mastery.fm – Page 23 – caffeine for the mind & spirit

Surprise Me

A few times people have asked my advice on giving TED talks. And here it is, here is my advice in five seconds: cut out everything that isn’t suprising.

People watch TED talks in order to learn something. And if they’re not surprised, they’re not learning. If you’re just telling them, “Well, this, and I did this, and I grew up here…” You haven’t surprised them. You haven’t made their eyebrows go up. So they haven’t really learned anything.

Instead, look at whatever message you want to give, whatever story you want to tell, and then just erase every single line of it that isn’t surprising. And what you’re left with is a short, succint, surprising thing that someone can actually learn from.

That’s why my book is only 88 pages. It’s cause at every paragraph, I cut out everything that I felt other people say, that’s been heard before, that isn’t surprising… and I just focused only on the sentences, the paragraphs that were actually surprising.

Teller (Penn & Teller):

Here’s a compositional secret.

It’s so obvious and simple, you’ll say to yourself, “This man is bullshitting me.” I am not. This is one of the most fundamental things in all theatrical movie composition and yet magicians know nothing of it. Ready?

Surprise me.

Steve Pavlina:

If you do what people expect of you, you’re reinforcing the patterns they’ve already learned, so they won’t remember you. If people don’t remember you, they can’t refer anyone to you.

Expectations are always changing. Some of the things I did that violated expectations in the past would now be considered more commonplace. So you have to keep looking at what others are doing today — and then DON’T do what they’re doing! Do what others are unwilling or unable to do. If you wish to create work that stands out, you cannot attempt to fit in.

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Clarity

Steve Pavlina:

Clarity isn’t something that arrives from outside of you. Clarity isn’t a matter of luck either. Clarity is what you create for yourself.

Clarity is a decision.

Whatever degree of clarity you’re experiencing right now is what you’ve decided to create. Not deciding still counts as a decision; in that case it’s the decision to remain uncertain.

Clarity-boosting patterns:

Hanging out with clear, focused people who can tell you their purpose and direction
Living with people whose goals and values align well with yours
Feeding your mind with inspirational and motivational material like quality books and audio programs
Eating healthy, unrefined foods (especially fruits and veggies, fresh juices, and smoothies) that keep your mind sharp and alert
Avoiding stimulants that cause swings in your thoughts and emotions
Thinking about your goals and the next actions you can take today

On creating the vibe of clarity:

Clarity is a certain vibe. When you’re really clear, you can sense that vibe through every cell of your being. Your mind and emotions are centered. Every part of you is on the same page. There’s no doubt or uncertainty. This is a powerful state of being to experience.

Sit quietly for a few moments and imagine what it’s like to hold the vibe of total clarity. Imagine what your surroundings would look like if you were really clear about your direction in life right now. Imagine the people and circumstances that would be in your reality. Imagine how you’d dress, how you’d move, and how you’d communicate with others. Paint a vivid picture of a reality — any reality — in which you feel crystal clear about your direction in life.

What matters isn’t the specific visualization you create. What matters is the vibe you experience. You can imagine yourself as an ancient Roman conqueror as long as it helps you hold the vibe of clarity. Do this for at least 10-20 minutes per day until the clarity vibe feels normal and natural to you. The more you practice holding this vibe, the more clarity you’ll bring to the rest of your life and to all the decisions you make.

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The Things That Matter

Lisa Brennan-Jobs:

We spend our lives so much just trying to get comfortable… and I think that’s the last thing that matters to the soul.

On your deathbed, the last thing you might say is, “Maybe I didn’t love or I didn’t work, but I was comfortable.” I don’t think you’d say that.

What you want to know on your deathbed is nothing about comfort. It’s something like, “Did I love the people I loved? Did I really love the people I loved? And did I do the work that I felt meant to do? Not someone else’s work, but my work.”

And those two things don’t have anything to do with sheet thread count, or how comfortable you are, or how big your house is.

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Freedom from Your Past Self

Alan Watts:

You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago.

Steve Pavlina:

I have the freedom to create a present moment that is disloyal to my past in a purely linear sense. I do not have to identify myself based on my history if I see that it no longer serves me to do so.

And:

You’re perfectly capable of defining, creating, and then holding a vibe that’s completely out of sync with your current physical reality. This is precisely what conscious growth is.

Many people seem to believe they can’t do this, but they can. You do it whenever you change the channel on the TV or switch to a different website. It’s as easy as pushing a button. You simply shift your attention from one experience to another.

This is how you shift from scarcity to abundance. Commit to leaving the whole scarcity movie behind. Ignore it completely. Change your attention channel to abundance.

When you walk out, feel free to make a stink about it: “Scarcity, you suck! Worst movie I’ve ever seen. So repetitive and boring. I want a refund. Zero stars!”

And:

Stop putting your attention on what you don’t want, and put your attention on what you do want. Acknowledge the reality you want to create more than the one you wish to leave behind.

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Prime Your Brain

Steve Pavlina on priming your brain:

Your brain is always bouncing around between linked associations. It does this in parallel, subconsciously, all the time. There are countless new neuroscience books sharing more and more details about how the brain does this. The simple truth is that the vast majority of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur without your conscious awareness or conscious involvement.

The lesson here is that seemingly subtle influences matter. If your senses perceive it, your brain is processing it. And this processing is seldom isolated. One little change in input can create significant ripples throughout your neural net. And this in turn can have a significant influence on the results you get to experience.

And:

Your brain is incredibly powerful — and highly programmable. Your brain is constantly being programmed by your environment. You may not be able to overpower your brain by conscious effort in this moment, but you can change its ongoing influences, starting today. Start feeding your mind new input that aligns with your desires. Trigger it to keep activating the associations you desire to activate most frequently. And remove those influences that you no longer wish to activate. If this means that you have to kick an overly negative person out of your life because they’re frequently priming you for negative thinking, then do that.

Don’t fret about what you can’t do yet. Think improvement, not perfection. You can always do something. So do that one thing now. Then make another improvement. And another. And all the while, you’ll be benefitting from the stacking improvements you’ve made previously. This will build momentum in a very positive direction.

See also: Daily Conditioning and Keep Going

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Oumuamua and Solar Sails

Oumuamua

Fascinating interview (archive) with Avi Loeb, head of Harvard’s astronomy department and author of the Oumuamua research paper that swept the interwebs last year:

The “spaceship” in question is called Oumuamua. For those who don’t keep up with space news, Oumuamua is the first object in history to pass through the solar system and be identified as definitely originating outside of it.

Avi Loeb:

“What we have, then, is a thin, flat, shiny object. So I arrived at the idea of a solar sail: A solar sail is a spaceship that uses the sun for propulsion. Instead of using fuel, it is propelled ahead by reflecting light. In fact, it’s a technology that our civilization is developing at this very time.”

(…)

“We have no way of knowing whether it’s active technology, or a spaceship that is no longer operative and is continuing to float in space. But if Oumuamua was created together with a whole population of similar objects that were launched randomly, the fact that we discovered it means that its creators launched a quadrillion probes like it to every star in the Milky Way. Of course, the randomness is significantly reduced if we assume that Oumuamua was a reconnaissance mission that was deliberately sent to the inner solar system – namely, to the habitable region where life would be feasible. But we need to remember that humanity didn’t broadcast anything tens of thousands of years ago, when the object was still in interstellar space. They didn’t know there was intelligent life here. Which is why I think it’s just a fishing expedition.”

And:

“It’s possible that space is filled with sails like these and we just don’t see them. We only saw Oumuamua because this is the first time we’ve had technology that’s sensitive enough to identify objects of a few dozen to hundreds of meters in size from the illumination of the sun. In three years, the building of the LSST telescope will be completed. It will be far more sensitive than Pan-STARRS and certainly we will see many more objects that originate outside the solar system. Then we’ll find out whether Oumuamua is an anomaly or not.”

And:

“Today, thanks to the Kepler Space Telescope, we know that there are more planets like Earth than there are grains of sand on all the shores of all the seas.”

(…)

“The search for extraterrestrial life is not speculation. It’s a lot less speculative than the assumption that there is dark matter – invisible matter that constitutes 85 percent of the material in the universe. The dark matter hypothesis is part of the mainstream of astrophysics – and it is speculation. Life [elsewhere] in the universe is not speculation, for two reasons: (a) We exist on Earth; and (b) There are a great many more places that have physical conditions similar to Earth.”

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Longevity, Telomeres, and Social Bonds

How much does social interaction influence how long we live? In Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body, Jo Marchant looks into the “Blue Zones” of the world — regions where people tend to live longer than elsewhere.

Living nearby was 99-year-old Francesca Castillo, who cut her own wood and twice a week walked a mile into town. And there was 102-year-old Ofelia Gómez Gómez, who lived with her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren. When Buettner’s team visited, she recited from memory a six-minute poem by Pablo Neruda. All of the elderly people they saw were still mentally, physically and socially active, despite their advanced age.

(…)

The team reported in 2013 that Nicoyans’ telomeres are indeed longer than those of other Costa Ricans. Their impressive life expectancy isn’t a statistical fluke but a real biological effect, in which their cells look younger than expected for their age. The size of the effect was equivalent to changes caused by behavioral factors such as physical exercise or smoking.

To investigate why the Nicoyans’ telomeres are so long, Rosero-Bixby and Rehkopf analyzed the effects of everything from the residents’ physical health and level of education to their consumption of fish oils. Diet makes no apparent difference, and the Nicoyans are worse off than other Costa Ricans when it comes to health measures such as obesity and blood pressure. Their slower aging doesn’t seem to be a consequence of genes either — Nicoyans lose their longevity advantage if they move from the region. And it isn’t money: richer individuals actually have shorter telomeres.

But there are some clues. Rehkopf and Rosero-Bixby found that Nicoyans are less likely than other Costa Ricans to live alone, and more likely to have weekly contact with a child. Such social connection seems crucial. The telomere length difference is halved among Nicoyans who don’t see a child each week, and if they live alone, they lose their advantage completely.

Other studies have found that Nicoyans have greater psychological attachment to family than residents of Costa Rica’s capital, San José. So Rehkopf and Rosero-Bixby speculate that close family ties might protect Nicoyans against life stress that would otherwise shorten telomeres. Despite their poverty, strong social bonds keep them young.

And:

After adjusting for age and other risk factors, adults who reported fewer social relationships and activities were around twice as likely to die over the next decade. Their lack of social bonds, it seemed, was killing them early.

(…)

In 2010, U.S. researchers analyzed 148 studies following more than 308,000 people and concluded that lacking strong social bonds doubles the risk of death from all causes. That confirms House’s finding that in Western societies, at least, social isolation is as harmful as drinking and smoking, and suggests that it is actually more dangerous than lack of exercise or obesity.

Of course, when we have social support, we live more healthily. We have someone to cook us meals, take us to the doctor and nag us not to drink or smoke. This has a powerful effect, but the difference in death rates persists even after accounting for it. People who have warm relationships, rich social lives, and who feel like they are embedded in a group “don’t get as sick, and they live longer,” says Charles Raison, a psychiatry professor and mind-body medicine researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s probably the single most powerful beahvioral finding in the world.”

And:

Compared to the 1950s, they pointed out, U.S. adults in the 1970s were less likely to belong to voluntary organizations, less likely to visit informally with others and more likely to live alone.

(…)

According to the 2011 census, 32 million people in the country now live alone; that’s 27% of households, up from 17% in 1970. When researchers asked a representative sample of Americans in 1985 how many confidantes they had, the most popular answer was three. When the study was repeated in 2004, the most popular answer — given by 25% of respondents — was none.

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Moving Towards Happiness

Reddit user @werd_the_ogrecl shares some advice on overcoming depression:

I learned several things that helped me understand sadness and depression in college. Those small assumptions helped me a lot and continue to help me everyday. I would say I went from being constantly depressed to being extremely happy with my life. It took time.

– Every negative thing you feel can be attributed to you moving away from a goal. Once you learn what is at stake and move towards it, you then have some control over happiness. (source: Richard Lazerus, Goal Congruent & Goal Incongruent contexts)

– Depression is simply prolonged sadness devoid of hope, that signifies that you PERCEIVE you have limited control over your circumstances. Either address your perception or your circumstances. Understand that somewhere a person in a similar situation is happy. What is the difference between you and that person? You have to take an active role in making yourself happy even if you don’t want to. Motivation starts with you, don’t feel entitled to happiness. Happiness is hard work that rewards itself.

– You are allowed to feel however you want to feel, you are not allowed to feel that alone. You are only as strong as your supports. If you don’t have supports, take steps to build a support base, or address the reason you don’t have one. Either way, you moving towards that goal will make you feel much better.

– Make a list called “Shit that would make my life easier.” This list could contain plastic flatware to avoid dishes occasionally, that end table you are missing or any other thing that helps regulate your environment with consistency. If you are worried about your environment you’re not thinking about the things that could make you happy. That’s why that list is important

– Make sure your basic needs are met EVERY SINGLE TIME, food, water and most of all support.

– If you are lonely seek support from a friend, understand that loneliness is different than depression. Everyone will feel lonely, we are social animals a good friend or a good person in general will be able to comfort you and relate to your situation.

– Set aside one hour every day, where you must be active. If you have a smartphone, jump on a treadmill and place your phone on the rest in front of you, and walk while you watch a show on Netflix. You won’t even think about it, because its not a chore and will make you feel much better.

– Laugh a lot, find people that make you laugh that are not dickheads. Secondary to this, recognize which friends perpetuate negativity and which ones help you in the long run. This is very important, don’t let anyone stand in the way of your growth, life is too short to feel shitty about yourself and the people you associate with.

– Recognize that no one is perfect including yourself. Don’t be critical of others and don’t be critical of yourself.

– Surround yourself with at least 10 things you have created that you are proud of.

– Make a small list called “My Fucking Problems”. On that list write down whats bothering you the most and don’t let anyone see it. Write three partial or full solutions for each thing on that list. Dedicate one day a month to aggressively eliminate each thing on that list. Half measures won’t cut it, you won’t fail because you won’t give up. And not giving up over time will give you a sense of security knowing that nothing will slow you down or stop you.

– Try not to perceive your world in black and white terms, people will disappoint you and you will disappoint yourself if everything has to fit in emotional cubbyholes. Instead recognize when someone (or yourself) approximates a behavior. That is much more important than not seeing it at all. Most of all be pleased that you are making the journey and smile knowing that it doesn’t end, but doesn’t have to be a chore.

– Above all else be honest with yourself and be honest with others. You can bullshit all day long but recognize that if you bullshit yourself you become the problem not the solution.

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Life & Meaning

Bob Borrough:

What is the meaning of life?

Wrong question. What are you doing to fill your life with meaning?

Reddit user @atouchofclass:

The importance of setting routines and daily habits is because they are what gets you out of bed in the morning. Having daily, weekly, and monthly goals are what gives your life meaning. Life is meaningless, SO GIVE IT MEANING. It wasn’t until I consciously started setting myself goals that life started to make sense.

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Creativity

Elizabeth Gilbert, on the Good Life Project podcast:

I always say this, because I always marvel at this: Any act of pure creativity is the most irrational thing you can possibly do with your time. You’re going to have an existential crisis, because it doesn’t make any sense.

Let me break it down to you, what this guy is about to do; if he says “yes” to the thing that ignited him. He’s about to take the single most precious thing he possesses: which is his time. We’re mortal. We have a very short amount of time here. And how you spend that time matters. And what you give it to has enormous consequences in your life. We’re deeply aware of the ticking clock.

He’s going to take the one thing that can never be replaced — which is his hours and days and months of his short mortal life — and he’s going to devote an enormous amount of energy and resources and power and trouble to creating something that nobody wants or needs. That nobody has asked him to do. It is a fundamentally really weird thing to do.

So, why in the world would you do that?

And I guess it’s because, when the moment that you do leave the party comes, you’re not going to be lying in your bed saying: “Man… it was so short, my visit here on Earth. Why didn’t I do the thing that ignited me to life? Because that was actually the only thing. And the rest of it, and all those rational ideas of stuff that was more important, I don’t even remember what that stuff is now. Why didn’t I do that thing? Why didn’t I do that thing I was called to do?”

I never want to be in that position. I want to be in the position where I can say: “I did all that stuff. I said yes again and again and again… to the irrational plan, rather than the rational one.”

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