Tag Archives: Creativity

Increase Your Genius

Aha!

The other day I was cleaning out my closet, in preparation for an upcoming move, and I happened across an old book that I hadn’t read for a while. Perhaps it’s because I’m basically a very lazy person, and am always looking for an excuse to take a break during anything that resembles any kind of physical labor, I decided to take a look through the book, as I remember having several “Aha!” moments when I first read it.

I had a friend once tell me she went to a lecture of a prominent mental health professional a few months ago, and he mentioned that there are some leading theories that suggest that the more you have those “Aha!” moments, the less likely you will suffer from any decrease in brain function that is normally associated with aging. Those “Aha!” moments can be tricky to come by, they often times come when you aren’t expecting them.

You’ll be watching some TV show about something, and it will remind you of something that happened a couple days earlier, something that you now see in a different light, or a new understanding. That new understanding, that feeling of making a neural connection that wasn’t there before, is where that “Aha!” feeling comes from, or so I’ve heard.

It’s like when you’ve driven to your favorite restaurant across town, and you have to go through all kinds of huge intersections where you are always stuck waiting, then one day by accident you find some small back road that is almost devoid of lights or stop signs, giving you a straight shot. There’s a new connection between you and your favorite food.

Sometimes those “Aha!” moments can be cultivated, like when you are learning a new language, and you take a break and watch a TV or movie that’s in your target language. What used to sound like gibberish, now is peppered with words that you can sort of understand, and instead of guessing what they are talking based on their body language and facial expressions, you can now sort of verify with the words here and there that you understand.

Or when you’re reading some long novel with many different characters and a fairly convoluted plot, then when you get close to the end the loose ends start to tie themselves up in nice understandable chunks of reckoning.

“Aha! So that’s what he meant!”

“Aha! So that’s why he hid the ice cream!”

“Aha! So that’s why she rejected his proposal! I get it now!”

And so on.

When you get a particularly dense string of “Aha!” moments then your brain is really juiced. Which is maybe why I decided to sit down and have a look through that book.

The book, in case you’re wondering, is The Einstein Factor, By Win Wenger. You can check it out on Amazon, or there’s plenty of info at his website.

But the book is chalk full of exercises to give your brain a thorough workout, and several of them have been clinically proven to actually raise your I.Q. One of the most famous is called “Image Streaming.” I tried this for the first time at a seminar I went to on Photoreading.

Image Streaming is when you close your eyes, and just describe the imagery that is in your head, whatever it is. No matte what you are doing, the brain is constantly feeding you images. The unconscious never stops. It’s best to do this with a friend, or at least to describe the image stream into a tape recorder. Otherwise you’re likely to fall asleep.

For every hour of image streaming, you’ll raise your I.Q. one point. Now if you try this, it can seem near impossible to keep this up for five minutes, let alone an hour. But just like any other practice, the more you do it, the easier it gets. And if you only did it ten minutes a day, six days a week. That would be one I.Q. point increase per week. If you took two weeks off every year, you’d increase your I.Q. fifty points a year by only doing this simple exercise ten minutes a day.

There’s plenty of other simple exercises you can do in that cool book. One of them is called “Borrowed Genius.” In this particular exercise (or hallucination, as that seems to be a more appropriate term) you think about a problem.

You imagine somebody that you are pretty sure could solve your problem. You get your friend or your tape recorder ready, and close your eyes. You start to describe your problem in as much detail as possible, and while you are doing so you slowly walk up behind the person you imagine could easily solve your problem.

Then you come up behind them, and quickly switch heads. Yep, you read that right, you switch heads with them. (See why this is best called a hallucination?) And as soon as you plot their head down on your shoulders, you immediately start jabbering away at your best guess to the solution to your problem. The reason you need a friend, or in this case a tape recorder might be better, is that you’ll get several great ideas, several of those “Aha!” moments, but since your jabbering away with some other persons head, when you switch back to your own head you might forget what you just said.

Another trick is called “Over The Wall.” Same concept, instead of walking up behind somebody and stealing their head (or borrowing it) you imagine that there is this big wall, and just on the other side is the solution to your problem. You walk up to the wall slowly, describing your problem in as much detail as possible, and leap up to the top of the wall, and immediately, and as fast as you can, and in as much detail as you can, describe what you see on the other side.

Again, make sure you have a trusted friend (who can take notes really fast) or a tape recorder, or your voice recorder on your computer.

I highly recommend the book, “The Einstein Factor,” or at the very least have a look at Win Wenger’s website. There’s tons of great info there on how to explode your genius and creativity.

Have fun.

Or, if you are interested in using NLP to explode your potential, click on the link below to get started:

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

Deepen Your Relationships And Skyrocket Your Creativity

Feed Your Brain

There’s this Starbucks that I like to go to on the weekends. In order to get there, I have to take a train, and a streetcar. From the station near my apartment to the main station downtown is seven minutes. From the streetcar stop to the stop just in front of Starbucks is about 8 minutes. If I hurry, I usually get off the train, leave the station, cross the big street and catch the streetcar in about three minutes. From my apartment to the station is about two minutes.

So If I time it right, leaving my apartment just in time to catch the train, and going from the train station to the streetcar stop without issue, my door to door time from my apartment to Starbucks is about twenty minutes. Not bad considering my apartment is located in an area that could easily be considered the boonies, as there are several large fields and open areas, and Starbucks is smack in the middle of downtown, surrounded by high rise buildings.

Coming back is a complete different system. From Starbucks back to the main station is about a 30-minute walk, if I take my time, and 20 minutes if I huff it. Huffing it isn’t all that exciting, so I usually leave at least thirty minutes before I want to catch the train. Between Starbucks and the main station is this long, covered, no cars allowed shopping arcade, with all kinds of stores ranging from casinos and video game centers to comic book stores to bars and café’s.

One think I like to do is to waste time in a controlled manner. Obviously, if I lose track of time, and I only have twenty minutes or so, I don’t have time to stop and window shop, or flirt with whatever girls I may see. I have to walk in a straight line, looking straight ahead, with my mind on the time.

But when I leave earlier, I can afford to wander around like a pinball, bouncing back and forth across the road from shop to shop. A kind of planned time of no plans, or planned spontaneity, if you will. I know what time I need to leave, I know what time I need to arrive at the main station, but I have zero plans for what I will do in between. Only that I will slowly move from point A to point B with out any predetermined path.

I was reading this book on relationships once. Actually it was a book on communication in general, but the particular section I was reading was on relationships. One of the complaints that many people have when their relationship gets passed the “honeymoon” stage is that it gets boring and predictable. While certainly not the only cause, being bored in a relationship is reason enough for some to turn an eye elsewhere for excitement.

One thing that the book suggested was to have some planned spontaneity. Many couples, especially couples with kids, recognize the importance of having “date night” where they do something that they used to do before they settled down and have kids. Unfortunately, many times this “date night” is the same boring, predictable thing that they do again and again, like see a movie, or go out to dinner. While it’s good to get away from the kids once in a while, if you are moving out of one boring and predictable situation into another, it sometimes doesn’t really help out that much.

What this book suggested was planning some kind of activity where you don’t know what is going to happen next. You know you’ll leave the house at 6, and come home at 10, but if you can structure your “date night” so that you don’t really know what’s going to happen, it can have a much more positive effect on your relationship. Of course many people are afraid to try this, as they fear they will fall into the “I dunno, what do you want to do?” trap where they oscillate back and forth for two hours before settling on something just to settle on something.

But what this particular book recommended was to purpose give yourself a starting point and an ending point, and a specified amount of time to travel from one end to the other, or in a loop as the case may be. Like up and down a boardwalk, or around a mall you’ve never been to, or through an area of downtown you’ve never been to at night.

The rationale behind these ideas is that the human mind is set up to always crave new experiences. We learn more of our behaviors by either modeling others and trial and error. If the brain wasn’t set up to always crave new experiences, it would be impossible to learn anything. That’s why movies, TV shows, books, and even gossip is so popular. It’s like candy for the brain. If we don’t involve ourselves in new experiences, the brain starts to crave artificially created ones.

And one powerful way to create a relationship, or to strengthen an existing one is to experience new things together. If you think of all the strong friendships you’ve forged throughout your life, it was likely through a common, and new experience. School, clubs, work, armed forces are all places that we naturally form life long friendships, in large part because we share a common and new experience, the emphasis being on the new.

There’s a reason you don’t become friends with that guy you bump into at the donut shop (or wherever) every morning. While buying your morning donut is a common experience, it isn’t new, so that bond isn’t created.

If you can structure new experiences with somebody you’re already in a relationship with, it can have a profound effect. The more new and unique, exciting and emotionally stimulating the experience is, the deeper the bond will be.

While wandering around downtown might not seem that new and exciting, you can do it in a different way, or go a different direction, or even make it a point to try a new restaurant every week. That way you can get into the mindset of exploring something new together, rather than just getting away together.

And even if you’re not in a relationship, doing something new and interesting where you play it by ear for just a little bit can also have a positive impact on your creativity and perspective. Something to think about next time you’re deciding what to do on a Saturday night.

For more ideas on how to take charge of your brain, and your experience for wild success in any area of life, check out the link below.

Success with NLP

Success with NLP

How To Access Genius Level Creativity

Imaginary Friends

I was having lunch with an old friend of mine the other day. I hadn’t seen her since just after she had her baby. That was four years ago. I can’t believe how fast time flies when you’re doing the same routine day in and day out. If you don’t and look up from what you’re doing, life can zip right by without bothering to take you along for the ride.

She was telling me about how her son has all these imaginary friends. He has normal friends as well, he goes to this kindergarten three days a week, and he gets on well with the kids there, but while he’s at home, and his dad isn’t around, he’s always wandering around talking to people that aren’t there. When my friend asks him about them, he acts like she’s the one living in an alternative reality. He can see them, why can’t she?

She wasn’t too worried, but seeing as he’s her only kid, and she’s never experienced the “imaginary friend” thing, she started checking around to find out how normal it was. Maybe her house was actually filled with ghosts or something, and he could see them, and she couldn’t. If that were the case, she would need to learn to communicate with them so they wouldn’t keep him up past his bedtime.

She was telling me she did all this research, and actually went to see a specialist in child development. What she found out was both interesting and relieving. Her kid was normal, and her house wasn’t filled with ghosts. At least none that she or he could see.

What he told her was how the brain develops as we grow older, and one way that the brain switches between externally focused and internally focused. All of this has overlap with other areas of brain research, but part of it is particularly useful for understand how children develop, and how they are often in their own worlds, which seem to them as real as these words you are reading now.

The brain has four basic categories of brainwaves. The brainwaves are made up of all the electrical impulses pulsing throughout the brain at any given time. Every time you have a thought, conscious or unconscious, several billion neurons fire off in particular orders. The sum total of the firing of neurons, and the resultant wave of electrical impulses can be measured. They range from very slow, long brainwaves, to fast and short ones. Each category is associated with a different “type” of brain activity.

Most adults alternate between beta and alpha. Beta is the fastest, and is what most people experience when we are awake. Externally focused, thinking about the things around us and how to deal with them. Extremely high levels of beta are thought to be an indication of stress and anxiety. (An indication, not a cause).

The next is alpha. (An interesting side note, alpha is not the fastest, even though it’s called alpha. It’s called alpha only because it was the first one they discovered.) Alpha is associated with daydreaming, drifting off into imaginations about the past or the future. Artists and creative thinkers find alpha particularly helpful, as this is where they get a lot of their inspiration. When you kind of “zone out” in the middle of something, you have slipped from beta into alpha.

The next one down is theta. This is where all hallucinations, hypnosis, and deep meditation occur. During theta you can have wild ideas and thoughts. When you are falling asleep at night, and you drift from thinking about normal, every day thoughts, and catch your thoughts drifting seemingly on their own, with you just watching them, you’ve slipped into theta.

As adults, it’s very hard to be in theta and stay awake. Theta is that brief space between waking and sleep. Advanced meditators can hold this state for a while, but it takes some practice. Theta is though to be where genius ideas come from. Edison used to sit in a chair in a dark room, holding a weight in his outstretched hand. As soon as he drifted into sleep, and into theta, he would drop the weight. This would wake him up, and he would immediately write down as much as he could. This is how he came up with so many creative ideas. It wasn’t that he was smarter or more creative than the rest of us, it was just he effectively used his brains capacity to slip into theta, and exploit all of the genius level thinking that occurs during that phase.

Other scientists and inventors have used dreams, which are also in the theta brainwave state, to come up with ideas that have literally changed the face of science and industry.

One of the things that child development researchers are starting to discover is that when kids are growing up, they are in theta state a large portion of the time. Much more so that adults. Their brains are growing, and learning, and theta is the natural brainwave state to be in if you are learning about your environment for the first time. Learning how to walk and talk is one thing, but kids also naturally learn complex things like values, beliefs handed down with their parents, and complex emotional issues. They believe that theta is the perfect brainwave state for building strategies in the brain for dealing understanding and dealing with reality.

This may be why thinking of a problem just before bed is particularly helpful. Even though you may not remember, while you’re in the theta state just before sleep, your brain can come up with some pretty creative solutions to your problems, as Edison and others can attest to.

For most adults thought, accessing theta is only achievable through long practice of meditation. Unless we consciously practice in a regular basis, theta only comes with sleep, and unless we program ourselves before sleep to solve problems, the usefulness of theta is only useful to children.

But recently there have been discoveries that theta brainwave states can be achievable by listening to specific sounds. Sounds that we listen to have a profound impact on our brainwaves. With properly engineered sound, and focused concentration, theta is easily accessible by anyone with a CD player and pair of headphones.

It really is possible to tap into that same genius level creativity that Einstein, Edison and others have used over the years to solve problems, and come up with some astounding ideas that have changed the course of human history.

Breaking bad habits, enhancing communication skills, and changing beliefs about your ability to make a ton of money are all achievable through specific tracks specifically designed for these purposes.

If you’re interested in tapping into your genius level creativity for happiness, love, and profit, click on the banner below and find out how you can powerfully enhance your life.

Powerful Metaphysics

Powerful Metaphysics

Is Your Brain Stuck?

How To Make All Things New

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine about language. He is a fellow teacher, and we were discussing the best way that children learn. There are those that believe there is a small window of opportunity, about three or four years, where a kid’s brain is especially compliant and flexible, and that they can learn pretty much anything. After that, teaching them something new is much more difficult and complex. Some say that during this time period, much of a child’s outlook on life will be determined, their beliefs, ideas, beliefs about their own capabilities and other core mental components will be pretty much set.

Then there are those that believe that it only appears that way, because during this time period of a kid’s life, they aren’t really expected to do anything except soak up information. They are supposed to hold down a job, or pass any university entrance exams, or even do any household chores. It is because kids are given a free pass that they can devote their whole lives to learning different things and ideas. This particular school of thought holds that if you took any adult, at any age, and put them in the same environment, and they would produce the same amount of learning.

This of course would require they have all their needs taken care of, and don’t need to produce anything whatsoever, and any failure is met by complete acceptance and encouragement by those around them. Like just being a kid.

It’s easy to imagine this being the case. Imagine going off to some foreign language camp. You are subjected to the new language twenty-four hours a day. You don’t have to worry about doing anything, not even learning the language in a “school” type environment. You are in a place where there are others around you, going about their business, learning the language, and every time you use it correctly you are given smiles and praise. And if you mess up, there are no negative repercussions. And all you have to do is eat, sleep and play, and follow other people around and try and pick up the language they are speaking.

If you’ve seen the movie “The Last Samurai,” that’s kind of what happened to the character played by Tom Cruise. For the first few months, he wasn’t expected to do anything except wander around and try to fit in as best he could, so naturally he picked up the language fairly quickly.

Those that argue against this idea will say that the brain changes somehow, and that after a certain age, usually around seven or so, the brain is pretty much frozen. You try to teach an adult a foreign language, and they’ll be studying for years and years and still not get it right.

I’m sure you could make equal arguments for each case. The problem with things like this is that you can’t really do proper scientific studies, as that would be out of the question. You could scarcely get any funding for an experiment that would take several adults and put them into a situation where they would be like Tom Cruise’s character for a year or so. And you couldn’t take a kid out of his or her natural upbringing and subject them to different ideas at the whim of an experimenter.

Human studies like this can only be done in retrospect, with naturally occurring events that weren’t planned by any scientist. Which of course makes it easy to “prove” any theory simply by looking for the right data to support it.

My friend tends to believe in the biological view, that the brain physically changes at a certain age, making it much harder to learn new things, as we get older. I tend to think that it is more of an environmental issue, at least more so that his idea gives credit to.

I’ve known people that have come to the United States as teenagers, not speaking a word of English, and successfully learned accent free English in a couple of years, simply by immersing themselves in language learning above all else. I’ve also known people that have been in the United States for ten years or more and can barely speak English.

The Jesuits used to say that if you gave them a child, they would make him a solider of Christ for life by the time he was seven. This was clearly a belief in the biological model of learning, that after a certain age, the brain is closed off to new ideas and ways to look at the world.

But the past is filled with individuals who, through late in life conversions, changed the course of history through simply taking on new ideas. Saul, Mohammad, and Malcolm X are just three individuals who come to mind who experienced late in life conversions, or inspirations that changed the course of history. Of course, one could argue that each of these received “divine” help, and that the brains of normal individuals, which are not exposed to these divine interventions, don’t qualify for late in life learning.

Various social experiments show time and time again that as humans age, choices and habits become less and less flexible, but what is causing what? Does aging cause inflexibility, or does inflexibility cause aging?

Personally, I’m off the believe that it’s never too late to learn something new, and that you really can teach an old dog new tricks. So long as you put yourself in an environment that is conducive to learning, the sky’s the limit to the things you can put into your brain.

Of course this gets harder and harder as we get older, and pick up more and more responsibilities and restraints on our time. But that only means you need to get more creative with how you look at the same things every day.

One trick is to spend a few minutes every day looking at normal, every day objects, and specifically giving them names that don’t fit. For example, look at a book and call it a frog, and then look at your shoe, and call it a taxi. If you do this a few minutes every day, with ten or twenty objects, you’ll be building lots of new neural pathways in your that can give the same old boring stuff you see every day a new perspective. Many people report that after doing this mind experiment for a couple weeks, the world begins to look a lot more brighter and more interesting, just like when you were a kid and you got a new toy.

And if you can look at the same stuff every day the same way a kid looks at a new toy, you’re doing pretty good.

How To Propel Your Creativity To Superhuman Levels

Have you ever wondered why some people are always good at coming up with fresh new ideas? Somebody gets an idea, everybody agrees that it sounds really cool, maybe it even makes them some, or a lot of money.

Maybe it’s somebody you know, or maybe it is a company that has taken a couple of seemingly obvious ideas, and by putting them together makes some incredible new product that everybody is raving about and can’t buy enough of.

Meanwhile, you are sitting back thinking, “Wait, isn’t that just a combination of this thing and that other thing that have been around, for, like, ever?”

Welcome to the club. It has been said many times by many people that nothing under the sun is new. Everything is merely re-packaged, re-shaped, remarketed in a new and unique angle.

I was at a seminar once for different writers and publishers in the self help industry. There was a speaker who was in charge of new products for a huge, well-known, multi million dollars a year distributor of self-help products. They didn’t produce any products; merely they packaged and sold them.

His advice? Anything you create only needs to be ten percent different or “better” than anything else that is on the market. You absolutely do not need to create anything from scratch. Just take whatever is out there, and make it a little bit better, or different, or put a different spin or angle on it.

On the one hand, that might say something about the gullibility of us humans. On the other hand, it provides a seemingly limitless opportunity of ideas that will get you lots of props, attention, and perhaps money if you market your idea right.

So how do you create the ability to do this? I’ll show you. There is one simple, but kind of weird trick that will help you to virtually explode your creativity and make connections between things that others have not noticed before.

Here’s the trick. You look at an ordinary object, like a book for example. But instead of saying “book,” you say something else entirely. And try to make your temporary “label” as different as possible. Different color, different category, different use. So don’t say “magazine,” or “information.” Say something like “elephant,” or “airplane.”

Do this for three or four objects in a row, and you’ll notice your brain is having a hard time. What you are doing is forcing your brain to create new neural connections where none exist. Whenever you can think of something easily, your brain is using pre-existing neural pathways. By forcing your brain to make new ones, you are creating the framework for massive creativity.

Make sure to make your new “labels” as different from each other as possible as well. Meaning don’t look at a book, chair, and a desk and say “car, boat, airplane.” Because all your new labels are in the same category, it doesn’t give your brain much of a workout.

When you do this every day for five minutes or so, you’ll soon notice a huge explosion in the way you look at reality. You’ll start making connections that no other people can see, and it will only be a matter of time before you come up with that million dollar idea that everybody will absolutely have to get their hands on.

How To Quickly Skyrocket Your Creativity To Genius Levels

If you’ve ever felt the need for a sudden burst, of creativity, then this article is for you. I’ll show you how you can dig through the seemingly limitless resources in your mind to come up with such wildly creative ideas people will think you are a naturally gifted genius.

Scientists are always being surprised by the complexities and depth of the human mind. Just as they are beginning to scratch the surface, they continue to be amazed at the sheer processing power of the brain. If all the computers of the world were connected together, and tasked with “thinking” about one singular problem, they wouldn’t come close to the power of one human brain.

The structure of the human brain is thought to be of a lattice structure, with nodes connecting to several nodes, each of which are connected to several other nodes. What this does is create a structure where one “thought” or memory stored at one node has a seemingly infinite connection to every other “thought” or memory through the connection of only a couple other nodes.

Similar in nature to the theory of Six Degrees of Separation, which states that every human on earth is connected to every other human through no less than six people. For example, you know somebody, that knows somebody, that has met the Pope. And the Pope, of course, has met most of the world’s leaders. You therefore have about three or four degrees of separation between all of the world’s leaders.

The brain works in a similar fashion. One thought or memory is connected to several others directly, which in turn is connected to several others. Pretty soon every thought can easily be connected to every other thought through only three or four nodes.

When you can harness this idea towards creative thought, you can virtually become genius. The key is to focus on your outcome, and let your mind roam until you find a solution. With practice, you’ll be able to do this within a few seconds, silently, and come up with a solution to almost any problem on the spot. This works great for brainstorming sessions at work.

The way to get started is to simply practice letting your mind wander. One simple way is to create an ABC list of several different items, with each list constrained to a specific category. For example, one list may be of musical instruments, starting with each letter of the alphabet. (Don’t worry; you can cheat if you need to.) For example A = “A guitar”, B= “Bongo drums”, C = “Clarinet,” and so on.

Another list may be food. So A is apple, B is banana, C is Candy, etc.

Once you have your lists, just pick a letter, and start writing about anything that comes to mind regarding whatever to item’s you’ve selected. It might feel strange and clunky at first, but you’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. It’s best to use some kind of word processor, and just type away without concern for spelling or grammar.

If you do this for five minutes a day, you’ll be giving your brain a tremendous workout, and will be strengthening your lateral thinking ability. Once you get the hang of it, you can start problem solving. Simply choose one word that describes your problem, and use the first letter of that word to select items from your various ABC lists. Then just start free associating, starting with whatever items you’ve chosen.

You’ll be amazed how quickly you will come up with a solution to your problem seemingly out of nowhere. The trick is to be open and not censor yourself. When you get that “aha” feeling, you know you’ve arrived.

For example, let’s say you work at a manufacturing company, and you are having a problem with shipping. So you choose S, and look at your two ABC lists, and choose Saxophone, and Sandwich. (S instrument, and S food). Just start brainstorming away, using the two S words as your seeds, and see where you brain takes you. Just keep associating, and follow along wherever your brain takes you, and you’ll have a solution in no time.

Because you can really appreciate how easily you can use this information, you can sign up for the email list below.

Cultivate and Express Creativity

I bumped into a friend of mine the other day a coffee shop downtown. It’s one of those laid back independent coffee shops that takes pride in their individuality. They have several nights of various forms of “community entertainment.” Usually some kind of musical performance by budding artists. It’s always interesting to go there, and see people who can really put themselves out there. Although there never really is a lot of people, I always admire the people who come and give their all for the few fans that do turn out.

My friend was telling me about her roommate. She had been working at a design company for the last several years. She’d started as an intern, and worked her way up to a junior designer position. She was kind of worried because her company, which was a small independent one, not unlike the coffee shop, was going to be bought out by a national chain. Now I’m not too aware of the goings on in the design business, so I didn’t want to appear foolish by asking my friend a bunch of naïve sounding questions.

I asked her why she got into the business in the first place, and she said that she had always liked to be creative. When asked if she’d still be able to express her creativity once the new company took over, she said that it was likely that she would. She described how important it was for her to express her creativity.

She went on to describe how creativity is one of the greatest achievements of humankind. When people lose their creativity, and begin to go through life doing the same thing day after day, they can become depressed. The secret is to find ways to express yourself in ways that honor your creative self. Find ways to think in new directions that can help you to stay energized as you move through an otherwise normal life. She told me how important it is to spend a few minutes each day doing something that can exercise your mind, even for only a few minutes. That is the secret to happiness. Exercising your mind in those ways that you know are right for you.

So we both decided that her roommate would likely keep her job, given her track record at the design company. And even then, we weren’t sure what was going to happen, as the impending buyout was nothing more than a rumor at that point. Another thing we decided was that living your life based on rumors and imaginations about the future never really got anybody anyplace.

And the particular band, actually it was two guys with acoustic guitars, was pretty good. They sang a few old covers and a couple of original songs. I think it’s great that there are still people that can create new things, and then go and belt them out in public for all to enjoy.

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The Expression of Desire at the Third Stage

I was taking the train downtown this evening to pick up a pair of shoes I’d ordered. I found a pair last week that I’d really liked, but they didn’t have my particular size, so they had to call another store to get the right size. Tonight was the first chance I’d had since then to go back and pick them up. On the way there, I saw an acquaintance that I talk to sometimes.

He was telling me about this book that he was reading, it sounded like a personal development book of some sort, because the guy in the book was talking about different ways to look at life. He likes to read those kind of books. Come to think of it, I wish I would have written down the title, although if I see it again I’ll probably remember it. You know how that goes. You notice something, and you tell yourself that you really like this, and you want to see it again, but for some reason you don’t take the time to write it so that you can later remember it.

I can’t remember how many times I’ve really wanted to look at this or that on the internet, based on what I hear or read, but by the time I get home, I can’t remember what it was. Perhaps I should carry around one of those small note pads to write myself messages. I kind of like getting messages from myself.

Anyways, the guy was saying that humans go through three stages in life. Well, not exactly. He was saying that there are three stages that are possible for us to go through, but most of us only go through two, maybe two and a half. Some of us can glimpse the third stage. And one of the great things about being able to glimpse the third stage, even once, is that because you can see what’s up ahead, you will never fall back to your old ways.

The first stage is infancy. We have desires, and we express them the only way we know how. We cry and scream, and if that doesn’t work, then we scream and cry. It works ok if we get picked up right away, but if there is a time lapse, we start to wonder what the heck is going on. And that creates confusion, and since the mind hates confusion, it comes up with a reason why our expression of desire isn’t being immediately met.  So we start to develop anxiety about expressing our desires, because sometimes they get fulfilled, and sometimes they don’t. Since we can’t make any words, or can’t move around much, we don’t have much options except to lie there passively and hope.

The second stage of life is when we develop motor and vocal skills. We can move around, talk, walk, form sentences. When we have a desire at this stage, we can articulate it in a number of ways. We can move around and ask other people. We can even ask in different languages if we want. The problem with this stage is that we still carry that anxiety from long ago, when the mere expression of desire caused anxiety. Before, we really had no control over when or even if the desire would be fulfilled. Scientists have done plenty of experiments that show uncertainty is one of the greatest sources of anxiety, adversely affecting both mental and physical health. So for most of us, the mere expression of desire is linked with anxiety deep within our subconscious. It’s nobody’s fault, it’s just the way our brains grow.  Unfortunately, many people stay stuck in this level their whole lives. The best strategy for some people is to blame some aspect of the outside world for not getting the good stuff in life.

The third stage of life is the best part. This is when we realize that the expression of desire is but the starting point to a life full of abundance, happiness, wealth, fantastic relationships, and every other cool thing you can imagine. The trick is to begin to notice on a deep level that if our desires aren’t fulfilled, it means nothing about us personally, only that we have about a million other ways to keep expressing your desire until it gets fulfilled.  Fully adult, you can realize that simply because you can walk and talk, and read and write, you really do have the power to create whatever life you want. And creating the life you want is merely a matter of tapping into your natural genius creativity, and plugging away until you eventually make all your dreams come true.

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Easily Develop Incredibly Powerful Brain Power

Imagine being the go-to-person when your company has a problem that they need solved. Now. Imagine you are talking with a client or on a date, and you have an almost magic ability to steer the conversation wherever you want it to go, and the other person thinks that it was their idea. Imagine being surrounded by stressed out executives who are almost ready to call it quits when you tilt your head to the side, think for a moment, and say “Why don’t we try…” and they look at you in utter astonishment. “Why didn’t we think of that?” They ask. “You’re a genius! We’re saved!” Would you like that? Would you like to develop the mental dexterity of thought that Bruce Lee demonstrated with his nunchucks?

Well, here I give you two strong tips that when practiced, will allow you to develop so much flexibility and creativity of thought that you won’t know how you managed after you naturally become incredibly smarter.

Since they both work on the same principle of how the brain is physically set up, you’ll probably find yourself able to make up new exercises after you make these a habit.

The first one is simple, but it’s pretty weird, so make sure you don’t do it if anybody is in earshot. Especially at work.  What you do, is look at ordinary objects, but give them a different name. For example, if you look off to the left of your computer, now, and see a pen, look at it and say “apple!” Then look at something else, say a piece of paper, and say “pickup truck!” The key here is to make sure your ‘new’ names for the objects don’t fall in the same category.  Like in the above example, if you called your pen an ‘apple’ and then called the piece of paper an ‘orange,’ it wouldn’t be as effective, because orange and apple fall in the same category of food, or even fruit. So try to pick your new names completely different categories, sizes, colors, uses, as different as possible. Beware, this sounds deceptively simple, but when you start to practice this regularly, you’ll realize it is anything but. The reason it isn’t as simple as it sound is because you are literally building new circuits in your brain.  Be prepared to have some wild dreams when you start this.

The next trick requires a pen and paper, or better, notepad or some other word processor.  Think of anything, any regular object, for example, potato. Then pick something in a different category, but starting with the same letter, in this case, the letter ‘p.’  So let’s say you choose potato, and Porsche. Next, you just start rambling off anything that comes to mind regarding those two objects, AND, whatever comes up after that, just let your brain flow, and everything you think of, write it down.  Don’t worry about spelling, or grammar, or anything like that. Just write your thoughts out as fast as you can. This also literally causes you to build new connections in your brain, so you will be able to connect ideas in ways that will astound your friends.

One word of caution. It’s difficult to see results with these exercises because it takes time to build new neural pathways, and as you build them, it feels normal, and you can’t really notice the results right away. It’s not like you’ll have to change hat sizes or anything. What will most likely happen, is if you put just 5 or 10 minutes a day into either of these exercises, you will have a powerful ‘Aha!‘ moment.  After about a week or so you will suddenly realize that you have an ENOURMOUS amount of data stored up in your brain. And I’m talking about the whole size of the internet enourmous. And trust me, this is a really cool feeling. It will make you feel incredibly confident in a way that you never have before.

Because you will soon be developing your new super brain power, I won’t have to remind you to check back often to see what other articles I’ll be posting on a daily basis. But if you want to share or link this site, please feel free to do so.

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