Category Archives: Life Skills

How Do You Learn Best?

The Secrets Behind Asian Cooking

Once I took this class in cooking. Actually it was two classes, and it was a specific kind of cooking. Kind of a vague kind of specific cooking. The class was Asian cooking, which sounds specific, until you realize there’s just as many different Asian styles of cooking as there are Asian countries, which at last count was plenty.

The reason I took two classes was I took the first class on a whim. I got this catalogue in the mail for a local adult education center in my city. It had a list of all kinds of classes that working people might enjoy taking at night. Cooking, yoga, meditation, all kinds of hobby type classes like photography. Since I like to eat, and where I was living at the time had plenty of Asian communities, and consequently many different Asian restaurants available, I figured I’d give Asia cooking a go. It was only about twenty bucks, and met once a week for six weeks, so I figured I didn’t have much to lose.

We learned to make a lot of stuff, but for some reason the only thing I can remember is how to make kung pau chicken from scratch. They have those kung pau chicken flavored sauces you can buy at the supermarket, but we made it completely from scratch. And it came out pretty good.

Because I thoroughly enjoyed the class, when the new schedule came out, I took the class again.

But the instructor was different. Completely different, with a completely different outlook on looking. The first instructor was very, very strict. We had to prepare the ingredients in a specific way, in a specific order. And we had to wash all the utensils in between steps to ensure there was no cross contamination. I got the impression that this lady was the kind of person who’d complain if they got a plate of cake and ice cream with the ice cream touching the cake.

Never the less, the stuff she taught us was fantastic. When the class was over, we had learned six different dishes, and I wanted to learn more. Hence the second class.

The second instructor was completely different. Same as before, middle aged Asian female. But she was completely different than the other instructor. She would give us the basic instructions, but completely vague. Instead of saying something like:

“Add one quarter cup of soy sauce, stir for thirty seconds, then slowly add 1/8 teaspoon of sugar over the course of one minute, while stirring at a constant rate,” like the first instructor would say, she said something like:

“Ok, put in some soy sauce, about this much (holding the thumb and forefinger in the international sign of a “a little bit”) and stir it for a bit, and then put in some sugar, about this much (smaller measuring unit of thumb and forefinger), but don’t dump it all in at once.”

Now both of those instructors were fine instructors, and taught us some good recipes. But they both had completely different teaching styles, and I suppose there are students out there that have two completely different learning styles, at least on the continuum of the specificity of instruction.

For example, whenever I cook from a recipe, and almost never measure the ingredients exactly. I just read it over to get a general idea about the general proportion. Then if it comes out lacking a certain taste, I’ll try and remember it and adjust for next time.

And even thought the first instructor was completely specific, and made sure we followed her instructions to the “T” during the class, when I reproduced them at home, I reverted to my non-specific eyeball measuring technique.

Others that I know are completely and strictly by the book cooks. They need to follow everything to the exactly specifications to the recipe, or it just won’t work.

Which is better? Of course neither is better neither is worse. Two completely different strategies to get to the same outcome. A good bowl of kung pau chicken, or whatever you have simmering on your stove.

The take away from all this is to simply realize that everybody has different ways of doing things. If you are teaching somebody, either by being a formal teacher, or explaining something to someone, realize they will figure it out according to their own style They may follow your instructions to the letter, or not. The goal is to focus on the outcome, and think of your method that you are teaching them only one of many ways to get there. They may follow your example exactly, or they may choose their own path. The important part is that they get there, however way they choose.

Similarly, if you are learning something from somebody, don’t think you need to do it exactly the same way. Just think of it as them giving you one of many examples on how to get from point A to point B.

To make things even more confusing, I’ll throw together three different metaphors that may not even go together, just like when I add peanut butter to my nikku jaga.

1) There are many ways to skin a cat.
2) All roads lead to Rome.
3) The road is better than the Inn.

Now get out there and cook some kung pau spaghetti or something.

Rewrite Your History For A Powerful Future

How To Apply The Secrets Of Alien Abductees

Many years ago, I used to be an avid reader of fiction. My bookcase at home would be filled with all kinds of books, usually paperbacks that I would buy and tear through in a weekend. I would come home from work, and instead of sitting in front of the TV or a few hours, like most people do, I would sit in front a novel for a few hours. Not that one is better than the other. They both serve the same purpose, namely, a temporary escape from reality through a powerfully engaging story that captures and leads your imagination away from whatever daily crud you deal with on a regular basis.

It’s interesting when you think about stories, and story telling. In some form, story telling has been around since humankind learned to speak. And it survives today in various forms. I have no idea how big of an industry it is, although I doubt that you could even categorize all the different forms of story telling in the same group. Books, movies, plays, TV shows, operas. The list goes on and on.

I can imagine what it was like thousands of years ago. The guys would go out hunting, or searching for food. The gals would hang out near wherever their home was, taking care of the kids, searching for roots and other edible plants.

Then they’d get together at night, sit around a fire, and there would inevitably be a few people that were good at spinning tales. Perhaps they were embellished from actual hunts that were significant, or maybe they were stories past on from previous generations.

One can see how certain elements would creep into them, the sun, the moon, and the various weather patterns. I imagine that some of the stories told at night had social and cultural significance, while other stories were told purely for comic relief. Very similar to what you see on TV today.

That humans have retained our basic tastes in stories and how we use them in conjunction with our imaginations in order to remove ourselves temporarily from the daily stresses of life never ceases to amaze me.

I started out by saying that I used to read novels. I don’t them so much any more. I tend to read non-fiction. I like reading personal development books, and books that border on philosphy/psychology. I’m particular interested in books pertaining to human evolution and how it has shaped our current mindset.

On interesting passage I came across recently in a book I was reading about reframing was a procedure in creating a new history for yourself.

Just as the stories described above make extensive use of your imagination, this procedure does the same. But instead of somebody else’s imagined story, this method can be used to recreate your own story.

This sounds strange at first. Most people feel that their history is their history. You can’t change what happened to in the past. While you can’t change the actual events, you can certainly change your interpretation of them. And you can choose which events you automatically remember when you enter into a familiar situation.

For example, if you are terrified of public speaking, every time you even think about public speaking, you will remember all the times that you experienced emotional discomfort or pain whenever you expressed yourself in a public setting. This includes all instances, even back to when you were three and your mom told you to shut up while you were in line at the supermarket, even if you don’t consciously remember that happening.

The power of re creating your history is two-fold. First, you can change your interpretation to the events that happened. Second, you can change which events you use as your reference points as you look toward the future.

So you can either go into your history, and re interpret all the events where you tried to express yourself, but were shut down by others. Instead of remembering them as painful experiences, you can remember them as simple feedback from the environment. Maybe you were told to shut up at the supermarket because your mom was trying to talk to somebody. So instead of giving the event the meaning of “public speaking is scary” you should give the event the meaning of “when public speaking, be careful not to interrupt others, or they’ll get mad,” or something like that.

What makes this possible is the fact that our memories are not set in stone. Our memories are completely malleable, when can give them any meaning we want.
Even our memories of the actual events themselves are suspect, as any good defense lawyer will tell you. If all a prosecutor has is eyewitness testimony, he or she will have a very weak case. The law recognizes that human memory, even recent memory, is highly suspect.

The second thing you can do with this procedure is simply choose different events to remember. Choose events where you expressed yourself in public and everything went ok. This means singing at birthday parties, giving a recital that went ok, or anything else you can imagine.

Here’s another secret. If you can’t remember any positive experiences of expressing yourself in public, make them up. That’s right. You can make up some examples in your history of you doing things that you want to be able to easily do in the future. Don’t think this is possible? Just ask anybody that is convinced they were abducted by aliens.

In order to do this procedure, simply think of something you’d like to do. Relax and imagine yourself drifting through your past, and look for any events that are similar to your current goal. Change those events around by changing the meaning, and put in positive events if you can’t find any real ones. Do this until you get five or six events that are a positive memory of you doing something that you’d like to do in the future.

Then any time you think of doing that thing, just purposely recall your five or sex “created” memories. It may take a few times, but pretty soon you’ll be recalling those “created” positive memories automatically, and your future will look brighter than ever.

The More Clearly You Define Your Destination, The Quicker You’ll Get There

Do You Know Where You Are Going?

I remember once me and a friend of mine decided to go hitchhiking. Neither of us had ever hitchhiked before, and we thought it would be fun to go camping that way. We both lived in the dorms, and our college was about fifteen miles away from the coast. Between the college and the coast were several businesses, industrial and residential areas. But on the other side, it quickly turned into pretty much nothing. A few rolling hills here and there, and small pockets of residential neighborhoods, and then desert.

Our plan was to hitch hike east until we found a place that didn’t have very many houses, and then camp out. Of course we prepared ourselves with plenty of water, food that didn’t require cooking. And beer. Lots of beer. After about three hours of hitchhiking, we finally found a suitable place to camp. Or drink until we passed out. Our only requirement was that it was relatively flat, and that it was far enough away from any houses so nobody could see our campfire and call the cops.

I took this seminar once on a weird type of speed-reading. It was called photoreading, and it taught you how to read an entire book in about 3 or 4 minutes. You slowly flipped through all the pages, and let the information soak into your brain without consciously reading it. Of course, you weren’t reading it consciously; you were reading it with your unconscious mind. Then later you could dig into your unconscious memory and pull out any required information that you needed. This was particularly useful for studying, or reading a bunch of books to do a report on something.

One of the things we needed to learn was to state a clear purpose for reading a book.

“I want to read this book to learn specific skills to improve my public speaking.”

“I want to learn specific techniques to nineteenth century Spanish architecture into my building designs.”

“I want to improve my fluency with daily use of French verbs.”

That way when you photoread the book, the elements that addressed your particular needs would stick better, and be easier to retrieve later when you needed them.

A particularly useful skill that we learned was photoreading a bunch of books on one subject, and then allow your unconscious alone to figure out how to incorporate those skills into your daily life. You never had to go back and try to “activate” some of the information if you were going to take a test or write a report. The new skills and behaviors would kind of just “show up” wherever you needed them.

There were a few people at the seminar that were repeat participants, and had used this technique with wild success. One lady photoread a bunch of books on painting techniques, as she was a beginning painter. After that her friends started commenting that her paintings were looking much better, and assumed she was taking lessons, or learning some advanced technique from some master or something.

In reality, all she was doing was photoreading a bunch of books on painting techniques, and the new techniques were just showing up in her paintings. She merely continued to paint as she felt, and the results spoke for themselves.

But before we learned how to do any of this stuff the instructor told us the importance of setting your intention before reading a book. What most people do is they read a book with only a vague hope that it can help them some way. It’s no wonder they have trouble applying what they read. They don’t really know what they were after in the first place.

He told us a funny story to emphasize this point.

There used to be this airline that was really cheap. You didn’t need reservations, and the planes always had seats available. They had several flights a day, so you could pretty much hop on a flight whenever you wanted. They were more than willing to sell you a ticket. The only problem was you never knew where they were going. The reason the tickets were so cheap was that the airplanes navigation systems were messed up. The pilots didn’t know how to program the destination. They sort of fiddled around with the buttons, and hoped they ended up somewhere decent. Sometimes they did, but other times they ended up in the middle of nowhere, and the passengers were left stranded on some frozen cornfield.

Of course, the airplane is you, and the pilot is your goals and choices. If you sort only know where you are going, with some vague hope that it will turn out ok, then maybe you’ll be ok, or maybe you’ll end up stranded on some frozen cornfield. Which we can all agree would pretty much suck.

I learned a lot from that seminar. They do have a book you can get at Amazon, called “Photoreading,” or you can get the home study course from Learning Strategies Corporation. Or you can take the whole seminar, like I did. It cost about three or four hundred bucks, but it was well worth it. Once you take it, you can take it as many times as you want after that, for free. If you Google “Photoreading,” you’ll find lots of pages to help you.

And probably the coolest thing about my hitchhiking camping trip is that after we finally got to our spot, and camped out without any problems from the cops, we started hiking back towards the highway to see if we could hitch a ride home. And this guy in limo picked us up. No joke. He had just dropped off a client, and was driving his limo back to his shop, and picked us up along the way. That was a fun trip. You never know how you’re going to end up with you start out like this.

This Big Breasted Beauty Revealed A Powerful Memory Technique

The Power Of The ABC’s

There is a radio show I listen to sometimes on the Internet. I work in Japan, and sometimes it’s nice to listen to American style radio. The particular show I was listening has a contest every year called Miss Double December, which is a beauty contest of sorts. The contestants, if you haven’t guessed by the name, must be well endowed to enter the contest.

One by one the girls come into the studio for the interview. That way the listeners can not only judge them based on their pictures, but their interview skills, personalities, and any other traits they may have.

The girl that was on the other night had an interesting skill. If you gave her any word, she could name each letter’s number based on its order in the alphabet. For example, cat would be 3-1-20. C is the third letter, a the first, and t the twentieth.

Now they were treating this as a cute trick, and making references to the movie Rain Man, where the main character was a genius but completely incapable of living an ordinary life without constant supervision.

The truth is that this is a powerful memory technique that can help you immensely to remember lists of items, as well as super charge your creativity, making people think you really are a genius. Here’s how.

First you need to understand something called mnemonics. These are so called memory “tricks” that are sometimes used in school to help you memorize things like musical scales, the order the planets, biological classifications and so on.

All Cows Eat Grass, for example is a mnemonic to help remember the musical notes on the spaces in the bass clef, starting from the bottom. A,C,E,G.

Kevin Put Crap On Fred’s Green Snake, helps you to remember the order of biological classifications:

FPCOFGS

Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Order
Family
Genus
Species

These are pre-made mnemonics and can only be used for the particular case they were created. But when you create a system, Like Miss Potential Double D’s, you can use in a bunch of different ways that will make it really easy to remember a lot of stuff. There’s a little work required on the front end, but once you got the basic list memorized, you can use to remember virtually anything.

First you need to construct a list of words that start with each letter of the alphabet. Generally speaking, the best way to do this is to just say each letter to yourself, and choose whatever word comes to mind first. A..a..a..apple. B..b..b..banana (you can tell I’m hungry while writing this) C..c..cat etc. Go through your ABC’s a couple times to make sure you remember each word.

Next you want to connect each word to it’s particular order in the alphabet. So apple, and the number one. You want to make a connection that is as visually interesting as possible, so it will be easy to remember. Maybe you can imagine a birthday party, and everybody is wearing those goofy hats, and they bring out an apple with one of those big candles shaped like a number one. The birthday kid starts crying because he was expecting a cake. Or something like that.

Next, banana, two. Maybe imagine somebody holding their hand in the “peace” sign, except their two fingers have been replaced by bananas. Continue this with each letter, and each word you chose. By now you realize that it’s best to choose easy to picture nouns to fill out your ABC list.

It may take a while to completely commit this to memory, so you can spout off the numbers for the word “Thanksgiving” like the girl did on the radio the other day, but once you’ve got it committed you’ve got a powerful tool. Here’s a couple ways to use it.

Whenever remembering a list of items, either shopping list, or bullet points in a speech, simply attaches them to each particular alphabet picture. Do this in the same way as you did before. Whatever is first on your list, attach it to apple. If you’ve built your list correctly, you won’t need to consciously connect apple and one, whenever you think a, or one, or apple, you will automatically remember the other two items. (A will give you one and apple, one will give you a and apple, etc).

Another way to use this ABC list to help your creativity is whenever you have a problem; think of the main root word of your problem. For example, let’s say you need to write a report, and you have no idea how to start. Look up R, for report, on your mental ABC list. Let’s you chose racquet for R. Just start to mentally free associate anything and everything when you repeat the words “report” and “racquet” and let your mind go wherever your imagination leads. You’ll be surprised how quickly you come up with an answer that appears seemingly out of nowhere.

The trick here is to give your mind room to play around with different ideas and create space for you imagination to fill in the blanks. The way the brain is structured, each neuron is connected to every other neuron in your neural network via only a few degrees of separation. So just going back and forth between these seemingly unrelated words (report and racquet) you’ll be surprised how much you stuff you have up there between your ears.

Like I said, this takes a bit of work at the beginning, but once you’ve got a solid ABC list set up with numbers and objects, this can be very useful in a lot of different ways.

I initially learned this procedure from a product called “The Memory Optimizer” from Learning Strategies Corporation. If you’d like to powerfully expand your thinking capabilities and mental strength, give this program a once over.

Abundance Or Scarcity, Independence Or Dependence?

Which Mind Set Do You Have – Rich Or Poor?

The other day I was talking to my neighbor. She was telling me about all the stress her kids are giving her. Not bad stress, just normal mom stress. Her youngest just entered junior high school, and her oldest is a junior in high school. I don’t remember what age the middle one is, but she is somewhere in between.
They are all girls, and they are all very pretty. They get a lot of attention from the boys at school.

My neighbor is of the opinion that girls should be able to make it in the world on their own without having to rely on their looks. Here in Japan that is still kind of a not so popular idea. Many girls today are still taught from a very early age that if you were pretty and feminine you can expect to get a decent husband. Being a housewife is still a dream for many girls here.

Which is exactly why my neighbor is concerned. Her daughters are all pretty smart, they consistently do very well on standardized tests, which are pretty much the norm here. If you can’t do well on tests, it’s hard to succeed here.

Getting into a university here is much harder than the west. But once you are in, it’s fairly easy. College life here is fairly relaxed. Most people focus on getting into a good university starting around junior high school, or even sooner. Many top high schools here have strict entrance examinations. Many people consider public schools here to be substandard. If you can’t get into a good private high school, then you are going to have a second rate career, and a second rate life.

There are many who think that children getting into a good high school or university, especially one of the top universities, is nothing more than a status symbol for the parents. Many of my friends have noted that parents whose children are in good universities are very quick to point this out to their friends (whose kids are in “lesser” universities.) Of course, not everyone is like that.

Progress is bit slow here in that regard, but there still is progress. When my neighbor was in high school, most girls aspired to go to “finishing schools” for lack of a better term.

These were schools that girls from upper class families went to learn proper etiquette, and traditional Japanese customs like flower arranging and the proper wearing of a kimono. All in the hopes of attracting a potential wealthy husband.

It has been said that Japan lags behind the west by twenty years or so when it comes to things like human rights and equal opportunities. It seems that more and more couples here are facing the harsh reality that in order to raise a family, both parents have to work.

There was a “golden” time in the United States after World War II where families could easily survive on one income. That was when they made TV shows like “Leave it to Beaver,” “Father Knows Best,” “Happy Days,” and all those other shows from the fifties where dad went to work and mom was a happy homemaker. Most economists agree, and are backed by a lot of data, that that was just a temporary set of conditions that made it easy to survive on one income. Most of the time before that, and most of the time since, and likely for any foreseeable future, it’s going to take two incomes to support a family.

Not to say that situation might never happen again, but it’s better to realize that good times that are based only on a coincidental confluence of events never last. The best times are the ones you create yourself, based on a thorough understanding of the environment in which you live, and you skills to maximize that environment.

I heard an interesting quote the other day that the difference between rich people and poor people is that while poor people look for problems and excuses, rich people are always on the lookout for opportunities.

Poor people are always worried about the economy, while rich people are only concerned with their own economy that they can control. While its nice to live during times of low inflation, low interest rates, double digit yearly stock market returns, it’s never a good idea to depend on them.

Those that tend to be rich figure out a way to make things work for them regardless of the general economic conditions.

Which is why I think my neighbors daughters will be ok. Whenever I’ve spoken with them, they seem to be able to be flexible in their thinking, and focus always on their ultimate objectives, regardless of the meager expectations that society puts on them. They seem to have pretty good expectations of themselves, which no doubt, will carry them a long way.

Nurture Vs. Nature – Why It Doesn’t Matter

How To Program Yourself For Automatic Success

There has been an ongoing debate for a while among people that study human development and potential, and believe it or not, linguists. There is one camp that believes that when humans are born, we are completely blank, and don’t know anything about anything. It would be the equivalent of buying a brand new computer with no operating system, not software, nothing.

Similar to the computers of many years ago. They didn’t even know how to start. So every time you had to start up your computer, you actually had to insert a punch card that was configured to give the program the start up parameters.

There are those that feel humans are completely and utterly blank when we come into the world, and that all we are is a result of our environment.

From a purely physical standpoint, that seems a bit ridiculous. As a general rule, and maybe you’ve noticed this, but children of Asian parents usually grow up with Asian features (e.g. black hair, brown eyes). Same with people from other parts of the world. Of course you could likely explain that different climates in different parts of the world gave rise to different physical features over hundreds of thousand so years of evolution, but you could hardly say that this process is repeated for each generation.

So at the very least, it appears that we come pre programmed for at least some kinds of things, such as certain physical traits, which are based both on our ethnicity and our parents. Tall parents usually produce tall kids, etc.

On the other extreme is those that argue that we come in with pretty much everything all configured, and life is nothing more than a discovery of that configuration. People will usually point out cases of twins who although separated at birth, grew up into mysteriously similar lives. Same lives, same names of their wives, same habits, down to the brand of cigarettes.

Of course, these cases are few and far between, they are anything but the norm. Those that study statistics will tell you that you can prove any theory, no matter how hair brained, by choosing certain data to represent your case. Nostradamus, and the appearance of the twin towers on a folded twenty-dollar bill to name a couple.

But along those two endpoints of the spectrum, we have to lie someplace in the middle. We do seem to come pre programmed with some kinds of pre-determined characteristics.

Despite how this seems to suggest that we are doomed by fate, there is a ray of hope in something called meta programs. These are a shorthand collection of decisions the brain groups together to conserve valuable processing time. The reason I say ray of hope is because although in many people these usually go undiscovered and therefore unchanged, once you find out your own metaprograms you can change them to improve your results. Here are a couple important ones. As you read, ask yourself which “endpoint” resonates most with you, and just be aware of it as you go through your daily life, to determine if it serves you, or if you want to change.

The first one is motivation. Are you motivated more by fear of pain, or the promise of reward? Many people are motivated by the fear of pain, and take action in the right direction. But as soon as they make progress, the fear of pain diminishes, as does their motivation. This is one of the main reasons it’s so hard to stick to a diet once you start it.

In order to overcome this, focus on the end results, and make it really big and compelling.

Another one is sorting. Do you see similarities in things, or differences? If you see differences more so than similarities, the world can seem to be a dangerous and confusing place. The human brain is more comfortable with similarity. If you want to try to something new, and only see how it’s different than what you are used to, it might be hard to get started. However, if you train your self to find similarities it will make doing new things easier.

For example, starting a new job can be a frightening experience, if you are always comparing how different it is to your old job. But if you consciously look for similarities instead, it will be much easier to adjust.

Another important one is verification. When you choose something, how do you know it’s the right choice? The two options here are internal and external. If you seek external verification for all your choices, you will always be following somebody else’s lead. What diet to go on, what to order at a restaurant, what movie to rent at the video shop, all these decisions will require you get somebody else’s opinion first.

On the flip side, if you only need to rely on yourself, then you’ll have much more freedom to choose. This can be the toughest one to change because it is very easy to rely on the opinions of others. If you find yourself asking others opinions often, try choosing by yourself, and be happy with your choice. Take small steps, and as your confidence continues to increase, it will become easier.

When you start to examine your own meta programs and how the help you achieve what you want in life, it opens up a huge realm of possibility. Just by noticing how you choose things, you will be far ahead of most other people.

To summarize here are the three main ones:

Pain or Pleasure – Which motivates you the most?

Same of Different – What do you see the most?

Internal or External – Do you always need others opinions, or is yours enough?

After you get skilled with these, there are about twenty other ones I’ll be writing about later on to help you make success automatic for you.

Why You Should Never Stop Learning

How To Maximize Your Success In Anything You Want To Do

I was having lunch with a friend the other day. He was this guy I used to play soccer with. I was never really any good at soccer, so I only played because my friends played. I don’t think I ever would have played had it not been for them. I just sucked too much.

It’s kind of weird when you find yourself in this kind of a situation. You are doing something for reasons that don’t seem like the ones other people would guess by looking at the situation. Like if you really like this girl for example, and she wants to watch a romance movie. You’d likely go with her, not because you wanted to see the movie, but simply because you enjoy being with her.

Or maybe its Friday night and you’d planned on hanging out and catching up on some Lost episodes that you’d TiVo’d, but the your buddies call you up. They are going to some club, and convince you to tag along. You don’t really want to go to that club, but hanging out with your friends is usually a fun experience wherever you go, so you decide to watch Lost some other time.

That’s what it was like when I played soccer. As soon as my friends quit, I quit as well. Well not quite. I decided to play one more game after they had quit. It was not a fun experience. The only thing left was me and my cruddy soccer skills. That was the longest game of my life.

So as we were talking about various things, my friend tells me about this seminar he just went to on dating. It was mainly for guys (although they claimed that this particular technique could be applied to girls also) and how to pick up and score with girls. When I say score, I don’t mean like playing soccer. I mean score as in having sex.

Now for those of you that think this is some underhanded seminar in manipulation and how to lie to girls to get them into bed, hold your horses. My friend just isn’t that kind of guy. I think perhaps you need to understand something about marketing.

In order to convince people to sign up and pay for three-day seminar, you need to make it sound really compelling. A three-day seminar is a huge commitment, both on your schedule and your wallet. So of course they need to make it sound like you’re going to get some superhuman skills of seduction and persuasion.
Like you’re going to learn some secret Jedi skills to beam your thoughts at girls and make them squirm in lust for you.

Of course, we all know the differences between the marketing of a product and the actual product. Some are completely different, and some marketing material is pretty close to the actual product. I guess it depends on the mindset of the person that is selling the product or seminar.

But my friend never seemed like the type of guy that would go to a seminar on how to learn Jedi mind tricks to covertly seduce girls out of their panties and into your bedroom. He always seemed to be pretty self confident, and relaxed and easy going. And I’ve never seen him hesitate at all to approach and talk to a pretty girl, so I was a little bit curious as to why he decided to go to that seminar.

He told me that the secret is always learning, and to be able to learn from as many sources as possible. He said some people only feel comfortable, or only can learn from one or two sources. He said those people are stuck, because they are only limited by the insights and model of the world of their particular guru.

And even, you’d have to study under a guru for a long time to get as proficient as your guru. Not because whatever your guru is teaching is so incredibly hard to comprehend, but because there is a lot more to it than most people imagine.

Your guru, whoever he is, is able to do what he can do largely based on his own personal experience, beliefs, habits, frames of reality that he holds, and a host of other unconscious filters that he wouldn’t even begin to be able to describe.

The actual content of what is he or she is teaching is likely not that complicated, but it’s setting your internal filters and belief systems to that of your guru is what takes so long. This is the point that most people miss, and have a hard time with.

It can take a long time to shed old beliefs and pick up new ones, especially if you aren’t aware that this process is always going on. When a guru teaches some breakthrough technique, and only ten or twenty percent of his followers can reproduce that technique, that doesn’t mean the technique itself is flawed, by that most people simply don’t have the internal frames and filters and beliefs required to implement the technique.

My soccer-playing friend told me that by always studying from as many different gurus as possible is a great way to continuously improve yourself. You may only pick up one technique from one guru that resonates with you in a way that you can go out and do it yourself. When you figure that out, you can simply go and collect as many worthwhile techniques from as many guru’s as possible, and continuously build up your set of tools in your toolbox and conquer life.

I asked him about the idea that jumping from guru to guru is a waste of time. There is a strong belief that you have to choose one guru until you master the system completely. If you jump from guru to guru, you’ll never master anything. You’ll be a jack of all trades, and master of none.

He said that is complete nonsense. He said that is a myth propagated by gurus to keep people coming back for life, even if they rarely find success. He said this is a great meme, as it gives people a reason to keep spending their money on guru’s products without ever seeing results. They have this belief that if they switch gurus; they’ll be starting at square on again.

My soccer-playing friend said it’s best to check out a guru, see what you can learn from him or her in a reasonable amount of time, and then switch to the next guru. Every time you’ll learn something new and pretty soon you’ll be master of your own world, and not copying some guru.

So I asked him what the Jedi mind secret to attracting women was. He told me it was to simply give a girl honest appreciation for whatever it is you appreciate about her. And to combine two powerful things. One is to be as open and honest as possible with your appreciation for her, whatever it may be. And the other is to be completely detached from the outcome. That is let her feel your appreciation, as much as she is ready to experience, without expecting anything back in return. And the more she feels your appreciation, the more likely she will automatically reply in kind, which of course, will quickly lead to sex. Because when you put a guy and girl together that feel open enough to show their appreciation for each other, sex is a natural outcome. There are six billion examples of that on Earth, at last count.

How To Develop The Perseverance Of Edison

Have you ever tried something, and not been very successful? Ok, stupid question. If we are honest with ourselves, our lives can be thought of successive string of successes and failures. Of course, if you define failure as only feedback, then you’re in pretty good shape. But that can be hard to do. I’m sure you’ve heard about the famous quote by Edison regarding his 10,000 “failures” when inventing the light bulb.

A reporter asked him how it felt to fail ten thousand times, to which he replied:

“I never failed once, I merely found out ten thousand things that didn’t work.”

Now I’m not sure if that conversation ever took place, usually when you see some kind of quote like that, which was supposedly made many moons ago, there is a strong possibility it has been embellished over the years.

Nonetheless, it is a magnificent attitude to have. Of course it is an extremely difficult one. I’m sure that if you marched into your bosses office and demanded a raise, you wouldn’t likely feel elated about discovering yet another way that wouldn’t get you any more money.

People generally have three responses to “failure,” and two of them are not so helpful. I’d like to share with you one trick that can help at least make some progress toward Edison’s positive attitude.

The first response, of course, is to accept failure, and stop trying. You ask your boss for a raise; he says not, you label yourself as a failure. This is likely the worst response (and unfortunately the easiest) because it pretty much shuts down any possibilities for future endeavors.

This is the main reason so many people are afraid of public speaking. When we are born, we naturally scream our lungs out whenever we want attention. As we grow older, we “learn’ that many times, screaming will bring bad results, in the form of angry parents or teachers, or people simply ignoring, or even worse, laughing at our requests.

Because we “fail” so many times in getting our needs met, we develop a deep anxiety about expressing ourselves. When we reach adulthood, it’s no wonder that most of us list public speaking as far and away the number one fear, even higher than death. Our response to failure is to learn to be afraid of trying.

The second response to failure is to blame others. A guy asks several girls out, and gets rejected. After a while, some guys develop a deeply held and sometimes unconscious anger towards women in general. They’re all whores, bitches; they manipulate men to get what they want, etc etc.

Or if you start a business and don’t do so well. It’s easy to blame the customers, the economy, your competitors, and your employees.

This response is equally bad as the first. In the first, you label yourself as incapable of success. In the second, you label your environment, your reality, as an environment in which success is impossible. Both of these responses make it difficult to keep plugging away like Mr. Edison.

So what’s the best response? How do we cultivate the perseverance (or “perspiration” which, I believe, Edison said comprises 99 percent of invention, next to one percent inspiration)?

By asking ourselves the right questions:

What can I do next time to get a better response?
What can I try differently next time to get a better reaction?
How can I present myself differently next time to improve my chances?

The magic about this is you don’t really have to come up with an answer. If you get into the habit of simply asking yourselves these questions whenever something doesn’t go your way, you brain will start to look for answers when you are busy doing other things. And believe it or not, next time you are in a similar situation, you’ll somehow get a different “idea” of what to do. This is a result of the powerful processing capacity of your unconscious mind. When you ask a question, it gets to work on finding an answer.

Many people ask themselves questions like “Why do I suck so bad?” And the brain will happily answer it for them. But when you ask yourselves open-ended questions that point you toward more resourceful behavior, your brain will just as readily answer them for you.

Of course, like any new habit, it’s best to start small, and allow yourself the time to build up your new behavior. Start slow, and build up your soon to be automatic habit.

Like if you overslept, instead of saying “Why am I so lazy,” ask yourself, “How can I wake up automatically?” If you always hit your golf ball into the lake, ask yourself “What can I do to keep it on the fairway?” If you take a test and don’t do so good, ask yourself, “how can I remember this stuff easier?”

The secret is to ask the question, and trust in your unconscious to provide and answer of some sort. It may take some time at first, but an answer will come.

When you make these questions automatic, you will be amazed how many ideas that seemingly come from nowhere. When you start to act on these ideas, your successes will be automatic as well.

How To Maximize The Golden Feedback You Get From Others

Sometimes when you are in the process of learning something new, it can help tremendously to get an objective, outside opinion on your progress. I say sometimes, because obviously if you are doing something like practicing your T-shot, you can pretty much check your progress yourself.

But when you are doing things that are much more personal, and much more subjective, it can be hard to tell if you are making any progress. This is largely due to how the brain processes, stores and uses information. This is also the reason that when people successfully apply things like the “Law Of Attraction,” it seems like the world has magically fulfilled their wishes.

No matter what changes you’ve made, small or large, they will seem normal.

Let me explain.

Lets say you are terribly afraid of elevators. Every time you approach an elevator, your palms get cold and clammy, your heart starts to palpitate, you imagine plunging painfully to your death, and then decide to take stairs. All this is happening inside your brain, due to your own particular history and how you’ve decided to code your experience. This is all normal for you.

Then you go and see a hypnotist, or watch some guy on Oprah who helps people overcome irrational fears, and are vicariously cured. Or maybe you even see some seemingly disconnected event that helps you to unconsciously reframe whatever past experience gave you your fear. Whatever the reason, suddenly you are not afraid of elevators any more.

Now the first time you approach an elevator, you might notice a difference. But more than likely, what has changed is your idea of what is “normal.” All of a sudden it will just feel “normal” to get on an elevator without any feelings of fear or anxiety. You will obviously remember taking the stairs before, but you won’t likely remember the actual fear, since it’s gone.

To get an idea of what this is like, try and remember first learning how to read. Try to remember the feeling of looking at a bunch of squiggly lines on a piece of paper, or on the board at school, and having no idea what they mean. Or try to remember riding bike for the first time, and not being able to keep your balance.

While you may remember the actual event, sitting in a chair at school, or riding your bike for the first time, you’ll likely have a difficult time remembering the feelings of confusion, difficulty, or anxiety that often comes with learning.

As you become more skilled, your brain simply readjusts what is “normal.” It continually updates your definition.

The upshot of this is that you have an unlimited capacity for learning and improving skills in virtually all areas of your life. The drawbacks to this is that in many life skills, (social skills, public speaking skills, writing and persuasion skills) you may be improving drastically, by leaps and bounds, but it doesn’t feel like it because you are always “normal.” This can lead to frustration if you aren’t seeing specific results, like when you improve your T shot, or free throw percentage.

The best way to keep your motivation high is to figure out some way to measure your progress. This can be done by soliciting the advice of people that can be objective.

For an example of public speaking, Toastmasters is really good for this. They have a system where after every speech; you are critiqued objectively by a sometimes-complete stranger. So you can be sure that any feedback you get is useful and helpful in drastically improving your public speaking skills in a relatively short amount of time.

Feedback is perhaps the most valuable thing when you are improving anything. One of the traps of feedback is that many people avoid it, due to a fear of being judged, or rejected, or having their deepest, most secret fears laid bare. Many people feel that if the feedback they receive isn’t one hundred percent positive, then it means they are a failure. This attitude only keeps you stuck in your present level of skill.

But in reality, feedback is simply feedback. It only has meaning that you give it. And when you consistently use feedback to help you improve, you’ll be light years ahead of most people on the planet.

How The Frog Built His Empire

Once upon a time there was a little frog. This frog was one of the kind that rains down on small villages during freak weather conditions. So far the only evidence of these frog-raining events is second and third hand information. Somebody knows somebody that heard about some report they read on the Internet. As of yet, this kind of thing is still considered one of those things that would be really cool if it were true, but most likely isn’t. Stories like these are best believed after a couple of drinks.

So here this frog was, growing up in the outskirts of a small farming community. Most people don’t know it, but it’s tough being a frog that experienced something that is the stuff of urban legends. At first he tried to use the story of his origins as a way to get girls whenever they had frog social functions, but as I turns out, most people had heard the rumor, and unfortunately, he wasn’t the best at telling it, even though he was the only frog he knew about that actually remembered being rained down on the community.

After a while other frogs that were more eloquent with the lady frogs started to borrow his story. After a while, most girls just assumed he was making it all up for attention. And because he was a poor storyteller, it usually didn’t get him much more than a few moments of time with a young attractive female frog.

So here this frog was. When he was a kid, he dreamed of turning his experience into fame and fortune. But as he grew older, he realized that almost every frog had the same story. Whether it really happened to them was beside the point. They were better at telling it than he was, so it quickly became obvious he’d have to find another way to make a living.

He always supposed he could just hang out and catch flies, but that wasn’t any fun. Most other frogs did that anyway. And once you established your lily pad, you really didn’t have much to look forward to. Catch flies all day, and croak all night in hopes of attracting a lady frog. While it was a decent living, and expected of most frogs, it simply wasn’t appealing to him.

So he decided to go on a journey. He wanted to find out what the world was like outside of the outskirts of his small farming community. So one day he just set off, hopping and hopping. At first he was a bit nervous, not sure what he would find. It was fairly easy along the way. He never really thought about it, but bugs were pretty much everywhere. No matter where he decided to stay for the night, there were plenty of bugs to be had.

And some places had so many bugs, that he allowed himself a couple days of just lazy bug eating before he decided to move on. Other places had different kind of bugs, and he had to learn new bug catching skills. Some he had to sneak up on, some he had to develop new tongue unfurling methods, and others he even had to set elaborate traps.

As he continued to travel, an interesting thing began to happen. Every once in a while he would pass through an area where a few frogs lived. And some younger frogs liked the idea of traveling for a living. They would sit around at night and learn from him. They would learn all about the different bugs that were available, and all the different ways to catch them.

Most of them were surprised to learn that they didn’t have to sit on the same lily pad day after day, catching the same bugs with the same methods. Some of them naturally traveled with him. And over time, his group of traveling frogs grew and grew.

Pretty soon their arrival into small frog communities became expected, and welcomed. People prepared big banquets for the group of traveling frogs. They would demonstrate all different bug-catching techniques to the delight of all who came to see him.

It wasn’t long before he was world famous. More famous than he ever though he’d be by telling his story of who he was. He became famous because he decided to leave his comfortable life, and learn new things. And by sharing all the useful things he learned with others, he gained a popularity and respect rarely achieved by frogs.

“The secret,” he began telling a group of young frogs who had gathered to hear him speak, “is that most people want to be recognized and respected for who you are, or where you came from. But the truth is, that true respect only comes from what you do, and how you can help others, by showing them how they can do the same thing. That is what the world needs. If you can figure out a way to do this, you’ll never be hungry or lonely again.”