Daily Living Series Articles

Communicating In An Imperfect World

  Have you ever been speaking with someone and thought to yourself: Wow, they just don’t get what I am saying. They must be from another planet! Or Man, I can’t make myself any clearer. How can they not understand me. They must be an idiot. In a perfect world our communications would go something like this: I have a chunk of meaning I want to pass on to someone...

   Ayoung man went to his grandfather for advice. The grandfather puffed on his pipe and listened as the young man described how hard and difficult his life was.  Nothing seemed to be going well for him. As hard as he tried, as soon as he solved one of his life’s problem another one would immediately rise up.  The young man told his grandfather he was tired of...

The French philosopher René Descartes (1596-1650) developed a concept of mind and body that came to be known as Dualism. The mind was thought to be non-material, not subject to the laws of nature, while the body was thought to be like a machine. Dualism holds that there is a rigid distinction between the mind and the body or matter. The mind can interact with the...

Blunder # 3 –  Lots of ideas  – No plan.     Part 4 – The Cloudy Crystal Ball looked at how to set up a S.M.A.R.T. goal as a way of achieving your New Year’s Resolution. Recall that the acronym S.M.A.R.T. stands for: Specific Measureable Achievable Realistic Timed   Your S.M.A.R.T. goal needs to: Be stated in the positive...

Part 4 – Blunder # 2 – The Cloudy Crystal Ball Part 3 three discussed how the RAS works and how it can either help or hinder us in achieving our resolutions. This showed that it was far better to have one resolution to focus on rather than having a “laundry list” of New Year’s Resolutions. The second Big Blunder that people make with the New Year’s...

  PART 3 – Blunder # 1 – The Laundry List In Part 2 we saw that the RAS is a part of the brain that acts as a pattern recognition system and filter, only allowing through to the conscious mind those things that it deems important.  We also saw that, unlike our reptilian ancestors, whose RAS was predominantly hard wired to respond only to a certain...

PART 2 – The Reptilian Brain and New Year’s Resolutions   In Part 1 it was noted that research shows that the vast majority of people are unsuccessful in achieving their New Year’s resolutions. This part will explore how a specific part of the brain helps or hinders us in achieving our resolutions. The first thing to really understand is that it is the...

Part 1 – The Big New Year’s Resolution Fail The New Year’s Resolution List The concept of making resolutions at the beginning of a new year dates back several thousand years. The ancient Babylonians made promises to their gods at the start of each year to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. The Romans started each year by making promises to the...

How many times have you heard someone say, “Just put your mind to it,” or “if you have enough will power you can do anything.” Many people believe they could improve their lives if only they had more of that mysterious thing called willpower. With more willpower they could eat right, exercise regularly, avoid drugs and alcohol, save for retirement, stop...

Lou Adler in his post “Why Good People Underperform”, 20 Oct 2015 points out several reasons why he believes this is true. “They’re not motivated to do the actual work required since the job they’re being asked to perform after being hired was ill-defined before they were hired. Being competent to do something is not the same as being motivated to do it. Being...

As Yoda explained: “There is no such thing as TRY. There is only DO or NOT DO.”  To “try” and do something is to admit that you have already failed. You can’t try to pick up a coffee cup. You either pick it up or you don’t. And so it is with life. You either do things or you don’t. And it is our own choice to do or not do things in our lives. No one else’s. We...

I was reading Jian Shuo Wang’s (CEO at Baixing) post “Should I follow your rules or Should You Follow Mine? on linked in the other day. (The post can be found here.) The gist of the post was that he hired a contractor to do some masonry work and the contractor and he didn’t get along very well. He was on the verge of firing the contractor when a friend...