Category Archives: Perception

Keep Going Baby

Fine Tuned Mental Calibration

Everybody knows about goals.

It’s one of those things that we all know we should have.

But few people take the time to create them.

There’s plenty of studies that show those with goals tend to do better than those without.

A famous study of Harvard graduates detailed this.

They tracked a graduating class for a few decades.

The people who had written goals did much better than those who didn’t.

On one level, it makes perfect sense.

To be successful without goals means you have to get lucky.

Meaning you just kind of stumble forward, not really knowing what you are doing.

Funny thing is, that many people who are successful did just this.

They just kept moving forward.

They had a vague idea of what they were doing.

Maybe a certain kind of business idea.

Or musical or athletic talent.

They just followed their instincts, and they were driven forward by their rewards.

When athletes win a game, it feels good.

This good feeling motivates them to get better, so they can get more of that good feeling.

Similarly, those who enjoy massive business success followed the same strategy.

They create an invention, and make a little bit of money.

Making that money gives them a good feeling, which motivates.

They keep doing whatever they did, so they can keep inventing stuff and making money.

In reality, it’s impossible to NOT have goals.

It’s just that very few people take the process and move it up to the conscious level.

Most business, scientific, and artistic success stories all follow the same strategy.

They have a certain set of skills.

They express their skills and in return get a positive emotional feeling.

They realize (consciously or unconsciously) that improving their skills will get them more of that positive emotional feeling.

For them, the money they get is important, but only as a byproduct.

For them, the money is EVIDENCE that what they are doing is valuable to people.

It’s one thing to come up with a goofy invention in your garage.

It’s something else completely to get people eagerly handing over their money so you will build one for them.

In this situation, the money is EVIDENCE that your skills are valuable to the world.

That the world appreciates your time and effort and thinking.

This is exactly why we have so much stuff now, when only a few hundred years ago there was only the very basics.

To maximize your participation, it’s a matter of calibrating your mind.

Of finding that proper alignment between your skills, the needs of the world, and the stream of income that connects the two.

Learn More:

Wealth Tuning

Do You Understand History?

Ancient Secrets Of History

It’s a pretty common idea that the winners write the history books.

This isn’t to say there is a bunch of secret history that’s being kept from us.

Or even that events didn’t happen.

But how those events are remembered isn’t always clear.

One of the benefits of being in charge of a society is you get to frame these events however you want them.

And generally speaking, those in charge tend to put that kind of spin on events.

Meaning that events were more because of the people in charge.

That’s kind of a human thing.

We try to “take credit” for stuff when we were really just there when it happened.

It’s not really different from when something unexpected happens, and then we say, “I knew that was to happen!”

We didn’t really KNOW that was going to happen.

If we did it wouldn’t have been unexpected.

So when good things happen, those in charge try to take all the credit they can.

Especially if they need to be elected.

They need all the evidence they can.

This happens in the short term, AND in the long term.

Read any book about the history of money, and they will all describe money as coming FROM governments.

But in reality, the IDEA of money is very instinctive.

All humans have an instinctive idea for “commodity money.”

When you have something you want to trade.

You can trade that for what you want, OR you can trade it for something you KNOW you can trade for what you want.

Little kids do this all the time.

When trading game cards, for example.

They instinctively trade for cards because they know those cards are in great demand.

Not because they want them.

Because they have “trade value.”

Nobody needs to teach them this.

This is precisely what “money” or “currency” is.

Something that everybody agrees is worth something.

Sure, when governments started minting coins, it made it easier.

Mainly because the stamp on the coin let everybody know it was real, and not make.

But governments didn’t INVENT the process.

They just make it easier.

(And also consider that since governments controlled all the guys with weapons, they controlled all the gold and silver mines..)

The idea of trading for something that is worth something to somebody else is a deeply human trait.

It’s the human instinct that is the cornerstone of all societies.

All creation, all inventions, and everything that exists.

You don’t need to learn how, you need to re-discover how.

By erasing all those false ideas about money.

Learn More:

Wealth Tuning

Road To Riches

First Rule Of Emperors

I used to know this old guy.

Attorney from Japan.

He’d done a bit of traveling (including a few excavations) and had an interesting view on things.

He told me the story about Tokugawa, the first Shogun who ruled all of Japan.

If you watch any of the old Samurai movies, they take place BEFORE that happened.

This was the “wild west” period of Japanese history.

When there were rogue bands of samurai’s everywhere.

If you are going to be a leader of any country, you need to have a lot of skills.

Tokugawa had a particularly interesting problem.

He took power right around the beginning of the 1600’s.

AFTER a lot of European explorers had visited Japan.

The first thing Tokugawa did was kick them all out.

The real problem was that most Japanese had either experienced or heard stories about these Europeans.

And at that time, the Europeans had FAR SUPERIOR technology.

So Tokugawa’s task was to rule AND figure out a way to get them to “forget” about the Europeans.

He needed his people to feel superior to the “outsiders,” as all rulers do.

Nobody is going to last long as a leader with the idea that “we suck, and we better hope our superior enemies decide to invade us.”

People like their leaders to tell the people how AWESOME they are.

Which was difficult for Tokugawa, since they’d all seen the HUGE gunships and technology the Europeans had.

And all the stories of different cultures on the other side of the world.

This is where Tokugawa was an absolute GENIUS at social engineering.

He came up with the idea that “technology” is evil.

Impure.

It’s better to be poor, and sit and watch the rocks grow.

Or spend an hour preparing pouring a cup of tea.

(Interestingly enough, it was this super attention to detail that made the Japanese super rich super quick when the Industrial Revolution showed up).

But as my lawyer friend explained, another aspect of Tokugawa’s genius was to put the merchant class at the VERY BOTTOM of society.

Who was on top?

The Samurai of course.

But the Samurai had to take a vow of poverty.

The idea of pursuing money was not becoming of a Samurai.

This sounds curiously similar to the early Roman Empire, especially when they took on Christianity.

The idea that it is “holy” or “divine” or “pure” to be poor.

It’s also a VERY EFFECTIVE way to ensure nobody raises an army against you.

Armies take money. Lots of money.

This is EXACTLY how Julius Caesar took over Rome.

He had money, and an army.

So if you ever become a ruler or an emperor or a shogun, the first rule is to convince everybody that “money is evil.”

So you can keep it all for yourself.

Or you can FORGET about becoming a ruler and just make a bunch of money.

Let everybody else find holiness through poverty.

Learn More:

Wealth Tuning

What Works? What Doesn't?

Find The Shot Down Planes

Nobody likes to fail.

At least in modern society.

For example, let’s say you see a cute girl or guy across the room.

They are giving you some pretty good signals.

So you walk over and say, “Hi.”

Only it doesn’t go so well.

On the way over, you were hoping that it would go perfect.

On the way back, you wished you hadn’t gone in the first place.

(Sounds like a lot my trips to Vegas!)

The hope of getting a good result feels good.

The feeling of getting a bad result feels bad.

And since nobody likes bad feelings, we tend to not repeat that process very often.

However, this is very short term and very dangerous thinking.

You’ve likely heard of the missile metaphor.

That on it’s way to the target, it’s always re-adjusting its trajectory.

And if we set a strong enough goal, we’ll be like the missile.

We keep moving toward our target, and adjusting our trajectory.

The thing we don’t like so much is failure is an absolutely necessary component of this.

Every failure is SUPPOSED to make us think of a better way to do what we just did.

This is EXACTLY how our human goal-seeking mechanism works.

Success tells us what to do.

Failure tells us what not to do.

Both are equally important.

Once, way back in WWII, they were studying planes that hadn’t been shot down over Germany.

They brought in all kinds of mathematical experts to figure out why the planes that didn’t get shot down weren’t getting shot down.

The non-mathematical generals figured if they could replicate what worked, they would create more successful missions.

But a young scientist told them that was the wrong way to think about it.

He said the most important part was knowing HOW and WHY the planes that were shot down WERE shot down.

And since all of the planes that were shot down were in enemy territory, this made it kind of difficult.

Plenty of courses tell you (or allegedly tell you) of a step-by-step system to get some result.

Modeling is a certainly a method of replicating successful behavior.

It is certainly helpful.

But every human has a different experience.

So modeling, or replicating behavior, can only take you so far.

You still need to learn by trial and error.

Because error is gives you the necessary feedback to adjust course, and do better next time.

So, the million dollar question:

How the heck do you get yourself to do that, consistently, when failure sucks so bad?

The answer comes by understanding that trial and error learning is a SKILL.

And like any other skill, it’s best to start slow.

Take teeny tiny actions.

SLOWLY build up your tolerance for “failure.”

It’s just like anything else.

If you can only do one pushup today, it would be silly to try to do a hundred tomorrow.

But ANYBODY can start off with one pushup a day.

And when that becomes easy, increase to two.

Same with learning by trial and error.

Start slow, and gradually build up your trial and error learning skill.

Just like anybody can learn to do 100 pushups over time, you can learn to learn ANYTHING over time.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

She's Right Behind You

Trapped On Demon Planet?

What the thinker thinks the prover proves.

This is a fairly ubiquitous “law of attraction” saying.

Meaning that if you believe something, you’ll see it.

One on hand, it makes perfect sense.

If you believe people are friendly, you’ll act as if you live in a world of friendly people.

You’ll walk with confident body language and facial expressions.

Thinking you live in a world of friendly people, you’ll be happier more often, and more likely to smile at strangers.

And BECAUSE of your positive body language (which is because of your thinking) people smile at you.

In a “cause-effect” chain of events, it goes like this:

Positive Belief -> Positive Body Language – > Positive Behavior -> Positive Response

Your belief CAUSED what you believe to happen.

You believed it was true FIRST, and then it became true SECOND.

Similarly, if you believed you lived in a world filled with demons, that is what you would find.

Your beliefs would cause a certain behavior, which would radiate a certain “energy” which would elicit a certain response.

Where it gets kind of squirrely is when you cross the threshold from beliefs causing things that are easy to identify (smiling people) to beliefs causing things that are pretty vague.

If you believe in a friendly world, this will create smiling people.

And smiling people is pretty easy to interpret as “friendly world.”

But if you believe you’re living on “demon planet,” you won’t actually see demons.

You’ll people looking at you with guarded looks and closed off body language.

Guarded looks and closed off body language could mean a lot of things.

But few people would make the connection that “closed off body language and guarded looks” is equal to “demon planet.”

This is when your brain can shift from “beliefs that cause events” to “after the fact reframing.”

“After The Fact Reframing” is when something unexpected happens, and then you LATER redefine it to make sure your beliefs are still intact.

Problem is that few people walk around wondering, “Hmm, which state of mind am I in… Beliefs that create responses or after the fact reframing?”

It’s as if no matter WHAT you believe, we’ve got plenty of built in biases to make sure we find PROOF, regardless of how silly those beliefs seem.

How can we be sure?

Always take data.

Be able to measure to make sure.

If you are on a diet, for example, it’s kind of hard to see numbers on your bathroom scale getting higher each week, yet still believe you are LOSING weight.

If they ARE getting higher, you hopefully have other measurements to VERIFY that those higher numbers (your gross weight) is healthy.

Smaller waist, more pushups every morning, etc.

Whatever you think is true, imagine that you have to take real DATA, and then present that DATA to a disinterested third party.

So long as you keep your beliefs tethered to DATA based reality, you’ll know if you’re making REAL PROGRESS instead of PRETEND PROGRESS.

Learn More:

Seven Disciplines

Hit Your Targets

Daily Empire Building

Dreaming big feels good.

Even if you don’t really have a concrete idea of what you want.

This is why we love movies so much.

They’re sort of like our own lives, but they are an absolute best case scenario.

Even far fetched sci-fi movies have human elements that we can relate to.

We watch the characters handling things, and wish we could do the same.

Or we see them messing up, and we wish we could tell them what to do instead.

Wondering “What if?” is perhaps our best skill.

This is what creates inventions, medicine, better, faster and cheaper transportation.

At the same time, wondering, “what if” can be constraining.

That’s the flip side of dreaming big.

We tend to dream SO big, we don’t know how to get started.

We watch movies and read books and that kind of “satisfies” our urges.

Sure, it’s nice to dream about building a huge empire, but how the heck do you get started?

Every empire that was built was built by somebody.

And there was a time in that person’s life where they had no clue what to do.

When we see the result, we see the results of their successes.

We don’t see any of their failures.

Even a small local business that feeds a family.

From the outside, it looks like they must be some kind of geniuses.

But every success is built on failure.

It’s the only way humans learn.

Sure, we can learn academic stuff in books.

But learning HOW to do something HAS to come from trial and error.

The secret is to start as small as you possibly can.

Once you start, the process is on.

And the more it goes on, the better you’ll get.

Pretty soon, “empire building” is just part of your daily routine.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

Break Out Of Average Prison

The Collapse Of The Averages

If you study stock charts, there are a kajillion indicators.

Meaning there are a bunch of ways that try and predict what the stock will do next.

The two simplest are moving averages.

One a fifty day, one a two hundred day.

The fifty day is “short term” while the two hundred is “long term.”

If the fifty day crossed the two hundred day on the way down, that’s a bad sign.

It means the stock is not only going down, but it’s picking up momentum as it’s going down.

On the other hand, if the fifty day crosses the two hundred day on the way up, that’s considered a good sign.

Not only is it going up, but it’s picking up momentum as it’s going up.

If you look at any stock chart over the past couple years, and look at the two different moving averages (50 day and 200 day) it looks like a decent signal.

Buy when they cross on the way up, and sell as they cross on the way down.

This is just one of MANY such indicators.

Pick two, a short term and a long term, and when they cross it’s time to buy or sell, depending on HOW they cross.

Implied in all of these indicators is the idea of reversion to the mean.

They are ALL based on past performance.

And these calculations based on past performance will hopefully predict future performance.

But they are all based on the idea that when a price of a stock moves too far way from where it’s been, it’s going to move back.

Reversion to the mean.

It’s been said that humans are scared, lazy people.

And everything we do is designed to make life easier (cause we’re lazy) and safer (cause we’re scared).

But sometimes we can go too far.

We can make life TOO easy and TOO safe.

And we lose our natural abilities.

To think, be creative, and take action when we need to.

Only a couple hundred years ago (which is a nanosecond compared to how long we’ve been around) getting food was a chore.

You had to do a lot of work to get something to eat.

Now you can push a couple buttons on your device, all while watching TV, and have something delivered.

They only “work” you’ve got to do is get up and answer the door.

While this is pretty cool, it’s also pretty dangerous.

Being too safe for too long, and having things too easy for too long can take away our edge.

Which can make it very hard to think creatively, so you can live a life far above average.

Luckily, shifting your mind back to your naturally creative self isn’t difficult.

The sooner you start, the better off you’ll be.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

The Deeper Issues

Speak To Their Deeper Structure

There’s an interesting movie that came out a few years ago.

About a bunch of aliens that decided to come to Earth.

Only when they got here, communication was an issue.

(You might wonder why they didn’t think of that before they made the trip).

This is generally something that’s never really focused on in movies.

Even movies about history.

They have a couple of different cultures meet, and they can communicate perfectly.

Most of the time, they just have everybody speak English and hope nobody notices.

Of course, in movies, books and other stories this is acceptable.

But in real life, communication is essential.

If you’ve ever been anywhere where you don’t speak the language, it can be pretty terrifying.

Especially if you’re alone and lost.

If somebody comes up and starts speaking English, it’s a HUGE relief.

However, most people just assume since everybody’s speaking English (or whatever your native tongue is), that’s that.

But that’s just the beginning.

Sure, if you’re with your buddies and you have a long history, you don’t need to say much.

But when you’re meeting somebody new, a potential client or love interest, you need to do a lot more than just speak English.

Everybody has their own unique way of experiencing the world.

If you don’t take the time to learn about THEIR model of the world, you’re leaving a lot up to chance.

Luckily, underneath all of our individual model’s of the world, lies a structure that is consistent from person to person.

Which means once you understand this deeper structure, and more importantly how to make sure your message resonates with this deeper structure, nearly everything you say will be accepted.

And if you’re REALLY advanced, and take the time to learn THEIR model of the world, then you can become even more effective.

More effective than 99% of communicators out there who spit out jumbled up collections of words and hope for the best.

Most people have conversations with strangers and then scarcely remember them.

But when you speak to their deeper structure, they will NEVER forget you.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Magical Forest

How To Speak Magic Spells

History has a lot of cool examples illustrating the power of language.

One of the more famous is the love triangle between Marc Anthony, Cleopatra, and Caesar.

Cleopatra was allied with Anthony, against Caesar, back before Caesar took over Rome.

Caesar had them on the run, and chased them into Egypt.

It looked bad for the two, as Caesar was looking better and better.

While Marc Anthony’s soldiers weren’t a match for Caesar, Cleopatra didn’t accept defeat.

“I got this,” she told her people.

She had them sneak her into where Caesar was staying.

She slipped in, and in one of the most talked about conversations in the history of civilization, she convinced Caesar not kill her, and not destroy Egypt.

And she ended up having his kid.

At the time, she was only 21.

And it’s easy to discount this as a hot young princess talking her way into the brain of a 51 year old general.

But there’s much more to it to that.

For that reason, many believe Cleopatra had magical powers.

So much that plays, books and movies have been written about her, and about that fateful conversation that changed history.

But consider this idea.

A magic “spell” is a bunch of words said in the correct order, that have a profound impact on the receiver.

The same word, “spell” is used to describe how the right letters put in the right order, will have the same effect.

Powerful words like love, fortune, freedom, slavery, hate, can evoke powerful emotions.

But you jumble the letters around and they are meaningless.

Most people when they speak, don’t give ANY thought to the order of words.

But when you put your words in the right order, your “spell” will have as profound an effect.

Imagine that most people say, “vole and nuftore”

While thinking, “Love and fortune.”

People look at them and say, “Dude, what?”

But you say, “Love and fortune,” and they look at you and smile.

Take this to a sentence or paragraph level.

Most people jumble up words, so when they speak, it sounds like jumbled up nonsense.

But when you “spell” your words in the right order, you will have a magical effect on your listeners.

Able to move generals and change the course of history.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Resonate With Her

Easy Secrets of Group Resonance

Resonance is a cool concept.

It’s also one of those words that sounds metaphysical, so a lot of people use it without really understanding it.

From a purely scientific standpoint, it refers to the natural frequency of any system.

Like a little kid on a swing.

When he swings his legs at the same “resonance frequency” as the swing, he can swing pretty high.

Singers that can break glass don’t have super powerful voices.

It’s that they can hold the perfect tone, without wavering.

And if that tone is the same vibrational frequency as the glass, then the glass will break.

Same deal when you rub your fingers around the rim of a wine goblet.

When the goblet starts to hum, it’s because the small vibrations of your finger along the top are the same frequency as the wine goblet.

Often times people talk about resonance among people.

Since there are WAY too many variables to even consider, this MUST only be a metaphor.

The resonance you share with your friends when you are all “vibing” is SORT OF like the resonance on a swing set.

But it’s only an approximation.

Thing is though, we understand that as a scientific concept, resonance can be repeated.

Wine glasses, swings, you can “resonate” with them any time you want.

But when we think of “resonating” with people, we assume it’s just one of those rare things.

It either happens or it doesn’t.

But us people, despite our goofy psychological makeup, are still made up of stuff, and although incredibly complicated, that stuff MUST follow the same laws of science that wine goblets and swings have to follow.

Which means if you understand the basic structure of human nature, and human thought, you can RESONATE with a great number of people.

Funny thing is when you are resonating with ONE person, it can be pretty difficult.

But resonating with a BUNCH of people is a lot easier.

See, we humans are PACK ANIMALS.

We naturally feel at home in a group of like minded people.

Which means in a lot of cases, it’s much easier to resonate with a GROUP of people than it is with any individual.

Learn How:

Cult Leader