Is Religion Relevant Anymore?

For years, I had this love-hate relationship in trying to understand the whole religion thing. As a teen I remember how I struggled to find what the meaning of religion had in my life. Even though I was raised in a family of Baptist, I’m not sure why I never really had any profound sense of connection with that particular view of the world.

One Possible Theory

As I grew older, I figured the only way to come to grips with the concept was to understand the evolution of humanity and how this whole religion concept started.

Take the experience of being born and emerging into physical reality. Is this when we first began to see all things as external or outside of us? After all, didn’t we just experience nine months of growth from the non-physical (the twinkle in my dad’s eye) to the physical? So now instead of being part of the “God” force in the spiritual, maybe we now saw ourselves as physical beings separated from this source. Sort of like being forced from the nest.

If your able to make that leap, then our focus certainly must have shifted into survival mode in the physical world where pain, hunger and the like were more or less the norm. These experiences were more “real” than the environment from which we had recently come, so our focus had to shift to deal with the immediate threats of now being in the physical world.

In making that shift in focus, was there a lost connection from where we came from? Since we were no longer the twinkle in our dad’s eye, the physicality of life became very real with very real sources of pain and fear. Maybe this was when man found the need for religion.

Take it a step further.

Just suppose because of our newfound vulnerability, we tried to connect with the idea of something larger than us. A “God” to help protect and defend us from this dangerous physical world. We created idea’s that were stronger than us. A God who would protect us. And as the human condition became stronger, so did the God.

It didn’t seem to me that God, or the Universal Mind, or whatever you want to call it, gave man religion. It’s seemed more plausible to me that man created religion for himself in order to deal with the experiences of the human physical condition.

But the nagging question of who we are kept popping up. When I came from the spiritual world to be born into the physical world, did I just lose the whole concept of greater self? Was that even possible? How could I just forget about who I was and where I came from, assuming of course I even existed in spiritual form.

And that’s when it hit me that I never really did forget. That’s why I had this nagging, love-hate thing with religion. It’s like that feeling you get when you know something just doesn’t feel right. I considered the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there was a larger sort of self, attempting to guide me to the point where I could recall and understand this connection.

I began to open up and see things as part of a greater picture and to identify with this “God” force as being something that was inside. I now understood that phrase the preacher man kept saying, “I and the Father are one,” but now viewed completely different. The creative forces of the cosmos resided within. I now felt connected and plugged into where I came from.

And to come full circle, that is why I believe I’m here. To create. In my opinion, that’s the purpose of life. Creation. Pure and simple… nothing more. Create whatever I want without the permission or approval of any higher force. The very essence of free will. Create my life, create emotions, feelings, a blog, my home, higher consciousness, a career, build a boat, design a building, teach… you cannot not create. Even the very idea of not creating is a creation. You get the idea.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve come to an understanding. I lost the need for religion years ago and began to relax and see life in a totally new light. The weight was lifted as well as feelings of guilt previously held for not being the church going son my parents hoped I would be.

So to answer the original question, “Is Religion Relevant Anymore?” Yes and No. To me, it’s no longer relevant. But I am thankful because religion kept prodding me to understand I am the creator of my life, given the gift to create as I please.

I’m made of the same energy and matter that created the stars and I use that power to draw experiences in my life by focusing my mind.

I’m not disrespecting religion. Just the opposite. To others, religion and faith are very relevant. If you feel connected with who you are and to your God, then more power to you. That’s your path. There is no right path or wrong path… there are only paths we each walk in our own way by paying attention to those voices we all have inside.

Written by Robert Hunt

22 Ways To Overclock Your Brain

The brain is a three-pound supercomputer. It is the command and control center running your life. It is involved in absolutely everything you do. Your brain determines how you think, how you feel, how you act, and how well you get along with other people. Your brain even determines the kind of person you are. Ririan offers 22 tips for improving your brain performance.

It determines how thoughtful you are; how polite or how rude you are. It determines how well you think on your feet, and it is involved with how well you do at work and with your family. Your brain also influences your emotional well being and how well you do with the opposite sex.

Your brain is more complicated than any computer we can imagine. Did you know that you have one hundred billion nerve cells in your brain, and every nerve cell has many connections to other nerve cells? In fact, your brain has more connections in it than there are stars in the universe! Optimizing your brain’s function is essential to being the best you can be, whether at work, in leisure, or in your relationships.

It’s simple, your brain is at the center of everything you do, all you feel and think, and every nuance of how you relate to people. It’s both the supercomputer that runs your complex life and the tender organ that houses your soul. And while you may run, lift weights, or do yoga to keep your body in good condition, chances are you ignore your brain and trust it to do its job.

No matter what your age, mental exercise has a global, positive effect on the brain. So, here are 22 ways to boost your brain power:

1. Run Up Your Brain Cells

Research suggests that people who get plenty of physical exercise can wind up with better brains. Scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., found that adult mice who ran on an exercise wheel whenever they felt like it gained twice as many new cells in the hippocampus, an area of the brain involved in learning and memory, than mice who sat around all day discussing Lord of the Rings in Internet chat rooms. The researchers weren’t sure why the more active rodents’ brains reacted the way they did, but it’s possible that the voluntary nature of the exercise made it less stressful and therefore more beneficial. Which could mean that finding ways to enjoy exercise, rather than just forcing yourself to do it, may make you smarter - and happier, too.

So, play a sport, train for an event such as a marathon, triathlon or “fun run,” or work out with a buddy to help keep things interesting.

2. Exercise Your Mind

It isn’t just physical exercise that gets those brain cells jumping. Just like those head-pumped cabbies and piano jockeys, you can build up various areas of your brain by putting them to work. Duke University neurobiology professor Lawrence C. Katz, Ph.D., co-author of Keep Your Brain Alive, says that finding simple ways to use aspects of your brain that may be lagging could help maintain both nerve cells and dendrites, branches on the cells that receive and process information. Just as a new weightlifting exercise builds up underused muscles, Katz says that novel ways of thinking and viewing the world can improve the functioning of inactive sections of the brain.

Experience new tastes and smells; try to do things with your nondominant hand; find new ways to drive to work; travel to new places; create art; read that Dostoyevsky novel; write a buddy comedy for Ted Kennedy and Rush Limbaugh - basically, do anything you can to force yourself out of your mental ruts.

3. Ask Why

Our brains are wired to be curious. As we grow up and “mature” many of us stifle or deny our natural curiosity. Let yourself be curious! Wonder to yourself about why things are happening. Ask someone in the know. The best way to exercise our curiosity is by asking “Why?” Make it a new habit to ask “why?” at least 10 times a day. Your brain will be happier and you will be amazed at how many opportunities and solutions will show up in your life and work.

4. Laugh

Scientists tell us that laughter is good for our health; that it releases endorphins and other positively powerful chemicals into our system. We don’t really need scientists to tell us that it feels good to laugh. Laughing helps us reduce stress and break old patterns too. So laughter can be like a “quick-charge” for our brain’s batteries. Laugh more, and laugh harder.

5. Be A Fish Head

Omega-3 oils, found in walnuts, flaxseed and especially fish, have long been touted as being healthy for the heart. But recent research suggests they’re a brain booster as well, and not just because they help the circulation system that pumps oxygen to your head. They also seem to improve the function of the membranes that surround brain cells, which may be why people who consume a lot of fish are less likely to suffer depression, dementia, even attention-deficit disorder. Scientists have noted that essential fatty acids are necessary for proper brain development in children, and they’re now being added to baby formulas. It’s possible that your own mental state, and even your intelligence, can be enhanced by consuming enough of these oils.

Eating at least three servings a week of fish such as salmon, sardines, mackerel and tuna is a good start.

6. Remember

Get out an old photo album or high school yearbook. Your brain is a memory machine, so give it a chance to work! Spend time with your memories. Let your mind reflect on them and your mind will repay you in positive emotions and new connections from the memories to help you with your current tasks and challenges.

7. Cut The Fat

Can “bad” fats make you dumb? When researchers at the University of Toronto put rats on a 40-percent-fat diet, the rats lost ground in several areas of mental function, including memory, spatial awareness and rule learning. The problems became worse with a diet high in saturated fats, the kind that’s abundant in meat and dairy products. While you may never be called upon to navigate a little maze in search of a cheddar cube, these results could hold true for you as well, for two reasons: Fat can reduce the flow of oxygen-rich blood to your brain, and it may also slow down the metabolism of glucose, the form of sugar the brain utilizes as food.

You can still get up to 30 percent of your daily calories in the form of fat, but most of it should come from the aforementioned fish, olive oil, nuts and seeds. Whatever you do, stay away from trans fats, the hardened oils that are abundant in crackers and snack foods.

8. Do A Puzzle

Some of us like jigsaw puzzles, some crossword puzzles, some logic puzzles - it really doesn’t matter kind you choose to do. Doing puzzles in your free time is a great way to activate your brain and keep it in good working condition. Do the puzzle for fun, but do it knowing you are exercising your brain.

9. The Mozart Effect

A decade ago Frances Rauscher, a psychologist now at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, and her colleagues made waves with the discovery that listening to Mozart improved people’s mathematical and spatial reasoning. Even rats ran mazes faster and more accurately after hearing Mozart than after white noise or music by the minimalist composer Philip Glass. Last year, Rauscher reported that, for rats at least, a Mozart piano sonata seems to stimulate activity in three genes involved in nerve-cell signalling in the brain.

This sounds like the most harmonious way to tune up your mental faculties. But before you grab the CDs, hear this note of caution. Not everyone who has looked for the Mozart effect has found it. What’s more, even its proponents tend to think that music boosts brain power simply because it makes listeners feel better - relaxed and stimulated at the same time - and that a comparable stimulus might do just as well. In fact, one study found that listening to a story gave a similar performance boost.

10. Improve Your Skill At Things You Already Do

Some repetitive mental stimulation is ok as long as you look to expand your skills and knowledge base. Common activities such as gardening, sewing, playing bridge, reading, painting, and doing crossword puzzles have value, but push yourself to do different gardening techniques, more complex sewing patterns, play bridge against more talented players to increase your skill, read new authors on varied subjects, learn a new painting technique, and work harder crossword puzzles. Pushing your brain to new heights help to keep it healthy.

11. Be A Thinker, Not A Drinker

The idea that alcohol kills brain cells is an old one, but the reality is a bit more complicated. In fact, a study of 3,500 Japanese men found that those who drank moderately (in this case, about one drink per day) had better cognitive functioning when they got older than those who didn’t drink at all. Unfortunately, as soon as you get beyond that “moderate” amount, your memory, reaction time is all likely to decline. In the same study, men who had four or more drinks a day fared worst of all.

Just as bad is the now common practice of “binge drinking,” otherwise known as getting hammered on the weekend. Research on rats found that those who consumed large amounts of alcohol had fewer new cells in their brains’ hippocampus region immediately after the binge, and virtually none a month later. This suggests that the alcohol not only damaged the rats’ brains, but kept them from repairing themselves later on - in human terms, that means you shouldn’t expect to pass the Mensa entrance exam any time soon.

12. Play

Take time to play. Make time to play. Play cards. Play video games. Play board games. Play Ring Around the Rosie. Play tug of war. It doesn’t matter what you play. Just play! It is good for your spirit and good for your brain. It gives your brain a chance to think strategically, and keeps it working.

13. Sleep On It

Previewing key information and then sleeping on it increases retention 20 to 30 percent. You can leave that information next to the bed for easy access, if it is something that won’t keep you awake. If you are kept awake by your thoughts, writing everything down sometimes gets it “out of your mind,” allowing you to sleep (so keep a pen and paper nearby).

14. Concentration

Concentration can increase brainpower. Obvious, perhaps, but the thieves of concentration are not always so obvious. Learn to notice when you are distracted. Often the cause is just below consciousness. If there is a phone call you need to make, for example, it might bother you all morning, sapping your ability to think clearly, even while you are unaware of what is bothering you.

Get in the habit of stopping to ask “What is on my mind right now”. Identify it and deal with it. In the example given, you could make the phone call, or put it on tomorrow’s list, so your mind is comfortable letting it go for now. This leaves you in a more relaxed state where you can think more clearly. Use this technique to increase your brainpower now.

15. Make Love For Your Brain

In a series of studies by Winnifred B. Cutler, PhD and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania and later at Stanford University it was found that regular sexual contact had an important impact on physical and emotional well being of women. Sexual contact with a partner at least once a week led to more fertile, regular menstrual cycles, shorter menses, delayed menopause, increased estrogen levels, and delayed aging. Brain imaging studies at UCLA have shown that decreased estrogen levels are associated with overall decreased brain activity and poor memory. Enhancing estrogen levels for women through regular sexual activity enhances overall brain activity and improves memory.

In Dr. Cutler’s study the occurrence of orgasm was not as important as the fact that sex was with another person. Intimacy and emotional bonding may be the most influential factors in the positive aspects of sex. As a psychiatrist I have seen many people withhold sex as a way to show hurt, anger, or disappointment. Dr. Cutler’s research suggests that this is self-defeating behavior. The more you withhold the worse it may be for you. Appropriate sex is one of the keys to the brain’s fountain of youth.

16. Play With Passion!

You can’t do great work without personal fulfillment. When people are growing through learning and creativity, they are much more fulfilled and give 127% more to their work. Delight yourself and you delight the world. Remember what you loved to do as a child and bring the essence of that activity into your work. This is a clue to your genius; to your natural gifts and talents. da Vinci, Edison, Einstein and Picasso all loved to play and they loved to explore.

17. Cycles Of Consciousness

Your consciousness waxes and wanes throughout the day . For most it seems to go through 90 minute cycles, with 30 minutes of lower consciousness. Watch yourself to recognize this cycle. If you learn to recognize and track your mental state, you can concentrate on important mental tasks when your mind is most “awake”. For creative insight into a problem, do the opposite. Work on it when you are in a drowsy state, when your conscious mind has slowed down.

18. Learn Something New

This one might seem obvious. Yes, we capitalize on our brain’s great potential when we put it to work learning new things. You may have a specific topic for work or leisure that you want to learn more about. That’s great.

Go learn it. If you don’t have a subject in mind right now, try learning a new word each day. There is a strong correlation between working vocabulary and intelligence. When we have new words in our vocabulary, our minds can think in new ways with greater nuances between ideas. Put your mind to work learning. It is one of the best ways to re-energize your brain.

19. Write To Be Read

I am a big proponent of writing in a journal to capture ideas and thoughts. There is certainly great value in writing for yourself. I continue to find that my brain is greatly stimulated by writing to be read. The greatest benefit of writing is what it does to expand your brain’s capacity. Find ways to write to be read – by writing things for your friends to read, by capturing the stories of your childhood, starting your own blog or whatever – just write to be read.

20. Try Aroma Therapy To Activate Your Brain

One day, as I was falling asleep, while listening to endless speeches at a conference, my brain suddenly perked up when I caught a whiff of lemon from someone’s cologne. I immediately felt alert and found it much easier to pay attention to the presenter. I discovered aroma therapy really is useful and I have used it ever since revitalize or to relax.

Energizers include peppermint, cypress and lemon. Relaxants: ylang ylang, geranium and rose. A few drops of essential oils in your bath or in a diffuser will do the trick. You can also put a drop or two in a cotton ball or hanky and inhale. One caveat for the workplace; make sure no-one is allergic to the oils before you use them.

21. Drugs To Increase Brainpower

Coffee and other drinks containing caffeine help students consistently score higher on tests. Since caffeine restricts blood vessels in the brain, it isn’t clear what the longer-term effects may be when it comes to your brainpower. So instead of coffee breaks try gingko biloba and gotu kola herbal teas. Ginkgo biloba has been shown to increase blood flow to the brain, and improve concentration.

22. Build A Brain Trust

Surround yourself with inspiring people from a wide variety of fields who encourage you and stimulate your creativity. Read magazines from a wide variety of fields. Make connections between people, places and things, to discover new opportunities, and to find solutions to your problems.

Remember that no matter what your age or your occupation; your brain needs to be constantly challenged to be at its peak in terms of performance. Whether it’s doing logic puzzles, memorizing lines from Shakespeare, or learning a new skill, keep your brain busy, if you don’t want it to rust away like a car in a junkyard.

Article from: http://ririanproject.com/2006/11/03/22-ways-to-overclok-your-brain/

Note To Self. Quit Job

The List, ultimately, is what ended Herb Lurie’s career. Fifteen years ago, shortly after he started a Wall Street job as a mergers-and-acquisition specialist for Merrill Lynch, Lurie randomly began jotting down things he wanted to do before he died.

He was logging brutal hours in those days, sometimes 100 a week, and the List was one thing that helped keep him going. “Someday,” the List reassured him, “you’ll get more than 3 hours of sleep a night. You’ll ride horses and travel and do more to maintain the machine than just swallow food and shower.”

At first it was a few quick scrawls on a Merrill memo pad:

• Learn to play piano
• Sky dive
• Take an African safari

After Lurie began free-climbing through the Merrill Lynch ranks and earning more downtime, the List grew longer and more complicated — much more complicated:

• Research autism
• Get a helicopter pilot’s license
• Go on an archaeological dig in Greece
• Seeing Eye dogs — how are they trained?

What kept the List alive and manically evolving was Lurie’s success. It wasn’t long before he’d broken out as one of the greatest deal-makers of his era. As a brainy tactician, he specialized in big bank mergers; and he masked his sharp eye for vantage points and percentages behind a dough-boyish demeanor and easygoing, storytelling manner. In April 1998, he landed the two biggest bank mergers of all time in the same week: Several days after joining NationsBank to Bank of America, Lurie united First Chicago with Bank One. Either one of those deals would have made his career. Nailing both made him a legend.

By the time he turned 40, Lurie was cruising toward a cushy management position with Merrill Lynch. The List, however, was still on his desk at home and beginning to nettle him. With time running out, he realized there was no way he could accomplish everything on it in one lifetime. At some point, he’d have to dump a few of his dreams.

Instead, he dumped his job.

“I like this guy already!” erupts Pat Croce, motivational consultant, former president of the Philadelphia 76ers, and author of the New York Times best-seller I Feel Great and You Will Too! After hearing only the first half of the Lurie story, Croce can’t contain himself. He’s thrilled by Lurie’s unabashed love of learning.

Here’s what he means: “Do you know why so many guys hit their professional peaks and feel deflated instead of elated?” he asks. “It’s because they’ve lost their ability to dream up new challenges. For years, they’ve accepted society’s definition of the top rung, and once they get there, they’re like, ‘Now what?’” Because they were so focused on the practical next step, Croce says, they allowed their imaginations to atrophy. Then a crisis hit — a divorce, a mortality reminder like September 11 or a good friend’s death — and they feel the urge to make the most of their time. But their “reinvention mechanism” is rusted from disuse.

Lurie, however, was ready for success. He’d unconsciously been preparing for that moment from the day he graduated. “First, he painted a vision,” Croce explains. “He didn’t care how outlandish it was — all options were on the List. Then, when the time was right, he pulled the old Bugs Bunny trick and found a way to step into the landscape he’d painted for himself.”

Practice Quitting
Actually,” Lurie says, “the first time I tried to quit, I failed.” He still loved his work, and his boss jangled his nerves with a few pointed comments: “It’s been 20 years since you sat in a classroom. What if you don’t like philanthropic work?” And then the killer: “Aren’t you going to open the Wall Street Journal one morning and be dying to get back into the action?”

This one really hit home. “I was a serious deal junky,” Lurie admits. “For me, finishing a big deal was euphoria. I had some serious worries that I would miss that.” So Lurie backed away from his resignation plans, but he didn’t abandon them. Instead, it dawned on him that he should apply the same techniques to quitting his job as he had to doing it. Like any other business decision, due diligence was called for.

“I hear from people all the time who spend more time researching their next car than they do their next career,” says Jamie Fabian, “The Career Coach,” whose advice column for JobCircle.com is based on her 15 years as a human-resources executive. “They’re hot for a change, and so they end up making a ‘flee from’ decision instead of a ‘go to.’”

To avoid that, Fabian recommends this essential step: Spend at least 2 days shadowing someone whose career you’re thinking of joining. “Learn if your talents and temperament are truly a good match for the job.”

Identify Your Purpose
The first items Lurie wanted to tackle on the List after quitting his job were to earn a master’s degree in psychology and to try to contribute to the treatment and study of acute autism. Lurie had no personal connection to the disorder; he’d simply been intrigued by a documentary he’d seen, and he began reading research performed by one of the top scientists in the field, Bernard Rimland, Ph.D., at the Autism Research Institute in San Diego.

“One day, I received a phone call from a fellow I’d never met,” Rimland recalls. He was initially somewhat skeptical about the caller because ever since the movie Rain Man, strangers with a highly romanticized notion of autism would call to see how they could get involved. “They don’t understand that it’s a tremendously debilitating disorder, an excruciating ailment for the victims as well as their families,” he says.

Lurie, however, was different. “He was direct, purposeful, and very rational, and I could tell he was highly motivated,” Rimland says, and he was so impressed that he put Lurie in touch with David Holmes, Ed.D., executive director of the highly respected Eden Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.

As a psychologist, Holmes feels he understands what pushed Lurie to switch careers. “I think he was very lucky to learn a profound truth at a relatively young age — what ultimately brings us peace is not how much we get, but how much we can share in terms of spirit, knowledge, and encouragement.”

Stimulate Your Brain Through Change
Gandhi understood that every time you make a change, you discover far more about yourself than you thought was possible,” says Brian Biro, a former U.S. National Swim Team coach who is now a life coach, helping people work toward goals, and the author of Beyond Success: 15 Secrets of a Winning Life.

You can make these discoveries because unfamiliar circumstances stimulate the brain’s “reticular activating system,” which ordinarily blocks out anything that’s not a threat or of value. “It’s like a junk-mail filter,” Biro explains. “When you’re in a comfortable routine, your brain allows only the perceptions that are necessary. But when you’re out in the woods, your brain goes on heightened alert.”

This primitive consciousness, he says, kicks in whenever you take on a new challenge. Suddenly, you’ll find yourself drawing on hidden talents, Biro says, and discovering resources around you that you’d never noticed.

Somehow, Lurie intuited that he would need a lot of challenges, not just a few intense ones. Besides his helicopter lessons, his graduate classes at Columbia, and his work with Eden, Lurie joined the board of the U.S. Equestrian Team, and he and his wife became volunteer dog-walkers at the Seeing Eye Institute in Morristown, New Jersey.

But one man wasn’t so eager to receive Lurie’s attention. “I was skeptical of him,” says Herb Terrace, Ph.D., a Columbia psychology professor and one of the world leaders in nonhuman primate research. “Lots of people say they want to work with monkeys, but they fall by the wayside.” Lurie, however, had an interesting idea — he wanted to see if he could combine his work with autistic children with studies in primate communication. This caught Terrace’s attention: If Lurie could help link the two disciplines, it could lead to some truly groundbreaking advances.

Still, Terrace was reluctant to give a highly prized seat in his lab to a novice. Finally, one thing won him over. “We were standing outside on a freezing February day,” Lurie recounts. “Professor Terrace was still undecided, so he says, ‘Look, I’ve got scientists from all over the world who want time in my lab. Why should I give it to you?’”

Lurie looked around at the miserable Manhattan weather and tightened his coat. “Professor, I could be in the Grand Caymans right now, lying on a beach,” he said. “What does that tell you?’”

The professor laughed. “You’re in,” he said.

Epilogue: Herb Lurie finished his first year of graduate school. He has been promoted to the Eden Institute Board of Directors and was elected vice-chairman of the U.S. Equestrian Team. He has nearly all the air miles he needs to qualify for his helicopter license, and he went on safari to Africa last October. But he’s proudest of one thing: “He did such a great job in our study that we included his name on our research paper,” says Jessica Cantlon, a team leader in the Columbia primate lab. “It’s amazing,” she adds. “He came out of nowhere, and now he’s a major contributor in the field of nonverbal cognition. If there are other men like him on Wall Street, send them to us.”

By: Christopher MacDougall - Best Life Magazine

Mind Maps And Boosting Creativity

Mind maps are tools for thinking - diagrams that represent ideas linked and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. They use pictures instead of words, radial branches instead of linear lists and as a result you think different.

Most people think in a linear fashion from point A to point B and so on. Conversations tend to progress along these lines. A linear thinker like this will prioritize thoughts by how far they are removed from a given point. If we are discussing “A”, then “B” is obviously more closely related than “D”.

Mind Mapping does not have this linear pattern of organization. Imagine a group of concentric circles with a series of spokes, or radials, going out from the center. In this arrangement, point “A”, the center, might be as close to point “B” as it is to point “X”, or “Y” or for that matter “Z”. This can result in some very creative problem solving skills.

Similar concepts of image-centered radial graphic organization techniques have been around for centuries used by educators, engineers and psychologist. It has been made popular in recent modern times by psychologist, Tony Buzan, who suggest the following guidelines for constructing a mind map.

1. Start with a central image or theme. Draw the main topic in the middle of the page for maximum space. This will allow for other ideas to radiate from the center.

2. Draw quickly without judging or editing. By editing, you are encouraging linear thinking and the idea of mind mapping is to think creatively and in a non-linear manner. There will be plenty of time for editing the information later, but at this stage it’s important to get every possibility into the mind map.

3. Look for relationships to connect the central idea. Personalize your mind map by using colors, arrows, branches and your own symbols to represent visual and meaningful relationships between ideas which will help your recall and understanding.

Some claim the mind map is a far superior method of taking notes and that mapping takes full advantage of the left / right brain hemispheres. I know I’ve used it on several occasions in my writing and can attest to the fact, it does assist in getting the juices flowing. I’ve also heard this technique has been successfully used in corporate brainstorming exercises. Whatever its success, you won’t know how it may help you unless you give it a try.

For additional information, check out “The Art of Visualization” post at the “How to Change the World”.

The Best Advice I Ever Got

Jack Welch, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson, Meg Whitman, A.G. Lafley, and 24 other luminaries on the people who most influenced their business lives. The stories and advice may be business related but the guidance and information is a gold mine for those seeking ways to improve personal performance, productivity, relationships or they’re overall path in life. Some really fascinating stories… The cow in the ditch story; gotta love it….I’ve had to get a lot of cows out of the ditch.

Warren Buffett, 74, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway

You’re right not because others agree with you, but because your facts are right.

“I had two mentors: my dad, Howard Buffett, and Ben Graham. Here were these two guys who I revered and who over the years gave me tons of good advice. But when I think about what they said to me, the truth is, the first thing that comes to mind is bad advice.

“I was not quite 21 when this happened, in 1951, and just getting out of business school at Columbia. I had just taken Ben’s class there–and I was the most interested student you ever saw. I wanted to work for Ben at Graham-Newman Corp., and I had famously gone to him and offered to work for nothing. He said no.

“But I still was determined to go into the securities business, and that’s where Ben and my dad gave me the bad advice. They both thought it was a bad time to start. One thing on their minds was that the Dow Jones industrials had been above 200 all year, and yet there had never been a year when it didn’t sell below 200. So they both said, ‘You’ll do fine, but this is not a good time to start.’

“Now there’s one thing that may have influenced my dad, and maybe Ben too. I was so immature. I was not only young-looking, I was young-acting. I was skinny. My hair looked awful. Maybe their advice was their polite way of saying that before I started selling stocks, I needed to mature a little, or I wasn’t going to be successful. But they didn’t say that to me; they said the other. Anyway, I didn’t pay any attention. I went back to Omaha and started selling securities at my dad’s firm, Buffett Falk.

“My dad was a totally independent thinker. I suppose the fact that he was has influenced my own thinking some when it comes to buying stocks. Ben instructed me some there too. He said, ‘You’re neither right nor wrong because others agree with you. You’re right because your facts and reasoning are right.’

“Now, Ben–I started learning from him when I read his books on investing at the University of Nebraska. I had tried all kinds of investing up to then, but what he said, particularly in The Intelligent Investor, just lifted the scales from my eyes–things like ‘margin of safety’ and how to use ‘Mr. Market’ rather than letting him use you. I then went to Columbia just to take his class and later got that turndown when I asked him for a job. But I kept thinking about that idea when I went back to Omaha. I kept trying to sell Ben stocks and pestering him, sort of. And finally one day in 1954 I got a letter from him saying something to the effect of the next time you’re in New York, I’d like to talk to you about something. I was elated! And I made a point of getting to New York immediately.

“I went to work for Ben in August 1954, without ever having asked what my salary would be. It turned out to be $12,000, plus the next year I got a $2,000 bonus. I worked for both parts of the business: Graham- Newman was a regulated investment company, and Newman & Graham Ltd. was what we’d today call a hedge fund. But together they ran only $12 million!

“Walter Schloss and I–though he left before long to start a hedge fund–worked together in a little room. We had a lot of fun with each other, plus we kept poring through the manuals, looking for cheap stocks. We never went out to visit any companies. Ben thought that would be cheating. And when we found something terrific, Ben would put 50,000 bucks into it.

“By early 1956, Ben was planning to leave the firm to go to California. And I had already decided by then to go back to Omaha. I had a terrible time telling Ben about that: I’d go into his office and come back, and then go in and not do it, for a really long time. But his reaction was kind of the same as my dad would have had: whatever’s best for you.

“I had $9,800 at the end of 1950, and by 1956 I had $150,000. I figured with that I could live like a king. And I didn’t know what I was going to do in Omaha. Maybe go to law school. I did not have a plan. I certainly didn’t know I was going to start an investing partnership. But then a couple of months later, seven people wanted me to invest their money for them, and a partnership was the way to do it. And that began it all.”

Richard Branson, 54, Founder of Virgin Atlantic Airways and the Virgin Group

Make a fool of yourself. Otherwise you won’t survive.

“The person who had the biggest impact on me was Freddie Laker. He had been an aviator involved in the Berlin airlift and had made his money flying goods into Berlin at the end of World War II. He started a low-cost airline [Laker Airways, in 1966] that flew over the Atlantic. He was forced out of business by British Airways. I don’t know whether I would have gone into the airline business without seeing what happened to him. He was a very charismatic figure. He was taking on the big guys. He would fly his own planes. He created a lot of excitement.

“At the time, I was running a little record company; I was about 17 years old. The first time I met him was some years later. I was thinking about setting up my own airline. He gave me this advice: ‘You’ll never have the advertising power to outspend British Airways. You are going to have to get out there and use yourself. Make a fool of yourself. Otherwise you won’t survive.’

“The other advice he gave me: ‘They [British Airways] will use every trick in the book [against you]. When that happens, three words matter. Only three words, and you’ve got to use them: Sue the bastards!’

“I suspect if I hadn’t sued British Airways [in 1992], Virgin Atlantic wouldn’t have survived. And if I hadn’t used myself to advertise the airline, then it also wouldn’t have survived.

“I named one of my airplanes after him: the Sir Freddie.”

Howard Schultz, 51, Chairman of Starbucks

Recognize the skills and traits you don’t possess, and hire people who have them.

“Warren Bennis is one of the most respected scholars on leadership. And I was under a lucky star one day–I heard Warren speak at an event, and I was so impressed by what he said that I sought him out for advice. This was in the late 1980s, long before we were a public company.

“Over the years, Warren has been a valued advisor and mentor, and he has become a trusted friend. It’s hard to pinpoint just one piece of advice that he gave me, because his guidance was valuable on so many levels. Early on, I remember his words–he said this many times–that I needed to invest ahead of the growth curve and think beyond the status quo in terms of the skill base, the experience, and the quality of the people around me. He also told me that the art of becoming a great leader is in developing your ability to leave your own ego at the door and to recognize the skills and traits you don’t possess and that you need to build a world-class organization.

“This was harder than it sounds, because I wanted to build a different kind of company–a company that had a conscience. So it wasn’t only that I needed people with skills and discipline and business acumen that complemented my own qualities, but most important, I needed to attract and retain people with like-minded values. What tied us together was not our respective disciplines, and it was not chasing an exit strategy driven by money. What tied us together was the dream of building a company that would achieve the fragile balance of profitability, shareholder value, a sense of benevolence, and a social conscience.”

A.G. Lafley, 57, Chairman and CEO of Procter & Gamble

Have the courage to stick with a tough job.

“My mom, a strong, proud Irish woman who died last year at 82, told me to have the courage of my convictions. She encouraged me to be independent and to be myself, and her advice was in my mind when I almost left P&G in my sixth year. It was 1982, and I decided to go to one of those boutique consulting firms in Connecticut. I even bought a house in Connecticut. I was getting out of P&G because I thought the bureaucracy was so stifling and the change was so slow. I was an associate–between a brand manager and a marketing director–and I was running a bunch of laundry brands. Steve Donovan was in charge of the soap business, and I handed him my resignation.

“He tore it up. I said to him, ‘I made a copy.’ He said, ‘Go home. Call me tonight.’ Which was smart, not to negotiate with me right there. When I called him that night, he said, ‘Don’t come into the office for the next week. Come and see me every night.’ So every night, I went to his home, and we’d have a beer or two. He kept working me over until he got to the root of my problem with P&G, which was the bureaucracy. He said, ‘You’re running away. You don’t have the guts to stay and change it. You’ll run from the next job too.’

“That really ticked me off. I stayed. And from then on, every time something didn’t work, I spoke up. I realized that you can make a difference if you speak up and set your mind to changing things.”

Sumner Redstone, 81, Chairman and CEO of Viacom

Follow your own instincts, not those of people who see the world differently.

“In my business career, I frequently turn to Ace Greenberg of Bear Stearns. I’ve known him for well over 15 years. In connection with all the transactions in which I have been involved, starting with the Paramount acquisition, Ace was one of my advisors. He has consistently advised me that you must follow your own instincts, rather than the views of naysayers or others who see the world in a different way.

“I put that advice into practice with Viacom. I had a terrific battle–most people forget it–a really vicious battle with Terry Elks for Viacom. People said at the time that I overpaid. They said MTV was a fad. They said Nickelodeon would never make it. I knew so little at that time about our businesses. But I saw MTV not as just a music channel but as a cultural channel, a generational channel, and a channel that could travel around the world. As for Nickelodeon, my instincts as a parent and as a grandparent told me, What’s more important to people than a kids’ channel? My instincts also told me that children are pretty much the same all over the world. They have the same issues with their parents, with their teachers. Everyone said I overpaid. My investment was $500 million. And even at the low price of our stock today, my stock is worth many, many billions. And that is a great illustration of why Ace’s advice has been so valuable.”

Meg Whitman, 48, CEO and President of eBay

Be nice, do your best–and most important, keep it in perspective.

“Several pieces of advice I’ve gotten in my life have really made a difference.

“‘Be nice to people.’ This sounds like a platitude, but I’ll never forget my father telling me that. I was 10, and I had been mean to someone. He said, ‘There is no point in being mean to anyone at any time. You never know who you’re going to meet later in life. And by the way, you don’t change anything by being mean. Usually you don’t get anywhere.’

“Remember that you can do anything you want to do. Don’t let anyone say, ‘You’re not smart enough … it’s too hard … it’s a dumb idea … no one has done that before … girls don’t do that.’ My mom gave me that advice in 1973. And it allowed me to never worry about what others were saying about my career direction.

“‘Always do the best job you can do at whatever you’re assigned, even if you think it’s boring.’ Jerry Parkinson, an assistant advertising manager and my boss at P&G, told me this in 1979. Here I was fresh out of Harvard Business School, and I was assigned to determine how big the hole in the Ivory shampoo bottle should be: three-eighths of an inch or one-eighth of an inch. I did research, focus groups … and I would come home at night wondering how I had gone from HBS to this. But later I realized that any job you’re given is an opportunity to prove yourself.

“‘Don’t be a credit hog. If you’re constantly in the neighborhood of good things, good things will happen to you.’ Tom Tierney, who was my boss at Bain in 1981 and is now on the eBay board, told me this. It’s true–you get ahead by crediting other people.

“Finally, in 1998, I was in New York watching the ticker as eBay went public. My husband is a neurosurgeon. I called into his operating room and told him the great news. And he said, ‘That’s nice. But Meg, remember that it’s not brain surgery.’”

Jack Welch, 69, Former chairman and CEO of General Electric

Be yourself.

“It was 1979 or 1980. I was on the board of GE for the first time. And I was in Seattle for one of those three-day director outings. I had just gone to my first or second board meeting, and at a party for the directors afterwards, Paul Austin, the former chairman of Coke, came up to me. He was a reserved, formal man. Anyway, he must have noticed my starched shirt and how quiet I was in the meeting. I was all prim and proper. He said to me, ‘Jack, don’t forget who you are and how you got here.’ I gave him an embarrassed ‘Thanks.’ But I knew what he meant. I had always been myself except in this instance. I had never been quiet. He hit me in the nose with it, and it was startling. Next meeting, I think I spoke up a bit.”

Sallie Krawcheck, 40, CFO of Citigroup

Don’t listen to the naysayers.

“When I was a kid I was ‘that kid’ –freckles, braces, and very unfortunate glasses. If I wasn’t the last chosen for the team, I was the second to last. There are so many heartbreaking stories I remember, like the time I finally managed to kick the ball in kickball. I was running for first base all excited, and then my glasses fell off and I had to go back and get them. The teasing was really tough. I wasn’t just crying in class; I was falling apart at school. My grades went from A’s to C’s.

“One day when I was really down, my mom sat me on the sofa. She spoke to me as though she was speaking to another adult, telling me to stop paying attention to the girls who were teasing me. She told me that they were naysayers who would sit on the sidelines and criticize those who were out there trying. She said that the reason they were doing it was because they were jealous. Looking back, I know they weren’t really jealous, but at the time, I believed my mom. My grades went back up, and I never let the naysayers bother me again.”

Vivek Paul, 46, President and CEO of Wipro Technologies

Don’t limit yourself by past expectations.

“The best advice I ever got was from an elephant trainer in the jungle outside Bangalore. I was doing a hike through the jungle as a tourist. I saw these large elephants tethered to a small stake. I asked him, ‘How can you keep such a large elephant tied to such a small stake?’ He said, ‘When the elephants are small, they try to pull out the stake, and they fail. When they grow large, they never try to pull out the stake again.’ That parable reminds me that we have to go for what we think we’re fully capable of, not limit ourselves by what we’ve been in the past. When I took over Wipro in 1999, we were the first to articulate that an Indian company could be in the global top ten [of technology services firms]. As of 2004, we were.

“The second-best piece of advice was something I learned from Jack Welch on one of his trips to India. He was commenting that every time he lands in New York he imagines that he’s just been appointed chairman and that this is his first day in the role, and the guy before him was a real dud. He said, ‘Every time, I think, What would I do that was different than the guy before? What big changes would I make?’ I took that seriously. You should always think, ‘How do I regenerate myself?’ I don’t do it religiously every time I fly internationally. But over Christmas break time, I set aside a day to zero-base myself. I force myself to do it every single year.

“But the person I rely on most in terms of advice is somebody in my Young President’s Organization group: John Donahoe [former managing partner at Bain & Co., now president of the eBay business unit]. John has been a life coach for me, helping me sort out the many conflicting business and personal priorities. He has given me great advice about raising high school kids. His suggestions are invaluable.”

Dick Parsons, 56, Chairman and CEO of Time Warner

When you negotiate, leave a little something on the table.

“The best business advice I ever received was from Steve Ross, who used to run this company. Steve was a friend. It was 1991 or 1992, and I was on the Time Warner board. I was going to be coming over to the company from the banking industry, and we were talking about how to get things done. Steve said to me, ‘Dick, always remember this is a small business and a long life. You are going to see all these guys come around and around again, so how you treat them on each individual transaction is going to make an impression in the long haul. When you do deals, leave a little something to make everyone happy instead of trying to grab every nickel off the table.’

“I’ve used that advice a thousand times since, literally. When I got to this company, for the first seven or eight years I was here I was the principal dealmaker, and I always took that advice with me into a negotiation. Most people in business do not follow that, though. Maybe there was a time when they did, but I don’t think most people do now. I think people get hung up with their advisors, investment bankers, lawyers, and others, and every instance becomes a tug of war to see who can outduel the other to get the slightest little advantage on a transaction. But people don’t keep in mind that the advisors are going to move on to the next deal, while you and I are going to have to see each other again.”

Andy Grove, 68, Chairman of Intel

When “everyone knows” something to be true, nobody knows nothin’.

“The best advice I ever got was from Alois Xavier Schmidt, my favorite professor at the City College of New York. A saying of his stayed with me and continued to influence me as the decades unfolded. He often said, ‘When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.’

“Our little research group at Fairchild [Semiconductor] some 40 years ago started to study the characteristics of surface layers that were the heart of modern integrated circuits. At that time, ‘everybody knew’ that surface states, an artifice of quantum mechanics, would interfere with us building such chips. As it turns out, nobody knew nothin’: We never found any surface states; what we found was trace contamination. When we identified and removed this, the road opened up to the chip industry as we know it today.

“I remembered professor Schmidt’s words again ten years ago, when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. ‘Everybody knew’ what treatment would be best for me. I thought that perhaps this was another case where common wisdom might be suspect and decided to do my own research, comparing all the known data about various treatment outcomes and coming up with less-than-conventional conclusions. Time and again, professor Schmidt’s saying prompted me to think for myself, go back to first principles, and base knowledge on facts and analysis rather than on what ‘everybody knew.’”

Anne Mulcahy, 52, CEO of Xerox

Remember the parable of the cow in the ditch.

“One piece of advice I got has become a mantra at Xerox. It came from a very funny source. It was four years ago, and I was doing a customer breakfast in Dallas. We had invited a set of business leaders there. One was a plainspoken, self-made, streetwise guy [Albert C. Black Jr., president and CEO of On-Target Supplies & Logistics, a logistics management firm]. He came up to me and gave me this advice, and I have wound up using it constantly. ‘When everything gets really complicated and you feel overwhelmed,’ he told me, ‘think about it this way: You gotta do three things. First, get the cow out of the ditch. Second, find out how the cow got into the ditch. Third, make sure you do whatever it takes so the cow doesn’t go into the ditch again.’

“Now, every time I talk about the turnaround at Xerox, I start with the cow in the ditch. The first thing is survival. The second thing is, figure out what happened. Learn from those lessons and make sure you’ve put a plan in place to recognize the signs, and never get there again. This has become sort of a catchphrase for the leadership team. It’s just one of those incredibly simple commonsense stories to keep people grounded. I bet that businessman had no idea what kind of legs his story would have.”

Brian Grazer, 53, Academy Award–winning movie and TV producer, Imagine Entertainment

All you really own are ideas and the confidence to write them down.

“I’ve spent the last 18 years soliciting advice from people outside the movie business. Before that, I sought advice from people in the entertainment industry. So I’ve collected advice from close to 1,000 people over 30 years. Every month I create a new list of people to call. I call it my ‘interesting people list.’ I call, on average, five people a week–I’ll personally call Eliot Spitzer or Isaac Asimov–and may end up meeting with one every two weeks. Ideally I like to meet these people in my office. And I ask them to tell me about their world. I meet these people to learn ultimately how to be a more efficient filmmaker.

“My whole career has been built on one piece of advice that came from two people: [MCA founder] Jules Stein and [former MCA chairman] Lew Wasserman. In 1975 I was a law clerk at Warner Bros. I’d spent about a year trying to get a meeting with these two men. Finally they let me in to see them. They both said, separately, ‘In order for you to be in the entertainment business, you have to have leverage. Since you have none–no money, no pedigree, no valuable relationships–you must have creative leverage. That exists only in your mind. So you need to write–put what’s in your mind on paper. Then you’ll own a piece of paper. That’s leverage.’

“With that advice, I wrote the story that became Splash, which was a fantasy that I had about meeting a mermaid. For years, I sent registered letters to myself–movie concepts and other ideas–so that I had my ideas officially on paper. I have about 1,000 letters in a vault. To this day, I feel that my real power is only that–ideas and the confidence to write them down.”

Rick Warren, 51, Minister, founder of Saddleback Church and author of The Purpose-Driven Life

Regularly sit at the feet of Peter Drucker.

“In life you need mentors, and you need models. Models are the people you want to emulate. I recommend that your models be dead. I’m serious. You don’t know how people are going to finish up. A lot of people start out like bottle rockets. They look great, but then the last half of their life is chaos. That can be quite devastating.

“In my life, I’ve had at least three mentors: my father, Billy Graham, and Peter Drucker. They each taught me different things. Peter Drucker taught me about competence. I met him about 25 years ago. I was invited to a small seminar of CEOs, and Peter was there. As a young kid–I was about 25–I began to call him up, write him, go see him. I still go sit at the feet of Peter Drucker on a regular basis. I could give you 100 one-liners that Peter has honed into me. One of them is that there’s a difference between effectiveness and efficiency. Efficiency is doing things right, and effectiveness is doing the right thing. A lot of churches–not just churches, but businesses and other organizations–are efficient, but they are not effective.

“Another important thing that Peter has taught me is that results are always on the outside of your organization, not on the inside. Most people, when they’re in a company, or in a church, or in an organization, they think, Oh, we’re not doing well, we need to restructure. They make internal changes. But the truth is, all the growth is on the outside from people who are not using your product, not listening to your message, and not using your services.”

Jim Collins, 46, Author of the bestseller Good to Great

The real discipline comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities.

“It was 1994. [My book] Built to Last had just come out. I mean, I was nobody. But a colleague knew Peter Drucker, and one day I got a message on my voicemail: ‘This is Peter Drucker. I would be very pleased to meet you for a day in Claremont [Calif., where Drucker lives].’ I call back, very nervous, and he says, ‘Speak up! I’m not young anymore!’ So I’m like, ‘PETER DRUCKER, THIS IS JIM COLLINS!’ And then he actually set aside a day. Think about the value of a day with Peter Drucker at age 85. The interesting thing is that he absolutely changed my life that day. In one day.

“I was at a point where I could have started a consulting firm, Built to Last Consulting, or something. The first thing he asked was, ‘Why are you driven to do this [start a consulting firm]?’ I said I was driven by curiosity and impact. And he says, ‘Ah, now you’re getting in the realm of the existential. You must be crassly commercial.’

“For a moment I had this image of going to Yoda for wisdom, and having him say, ‘Have a Coke!’ But he was either testing me, or it was a joke. I’m not sure which.

“The huge thing he said to me was, ‘Do you want to build ideas to last, or do you want to build an organization to last?’

“I said I wanted to build ideas to last.

“He said, ‘Then you must not build an organization.’

“His point was, the moment you have an organization, you have a beast to feed–this army of people. If you ever start developing ideas to feed the beast rather than having ideas that the beast feeds, your influence will go down, even if your commercial success goes up. Because there’s a huge difference between teaching an idea and selling an idea. In the end, what are you in a battle for? You’re battling to influence the thinking of powerful, discerning people. If you ever abuse that trust, you can lose them. So the moment that arrow changes direction, you’re dead.

“He said something else important: ‘The real discipline comes in saying no to the wrong opportunities.’ Growth is easy. Saying no is hard.

“I’ll never forget asking, ‘How can I ever pay you back?’ and his saying, ‘You’ve already paid me back. I’ve learned so much from our conversation.’ That’s when I realized where Drucker’s greatness lay, that unlike a lot of people, he was not driven to say something. He was driven to learn something.

“I feel proud that I followed the advice. It’s a huge debt. I can never pay it back. The only thing I can do is give it to others. Drucker had said, ‘Go out and make yourself useful.’ That’s how you pay Peter Drucker back. To do for other people what Peter Drucker did for me.”

Peter Drucker, 95, Business consultant

Get good–or get out.

“The most important instruction I received was when I was just 20 and three weeks into my first real job as a foreign affairs and business editor of the large-circulation afternoon paper in Frankfurt. I brought my first two editorials to the editor-in-chief, a German. He took one look at them and threw them back at me saying, ‘They are no good at all.’ After I’d been on the job for three weeks, he called me in and said, ‘Drucker, if you don’t improve radically in the next three weeks, you’d better look for another job.’

“For me, that was the right treatment. He did not try to mentor me. The idea would have been considered absurd. The idea of mentoring was post– World War II. In those days [before World War II] you were hired to do your job, and if you didn’t do it, you were out. It was very simple.”

Ted Turner, 66, Founder of CNN and former vice chairman of Time Warner

Start young.

“The best advice I ever got came from my father. He told me to go to work at his billboard company when I was 12 years old. I worked 42 hours a week, just like an adult. I worked the first summer as a water boy, a runner, and an assistant to the construction crew. Over the next 12 summers, I worked in a different area every year. I learned sales and leasing. I could paint billboards. I can post bills. My father would explain how the business world works–how a good business depends on good labor relations, enthusiastic leadership, making a profit and reinvesting it. When I was 21 and went to work in the company full-time, I was ready. He passed away three years later, when I was 24, and I was able to take it over without a hitch. People couldn’t believe how successful I was. This turned out to be the best business course I could have gotten.”

David Neeleman, 44, CEO of JetBlue

Balance your work with your family.

“I’m a God-fearing guy. And the best advice I ever got came from the head of our [Mormon] church, Gordon B. Hinkley. It was when we were going public in 2001, and I was caught up in the money, power, and glory. He cut me right down to size. In a conference where he was speaking, he reminded me, ‘It’s all about your family, your relationships. You’ve got to balance that with your work.’

“So I set rules to be with my family and to keep everyone from encroaching on my time. I keep weekends as free as humanly possible. I try to make it home in time for nightly Scripture study and prayer as a family, and I try to make sure to take some good vacations when my kids are out of school. Those rules have had a positive effect on the business. I’ve seen so many people who have neglected their families. Now their kids are giving them trouble, so they’re distracted. If you have a closer family, you can be a lot more focused when you’re at work.”

Mickey Drexler, 60, CEO of J. Crew

Bail out of a business that isn’t growing.

“It was 1980. I had been working at a department store [Bloomingdale's] for 12 years, and I knew I had to get out. There wasn’t really a future there for me. I was offered the job of president at Ann Taylor [the women's-wear chain, a division of a now defunct corporation called Garfinckel Brooks Brothers Miller & Rhoads]. I thought about it–and when you are changing jobs, you think of all the reasons you should not do it. Then you get a little nervous. I said no.

“That night I was having dinner with someone who was older and wiser, Arthur Levitt [then chairman of the American Stock Exchange], and I told him about the offer. He said, ‘I would grab that position at Ann Taylor. Department stores are a nongrowth business.’

“He was right. The next morning I told the corporation I was interested after all. I resigned the next week. That was by far the best advice I’ve gotten in my life. If I didn’t have dinner with him that night, I don’t think I would have called back and said I wanted the job. And I am not sure I’d be where I am today.”

Brian Roberts, 45, CEO of Comcast

Let others take the credit.

“My mentor is my father, Ralph, who turns 85 this month. When I wanted to start my Comcast career at corporate headquarters, my father wisely insisted that I learn the business from the field, even though that isn’t the way he started. One of my first summer jobs in college was as a cable installer in New Kensington, Pa., near Pittsburgh. I struggled to climb the telephone poles, strung cable, and went into people’s homes to wire them. I really learned the ropes from people at the system level. That experience drove home how important our technicians and customer service representatives are, and how dangerous some of those jobs are at times. That empathy and understanding was something Ralph knew couldn’t be taught in corporate headquarters.

“Ralph is a great listener. He doesn’t feel the need to direct the conversation. Usually, when you come in, there’s the problem and then there’s the real problem; there’s the agenda, and there’s the hidden agenda. Just by listening and asking questions, he lets you get to the heart of the issue that you are chewing on. He’s not looking to take credit for anybody’s work. In fact, the single best piece of advice Ralph ever gave me was to let others take the credit. ‘You’re in a lucky position, and you know it,’ he told me. ‘You don’t need all the glory. If you let others take the credit, it makes them feel like they’re part of something special.’ He’s right. That’s just the way Ralph is with me, and that’s the way I try to be with others.”

Marc Benioff, 40, Founder and CEO of Salesforce.com

Incorporate philanthropy into your corporate structure.

“I was on a panel about business and philanthropy at a conference in 2001. Alan Hassenfeld, who at that time was CEO [now chairman] of Hasbro, took me aside afterward and told me I had a lot of good ideas, but I had to give them more structure. He said I should also incorporate the ideas of volunteerism [into Salesforce.com]. To meet somebody who had already fully integrated something like this into his company was critical. Hasbro has one of the richest philanthropic programs of any U.S. commercial organization. One of the many things they do is make toy donations to children’s hospitals. It wasn’t something Hasbro did by writing a check; it was part of their culture.

“We ended up putting 1% of our equity into the nonprofit Salesforce.com Foundation, as well as 1% of our profits, which of course at the time were zero. But following Alan’s advice, we also put in 1% of our employees’ time. That’s six days a year of company-paid time for volunteerism. Employees want to work for us because of these programs –they want to reach out and do volunteerism anyway, and we give them a structure. Also, we let nonprofits use our service for free. Alan’s advice ended up being really important, because this is what sets Salesforce.com apart from being just another company.”

Hector Ruiz, 59, CEO of AMD

Surround yourself with people of integrity, and get out of their way.

“In my adult years as a manager, Bob Galvin, the former CEO of Motorola, was my most influential leader. He told me, ‘A good leader knows he is doing a good job when he knows with certainty that he can say yes to anything his staff asks and feel totally confident that they will do the right thing.’ If you surround yourself with the right people who have integrity, and they all understand well the goals and objectives of the organization, then the best thing to do as a leader is to get out of their way. I use this advice quite a bit at work. The right people will feel far more pressure to perform well when they are trusted.

“I was given another piece of wisdom that has made a huge difference. When I was at Texas Instruments [from 1972 to 1977], my boss’s boss, Al Stein, who was running the semiconductor business, one day asked me, ‘What’s the worst thing that could happen if you make a decision that doesn’t work out?’ I remember thinking, ‘I guess I could get fired.’ I realized that in the scheme of things, that seems so insignificant. It was almost like an epiphany.”

Donny Deutsch, 48, CEO of Deutsch Inc. and host of CNBC’s The Big Idea With Donny Deutsch

If you love something, the money will come.

“Back in 1983 I went to work as an account executive at my dad’s ad agency, David Deutsch Associates. I was a fuckup from the beginning. I was supposed to be taking care of clients, but I was 24 years old, still partying, not ready to grow up. And he fired me. My dad said, ‘You know, you’re not passionate about what you are doing here. So get the fuck out of here! You don’t love this, and I don’t want you around here, because I love what I do.’ Then he said, ‘Look, whatever you do in life, find something you love–I don’t care if you’re a garbage man–and everything else will fall into place. If you love something, you’ll be great at it, and the money will come and everything else will fall into place.’

“It was hard to take. But he knew I needed a kick in the ass, and I did. So what else could I do? I cleaned out my desk, and I went out to the West Coast. I kicked around, went on Match Game [a TV game show] and won $5,000. Then I came back East, sold jeans in a flea market. I thought about law school. In the process, I found myself.

“Six months passed, and I found out my dad was thinking about selling the business. He had an offer, for not a lot of money, but it would have allowed him to stay on for a few years after the deal closed. He was in his mid-50s. So this was what he wanted. And I said to him–I don’t know how, in hindsight, I had the balls or stupidity to do this–I said, ‘Don’t sell it. I want to come back. I just don’t want to be an account guy. But put me in a corner and leave me alone. I’ll work on new business. Just let me build my own little thing here.’

“From that point on, I went to the wall. I started pitching new business instead of holding clients’ hands. As luck would have it, I had a real skill for it, and I loved it. Seven years later I became CEO, my dad retired happily to become a painter, and we’re now one of the ten largest ad agencies in the country.”

Klaus Kleinfeld, 47, CEO of Siemens

Keenly visualize the future.

“The best advice I ever got was from an old friend of the family’s, and it goes like this: Whenever you take on a new position, before you jump in and get bogged down in the details, sit down, lean back, close your eyes, and think about what you really want to achieve and how you want things to look in a couple of years. And only then–once you have a clear vision in front of your inner eye–start executing so that things will move in that direction. I was in my early 20s at the time, and the family friend, Georg Brandl, was probably in his mid-80s. He had been born in Bavaria, and after receiving a manual education as a construction worker, he went on to lead large construction projects around the world.

“When I was working as a consultant on many restructuring projects, this was always the approach I took with the core leadership team. Even though we couldn’t see any end state because there were so many problems in front of us, I would put that aside and say, ‘Okay, what should this look like?’ It always started with me as a personal thing–thinking it through and then drawing people in.

“I was never able to tell Georg Brandl how helpful that advice has been.”

Ann Fudge, 53, Chairman and CEO of Young & Rubicam Brands

Don’t chart your career path too soon.

“It was 1978–oh, God, that seems so long ago. I was a year out of Harvard Business School. I was working at General Mills as a marketing assistant on Cheerios. One day I was having a conversation with the product manager on Cheerios, Kent Tippy. He was complaining about how MBAs want to be CEOs and measure how fast they make it to this level and that level. In fact, one guy in our group was keeping score–he had people’s careers all charted out. I admit I was looking ahead too. I really wanted to be a product manager. Kent said to me, ‘Don’t look too far ahead. Focus on what you’re doing right now.’ He convinced me that people who are good in product management tend to be good executors but may not have the skills to go to higher levels of leadership. So it’s not useful to chart your career path so early on. You’re better off demonstrating capabilities at each level–to do X, Y, and Z when you’re asked to do X. Following his advice, I really tried to excel in each job. It worked.”

Herb Kelleher, 74, Founder and chairman of Southwest Airlines

Respect people for who they are, not for what their titles are.

“I’d say my mother made more of a difference to me than anyone else did. I know that’s a conventional and perhaps mundane answer, but my family was blown apart at the start of World War II. We went from six to two people, my mother and myself.

“There were so many things I learned from her. One piece of advice that always stuck in my mind is that people should be respected and trusted as people, not because of their position or title. Frequently, position or title did not reflect the true merits of a person. I got a lesson confirming that almost immediately, because there was a gentleman [in our town] who was the head of a financial institution. He was always dressed immaculately, and he gave the impression of being a very upstanding guy. Well, he was indicted, convicted, and sent to jail for embezzling.

“Thanks to her advice, in the business world I try not to judge anyone by superficial standards. I try to approach them with an open mind. I’m very interested in their ideas. You don’t have to have a doctorate to have an idea. You ought to be open to listening to people. Show that you care about them as individuals, not just as workers. You know how some people are always looking over your shoulder to see if there’s somebody more important behind you? Well, one of the things that I’ve tried to do–if I’m talking to a person, that person is the only person in the world while we’re talking. They’re owed that. Besides, they’re usually fascinating. Getting together with the people of Southwest is one of the most rewarding and exciting things in my business life.”

Clayton Christensen, 53, Harvard Business School professor

You can learn from anyone.

“Kent Bowen was my partner in a company we started in Boston before I switched to academia. He was a professor at MIT then. If they ever give a Nobel Prize in material sciences, he should get it. Once I realized he was the best in his field, I asked him, ‘How does it feel to be the top guy in the world in your field?’ Without denying my characterization of him, he said: ‘You know, there’s a real disappointment.’ He said something like, ‘When I was younger, I looked up at the top of the mountain and thought, Wow, those guys are really smart! When you’re near the top of the mountain looking down, you think, Boy, if nobody is smarter than I am, the world is really hurting.’

“That had such a profound impact on me. I realized that a lot of us, when we’re in school, believe that you can learn only from people who are smarter than you. But if you move toward the top of that hill and maintain that belief, then your opportunities for learning become progressively more constricted. So what you need is a fundamental humility–the belief that you can learn from anyone.”

Ted Koppel, 65, Anchor of ABC’s Nightline

Do what you love.

“There was a very famous radio reporter in New York City in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. His name was Danny Meenan, and he was the quintessential old Irish reporter. I was about 22, just out of graduate school, and had gone to work at WMCA, where Danny worked, with the exalted title of copy boy. Being a copy boy meant you did what anybody else on the staff wanted you to do. Danny was a very generous mentor. He knew I wanted to be a reporter. He took me on a couple of assignments with him.

“Shortly thereafter, he and I repaired to a bar and had a couple of beers together, and Danny said, ‘What do you want to do with your life?’ I said, ‘I think I want to go into politics. I might want to be a Congressman someday.’ He looked at me as if I had just said or done something obscene. He said, ‘You would be a lousy Congressman. And it looks as though you are going to be a pretty good reporter. You will have much more fun being a reporter than being a Congressman. And you should do what you’re good at, and do what you love. And you look to me that you are loving journalism.’

“It’s what I’ve been doing for the last 40 years.”

(FORTUNE Magazine)

Universal Law Of Attraction

I think most scientists would agree that the universe is made of energy. Everything is energy. This includes the matter that makes up the computer screen your reading this on.

Energy is not a separate entity in and of itself but is all connecting. Energy comprises all things physical and non-physical, and like all energy, attracts similar energies to themselves. This equally applies to thoughts and circumstances, people and things, all of which are made of energy.

Since the universe is made of energy, it then obviously responds to energy. Like attracts like and this, in my humble opinion, is where the rubber meets the road. Since our thoughts are comprised of energy, and the universe responds to like energy; then our focus of thought will mold the energy based on where the attention is given.

The Universe doesn’t say… “Hey, I like what this one wants, lets give it to him because he deserves it.” It doesn’t play favorites. If it did, we wouldn’t have free will and without free will, thought would not exist, as we know it. It doesn’t do any good to beg the Universe to deliver the goods you so desperately want. In a blunt sort of way… it doesn’t really care. Not in the sense that you don’t matter or your not important or loved. You are extremely important and very loved, that is why we have what we have.

It sounds like a contradiction but it’s not. You are given everything you want because you are so magnificent. It sounds like a contradiction because you know on a conscious level you didn’t want the headaches and the heartaches, but thats what you got because thats where your attention was. It’s brutally efficient and when you see it for what it is, you wouldn’t want it any other way.

The Universe responds to attention. It doesn’t matter if our attention is focused on something we judge to be good or bad. It doesn’t matter if it’s something we want or don’t want. There is no difference between negative attention or positive attention. The universe will simply respond to the attention or energy and be molded by the thought that has been launched. This focus of thought (energy) then manifests itself into the circumstances we come to experience. Simply said, the Universe responds to your thinking.

The beauty in all of this is that as soon as you stop giving your attention (or energy) of thought that is attracting circumstances you consider to be bad, the circumstances will stop being created. But this probably won’t happen as fast as you’d like primarily because of the other thoughts you are also offering. How many times have you thought about something you want only to change your mind a few days later, or worse, thought you couldn’t have it. The universe responds.

Everything you have in your life can be tracked back to an idea or belief, both positive and negative. If all you think about is how hard it is to have the sums of money you want… that’s what you’ll experience. And so it goes with love, health and every other aspect of your life.

If you take an inventory of your life and have experienced a lack of money or health, then you can trace the circumstances back to the balance of your thinking. If your thought energy has been predominantly focused on the “not having” of wealth or health, then that is why you have experienced these events in your life. These are your creations. Like thoughts are attracting like events. The tao of attraction at work. The energy of the Universe has aligned in perfect balance.

Each life event or circumstance we have experienced or will experience is an accurate reflection of the balance of our thought energy. If there is something you desire to have in your life that has yet to be experienced, then adjust the balance of your thinking toward the “having” of this experience. Once this balance of thinking is tipped toward the “having” side of things, you will have it.

The cool thing about all of this is the more you think in terms of having something, the easier it becomes. The flow of your thought energy has now gained momentum and has turned completely away from the “not having” state.

You have now arrived at the conscious idea that you are Creator. You have at your command the same power that has created galaxies and nothing can stop you from having whatever it is you want. You’ve had this power all along, but the difference now is you can consciously create by focus of thought. As a result, your life will improve. As you think… so it is. There is no other way.

Copyright 2007 Robert Hunt

[tags]attraction, creator, consciousness [/tags]

Musical Savants

Derek Paravicini

Derek, now in his early twenties, was born premature, at 25 weeks, and weighing just over half a kilogram. As a result of the oxygen therapy required to save his life, Derek lost his sight, and his development was affected too. It later became apparent that he had severe learning difficulties. However, he soon acquired a fascination for music and sound, and, by the age of four, had taught himself to play a large number of pieces on the piano, of some melodic and harmonic complexity (such as ‘Smoke Gets in your Eyes’). Almost inevitably, with no visual models to guide him, his technique was chaotic, and he his elbows would frequently be pressed into service, as he strove to reach intervals beyond the span of his tiny hands!

At this time, his enormous potential was recognized by Adam Ockelford, then music teacher at Linden Lodge School for the Blind in London. In due course, weekly and then daily lessons were arranged, in an extensive program of tuition that was to last for several years. Painstakingly (though physical demonstration and imitation) Derek acquired the foundations of technique that were necessary for him to move forward. His natural affinity for jazz, pop and light music soon became evident; together with his improvisatory talents, ability to play in any key, and flair for performing in public!

Derek ParaviciniDerek’s first major concert was at the Barbican Halls in London, when he was just 9 (in 1989). He played jazz with the Royal Philharmonic Pops Orchestra. Numerous national and regional television appearances followed, in the UK and overseas. His increasing maturity both as a person and performer enabled him to give concerts in venues across England and in Europe; among them, Ronnie Scott’s renowned jazz club in London.

Today, Derek is a student at Redhill College in Surrey, England, run by the Royal National Institute of the Blind. He attends courses at ‘SoundScape’ — a unique performing arts center for young adults with learning difficulties and exceptional musical abilities or needs. His talent, love of music, and — above all — the ability to communicate through sound means he will continue to thrill audiences for years to come in the UK and abroad.

Rex Lewis-Clack

Rex was born blind, with brain damage so severe it looked as though he would never walk, talk, or do much of anything. And yet he has a talent few of us can imagine. To understand Rex’s brain would be to unlock mysteries of language, memory, and music.

Rex at age eight was a study in contrasts. Blind and full of enthusiasm, Rex was unable to dress himself, or even carry on a basic conversation.

But with everything Rex can’t do, he can instantly identify any note that is played for him. It’s a talent only one in 10,000 people have.

But that was just the beginning of Rex’s gifts at the piano.

Rex played a song he had never heard – “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” – with Rex’s piano teacher singing along. Despite not being able to see the keys, Rex was able to play the song himself after a single hearing.

Rex is a musical savant, one of a handful of people in the world who share a mysterious combination of blindness, mental disability, and musical genius.

But away from the piano, Rex was a different child, easily upset and confused by basic concepts.

Does damage in one part of the brain somehow enable brilliance to develop in another part of the brain? Do these abilities lie dormant somewhere within all of us?

Why Do We Stress?

If you do an on-line search on stress, you’ll find a lot of web sites that do a good job of identifying stress with quizzes and tools that measure your level of stress. There’s even a website that has a test to determine whether you even have stress at all… and if they convince you that you do, they’re ready and willing to sell you the cure.

That’s all fine and well, but if I’m stressed, I want to get to the root of the problem. Sure, stress may be because your job is demanding, or the kids are screaming and the bills are due when there’s no money in the bank. Those are stressful situations, but why are they stressful situations?

The first answer that pops in the mind of many is because I can’t pay the bills and I don’t have any control over the situation. Many think they wouldn’t stress if they had control over they’re environment. “If my job wasn’t demanding and I could pay the bills, then it wouldn’t be so stressful.”

Is that really true? If you had more coin in the bank and a really cool career, then your life wouldn’t be so stressful. Or would it?

In this example, are career and money really the root cause of stress? If it wasn’t your job, or the lack of money, it would probably be something else. I know for a fact, people who are rich are not immune to stress. And individuals who have some pretty amazing careers still experience a certain amount of stress that goes along with the pressure’s of most any career.

So what causes the stress in our lives and how do we handle it? I’m one of those people who completely agree that we are the one’s who induce ALL of the stress we experience in our lives. Not just some of it, or a little bit of it…. but all of it. We induce stress in our lives, because at the root of it all, we harbor fear.

I know, some of you are thinking… right… he doesn’t have a clue. The guy who hit my car; nooo… he didn’t have anything to do with my stress levels. Or how about the fact I can’t pay my mortgage, I suppose that’s my fault? What about my job? They’re closing the plant down next week and I suppose that has nothing to do with my level of stress?

What I’m saying is this. In each and every one of those circumstances, if we can come to appreciate and understand the power of our control, we can ultimately begin to change the circumstances that we believe to be the cause of our stress.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you can’t make the mortgage - pretty stressful stuff for most people. Like most people, you don’t really care why it’s stressful; you just want to pay the mortgage so that the stress goes away. I completely understand but if you can’t pay it this month, chances are your going to encounter a similar situation the following month.

Ok, so you’ve decided to figure out why you’re stressed over the mortgage. The obvious reason is because you fear you will lose your home. If you lose your home, you’ll have no place to live, and if you have no place to live, you’ll be walking the streets, and if you end up walking the streets, someone might attack you, and if someone attacks you, you could end up dead and if you end up dead… then you won’t have to worry about the mortgage.

Believe it or not, some people will use that train of thought. But let’s flip it a little. When you experience the inability to pay the mortgage and you are bursting with stress, what is the fear here? When you come down to it, it is the fear of powerlessness. When your talking about any sense of stress, you can always link it back to a fear of being powerless.

Without getting too esoteric here, the reason you are feeling powerless is because you have not identified with that part of you which is creating the situation in the first place. You are the reason you cannot pay your mortgage… not your job or circumstances. Your powerlessness stems from the thoughts and actions you have been processing on a continual basis.

I’m not referring to some new age mama jama. I’m talking about a mindset that says, I don’t have the ability to alter my circumstances for the better, or if I do, it’s very limited. I am powerless to the will of a higher power and if I can’t pay the mortgage, then that’s just the way it is.

And what I’m saying is…. YOU are the higher power. If you were powerful enough to create the inability to pay, you are just as powerful to create the circumstances to actually pay the house off. I know that’s a leap from some people, but if you manage the responsibility of your thoughts, you can reduce, or better yet, eliminate the stress in your life.

There is an article here that goes into greater detail on the law of attraction and how we bring these “stressful situations” in our lives, but in a nutshell, you bring all circumstances in your life by what you tend to focus on. You keep focusing on the fact you can’t pay your mortgage, then that is what you will continually engage.

If you want to reduce or eliminate the stress if your life, then you’re going to have to shift the way you think. This isn’t new or earth shattering information. It’s been well documented. But this is a mindset change you’re probably not going to be able to do overnight. It’s a gradual process that takes time, effort and practice. You have to want to change with the belief you are the creator of your life and not subject to the whims of a God or an unfair universe.

And remember, if all of this is nonsense to you, then just do what my Dad use to tell me…”don’t sweat the small stuff; and it’s all small stuff”. Only he didn’t use the word “stuff”.

Copyright 2006 Robert Hunt

What Should I Do With My Life?

It’s time to define the new era. Our faith has been shaken. We’ve lost confidence in our leaders and in our institutions. Our beliefs have been tested. We’ve discredited the notion that the Internet would change everything (and the stock market would buy us an exit strategy from the grind). Our expectations have been dashed. We’ve abandoned the idea that work should be a 24-hour-a-day rush and that careers should be a wild adventure. Yet we’re still holding on.

We’re seduced by the idea that picking up the pieces and simply tweaking the formula will get the party started again. In spite of our best thinking and most searing experience, our ideas about growth and success are mired in a boom-bust mentality. Just as LBOs gave way to IPOs, the market is primed for the next engine of wealth creation. Just as we traded in the pinstripes and monster bonuses of the Wall Street era for T-shirts and a piece of the action during the startup revolution, we’re waiting to latch on to the new trappings of success. (I understand the inclination. I’ve surfed from one boom to the next for most of my working life — from my early days as a bond trader to my most recent career as a writer tracking the migration of my generation from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.)

There’s a way out. Instead of focusing on what’s next , let’s get back to what’s first . The previous era of business was defined by the question, Where’s the opportunity? I’m convinced that business success in the future starts with the question, What should I do with my life? Yes, that’s right. The most obvious and universal question on our plates as human beings is the most urgent and pragmatic approach to sustainable success in our organizations. People don’t succeed by migrating to a “hot” industry (one word: dotcom) or by adopting a particular career-guiding mantra (remember “horizontal careers”?). They thrive by focusing on the question of who they really are — and connecting that to work that they truly love (and, in so doing, unleashing a productive and creative power that they never imagined). Companies don’t grow because they represent a particular sector or adopt the latest management approach. They win because they engage the hearts and minds of individuals who are dedicated to answering that life question.

This is not a new idea. But it may be the most powerfully pressing one ever to be disrespected by the corporate world. There are far too many smart, educated, talented people operating at quarter speed, unsure of their place in the world, contributing far too little to the productive engine of modern civilization. There are far too many people who look like they have their act together but have yet to make an impact. You know who you are. It comes down to a simple gut check: You either love what you do or you don’t. Period.

Those who are lit by that passion are the object of envy among their peers and the subject of intense curiosity. They are the source of good ideas. They make the extra effort. They demonstrate the commitment. They are the ones who, day by day, will rescue this drifting ship. And they will be rewarded. With money, sure, and responsibility, undoubtedly. But with something even better too: the kind of satisfaction that comes with knowing your place in the world. We are sitting on a huge potential boom in productivity — if we could just get the square pegs out of the round holes.

Of course, addressing the question, What should I do with my life? isn’t just a productivity issue: It’s a moral imperative. It’s how we hold ourselves accountable to the opportunity we’re given. Most of us are blessed with the ultimate privilege: We get to be true to our individual nature. Our economy is so vast that we don’t have to grind it out forever at jobs we hate. For the most part, we get to choose. That choice isn’t about a career search so much as an identity quest. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. There is nothing more brave than filtering out the chatter that tells you to be someone you’re not. There is nothing more genuine than breaking away from the chorus to learn the sound of your own voice. Asking The Question is nothing short of an act of courage: It requires a level of commitment and clarity that is almost foreign to our working lives.

During the past two years, I have listened to the life stories of more than 900 people who have dared to be honest with themselves. Of those, I chose 70 to spend considerable time with in order to learn how they did it. Complete strangers opened their lives and their homes to me. I slept on their couches. We went running together. They cried in my arms. We traded secrets. I met their families. I went to one’s wedding. I witnessed many critical turning points.

These are ordinary people. People of all ages, classes, and professions — from a catfish farmer in Mississippi to a toxic-waste inspector in the oil fields of Texas, from a police officer in East Los Angeles to a long-haul trucker in Pennsylvania, from a financier in Hong Kong to a minister at a church on the Oregon coast. These people don’t have any resources or character traits that give them an edge in pursuing their dream. Some have succeeded; many have not. Only two have what accountants call “financial independence.” Only two are so smart that they would succeed at anything they chose (though having more choices makes answering The Question that much harder). Only one, to me, is saintly. They’re just people who faced up to it, armed with only their weaknesses, equipped with only their fears.

What I learned from them was far more powerful than what I had expected or assumed. The first assumption to get busted was the notion that certain jobs are inherently cool and that others are uncool. That was a big shift for me. Throughout the 1990s, my basic philosophy was this: Work=Boring, but Work+Speed+Risk=Cool. Speed and risk transformed the experience into something so stimulating, so exciting, so intense, that we began to believe that those qualities defined “good work.” Now, betrayed by the reality of economic uncertainty and global instability, we’re casting about for what really matters when it comes to work.

On my journey, I met people in bureaucratic organizations and bland industries who were absolutely committed to their work. That commitment sustained them through slow stretches and setbacks. They never watched the clock, never dreaded Mondays, never worried about the years passing by. They didn’t wonder where they belonged in life. They were phenomenally productive and confident in their value. In places unusual and unexpected, they had found their calling, and those callings were as idiosyncratic as each individual.

And this is where the second big insight came in: Your calling isn’t something you inherently “know,” some kind of destiny. Far from it. Almost all of the people I interviewed found their calling after great difficulty. They had made mistakes before getting it right. For instance, the catfish farmer used to be an investment banker, the truck driver had been an entertainment lawyer, a chef had been an academic, and the police officer was a Harvard MBA. Everyone discovered latent talents that weren’t in their skill sets at age 25.

Most of us don’t get epiphanies. We only get a whisper — a faint urge. That’s it. That’s the call. It’s up to you to do the work of discovery, to connect it to an answer. Of course, there’s never a single right answer. At some point, it feels right enough that you choose, and the energy formerly spent casting about is now devoted to making your choice fruitful.

This lesson in late, hard-fought discovery is good news. What it means is that today’s confused can be tomorrow’s dedicated. The current difficult climate serves as a form of reckoning. The tougher the times, the more clarity you gain about the difference between what really matters and what you only pretend to care about. The funny thing is that most people have good instincts about where they belong but make poor choices and waste productive years on the wrong work. Why we do this cuts to the heart of the question, What should I do with my life? These wrong turns hinge on a small number of basic assumptions that have ruled our working lives, career choices, and ambitions for the better part of two decades. I found hardly any consistencies in how the people I interviewed discovered what they love to do — the human soul resists taxonomy — except when it came to four misconceptions (about money, smarts, place, and attitude) that have calcified into hobbling fears. These are stumbling blocks that we need to uproot before we can find our way to where we really belong.

MONEY Doesn’t Fund Dreams

Shouldn’t I make money first — to fund my dream? The notion that there’s an order to your working life is an almost classic assumption: Pay your dues, and then tend to your dream. I expected to find numerous examples of the truth of this path. But I didn’t find any.

Sure, I found tons of rich guys who were now giving a lot away to charity or who had bought an island. I found plenty of people who had found something meaningful and original to do after making their money. But that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the garden-variety fantasy: Put your calling in a lockbox, go out and make a ton of money, and then come back to the lockbox to pick up your calling where you left it.

It turns out that having the financial independence to walk away rarely triggers people to do just that. The reality is, making money is such hard work that it changes you. It takes twice as long as anyone plans for. It requires more sacrifices than anyone expects. You become so emotionally invested in that world — and psychologically adapted to it — that you don’t really want to ditch it.

I met many people who had left the money behind. But having “enough” didn’t trigger the change. It had to get personal: Something had to happen such as divorce, the death of a parent, or the recognition that the long hours were hurting one’s children. (One man, Don Linn, left investment banking after he came home from a business trip and his two-year-old son didn’t recognize him.)

The ruling assumption is that money is the shortest route to freedom. Absurdly, that strategy is cast as the “practical approach.” But in truth, the opposite is true. The shortest route to the good life involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It’s scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.

This is an extremely threatening conclusion. It suggests that the vast majority of us aren’t just putting our dreams on ice — we’re killing them. Joe Olchefske almost lost his forever. Joe started out in life with an interest in government. In the early 1980s, he made what seemed like a minor compromise: When he graduated from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, he went into public finance. He wouldn’t work in government, he’d work with government.

Joe went on to run Piper Jaffray in Seattle. By the mid-1990s, he realized that one little compromise had defined his life. “I didn’t want to be a high-priced midwife,” he said. “I wanted to be a mother. It was never my deal. It was my clients’ deal. They were taking the risk. They were building hospitals and bridges and freeways, not me. I envied them for that.”

One night, riding up the elevator of his apartment building, Joe met newly hired Seattle schools superintendent John Stanford. Soon after, Stanford offered Olchefske a job as his CFO — and partner in turning the troubled school system around. Olchefske accepted. Stanford rallied the city around school reform and earned the nickname Prophet of Hope. Meanwhile, Olchefske slashed millions from the budget and bloodlessly fired principals, never allowing his passions to interfere with his decisions. People called him Prophet of Doom.

Then Stanford died suddenly of leukemia. It was one of the great crises in the city’s history. Who could fill this void? Certainly not the green-eyeshade CFO. But Stanford’s death transformed Olchefske. It broke him open, and he discovered in himself a new ability to connect with people emotionally, not just rationally. As the new superintendent, he draws on that gift more than on his private-sector skills. He puts up with a lot of bureaucrap, but he says that avoiding crap shouldn’t be the objective in finding the right work. The right question is, How can I find something that moves my heart, so that the inevitable crap storm is bearable?

SMARTS Can’t Answer The Question

If the lockbox fantasy is a universal and eternal stumbling block when it comes to answering The Question, the idea that smarts and intensity are the essential building blocks of success and satisfaction is a product of the past decade. A set of twin misconceptions took root during the celebration of risk and speed that was the 90s startup revolution. The first is the idea that a smart, motivated individual with a great idea can accomplish anything . The corollary is that work should be fun, a thrill ride full of constant challenge and change.

Those assumptions are getting people into trouble. So what if your destiny doesn’t stalk you like a lion? Can you think your way to the answer? That’s what Lori Gottlieb thought. She considered her years as a rising television executive in Hollywood to be a big mistake. She became successful but felt like a fraud. So she quit and gave herself three years to analyze which profession would engage her brain the most. She literally attacked the question. She dug out her diaries from childhood. She took classes in photography and figure drawing. She interviewed others who had left Hollywood. She broke down every job by skill set and laid that over a grid of her innate talents. She filled out every exercise in What Color Is Your Parachute?

Eventually, she arrived at the following logic: Her big brain loved puzzles. Who solves puzzles? Doctors solve health puzzles. Therefore, become a doctor. She enrolled in premed classes at Pepperdine. Her med-school applications were so persuasive that every school wanted her. And then — can you see where this is headed? — Lori dropped out of Stanford Medical School after only two and a half months. Why? She realized that she didn’t like hanging around sick people all day.

The point is, being smarter doesn’t make answering The Question easier. Using the brain to solve this problem usually only leads to answers that make the brain happy and jobs that provide what I call “brain candy.” Intense mental stimulation. But it’s just that: candy . A synthetic substitute for other types of gratification that can be ultimately more rewarding and enduring. As the cop in East L.A. said of his years in management at Rockwell, “It was like cheap wood that burns too fast.”

I struggled with this myself, but not until I had listened to hundreds of others did the pattern make itself shockingly clear. What am I good at? is the wrong starting point. People who attempt to deduce an answer usually end up mistaking intensity for passion. To the heart, they are vastly different. Intensity comes across as a pale busyness , while passion is meaningful and fulfilling. A simple test: Is your choice something that will stimulate you for a year or something that you can be passionate about for 10 years?

This test is tougher than it seems on paper. In the past decade, the work world has become a battleground for the struggle between the boring and the stimulating. The emphasis on intensity has seeped into our value system. We still cling to the idea that work should not only be challenging and meaningful — but also invigorating and entertaining. But really, work should be like life: sometimes fun, sometimes moving, often frustrating, and defined by meaningful events. Those who have found their place don’t talk about how exciting and challenging and stimulating their work is. Their language invokes a different troika: meaningful, significant, fulfilling. And they rarely ever talk about work without weaving in their personal history.

PLACE Defines You

Every industry has a culture. And every culture is driven by a value system. In Hollywood, where praise is given too easily and thus has been devalued, the only honest metric is box-office receipts. So box-office receipts are all-important. In Washington, DC, some very powerful politicians are paid middling salaries, so power and money are not equal. Power is measured by the size of your staff and by how many people you can influence. In police work, you learn to be suspicious of ordinary people driving cars and walking down the street.

One of the most common mistakes is not recognizing how these value systems will shape you. People think that they can insulate themselves, that they’re different. They’re not. The relevant question in looking at a job is not What will I do? but Who will I become? What belief system will you adopt, and what will take on heightened importance in your life? Because once you’re rooted in a particular system — whether it’s medicine, New York City, Microsoft, or a startup — it’s often agonizingly difficult to unravel yourself from its values, practices, and rewards. Your money is good anywhere, but respect and status are only a local currency. They get heavily discounted when taken elsewhere. If you’re successful at the wrong thing, the mix of praise and opportunity can lock you in forever.

Don Linn, the investment banker who took over the catfish farm in Mississippi, learned this lesson the hard way. After years as a star at PaineWebber and First Boston, he dropped out when he could no longer bring himself to push deals on his clients that he knew wouldn’t work. His life change smacked of foolish originality: 5.5 million catfish on 1,500 water acres. His first day, he had to clip the wings of a flock of geese. Covered in goose shit and blood, he wondered what he had gotten himself into. But he figured it out and grew his business into a $16 million operation with five side businesses. More important, the work reset his moral compass. In farming, success doesn’t come at another farmer’s expense. You learn to cooperate, sharing processing plants, feed mills, and pesticide-flying services.

Like Don, you’ll be a lot happier if you aren’t fighting the value system around you. Find one that enforces a set of beliefs that you can really get behind. There’s a powerful transformative effect when you surround yourself with like-minded people. Peer pressure is a great thing when it helps you accomplish your goals instead of distracting you from them.

Carl Kurlander wrote the movie St. Elmo’s Fire when he was 24. For years afterward, he lived in Beverly Hills. He wanted to move back to Pittsburgh, where he grew up, to write books, but he was always stopped by the doubt, Would it really make any difference to write from Pittsburgh instead of from Beverly Hills? His books went unwritten. Last year, when a looming Hollywood writers’ strike coincided with a job opening in the creative-writing department at Pitt, he finally summoned the courage to move. He says that being in academia is like “bathing in altruism.” Under its influence, he wrote his first book, a biography of the comic Louie Anderson.

ATTITUDE Is the Biggest Obstacle

Environment matters, but in the end, when it comes to tackling the question, What should I do with my life? it really is all in your head. The first psychological stumbling block that keeps people from finding themselves is that they feel guilty for simply taking the quest seriously. They think that it’s a self-indulgent privilege of the educated upper class. Working-class people manage to be happy without trying to “find themselves,” or so the myth goes.

But I found that just about anybody can find this question important. It’s not just for free agents, knowledge workers, and serial entrepreneurs. I met many working-class people who found this question essential. They might have fewer choices, but they still care. Take Bart Handford. He went from working the graveyard shift at a Kimberley-Clark baby-wipes plant in Arkansas to running the Department of Agriculture’s rural-development program. He didn’t do this by just pulling up his bootstraps. His breakthrough came when his car was hit by a train, and he spent six months in bed exploring The Question.

Probably the most debilitating obstacle to taking on The Question is the fear that making a choice is a one-way ride, that starting down a path means closing a door forever.

“Keeping your doors open” is a trap. It’s an excuse to stay uninvolved. I call the people who have the hardest time closing doors Phi Beta Slackers. They hop between esteemed grad schools, fat corporate gigs, and prestigious fellowships, looking as if they have their act together but still feeling like observers, feeling as if they haven’t come close to living up to their potential.

Leela de Souza almost got lost in that trap. At age 15, Leela knew exactly what she wanted to be when she grew up: a dancer. She pursued that dream, supplementing her meager dancer’s pay with work as a runway model. But she soon began to feel that she had left her intellect behind. So, in her early twenties, with several good years left on her legs, she took the SATs and applied to college. She paid for a $100,000 education at the University of Chicago with the money that she had earned from modeling and during the next seven years made a series of seemingly smart decisions: a year in Spain, Harvard Business School, McKinsey & Co., a White House Fellowship, high-tech PR. But she never got any closer to making a real choice.

Like most Phi Beta Slackers, she was cursed with tremendous ability and infinite choices. Figuring out what to do with her life was constantly on her mind. But then she figured something else out: Her need to look brilliant was what was keeping her from truly answering The Question. When she let go of that, she was able to shift gears from asking “What do I do next?” to making strides toward answering “To what can I devote my life?”

Asking “What Should I Do With My Life?” is the modern, secular version of the great timeless questions about our identity. Asking The Question aspires to end the conflict between who you are and what you do. Answering The Question is the way to protect yourself from being lathed into someone you’re not. What is freedom for if not the chance to define for yourself who you are?

I have spent the better part of the past two years in the company of people who have dared to confront where they belong. They didn’t always find an ultimate answer, but taking the question seriously helped get them closer. We are all writing the story of our own life. It’s not a story of conquest. It’s a story of discovery. Through trial and error, we learn what gifts we have to offer the world and are pushed to greater recognition about what we really need. The Big Bold Leap turns out to be only the first step.

Sidebar: One Size Does Not Fit All
Two different answers to one ultimate question

Organization Man

Of the 900 people who I talked to, only one has had the same employer for his entire adult life. His name is Russell Carpenter, he’s 35, and he’s an aerospace engineer at NASA Goddard. We can all learn from him. Russell began working at NASA during college. In exchange for his summers, they paid for his tuition and, later, financed his PhD. Russell is a GS-14, stuck to government pay scales. The money is okay, but it’s never the reason to stay. He’s building a guidance system for the newest type of satellite.

The halls and offices at NASA are quiet. These engineers are content with slowly pushing toward a solution. Which I took as Extractable Lesson number one: time frame. At NASA, Russell has found an intermediate time frame where he can accomplish the high-minded objectives that his division is charged with, but he’s not under absurd pressure to do it all in 90 days.

Aerospace engineers are obsessed with redundancy and backup systems. Russell knows that metals give, that gears slip, and that motors overheat, and he plans for that in his designs. Not everything has to go right in order for it to work. And that way of thinking shows up in every aspect of his life, including how he achieves his ambitions. Which I took as Extractable Lesson number two: His backup plans do not lead to different destinations, such as “If I don’t get into business school, I’ll be a schoolteacher.” His backup plans lead to the same destination, and if he has to arrive late by a back road, that’s fine.

Later, Russell and I went to a baseball game, which clued me in to Extractable Lesson number three: Russell doesn’t let himself get burned out. He doesn’t think it’s a big deal that he’s only had one employer. His method is his secret, but it’s no secret.

“So what do you do?” For five years, Marcela Widrig had a dream job that compensated her well, let her live in Barcelona, and paid for her frequent travel throughout Southern Europe. She sold modems for a big modem manufacturer. Modems were her means to her ends: money, travel, human connection.

When her company moved her to San Francisco, she suffered culture shock. The Internet was destroying everything that she loved about sales. The new ethos was speed. Get the deal done in a day! Don’t even fly — email makes it so easy! The human contact was gone.

The worst part was constantly being asked The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question: “What do you do?” Marcela had been away long enough to have forgotten about this disgusting American custom. She found it degrading and reductive and mercenary. I too used to think that The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question was a scourge on our society. But I’m starting to see that it is really about freedom to choose. A status system has evolved that values being unique and true even more than it values being financially successful.

In other words, if you don’t like The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question, maybe it’s partly because you don’t like your answer.

Marcela no longer liked her answer. She endured migraines and insomnia. After flying all the way to Hong Kong for a meeting that didn’t even last one hour, she vowed, “I cannot sell one more modem.” But she didn’t quit for two more years. On her vacations, she flew to Switzerland to train in a school for deep-tissue massage. It was her way to move toward genuine human contact. The day she returned from one of her Switzerland trips, the modem company went under, and she was forced into her new life.

It took her about a year to drop the business-suit persona and truly embrace her new profession. The Inevitable Cocktail-Party Question no longer bothers her. “I do body work,” she says. “I love what I do, and I think that comes across.”

Po Bronson is the author of three best-selling books. This article is adapted from his new book, What Should I Do with My Life? The True Story of People Who Answered the Ultimate Question (Random House, January 2003). Contact him by email (pobronson@pobronson.com).

Minds Eye Caught On Film

Years ago when I lived in the Bay area, I would make the two hour drive to the Big Sur area of northern California pretty much every weekend. To me, its a photographers paradise. I have traveled all over the world, and in my opinion, Big Sur is by far, the most beautiful place I’ve been. For those willing to put in some walking and a lot of hours waiting for the right conditions, the photographic results can be awesome. The combination of rock, sea and mountains is like no other place I know.

On this one particular weekend, it was very gray and overcast coupled with high winds and periodic downpours. The seas were really boiling against the rocky cliffs. This was going to be a really good weekend for dramatic shots or it was going to be a bust with all the wind and rain. The equipment I use is not very friendly in these conditions. My 4 x 5 wooden view camera requires a tripod and careful setup and is pretty much useless if the wind gets above 15-20 knots. The conditions that weekend easily exceeded 20 knots, but I just knew if I got lucky and hung around that maybe I could get something.

I scouted a location that looked really promising, but the wind was crazy and the rain was nonstop. So I sat in the car and waited. I leaned back in the seat, flipped on some Pink Floyd, closed my eyes and imagined how I would like the shot to come out. I had a vision in my mind what the perfect image would be. It was nothing like the current heavy gray overcast with wind and rain but still, there was this urge to hang around for a little while longer. After another 30 minutes or so, the rain stopped but the wind was still an issue. I don’t know why, but I decided to give it a try.

The image comes alive

I climbed out on this high rocky outpost exposed to some very high winds but at least it wasn’t raining. I remember thinking how fast the clouds were moving. The wind was really whipping me as I tried to set up my equipment. I thought this was nuts, there’s no way this is going to work. But no sooner than I had that thought, the clouds parted and the sun came out. For 15 - 20 seconds, the sun lit up the clouds and sea. I was stunned since it seemed to come out of nowhere. I couldn’t believe it.

I was shocked to see the landscape in front of me. It was the EXACT image I had in my mind while sitting in the car. It was one of those defining moments I will never forget. A few seconds later, the clouds gathered back and the gray overcast returned. Only one thing. I couldn’t remember if I had snapped the cable release. I waited for another hour until dark but the sun never came back. I thought I might have screwed up a perfect opportunity. This was in the days before digital and I wouldn’t know the results until I had the film developed.

The following day, my last day before returning home, I returned to another location that I had been scouting for a couple of months. The scene was never right because of low tide but I returned again for another chance, all the while, envisioning the image in my mind. The wind conditions were horrible, but I felt I had to give it a try. The camera shook from the wind and was sprayed with sea salt but I went ahead and took the shot. I thought it was a total disaster.

The Following Monday

The next day I had the filmed processed and held out a shred of hope that I had captured something. The lab technician handed me the film and I laid the 4 x 5 sheets out on the light table. When I saw the images, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

The two images I had so clearly seen in my mind were captured on film exactly as I had envisioned them. I just stared and smiled at the images. The young lab tech leaned over, took a quick look, “cool”, he said, and walked off. He had no idea just how cool it was. Those two images have been my most popular. Both have been bought many times over and Fuji Film used one of them to market they’re large format film.

I use this process all the time and have captured additional images just as spectacular, but on that particular weekend, it worked really well. Those two images had such a profound impact on my life, that I had to find out more about what I experienced. That experience made me hungry for more information. Did I get lucky? Was it fluke, coincidence? I don’t really know. That’s the easy answer… to dismiss it as some kind of luck or coincidence. But I do know this.

I set myself up to capture those images. I put myself in a position to follow through with the creative process. Despite all outward circumstances of the clouds, wind and rain, I trusted my intuition enough to move forward. I held the images in my mind, trusted the process and let my mind do the seeing. Did I create my luck? Maybe, but I like to think I created my reality.

Is the lesson in this all too allegorical? I mean, I could’ve just given up and driven back home. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t. But it points out a pretty obvious lesson that’s bigger than a couple of photographic images. Just when you think its going bad, and there’s nothing to hang on to… keep following your visions. Never give up on them. Your dreams are your “nows”, just waiting to be walked into. Listen to your inner voice and follow your urge. Keep the vision going and believe in your dreams. They can and will come true.

Copyright 2006 Robert Hunt

Getting Results With Ease

The reason we put a lot of emphasis on action is because we don’t understand the power of our thought. If you analyze it, 90% of most people’s actions are spent trying to compensate for inappropriate thought.

The Chinese philosopher Lao-tsu said, “In the practice of the Way, every day something is dropped. Less and less do you need to force things until finally you arrive at “non action.” When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.” What he is talking about is “doing without doing.”

The problem is most of us are preoccupied with “doing”. Unfortunately most of our doing usually involves struggle. In the western world we are conditioned to be action-oriented, so we place a tremendous value on doing. We are so busy doing we don’t realize that all this “doingness” causes us to create in a reverse fashion.

Most of our actions are out of fear, worry or doubt because we believe nothing will get done unless we DO something. In other words, we are trying to force our desire into manifestation through action.

If your decision to DO is dominant, then you’ll not focus on what you want to BE in the present moment. This causes you to miscreate because BEING is the first and most important step in the creative process.

Here is the secret to getting results with ease:

It is not your action that makes things happen, it is your intent. You can reduce the need for action to a very minimum by allowing yourself to focus on what you desire until you feel the positive energy begin to move within you. This energy is not based on doubt, fear, anxiety, worry or need. If you focus on what you want instead of what you don’t want, you’ll know when it is time to take action. And when you do, it will be effortless. Doors open and the entire universe will conspire to assist you in your desire.

Put simply, you should take no action on anything until you have visualized your desire and made it real enough in your mind that your next action (step), whatever it is, seems like the most logical step.

How can you know the next logical step? Here is the test that you can give to yourself before taking any action: If you focus on what you desire and still feel overwhelmed or anxious, then you are not ready for any action. You know you are ready when it feels like the next logical step is effortless. There is no effort, no strain and no pain.

What we want to do is to use the leverage of energy, the same leverage of energy that creates everything in the universe. However, we are so caught up in the reality of WHAT IS, that we feel we must create everything through physical activity.

Have you ever seen people who seem to have all the wonderful things in their life without much effort? It almost seems like they have an advantage over everyone else. Then you see the people who work the hardest usually have the least. That doesn’t seem fair, does it? But that’s the way the universe works.

Unfortunately, those who work the hardest usually have the least because they haven’t learned the leverage of aligning their energy. They are going about creating their lives the hard way. They are trying to use their actions to create what they want.

We have also been programmed that in order to have what we desire we must work hard. How many times have you heard—”No pain, no gain.” The implication is that if you want to make something of yourself, you must work hard. The message is clear—if you are not hurting or struggling, you are not moving forward.

But here is the truth—anytime you are struggling, you are miscreating. Anytime you feel pain or struggle, your magnetic point of attraction is directed to that which you do not want, rather than to that which you desire. (Read that again.)
Actions are necessary, but they are the last component of the creation processes. Actions cannot be used effectively to initiate results, because initiation is the function of BEING, then thought, then action.

Remember, the creation of anything is through your vibration. Everything vibrates, and it is by that vibration that we harmonize and attract experiences to ourselves. So before you act or do anything, first ask yourself, how am I vibrating? How do you tell? You tell by how you FEEL. Your feelings show your vibration. How you feel determines what you attract.

When you use the process of creating by only focusing on what you want instead of what you don’t want, you will see that the universe will provide a different set of circumstances for you that requires much less action. This puts you in a state of “doing without doing” or action without effort.

So if you want more results in your life—and with far less effort, struggle and pain—try this “not doing” way to success.

by Dr. Robert Anthony

Why Can’t I Touch The Sky?

My six-year-old daughter Sophie and I were playing a rhyming game the other day and out of the blue she asked me, “Why can’t I touch the sky?” I laughed inside and thought for a few moments. I tried to explain it from the Jack and the Beanstalk story, but she just just looked at me funny. Then I tried the old earth space thing, but that was too technical. The more I tried, the clumsier it got when finally I realized I wasn’t getting through.

Then I had a realization. What if my daughter had asked the same question to another six year old? What would the other child have said? Some six year olds think they know the answer to everything and its fun to listen to what they have to say. Something tells me her friend wouldn’t have the slightest difficulty in explaining the answer. Chances are, they would have argued and discussed it until finally reaching agreement. I wished I could have turned the question over to an imaginary friend and then sit back and listen to the conversation.

That night while lying in bed, I kept thinking about her question and why I couldn’t come up with a really cool answer. Was it because I had “grown up” and now used my imagination like an “adult”? As I grew, the maturation process obviously had boxed me in. And worse yet… I knew that someday, my little girl just might lose her pure and trusting imagination to adulthood and maybe stop asking these wonderfully creative questions.

I didn’t feel like it was right that I progressed up the ladder of maturity only to lose what I feel is a very important concept: the ability to retain and possess a childlike quality to explore other possibilities. Where did my childlike imagination go? Why did it go? I thought I would ask Sophie this question to help me understand why some adults tend to lose sight of this magical way of thinking and why others make a living by it.

She looked at me with a puzzle on her face and then I knew. It never occurs to her that there’s any other way. Why on earth would a six-year-old little girl dream she couldn’t touch the sky unless somebody told her she couldn’t?

I watch my little girl as she plays. She conducts an imaginary reading class and makes sure each doll pronounces the words correctly. She dresses her babies and gets them ready for they’re day. Her imagination takes wing each and every day to places I’m not aware. Sometimes I can catch a glimpse of her inner world when we sit and talk about her day or what her plans are for tomorrow.

Remember when we were younger, when we used to talk about and imagine what we would become when we grew up? I wanted to be a policeman and my friends wanted to be fireman and race car drivers. We believed anything was possible and we could become whatever we wanted, never doubting the possibilities. As children, we dreamed big.

Children are visionaries and it seems a little sad to think our childlike imagination seems to disappear, as we grow older. As we age, the ever-increasing intrusions of the world on our minds seem to frighten that childlike imagination into full-blown retreat.

As we grew up, we learned why the sky really is blue, and why grass is green. Why flowers need sunlight and how birds really fly. We lose a little bit of the wonder of life around us as we schedule the next meeting or plan tomorrow’s agenda.

I have my daughter to thank for asking her question. It connected me, once again, with my priorities. She made me think about my own potentiality and how I may be limiting myself. Maybe I need to reconnect with my childlike imagination and think more outside the box of adult creativity. If I do that, maybe I can explain in my own six-year-old way, why she can touch the sky.

Copyright 2006 Robert Hunt

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Stephen Wiltshire: The Human Camera

In February 1987, the BBC aired a program on Savant Syndrome entitled “The Foolish Wise Ones.” One segment featured a then twelve-year old autistic boy, Stephen Wiltshire, drawing from memory on camera a remarkably accurate sketch of St. Pancras station which he had visited for the first time only briefly several hours before. As the camera recorded, he quickly and assuredly drew the elaborate and complicated building exactly as he had seen it with the clock hands set at precisely 11:20, the hour he had viewed them.

There were hundreds of calls and letters to the BBC following that broadcast seeking a source to purchase originals of Stephen’s astonishing work. That initial interest and then a sustained demand for the drawings led to the publication of an entire volume of his works entitled Drawings, (J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd, London, 1987)

In the introduction to Drawings, Sir Hugh Casson, former president of the Royal Academy, says of Stephen: “Happily, every now and then, a rocket of young talent explodes and continues to shower us with its sparks. Stephen Wiltshire — who was born with severe speech difficulties — is one of those rockets.” He then describes the artistic brilliance further: “His sense of perspective seems to be faultless… I’ve never seen in all my competition drawing such a talent, such a natural and extraordinary talent, that this child seems to have… (Stephen) is possibly the best child artist in Britain.”

Stephen concentrates almost exclusively on architecture. He provides exact, literal renditions of any building, no matter how complex, and in fact he seems to prefer the especially intricate. He views buildings, in person or from a photograph, and retains an exquisitely precise and detailed image for later recall and drawing. Additionally, he can sense and draw a building, no matter how complex, with a three-dimensional perspective from a two-dimensional photo.

Like other savant artists, Stephen’s work depicts exactly what he sees without embellishment, stylization, or interpretation. He makes no notes; impressions are indelibly and faithfully inscribed from a single exposure for later recall and he draws swiftly, beginning anywhere on the page.

At age of ten Stephen drew what he called a “London Alphabet,” a group of drawings from Albert Hall to the London Zoo with structures such as the House of Parliament and The Imperial War Museum in between. An exquisite sense of perspective is demonstrated in a drawing he titles “Looking down the lift shaft and stairs,” and his drawing of Buckingham Palace is a spectacular example of Stephen’s intricacy and accuracy.

Stephen is, by any standards, an extraordinary artist, but what about his handicap? Stephen started attending Queensmill, a school in London for children with special needs, at the age of five, as an extremely withdrawn and almost mute child. He existed in the world of his own so typically described in autistic youngsters. He was distant, preoccupied, had little or no eye contact and often roamed about classrooms aimlessly, sometimes staring for long times at pictures, then suddenly dashing from room to room. He would absorb himself for long periods of time with scribbling on scraps of paper.

In school he did learn to read and began to immerse himself for hours in books on architecture and travel. Simultaneously he developed some language, but it remained difficult and sparse. He was characterized by the headmistress of the special school as having a “gentle personality, humor and curious dignity.” Overall he was described as eminently likable and far from detracting from his general development, his art seemingly aided it.

In the summer of 1993 an additional talent of Stephen’s — music — was quite unexpectedly discovered. While Stephen had always liked to listen to music, and to sing, always in tune and often imitating other great singers, to his music teacher’s surprise it was discovered Stephen had perfect pitch and considerable talent as a musical savant with some of the innate sense of the ‘rules of music’ characteristic of such savants. While simultaneous skills in several areas have been reported in some other savants, such multiple skills are really very rare in an already rare condition. Stephen shows much prowess in both music and art. Stephen’s story, and a fuller description of his art and music abilities, can be found in his books and also described in Oliver Sack’s 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars.

Perhaps the most striking and astonishing display of Stephen’s remarkable visual memory and drawing ability occurs in a segment on a 2001 BBC documentary entitled Fragments of Genius. In this segment Stephen is taken on a helicopter ride over the city of London. After a brief ride, he returns to the ground where, in three hours, he completes a stunningly detailed and remarkably accurate drawing of London from the air which spans four square miles with 12 major landmarks and 200 other buildings drawn to perfect perspective and scale. Words cannot describe the prodigious ability and visual memory that drawing documents; it needs to be seen to be appreciated.

The Optimistic Child

You can teach happiness. Optimism is not a mere sunny outlook on life, nor is it simple self esteem. Rather it is a type of self-knowledge that can make people healthier and happier. And 20 years of controlled scientific clinical trials have proved that it can be learned.

Furthermore, optimism can be taught to children. There is probably no better gift to kids (your own or others) than to teach them how to train themselves to be happy. If for no other reason than the fact that pessimism leads to illness and depression. This book is based on large-scale programs that have taught kids of all backgrounds and dispositions how to be more optimistic.

Excerpt:

Why should we bother? Isn’t pessimism just a posture with no effects in the world? Unfortunately not. I have studied pessimism for the last twenty years, and in more than one thousand studies, involving more than half a million children and adults, pessimistic people do worse than optimistic people in three ways: First, they get depressed much more often. Second, they achieve less at school, on the job, and on the playing field than their talents augur. Third, their physical health is worse than that of optimists. So holding a pessimistic theory of the world may be the mark of sophistication, but it is a costly one. It is particularly damaging for a child, and if your child has already acquired pessimism, he is at risk for doing less well in school. He is at risk for greater problems of depression and anxiety. He may be at risk for worse physical health than he would have if he were an optimist. And worse, pessimism in a child can become a lifelong, self-fulfilling template for looking at setbacks and losses. The good news is that he can, with your help, learn optimism.

*

Optimistic children explain good events to themselves in terms of permanent causes. They point to traits and abilities that they will always have, like being hard-working, likable, or lovable. They use “always” when they describe the causes of good events. Pessimists think in terms of transient causes. “I was in a good mood,” or “I practiced hard this time.” Their explanations of good events are qualified with the words, “sometimes” and “today,” and they often use the past tense and limit it to time only (”I practiced hard this time.”). When children who believe their successes have permanent causes do well, they will try even harder next time. Children who see temporary reasons for good events may give up even when they succeed, believing the success was a fluke.

The Optimistic Child
A Proven Program to Safeguard Children Against Depression and Build Lifelong Resilience
Martin E. P. Seligman
1995, 336 pages
$11
Amazon

[tags] optimism [/tags]

How To Boost Low Self Esteem

These individuals blame they’re problems on prejudice, abusive relationships, a mean and unfair boss, etc. They compensate by acting aloof, or tough, egotistical or even disengaged. This can manifest into poor relationships, financial difficulties, lack of follow through or commitment or any number of traits that degrade the quality of our lives.

Its much easier to blame outside forces, but in doing so, denies the problem and any potential solutions. Disguising low self esteem as some other visible issue, the problems are never addressed and overcome. But you can count on one thing, whatever challenges arise in our life, you can bet someone else has had it worse than us and has gone on to bigger and better successes.

Ask yourself who is the primary force that shapes your life? Who does the majority of your thinking? Who chooses to think what they wish to think on a daily basis? The answer of course, is you. You shape your life and no one else. So is there anything preventing you from going on to bigger and better things? If others have faced greater external challenges and succeeded, then can outside circumstances determine the course of your life?

Low self esteem in large part is a product of how we were raised. Researchers have found that we come to the predominant view of ourselves by the age of five. By this age, the world is either a safe or dangerous place and we react either positively or negatively. Our parents are the primary shapers at this time but this is also tempered by our experiences in school and our experiences in society as a whole.

Our foundation of thinking is impacted a great deal at an early age and is carried with us into adulthood. By this time, we have accepted our flaws and how we define ourselves, not even thinking that the very flaws we have come to accept as fact, have nothing to do with reality at all. It is just a product of the way we have decided to accept ourselves. But that doesn’t mean its true.

I believe we can improve our self esteem by making a genuine effort to focus on a sense of empowerment. We can do this by making a commitment to spend time to understand who we really are as individuals. Really make the commitment. Not an half hearted attempt, or “I don’t have time” attempt. Peel the onion of your self and go deeper and deeper to a place that will allow you to realize the power of who you really are.

We have decided to carry this bag around called a “self image”. This is the image you have formed about yourself in comparison to those around you. Its nothing more than a judgment you have made about yourself. This self image in most people is probably kind of negative since we usually compare ourselves to someone “better” than us. Look at children who are three, four years old. They have perfect self esteem because they have not formed a self image by that age. They don’t judge themselves.

Take stock of your negative inner talk. Most people’s self talk is 95% negative. They see the worst in themselves. It is our thoughts and beliefs that shape and produce what we become. The quality of our lives is a direct result of them. Use that negative talk to remind yourself that this is not the path to your higher self. One of the basic keys to success in life is the ability to recognize that many of the challenges manifesting as external problems in our lives are really issue’s that are disguised as low self esteem. What do you think? Leave a comment and let us know.

This article is Copyright © 2006 by Robert Hunt

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[tags] esteem, higher self, empowerment[/tags]