Archive for the ‘Stimulus Space Response’ Category

#Decisive

Posted: February 7, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
2/6/2014

Making good decisions is a basic part of life, but certainly not an easy one. If everyone made the decisions that are best for them consistently, well the world would certainly be a different place.  Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath seeks to help people make better decisions in life and business.  It is a personal development book based upon science rather than spirituality. I recommend Decisive, for the same reason I recommend Willpower and The Power of Habit.  All three are personal development/ self help books for people who don’t like self help books.  All three are based completely on empirical, peer reviewed, scientific research and kill the idea that self help books are new age, rah rah, think positive and you’ll become rich that has stigmatized the genre since the 1980s.

The key concept in Decisive is the W.R.A.P Method which stands for;

  1. Widen your options
  2. Reality test your assumptions
  3. Attain some distance
  4. Prepare to be wrong

The other concepts of the book that are very useful are confirmation bias, pre mortem, trip wires, and loss aversion. Each of which can go a long way to helping a person think more independently, separated from pride one’s pride, ego, and personal bias.

The book encourages a person to always look for at least one alternative to their original idea. In a business setting, the following three questions are encouraged to be asked;

  1. What would I tell my best friend to do?
  2. If I got fired, what would my successor do?
  3. What would have to be true for each option to be right?

As with every book, the devil is in the details. The seven things I have listed above alone can provide a baseline of help. Though the credibility as to why they are helpful are explained in detail by citing research and studies over the course of many years.

This book will help you. The processes the book gives can be plugged into the space between stimulus and response to help any person utilize the space after the stimulus, in order to produce a response of dignity, maturity, and with the end in mind.

Definitely recommended for the anti personal development person we all know. Or anyone who can admit to themselves that we all need help making better decisions in our personal and professional lives.

A New Earth, A New Life

Posted: January 31, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
1/31/2014

Very few things have happened to me that I consider genuinely life changing. Listening to the audio book for A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle is one of them.

There was immediate change as well in terms of how I viewed my own life, as well as the lives of others. That wore off after a few months, but the seeds for long lasting permanent change had been planted.  Present moment awareness, resistance as an emotion, the ego, reading the sign posts of the universe, letting go, and mental noise are concepts taught in this book that I am eternally grateful and better for learning.

I know I would be lost without this book. It is no magic pill, because there is no such thing. It did fill in huge pieces of the puzzle of life for me.  This book brought me to year zero in terms of being who I wanted to be and living the life I wanted to live. This book is the salt of the Earth. This book allowed me to feel calm, ready, and willing to accept I had to tear it down and start from scratch.

How I came by this book? It was thanks to The Game by Neil Strauss.  The villain of that nonfiction book is a man named Owen Cook, who was going by Tyler Durden at that time (yes named after Fight Club Tyler Durden.) When Owen’s life came crashing down around him after The Game came out and painted him in a very negative light, and the negative financial repercussions that came with it, he started getting into spirituality.  A New Earth turned his life around and his most successful piece of self help material he personally created The Blueprint Decoded was built on a foundation of the concepts in A New Earth.

A vast majority of the Blueprint stuff was deep level stuff.  Well below the surface layer of pick up lines and traditional social dynamics material.  An audience member at the four day seminar where Blueprint was recorded talked about changing his college major after reading A New Earth. I was in college at the time and figured I would check it out.  Wow am I glad I did. My major didn’t change.  But the way I perceived basically everything that happened to me did.  How I looked at other human beings changed. How I looked at the world changed.  How I looked at concepts like coincidence, serendipity, chance, luck, reaction, interpretation, breathing, the thought process all changed forever.

In the future I will detail those changes more specifically.  The greatest gifts were a gift of calmness both in the face of adversity and good times.  An awareness of where my thoughts come from.  Better clarity on the human condition.  The struggle of the ego versus the soul that is waged inside of all of us, all day, every day.  A New Earth started the remodel by tearing it all down including knowing a new foundation had to be engineered.  The Game by Neil Strauss gave me the idea change was needed.  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey was what would serve as the new foundation. More to come on those next time.

Tap the #Source, Create the Space

Posted: January 25, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
1/24/2013

You’ve probably heard of the Law of Attraction by now.  The Secret by Rhonda Byrne as publicized by Oprah has made it almost impossible to not know what the Law of Attraction is.

Think of The Secret as Tumblr of self help/personal development books. The is essentially reblogging of material that is hundreds if not thousands of years old. However, she mostly just reblogged (in book and movie form) the works of Charles Haanel.

To me, personally, The Secret came off as naive, pretentious, and new age selfish.  Another famous Law of Attraction book by Jerry and Ester Hicks came across as to me as borderline deranged.  Tapping the Source is put in plain language. It is explained thoroughly and simply. The main points are repeated throughout the book to hammer them home.  It is one of the few books I recommend to every human being to read.

The main points of the book involve thinking positively, visualizing specific goals as if they have been achieved, AND feeling positive emotions while thinking/visualizing the positive thoughts.  Attaching the feeling(s) to the thought(s) is what most people miss/forget about the Law of Attraction. Without the specific visualization and physical emotional state attached to it, thinking positive is essentially useless.

The other principle the book is centered upon is saying specific “focus phrases” while meditating.  A person should get into a meditative/prayer state (which is more than just sitting down with your eyes closed) and say each of the following in order:

  1. I choose to focus enjoyably inward
  2. My mind is quiet, I am now in the silence
  3. I am open to receive guidance from my source
  4. I know what I want
  5. I feel connected with creative power
  6. My vision is right now perfect and complete
  7. Each new moment is manifesting my dream

The book offers very detailed and specific guidance for why each focus phrase individually and collectively are important to say.  Tapping the Source is essentially an update of Haanel’s own 1912 book The Master Key System.  If you are looking to turn your life around or fine tune your success this book is what you’re looking for. It is a great starting point because it has been a starting point for every self help author for the last century.  Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Tony Robbins, etc all use Haanel’s work as primary source material. That is what initially attracted me to the book. I wanted to know what the self help guru’s were reading and using to create their material.  If it is good enough for them, it’s good enough for you and me. This book will help to create a solid foundation for which you can build a palace of personal development upon.

#AK47 Creator Caused Death, Faced it & Repented

Posted: January 15, 2014 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional, Excess and Algorithms, Stimulus Space Response
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by @anarchyroll
1/14/2014

Who is Mikhail Kalashnikov? He invented the AK 47? The most notorious gun the world by a mile with the magnum 357, M16, and M4 with grenade launcher bringing up the rear. Nothing comes with the realm as the AK 47, just ask any fan of the James Bond franchise.

Kalashnikov died last month at the age of 91, a very very very very wealthy man. He had that military contractor money, aka fat stacks to the sky. He had that, all the money in the world, kind of money. He has the go to military arms dealer during the height of the cold war. So why is this the first line in a letter her wrote to a priest “”The pain in my soul is unbearable.” ???

A man who wasn’t just rich but wealthy, a hero’s hero to his country. Pain in his soul?

Because facing death makes one look back on life more independently, because we separate from our ego as we enter or complete the final chapter of our physical lives. Kalashnikov always knew deep in his soul he was making money literally from murder, death, and destruction. He knew he made the world a worse place while making his fortune.

I personally think anyone who works on Wall Street, for an oil/gas company, for a utility company, fast food company, tobacco firm, or as a lobbyist should read his quotes and wonder if they will think they same of themselves when they eventually die. People who make money polluting the earth, gauging people for money for basic elements of survival, make people sick and/or unhealthy, and influence legislation at the expense of the many for the sake of the few. What will they think of themselves, their lives, legacies when they are inevitably on their death bed?

This isn’t just CEOs, this goes all the way down to the clerks. Whether religious or not, none of us escape death, and we need not worry about St. Peter we need only about the last time we look in the mirror. We are responsible for our legacies. All the money in the world cannot buy one’s way into heaven or piece of mind and spirit when we are about to die.

Kalashnikov’s quote made me think about beginning with the end in mind, a principle of Stephen Covey. It made me think about the quest to have a comfortable living and peace of mind. It made me think about tribal society and how we’re all in this together whether we want it to be that way or not.  It made me think hedge fund managers, shady investment bankers, private military contractors will eventually think and feel what Kalashnikov thought on his death bed. What does it make you think of?

#Habits & #Willpower

Posted: January 14, 2014 in Stimulus Space Response
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ssrlogo2by @anarchyroll
1/13/2014

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which came first habits or willpower? I suppose since everything we think, believe, and do is a habit…I’m going with habits for now.

I recently listened to the audiobooks for both titles pictured above and recommend them as passionately as I can possibly recommend a physical object to another human being. These are two books based not on rah rah, psych up, self help,  new age methods that some people (not me) would classify as BS or useless. Both of these books are based completely upon scientific, peer reviewed research spanning decades. The results are fascinating, almost as much as it is empowering.

The material covered answered a lot of questions I had about myself and about the human experience. Namely why we do what we do. Both books provided clarity and in the case of The Power of Habit specific answers. Have you heard the phrase, “everything we do is a muscle”? Substitute muscle for habit and you have the basis for the book. I will have much more to write about both of these books and their practical applications in my own life in the future because both have given me practical help right away and have sewn the seeds for long term change.

The two things I found most fascinating and immediately help are the “everything is a habit” paradigm and the scientific fact that willpower is limited and directly tied to glucose levels in the bloodstream.

Both these books provided great deals of hope for me that I can change, I can always change for the better AND for the worse. It really cemented why discipline and consistency is so important in life. It made me realize how unexceptional I am for the better. That I have unique talents, but without consistent dedication to cultivating the uniqueness on a habitual basis, then I am just another faceless, talentless, unexceptional grunt of a human being on an over populated planet. The books helped tie together a lot of the unscientific self help material I have been reading for the past few years. A cherry on top in a way. Both helped put my maturation into manhood and adulthood on fast forward, after years of being stuck in either reverse or slow motion, and for that I am happy and grateful to the authors, and recommend both titles to you.

Namaste.

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