Richard Feynman was one of the greatest physicists ever.   think the most provocative and admirable quality of Richard Phillips Feynman (okay more than one) is:

1. The fearlessness, humor, and outspokenness of his voice (when he speaks he just speaks his mind and he’s usually thought about what he says a great deal, so he just projects, barks it out and delivers truthful and illuminating utterances.  When he detailed how the O-Ring on the Challenger Shuttle lost resilience below 0° celcius at the Presidential Rogers Commission of 1986, he just dunked the ring in ice water and spoke this discovery.  It was the crucial key-pin discovery that explained the Challenger catastrophe, and he just opened his mouth and said it.  He didn’t conceal his words nor use trickery nor politics of any kind and it showed in his voice.  I aspire to do the same and sometimes recognize (albeit short) pronounced moments where I feel I have the same simultaneous clarity, boldness,and just naturalness of communicating as Feynman.  But his “communicational style” is not the interest with this point.  Don’t get confused. It’s the clarity, intelligence, self-integrity, and humility that he held that make his voice fearless and outspoken.  I think one could say he didn’t care about perceptions, but he was viciously committed to explaining how things worked to people. What I mean by this is if he wanted to explain the details of the weak nuclear force he would just say it like it is, no strings attached, no air of pomposity, no boasting, no bragging.  Indeed! That is the very most admirable quality of Feynman’s voice that he DIDN”T try to communicate.  See a lot of people, I guess you can bring Reagan, the Great Communicator, into this although he’s a bit of an acception being a pretty solid guy it seems.  But a lot of people try to communicate.  They focus on pronounciation and delivery and how to stand or when to say what or something and their message is hollow.  I guess it’s kind of like trying to build a house and all you do is focus on the where to put the house and the millions of details of placement and foundation etc but you never actually construct anything when you speak.  Feynman on the other hand, just seemed to think about things and then just “build the house” to follow this increasingly odd analogy.  In other words, he didn’t have an agenda under than making someone understand.  Now THAT is extremely, extremely rare.  Even people whom I met whom have that agenda, usually their’s some splinter of “I want to look smart so I’ll explain this” or ” I want to have some reputation of a good explainer” or something of the sort.
2. 2)His ability to Discover.  Feynman said  “The thing that doesn’t  fit is the most interesting!– (Feynman)” Because it means that that’s some new law of nature (or of the great grand chess game or something which he referenced as an example of figuring things out) and it menas you’re just spotted a hidden (and tip of the iceberg emerging) element of a whole other law of Physics or detail of Nature.   He talked about how he loved interpreting Russian and Mayan hierglyphics just because they were this awesome puzzle to work out.  I love puzzles because solving them is an accomplishment in itself.  ”The reward of a thing well done is to have it done”, wrote Emerson.  And Feynman’s discoveries and excitement to intellectually discover earned him man got-it-well-done rewards.
3. 3)His intelligence. The guy was wicked smart. Done.
4. 4)His adventuresome almost partying personality.  If anyone ever thought of the idea of a “Rock Physicist”, Feynman would probably fit the depiction.  He frequented a strip club now and then, played the bongoes like no other and played some excellent pranks, but still — first and foremost — held the dignified and well-qualified demeanor and hosted the cognitive abilities of a Nobel Prize winning theoretical Physicist.
5. 5)His total and utter lack of snobbiness.  He easily could have held the “I know how this works and you don’t” POV, but it he didn’t.  He told stories.  He was extremely kind (but not in the cheesy “look at my generosity” way), but in a sharp kind of way, mitigating the chances of his intelligence being exploited — of that I seriously admire as well.  He made attempts to explain these freakishly complex quantum topics to laymen.  He Shared a good laugh and was an awesome gentleman dude.

Man, this guy was just so indescribably awesome!  But I will attempt to describe.  He was a master of logic.  Things he says and describes are always clear and rock-solid in their structure and stability.  Meaning, when Feynman described something you also were getting a dose of logic, natural sciences, math, learning process-theory, and probably a dash of humor.

He was clear, pure, genuine.  The kind of person from which you could learn heaps of truly worthwhile stuff and trust that you’re in Good company.  I distinguish worthwhile learning (actually truthful knowledge of natural sciences and math) from unworthwhile learning (religion, subjective beliefs, New Age bs, most all of psychology — indeed Feynman condemned psychology as a crock, which it is — for starters) because what Feynman knew and taught – Natural Sciences, specifically theoretical quantum physics — was the undeniable truth and quintessentially, inexplicably “worthwhile”.  That’s how things worked.  That’s how and why the sun rises and sets (okay that’s more of the classical mechanics branch of physics).  But the composition of matter is the very stuff in which he explored and made breakthroughs.  If anyone thinks that kind of knowledge isn’t worthy to learn, they should get their head checked.  I guess he kind of new the underpinnings of matter and energy and as a result of that incredibly electrifying (couldn’t help the pun) knowledge, he always had that never-pompous, always humble, but joyful look in his eye of “I know how this works.  I figured it out, and if there’s still more to discover, I’ll enjoy figuring that out too.”. Indeed,  if there was any person who directly personified Emerson’s quote of getting a job well done, it was Feynman.  I don’t think Feynman saw things as work or play.  Of course not.  He couldn’t.  That capacity of not distinguishing between work and play is something I do (but of course on a much less advanced caliber than Feynman) and it definitely puts you at a different rhythm or cadence with the wolrd (most whom of which lives for the weekly paycheck and operates as a brain drone living paycheck to paycheck never bothering to discover why they don’t atomically sink through the floor when the particles of the floor and their own feet are mostly empty space).

With Feynman, you knew you were getting getting the essence of clarity.  Not just mentioning his schooling — Caltech, MIT, Princeton, and more — because that wasn’t Feynman, it was Feynman’s clear-thinking mind that got him to and through all those schools.

He was the antithesis of “stuffy” or snooty.  He was like a partier with nobel-prize winning physicist mind or physicist with a strong partier itch.  But maybe those aren’t as mutually exclusive as they may appear.   I think the very act of discovering some of the things he disvovered on his own has got to be one of hte greatest “thrills”, an apex of elation, in any sense.   Consider the following:

Like how the Mayan’s coded their numbering system based on the revolutionon venus every 580 days.  Feynman unraveled that just by scrutinizing and making some calculations and interpreting the symbols of an ancient mayan tab.  He archaeologically decoded a Mayan mathematical system on his own! Now, granted, I’m sure proper archaeologists had already decoded the system before him, but Feynman just set out and did it on his own.  That’s kind of awesome guy he was.  He didn’t compartmentalize his work and discoveries to physics; he was the renaissance man who discovered and worked out puzzles on bits of everything.  That’s fascinating stuff! Deciphering an ancient hierglypnhic that a bunch of villagers in huts (not intending to relegate Mayans at all) composed over two thousands ago?  That’s pretty awesome.  But I guess you can take that to an infintesimally greater magnitude when you consider the laws of physics, “composed” over 13 billion years ago, were some of the discoveries with which Feynman worked.  So the age — indeed you can’t get any more ancient and enduring than the duration of the Universe! — of the knowledge with which he worked combined with its veracity is awesome.

Indeed, he took a biology class one summer (instead of his typical drive across the country), and discovered something about bacterial macrophages and viral replication.  His curiosity was his genius and of that I take after him.  I often look at my life and think “this doesn’t make sense” how could I have just studied this (accounting or acting or english poetry, for example) and now be into this (natural sciences, physics, and mathematics).  For me the answer is usually I discovered a previous interest or curiosity is a fallacious crock of shit and decided to focus on something that had more veracity, integrity, and truthfulness in it.  But that curiosity is what motivates me and continually serves as a bearing for what’s worthwhile to study and learn.  So seeing a guy who’s massively successful and his curiosity is what indubitably stabilizes his success is definitely encouraging.

Not Doing Something Often ==  Can’t Do Something.

He volunteered for a hypnotist once.  The hypnotist hypnotized him to do various things.  One of which was circling the auditorium before returning to his seat.  (Let me just interject on the topic of curiosity and discovery.  Take the word “auditorium”.  If you deconstruct it you get the root word “auditory” and realize that yes an auditorium’s purpose is room in which things, most likely people, are made to be heard.  So an auditorium — atleast a well build and designed one — will have optimal auditory acuoustics in mind.  Common sense when you deconstruct it, but still a cool and miniscule (but worthy) mini-discovery. )  So, Feynman went back to his seat and planned to boycott the hypnotist’s design.  However he found himself going along with it and circling the auditorium first.  His comment on his own actions was brilliant: “If you can do something but decide not to, it’s the same thing as saying you cant”.

Have I done this and is it interesting?

My extrapolation of Feynman’s quote “If you can do something but decide not to, it’s the same thing as saying you cant” is as follows and is quite honestly, quite good.  ”In a sense that’s very true and distingishes a talker who validates and supports his words with what he does, his actions, and someone who kind of just says things.  I can relate to that a lot with something like a marathon.  I think something like a marathon is one of those things someone says they can or can’t (people usually say they can’t) do but what matters is actually doing it ore not.  Have you done this?  Not can you do this? Is the question I think.  In other words, asking the question of something that holds your interests “Have I done this and is it interesting?” Prompts you to simply check your past and your own curiosity.  Is xyz action in my past?  Does xyz action pique my curiosity?  If you get a “no/yes” (/No, I haven’t done it and yes it’s interesting), then it may be useful to actually start trying to do it!  That’s exactly what I did with a marathon.  I had no idea how to get in shape to run that insane distance, but I hadn’t done it and it was interesting and seemed worthwhile, so I did it!  Learning about physics is something that I have not done (with the exception of classical physics employed making booby traps as a kid and physics is very interesting and worthwhile, so I am doing that.  If you ask yourself the question “Can I do this?” you automatically short-circuit yourself and your brain trips up and you go into “evaluating your capacity” mode.  You don’t want to  be in “evaluating your capacity” mode.  Trust me.  I’ve been there.  What happens is “evaluating your capacity” mode branches into to “understanding your identity” mode, which then spirals into “comprehending your life” mode, which then becomes….You get the picture.  Asking “can I do this” brings in capacity and capacity is determined primarily by what you have already done.  So skip the “evaluating your abilities” downward-spiralling nonsense, and simply ask “Can I do this and is it interesting?”!

Feynman is unquestionably a hero of mine.

I think this WAS a step backward in the ruling. In the usa it’s the other unhealthy extreme, you touch someone the wrong way and you’re jailed for 50 years. in australia, police are running around naked and euthanasia,  if you want to off yourself, that’s apparently legally “okay” (which it really isn’t). I think britain and europe strikes a fine healthy balance between these two unhealthy extremes, but if I had to choose one of the unpleasant ones, I’d choose the australian over-liberality instead of the usa dictatorship ubiquitous illegality.  But, as usual, UK ftw.

Gotta love aus news though (it may not be as topnotch as uk, but it’s much more worthy than an american news).  A cat somehow ends up in Tasmania and safely arrives back at home in Queensland another cat was shot 13 times and survived.  What’s with bizarre cats surviving the worst?

Also, this epic sandstorm (worst in 70 years apparently so since 1939 roughly) hits Sydney. Interesting.  Also the pizza ransom row was ludicrous, absurd, but amusing.  Obviously the pizza delivery dude on low wage couldn’t handle not getting paid probably.

In UK, this epic treasure find illuminates the silent and shadowed dark ages, a token reminder that that awesome land holds immense and incredible history in the ancient land (Londinium, for example) .  Couple that booming discovery (revealing something of the here feudal times reigned and so much of the modern europe’s skyscrapers or fields are hovering on grounds that previously held treasures, cDark Ages, back in the days of yore, loot & pluder, damsels and knights) with the discovery of water on Mars?   This is epic, breakthrough and exciting times for very cool areas.  Fascinating times.  The martian agua discovery is absolutely fascinating.  There’s so much exciting news currently from epic sandstorms to martian discoveries, to illuminating the dark ages? This is epic!

For something completely different.

Response to this:

Excellent article. I stumbled upon this earlier before I had known of Tim ferriss, but gave it a second and more scrutinized read the second go. I like the simplicity of the rules. Seems like this holds together (especially with the surprising tat-loss-inducing 1day/week junk food binge) with the repetitive no-white carb food groups and then repeating meals.

Currently I’ve been doing 2 meals a day at 8am and at 1pm. I have very different sleep schedule though and usually rise at roughly 1am and sleep by 6pm ish. This may fluctuate, but I hope it does not. I usually have a piece of fruit at 6am. The pork and beef look vile so those are out.

Substituting a lot of vegetarian-based protien (the beans, fallafel, etc) is good.

I’ve never been a diet person and loathe diets because most always induce yo-yoing. I’ve always had robotic eating patterns so that’s great repetitive nutrition is built into this diet.

Most diets people can’t stand to get off and yo-yo. Additionally, diet based on “1 pound of fat down!” 2 pounds of fat down! are fail. A diet cannot be weight-based or it will always, inevitably collapse. Has to be a nutrition restructuring relationship with your body (whatever that means, and I think that means. You have to like the new nutrition timing, amounts, and substance).

I like how you have set 3-4 categories and then 4-5 options from each of those for roughly 20 different foods you can have with each meal to pick and choose variety. That makes for easier grocery shopping too.

It’s easy to get creative and create good high-protien stirfries with a lot of spices and the like. anyways, cheers. I doubt I’ll try this completely because I don’t usually ever copy other people’s methods (it’s impractical because every lifestyle is so vastly different) but I have integrated a few ideas (like

the 20 food group selection array,
consistent eating times,
1 glass of wine/day is nice,
the caloric distribution in greens versus for example white rice (which I eat A LOT of) was interesting. About a 20:1 Rice:green caloric ratio. THAT’s FASCINATING and useful.
the junkfood day is also fairly practical.

In a lot of my massively alterred eating habit bouts (some of which have included fasts), you get this wave of junkfood eating when the interest dissipates or changes so it’s good that that’s built in.

Flexibility with adaptability some cool ideas. cheers.

“So men are not from Mars, nor are women from Venus. Men and women are from Africa, the cradle of our evolution, where they evolved together as a single species. Men and women have all the same genes except for a handful on the Y chromosome, and their brains are so similar that it takes an eagle-eyed neuroanatomist to find the small differences between them. Their average levels of general intelligence are the same, according to the best psychometric estimates,24 and they use language and think about the physical and living world in the same general way.”

== Steven Pinker, MIT & Harvard prfoessor and cognitive scientist.

YES Finally, something that dissolves the pop-new-age ludicrous falsities claiming men and women are biologically different . They are not. They are very very similar and almost 100% identical, genetically.

This isn’t so much an interest in masculine/feminine studies, but rather a dissolution of fallacious belief, hyped by superficial media and pseudo-science.

Hearing Pinker’s wise words is not only comforting and alleviating from the intoxicatingly vile untruths I heard uttered to me by so many pop media feminists or people interesting in pointing out the “inherent superiority of one gender over the other”, but Pinker’s words move forward with dissolving untruths that clog, obfuscate, and blur our scope of reality.

I think the most concise and most lucid article that encapsulates this entire pseudo-truth-unraveling behavior is Dawkins’ article “Hall of Mirrors”, where he enunciates the validity of scientific truth.

Pinker’s dissolution of and illustrative evidence provision of the noble savage, blank slate, and ghost in the machine fallacious paradigms of human nature is brilliant.

Of course, while others put forth similar ideas, it was pop-hype author John Grey who further propounded this disillusioned idea that men and women are so inherently different.  So John Grey is obviously the nemesis of the subject of this article.  But it’s wise and prudent to if one recognizes a nemesis, to not speak frequently of him.  So we won’t waste time unraveling Grey’s fragile arguments and absurd “wave-welling”, “elastic-rubberbanding” feminine and masculine analogies.  Instead, let’s focus on how toxic said authors are on our collective conscience.

If one wants to have an intelligent conversation with another human about, say, human nature, or gender roles, or cognitive evolution, I think the best course of action is to completely evade the possibility of entertaining such a conversation with a status quo, average, pop-hype-book-reading human because of the eventual inevitable collisions with these hype media falsities.

These hype media falsities that sell simply because of emotional reaction flurry, permanently scar the perceptions some people make.  I am not proposing that they should be banned, but rather, that some kind of warning be put on said books indicating it as completely unproven, completely unscientific.  The Bible, John Grey’s “Men are From Mars, Men are from Venus”, most all non-scientific works, would all be pooled under pure 100% fictional works, for that they are.  I think it’s vitally important to clarify that certainty.  And to then of course distinguish those books (the majority of which make up most bookstores unfortunately) from the proven, cut & dry, scientific books that are actually true, that have the potential for containing material that is genuinely true!

Many of the “non-fiction” books in bookstores are grossly miscategorized and the social and cognitive consequences of this are drastic.   Abolishing fiction would be absurd, dangerous, bleak, and depressing, but when I read fiction, I want to read of Tolkien’s lore, or of Verne’s punctual characters, or of any of the other much more rich and inviting works of true fiction.  Instead of these pseudo-non-fiction works that are like weeds amongst the truthful scientific books and the pure, original fiction books, or the scientifically-proven and tested books, I think appropriately labelling all the pseudo-non-fiction (unproven) books as what they are, fiction, will cause people to drift to the healthy extremes: pure fiction  or pure scientifically proven books and these pseudo-non-fiction hype media works will simply drift off and plummet in sales simply because of appropriate labelling!

The pseudo-science books written by non-scientific, usually very uneducated authors that claim to be true are, frankly, deleteriously cognitively malnourishing.  This analogy to food is interesting.  I think an appropriate set of parallel extensions would be fiction is oh some kind of stirfry, scientific books as some kind of healthy natural produce or fish, and then these hype media false non-fiction boks as something similar to the cigarrette: addictive, intoxicating, wrought with flair and hype, and massively destructive.

If you extrapolate this idea out, yes, it would mean finally appropriately labelling all “religious tomes” as merely (in my opinion horribly written and very bland) fictional stories.  These pseudo non-fiction books are toxic books 1)they are unscientific untruths, 2)claiming to be truthful!  Pure fiction of Tolkien or Verne or Doyle is not the slightest bit toxic because the readership of those epic works know that the respective Frodo, Fogg, and Holmesian heroes are fictional.  Increidbly descriptive, brilliantly crafted? yes, but indubitably fictional.  Religions and similar books preachign fiction as non-fiction is a direct cognitive dissension into insanity.

Books by scientific authors containing scientifically-proven data should be the only books acceptablly labeled as “idea-sharing” books.  Fiction books should serve the purpose of image-sharing (some of which can have ideas) pieces of literature.  New Age, pop culture self-help books have become the new religion for the “semi-educated” average intelligence (typically american).  This newest incarnation of this vile, toxic, dangerous entity (religion) is even more surrepticious and dangerous because it’s packaged as this “life improvement” device, but it’s really toxic and fallacious repackaged religion.

The religious folk’s clever malign doesn’t really have much downtime.  It’s always crafting new ways to infect peoples’ minds.  Religion discourages critical thinking and that is one of the greatest causes of its toxic and viral-like perpetuation.  The example of this is the biblical quote of  saying “Don’t argue with the devil, he’s had thousands of years to practice”.  That’s religion discouraging critical thinking and encouraging blind submission.  Religion is how people devolve into drones hiding behind sanctity, eager to kill on command.  Domesticated house pets have more cunning than humans under the dangerous, deluding, and deleterious spell of religion.  So obviously greatest perpetuation of this mind virus, religious books, should ulitmiately simply be eliminated.  This is very brash, but the proposition of any religious books to be labelled simply as what they are: fiction, will lead to the natural extinction of religious texts simply because no one wants to read extremely insipid and poorly written fiction when there’s extremely well-written and colorful and adventurous genuine bona fide fiction authors on the next shelf, or genuine bona fide scholars, academics discussing scientific truths!

Indeed, Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit as well as the entirety of his book, The Demon-Haunted World, is an indispensible survival item for cognitive clarity.

Books that have not undergone rigorous scientific scrutiny and claim to be non-fiction truly pollute any attempt for clear thinking.  There’s so much astonishment and shock and “Wow” in scientifically laboratory-proven evidence that there’s absolutely no need for this pseudo-non-fiction rubbish.  There’s a need for fiction, for escape, and a need for scientific articles and books for truth.  There exists no need of the desire “to be deluded into a hype media falsity belief to prove or disprove some opinion one currently holds”.  I’ve been a victim of believing so many of these pseudo-non-fiction books and therefore found authentic, genuine scientific and true books by the authors of Pinker and Dawkins for example so remarkably mind-shatteringly good that the need for any other kind of “non-fiction” book or a book that hedges the fence of fiction and non-fiction seems pointless.

On a side note, one of the most indubitably unique, often quite humorous, and unquestionably impressive characteristics of Pinker is his ability to list a smorgasbord of highly diverse, seemingly random, and all entirely relevant examples that illustratively delineate and provide meaning, color, and texture to what theorem or point he is making.

After having a mind clogged with all these pop fiction media hype authors such as Anthony Robbins, John Grey, most any of the non-scientific-authored books you’ll find a book shelf that claims to be fiction, the works of Dawkins, Pinker, Hitchens, and many others is like having a full feast from all the food groups after cognitively starving off of an obscure, meager, and deprived diet of say only beets.  The non-scientific books that claim to be non-fiction are mind pollutants, and their fallacious points offer at best meager (and at worst, outright toxic and poisonous) sustenance for an already ravenous cognitive conscience.   People are starving for truth and they’re being fed preservatives.

Personally, I would like all the pop hype media books not written by a scientific author and lacking in scientific data, removed or banned in someway unless they’re explicitly labeled as fiction.  Meaning that bookstores would contain scientifically proven books and fictional literature.  I don’t think such a change will happen any time soon nor ever at all, but the fact remains that these pseudo-science hype media falsity “non-fiction” books that are wrought with fiction, do scar the clear thinking of the status quo.

So conclusively, the best solution for an intelligent conversation regarding any of the aforementioned topics is to circumvent the status quo American (actually, bypass all but the most educated americans) and find an academic savvy in the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, or any of the natural science fields, or simply a noble lad whose a solid bloke from the UK or Europe. haha.

…and not watching movies. (This is in reference to non-fiction books, btw — and quality reads, not crap).

1. Movies leave you under a spell; an illusory haze so you cannot see. Books give control of the haze others are under.
2. Movies manufacture illusion without you knowing it, while books allow you to choose experience illusion, without decoupling awareness from experience.
3. Books enable to you to explain and teach about illusions and reality, placing you at “cause” instead of at “effect” where you are a victim of illusion. You’re in the driver’s seat reading and writing books.
4. Books clarify and provide understandings. Movies merely create suspence and foreshadowing. Movies are hollow, they foreshadow and build suspense, but they leave you empty with no treasure, no gem. Books have the gem. Books, sure, create suspense, intrigue, and connection. I remember countless “on the edge of my seat” reads of Sherlock Holmes and bawling at the end of Where the Read Fern Grows in early elementary school. And just in 2008, I was completely engaged and in awe of the adventure created by Jules Verne in around the world in 80 days. Those fiction reads provided massive suspense, BUT BUT BUT, unlike movies, the books also provided incredible value and understanding!! I learned so many lessons from those books above. For example, inductive observational skill from Doyle’s book (Sherlock Holmes), the touching experience of pet comraderie (from Where the Red Fern Grows), and the necessity of time, precision, and the cool collected travel making things happen skills of Mr. Fogg from Around the World in 80 days. Because I READ those experiences as books as opposed to watch what was blasted at me with pixels from a movie, I experienced them more wholistically and I acquired the lesson and understanding, with the entertainment and fun of a very absorbing and exciting read!
5. You think more clearly with a book because your brain gets neurological activity firing that is congruent with the logic of the book. Kind of like a “mental-cerebral” version of “if you smile, you’ll feel happy”. If you read a smart book, you’ll think more intelligently. Movies trick and obfuscate intelligence.
6. Books, you have total control over the pace, and “order you read”, movies (unless you fumble with FF and RW buttons, you do not have the same control.
7. Books, your vision is the movie and you are the director; movies lack that customization.
8. Books teach and entertain and create more cohesive thinking; movies, merely entertain with an inkling of “teaching”.
9. Both movies and books inspire, but books provide an inspiration that is more enduring beacuse it is “your own version” of the inspiration.
10. Finally, books don’t need electrical outlets, high-tech dvd players, surround sound and the like. Books are portable; you can bring them anywhere. Laptops are fixing that with movies, but with a book, you use your “built-in” surround sound, imax, widescreen mental imagery vision, which is infinitely more crisp, alive, and exciting than a movie screen.

I’m a former movie junkie (thousands and reruns) and have rediscovered the joy of reading!

Refuting Preposterous Counter-Arguments

• Books are hard to preserve — ebooks hard copy, soft copy. egyptian documents have been found that are over thousands of years old, our declaration of indendence has been perfectly preserved for 200+ year. Books have been around longer than movies and will likely stay longer.
• Books are expensive — nope. your average dvd (say $20) is infinitely more expensive than a library book (free), but even if you buy a book, it’s likely to be less than film.
• Books are heavy — ebooks, my friend. wieghtless
• Books can fall from tall places and kil your children — so can movies.
• Books smell bad in high humidity places — film will corrode and become inoperable in high humidity places. Books actually have a broad environmental survival capacity when you think about it.
• Books becomes ugly looking after soaked in water — try putting a wet VHS in the video player and see what happens. The pages might be wrinkled, but a book won’t damage your electronic equipment.
• Books are written by old people mainly — haha. first off, not true. I’ve written a fair share of books and am in my youth. There are tons of youthful authors. Besides, whats the average age of your typical movie director and producer (older than the average author). Besides, whats wrong with some wisdom from elders?
• Books are against technology — apparently you aren’t familiar with the sci-fi fiction genre and the entire nonfiction line devoted to teaching and theorizing about new forms of technology.
• Books use large amount of trees — true, but ebooks refutes this.
• Books are ancient tools — they’re ancient learning devices, tools, forms of carrying messages, passing on research that took years and thousands of people. Yep. they’ve stood the test of time and have endured in their utility.
• Books lack user interaction — no. Books require you (especially with fiction) to 3-dimensionally interact with the interpretation of the material and your mind via visualizations. Movies cripple your ability to visualize. You create “the mental movie” so to speak, but movies just have little creative interaction where you see what everyone else sees.
• Books don;t have any moving things in them — the images created by books (your mental picture) ceaseless changes and dynamically moves.
• Books are rigid — this point, of course, doesn’t necessarily descredit books, but last time I checked, isn’t a paperback much less rigid than a dvd? If you “bend” a movie, it breaks, bend a paperback, it bends.
• Books are 2 dimentional — no, again, 3-d with your mental imagery. Actually, with very creative mental imagery you could visualize a book’s material in infinite dimensions with thought experiments, something impossible to do when just “observing” what happens on a screen.
• Books are usually unclear — haha. A distaste for literature is becoming more and more clear. Unless you’re a cat, scientist, or the rare exception of a courageous person, we usually fear or dislike what we don’t understand. Read books that interest you and work your way up to the complex ones, otherwise, you won’t like the experience. You’ll find some literature that fascinates you. Given that many more books exist than movies, it’s almost a probablistic certainty you’ll find an interesting book, if you found an interesting movie.
• Books have to be copied and printed — and movies have to be spliced, edited, printed, copied, and distributed as well.
• Books can’t be edited easily — actually neither books nor movies are designed for post-final print editting, but changing one word is MUCH easier than having to call back in the director, the camera crew, the actors, the editting crew, and reshoot, refilm, reprint and republished one line of s movie scene.

That said, I just wanted to say, I don’t dislike movies. Movies have reached and inspired me in ways that some books could have never have done, but, on the other hand, books have done the same — evoked intrinsic understanding that open up new doors of thought that completely change my life. Both definitely possess the ability to inspire. However, in my experience, the quality of the motivation and change you experience from a book feels MUCH more solid and grounded. In other words, the longevity of inspiration received from a book is greater — the fictional scene, or idea, or inspiration — sticks with you longer than with most movies (unless the rare exception of incredible filiming and cinematography) because you have to “design the mental movie” cognitively. But I definitely wouldn’t be person I am today without movies, and certainly without books. In part, I feel like I was “raised” by books and movies. Lessons from authors and films that teach what was skipped over at home or school. Good stuff!

I think the ultimate underlying mutual understanding here is this: “You read the right books, on a topic, skill-set, or value you want to acquire, and you will program your mind to genuinely live that life”. Movies are a quick way to glimpse at, and live vicariously through the characters and plots of other (fictional, screenplay) stories.

Why do so many Millenials (almost every member of the IWR club) LOVE Office Space? Because we’re constantly mobile, we loathe actual stagnant office spaces, but don’t mind the internet and that dynamic exchange at all. However, watching the movie “Office Space” will merely create a vicarious, temporary, short-lived feeling of “freedom” from something in your real life that you wish to escape. If you actually want to CHANGE your life, books will do that for you. I guess an analogy is a movie is the ignition (it can start the desire or create awareness of a desired change) but then the book is the actual car (it supplies the programming you need in order to get you where you want to go).

Books connect your body, mind, and voice.

I am not you, and you are not me.  That is the way things are.  I like that.  As you ponder that, let me explain to you why I find tremendous value in that distinction.

Distinctions create boundaries.  Without distinctions, everything would be porous and absorbing this information or that information would generate confusion.  But that confusion is instantly absolved when we utilize distinctions.

There’s a tendency for people with whom I communicate to think that we have some connection, as-if they “know me”.  The way they communicate and the advice they give comes from the perspective of “I know this person in every dimension and in every aspect”.  But then I mention something that I have done that the person with porous distinctions has not done, like ran multiple marathons,  the person shirks back and immediately says “Oh, I couldn’t do that!”.  Instantly their slurring and blurring of our distinctions of you being me, and me being you –gets mutilated when an element of capacity enters the conversation.

You see, as you listen to this closely and intently you realize that intention should govern our behavior (and often it does when we are not being persuaded, manipulated, or under a hypnotic trance by the media), but  many times our perception of capacity limits our behavior.  When I mention to someone actions I have taken that they deem outside of their capacity (for example having written 4 books, or ran multiple marathons, or any other task of which people are incredibly capable of doing, but don’t believe they have that capacity to do so) who has a ruptured their perception of boundaries, what happens in their mind?  First they recoil.  They instantaneously have a thought process of “this person is not whom I thought they were and there exists a distinction in our capacity”.  Such distinctions are good.  Because in many ways, what makes you you, and me me, is our logical levels, which of course, include beliefs, identity, capabilities, and behavior.  If I am talking to you in person, we share the same environment.  That is it.  I’d say environment is roughly 3% of “who I am” and “who you are” at best.   Without logical levels, we are all practically identical twins because our only differences would be blemishes on our epidermal layer of our skin, hair coloration, simple, trivial distinctions bound into the same sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid.  So it’s truly our logical levels that spark this kind of Lamarakian

For awhile in my junior year in college I engaged this belief that we were all this spiritual, interconnected, “Universal One” person.  I enjoyed entertaining that belief because of many reasons.  Reasons for entertaining the “universal one” delusion:

1. It was a good remedy for loneliness (If you’re lonely, thinking that everyone is interconnected creates a delusion of togetherness).
2. I thought it would be helpful to creating a connection with people.  (After all if you are interconnected with people “as one” then it’s very easy to feel harmoniously connected with another human).
3. I felt the idea of a “universal one” would somehow bring success believing that people were “working with me on my specific goals”.
4. What sparked this belief?  Likely a reading of Whitman’s Song of Myself

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

–Whitman 1819-1892

Yep, taking a gander at the American poet and essayist’s verse was likely what sparked that delusional belief for me.  Now am putting forth a criticism of that belief that “we are all universally one” where I will detail how toxic it truly is.

First off, we must first acknowledge that yes, “we” humans are taxonomically very similar in that we share the same class (mammalia), order (primates), genus (homo), and our species of course, sapiens, are also identical.  But there are VAST differences beyond that species classification.  We have homo sapiens who can program themselves to run 26.2 miles in under 2 hours, 10 minutes.  We have homo sapiens, like Nikola Tesla, who create magnificent inventions like the wireless communications radio and polyphase power distribution. Tesla was fluent in 7 languages.  Few people even fathom learning a “second” language”!  Indeed, the person who thinks we have 6.8 billion identical people walking around the planet is in effort to be as uncolorful as possible, an idiot!  There exist 6.8 billion exact DNA copies, but each and everyone of those bundles of cells is simultaneously a bundle of beliefs and identities and what I refer to as “life program code”.  Our internal cognitive programming that creates addictions and creates discoveries and breakthroughs previously thought impossible are derivatives of our internal code.  It is our internal code that makes us distinct.  Going beyond the given cellular similarities, humans, because of the existence of the cerebrum, are each individual bundles of code.  As a species, I’m convinced our belief in capacity has slowly decreased since the late 19th century, the Einstein and Tesla era.  Sure we have, in regards to technology, expanded in the realm of software with personal computing platforms with inventors like Wozniak (Jobs and Gates were merely businessmen, mind you), and in physics with the utilization propulsion, aerodynamics, and the employment of the LOR method at NASA we were able to land on our neighboring natural satellite .  Although I am not an enormous fan of art and frequently denounce religion for its destructive mind-virus-like properties, it is undeniable that the intricacies of Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel or David or Da Vinci’s Vetruvian Man are creations that few people could honestly say they have the capacity to create.

Most certainly, one could argue that it was not just Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin who individually “landed on the moon” first (Collins never set foot on the rock, but orbited in the Command Module) but rather the “universal one” of Mission Control, the past inventors who had paved the way for such launches and maneuvering to occur, as well as possibly a “sprinkling” of that “human spirit” universality.  But when it comes down to it….

ONE INDIVIDUAL DISTINCT person invented the polyphase power distribution system, Nikola Tesla.  Do you not think that Tesla’s fluency in 7 distinct languages was absolutely essential to his capacity to “think outside the box” and go beyond the capacity of so many of his scientific predecessors?  Linguistic definitive diversity is without a doubt an intrinsic component to scientific creativity and precision.

ONE INDIVIDUAL DISTINCT person outlined the paradigmatic ground-shattering breakthrough in physics known as special relativity, Albert Einstein.  But did you know that it was the photoelectric effect that won Einstein the Nobel Peace prize in 1921 and that it was his Annus Mirabillus papers written in 1905 that, although less known, had a larger impact on physics than any of his other work, including special relativity?  When Einstein first proposed the special theory of relativity on June 30 of 1905, his third paper that year, in “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” he referenced

One person surveyed, calculated, and documented the actual origination of our very biological species in 1859, Sir Charles Darwin.

Now I have been inductively drawn to the late 19th century….all of its inventions, ideas, fictions, and beliefs.

I have a penchant for late 1800s Scottish and British Authors!! I just inductively became aware of this pattern!

• 1859 British, Dickens, Tale of Two Cities (2 books)
• 1859, Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
• 1873, French Verne, (Around the World in 80 Days and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea)
• 1886, Scottish Stevenson,  (Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
• 1891 Scottish, Doyle, Adventures of Sherlock (2)
• 1897, Irish, Bram Stoker, Dracula (1 book)
• 1980s, British, Douglas Adams (10 books)
• 1950s, British, Roald Dahl,  (10 books)
• 2000, British, Mark Haddon
• 2000, British, Richard Dawkins
• 31 Books by British Authors!!!! Jolly good!

Young Eintein (1879-1955) was a mere toddler during the time most of those fictions were published.  But we are not focusing on Einstein, because there exists a greater capacity and a more greatly overlooked genius, of Nikola Tesla (1856- January 7, 1943).  Do you ever view a picture of a person and feel some kind of connection as-if you know them or can relate to them?  Such delusions are common and for the reasons I outlined above in the “Reasons for entertaining the universal one delusion”, appealing.  However, when Nikola Tesla invented the wireless communications radio in 1894, he did not accomplish this amazing feat by staring at a picture of english chemist Michael Faraday and  sottish physicist James Maxwell — the 18th century theorists of electromagnetic waves — and “willing the universal one” to enable him to craft a wireless communications radio!  If Tesla believed that “we are all a universal one working harmoniously together”, we would not have FM and AM radio as we know it today because Nikola would not have had the resources to design the wireless communications radio.  You are beginning to understand!  Believing in the “universal one” or any derivation thereof is “acceptable copping out”.  Saying, “Oh i could run a marathon or have a great scientific invention or accomplish this great feat…but I’ll just leave it up to the universal one” is a way of failing to achieve but stated in a way that it slips under the radar.  I can assure you that it is only the status quo who believes in “the universal oneness of things”.  Great achievers who accomplished very unique and highly specific feats — inventions, athletic achievements, great papers, paradigmatic mathematical formulae — did so out of acknowledging “Hey, I am unique in this area.  I have an attraction to xyz subject or field.  Few other people are focused on this.  I am going to pursue an interest in that.”  Most people are deluded by the obfuscating sludge that is religion, media, newspaper dribble that occupy the clarity of our mind, that hypnotizing us into thinking that “some universal one will take care of it”.  Let me assure you that one and only one person

Traversed 26.2 miles in Munich, Germany in 2 hours 12 minutes of the 1972 Olympics to win a gold medal, Frank Shorter.

Wrote the ground-shattering paper that completely revolutionized our perception of time, Albert Einstein in 1905.

Popularized the breakthrough discovery known as the copernican revolution, which made “the universal one” realize that our solar system is not geo-, but heliocentric!

Swam 100m butterfly in 50.77 seconds at the 2007 World Championships in Melbourne, Australia, beating his own 51.25 Athens record.  This ONE person was Michael Phelps.

Designed myriad inventions in at least 278 distinct patents in 26 countries that contributed incredible new technologies.  This ONE person was Nikola Tesla.  Out of all these distinct, individual achievers, I think it is Tesla whom accomplished the most and simultaneously received the least credit.

As you can see “the universal one” by DEFINITION is inherently outdated, obsolete, old-fashioned, and unadvanced!  It was the universal one that believed in geocentrism.  It was the universal one that believed that the sub-4-minute mile was humanly impossible.  It was the universal one whom believed transference of information without the usage of wires couldn’t be done.  It was those individuals, those people who acknowledged distinctions between them and other members of the same species (in regards to the above  three accomplishments respectively Copernicus, Roger Bannister, and Nikola Tesla) who proved the universal one wrong.  And for those who actually go around believing that their answers lie in the universal one are seriously setting themselves up for massive capability limitations!  All of the “I can’ts”, “That’s Impossibles”, “I can’t do thats” are components to the universal one.

As a conclusion, I present 5 of my current heroes all of whom exemplify the incredible capacity to neglect the condemning and restricting “universal one” and who rise above it, creating distinct and very constructively elucidating breakthroughs in music, logic, science & electricity, for our species.

Richard Dawkins.  1941-Present.  British Evolutionary biologist.

Nikola Tesla, 1856-1943.  Serbian-born scientific inventor who individually created roughly 300 patents for countless inventions that paved the way to the technology we see today.

Gustav Holst. 1874-1943, British Composer known for distinctly composing The Planets.

Sherlock Holmes, Fictional Detective crafted by Scottish Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  1887, first appearance publication.

Derren Brown, 1971-Preset.  British illusionist, stage hypnotist, and mentalist.

Sherlock Holmes (A fictional creation can hold some invaluable lessons on the process of deduction) and Derren Brown (both masters of microcosmic observation).

Ludwig Van Beethoven, 1770-1827.  German composer who Distinctly assisted in the transition of classic to romantic music.

I encourage you to look at all those individuals and observe how by NO MEANS could they have crafted the magnificent creations that they authored, invented, composed, conjured, or observed with the assistance of the “universal one” concept.  They all focused their minds and bodies and genius to create authentic advancements for our species.  I encourage you to do the same!  Disown your relationship to “uiversal oneness”; honor your distinct individual genius be it in athletics (undoubtedly Michael Phelps and Frank Shorter both, unquestionable have cultivated a distinct genius in the fields of swimming and running), science, music, authoring, or whatever field you notice a distinct and unique pull.  This is a call to action that is much more demanding than embracing self-reliance or non-conformity.

I think it’s worthy of note that the above heroes of “Distinction” are personal predecessors to five heroes that brought me to the above five great individuals.  The previous ones are shown above.

The moment you realize your individuality and that you are a distinct network of electric neurological electrical firings directed and managed by a 8-pound nervous-system center containing two distinct hemispheres intersecting at a corpus callosum that controls endocrinological chemical mini-sub factories such as the hypothalamus, pituitary gland, thalamus, thyroid, adrenals, and testes/ovaries woven into 206 distinct sticks of calcium matrices, pulleyed together through over 600 distinct muscular strands, and sheathed in a kinesthetic epidermal layer, you realize that you are not a universal one.  You are you.  And I am me.  And that is the way things are.  And that is very, very good for the sake of advancing our species!

This work is licensed by John Thomas “Kooz” Kuczmarski and Validate Your Life under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/.

This article is primarily about the outcome frame: applying it, it’s inherent awesomeness, and connecting up with what you want, need and deserve in life through utilizing the outcome frame.

Picture your life — I’m serious.  Actually do this.  Visualize.  You’ve discarded all your crappy cult of hollywood movies by now, right?  So you have to start to visualize.  Do this. — after everything’s done.

Picture your life after:

• The website is up and completed
• All your sales, all your products are not just available, but there’s a high turnover rate of sales
• Your services are not just available, but business is booming and you have clients.
• Your books are not just finished, but published and selling.
• All those nuisance annoying errands like get the “car’s brakes fixed” and “update xyz” are complete.
• All the loose ends to all projects are complete and filed and finito and done.
• Everything your reading, watching, or listening to from podcast to magazine, to web article to book, to research, to novels to important non-fiction reads you’ve already read high-lighted, taken notes on and fully processed and archived.
• All of your notes are applied triple-synced, archived, and used in your profession.
• You have a consistent health routine and all your health goals are achieved.
• In short, all of your “todos” all of your projects are DONE.  Finito.  Complete.  Total. Comprehensive.  Completion and Victory.
• RAD!!

What now?!! Seriously.  Visualize that state.  And for those of you who constantly find warped pleasure trying to add more and more things to do this may be particularly difficult.

But if you’ve done this correctly, it will be life-changing.

Do you still have the same outlook?  Do you even have the same profession?  Do you have the same relationships?  The same life?

Outcome state is very very extremely effective for creating massive change.  Use it!

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The whole “work hours” thing is a foreign concept to me. Maybe because I just don’t make a distinction between work and play, or (most likely) I just always work.  Sometimes I wake up and start work at 2am. Sometimes I just don’t ever go to sleep and take a nap in the middle of the day.

It’s easier for me, I realize, to just say my sleep patterns (the times where I’m not working) than the times I am working;  I sometimes sleep around the 12ish to 3ish zone. I like exercising at night (moonlight runs).

So it’s strange, I work about 80-90 times harder and am more demanding of myself than I would have been if I worked for an employer other than myself.  This increase in work motivation, results, and demands is probably inherent to any freelance work or “business owner” work.  That’s an interesting pattern and managing the work that you do as an entrepreneur is what we’re talking about today. You have to develop this weird relationship with yourself where you’re the administrator who decides what we need to do (as a business) and then you put on the “employer cap” and do the stuff that you decided to do while wearing the administrative hat. Finally, you clean it all up by wearing, possibly a “customer hat” and test-running for the purposes of debugging your business feature.  This works with websites, products, services, expansions of any kind.

Having access to multiple outcome frames from multiple hats (points of view and angles) is a must for any entrepreneur. How do you do this? How do you don and even design the array of chapeaus you have to wear to be a successful entrepreneur?

Map it out

Map out which hats you need. Read my excerpt from my fourth book, Compassionate Reservoirs, where I discuss De Bono’s thinking hats.

Recognizing Venues of Impact

It is incredibly challenging and essential to discern when we do and when do not have an impact.    This can be accomplished by examining the people in the room.  Are they laughing at you or with you?  Are they looking towards you or through you or at you?  If their relationship with you is aimed so that they look or laugh or talk at you, you can’t have an impact because the people have either labeled you negatively or chosen not to change. In situations where people interact at you — the prepositional connotation is key — where you cannot have an impact, give up control and stop speaking.

When we don’t have the potential to impact — because of external factors with the people or internal limitations in ourselves — we should, obviously, aim cease conversing.  Continuing will only manufacture agitations and doubt.  Giving up control where we have no control is incredibly liberating, as well.  Acts of relinquishment provide freedom to stop bashing our psychological brain against the wall.  It inspires us to ascertain certainty in our convictions.  Whenever we certify our capacity for invigoration, we create opportunities for growth.  Pinpointing those areas of certification and linking them to areas that behold a capacity for impact is the vital consideration. Go to your studio and converse and make stuff, but make sure you studio is the place where you have control and an impact.  If your studio doesn’t have those qualities change the studio or find one that connects to your wisdom.

Wherever you have the potential for leaving an impact, you can experience with leading discussions by wearing different hats.   Edward de Bono’s “6 Thinking Hats” describes the six hats that successful people where and must wear in different situations.  Here’s the breakdown of the empowerment hats:

·         The White Hat – resourceful, use what data is available

·         The Black Hat – criticism and pessimism;

·         The Green Hat –- creativity;

·         The Red Hat – intuition and gut thinking;

·         The Blue Hat – control and managing, often links to other hats for problem solving

·         The Yellow Hat – optimism

The white is the ultimate hat of adaptive resourcefulness.  You connect with what is in front of you and around you and use it for that agenda.  It is the hat that you wear when you live out Teddy Roosevelt’s idea of “do what can with what you have where you are”.  I mentioned Teddy Roosevelt’s incredible ability to access his child-like voice and adapt when Teddy Roosevelt said that phrase and created the successful Rough Riders in my first book, Validate Your Life. De Bono is simply phrasing this capacity for adaptation and expansion in another context using the hat metaphor, but the underlying principle is the capacity access our inner voice and adapt beautifully.

Although the black hat may not sound like a hat of empowerment, the ability to criticism can toughen and make your agenda more connected and secure.

The other hats are quite obvious in their application.  This hat idea is quite interesting, but I don’t think people have a choice to wear these hats.  They are patterned into one specific hat.  The most liberated person not only has the potential to wear all the different types of hats, but they have the awareness and scrutiny to decipher precisely when a certain situation calls for a specific hat.  Knowing when to communicate and when to liberate your control, or knowing which hat to wear, are different ways of expanding your potential for interaction.

Great, now that that’s all in the clear…

Visualize which hats are most important to you and then cut that number in half. If you think you need 4 hats to run your business, you only need two. Minimize. Make the differences between the types of hats you need to wear HUGE. In other words, make sure a “different hat” truly links up to a VERY different kind of thinking, cognitive questions, frames, and outcomes.

At most, I think three hats is by far all you need: Administrative hat, Employer hat, and Customer Hat. Keep in mind that these hats are just merely collections of cognitive frames.  What I mean by cognitive frames is that in NLP (something I study, teach, and practice) there’s multiple frames where different criteria and outcomes are envisioned.  The way you should structure your 2-3 entrepreneurial hats is so that each of those hat points of view is a collection of frames that achieve the objects of that point of view.  For example, if you decide to go with a customer hat, the customer hat would likely want an “outcome” (that of buying a product or service) but that would be very different and distinct from the type of outcome frame utilized the administrative hat.  Additionally, with a customer hat you’d likely want a backtrack frame so that you could reconnect with your original purchase idea to see if whatever you’ve installed (a website, a service, a product) moves in congruence with that frame.  Here’s the most common NLP.  Just pick and choose which one of the frames you’d like to associate with each of your hats and plug those into the cognitive structured Point-of-View!

When I coach clients some of the most effective techniques I use for remapping the clients’ model of the world to achieve the success results they want is framing.  I use framing all the time.  Framing is used by advanced NLP practitioners, and although they may not know it at the time, anyone who embraces a “different Point of View” mentality embraces a form of framing.  Frames are an incredible NLP tool and an amazing bit of transformation technology.  If you learn one thing from this article: learn the ability to frame and different types of frames.  If my clients knew how to frame (and I do try to teach them how to do this , they’d likely be clients for a much shorter period of time!  Learning to frame is like adding “another mind” to the problem.  If you can take problem x and frame it in 3 different ways, suddenly it’s like you have 3 cerebrums working on that same problem!  Framing is definitely part of the equation to using that so-called other 90% of your mind.  So onward!  What are some frames?  Alphabetical list of all 8 frames with major (most common frames) frames in bold:

• As-If Frame — How would I go about this goal as-if my desired state had already been realized? The as-if frame is a very intriguing one.  It was taught to me in acting class.  I was supposed to, if playing a scene where, for example, I had to congratulate you on achieving a degree, but in real life I had trouble congratulating you if I never knew you to achieve anything.  So I was supposed to think of you “as-if” you were a brother who’d just won an award and then that as-if would get the desired result for a scene.  So that was a small taste of the impact of as-if frame.  It’s most potent application is of course in coaching.  Envision how you would go about your life as-if the outcome (from outcome frame) had already been achieved or to go about a meeting as-if xyz person were there.  A great trick is to plug in an as-if outcome frame so you act as-if the outcome has been achieved then plugin a backtrack frame to examine the “backtracked steps” necessary to achieve that outcome frame as-if it were complete.  This is rad!
  • Similar to Dreamer Disney Reality Strategy
• Backtrack Frame — Does where we are now and where we are going have concordance and agreement with our goals and aims of a project or meeting? Backtrack frame is analogous to a “double check” frame.  Backtrack to make sure all ends are in agreement and understanding.  I like to think of the backtrack frame as though you observe all the “decision and action branches” of a project.  Every project has variety of action branches, and those branches have sub-actions, and a backtrack frame is just taking that entire action and/or decision “tree” if you will of a goal or outcome to make sure it’s heading in the productive and desired direction!
  • Similar to Open Frame and Evidence Frame
• Ecology Frame — What will the impact on my body, family, society, work environment, and/or community in pursuing this outcome? Ecology frame is one of the main and incredibly important frames because you ask “will this work?  can this be safely implemented?”  For example, staying in the same place is ecologically easy to do externally, but on your body and mind would staying in the same place be good?  Or, changing your diet may not ecologically effect work environment, community, family, and will hopefully make you “look attractive” but what will the impact be on your immune system?  Ecology frame is similar to Ed de Bono’s judgement hat.  Ecology frame is also very similar to the Realist Disney Reality Strategy.
• Evidence Frame – How will I know — what’s the exact criteria — of having achieved an outcome? Evidence frame is an outcome sub-frame. It adds detail and a more crisply vivid vision to manufacture a more rich and lucid end outcome frame.
  • Similar to Outcome frame
• Open Frame -- What are some comments and or questions to the topic? An open frame is just a frame for people to ask comments or questions about the topic.  Usually an open frame can be a corollary to an outcome frame.
  • Similar to Backtrack frame
• Outcome Frame – What will this look like when its finished? Easily, the most common and one of the most universally useful frames.  When you focus on the outcome frame you’re envisioning the end result.  The outcome from is essential to the Present_State comparison to Desired_State test of the TOTE model.  You needed to determine an outcome for all of your activities.  An outcome frame provides a focus for what you want to achieve.  Better yet, it’s the frame where you focus on visualizing what you want to achieve.  Do you have problems making decisions?  Having a clearly defined — crisp in immense detail and visualized — outcome frame is absolutely essential for having success in getting things done.  Ever merely have a meeting but nothing gets accomplished?  You need an outcome frame!  Not having an outcome frame means you can quickly experience overwhelm by taking on too much or not achieve your dreams at all because the actual “I’m finished!” state and criteria has not yet defined.  You can use outcome frames for projects, for meetings, for anything where a specific result is desired!  Achieving anything successfully, efficiently, smoothly and intelligently involves the outcome state.
• Problem Frame — What could go wrong in achieving this outcome? Problem frame kind of works from the opposite direction as the outcome frame by focusing on all the possible weird or unexpected things that could arise.
  • Similar to Critic Disney Reality Strategy and a sub-frame of the Ecology frame.
• Relevancy Frame – Is this behavior comment or question pertinent to an agreed upon outcome? This frame is essential if you have an open forum and embark on an “open frame” and take questions from a crowd.  One of my favorite radio programs at the moment is an Australian local radio program and the host is brilliant at maintaining a good relevancy frame; if a caller deters off the topic he’ll end the call or pull them back on topic.  He’s great at staying very open to a variety of opinions, but if one of those opinions becomes irrelevant, he moves on very quickly.  Relevancy frame is essential to staying on target, keeping the nose to the grindstone, and moving forward in the direction you want to go.
  • Similar to Evidence frame.

Here’s some suggestions based on how I structure my hats in relation to the consolidated frames integral to each hat (each hat represents a unique cluster of frames).

Administrative Hat

• Ecology Frame — Consider how this will effect your environment, your belongings, your future, your past, your relationships, your friends, community, your body.
  • Trigger Question: How will achieving this outcome and living in the state of having this outcome achieved effect my body, ideas, beliefs, my community, my friends, family, society?
• Outcome Frame — The vivid visualized end result to be compared to the present state using TOTE, so you know when the outcome is achieved and if you have more work to do or you’re done!
  • Trigger Question: What does this outcome look like?
• Backtrack — Check agreement and understanding during or after a meeting to update a new idea arrival or to restart a discussion.
  • Trigger Question: Wait…what were we talking about again?

Employer Hat

• Evidence Frame– Gauge how well you’re progressing.  Looking at evidence.  Assessing progress.
  • Trigger Question: What are milestones and how will know — what will I see and feel — to understand that I’ve completed a sub-outcome?
• Outcome Frame — Implement strategies and actions to achieve sub-goals that are congruent and components of the major administrative outcome.
  • Trigger Question: How can implement this sub-goal that ties in with the administrative main meta-outcome?

Customer Hat

• Backtrack Frame — Focus on a customer outcome and constantly backtrack to ensure the interface appropriately matches up.
  • Trigger Question: How does this interface help me get the product or service I want?
• Outcome Frame — Get the desired product or service you want and shape what that will look like and even possibly what the process may be like (you will obviously use the framework designed by the Administrative hat and created by the Employer hat for this one!) .
  • Trigger Question: Do I trust this service-provider? How can I find the service (or product) I seek? How do I know it’s legitimate? Is this a good price?

Ideas for implementing these different hats

• Different Logins  – If you have blog or other kind of customer-driven interface you could create different logins to explore the product or service.  For example, if you’re creating an iPhone app that requires a login, you could create “john_adminhat” “john_employerhat” and “john_customerhat” logins.  These will function to remind you that “Oh yeah! I have to be in the customer hat to see how this goes and plug-in the backtrack frame and outcome frame for getting a a product!”  or “Oh yeah I shouldn’t be focused on product buying, I need to focus on design for the customer” (admin hat), or “I need to implement the design I decided upon (employer hat or “design hat”)
• Different Emails -- This one is similar to the different logins. But if you’re setting up something with e-commerce, and want to “test buy” a product you’ve put up, then having all those debugging test buys (undoubtedly the “Customer Hat”) consolidate toward your customer email (yourname_customerhat@gmail.com would work) is a great way to keep track to see if all your welcome messages and auto-responders work.  This sounds overly organized (and it is!) but when you setup something like an online store, or some advaned bit of ecommerce, knowing the difference between “Hey, yeah I sent myself this email when I was troubleshooting wearing the customer hat!” or “Oh yeah, this is a little administrative hat note to myself to change the usernames around!” is very valuable.
• Different Accents — Yes, I know this one is strange, but with my voice acting experience, I’ve found actually speaking in a different accent is conducive to getting things done more efficiently and structuring auditorially when I’m in a different cognitive mode.  I’m convinced you truly do think differently when speaking in a different accent.  Therefore, although the idea of accent utilization is very peculiar, I recommend this anecdote for implementing your different kinds of entrepreneurial points of view.
• Inter-relationship — What’s so cool about using these different hats for your business, is you make the functioning of your business hermetic, and airtight, with no problems or flaws or cracks where stuff can happen.  You’ve thought through all those by employing, administering, or “customering” scenarios and outcomes and cycling through the various frames.  Frames and applying these hats catalyzes growth, expansion, and new ideas, but such application also makes ideas and concepts and projects airtight and moves them forward and makes them seamless and extensible!

Also, this guy I think is awesome.  1)He offers a GREAT explanation and 2)He’s a bloody aussie, mate!

Basically a put (pun surprisingly unintended maybe subconsciously intended, yes, definitely) a put option is buying a contract that provides you insurance; insurance to sell something at a price.

In what market is (put and call) option trading?  Options are not in the “Shares Market” (because an option doesn’t exchange shares, it exchanges contracts to buy or sell shares at an exercise price!).  Instead, options are in the “Derivatives Market”!  Yay! Go calculus! (LINK).  I love the word derivative. So technical.  Delicious.  Without getting too technical, futures, forwards, swaps, credit derivatives, and hybrid securities are also part of the derivative market, along with options (oops, I got too technical .  Don’t worry about those 5 other kinds of derivative market trading.  Solidify and possible exercise (again, pun had to be somewhat intended ) your knowledge of put and call option trading first!  That way you can gauge if options are for you.

Before you delve into this excitingly numerical and mathematically exciting rockin world of options trading, you may find value (intrinsic or just numerically comedy ) in acquainting yourself with some factoids of the stock exchanges, especially “What the hell is up with stock exchange trading hours?” from a previous post of mine.  When you’ve graduated yourself from the joys of compound interest and basic stock investing and have skirted the real estate investment “thang”, but still want some advanced high tech investment ideas…you might be ready to get savvy for stock option trading!

In my own words:  In simplest definitions, buying and selling options is buying and selling contracts to buy stocks at certain prices.  There’s only two types of options.  Put options (upon expiration date, I have the the legal nifty awesome stock-trading right to SELL xyz shares at abc exercise price) and call options (you guessed it, upon expiration date, I have the legal nifty awesome stock-trading right to, yep you guessed it, BUY xyz shares at abc exercise price).

For more details, check out this INSANELY well-written, lucid article.

Example:  July $50 call option for Walgreens is $1.66 (1.66/share, always in round lot, so $166)

July = Expiration Month (it’s always the 3rd friday of the month!)

$50 = strike price

When the Option Expires.  Decision Flow

When an option expires, you either sell it (sell the contract), exercise it (buy the call option (or sell, if it’s a put) the shares for the strike price, which shows no regard to the current price!), or do nothing (lose the original investment of the option cost.

———-> Excercise the option   (yes = buy (with calls) or sell shares (with puts); no = Sell the Option || Neither Sell the Option Contract nor Exercise it

———->Sell the option   (yes = sold;  no = lost money)

Also, this guy I think is awesome.  1)He offers a GREAT explanation and 2)He’s a bloody aussie, mate!

Our Friend, Jules Dawson explains how Put options are a congruent to insurance.

This is valuable, true, interesting, and a good analogy to understand puts.

Basically put (pun surprisingly unintended maybe subconsciously intended, yes, definitely), a put option is buying a contract that provides you insurance; insurance to sell something at a price.

Extensions

In what market will you find (put and call) option trading categorized?  Options are not in the “Shares Market” (because an option doesn’t exchange shares, it exchanges contracts to buy or sell shares at an exercise price!).  Instead, options are in the “Derivatives Market”!  Yay! Go calculus!  I love the word derivative. So technical.  Delicious.  Without getting too technical, futures, forwards, swaps, credit derivatives, and hybrid securities are also part of the derivative market, along with options (oops, I got too technical .  Don’t worry about those 5 other kinds of derivative market trading.  Solidify and possibly exercise (again, pun had to be somewhat intended ) your knowledge of put and call option trading first!  That way you can gauge if options are for you.

Is this too high-tech? Is this for me?

That’s up to you.  Check out the articles linked above, this one, and this dude’s 10 Keys to option trading in any market, bull or bear.

Remember, with options, there’s a high risk factor

so do your research and get it done, to reap the reward!

Basically if you effectively purchase puts on a falling market and then exercise them, and/or purcahse calls on a rising market and then exercise them…you’d be a successful options trader, and it’s very safe to say that option trading is for you!  Beautiful!

Sure there’s a few rare incidents of them attacking humans

but the same is true of lightning

and lightning strikes are actually more frequent than shark bites.  If Spielberg had created Zappers instead of Jaws, about how frequently people get struck and killed by lightning would there be a greater fear irrational fear of the atmospheric discharge of electricity and indifference to our cartilaginous friends?  I think so.

Sharks are beautiful.

And the belief that they’re man-eating, devouring, aquatic killing machines is a purely irrational fear.

Not too much to say here.  Rob Stewart says it all.  I’m a huge fan, benefactor, philanthropist, afficionado, and exited knowledge learner of sharks.  They’re endangered.  The shouldn’t be.  Spielberg’s Jaws started irrational fear.  I’ve said that message to many a people, but Rob Stewart says it with incredible clarity.  His message is important!

Check the sharks tag for more insightful reads on the beauty and sophisticated of sharks.

Conclusively, out of my choice that I started practicing many years ago to sleep on the floor as opposed to the bed, I’m nicer to my wallet, more aligned in my skeleton, simpler in regards to my belongings, more abundant in energy, and I mathemtically factually have MORE TIME than you, a person who sleeps on a mattress!  It was a good move!

One interesting fact about is me that I don’t sleep on beds.  Since 2003, I haven’t slept on a bed.  I started this practice while studying spider monkeys in the yucatan jungle of Mexico.  Obviously, we slept in tents in the yucatan and there were no mattress beds in the tents — just the refreshingly simple jungle floor.  I continued this.  Sleeping on the floor is better for:

• My back.  Mattresses encourage odd vertebral curvature, the floor does not and my spine has been noticeably more aligned and even spinal elongation has occurred since I started this practice.
• My energy.  I got groggy sleeping in beds, but I feel refreshed and clear sleeping on the floor.
• My simplicity.   As part of my productivity and organizational coachign, I’m an anti-clutter freak and while it may seem overly-meticulous to focus on not having bedding clutter to worry about, having to make a bed, deal with undersheets, comforter, mattress sheets, versus just one blanket that I use to cover me while sleeping on the floor, greatly makes my life easier, simpler, and more clutter-free, when you add up all your belongings (and they do add up!).
• My Time.  I know that because that small part of my mind, energy, and life that would go toward “dealing with bedding and sheets” no longer has to worry about that, I’m better off and have more freedom and energy and time than the person who has to worry about, wash, buy, and keep track of their bedding.  Now, this sounds incredibly overly-detailed focus and the time saved is probably only a minute each day (at most), but on the most fundamental level time is all you have in life, and even if we live to be a hundred, we only have 876,000 hours in our life, so eliminating things that I don’t want to spend time on is important!  I don’t want to spend time on dealing with sheets, bedding, and “beddery” junk each day!  So I don’t!  Think about that.  You mathematically have more time in your life by not having a mattress.  This sparks the idea of “what other things could we eliminate to make temporal space for more valuable things?”!
• My wallet.  The floor is free. Beds, box strings, futon, foam, and/or spring mattresses, combined with the 2-3 layers of sheets, mattress covers, and bedding can really add up and become costly!

Conclusively, out of my choice that I started practicing many years ago to sleep on the floor as opposed to the bed, I’m nicer to my wallet, more aligned in my skeleton, simpler in regards to my belongings, more abundant in energy, and I mathemtically factually have MORE TIME than you, a person who sleeps on a mattress!  It was a good move!

Hear This In FULL as a free podcast! If you like what you hear. Be sure to check out the “Audio” page of http://www.validateyourlife.com for more inspiration and clarity!

People Categories

Categorize People in I’ve noticed those three distinctions VERY clearly in friends but instead of just categorizing appropriately the “friend” as a

• Drag (Enemy; Direct Impediment to Your Goals) — Bad Medicine — Very Much Not Interested
• Neutral (Neutral Person; Potential Client) — Neutral Medicine — Not Interested
• Galvanizer (Good Friend) — Good Medicine — Very Interested

I reacted negatively to the draggers and positively to the Galvanizers. The result was, quite simply, that ended up fearing people in general because I didn’t know how to deal with the debilitating presence of a dragger.

Now the solution is simple: you cut out the “pseudo-friends” who drag you down! Someone ridiculing your goals is only feedback. You don’t take it personally! You just use their dragging, discouraging words as evidence to verify your choice to cut them out of your life!

This is tremendously liberating and necessary! What happens if you don’t do this? If you fail to label someone as a dragger, a galvanizer, or a neutral person? You’ll have draggers clinging to you, galvanizers pushing your forward, but draggers causing you to go in reverse. And you’ll instantly realize you just stutter, stop, and fail. I’ve experienced this.

We’ve established that there ARE those three types of people. Those three types of people DO exist. In my life the “draggers” have been disgustingly more abundant than the galvanizers. Cut them out! Don’t let draggers into your life! Let Galvanizers in!

Great, we’ve established the following postulates as truth:

1. There exist three different types of “friends”: draggers, neutral, and galvanizers.
2. Eliminating draggers from your life increases success.
3. Adding Galvanizers increases success.
4. And possibly turning neutral people into clients increases success.

Excellent. Now the big question is we know that doing 2-4 will increase our success. The question is HOW do we do that? How do we implement that?

Do we, for example, upon identifying a galvanizer, say “Hey, you’re awesome! Can I schedule a time to meet up with you every day this week?” or upon discovering a dragger, scream “Get the frick out of my life you Dragger!”. Hhhmmm those approaches may work, but they may be too extreme, too. I propose possibly making a list of what I call Good Medicine, Neutral Medicine, Bad Medicine.

The Multiple Calendar Approach – I interacted with two people, a couple, and felt crippled, debilitated, frustrated, hurt, and worthless afterwards. Clearly they were both draggers and both were very Bad Medicine. How do we work with this? Do we create a Bad Medicine list? This seems wise. Better yet, if you’re actually on the same page as the rest of the planet and are using an electronic calendar, why not simply make three categories of contacts — Good, Bad, and Neutral Medicine? How would that work? If you noticed someone had a bad medicine effect on you, you simply put them in the Bad Medicine cluster of contacts. Eventually, after maybe a few months you’ll weed out and eliminate contacts from your Bad Medicine contacts. Now the best part is you’ll have definitive Rules set up with each of the contact clusters! Remember, the purpose of all of these is to ensure that people who freak out and feel intimidated by you succeeding are left out of the picture of your life. Hell if they can’t contact you on the phone then they’ll have a hard time negatively debiliating you! And this encourages Good Medicine people from contacting you!

So I use Apple Address Book. It’s an incredible, synced up, awesome contact management program. There’s so much you can do with it and it amazingly syncs up incredibly with my iPhone and I love the whole interconnectedness with apple products! Okay, enough of my sales pitch for Apple . So if you write on a contact “BadMed” or “GoodMed” or “NeutMed” consistently and then make a smart contact folder for them, things will work amazingly well because if you get a call from someone you can instantly check to see if they’re labeled as a dragger, neutral, or galvanizer, and then respond appropriately.

Responding Appropriately : Language as Medicine.
Guess what, if I get a phone call from a guy who says “Hello, I’m hear to dump a bucket of Hydrocholoric acid on your arm. Where should we start?” You don’t say “Well, let’s do it fast at first and save some of the pain for later.” Hell no!! You get the frick out of the way and hang up on the person. Well, draggers, or Bad Medicine people have the exact same effect. Anyone who’s read 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World, knows that Words ARE medicine. Language can manipulate and delude you into actually achieving your dreams when you didn’t think you could (galvanizers can do this!!!), and language can warp your life into the hell of incapacity even when you’re incredibly capable (draggers do this to you!). I’ve experienced this on NUMEROUS occassions! Endlessly. Here’s too quick examples before we get back to responding appropriately. I was a runner in school (even though I prefer swimming now), so both of these examples are running based. Then I’ll get back to the Script, the Language, the actual action to deal with draggers and galvanizers.

Because everything is causality, people.  We’ve got to understand the causality effect here.  We get a call from a dragger or galvanizer that we’ve properly identified, and we need to respond accordingly, or we WILL :

• Become pinioned in failure with a bucket of noxious toxic langauge poured on us in the flavor of “Oh you can’t do that! That’s awful. That won’t happen!” (Dragger — Bad Medicine)
• OR
• You will get more people who have the language that gets you going to do exactly what it is that you want to do! Along the lines of “You’re awesome. You have the strength, smoothness, and intelligence already. It’s done, you’ve already achieved your goals! Congrats!” (Galvanizer — Good Medicine)

An example of how Powerful Good Medicine and Bad Medicine Langauge Is.
Sub 5-Minute Mile: When I was 16, I broke 5 minutes in the mile. I accomplished this because I eliminated draggers (Bad Medicine people) and listening to galvanizers (Good Medicine people). Hold up.  Hold the presses.  Can you believe that?!  I’m tell you, people, this is amazing stuff.  Eliminating draggers and listening to galvanizers was more potent than any kind of adrenaline, steroid, crap drug booster could ever have done.  This is medicine!  By eliminating draggers and listening to galvanizers, I was able to move my physically revolutionize not just my sense of self, but my physiology, body, and body-mind connection.  Now this was not just a “well I felt a bit more uppity”.  No,  I mathematically increased my performance massively.  And using the galvanizer, neutral, and toxic (GNT) categories of people medicine instantly transcribes to improving the relationships, career, organization, and health areas of your entire life, too. So, onward with this anecdote.

I was sick and then went to school late, hopped in a van and simply didn’t listen to the teammates that ridiculed my talk of surfing. The coach and a few other people entertained (Good Medicine) my talk of surfing, so when we arrived at the meet, I busted out in the mile and was so exhilarated (not weighed down by Bad Medicine people) that I stayed in front of EVERYONE for the first 3.75 laps of the entire race!  In the remaining 300m 2 people passed me, and then I passed up one of the two people who had passed me, and took second in the mile!  I knocked over 30 seconds off my previous time of 5:23, got a 4:51 minute mile, lead the entire first 93% of the race, and got a second place medal — ALL, ALL, ALL because I chose to listen to galvanizers and ignore toxic draggers!!!!!! Make that choice, people!  It’s an awesome one!   I was NEVER able to do that again. I talked with a friend about how my color visual percetion literally changed to “blue”.  My entire visual field was blue for the entire run!  So the impact of galvanizers changed how I literally, optically, saw the world!   My friend joked that it was called “going unconscious” which is what happens to basketball players a lot — a kind of zen state of satori.  And that may have well been the state I was in, but we’re focusing on the cause, and the cause was because of applying these people medicine principles! Now, I was never able to do that again, Not because of lack of running talent or physiological skill, but because I failed to make an incision and surgically remove the draggers from my life and only have galvanizers. But look what happened when I dealt with good and bad medicine appropriately: I literally “grew wings” and broke an athletic barrier I never thought possible! You will grow your wings, too, upon eliminating bad medicine and creating good medicine in your life!

Cross Country : The Bad Medicine example. Well this was two years after the appropropriate usage of good medicine and eliminating bad medicine that enabled me to break 5 minutes in the mile. Every single race I did (which was around 20) my senior year, when I thought I should’ve had the most athletic talent possible, I sucked! Why? Because so much Bad Medicine people had infected my life. I became depressed and my entire finesse and agility suffered and I became drained.

A Quick Note on Suffering: Everyone thinks that suffering is this epic religious struggle of Jesus walking in the sand for 40 days, or fasting, or some kind of human sacrificing…Blah Blah. Struggle and Suffering is the Product of having Bad Medicine people and language in your life and not Eliminating them. The Cessation of suffering is learning to eliminate Bad Medicine people and maintain Good Medicine People!

So let’s focus on HOW to do that!

We talked about the Address Book categorization. GREAT! Identifying and properly labeling (think of this like GTDing people instead of just papers!) Process people, baby! Okay, awesome, this is exciting and liberating.

Step 1 : Identify and Label (Good, Bad, Neutral Medicine)
Step 2: Appropriately Respond based on Causality.

If you get a phone call from someone you’ve already identified you should have three responses.

1. Respond to Bad Medicine — Hang up. Delete the Voicemail.
2. Respond to Good Medicine — Take the Call, or make a note to return the call (after all this type of person has a positive effect on you!)
3. Respond to Neutral Medicine — Optionally return the call or email.
4. Respond to Unidentified Contact — This is what will be most common. You have not yet identified someone as good, bad, or neutral medicine. How do you deal with that? One way is NEVER take the call or answer the email until you’ve evaluated. This is the safest. You can see why jumping on the ball and getting this down will bring tremendous certainty!

The Wisdom of Flexibility: Be open and be flexible to them changing. Be open and flexible to the people changing. You have to be open to flexibility.  But not too much flexibility because you cannot be evaluating a person everytime you interact with them.

So let’s do this:

You have to define success in order to experience success.

Dealing with Emails:

One solution is channeling all the contacts from different email address! It’s so easy to have different accounts these days. If someone because Bad Medicine, ensure that they start sending email to your other account (just tell them you changed your address, which is fine because in your mind through the cognitively essentially judgmental label, you HAVE changed your address with them!). And then have an account for neutral, good medicine, and finally a catchall for unidentified contacts. Great! That way, when you log into each account you’ll know to expect bad, neutral, good, or unidentified medicine. Sweet!

1. Step One: Go through ALL contacts and just put each one into 1 of the 3 categories
2. Step Two: Respond appropriately.
3. Step Three: If you get an unidentified contact (Which will be frequently), do not take the call nor email untill you’ve properly identified them.
4. Step Four: Grow wings and live a more complete life!

Part two of the People Medicine Install Kit, is here.