are they holding us back?

Imagine for a minute if you could take out each thought and belief, examine it, change it around so it better serves you, and then stick it back into your head. What beliefs would you like to have? Making money is easy? Falling is love is natural and blissful? There are enough resources to go around for everyone? You are capable of achieving anything you set your mind to?

Would you like that? Would it make life more fun and enjoyable? What would be different?

Be sure to check back often, as I will post many more articles related to this subject.  I think this is fascinating. And please share this site with others, because the more you can share, the easier it is to feel better about what is possible. 

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