Love Baby

Don’t Wait 1000 Years

If you look at a piece of corn from a thousand years ago, it looks totally different.

Corn was sort of genetically modified over the centuries.

In each given piece of corn, you have plenty of the seeds.

Depending on which pieces they chose when they (the ancient proto-farmers) picked it, and carried it back, different seeds fell off.

Dudes would go out to get some corn, and they would naturally pick the biggest ones.

Then as they walked back, the seeds from those biggest ones would drop off.

The net result was that after a thousand years or so, they corn became bigger and bigger.

They were unconsciously (collectively) re-planting only the corn with the biggest seeds.

Now, do we say that the corn 1000 years later is “genetically engineered?”

It happened unconsciously, but it’s the same process they use when they “selectively breed” racehorses and show dogs.

Of course, when the proto-farmers did it, they didn’t know what they were doing.

The corn, and all other plants with flowers and seeds, takes whatever it can get.

Flowers don’t really care that bees are getting free nectar.

And the bees don’t really care that they are cross pollinating the flowers.

It just works out that way.

But with modern science, we can understand how those work.

Using bees to commercially pollinate huge farms is a big business.

So is using science to make better food.

Of course, they can go too far.

Using sketching techniques at the molecular love to “genetically modify” the food.

But the fact remains, there are plenty of things which happen naturally and organically, but can be understood scientifically.

You can go hiking in the wilderness and find some beautiful flowers.

They grow naturally and organically.

But you can come back, find those same flowers, and plant them in your own garden.

With scientific precision and accuracy.

The net result is the same.

Even though the flowers you “created” were done so with precision and forethought, the net result is just as beautiful.

Just as emotionally pleasing.

Many things are like this.

They can happen organically, or they can be scientifically engineered with forethought and precision.

Learn How:

Love Hypnosis

Magic Box Of Love

Who Controls Your Thinking?

I remember the first time I heard Alice Cooper.

I was at a beach party, in high school.

With a bunch of people I worked with.

Some guy had a boombox and was playing “18,” a famous Cooper song.

The theme was being on the border between being and being a man.

Confused, angry, not sure what to do.

The transition from childhood to adult hood is a long one.

Most of us never make it completely.

The most common childhood model of getting our needs met is asking and waiting for it to be given to us.

The most effective method as an adult is USUALLY to figure out how to get it on our own.

Usually by working with other people.

But for many, the childhood model works fantastic in adulthood.

It’s easy, and lots of those in power LOVE that we continue to use that model.

Because the “giver” has all the power over the “receiver.”

Especially if the “receiver” doesn’t know how to otherwise get it.

On a much bigger scale, the human race is on the border between “childhood” and “adulthood.”

On a whole species level, you can say that humans in our infancy (as a whole, not individually) and are driven by instincts.

Instincts drive us so we don’t have to think.

We eat whenever there is food.

We have sex whenever there is an opportunity.

We are utterly dependent on social signals.

It’s nearly impossible to leave our instincts behind.

I always think of that when I watch Alien TV shows.

In modern earth society, nearly 40% of adults are obese.

But aliens are always skinny.

So I always wonder how those fictional aliens managed to leave their instincts behind.

As individuals, one of the indications of how “civilized” we are is how we can effectively manage our instincts.

Take hunger, for example.

If you are a slave to hunger, you eat anything and everything.

But if you can manage hunger, you can plan what you eat.

Make sure it’s enjoyable and healthy.

It requires a big of delayed gratification, and a lot of practice.

But it’s definitely possible.

If you’ve ever put off having a good meal until you were finished with something important, you know this.

Planning to enjoy your food successfully is MUCH BETTER than letting food control you.

All of our instincts are this way.

They can control us, or we can control them.

Most people only recognize that this is possible with food.

But it is possible with ALL of our instincts.

Including the most IMPORTANT one.

Learn More:
Love Hypnosis

Know What You Want?

The Carne Asada Nachos Pattern

I love eating.

But since I ain’t no spring chicken, I can’t eat as much as I used to.

When I was in high school, I could eat anything and everything.

I ran cross country and I wrestled, so not only did I have the magical metabolism of youth, but I exercised quite a bit.

But today, I need to be careful about what I eat.

Usually.

Because you HAVE to have cheating days.

And I like to plan my cheating days.

Think about what to buy, what to cook, what to watch on TV when I enjoy my cheating days.

Planning pleasurable activities is something we humans love.

They say that the only two tragedies of life are achieving your goals, and not achieving your goals.

What the heck does this mean?

If neither one of those is true, (not achieving a goal or achieving it) it implies you are ON THE WAY to some goal.

And that is a pretty good place to be.

When you look forward to something.

Even if it’s something silly like a heaping plate of Carne Asada Nachos and your favorite episode of The Sopranos.

The idea of something GOOD in your future is wonderful.

Since we humans can NEVER predict the future, when we have something good coming, it’s mixed with uncertainty.

But it’s the BEST kind of uncertainty.

When you’re uncertain exactly HOW you’ll enjoy something.

Or exactly HOW that enjoyable thing will evolve.

Or exactly WHEN that enjoyable thing will happen.

This is why pretty much everybody agrees that the Road (the way to the enjoyable thing) is better than the Inn (the actual pleasurable thing).

This is what has inspired humankind since we climbed down out of the trees and realized there was more to life than bananas.

What’s even better is you can give somebody else the gift of looking forward to something fantastic.

By making YOURSELF that fantastic thing.

How you interact with them when you’re around, and how you give them the gift of missing you when you’re not.

By understanding the process, you can create the most wonderful feeling we humans can ever feel.

At will.

Learn How:

Love Hypnosis

The Waiting Is The Hardest

Avoid Cannibal Shortcuts

Most everybody would like to know the “secret” to success.

Even the movie, “The Secret,” capitalized on our common desire for hidden knowledge.

The idea is that if we find that allegedly secret “idea” that other people know, but are keeping to themselves, then we’ll get what they get.

This is not a new idea.

One description of human history is the long story of us humans doing everything we can to make things safer, and easier.

It’s as if we have a constantly running program in the back of our minds that is ALWAYS saying, “There’s got to be an easier way of doing this…”

After all, every single invention has been made to make things easier.

Even doctors back in the old days, when operating on fallen soldiers, (while the poor dude was screaming his brains out) was thinking that.

“Damn, there’s got to be a better way to cut people open, fix them, and sew them back up….”

So the idea about a “secret” way of doing things is very normal.

Sure, some “shortcuts” may take you through a forest where you end up getting eaten by cannibals, but other shortcuts actually work.

And work well.

But sometimes, the “secret” is not what we DO, but what we STOP doing.

Humans are equally curious because we keep doing things, just because we did them before.

Even when they make zero sense today.

Many religions have these ideas built in.

Things that were actually dangerous back in the day, but they keep doing for their significance, not because of the danger.

What’s really difficult is when we KNOW what NOT to do, but we do it anyway.

This is VERY common in the beginning stages of relationships.

You like somebody, you aren’t sure if they like you.

You are DESPERATE to tell them how you feel.

Unfortunately, doing this almost GUARNATEES you’ll ruin everything before it starts.

Why?

Because love is an inside game.

It happens when would-be lovers are apart, and thinking about each other.

And crucially, when they are thinking about each other and are UNCERTAIN how the other feels about them.

As soon as they KNOW you love them and will do anything for them, it kind of kills the mystery, the suspense, and the romance.

That’s why in the beginning, what you DON’T DO is just as important was what you DO.

Luckily, there is a very helpful strategy to go by.

So you aren’t guessing.

You’re building.

Learn How:

Love Hypnosis

She Lives On Love Street

God Is An Artist

Way back in the day, I had this cool calculus teacher.

He was a retired engineer, and he loved to teach.

He was over-the-top enthusiastic about certain things.

Once he derived a famous math identity.

One that related “e”, “pi,” zero, one, and “i,” the imaginary number.

Ask any mathematician and they’ll tell you about the elegance of that equation.

All the fundamental mathematical ideas on one equation.

When he derived it, he stood back, looked at the board, and then to the class.

“God is not a mathematician, God is an artist,” he said.

For most people, for most of the time, math is complicated, frustrating, confusing and something they only deal with when they have to.

But if you can wrap your mind around it, it can be breathtakingly elegant.

On the one hand, it’s pure, inflexible, and a dry tool that’s use to describe actual things.

On the other hand, it’s a deep philosophy whose language is the nature of reality.

If you know anything about colors and color matching, there are mathematical relationships between colors that match.

Yet at the same time, we look at those matching colors, and if they are arranged by a competent artist, they evoke indescribable feelings.

From the outside, our biological beings MUST follow the laws of chemistry and physics.

But from the inside of our brains, the human experience is something artists and writers and philosophers have been trying to describe since the dawn of time.

One of the more useful skills you can cultivate as a human is to switch from inside your experience, where you can feel the full range of your emotions, to outside your subjective experience, so you can make rational and objective choices.

The better choices you make from outside, the better your experiences will be from the inside.

Consider this one of the “meta skills” that make all other skills better.

Learn More:

Love Hypnosis

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

Start Building Your Future Now

Let Your Imagination Lead You

Shifts in thinking can be very powerful.

They can also be so subtle that we don’t even notice.

One of our greatest assets as humans is our imagination.

Yet few of us ever use it to much potential.

Most of us use to dream about what we wish would happen.

Or even worse, we let others do our imaging for us.

Whenever we watch a TV show or movie, or even read a book, we’re letting somebody lead our imaginations.

This can be very effective.

In fact, it’s the whole reason people developed the ability to tell stories.

Way back in the day, stories helped us to deal with the daily uncertainties and real dangers of life.

Going out hunting every day was scary.

So having a bunch of stories in your brain of heroes killing monsters was helpful.

Today, not so much.

Most of our issues aren’t so life threatening.

But having a calibrated imagination is a huge asset.

When your imagining straddles the boundaries between dreams and possibilities.

You want them to be compelling enough to give you emotional pleasure when you think about them.

But they also need to be realistic enough so you actually change your behavior in an attempt to make them real.

Fantasizing about flying spaceships around and killing aliens is cool, but it doesn’t really motivate you.

Or it motivates to do what you need to do.

But if you only do what you need to do, you generally end up fulfilling the goals of somebody else.

People give you stuff to do, you do them so they’ll get off your back.

Imagining that you’re slaying dragons while doing those tasks is helpful.

But far from optimal.

Humans were meant to be explorers.

Of the planet, of our lives, and of our minds.

If you can fantasize about doing things for your own reasons, and those fantasies actually get you getting out there and trying things, you’re doing pretty good.

That balance of thinking and imagining and acting can take you much further than just following directions.

Which comes first?

Whichever works.

Because all three lead into each other.

But where the rubber meets the road, when thoughts turn into things, is your action.

Self chosen, dream driven action.

Get Started:

Seven Disciplines

Merging Brains

Whose Thoughts Do You Think?

Our brains are like sponges when we are born.

The reason is that humans need a lot of time outside the womb before we are fully developed.

So when we are born, we are only “half baked.”

Most people know this, at least intuitively.

Few people remember much from early childhood.

And the idea that whatever we are taught in early childhood is believed pretty strongly throughout our lives.

Few people change religions or political parties as they age.

However, when it comes time to learn as adults, we believe that it’s harder as an adult than as a kid.

We have this idea that kids can soak up stuff pretty quickly, but adults have a harder time.

This is a very dangerous thought, for a couple of reasons.

The common recognition of the danger of this thought is that if you think it’s hard to learn as an adult, you won’t make the effort.

And that you have this massive learning capacity that you aren’t utilizing.

This is absolutely true, but there is another facet of this erroneous belief that is FAR MORE dangerous.

We assume that as children, we “soak up” ideas easily and effortlessly.

And as adults, we lose that ability.

But what if we really don’t?

What if we STILL soak up ideas and beliefs just as easily and unconsciously?

This is a scary thought.

Because we are bombarded all day by ideas and messages.

Many of which are VERY DANGEROUS.

For example, a lot of the ads that blast our brains come at night when we’re watching TV.

When we are LEAST RESISTANT.

Who pays for seventy percent of TV ads?

Drug companies.

Do you want THEM putting ideas in your head?

Consider that your brain is just as open as it is today, as it was when you were a kid.

Think of all the ideas and messages and random things people are saying all around you.

When you are alone, and you’re having a random stream of thoughts, WHOSE thoughts are those?

Even if they are yours, it’s hard to get around the idea that they are HEAVILY influenced by messages.

Many of which (TV ads and political slogans) that were carefully crafted to GET PAST your conscious resistance.

How do you avoid thinking thoughts others have put in your mind?

The only way to get rid of ONE thought is to REPLACE it with another.

And the best way to hold that new thought is make sure it is pointing somewhere specific.

Something YOU would like in YOUR life based on YOUR decisions.

Focus on THAT target, and make sure to keep moving toward it.

Take data, and ensure you are getting closer.

This will give you objective evidence that those thoughts are yours.

AND it will give you an easy way to RESIST those other ideas.

Just as the simple question.

Do they help you get closer to your goal, or not?

So long as your goal is yours, your life and your thoughts will be yours as well.

Get Started:

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