Category Archives: Metaphor

Visualize Yourself To Victory

How To Change The Playing Field In Your Favor

I remember once, a long time ago, way back when I was in Junior High school, I was playing golf with a couple of friends after school. There was one hole that I always had trouble with. The first 80 yards or so, you had to hit your ball over part of a lake. The part of the lake that you had to hit over ended on the left edge of where the fairway would be, and to the right it only got bigger. Being a habitual slicer, I usually sliced off to the right, and into the water.

In order to get over the water hazard, I only had to hit a normal shot. My normal shot didn’t start to fade until about fifty to a hundred yards or so, which gave me enough distance to get over the water if I could ever hit a normal shot. My problem was that on that particular hole, I never hit a normal shot. My drive was rarely more then ten yards or so off the ground and sliced a lot earlier and more pronounced than normal, sending my ball straight into the large area of the lake.

From a pure physics standpoint this is easy to understand. If you flinch even slightly in the direction of lifting your head to see where the ball went, you’ll hit the ball just a little bit higher than normal, giving you less height, and in my case, more slice, as I twisted the club head just a little bit more than I normally would have.

The funny thing is that I lifted my head because I was unconsciously worried about slicing into the lake. And because I lifted my head, I sliced into the lake. My unconscious actions, (e.g. lifting my head up and turning the club head more than normal,) which were based on my fears, actually caused my fears to come true, rather than preventing them.

From a structural standpoint, it went like this: I had this fear about an outcome based on a planned action. My anxiety going into the action changed the action slightly, and became the direct cause of my fears coming true.

In this particular case, it was one off shot, so to speak. I hit it in the water; walked about halfway up the fairway, about even where my ball went into the lake (next to all my other balls) dropped a ball, took a penalty and went on my way. This was a one-time event, which in the end only increased my score by two. The rest of the course was wide and open, so I could slice all over the place and be OK.

Naturally, every time I teed up on that particular hole, I remembered all the other slices into he water, which of course increased my anxiety, and made it much more likely to repeat the error. But only being a golf game, and only being in Junior high school, I figured that was normal. Until my friend shared with me a powerful secret that I still use today, and you can to, to break out whatever rut you happened to be in.

This problem, often called a self fulfilling prophecy, can present itself in many ways, and the feedback loop can be much more debilitating that a couple of strokes on an afternoon golf game.

Suppose you are a single guy, and you see a girl you like. You walk up to her, introduce yourself, and she blows you off. Happens all the time right? Only next time you walk up to a girl, you remember the last one that blew you off, and it makes our approach less effective. You are nervous, can’t hold eye contact, and basically come across as kind of creepy. This makes you get rejected even more harshly, which in turns makes approaching another girl too scary to even contemplate. You have effectively locked yourself into a vicious circle of defeat, by using your worst possible past in order to hallucinate a likely outcome. The likely outcome terrifies you so much; it cripples your behavior, and virtually guarantees itself.

Another example. You go ask your boss for a raise. He turns you down. You become depressed, and your motivation to work hard decreases slightly, which in turn decreases your productivity a little bit. Next time you ask for a raise, your boss is even less likely to give you one, based on your productivity. If you get locked into this horrible tailspin, you may very well find yourself on the list of people who are expendable when budget cuts are mentioned.

One of the insidious things about these self-defeating cycles is that it is incredibly easy to blame others for your predicament. The guy who is approaching girls can blame women for being stuck up and not having the ability to see his true worth. Maybe they think he’s too short, or doesn’t make enough money. This can lead to a belief that all women are shallow and materialistic

The guy who never gets a raise can blame his boss, the economy, his coworkers for talking about him when he’s not around, and so on.

As difficult as it sounds, only when you take responsibility for your lot in life do you have a shot at bootstrapping yourself up and out of any vicious cycle of defeat you may find yourself in. Even though that often times others are culpable, some bosses do play favorites, and many people, both men and women, are shallow and materialistic, that doesn’t help you a bit. You can’t change the world, but you can change how you interpret it and react to it. That is completely in your control.

So one day, just as I was teeing up, my friend, says “Hey wait, before you hit, just close your eyes and pretend there is nothing but a huge patch of green grass in front of you.” I tried it, and it worked. I don’t think I ever hit another ball in the water after that.

The funny thing is that he didn’t tell me to visualize my ball bouncing on the other side of the lake, like most sports psychologists would have you do, or visualize how I’d feel when I hit it over the water. The advice my friend told me was to imagine the playing field, the course, was physically different than it really was. By imagining a different playing field, my actions changed automatically.

It’s so easy to argue until we’re blue in the face that “the playing field isn’t equal” and that others have advantages and opportunities that we don’t have. But what if you could simply hallucinate a more helpful playing field, and allow your actions to naturally respond to your hallucination?

What if before approaching some cute girl in a bookstore, instead of going through the difficult procedure of imagining a positive outcome, and planning his various openers, he simply imagined that all girls were irresistibly attracted to his type? There’s no rule that says your imaginations have to be true or accurate, only that they lead to behaviors that get you what you want.

And what if the guy in the office imagined he was the boss’s nephew, or that he’d pulled him out of a burning care a week earlier, or something else as ludicrous? Sure, it’s completely false, but what if it works?

Something to think about next time you’re gearing up to imagine yourself into a positive outcome.

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Relentless Expansion

Should You Learn To Fight?

Recently I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about colonizing other planets. Well, maybe not so much as hearing as I’ve been reading many articles on the Internet about the subject. You know how that goes, you find something online, you find this pretty interesting, and you read more and more about this, and click around on the links, and pretty soon you find that you suddenly have developed an interest in this topic that you only maybe were vaguely aware of before now.

When I think back, I think it was all started by something I saw on TV, some crime drama involving some guys that were on this privately owned space ship that offered millionaires the chance to go into orbit for a few days. One of the characters mentioned that this is the golden age when it comes to space entrepreneurial ship. Whether that’s actually true obviously remains to be seen. But it doesn’t take much imagination to see the correlation with Europeans setting out across vast unknown bodies of water search of new lands hundreds of years ago to setting out across space to set up colonies on other planets.

Of course, then there’s that recent movie that is a fairly thin metaphor of what to do when you meet up with people already living in the new area that you’d like to colonize. Human strategies have ranged from killing them, joining them, assimilating them, and pitting them against one another.

Probably the most useful strategy, and resulted in the spread of the most culture, at least according to some historians, is Alexander of Macedonia, or Alexander the Great as he is commonly referred to. He lead a coalition of Greek forces across Persia, and to this date is the second greatest conqueror of all time, if you measure how great a conqueror is by the amount of land they took over. In the number one position is Genghis Khan. An interesting side not is that Genghis Khan was a peasant who’s parents were murdered by a rival chieftain, and yet he rose to become the greatest conqueror in human history, while Alexander was born into a royal family, and inherited his kingdom, which already had quite a bit of support from the various Greek city states when his father was murdered. So you don’t need to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth if you want to conquer the world.

But while Genghis Khan swept through land with fury and terror, and slaughtered everything in his path, Alexander took a more diplomatic approach. Much of the land he conquered, he didn’t even have to fight for. The Persian Empire at that time had undergone quite a bit of upheaval, and they were spread far and thin. Many times Alexander and his troops would ride into a city, and the city government would simply switch their alliance from Persia to Alexander.

But one thing that Alexander did that helped spread Greek culture throughout the world was to encouraged his men, at least the single ones, to take brides from the new cultures. Often times he would pick up fresh soldiers from the cities, and many of his soldiers would stay and build new lives. Of course, this wasn’t always the case. When Babylon fell to Alexander’s troops, he gave them free reign over the city. They raped, plundered, murdered and burned the city to the ground, as was fairly common practice back in those days. (And unfortunately today as well in many places).

Another interesting strategy is the divide and conquer strategy. This was used particularly effectively by the Catholic Church during the colonization of South America and part of Asia in the 1500’s and 1600’s. First they would send the priests, who would convert as many people as possible, including the leaders. Of course, not everybody would convert, and would stick to the old “pagan” religion. Including in some that converted, and some that didn’t would of course be those involved in government. Once there was sufficient division in the ruling classes, then the solders would come, their jobs having been made much easier by the priests that preceded them.

This was attempted in Japan during the same time period, but all the Christians were expelled, or executed before they could finish their plan.

Anytime you want to expand influence into a new area, there is going to be resistance, and there are always several different strategies to take to best overcome the resistance. Brute force, cooperation, or subversion, it depends the desired outcome, and what an appropriate level of risk you’re willing to take, and what skills you possess and how they could best be used. I doubt Alexander or Genghis Khan could have gotten very far by sending in priests. I also doubt that the Spanish Conquistadors would have done well with Alexander’s or Genghis Khan’s fighting strategies, as they required open fields, and many men galloping furiously on thousands of horses. That strategy doesn’t work well in the jungle.

One interesting, and some say natural, application to all these battle, warfare, and conquering strategies is in business. Classic books on warfare, like Sun Tzu’s “The Art Of War,” And Miyomoto Musashi’s “The Book Of Five Rings” are usually found in the business section of the bookstore.

The huge success of the British Empire was largely do it’s effective application of these strategies of warfare to business. One could argue that English is the second most spoken language in the world today, behind only Mandarin, is due to the effective application of timeless warfare strategies to business purposes.

If you own a business today, whether it is a twenty-year-old brick and mortar shop, or an online start up that you are doing in your spare time, it might help to keep some of these ancient warfare strategies in mind.

Because I guarantee you, whatever it is you are trying to sell to your customers, there’s several other people fighting for their attention, and would be pleased as punch to get their business instead of you.

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What’s The Real Reason Behind Conflict?

Two Guys Walk Into A Bar…

I was hanging out with a friend of mine in a sports bar one afternoon. It was Sunday, and there were a couple good games on, so we figured we’d kick back there for a while. Both of us were too lazy to make the proper preparations (meaning clean up enough) to watch the games at either of our houses. And also, and more importantly, the sports bar had several different TV’s, and so we could watch several games at once, even though we were only interested in two of them.

The only problem was that there was a gap between games for about an hour. Not really long enough to go to a different bar, but long enough to be concerned about drinking ourselves silly out of boredom so early in the day. One game finished around 1 PM, and the other didn’t start until around 2 or so. So there were, in between games wondering how to kill the time. I don’t know about you, but I can’t sit there with a drink in front of me for very long without drinking it. Even if it’s only soda or water, if somebody keeps filling it, I’ll keep drinking it. So I had to be particularly careful not to get too sloshed before the second game started. We had taken the train there, so neither of us were concerned about driving, but it kind of ruins your afternoon when you come home trashed at 4 in the afternoon. Any productivity you may have enjoyed in the evening is gone.

We noticed a group of people sitting a few tables over that for some reason didn’t seem particularly interested in the game. They didn’t cheer or exclaim during any of the spectacular plays that had happened earlier, and they didn’t seem to have any concern one way or the other when either team scored. So we focused our concentration on them to keep ourselves entertained.

They were all men, as were most of the patrons that day. They weren’t wearing suits or anything, so they weren’t businessmen in town for a sales meeting or something. But they seemed to be quite animated about something. Finally, one of them noticed us paying a little too close attention to them. He got up and made his way over to our table. I was a little concerned, when I realized if somehow they took our attention the wrong way, we may be in trouble, as there were only two of us, and four of them.

I remember once I took this course in political science. I think the professor wished he were teaching history, as we didn’t spend too much time talking about politics, but more time talking about the history behind the politics. The professor had this rather interesting view of human nature. The textbook would go on and on about different political viewpoints, and certain government bodies among countries, which honestly I find incredibly boring. I suppose the professor did as well as he would always get really animated when he started talking about things like human nature, and how different factors along with human history lead inevitably to various political systems.

Although he was a professor at a public university, and was required to keep his political and religious leanings out of the course material, I suspect he was a strong believer in capitalism, and a devout atheist. He always talked in terms of competition, survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle. His theory was that all politics, and all political maneuvering is purely the law of the jungle in action. Any efforts to present any public policy is really a means to an ends, which in his opinion, was always more power to the politician in question. His theory was that all political systems were merely a collection of strategies to amass more power to those already in power.

He believed that pure capitalism, on a level playing field, was the best way to make sure that certain groups of people didn’t secure power and then make it impossible for others to do so through the creation of draconian laws. He based this on the theory of escalation within a closed society. Whenever one group amasses enough power, they can put in to play systems, which will keep others from amassing power. This is the most stable when there are two separate groups wielding power, and the power will naturally oscillate back and forth. In the creation of a society, or in the early days, each group will slowly grab more power by escalating its dominance in the face of its adversaries. And the adversaries will respond by escalating their dominance.

It’s a bit complicated, but there is a mathematical model that describes it in terms of driving elements of a function in a closed system. There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between elements, that is one gets power from the others weakness, but if the other disappeared completely then so would the original groups power.

According to this professor, this explains why many countries in today’s modern world seem to be at odds, but really depend on each other for their respective survival. If the stronger would completely obliterate the weaker country, then they would lose a lot of their reason for existence. I’m not sure I understand the mechanisms behind all this, but when this particular professor described, it sounded really logical.

When the big guy from the group of four reached our table, he asked us if we would like to join them. Although it seemed a little weird, a group of four guys who weren’t outwardly interested in sports asking two guys who were at a sports bar to join them, we said what the heck.

It turned out they were seminary students who were at this big conference at the convention center downtown. It was a weeklong conference, and seeing at it was Sunday, they had the day off.

I’ll leave the strange, but interesting discussion that followed for another post.

And now for something completely different:

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There Is Treasure

You’ll Never Know Until You Look

Once there were these two guys that were on this bicycle trip. They didn’t really cycle all that much, but they’d seen a documentary on TV about this particular scenic route through the country where they lived. It was an area that they were both familiar with, as they’d driven through there numerous times. But as I’m sure you know, driving through a place, especially when your mind is on your destination, and you ears are filled with music from your CD player, it can be difficult to really appreciate the scenery as you are traveling through.

I suppose that could be said for any area through which you pass on the way to someplace else. You never know what’s around unless you have a reason to take your eyes of the distant future, and pay attention to what is around at any particular instant.

Once I had a friend who was driving an old VW bus on the way through a particularly large city. He lived in the suburbs, and this particular route took him through some areas that he would never go to. But one day, his VW suddenly started having problems. He just barely pulled off the freeway, when he saw this old VW shop. Luckily, the guy had extended hours, and was able to help him.

This guy had been in business for several years, and was an expert on all things VW. My friend, not being the most astute mechanic, learned quite a bit from this guy, and returned to his shop several times in the future for repairs and fine tuning of his classic van. Had it not been for the engine trouble he had on that day, he likely would never have found that guys shop, and wouldn’t’ still be driving his VW bus to this day. That shop seemed to awaken an interest in engine mechanics in him, and he has been tinkering ever since.

So it was with our two characters of this story. Neither one of them had ever though much about the rolling countryside through which they drove on a regular basis, until they both coincidently saw the same documentary regarding the various farming and mining industries that had been developed over the past several hundred years in this area. The next time they met, they decided to go on a cycling tour through the area. They had discussed the best way to visit, and despite neither of them being avid cyclists, they figured that would be the way to go.

This took quite a bit of planning, as they reckoned it would take about a week to wind their way through all the back roads off the main highway on their bicycles. Since they both had full time jobs that only came with the minimum amount of vacation time, it took a few months to coordinate. But they finally did, and that’s how they came to discover what you’re about to find out.

The area was presently used as various orchard farms, and a couple vineyards. Nothing world famous, but enough for the local farmers to make a decent living. They did produce a really good merlot from time to time. Before being a vineyard, the area was a copper mine for a time. A developer from back east came in and decided to mine for copper, as copper back in those days was worth quite a bit, and technology at the time was heavily dependent on copper. So the developer figured that if he got lucky, and tapped into a large source of copper, then he might become a big player in the realm of precious metals. Who knows, he may even discover oil.

It’s not widely known that most of the early oil tycoons of previous years started out as miners. Gold, silver, copper, these were all extremely profitable metals back in those days. But with the advent of the railroad, and later the gasoline powered automobile, crude oil became huge. And still is, obviously.

However, this particular entrepreneur never quite made enough to break even. For a while, he was mining enough copper to make a tidy profit, and pay all the workers, and keep his family fed, but most of the time it was a struggle. So after a few years, he finally gave up, which left several untended mines in the area.

Later, of course, farmers moved in and found the soil particularly useful for growing citrus and grapes, as they do to this day.

So on their third day out, camping in some places and staying at cozy bed and breakfasts on other days, our two friends were cycling along, when they came across an abandoned copper mine. Naturally, being on vacation, they decided to take a look.

It was a relatively large opening, and easy enough to walk down into. They had a couple flashlights, as their guidebooks suggested for this very occasion. They had walked about a half a kilometer down into the mine when the earthquake hit.

At first they were terrified. Then the shaking stop, and the dust settled, they realize they were still safe. But they noticed a crack in the small excavated room they were standing in. It was a crack that seemed to open up to another natural pocket in the earth. One of them wriggled his head and his arm in, and shone the light around.

Despite the darkness, his friend could read the astonishment on his face.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Take a look.” He looked. What he saw made him gasp audibly. For inside the recently opened natural space deep under the earth, were mounds and mounds of raw gold.

“Yea, but, this isn’t ours, is it?” He asked. Unsure of the property laws and who owned what and whose farm they might be on.
“Check the guide book.” He checked. They were astonished that the copper mines, which had fallen into disrepair, had been passed from owner to owner, and since fifty years had passed since anyone had supported the property with any maintenance (which is required for mines due to some insurance law of antiquity) they had fallen into the public domain.

“So, we can keep all this?” he asked, incredulous.
“I guess so.” They looked at each other, and looked around for left over mining equipment, and got to work.

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Don’t Argue With Mother Nature

The Future’s Uncertain And The End Is Always Near

Once, a few years ago, I went on a hiking trip with a couple of friends of mine. We were hiking up this one mountain that supposedly had this great view from the top, at least that’s what the guidebook said. The top was an area that wasn’t a jagged peak, or surrounded by trees, but it was shaped like a large smooth dome, and was free from any obstructions. The way the book described it, it made it sound like you hiked through all these rough switchbacks, and through some fairly dense trees, and then when you got within half a kilometer of the top, the trees disappeared, and it was all flat, and open. Kind of like a giant, curved soccer field, only at about 13,000 feet.

We’d planned the trip for a couple months, as we had to choose a time when it was convenient for the three of us. It was quite a drive, and we had to leave right after work on Friday, drive for a few hours, sleep at the trailhead, and then start hiking Saturday morning. The plan was to find a place to camp about halfway up the mountain, then leave our heavy packs and continue on. If we were lucky, we’d get to the top, have about hour to spend up there, and then get back down to our campsite before dark. Then we’d huff it out and drive home Sunday afternoon.

Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate. Even though we’d planned weeks in advance, and checked the weather reports, we ran into some trouble. We left on Friday, as we’d planned, and got to the trailhead about 10 PM, laid out our sleeping bags on the ground, and started hiking. And as we’d planned, we got to the campsite around noon, giving us plenty of time to get to the top and back down to our campsite before dark. But about halfway to the top, a bunch of huge, black clouds started to roll in. So we figured we may have to cut our time short on top, but getting to the top was the whole reason we’d made the trip, so we pressed on. By the time we got to the top, the clouds were right on top of us. And it started raining pretty hard. Not only that but there was also plenty of lightning and thunder.

Now as a kid, (and even as an adult) I always thought thunder and lightening were pretty cool. But not this time. Every other time I’d seen lightening, and heard thunder, I was safe. Even before when I’d been backpacking and the weather changed, I was far enough away to enjoy it without worry. Not this time.

This time we were at the highest spot with a hundred miles. And the lighting was right on top of us. You know how when you see the flash of the lightning, and then you count to see how many seconds the thunder is behind it? Then it was instantaneous. And the lightning was so bright we knew that it was dangerously close.

They say that you can tell if you are going to get hit by lightning if your hair starts to stand on end. That lightning really isn’t a spontaneous discharge, there is a buildup of static electricity, and as it seeks a place to discharge, it “charges” the path slightly before. And if you happen to be in the vicinity, you will notice that charge as your body is covered in static electricity, much like when you walk around dragging your feet on the carpet before sneaking up on somebody and giving them a shock. With enough static electricity, your hair will stick up, like when somebody rubs a balloon to build up a charge and holds it to your hair.

Only it was pouring down rain by then, and I didn’t think that we’d notice our hair standing up on end, as we were soaked. And running as fast as we could off the top of the mountain.

I remember reading about how the South tried to finance it’s way through the civil war. The sold quite a bit of cotton futures to France. France stood to make quite a lot of money, and a lot of the Southern government, and hence their armies, had quite a bit of up front financing. The French were assured that they would profit, as the South seemed poised to win the war. But as it happened, the South lost, and France lost quite a bit of money on the deal. Despite all their planning and best estimates, things didn’t turn out quite as bad. Of course, the French only had a financial stake in the war. Those that had much more things in involved, like their property or their lives, lost even more. After the south capitulated, the burning of plantations by northern armies was quite common.

Even Hitler’s armies were no match for the unforeseeable. They marched across Europe without many problems, but when they ran into Stalingrad, they stopped dead in their tracks. In large part due to the worst storm in a hundred years.

Sometimes no matter how much you plan for something, no matter how well you use the information at your disposal, your plans can quickly and easily crumble, with horrible results by forces that are just out of your control. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try, that only means that success is never guaranteed, and certainly never inevitable. But life wouldn’t be much fun if there weren’t any risks.

Those that wait until chances are perfect, and success is guaranteed before they take action are going to be waiting long time. As Dale Carnegie said, the sure thing boat never gets very far from shore. There’s always the danger of storm, and the boat sinking.

Fortunately, we got down quick enough, and back under the cover of the trees without getting hit by lightning. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared out of my wits. It’s one thing to see and hear lighting and thunder off in the distance, it’s another to hear it, over and over again, with fifty yard or so from where you stand, or in our case, running away from it. It’s as if Mother Nature wants to remind you that she could kill you in an instant without a second thought. It’s not like humans are in short supply on her planet.

Once we got back down to our camp, the rain had stopped, or maybe it was just raining up on top. We enjoyed evening much more than other nights spent sitting around a campfire after a days hike. Making it through harrowing experiences tends to have that effect on people.

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The Mechanic

Trust Your Instinct

Once there was this guy that was a well-known mechanic. He was pretty well respected in his community, and people would come to him whenever they needed something fixed. He’d opened his shop many years before, and had slowly gotten a reputation as somebody that could look at pretty much any machine, and within just a few minutes, know exactly what was wrong with it.

He was one of those old school guys who firmly believed in the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” Often he would look at a piece of machinery or equipment, and depending on the size, listen intently to the owner describe the problems they were having, as he turned it over in his hands or walked around it depending on it’s size.

One thing people always found particularly intriguing about this guy was that he seemed to many questions, some that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the piece of equipment or the problems they were having with it.

For example, once this relatively young homeowner brought in a large gas operated lawn mower. The mechanic spent a good twenty minutes asking the homeowner various questions about when and how often he mowed his yard, as well as things like what kind of grass it was, weather it was there when the homeowner moved in or did he plant it himself, and even if he had any plants surrounding the grass, or was it just grass in his yard. The entire time he asked these questions, he examined the lawnmower intently, from several different angles.

Once somebody asked him why he asked so many questions, and he said it helped him to “get a feel” for the particular piece of equipment, that it helped him to “understand its personality.” People didn’t usually complain, because he almost always fixed it within a few minutes, and he usually didn’t charge very much. He wasn’t one of those “five dollars for tapping, and five hundred dollars for knowing where to tap,” kind of repairmen that always seem to figure out a way to convince people to give them a lot more money than they’d expected. This guy was smart, quick, and extremely affordable. He rarely needed to keep a piece of equipment overnight.

Another fascinating thing about this guy was that he had hundreds and hundreds of tools. He was the first to admit that he loved acquiring and using new tools. Some say his income that he generated from fixing things must be nearly completely spent on buying new tools. His workshop was huge, and had tools in every possible place imaginable. What’s even more, because most of the time he got the root of the problem relatively quickly (at least when he finished asking all his seemingly oddball questions) he would use a tool that most people had never seen before? Then with the tool, he would reach in and make a minor adjustment, and the machine would be running smoothly again.

But it wasn’t always that way. When he was younger, much younger, he was under the impression that only a few tools were required to get the job done. Once after he was finished fixing a vintage printing press (in under an hour) that had been inherited by yet another young homeowner, he was asked how he got all of his tools.

He explained that when he was younger, he knew he liked fixing things, but he was very poor. All he could afford was a basic tool kit. His dad would let him play with things in the garage, and before long he knew he had knack for taking things apart and putting them back together again. But whenever he bought tools, he would only buy them in sets. And because sets were so expensive, it took him quite a while to save up enough money.

He was very impressionable, and he would only buy tools that had a specific purpose. Screwdrivers were for driving screws. Hammers were for hammering nails. Saws were for sawing, and so on. In order to fix something, he had to have a tool that was designed to fix that particular problem. As a result, he could only solve problems that other people had already figured out how to solve, and had designed tools specifically for that purpose.

This, of course, limited him in his abilities to solve problems and fix things. Because he could only do things in a way that was already determined by somebody else, there was always somebody that was better than him, with more experience, that could usual get the job done quicker and cheaper. This was always a source of frustration. He didn’t know how those people got to where they were. He supposed it was just the natural course of life. You always learned from others, and then when you were older, others would learn the same things from you. He wasn’t quite sure who and how people came up with new ideas.

Until one day, this fellow brought in a small piece of equipment he’d never seen before. When he asked the fellow who brought it in, he seemed reluctant to explain it’s true purpose. Because the mechanic was so intrigued by the new machine, he kept asking various questions about it, some that were answered, and some that weren’t. After a while, despite not knowing the true purpose of the machine, he got a pretty good idea of what was wrong with it. But it wasn’t a problem that he’d ever seen before, and therefore he didn’t have any tools that were designed for specifically for that problem.

He was puzzled, and then had a thought. Since this was a machine that he’d never seen before, why not use a tool that he’d never used before. He suddenly had a flash of insight, of recognition. Not unlike Edison felt when he finally found a filament that didn’t burn out, or when Einstein imagined himself riding on a beam of light. He had what alcoholics refer to as a “moment of clarity.”

He rushed inside, and got a hole punch and a nail file. The hole punch he’d used only once before, as a gift he’d received. Something about making belts that he was completely uninterested in. The nail file, was a nail file. When he brought the two unrelated tools back into the workshop, the particular customer was immediatley intrigued. While he didn’t know exactly what the mechanic was going to do, he could tell by the look of his face that he did. And only five minutes later, this contraption, whatever it was, was working perfectly. The customer was astounded.

And ever since then, the mechanic refused to be constrained by mainstream logic and accepted methods of doing things. By asking questions, and trusting his instinct, he found that he never failed to fix any piece of equipment presented to him.

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Success with NLP

Success with NLP

The Farmer’s Advice

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap

I met a couple of my buddies for lunch the other day. Some guys I hang out with sometimes. We were talking about the recent economic conditions, and how messed up they are for everybody. Our particular industry that we are in is slowly spiraling down the drain. A few years ago, in this one particular niche, there was plenty of demand that would easily support any old shop that decided to open up. You didn’t need much experience, or even business knowledge of savvy. If you just sold this particular product, you could make money.

Things like that happen all throughout a normal business cycle. For any particular product or service that is offered by a bunch of different companies, it can be tough to separate the exceptional services from the mediocre, and even the lucky. Whenever there is a general economic boom, you could swing a dead cat a hit a slew of successful businesses.

Similarly in the stock market. In the roaring nineties (and even as far back as the roaring twenties), anybody with half a brain could, through some real experience, convince themselves they were a savvy investor, as pretty much any tech stock, especially Internet stocks, were doubling every couple months as a matter of course. Of course, then the bubble eventually burst, and wiped out a lot of so-called “savvy” investors.

So it is with any market boom/bust cycle. On the boom side, anybody can set up shop, make tons of cash, and convince themselves they’ve discovered the secrets to a successful market. But the true winners are the ones that survive the bust and continue to make money.

Like the particular industry my friends and I are involved in, ten years ago, any housewife without any education could set up shop and make a decent profit. But with the economy shrinking, as many peoples disposable incomes, making some purchases are no longer no-brainers. People are actually forced to make some hard choices how they spend their money.

We noticed this old guy sitting next to us, and he was kind of going alone with our conversation. He wasn’t eve’s dropping or anything, it was just a quite café without a lot of other people, and he seemed to be nodding along with certain parts of the conversation. Slowly he kind of joined the conversation.

That in and of itself is an interesting thing. There’s the guy who shows up to a few people who are talking, and interjects himself rudely, and tries to hijack the conversation. Perhaps you’ve seen this guy at a party or a bar. Then there’s a guy who happens to be in the area, and slowly over time, your conversation circle slowly expands, like some kind of social amoeba or something.

Anyway, this old guy happened to be a farmer, and he was telling us how farmers every year must make a tough decision on what to grow. Because the planting time to the harvest time is quite a few months, a wrong decision can have some pretty harsh results. If you belong to some kind of system where the government offers some kind of guaranteed protection, where they’ll buy your stuff at a certain price, this isn’t such a big deal. But they only offer a certain price for certain products. And the government price is usually on the low side. So while it’s safe to farm that way, at least in this neck of the woods, it is anything but lucrative.

Which is why many farmers attempt to grow things not on the government approved list of guaranteed purchases. While this is entails a lot more risk, the rewards are much better. The rub is that you have to predict six or eight months ahead of time what the market will be like. Of course, if you grow some kind of product that is always in high demand, then you’ve got yourself a good business. But then again, there’s always competition for that same product ever year.

So you’ve got to not only accurately predict what the market demand will be, bit you’ve got to have a pretty good handle on your competition as well.

There’s much more that goes into farming that just planting seed and waiting for them to grow. This farmer was telling us that they too, experience the same boom/bust cycle. Somebody will start to grow a new crop, and it will do very well. Then the next year they’ll be even more demand, and more farmers growing that same product. But then a few years down the road, the market will be saturated, and they’ll be more supply than demand, and the farmers that joined in too late in the game will be left holding the bag. Literally. A bag of product that they can’t sell.

The secret, he said, (which we listened to intently, as this was some old guy who’d been around the block a few times) was to always be aware of your circumstances, and your abilities. He said a lot of farmers get stuck in growing the same thing year after year, and get dependent on market demand. When market demand turns sour, they have no place to go. But those that are always successful always keep something hidden in their back pocket. Always have an idea in the back of their mind for a new crop or a new product in case the market suddenly turns.

To some people, a field of dirt is a burden that can only produce corn or wheat or whatever you’re used to producing. But to others, a field of dirt is pure magic, and will grow whatever seeds you plant. If you keep your eyes and ears open for opportunities, and choose wisely, and plant the right seeds, you will have an extremely lucrative harvest year after year after year.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

The Parable of The Trees

Everything Is Eventual

Once there were these two trees. They were regular trees, in a regular forest. But there had been a drought lately, and there wasn’t much water to go around. So the leaves on the trees didn’t become as green as they had in the past. They would still grow, but not as many as before, and they didn’t look as good as before.

The mood of the forest was one of general anxiety. Most of the trees weren’t as happy as they’d been before. They still talked about the same things that they’d talked about before, but their conversations didn’t seem to have the same level of positivism as they did before. And the conversations seemed to be about trivial things, rather than any conversations that easily lent themselves to the future.

These were particularly old trees, several hundred years old, and they had been through several droughts before, but this one seemed a little bit different. None of the ones that came before seemed to have as deep an effect as the current one. Sometimes days would go by and nobody would say anything, they would just let the wind slowly seep through what few leaves they had.

Which is how this story begins, on one of those days when there hadn’t been any conversation to speak of for a few weeks. One tree, who happened to be particularly young, compared to the other trees at least, finally couldn’t take it any more, and decided to break the silence with his nearest neighbor, who was much older.

“I’m thirsty.”
“We’re all thirsty.”
“How much longer do we have to wait?”
“As long as it takes,” the old tree replied, starting to get perturbed. He too, was worried.
“How long does it usually take?”
“Sometimes a few months, maybe even longer than a year.”
“Longer than a year?” the young trees fear was obvious. The other trees pretended not to notice, but somehow they felt the same fear as the young tree despite their age and experience.

“You can’t control the rains. They come when they come. All we can do is wait.”
“But what happens if they don’t come?” The younger tree was almost in tears.

A strong wind blew, as if the angered by the young trees immature demands on the weather.

“Can you control your leaves?” The old tree asked.
“Huh?”
“Your leaves. Can you make them any greener? By only your thought?”
The young tree paused, apparently trying this new concept out for the first time.
“No. I can’t.”
“Can you make the water from the earth seep up your roots any faster?”
The young tree didn’t try this time. He just shook his head.

“When the wind blows, do you have any choice but to bend?” he asked again. The other trees were listening with rapt attention.

“No. I just bend. I don’t have to think about it.”

“So it is with the wind, and the sun, the moon, and the rain. They happen when they happen, why we do not know. How we do not know. We only know that they happen, and it helps us.”

“But” the young tree started, but trailed off.

“Do you know what happens when your leaves fall?”

“No.”

“They turn into dirt. The dirt through which your roots grow to pull up the water that comes from the rains, which comes from the oceans far, far away. So you can grow more leaves. ”

The young tree looked to the ground, and his branches, and the sky, and finally back to the older tree.

“Will I turn into dirt?” He asked.

“All you see around you is part of the same substance. It came from nothing, and shall return to nothing. Some sooner, some later. Everything is eventual.”

The young tree didn’t understand.

“But, what about us, the trees. We will turn into dirt?”

“Yes. But not today.”

The wind blew once more, shifting the branches, blowing off the dry leaves, clearing the forest floor below. Then the skies opened up, and rain began to fall.

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Love The Plateau

The Juggler

I had this friend once that was really into juggling. He wasn’t that good, but for some reason he had always wanted to become a really good juggler. The kind of guy that would be able to pick up any three or four objects and juggle them for an amount of time without any problem. He’d bought several DVDs on how to juggle, and even took a workshop once at some juggling school. I hadn’t been aware that there even was juggling schools.

He studied for several weeks, and finally he was comfortable enough to start juggling in front of strangers. He usually got a pretty good reception, and for a while he even went downtown where they allowed various performers to do their thing on the street in hopes for a few spare coins. On some nights, he developed a pretty big crowd. But most of the time, there were only a few people that would stay and watch for more than a few minutes.

After a while he noticed the same people would pass by, make a comment like “oh, there’s that juggler, he’s pretty good,’ and then they’d keep walking. It got to the point where most of the people that went downtown on a regular basis got to know him, and acknowledged that he was a highly skilled juggler, but didn’t hang around to watch him. He thought about traveling to neighboring cities, where they hadn’t yet been exposed to his juggling skills, but then he began to question his whole reason for becoming a skilled juggler.

At first he just wanted to juggle, and he had some vague imagination of juggling in front of people. Then when he got a taste of how good it felt to actually do that, he wanted to juggle in front of bigger and bigger crowds. But when it go to the point where he was thinking of actively seeking out bigger and bigger crowds, rather than just spontaneously juggling wherever he happened to be, it became more of a chore, or a job, than fun hobby. Soon he went back to only juggling whenever he happened to think about it, instead of purposely setting out to juggle in front of weekend crowds.

It reminds me a little bit of the law of diminishing returns. When you first put in a little bit of effort, you get a lot of results. But as you start to put in more and more effort, you start to get less and less results. If you’ve ever gone on a diet you know what I’m talking about. It’s pretty easy to lose that first couple of pounds, but after that it just keeps getting harder and harder. Eventually you hit a plateau, and if you keep at it, your successes are really a serious of longer and longer plateaus, with intermittent jumps in success levels.

There’s even been books written about how the plateau is really where all your skills and abilities are forged. If you look at life a series of long plateaus, with intermittent jumps in skill level, it makes I easier to keep on moving forward when it often appears as though you aren’t making any progress.

This structure may have some kind of biological origin. Evolution is thought to be a series of plateaus, with intermittent jumps in mutations that over time significantly change a particular species. Even the evolution of language is thought to follow this same pattern. There are certain points in the growth of a language where it changes significantly in a relatively short amount of time, due to a variety of circumstances.

For example, English underwent a huge change around the 1400’s, known as the great tonal shift. The way English vowels are pronounced changed significantly in a couple generations. It is said that somebody speaking English after this tonal shift would not be able to communicate with someone speaking English before this tonal shift.

Even at the quantum level, the energy levels of electrons don’t change from gradually from one energy state to another. There is huge jump (the word “quantum” simply means “discrete”) from one energy level to the next. There is no in between.

It’s as if the whole basis of physical reality follows the model of plateaus in energy levels or states of matter punctuated by large intermittent changes in state. The reason behind all of this is of course a mystery, to even the smartest theoretical physicists. It just seems completely strange, and pretty cool, how whatever law that makes an electron follow the discreet energy level model lead to somebody being on a plateau punctuated by intermittent successes in weight loss.

They say that the universe is a hologram of itself. If you take any small piece of matter, and look at it, it will be of the same structure and makeup as the whole system. Electrons orbiting atomic nuclei behave the same way as planets orbiting a sun. Just like there are discreet energy levels of electrons in a hydrogen atom, there are discreet elliptical orbital paths of the planets in our solar system.

So next time you feel “stuck” on a plateau, know that you are in good company.

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Come Back With Your Friends And Play

The Lost Monkey

Once there was this young monkey. He lived in the jungle, with the rest of the monkeys. And he played with all the other monkeys just like you would expect a young monkey to. He was at that age where the adult monkeys didn’t really expect much adult behavior from him, so they didn’t really mind him playing around all day. But he was still young enough so they felt as though they needed to keep watch over him to make sure he didn’t get into too much trouble. If monkeys are good at anything, it’s getting into trouble.

It’s not widely known that monkeys can be the most thrill-seeking animals there are. They have an elaborate warning system of cries and shrieks to warn the community when predators enter into their area. Some of the jungle cats in particular are very stealthy, and enjoy eating monkeys. Especially young monkeys that haven’t quite mastered the recognition of the various warning signs.

Young monkeys are so often yelled at by the older monkeys that they sometimes miss a serious warning cry, and end up being an afternoon snack for some hungry cheetah. So you can understand how monkeys at a certain age can be particularly troublesome for the adults.

Another thing that makes things difficult is that monkeys are much more communal that other animals. On the range of sexual behavior and monogamy, monkeys are fairly promiscuous. Some scientists believe it is the safest way to protect the young, or at least their best strategy. If you are an adult monkey, and you see a young monkey, you are inclined to protect it because there’s a fairly decent chance that it may be your own kid.

So having a group of young monkeys that are old enough to play around on their own, but young enough to not quite understand the warning cries are a nuisance to the adults who just want to go about their own monkey business, which in the monkey world is to find as many bananas and have sex with as many monkeys as you can.

Once that the young monkeys grow up and discover the secret of life, namely bananas and sex, they start to lose interest in playing around, and seeing how close they can get to the cheetahs without being eaten alive.

But this one afternoon, this one particular monkey had somehow separated himself from the group. He was swing around, from branch to branch, and suddenly noticed that there weren’t any other monkeys around him. He stopped, and didn’t hear any monkey chatter or monkey cries, so he became a bit nervous, inasmuch as monkeys can become nervous. Which in reality isn’t that much. They are monkeys, after all.

So this young monkey kept swinging from branch to branch when he discovered a big clearing in the jungle. It looked as if the trees had been cut down for some reason. Being naturally curious, he decided to investigate. In the middle of the clearing, was a big hole in the ground. But not just any hole, it had been dug to a specific shape. It was a perfect square, and went straight down into the ground as far as he could see. He kicked a couple rocks in, and waited to hear them drop, but he didn’t. He suddenly wanted to remember exactly where he was. His friends would really find this fascinating. He was torn between investigating further, on his own, or going back and getting his friends. He decided to climb down into the hole, just a little bit, to see what he could find.

The sides were pretty easy to hang onto, so he climbed down a few hundred meters. It took a while, but he had a sinking suspicion something really cool was going to happen. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but the further down he climbed, the more he got excited.

Finally the hole opened up into this giant cavern. Inside the cavern were all these strange looking machines and shiny pieces of things that he didn’t even recognize, let alone know what category to put them in.

He decided to go over and play on one of the machines. There were all these dials and knobs, and wheels. He started punching them and spinning them, and the machine, if that’s what it was, roared to life. It made all these strange sounds, and started rolling around, as if on its own power.

The monkey was scared and excited at the same time. He jumped of the machine, and stood back and watched the machine go to work. The machine started digging through the side of the cavern. When it dug, the monkey noticed some really shiny stuff, again that he didn’t recognize. He scooped up a handful of the shiny stuff, and climbed back up the hole. He’d have to tell his friends about his place for sure. He’d have to just be sure to remember how he got here, so he could tell his friends about this place and come back to explore.

Because he knew that what he’d found here was amazing, and he couldn’t wait to tell all his friends, so they could all come back here and play.

To be continued…

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Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics