Review of Doctor Strange

Posted on August 23, 2018 by admin

Doctor Strange is a wonderful movie that chronicles the journey of a man who discovers that there is more to life than he ever thought possible. An arrogant surgeon named Stephen Strange is severely injured in a car wreck and loses the stability in his hands that made him so excellent at his craft. Desperate to save his career, he spends all of his time and money trying to find something that could undo the damage. He learns of a man who was previously unable to walk but regained that ability after spending time in a place called Kamar-Taj. After getting there and being initially turned off by the spiritual ideas he’s shown, Strange discovers that they are telling the truth. Under the guidance of the Ancient One and her other students, he learns to let go of his ego and look at the world differently than he ever had before. Through regular study and practice, he uses his newfound abilities to protect the world from those who try to harm it.

While Strange was already saving lives when he was a surgeon, his purpose in doing so was to feed his ego and make himself rich. Now, his actions are guided by a desire to help others and serve a cause greater than himself. Accordingly, he gives a sincere, heartfelt apology to his ex-girlfriend for verbally abusing her and rejects the simple option to heal his body and resume his previous life, which was the option chosen by the once-disabled man who told him about Kamar-Taj. These are profound changes that reflect a true spiritual awakening. 

Some may see this movie as a simple, straightforward superhero flick, but it’s so much deeper than that. It expertly illustrates the importance of checking the ego, surrendering to the fact that there is more to life than we realize, the power of transmuting suffering into peace, and being present as often as possible; these are important both for helping us live our best possible lives and for showing us our greater purpose in this world. By weaving these lessons into a fun, action-packed movie filled with memorable, likeable characters, the creators are able to introduce them to more people than if it were a serious documentary or guidebook. This makes it one of the most important movies released within the past decade and one of my all-time favorite movies.

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How to Slow Down Time

Posted on August 22, 2018 by admin

Most of you have probably heard “Time flies when you’re having fun” more times than you can count. I don’t know if there’s a catchy phrase for the feeling that time drags on when you’re bored, but you’re probably also familiar with that sensation. If so, then you already have one tool that you’ll need for making use of this post: the understanding that you can change the flow of time by changing your mindset.

Before we go further, you may wonder why anybody would want to make time pass more slowly. Well, when you break down a typical day for the average person (there’s one such breakdown in this video), it’s very easy to let time get away from you and find yourself with little to no time left to do the things you most enjoy. Then there are things like watching friends and family members grow up and move on to other things in life, enjoyable events that feel too short, and a feeling of lacking control over your life. If you can stretch out the time you have, your life will feel a lot longer, fuller, richer, and more enjoyable, and you’ll be better able pursue your interests. With that in mind, let’s dive into how this works.

Being in a negative mood will make time feel like it’s moving slower. Good things will seem to take a lot longer to arrive, bad things will seem to go on longer than you’d like, and it’ll feel like forever before you’re out of that situation. Even once you’re out of it, looking back on it, it will seem to have taken up a larger part of your life than it actually did. A positive mood, on the other hand, will make bad things pass more quickly, good things appear sooner, and a rough situation will seem much shorter while you’re in it as well as when you look back on it. Being present, which I talked about in my previous blog post, will help tremendously with this. In addition to helping you keep and maintain a positive mindset, it will also make you more aware of the passage of time (I’ve found that this is often sufficient for making it feel slower) and of your surroundings. Presence makes it easier to use another tool for slowing down time: keeping busy.

By “keeping busy”, I don’t mean doing a lot of pointless tasks or never stopping to rest. I mean minimizing your idle time by accomplishing productive tasks (tasks that put you and those around you in a better position than before you did them) and then finding other useful things to do with your remaining time (such as reading about a subject you enjoy, visiting with friends, learning a new hobby, etc). When you look back on a day in which you accomplished a lot, it will feel longer than a day in which you accomplished very little; the more full days you have, the slower time will move and the longer your life will feel. Plus you’ll go to bed feeling good about getting a lot of good things done, which will make it easier to keep a positive mindset the next day and create a positive feedback loop that makes this easier and more natural as you go. 

Since I started doing these things earlier this year, time feels like it moves a lot more slowly for me. I can make three or four hours before going into work feel like twelve hours, and I can usually stretch out one day into two or three; this works nicely for making one day off feel like several, especially since my normal days off aren’t consecutive. Rather than getting stressed out and rushing to get things done as fast as possible, I can breathe, slow down, and move at my own pace while still getting done everything I need to do and most of what I want to do in any given day. I also feel like I have a lot more time to plan for the future and put those plans into action than I did before. 

This is a subject I haven’t talked about much and it was tricky to figure out how to explain it, so I hope this post makes sense. There is a great article from The Art of Manliness that covers this subject and looks at it in ways I did not. I recommend checking it out if you’d like to learn more about this. I hope you found this useful and enjoyable, and I will see you next time (pun intended). 

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Presence

Posted on August 21, 2018 by admin

As far back as I can remember, I’ve wanted to leave the world better than I found it. When I found out how much suffering exists and how much has to change, it was easy for me to get downtrodden and discouraged. My personal interactions with people who seem to be interested only in benefitting themselves no matter the cost to other increased the negative emotions I felt. Wherever I went, I allowed others to determine my emotional state. If I was surrounded by happy people, I’d be happy. If someone said something to me that I disliked, I’d get angry. This was how I lived for years.

Occasionally I experienced brief periods of true peace. The first occurred when I worked at a retirement home and lasted a week. Out of nowhere I felt a sense of peace and stability that I had never felt before. No matter what happened around me, nothing could shake or remove this sense of peace from me. Getting stuck in traffic on the way to work, finding out someone else had made my job needlessly more difficult, or anything else that would normally draw up negative emotions within me failed to do so. This sense of peace and stillness left as quickly and mysteriously as it came, and before I knew it I was back to living in my normal state of wildly varying emotions. A year or two later, I took an acting class at a local theatre. The first thing the instructor had us do at the beginning of each class was lie down on the floor and focus on our breath and our bodies; he also gave us visualizations to use during this time if we wished. Over the course of the six-week class, I experienced more peace both in the class and outside of it than I had had in a long time. After the class ended and I stopped focusing on my breath, however, that sense of peace once again left me.

About a year and a half after my acting class ended, I experienced a great transformation in my life. My friend Israel Anderson had been talking about something  called presence and started offering what he called presence sessions. As I heard more from him about what this entailed, I asked to experience one. He called me up and talked me through some concepts about our minds, our thoughts, our bodies, and other related subjects. Over the course of an hour, he showed me how to clear my mind and focus on the present moment rather than dwelling on the past or dreading the future. I now had access to the tools that would allow me to live in that state of presence and peace that I had previously experienced only for short intervals.

“Old habits die hard” is a cliché, but it’s also true. Since I hadn’t known about presence until 2017, I spent most of my life living in a state of unconsciousness. As a result, it was incredibly easy to slip back into that state when I wasn’t focused. However, I had obtained an audio version of The Power of Now and the more I listened to it (in addition to reading the printed version) and practiced its teachings, the easier it became to stay present. I began to notice when I became lost in thought and could then return to a state of presence.

Being present helped me focus less on the things I can’t control and more on the things I can control. Instead of getting caught up in unnecessary drama or spending an afternoon thinking about how things might have turned out had events gone differently than they did, I found myself focusing on things I wanted to change in my own life. Gradually I turned bad habits into good ones, I learned new skills and got better at the ones I already knew, and I spent more time enjoying the company of good friends and getting to know them on a personal level. Presence has helped me a lot and I think the world would change for the better in just about every way if more people made this a regular practice. 

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How I Do Things I Don’t Want to Do

Posted on August 20, 2018 by admin

That may seem like a strange title, so I’ll explain what I mean by it. There are many times each day in which I have trouble finding the motivation to do things that I know are beneficial. Something that I’ve discovered over time is that I find the hardest part of a task to be getting started, especially if I’m relaxing and not really doing anything. At that moment, I’m continually “moving” in the direction of relaxation, so it’s easier to keep that “momentum” going than it is to change it. Similarly, I’ve found that if I’m engaged in some activity, my momentum will make it easier to continue working on that activity than to stop or switch to another activity (as long as what I’m doing isn’t excessively painful, confusing, or something else along similar lines).

The trick, therefore, is to find a way to get started on an activity that I don’t want to do but I know will benefit me and then let my momentum carry me through to its completion. So to get started, I take a big task and break it down into one simple task that I can complete. That way I’m not getting overwhelmed at the amount of work ahead of me or racking my brain trying to figure out how to do it all at once. I now have one small, simple step I can take that will get me going in the right direction and will help me gradually get to the end.

I’ll use my writing process as an example. There are some rare occasions in which I can write out a full blog post in one go, but usually I work on it a bit at a time. Maybe I don’t know exactly what I want to say but I have a general idea of what I want to talk about, so I’ll start by just typing out a few ideas. They may be fragments and not make sense to anyone else yet, but I know what they mean and they give me a starting point that I can use to flesh them out later. Once I get some ideas down, I find the rest of the process becomes much easier and the post seems to write itself.

Another example pertains to my job. A few times a week, we get a truck loaded with appliances. Sometimes I’m there to unload it and sometimes I come in after it’s already been unloaded, but in either case, I’m normally there to move the merchandise onto the floor once it’s ready to be sold. What I do as often as I can is pick the appliances that I think will be the easiest to move (sometimes it ends up being refrigerators and other times it’s washing machines or dryers) and start taking those out first. That way, I’m working on something that takes less time to move, is easier to put where it belongs, and, because of those things, helps keep me in a better mood than if I’d started with a more difficult choice. Once I’ve finished that, I’ve got a lot of momentum carrying more toward finishing the job, I can see how much I’ve done by observing how much more room there is in the back warehouse now that I’ve taken out a couple dozen appliances, and I can more easily maneuver in the warehouse now that I’ve freed up a lot of space, which makes it easier to get the more difficult appliances out.

This basic template of starting on something that’s easy and that I enjoy before moving onto the more difficult and less enjoyable tasks works in every area I’ve tried it. It consistently works even when I’m feeling sick, tired, unmotivated, or otherwise weighed down. Starting my day by getting something accomplished also makes it easier to be productive later on that if I have a lazy start. So if you find you’re having trouble finding the motivation to do something, maybe give this a try and see if it works for you. 

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My Biggest Moment of Serendipity This Year

Posted on August 19, 2018 by admin

I started off this year with a great sense of optimism and peace, but little to no direction. That all changed on one of my days off when I decided to start organizing my room. Having tried in the past to do too much in one day and then gotten discouraged from doing any further organizing, I decided to take it slow. Each day I would spend a few minutes straightening it up; some days I got a lot accomplished and others just a little, but I always did something to decrease the clutter and increase the amount of useable space. 

Satisfied that I had accomplished something and gotten off to a good start, I settled down and listened to an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast. This one featured Jordan Peterson, whom I had heard a bit about but never looked into before that day. One of the things he talked about in that episode was the importance of cleaning your room. I nearly fell off the couch when he said that. Of all the things I could have done that day, I happened to start cleaning my room and then listen to Peterson talk about that very thing (being previously unfamiliar with Peterson, I had no idea that was something he talked about). That was one of the clearest moments of serendipity in my life and my interest in Peterson immediately skyrocketed. He discussed how cleaning your room will have positive effects on the people you live with by inspiring them to make positive changes in their lives, it gives you a sense of purpose while doing it and satisfaction when it’s completed, it increases your confidence and competence in changing things for the better, and that it’s an important to get your own life together before you try to fix the problems in the world.

This served as a good motivator to keep cleaning my room at least a few times a week; I don’t work on it every day, but I still work on it a lot more than I did before this year. Additionally, once I got the ball rolling on one positive activity, it became easier to add additional ones. I’ve spent a lot of time this year cleaning my room, learning Spanish, reading great books, exercising, improving myself, and working toward self-employment. I think that moment of serendipity about cleaning my room came in right when I needed it gave me the right motivation and direction to gradually move myself into an all-around better position in life. I’ve embedded a short clip of Peterson talking about the importance of cleaning your room if you’d like to check it out. I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me.

Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan talk about cleaning your room
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Review of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Posted on August 18, 2018 by admin

I’ve read a handful of books that have blown my mind, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People is one of those books. I thought it would be good but it’s incredible; I’ll go so far as to say it’s the best book I’ve read in a long time.

So much of what I’ve noticed through my interactions with others, thinking about life, and reading other great books is contained in this book. Even better, it’s distilled down to its essence and explained as clearly as possible. Stephen Covey poured decades of work, life experience, and research into this book, which makes it a great resource for learning these principles in a much shorter time frame. Although I already knew some of this stuff before, the book explains it a lot better than I can and introduces new concepts and ways to go about living life that I hadn’t previously considered. If there were one book that could act as a how-to guide for life, this one would probably be it.

While the book is dense and will probably require several readings to fully understand and apply its lessons, it’s an easy enough read that anyone who checks it out should benefit tremendously from absorbing its wisdom and applying it in their life. If you read just one book this year, I highly recommend it be this one. And if you do, I’d love to hear what you think about it afterward.

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Irrational Decisions and Identifying with Ideologies

Posted on August 17, 2018 by admin

Have you ever seen (or participated in) an exchange in which two people with opposing views were convinced they were right and their opponents were wrong? Maybe they even cited studies that supported their respective sides. Looked at individually, it’s easy to see how each study supported one side over the other, but looked at together, two studies with opposing conclusions (for example, one that says exercise is good for your health and another that says exercise is bad for your health) can’t both be right. What’s going on here?

Understanding the answer requires letting go of a concept that most people probably believe: that humans make decisions based on reason, logic, and evidence. That may be true in certain instances, but, as put forth by Jonathan Haidt in The Righteous Mind, this is the exception rather than the rule. Haidt’s work revealed that humans make decisions based off irrational things such as emotion and then afterward look for reasons to justify their decisions. In the process, they tend to gravitate toward evidence that seems to support their point and avoid evidence that seems to contradict it. This explains why citing studies, facts, and figures in a debate are all ineffective in getting someone to change their position. In my own experience, that only works when the person I’m talking to is already leaning toward a particular position and the information I provide nudges them even closer to that position; it has consistently failed to move someone away from one position and toward the opposing position.

There is another phenomenon that contributes to this, and Eckhart Tolle examines it thoroughly in The Power of Now. In short, it is the tendency for people to make their views/ideology part of their identity. How often do you see someone say “I’m a liberal”, “I’m a conservative”, “I’m a libertarian”, or something along similar lines? No matter the ideology with which they identify, their identification with it makes it much harder for them to see outside of it. Someone who has identified with an ideology will have a hard time seeing the good things in other ideologies as well as the bad things in their own ideology. Additionally, they will have an easier time seeing those with the same ideology in a good light and those with a different ideology in a bad light. This is because they will, on a subconscious level, see attacks against their ideology as an attack against them, and that their very life is at stake because they can’t separate their ideology from their sense of self. That could explain why so many debates (even over unimportant issues) are filled with hostility; the participants subconsciously approach the debates as matters of life and death.

I’ve benefited greatly from spending most of this year putting those lessons to work in my life. It’s a lot easier to see the good in a variety of ideologies and the problems in my own since I’ve ceased making them part of my identity, I’m not nearly as dramatic as I used to be and I avoid drama as often as possible, I can have much better conversations with others about different subjects, I no longer see those who think differently than I do in a bad light, and I’m able to focus more on important things in my life instead of wasting time arguing over trivial matters. I’ve learned that humans see the world through different lenses or filters, and at this point I can see things from nearly anybody’s perspective if I so choose. This makes it much easier to empathize with others and remember that they more than likely want the best for everyone even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on how to make that happen. If this sounds interesting to you, I’d highly recommend reading the above books and seeing what they do for your life.

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Protecting Yourself Against Manipulation

Posted on August 16, 2018 by admin

In his book Influence, Robert Cialdini talks about six principles that increase the chances of successful persuasion. These principles help us navigate life without becoming overwhelmed by minute details, but they can be used against us by con men. Cialdini provides numerous examples of each principle in action, cautions readers to avoid using them in an unethical fashion, and offers methods of resisting them when they’re employed by deceivers. I highly recommend reading the book to learn more about all of this, but if that’s not an option for you, here are some tips on how to say no when faced with…


Reciprocation

– First, try rejecting the initial favor or gift.

– If you accept it and it’s a true favor, respond in kind; if it’s a compliance tactic, recognize it as such and treat it accordingly.


Commitment/Consistency

– “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

– Listen to your gut when it’s obvious that you’re being pressured to do something you don’t want to do.

– If you knew then what you know now, would you make the same choice again?


Social Proof

– Determine if the information you’re being given is inaccurate, one-sided, or counterfeit, and, if so, disengage from your autopilot and grab the controls.

– Call them out on their deception.

– Your autopilot can sometimes make mistakes even if there’s no deception involved.

– When in doubt, take a minute to make sure your autopilot isn’t steering you wrong.


Liking

– Recognize when an undue liking has been produced, such as liking a compliance practitioner sooner or more deeply than you expected.

– If so, mentally separate the person from what they’re trying to get you to do and consider the pros and cons of that decision apart from the person.


Authority

– Keep in mind the influential power of those in apparent positions of authority.

– Ask yourself if the person in question is actually an expert on what they’re talking about.

– If they are an expert, consider how truthful they may be when speaking to you or what they might gain from your cooperation.

– Be wary of them appearing to argue against their own interests; they may be trying to “prove” their honesty and therefore gain your trust and compliance.


Scarcity

– Become aware of emotions and tensions rising within you in a compliance situation involving scarcity.

– Try using awareness of those sensations to slow down and think clearly about the situation.

– Remember that possessing scarce items, rather than experiencing them, is what makes the scarcity principle work.

– If you value the utility of an item, remember that scarcity adds nothing to its utility.

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How to Change Habits

Posted on August 15, 2018 by admin

The following is an excerpt from The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. It’s one of the most useful books I’ve ever read and I highly encourage you to check it out. Knowing how we’re wired gives us the power to take control of our lives in ways we couldn’t without that knowledge. If you read the book, I hope it helps you as much as it’s helped me.

“So rather than creating new habits, Dungy was going to change players’ old ones. And the secret to changing old habits was using what was already inside players’ heads. Habits are a three-step loop – the cue, the routine, and the reward – but Dungy only wanted to attack the middle step, the routine. He knew from experience that it was easier to convince someone to adopt a new behavior if there was something familiar at the beginning and end.

His coaching strategy embodied an axiom, a Golden Rule of habit change that study after study has shown is among the most powerful tools for creating change. Dungy recognized that you can never truly extinguish bad habits.

Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

That’s the rule: If you use the same cue, and provide the same reward, you can shift the routine and change the habit. Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

The Golden Rule has influenced treatments for alcoholism, obesity, obsessive-compulsive disorders, and hundreds of other destructive behaviors, and understanding it can help anyone change their own habits. (Attempts to give up snacking, for instance, will often fail unless there’s a new routine to satisfy old cues and reward urges. A smoker usually can’t quit unless she finds some activity to replace cigarettes when her nicotine craving is triggered.)”

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Understanding Each Other

Posted on August 14, 2018 by admin

We have direct access to our thoughts, our experiences, and our entire backstories. Because of this, we know and understand views quite well. We know the ways we came upon those views; the reasons we believe in them; the reasons we hold to them; and the complexity, the nuance, and the interconnectedness of them. But we don’t have direct access to anyone else’s thoughts, experiences, backstories, or their reasoning process, so we don’t know why they came to hold those views. Accordingly, their views can seem to be contradictory or overly simplistic.

If we can get inside their heads, put ourselves in their positions, recognize their starting place, and really try to understand how they got from that starting place to the conclusions they drew from it, then their thought process will become clear to us. We’ll be able to see the nuance in what they believe, how their ideas interconnect, and why they hold those positions, even if we ultimately still end up disagreeing with those positions. The more common alternative is (perhaps unintentionally) misunderstanding someone else’s position and trying to reduce big, complex ideas that fit into an even bigger philosophy down to one simple sentence that contains no nuance and leaves out almost everything important (including their backstories and the beginning place for all the points that branch off from it).

If we can avoid that, then we’ll be able to talk to them on a real, human level. We’ll be more open to their ideas and their way of thinking; likewise, they’ll probably be more open to our ideas and our way of thinking. We’ll probably learn how much we have in common with them and how our biggest points of disagreement are likely on the best way to get to a shared goal rather than the goal itself. We’ll have more respect for them and they’ll probably have more respect for us. At the very least, we’ll truly know what they think and why they think it. We could have real conversations about it and more easily see each other as friends rather than enemies. In getting to know them as people, we’ll be able to separate themselves from their views and see them for who they truly are instead of identifying them as their views. I’d like to see more of this and I’m going to practice this whenever I get the chance. How about you?

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