Tag Archives: Metaphor

External or Internal Motivation – Which Is Better?

Which Path Do You Take?

Once there was this pumpkin. He was a normal pumpkin, and went to a normal pumpkin school, like the rest of the kids in his neighborhood. His parents had tried to get him into one of those special schools for gifted pumpkins, but he didn’t think he passed the final entrance examination. They didn’t feel bad, neither did the pumpkin, as almost every pumpkin tries to get into one of those special schools, but very few make it. So his parents as well as he were in good company. Many parents teach their kids early on that the trying and failing is ok, so long as they try. That way, when the vast majority of the kids don’t get into the pumpkin school, they can feel proud of themselves for putting forth valiant effort.

The way the schools are set up, in case you aren’t familiar with them is that they are government run schools, and are completely paid for. There is a whole section of the pumpkin government devoted to the enrichment of its citizens. To that end they’ve created a panel of experts that teach the most cutting edge subjects. The school is a state of the art facility where most scientific and technological advances are made.

Many kids secretly don’t want to get into the advanced placement school. That would mean leaving their friends and family, as the school is located near the central government. Once they finish the school, they are required to spend no less than 5 years teaching at the school and further developing the curriculum. For a young pumpkin just entering into adolescence, this is an awfully large commitment.

Of course, the kids enjoy bragging about their scores, and comparing them to one another. Because they are completely meaningless if they aren’t accepted into the special school, the teasing and posturing of the young pumpkins is accepted as a normal part of every day school life.

Most pumpkins finish their primary education without moving on to higher levels. The pumpkin economy is sufficient to provide many well paying jobs to blue-collar pumpkin workers. Because these jobs are so plentiful, most pumpkins can easily find a way to make a living very near where they grew up.

It’s not uncommon to find neighborhoods with two and sometimes three generations of families spread throughout. Which is why the pumpkin of this particular story was overwhelmingly upset when he learned he was accepted, just barely, into the special pumpkin school. That meant ten years away from his friends and family. Five for the school itself, and five for the teaching commitment that came with it.

Of course, he knew very well that after finishing his teaching commitment, he was pretty much set for life. While many pumpkins stayed and taught at the special school after their commitment was fulfilled, it was by no means expected or even depended on. Virtually all the pumpkins that fulfilled their teaching requirements found extremely lucrative jobs in the technological fields, some even sitting on boards of directors of several large international conglomerations.

However, that didn’t appeal to our young pumpkin hero at all. He didn’t want a prestigious job in ten years. He didn’t want to start teaching at a prestigious university in five. He didn’t want to study there next fall. He wanted to stay right where he was.

He was in love.

They had begun hanging out together at lunchtime last spring. They had started sitting together at lunch, the way kids do. As time went on, they started sitting closer together, some days even exchanging a few words. Then one day, for some reason that neither of the cared about, when they showed up to their normal lunch table, it was only the two of them.

Of course they were both very nervous. But once they started talking, their nervousness was quickly replaced by the excitement of discovering new feelings and emotions that you never knew existed. Soon they started meeting when they knew it would only be just the two of them, if for only a few minutes. Sometimes they would talk about their math homework; sometimes they wouldn’t talk at all.

But now this young pumpkin had a decision to make. His acceptance letter, as a matter of law, would be reported to his school administrator. It is quite an honor for any school to have one of its students accepted to the government school of higher learning. Of course, attendance wasn’t compulsory, but no pumpkin had ever turned down such an opportunity. To attend a school, at no charge, with a virtual guarantee of economic success in only a few years. To do so would be unthinkable.

But that was just what the young pumpkin intended. The feelings he experienced when he was with his new girlfriend were far more wonderful than any ideas of economic success on the other end of a long, boring, ten-year separation from his friends and family.

But how in the world would he tell them?

One day he was moping about down at the park, when one of the elder pumpkins spotted him.

“What’s wrong?”

The young pumpkin explained everything, feeling a strange sense of relief at unloading his problems to a complete stranger. This was the first he’d told anyone of his predicament.

“That is a tough one.” Said the elder.

He paused, and the young pumpkin waited. After a deep breath, the elder turned to him and started.

“Many folks would tell you that young love is fleeting, that it doesn’t last. That you should focus on long term success, rather than short term feelings. That it is an honor and a privilege to be accepted to that school. That you have a duty to your family, to your school, to society to fulfill your destiny, as they’d say. To fulfill your talents. To use your creative gift to give to others what they may not be able to get for themselves.”

This is exactly what the young pumpkin was afraid of, and precisely what he didn’t want to hear.

The elder continued.

“Many will tell you tales of opportunities missed, of dreams that went unfulfilled. And they will tell you that if you do not take this opportunity, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”

The young pumpkin, although depressed beyond measure, was ready to accept his fate. His young mind was no match for such rhetoric from such an old and learned pumpkin.

“But here is one thing they will most assuredly not tell you. Their motives are selfish. They care not for you, but only for their own memories of their own lost opportunities. They see you on the cusp of success, and recall all of their failures. All of the times they could become great, but failed. In you they see their only chance of redemption, if only vicariously.”

The young pumpkin wasn’t sure he understood.

“It is a self perpetuating myth. An idea that isn’t true. They made a choice, and it didn’t turn out very well. So they see you, and by urging you to make the same choice and follow the same, expected path, they are hoping you will heal their wounds. Society is filled with people like that. Telling you what is right. Telling you what should be done. People seek comfort in the conformity of others. It helps them to believe that even if the choices they made didn’t bring them the happiness they expected, they are the common choices, and therefore the right choices.”

“Here is wisdom, young pumpkin. Many will tell you to make your choice based on what you want, and not what others want. But they forget to mention that that can only be done when you accept full responsibility for the outcome of your choice. And never expect others to undo what you’ve done. Ever. Ask yourself one question:

Can I live with it?”

The young pumpkin thought. Thought about ten years of doing things other people wanted him to, followed by who knows how many years doing who knows what. Could he live with that?

Then he thought of his friends, his family, his girlfriend, and the life he would likely lead should he turn down the opportunity of a lifetime.

The decision became lucidly clear. He smiled, and walked home.

Flower Power

Why You Should Stop And Smell The Roses

I was reading this essay the other day. One of those things where you start to read this, and the more you read, the more you get interested. But then when you finish reading this you aren’t really sure what you just read. Which is why I’m having trouble remembering now the exact topic this essay. It was kind of like that. I think it was about recycling or something.

Anyway, there was a section where it was talking about how flowers are good. That some scientific studies have shown that flowers actually elevate people’s moods, creating some chemical in the brain that is associated somehow with happiness and good moods. One of those chemicals that if you could sell to people you’d make a killing. I believe it is the same chemical that is a by-product of some narcotics. But with narcotics you get all these other horrible side effects, like physical addiction. When this chemical is naturally produced, it is not nearly as strong as injecting heroin, but it doesn’t have the addictive side effects.

It reminded me of this book on evolution I was reading. I believe the author was Steven Pinker. Evolution is much more complicated than most people think (including me.) There are several different overlapping systems that benefit as they grow and mutate over successive generations into better and more successful organisms. No organism evolves on it’s own. It is always dependent on how its new mutations interact with the environment, rather just how well it can exploit he environment.

Take bees for example. They take the nectar from the flowers, and in turn spread the pollen around, so the flowers can reproduce. It is a win/win scenario. The flowers get to make more flowers, and bees get food. Now if some generation of bees evolved some more efficient way of getting nectar from flowers, but they didn’t spread the pollen, it’s success would be short lived. Say for example, instead of going from flower to flower, each bee just hit up one flower, took its nectar, and went back to the hive. Pretty soon there wouldn’t be any more flowers because they would suddenly have lost their reproductive abilities thanks to the greedy bees. So the bee’s ability to take nectar from flowers is dependent on their habit of spreading the pollen around. Of course the bee doesn’t look at itself in the mirror every morning and try to pump itself up with affirmations of how great it is to create win/win relationships. It just does its thing.

Nature is filled with examples like this. Seemingly selfish behavior that somehow benefits various different species through their interaction.

Which brings me back to the flowers. Why do they make us feel so good? Why do numerous studies show that patients in hospital rooms recover quicker when their rooms are filled with flowers?

A botanist will tell you that wild flowers often grow in conjunction with edible fruit. If not on the same plant, at the very least in the same area. The existence of wild flowers also show evidence of water being around someplace.

Some imagine a couple of different tribes of people, wandering around couple hundred thousand years ago. One group had this peculiar reaction to flowers. They liked looking at them. They liked the smell. So what happened when they were out wandering around and saw a patch of wildflowers? They went to take a closer look. And the likely saw a stream or several fruit bearing trees. What a discovery. Sweet tasting food and plenty of water.

Now consider the other wandering tribe. They didn’t particularly care one way or the other at the sight or the smell of flowers. So when they saw a patch of wildflowers, or a meadow filled with wildflowers off in the distance, they ignored it, and kept looking for something to kill. Sometimes they found something sometime they didn’t

Now which group do you think would produce more people over time? The group that had a built in response that allowed them to find free food and water? Or the group that didn’t?

They group that stopped at patches of flowers, and subsequently found more food and water that was pretty safe to eat (compared to the other group that was always running after zebras) had lots of time on their hands. And I don’t think I need to tell you what primitive people would likely decide to do when they were hanging out in a place surrounded by water, sweet food, and pretty flowers.

Make more people.

So it’s easy to see that the group that had a natural inclination to enjoy flowers, both the sight and the smell, quickly out populated the group that didn’t. It may also explain (one explanation among many I suspect) why having color vision is much better than black and white.

And just like the bees helped out the flowers by spreading their pollen, these primitive peoples helped out the fruit trees by spreading the seeds through their waste. The more people ate fruit, the more the particular tree spread.

So when you hear the old saying “stop and smell the roses,” you now know that it has much deeper meaning that just to goof off and enjoy yourself. It is proof that mother nature, God, or whoever, has equipped us with various built in strategies that make us feel good when going after something that is actually beneficial to our survival.

So go out and have some fun. Enjoy yourself. Mother Nature wants you to.

Coefficient Of Correlation

Pure Randomness

I used to have this neighbor that was quite eccentric. She had all these different hats that she would wear for all different kinds of occasions. I don’t think I ever saw her wear the same hat twice. I never saw the inside of her apartment, but I suspect that it was filled with hats. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever bought hat before. Maybe a couple baseball hats, and some ski hats for skiing, hiking, and robbing banks, but those don’t really count.

These were hardcore, fashion-oriented hats. The kind that you would see on some French aristocrat at a horserace. Assuming of course that French aristocrats have horses races. I’m not sure that they do, but it would seem logical. I never really thought about the psychology of hats until I lived next door to this lady. I never saw any kids or grandkids, so I assumed she lived alone.

I remember reading an essay once that destroyed the urban legend and often repeated myth that Americans stopped wearing hats when JFK was president. The common belief is that before he was president, everybody wore hats. Then when he, as president, went everywhere without a hat, the trend quickly caught on.

The truth of the matter, however, is far less interesting. Hats, gloves, other clothing items that are purely ornamental had been falling out of fashion steadily since the turn of the century. Hats were just another example of this. When Kennedy was not wearing his hat, he was just one example of the growing trend of hatless men.

Of course, the human brain comes pre wired to find cause effect relationships. Something like suddenly noticing people aren’t wearing hats, and then noticing a prominent figure like JFK isn’t wearing one, the easiest conclusion is that one thing caused the other. More often than not, they are merely related, and some other factor is causing them both.

Now I’m not particularly qualified nor well read enough to comment on the reason for the decline in hats, gloves etc. There are several theories, some make sense, and some don’t, depending on your social philosophy. Whatever that means.

They’ve done some pretty interesting experiments to study the brains propensity to find cause and effect relationships between random objects. They show random objects moving around on a computer screen to a baby, and the baby quickly assumes that one “shape” is chasing the other. They suspect this because they show one shape moving around by itself, and then stop it. They babies interest doesn’t change much. One object stopping and starting by itself is no big deal.

But then they show two objects moving around, and pretty soon the baby assumes there is a cause/effect relationship between the two objects. They stop one of the objects from moving, and the baby gets confused and looks back and forth between the stopped object and the moving object as if something is wrong. Why did one stop and the other didn’t? They suppose that if there weren’t any assumed cause/effect relationship between the shapes, then the reaction of two moving objects with one stopping would be the same as one moving object and then stopping. It isn’t.

One explanation for this is that back in the old days, when daily living was a life and death struggle against the environment, humans didn’t have time to sit around and do double blind studies every time they saw a tiger coming at them.

The cause/effect relationship was simple:

Tiger = Danger

Those who needed to learn that every time didn’t live long enough to pass on the need to scrutinize every decision. Those that had the capability to make snap cause/effect judgments on the world around them lived long enough to reproduce.

So here we are, thousands of years later, with that circuitry still firmly wired into our brains. We see two events, and immediately come to the conclusion that one is causing the other, or one has an impact on the other.

In the book “Fooled By Randomness,” by Taleb, he shows how often completely random events with no statistical causal relationships are often mistaken to be linked somehow.

In the book “Mind Lines,” Dr. Hall illustrates how we have a capacity to witness or experience an event, and quickly give it meaning. That event causes this, or this event means that. We then react not to the event itself, but the meaning we give it. In the language of NLP, that’s called a complex equivalent. Something that we think is a simple cause/effect relationship, but in reality has several layers of subconscious thought and judgment between the event (the cause) and the perceived outcome (the effect).

So what does this all mean? Just be careful when you assume any cause/effect relationship. We live in big cities now, and we don’t have to hunt for our food anymore. It’s ok to take a few moments to use your brain to make a decision, instead of reacting right away.

And if you bump into some lady that is wearing a different hat every time you see her, tell her I want my can opener back.

Evolution Of A Coffee Shop

When Is A Punch Just A Punch?

So the other day I was waiting for my coffee order. It was at this small shop that had just opened and I suspected they were still ironing out all the bugs so to speak. They seemed to have quite a few different coffee selections, and while my particular order wasn’t all that complicated, I could understand how somebody, especially somebody in high school trying to make a couple extra dollars on the weekend, could easily become overwhelmed at both the complexity of the equipment and the throngs of curious crowds trying to squeeze their way into this ingeniously located attractor of customers.

“What is the difference?” I heard a voice behind me ask. Since the place was packed, I assumed the voice, or rather the voice’s owner, was speaking to somebody else.
“Really, what’s the difference?” I turned to see this person was talking to. He was looking right at me.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“When you learn something, and when you know something already?”
I had to shake my head to make sure I heard him right.
“Huh?” Was the best I could do.
“That girl,” he said, motioning to the about to lose it girl who was struggling to keep up with the orders.
“In a few weeks, she’ll be able to do all this while talking on her cell phone to one of her boyfriends without any problems.”
“Um…”
“So what’s the difference?”

Now if this guy had been some smelly homeless person, I would have written this exchange off as some kind of random run in with a word salad generator. But he guy was clean-shaven, and dressed in clothes that he didn’t get from the good will. So I tried as hard as I could to figure out what in the world he was getting at.

I was reading this interesting article, or essay I guess, by Richard Dawkins, or maybe some other guy, the other day. He was talking about how genes have this uncanny ability to work together to give the illusion that we have genes for every specific action that is possible. Like I have a gene that makes me love chocolate ice cream, or I have a gene that makes me suck at fractions.

The example he gave was basketball. Some people are really good at basketball, and some people, like me, (actually many people like me) have no business being anywhere except in the bleachers at a basketball court.

But some people are naturally gifted basketball players. Which may lead some to believe that there is some type of “basketball” gene. As if two parents that were superb basketball players would automatically have kids that were superior at basketball.

But obviously, there was never any evolutionary selector for basketball. There certainly was for throwing rocks at moving animals, and being able to jump over ditches if you were being chased by a tiger, or being able to chase after a wounded zebra for a couple kilometers, or being tall enough to reach the good stuff that nobody else can reach. Only recently have these random genes been collectively beneficial in certain people who are good at basketball.

The point of this article is that one of the reasons, or at least one of the possible reasons, according to evolutionary biologists for humans’ dominance on the planet is our versatility. Humans have lived in all different kinds of environments from houses built out of ice to house built on the sides of cliffs.

The conjecture by this particular essayist is that we humans have such a versatile pool of genes to pull from that they can combine to form many useful skills in many useful environments.

One mistake people make is that humans have less instincts that so called lower animals, and more learning power. Lower animals have instincts built in so they are pretty much good to go after a few weeks. Human don’t have so many instincts, so it takes us a while to figure things out.

But more and more scientists are starting to agree that humans have both much more learning capacity than lower animals, and many more instincts. It is that combination that gives us our edge. To be able actually learn new things, until we can perform them as if they are second nature, or an instinct. We actually have the capacity to learn more instincts, so to speak.

Bruce Lee once remarked that before you learn Jeet Kun Do, a punch is just a punch. You throw it without thinking. Maybe it will hit its target, maybe it won’t. But when you start to study martial arts, a punch becomes a complex combination of intention, balance, breath and focus, and directed energy. After learn to master these different elements, and can do so without thinking, a punch is again, just a punch. But it is an altogether different, and much more powerful and deadly punch.

So I finally asked the guy, “What exactly do you mean?”

“When you come back in two weeks, she’ll me making coffee like a pro. If you compare her then, to somebody who is just naturally good at making coffee, how would you be able to tell the difference?”

“Hmm. I suppose you wouldn’t.”

“Exactly.” He said. Just then both our coffees were ready, and we both went our separate ways.

How To Genetically Alter Your Personality

DNA – Is It In You?

I had this pretty cool revelation, or idea, this morning while I was out walking that I’d like to share with you. It’s one of those ideas that make perfect sense until you try to explain it to somebody else, and then it sounds like utter nonsense. Hopefully this won’t happen here.

It’s based on some basic ideas from biology as well as some concepts from metaphysics. It is also based on the underlying assumption that all of the interactions between matter and energy in the universe obey specific laws all of the time. There is zero room for randomness. Of course, often times we humans with our limited range of perceptual abilities and logical reasoning are ill equipped to deal with most of these laws, so many times they can appear like some kind of voodoo black magic or white magic or law of attraction or however you like to describe your favorite metaphysical laws.

It’s also based on the idea that smaller systems, which follow certain rules can collectively make up larger systems which may or may not appear to follow the same rules. For example, the laws of Newtonian physics are vastly different than Quantum physics. Of course, they are different sets of systems on two totally different scales. So the laws are the same, they are just scale dependent. Like a speed limit in a small town is vastly different than on the interstate, they are still laws enforced by the same entity.

Ok, where was I. Oh yea.

DNA. This is the building block of all life. The core of life on earth. Billions of years ago, there was no life on earth, and then something happened. Either by an intervention by a deity, or aliens, or a random strike of lightening, DNA was created. And it started to reproduce. Again and again. Every strand of DNA that exists today, in every living entity, is a combination of strands that came before it. Humans get half from mom, and half from dad. Some other organisms, like some simple plants reproduce themselves exactly. Nevertheless, all DNA is copied and pasted from one or more of its predecessors. All the way back to the original one.

How exactly does DNA work? It is this long strand of chemical, shaped like a twisted ladder. They call it a double helix. Then somehow, it untwists, so it looks like a normal ladder. The rungs of the ladder separate, and expose their raw ends to the inside of the cell soup. And within that cell soup are certain amino acids that come up and link together with the raw ends of the ladder. The amino acids link individually to the raw ends of the ladder, and then join to each other. Then they collectively uncouple or detach from the ladder. The ladder then re attaches to itself, and coils back up. The new protein, formed from the single amino acids that came down and joined together is now floating off to do whatever job it was made to do. DNA is incredibly long, and it has four different types of “rungs.” So whatever small stretch of the DNA decides to uncoil, will make a different protein. DNA is like blueprint for your body. Your brain.

DNA uncoils, and exposes its raw “blueprint” for the protein to be made. Then the protein is filled in by whatever is available in the surround cell fluid, or soup, or whatever you call it on that microscopic level.

Ok, now here’s the part that seemed to be much more insightful on my morning walk while the sun was just peeking over the mountains. Suppose your personality behaves like your DNA. Whatever part you decide to open, or expose, will be filled by whatever is around you. If you expose fear and anxiety, you will create fear and anxiety. If you smile and wave at people, you will receive smiles and waves in return. If you are growing in the womb, and your DNA is continually unraveling a blueprint to create brown eyes, that is it is “attracting” specific amino acids to link up into proteins to build brown eyes, you will have brown eyes.
If you continually expose part of your personality that builds happiness, you’ll be surrounded by happiness. So how do you do this?

The things that link together to build the proteins for brown eyes are the amino acids that link together in a specific order. There is nothing mysterious or esoteric or metaphysical about it. You put the right amino acids in the right order, and you’ll get the same effect again and again and again.

What about happiness? If happiness is the end result, what are the building blocks? What are the smaller “bits” like amino acids that when linked together, will create the exact same happiness, again and again and again?

Behaviors and communication. A specific strand of DNA exposed in the microscopic soup will attract the right amino acids to make the right protein.

A specific collection of behaviors and communication, when exposed to the world around you, in the right order, will produce the same happiness again and again and again. When your DNA wants to grow some hair, it unravels that part of itself, attracts the right amino acids, and they hook up together to make some hair in your hair follicles.

When you expose the right behaviors and communication in the right order, you will attract the right responses from people that when linked together, will build the same result every time.

Now, of course, people aren’t robots who will respond automatically the same way every time, but you’d be surprised how repeatable most of our behavior is. If you scream “fire” in a crowded movie theater, nobody is going to come up and shake your hand. If you offer a genuine smile and say “hi” to a stranger, they aren’t likely to punch you in the face.

Most people will respond pretty much the same way to the behavior and communication you project. So if you want a different result than you’ve been getting, change up or experiment with your behavior and your communication a bit, and see how the results you create will differ.

Probably the biggest take away from all of this is that you are largely responsible for the world you live in. By changing your behavior, you can drastically improve the results you’ve been getting, whatever they are, or whatever they want them to be.

And just as DNA is so fricking long it has taken scientists years and tons of money just to list it’s sequence, your personality is much more complex and abundant. If one part doesn’t work, you can easily try on something else.

The Dangers Of Your Comfort Zone

How To Expand Your Limits

I had this fish once a few years ago. Actually, I had several fishes. I don’t know what go into me, but I got the idea that I wanted to have a tropical fish tank in my apartment. And as luck would have it, there was a tropical fish store in the mini mall just behind where my apartment was located. I suppose there is a connection there; as the tropical fish store was right next door to the cleaners I took my shirts to. (Marketers take note.)

So I went in one Saturday afternoon, not sure what I wanted, and started looking around. I priced difference size tanks, equipment, shapes that would best fit in my apartment, etc. Finally I settled on size and a price, and now was time to pick the fish.

“I need some fish,” I asked the guy. He explained to me how the shop was set up. On the left, were fighting fish. Fish that can’t live with other fish or else they’ll kick the crap out of each other. On the right were passive fish, or fish that just stare at you bug eyed from inside the tank. Since I had in mind a tank with a bunch of different fish swimming around, I decided on the passive fish.

I remember once I took this public speaking class. The guy who taught it started it off with some story, which of course was a metaphor for personal growth. The story was told to him by his original teacher at this public speaking course. It was a famous course, and most of the instructors are former members who realized incredible personal growth through the course and wanted to continue their growth by teach others.

I’m not sure if they actually designed the course that way, or if it just naturally grew that way, but it seems to be a pretty good way to build your business. The people that teach others are people that were successful in it to start, so they really know the ins and outs. And the instructors are always being created, as more and more people join the course.

That way, they really only need to worry about getting new people to sign up for the course, rather than always be on the lookout or new instructors. It is kind of self-feeding business. Just put people into the funnel and they will either spread the word to other potential members, or become instructors themselves.

This particular public speaking class has been around for many years, at least fifty or so, and has slowly grown through this method. Unless you know somebody who’s gone through the course, you likely haven’t heard of it. Of course, if you are looking for one of the best public speaking courses around, you’ll likely find this one, if you do any kind of searching.

Anyway, this guy went into a fish store, and noticed that there were several different sharks. Some sharks were pretty big, while other sharks were kind of small. At first the guy thought maybe they were different breeds or species or whatever the word is that they use to classify sharks, but then he noticed that they were all very similar in appearance. They only differed by size.

So he then assumed that maybe some were younger, and some were older. But when he asked the shopkeeper, he was surprised.

These sharks only grow as big as their cage. It has something to do with their swimming patterns. They don’t have air buoys like other fish, so they can’t just sit and float. They need to keep moving. If they are confined to a relatively small area, they won’t grow very big. They have evolved this as a way to not out strip their resources. If they are in bigger tank, or a bigger area, then they grow bigger.

Of course, the sharks really have no idea that they are in a container; they just swim around and are automatically constrained by their boundaries. Those with larger boundaries expand to meet them, and those with smaller boundaries stay small.

He asked what would happen if you took a small fish and put it into a larger area. The shopkeeper told him that they would naturally adjust, and grow bigger. He said that’s the interesting thing about sharks, is that they are like people in this regard. They are always growing to match their boundaries. If they want to grow bigger, all they need to do is increase the limits of their boundaries, and they will naturally expand to meet them.

But like most people, sharks sit around and wait for somebody else to put them into a bigger container. They expect some outside force or entity to change the shape of their cage. Some people have figured out the secret. That our cages are really only a figment of our imagination. All we really need to do is imagine that our cages are bigger, and we will expand accordingly. Most people never figure this out, and are always waiting for somebody else to guide them by the hand to bigger and better cages.

Once you know the secret, you can just re-imagine our limits until they are big enough to contain all the goals and things you want to achieve in life.

That’s when this guy realized he was at the first day of a public speaking seminar, and the instructor was giving them a kind of pep talk. Over the next twelve weeks, they would be expanding their comfort zones considerably through the practice of public speaking. And they would learn the best secret of all.

All of your boundaries are set by your fears of what you think is on the other side. When you face those fears, and realize they are only figments of your imagination, you boundaries or comfort zone will expand immeasurably. Which is exactly what they learned at this public speaking seminar.

The funny thing is that I think the shopkeeper made a mistake. Because even though I picked all passive fish, from the passive fish side of the store, it didn’t take long for one fish to eat all the rest. I started out with about six fish. Every other day or so there would be one more fish missing.

And all I had left was one fighting fish that had been mistaken for a passive fish, which was now proudly the only fish in his tank.

How Many Levels Is Your Communication?

The Depth Of Perception

I was riding my bike downtown yesterday when I bumped into a friend. Not quite a friend, but an acquaintance. Some people have hundreds of people that they could consider friends, but I have a clear distinction in my mind between a friend and an acquaintance. Certainly acquaintanceships can grow into friendships, that’s how all friendships start, when you think about it. You meet somebody, you either share enough in common, sometimes a location or common goal, like at school or at work.

Then you make the all-important break from your commonalities. If you see somebody at work every day for several months, and you get on with them pretty well this can happen. Maybe they’ll be some after work party, or maybe you’ll get together for a game of basketball after work, and slowly move your relationship away from areas of commonality.

When you can have obvious differences, especially religious, moral or political views, and maintain a solid friendship that transcends all that, then you know you’ve got a winner

I was listening to this guy giving a lecture once on the power of a contrarian opinion. He said that most people surround themselves with people that share their same viewpoints. Most people easily fall into this trap. He was saying this is very dangerous, because if you only expose yourself to one viewpoint, you effectively shut yourself off from the flexibility of thinking if you were to expose yourself to other viewpoints. This works two ways. The first is that you may hear another point of view that actually makes more sense that yours. Another is that you will have to actually defend your point of view rather than just say “Yea!” to each other when you’re hanging out with like-minded friends.

Going through the process of defending and arguing for your point of view other than simply saying “Well, that’s just how I feel. We’ll have to agree to disagree.” Can be a profound learning experience. Saying that you’ll just agree to disagree only makes you and whoever you are disagreeing with dig into your own respective positions a little deeper.

Of course, this can be extremely difficult to do, as many times we have strong emotional connections and investments in our viewpoints. It can be hard to discuss them objectively without feeling we are in a personal battle to see who has the stronger emotional fortitude. Many times, if you break down the arguments from a linguistic and logical standpoint, they don’t differ very much from second grade schoolyard arguments:

“Nuh uhh!”
“Yea Huh!”
“Well, you’re stupid!”
“And your fat!”

And so on. If you remove the emotions from many discussions, debates and arguments, and look at them objectively, you’ll find that almost all arguments will fall into the above structure. Sure they will be much more eloquently stated, and much more long-winded, but the logic boils down the same. To really understand this, it can help to read them on paper, rather than listening to verbal exchanges.

Those that have a depth of understand and a really wide view of the world have the ability to make friends with people of varying viewpoints. Not only that but those that can accept their friends’ opposing viewpoints objectively, and respectfully, without thinking they are somehow morally or intellectually deficient in need to “fixing” are the true winners.

But the guy I ran into had yet cross that level of familiarity. He was an acquaintance that I’d met at a few seminars. We are both in the same line of work, so we attend the same kind of seminars.

So after I stopped and talked to him, we realized that we really don’t have that much in common. After exchanging pleasantries, how ya been, etc, and talked about the latest “news” in our particular industry, we really weren’t left with much to talk about. It was an interesting part of our conversation, that only lasted a few seconds. It was subtle, but I think we both understood what was going on.

I’d stopped my bike and got off, but not completely. I was still straddling it so I could easily start peddling again. He stopped in the street, and only half turned to face me. Both of us had only about half a commitment to the conversation. After the normal “how ya doin,” we moved onto the “what are you doing, where are you going.” Neither of us wanted to give up much, we each gave the perfunctory “oh nothing much, just hanging out.” Then the moment of truth came. There we were, on a Sunday afternoon. We knew each other on a first name basis, and if we kept our discussion to our respective jobs, we could probably fill a couple hours of conversation. Both had acknowledged we didn’t have any particular plans for that day. But neither of us had committed fully to the conversation, from a body language perspective.

So after our exchange, we stood there. Waiting for the other, or perhaps giving the other a chance to suggest doing something together. Grab a bite to eat, get a beer, whatever. But neither of us was interested enough to being the first to initiate it. But we both felt kind of obliged to allow the other person to chance. Neither of us did, and we said our “see ya around’s” and left.

The same kind of interaction that happens every day, hundreds of millions of times. The way humans kind of “sniff” each other out to determine each other’s intentions.

Now normally I wouldn’t pay much attention to such a non-event, but I’ve been reading a lot of Steven Pinker’s books lately, which focus on linguistics and how they effect psychology. There is a lot going on to our daily communications that are below the surface, and many times have much more influence on our relationships that the actual words that we use. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

I guess the moral of the story, or the take away, is realize that we humans communicate on many, many different levels, and we are always reading others and projecting things about ourselves to all of those around us, all the time.

So we got that going for us. Which is nice, I think.

How The Rabbit Discovered The Secret Of Life

The Magic Of Multiplication

Once upon a time there was this rabbit. He was like any other normal rabbit, except when it came to chasing down carrots, he was a little bit afraid. When he was a young rabbit, just at the stage when rabbits learn how to dig for their own food, he set out to find his first carrot. He’d watched his parents dig up carrots, and thought it seemed pretty easy, so he figured it was time he could dig up his own, and not have to follow his parents around.

Now when it comes to rabbit and carrots, there is a huge window in the time that they get food from their parents, and when they learn to dig it up on their own. What makes it particularly confusing is that just around the time that rabbits start learning to dig up their own carrots, they start to learn how to make more rabbits, if you know what I mean. That can thoroughly confuse the issue with most rabbits.

It’s kind of tough growing up as a baby rabbit whose parents haven’t yet learned how to dig up their own carrots. Then you have a situation where grandma and grandpa rabbit are digging up the carrots for everybody. It sort of gives some time to the parents, sometimes. It’s not uncommon for several generations of rabbits to be alive at once, as everybody knows how good rabbits are at multiplication.

It’s not uncommon at all for a rabbit to live his whole life and never learn to dig up his own carrots. Of course, this story is about one young rabbit, and how he learned to this.

The first time he set out, he was really excited. He’d seen his dad do it plenty of times. His dad was known as the local expert in finding carrots. It’s not as easy as one would think. Most of the carrot lives underground, with only the green part sticking up. It’s easy to miss a good patch of carrots, and it’s easy to pull up a bunch of weeds that don’t turn out to be anything.

What happened to this young rabbit was particularly frightening. He set out by himself, because in case he pulled up a clump of weeds, he didn’t want to be laughed at by those older than him.

So he found a clump of green stuff, that he thought was likely a carrot. He looked around to make sure nobody was watching, and then he pulled with all his might. What he found horrified him. It was a carrot, but it had already been partially eaten. There was a squirrel that had gotten in and eaten it from the ground up. And he squirrel was still eating it, and caught completely by surprise by the rabbit. He reacted accordingly, and snarled and hissed at the rabbit. Now, had the rabbit spoken squirrel, or the squirrel spoken rabbit, they likely could have come to an agreement about splitting the carrot. But as it was, the rabbit fled in terror.

That was over a year ago. And since then, all the rabbit’s friends had learned to dig up their own carrots. Every time the rabbit ventured out to find his own carrot, he remembered the snarling and screaming squirrel. He would find a plump carrot just begging to be dug up, but would lose all his nerve. He would scamper home, empty handed and depressed.

One day he was on is way home, and he ran into his grandfather. (Or maybe it was his great grandfather, he couldn’t tell).

“What’s up?” Said gramps.
Young rabbit tried to ignore him.
“Still worried about that squirrel?” gramps asked. Young rabbit was shocked. He didn’t realize that anybody knew. Gramps chuckled.
“Old Chester once got scared off by a rock, thought it was a monster. Couldn’t dig carrots for years after that.”
Young rabbit felt a little bit better, but he didn’t know who Chester was.
“And Marvin was scared by a squirrel as well. But he learned a secret.”
“What secret?” young rabbit asked.
“Squirrels are all bark and no bite. They only scream at you so you’ll be startled enough so they can run away. They never, ever will fight over a piece of food. They’re actually pretty smart when you think about it.”
“What do you mean?” young rabbit asked.
“Just look around,” gramps said, waving his paw at the vast countryside where the rabbits lived.
“There’s enough food here to last everybody hundreds of generations. Why in the world would you fight over a small scrap like one carrot?” gramps said, laughing.

Young rabbit thought about it.

“Like take that small green shrub, pull it out and take a look at it.”
Without thinking, young rabbit turned around, grabbed the green leaves sticking out of the dirt and gave it a yank. A nice, plump carrot came out.

“Now take a look at that one, is it any different from that one over there?” Gramps said, motioning to another clump. Young rabbit turned, grabbed and yanked. He held the two carrots together. They were identical.

“Just look around, I’ll be in an hour you could find hundred just like that. Do you really think a squirrel would want to fight a rabbit over something that is so abundant?”

The young rabbit thought.

“No, I guess not.”
“So how many carrots can you eat in a day?”
“I don’t know, maybe one?”
“Well now, you’ve got two. Why don’t you find a nice pretty girl rabbit and give it to her. I think you know what comes next.” Gramps winked and hopped off.

Young rabbit thought. So many carrots to pull. So many girls to give them to. He suddenly realized why all the rabbits around him seemed so happy. He smiled and hopped off.

Money Love

Open The Floodgates

I remember I went on this backpacking trip once. We had planned it out fairly thoroughly, reading several guidebooks, and buying maps with different levels detail. One thing that we couldn’t really plan on was the size of the rivers. The mountains we were planning on hiking in were in the Sierra Nevada range in California. Those mountains have several thousand small lakes, which are fed by the annual rainfall, creating several thousand streams and rivers of various sizes.

Because these streams and rivers are so numerous, you inevitably have to cross one or two large ones if you are going on hike that is longer than a day or two. Since these mountains are kept as pure as possible, from a human interaction point of view, doing anything other than keep debris from blocking established trails is strictly prohibited. This means that no bridges exist, or do strategic placements of stones. It’s not uncommon to spend several hours wandering up and down a riverbank looking for an appropriate place to cross.

Often time there is not real danger, but when hiking with a pair of wet boots is never a pleasant experience. It makes it much easier to get blisters, which can ruin an entire trip. Crossing a river without getting wet is ideal.

Generally speaking, when looking for a place to cross, you either look for a point where the river is particularly narrow, where crossing will only take a couple strategically places steps. Other times the best you can do is find a place that is relatively shallow, and simply walk across. If you are lucky, and the bottom is relatively smooth, you can take off your shoes and wade across, with the water hopefully not getting higher than your waist. Keep in mind this water is freshly melted snow, so it is really cold.

The ideal is a slow moving river that is shallow enough and narrow enough to not get your boots wet. The worst I’ve ever experienced was when we had to strip down to our underwear, carry our packs over our heads, and cross that way. The best place we could find to cross was about four meters across, and about a meter deep. Luckily the bottom was sandy, and the water was flowing slow enough that it didn’t pose any danger. But it was really, really cold.

I was listening to an interview on the radio the other and they were talking about this book called “Flow,” where the author described the experience when you are completely and fully engaged in something to the exclusion of all else. It is a fascinating feeling, usually experienced by athletes and artists. If you’ve ever experienced it, then you know what it’s like. Everything seems to disappear, and any conscious interference that exists normally is virtually shut off. You become a machine, fully focused on the event at hand. It’s almost as if you are watching yourself flawlessly performing some task.

One of the most esoteric conversations you can have with yourself is regarding the metaphysical flow of money. You can look at it as a purely right-brained physical based entity, obeying the laws of physics and of cause and effect. You do certain things, and you get a certain amount of money. You want certain things and you give up a certain amount of money. Other schools of thought, usually thought a little bit on the new agey side, teach the money should be thought of as a flow of energy, and that all you need to do is open yourself up, in both directions. That is, in order to have money flowing in just as readily as it flows out, you should set up your consciousness to appreciate the exchange in both directions. You should be just as happy to receive product or services in exchange for your money, as you should in receiving money for your products or services.

I’ve even read some suggestions saying you should write a big “Thank You” on your checks to the IRS every year.

The interesting thing about money is that if flows whether we want it to or not. For the whole of human history, until only a few thousand years ago, there wasn’t any money. Now there is hundreds of millions traded every day on the Forex Exchange. This is just different country swapping out their currencies at the end of every single day.

Whatever your own personal beliefs about money are, money is there, money is flowing, and it would probably do you some good to figure out a way to get in on the action. It’s not like there is a finite size of the pie, and once the pieces are gone, they’re gone. The money supply increases every year, and the ways and paths that it flows increase as well.

And the cool thing about money flow is that you don’t have to worry about getting swept away by the current, or worrying about keeping your boots dry. You can just dive right in. Kick the boulders out of the way and let if flow. They’ll be plenty more where that came from.

How To Exploit Glitches In The System For Fun And Profit

Nice To Meet You

So the other day I was out on my morning walk, (so I guess I should say the other morning) when I bumped into this old guy that I hadn’t seen before. He was some old guy that I see downtown sometimes. At first I didn’t recognize him, because he wasn’t wearing his downtown clothes. So I had to go through that momentary transderivational search when the brain pretty much freezes all forward progress and searches it’s database for the relevant information.

I was once on this university campus when me and a friend were having fun seeing how long of a transderivational search we could induce in people. The brain is incredibly fast when coming up with information, but sometimes it gets stuck momentarily.

For example, if you grab a bottle of clear liquid, that you think is water, from the fridge after a hard workout, and upon taking a huge gulp find out that it’s vodka, your brain will spend maybe half a second freezing and trying to figure out what in the hell is going on. Opening up the fridge is automatic. Drinking water when you are thirsty is automatic. Your whole mind/body system is in pure automatic water drinking mode, so when you chug down the vodka, your brain has to momentarily stop all processes until it figures out what in the world is going on. It may even take you a few seconds to realize it’s vodka, and not gasoline or battery acid.

Compare that to sitting in a bar and ordering a shot of vodka. You see it coming, so naturally there is no disruption. This actually happened to me once. I was in a restaurant, and I ordered a scotch on the rocks. My girlfriend got some kind of mixed drink or something. The waitress brought us each a glass of ice water. Or what I thought was ice water. I took a big gulp of what I thought was ice water, and almost upchucked on the table. She had mixed up my order, and brought me a glass of straight gin on the rocks.

So at this university, I borrowed a stapler from some girl working in the student center. A friend and I were putting up some flyers. When I returned the stapler, I gave her a ballpoint pen instead. But when I gave it to her, I said, “Thanks, here’s your stapler,” and handed her the pen. Her face froze for about half a second until she realized what had been going on. It’s pretty interesting when you do this to somebody on purpose. Their face immediately loses all expression, and their pupils dilate briefly as their brain diverts thinking resources to try and make sense of what is going on. The brain loves to run on autopilot whenever possible, so throwing a monkey wrench in there tends to mess things up.

There was this guy named Milton Erickson. He invented a kind of conversational hypnosis that he used in therapy on people. The cool thing about Dr. Erickson was that he would go out and experiment on people. Not conk them on the head the take out their organs experiment, but what up to them and do goofy things like giving them pens instead of staplers and see how they’d respond.

One of the things he invented was called a double bind. You give somebody two choices, so they think they are retaining their free will (this is important to humans) but in reality the choice is pretty much the same. He would say things like “Do you want to shake hands with your left or your right hand?” People would think and say “right hand.” They would realize that he was pretty much forcing them to shake hands. Of course, you can go too far with this. He would walk up to people and say, “Do you want to give me five dollars or ten?” In which case people would laugh and walk away.

Another thing he invented was the handshake interrupt. Maybe you’ve heard of this. A handshake is one of those things that is automatic, and takes up a significant portion of brain processing power. The physical part about shaking somebody’s hand is automatic, but at the same time you are gearing up to hear a person’s name for the first time, and give yours. There is actually a lot involved.
So you have this automatic process that involves receiving information, usually without question, from the other person. You are not likely to question another person’s name, but at the same time, it is new information, so it puts the brain in a particularly vulnerable position. Which Dr. Erickson learned to exploit.

He would walk up to somebody, stick out his hand and say “Hi, I’m Milton, nice to meet….” And then he would suddenly change into a completely unexpected behavior, right at the point when the other person’s brain was open. He would take their hand, and quickly turn it around so the person was looking at their own palm. Then he would give them a few simple commands that would slip into their open to receive brains.

Now, when he started, he was nervous and unsure, which other people picked up on, and so it didn’t work so well. But when he practiced it and got better, he would do the hand in the face part just as natural as the handshake part, and people would go along with it.

So he’d walk up to somebody, say “Hi my name is Dr. Erickson, nice to….(put the other guys palm facing him)… and as you look at this you can think of all those things that make you feel that certain way…ways that make you wonder how many different things you can discover, now, that will allow you to feel those really good feelings, standing, there, thinking those thoughts…” And then he would simply walk away, leaving the guy looking at his hand. Usually about ten or fifteen seconds later, the guy would snap out of it, and look around, wondering what in the world just happened.

And when I finally realized who the old guy was, I greeted him accordingly. I asked him what he was doing in this neck of the woods, and not downtown where he is supposed to be. He said that he was visiting his grandkids, who live two houses down from mine. He had enough of their screaming and was out trying to clear his head. It’s good to do that sometimes.