Information, inspiration and resources for a better life

A friend of mine recommended The Story of Stuff website and I think you’ll be well served if you decide to view this site too. Watch the 20-minute video of the inspiring Annie Leonard. She clearly and brilliantly walks you through the chain of events in our current consumerism society, highlighting the downside of continuing on that path. Then she points out what we can begin doing to make a difference in our lives, the lives of others, and our planet. Please treat yourself and spend 20 minutes viewing this video. It’s worth it.

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Last night I was watching a recording of the brilliant musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim. What an amazing work of theater it is. If you like musical theater and haven’t seen it, I recommend it.

One of the lines in the show struck me as quite beautiful in its clear summation of why our individual uniqueness is so beautiful.

The prettier the flower, the farther from the path.

Isn’t that great? It says it so nicely. Flowers are all unique. No two are alike. And to point out that the most beautiful flowers (people) are those farther from the path (conformity) really made the point in a meaningful way to me. I thought I’d pass it on to you. Enjoy your day, and remember you too are a beautiful flower and you shouldn’t fear straying from the path of conformity because that’s where your beauty will blossom best.

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Achieving Happiness by Moving from a Quantitative to a Qualitative Mindset

Western society is obsessed with counting. We count everything. Money. Personal and business achievements. Educational recognitions. Possessions. And what we don’t count in specific amounts we judge based on a scale that is, essentially, counting. How attractive is someone? How prestigious is a job? What is the class level of our friends? These are all ways to count things in order to assign value to them. I contend that this it not the way to live if you want to be happy.

Rather than count things (quantitative thinking), I propose another perspective on living by instead placing more value on the actual experience and how something feels (qualitative thinking). It’s more important that you like your job and feel it has value to society than having a fancy title and getting a huge salary. It’s more important that you enjoy your home and the possessions it contains than how much they’re worth monetarily.

There are some things in life we already tend to judge qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Imagine you’re eating a wonderful meal. When you describe to someone how much you enjoyed it, do you assign some sort of quantified number to it? No, you simply describe it as a wonderful experience. When you have great sex, do you rank and rate it against other sexual experiences? Hopefully not. Hopefully you embraced the sexual encounter completely and enjoyed it for the experience it was.

As you go through your day, try to catch yourself counting. Do you envy people who make a lot more money than you do? Do you look at a fancy car driving by and think that people would judge you differently if you drove such a vehicle? Do you look at your to do list and focus on getting as much done as possible rather than prioritizing and enjoying the important things you get done. I think you’ll be surprised how often we count and rank our life experiences. I’m going to try and stop doing this because I know it will make me happier. Perhaps it will do the same for you?

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“Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.”
Miguel de Unamuno

Everyone is out to sell you a system. Diet gurus sell countless weight loss systems. Fitness experts sell an endless array of exercise systems. Spiritual leaders sell systems to govern your views of God and spirituality. Business experts sell moneymaking and management systems. Cosmetic companies sell beauty systems. There’s no end to the systems you can buy.

What these folks don’t want you to know is that most of their systems are based on the same few principles. The systems may vary, but the principles remain the same. It’s the principles behind the systems that are ultimately what’s important, and what we should all focus on.

A simple example might help to illustrate this. Let’s say someone is trying to sell you an exercise system to build muscle strength and size. Maybe it’s a machine or device. Or maybe it’s a series of predefined movements. Regardless of the system, you can probably break down the system into its basic foundation principles. A muscle building system might look something like this when dissected to its essential and most basic underlying principles:

1. Apply resistance (weight) to your muscles using good form.
2. Do this consistently over time.
3. Slowly increase the resistance as your muscles adapt to the level of resistance.

That’s it! Every system of muscle development will apply these same basic principles in order to attain muscle strength and size. This muscle building example is an extremely simple one I know, but I use it to clearly illustrate that the countless systems can always be deduced to a small set of principles upon which those systems are based. And it’s those principles that we need to focus on, not the systems.

Systems often don’t conform well to the uniqueness of each individual using the system, and they are often attempts at easy fixes to complicated problems. Systems are typically solutions to a problem or need from only one person’s perspective.

Notice that I never urge you to avoid systems, merely to beware of them. There’s a big difference. Rather than avoid systems, feel free to learn about them to whatever degree you believe is helpful. Just don’t assume any system will apply to your life situation exactly. It won’t. Why? Because each one of us is truly unique. Everyone has a unique set of experiences, genetics, education, family history, and personal passions. Since this is the case, how can any system apply universally to all of us. No system can. When it comes to systems, one size does not fit all.

Systems are not bad. In fact, they’re helpful and sometimes necessary to meet our objectives. The danger is assuming someone else’s system fits your particular needs. We should all create our own personal systems.

Studying other systems can be helpful. Many systems were created after some thoughtful consideration by many wise people. Dissecting systems for those things that work well for you, and discarding those that don’t, and mixing in your own personally developed approaches that fit your own needs and situation, is a great way to come up with systems that work for you. This is how you achieve personal greatness, happiness and fulfillment. Using systems in this way is an intelligent way to view systems, as guides to understanding any system, or parts of systems, that work in your life.

We all need systems. Basic personal systems for those things we do repeatedly all through our lives. More complex personal systems to achieve what we want to achieve. It’s a well put together strategy of systems that comprises most of what we’ll do with a fulfilling life. But the key is that they have to be our systems that seem appropriate and relevant for us. Adopting someone else’s system with no consideration of adapting it to meet our unique needs is illogical. Illogical, but we all do it much too often.

You might do yoga as a form of exercise (a system) and really like it. You’ve explored other physical fitness systems and have decided that yoga is the right approach for you. That’s a sensible way to go about it. Or, you might just as well have decided you didn’t like yoga in its entirety, but you chose to use a few of the principles you learned in yoga in your own personal form of physical practice. No one approach is necessarily superior. Multiple systems can be equally effective in their own way.

I guess all I’m really saying is that we all need to respect our uniqueness enough to plan and act upon our lives through the prism of that uniqueness. I am often the first to absorb a system without the necessary scrutiny. My natural inclination seems to be to assume I’m the one who needs to adjust to a system rather than the other way around.

As I work on this in my own life, I welcome comments from anyone who might have thoughts about this post.

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Do we actually create our own happiness? Is our level of happiness really within our control regardless of our life situation? Do we overestimate how one particular life goal or outcome might improve our overall happiness over another goal or outcome? In Daniel Gilbert’s TED presentation, evidence he’s gathered suggests this is the case.

Daniel Gilbert also wrote the bestselling book Stumbling on Happiness in which he presents his contentions about how we synthesize happiness to truly create an internal happiness state regardless of the situations with which we might be presented in our lives. Gilbert contends that our brains consistently misjudge what will make us happy and we therefore end up being terrible predictors of what will actually make us happy.

So watch this video and take solace in knowing that, regardless of where you’re at in life right now or what challenges exist, ultimately we often seem to be able to arrive at a happy state of mind anyway. Hmm, I’m felling happier already writing this! Enjoy.

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This is a somewhat revised post that appears on my The Art of Self Education blog dedicated to providing information, inspiration and resources for adult self learners.

One of the important components of good life habits is the ability to focus. I don’t buy in too much to innate intelligence as the determining factor in whether someone can achieve. I’ve just seen too many instances of someone with what appeared to be average intelligence and skills excel far beyond others who supposedly had much more of both. I believe focus makes the difference. Someone who can truly focus on any aspect of their personal development is going to accomplish more than someone who is constantly distracted or multitasking.

Alan H. Cohen’s advice in his book, Why Your Life Sucks and What You Can Do About It, is one of the smartest bits of advice I’ve ever read in a self-improvement book. (It’s a great book by the way and I recommend it.) Here’s what he wrote.

The secret of genius is focus. If you can laser your attention on any subject or project, it will reveal its blueprint to you. George Washington Carver discovered 325 uses for the peanut and 100 for the sweet potato! Great geniuses are powerful focusers. Many have been called eccentric or insane because they put aside worldly concerns for the sake of their music, art, architecture, drama, inventing, or writing. But they are the individuals who change the world, while those with scattered attention wade through mediocre lives. Geniuses don’t fritter their precious minds on mass trends. They create the trends that alter the masses.

Cohen’s insight is so true and the focus he mentions, combined with tenacity and conviction, is an astoundingly powerful combination.

Recent research on the effects of multitasking back up the claim that focus is important and gives pause to those of us who are constantly emailing, tweeting, surfing, texting, watching television, playing video games and otherwise flitting constantly from thing to thing while we attempt to do something.

According to a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, heavy multitaskers are easily distracted by irrelevant information. A potential reason for this may be that people who multitask tend to retain all of that distracting, and often mundane, information in short-term memory. If your short-term memory is full of a lot of stuff that’s not relevant to the real tasks at hand, it affects your ability to focus.

So what can we learn from all this. When you want to accomplish something, focus on it. Set aside time to focus solely on whatever it is. If your environment is distracting, change it. Go to a library or anywhere you can best focus. Or find yourself some good noise-canceling headphones to create some privacy if you’re in a loud environment. No two of us are alike and what might be distracting surroundings to one person might be an atmosphere of solitude to another.

In addition to controlling the distractions within our environment, we need to minimize the distractions within ourselves. Whatever it takes to bring your focus to the objective of the moment, make that a part of your daily practice. Meditation might help. Taking care of those lagging chores or tasks on your to do list might free up your mind to focus on more important matters. Perhaps you can “trick” yourself into focusing by thinking of your self improvement efforts in 15-minute chunks of time. Whatever works for you, do it. The ability to focus is imperative if you’re going to maintain an effective life.

Remember what Peter McWilliams said, “Our thoughts create our reality – where we put our focus is the direction we tend to go.”

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In my previous The Uniqueness That Is You post, I talked about how important it is to celebrate your uniqueness.

Closely related to celebrating your uniqueness is understanding that, ultimately, only your opinion matters. Much of the suffering we force upon ourselves stems from our irrational need to impress others, even when those others are complete strangers. I put it this way:

Your happiness is in direct inverse proportion to how much you care what other people think.

Think about it for a moment. The more you care what other people think of you, your actions, your accomplishments, your possessions, your home, your looks, your whatever, the less happy you’ll be. On the other hand, the less you care about what people think about you, the happier you’ll be. It seems so simple, but in this conformist society of ours it’s not easy to brush off other people’s opinions. But you need to work at it. The better you get at not caring what others think, the happier you’ll be.

In Ernie J. Zelinski’s excellent book, The Lazy Person’s Guide to Success: How to Get What You Want without Killing Yourself for It, he illustrates well the need to think for yourself when he says “The hardest way to achieve success is to have someone else define it for you.” Zelinksi’s observations are so true. Remember to be you. Think for yourself. Define yourself. Never forget that ultimately, only your opinion matters. Embrace your uniqueness.

Every human being is different. No two of us are alike. Each is totally unique. While this may appear to be self-evident, it’s surprising how often we act contrary to this fact. On the one hand you’ll hear folks talk about uniqueness, individuality and the distinctive nature of everyone’s personality and essence. Yet on the other hand many of those same folks work incessantly, consciously or unconsciously, to categorize, pigeonhole and label people in an effort to restrain their uniqueness.

At the core of all self improvement work must be an acknowledgment that everyone is unique. A person’s innate nature, experiences, education and life situation all mix in a myriad of ways to produce an individual that is totally unique from anyone else. To not accept this truth is to begin all self improvement work from a foundation of falsehood, which can only lead to less than optimal results.

When people decide to improve themselves, either in generalized ways or in a specific area of life, they turn to many forms of help. They might seek out counseling, coaching or therapy. They might read a book or take a class. Support groups might be appealing. They might try meditation or spiritual guidance. (And perhaps they might read this blog.)

All of these forms of help can be valuable, but often they come from a place of bias or are based on a rigid system of thought or practice. A therapeutic approach might be based on only one perspective of the human condition. A book may contain information and advice heavily entrenched in the opinion of the author. Support groups are notorious for promoting a group think mentality that doesn’t tolerate dissension well. Meditation and spiritual practices can be based on a narrow interpretation of the divine.

All of this often leads to us caring far too much what all of these folks think about us. Resist this tendency. Forces surround you that will continually try to make you conform. Religions, schools of thought, physical disciplines, spiritual practices, educational institutions, social constructs, family, friends, and even our own habits and internally imprinted patterns are just a few of the forces that will inevitably exert pressure on you to conform, to the detriment of your individuality. Resist these forces. It is only your own path to self improvement, your own path to a better life, that is important. And your path won’t necessarily look like anyone else’s.

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“Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” Dr. Seuss

The pressure to conform is all around us. Our friends, families, employers, schools, religions, governments and organizations all take part in this pressure. Sometimes their participation isn’t conscious or intentional, but it’s pressure nonetheless and succumbing to that pressure is a guaranteed pathway to unhappiness. Remember this, always. You are unique! There is no one on earth exactly like you.

Our individual uniqueness shouldn’t be surprising. As a close friend of mine used to point out, all one has to do is look to nature to understand diversity and uniqueness. Look at snowflakes. Look at flowers. Look at trees. Look at mountains. Look at people’s faces. They are all 100% unique.

If these externals are unique, why would we think that our insides, our minds and hearts and needs, are the same. They’re not. They possess the same uniqueness as everything else in the world.

There’s no such thing as an average person. An average person does not exist. Each of us is unique and that uniqueness should be celebrated and fostered. When average human characteristics are discussed, what’s being discussed are statistical measures that can’t really be applied to an individual. How can you average character, bodies, psychology, education, values, ethics, family, social situation, lifestyle and other measures of what make up a person? You can’t.

Anytime we try to quantify or measure an individual’s makeup by any set of standards, they are destined to fall short. In spite of the pressure around all of us to all try to be the same, we just aren’t. And this is what makes life worth living. How boring if we truly all were the same. There would be nothing new to learn, explore or experience.

Even traditional psychotherapeutic strategies are increasingly embracing the concept of individual uniqueness. Transpersonal psychology, for example, attempts to embrace this more comprehensive view of human nature.

We must embrace our uniqueness. To do any less is to deny who you really are and the true nature of your self. You are the only person on the planet with the qualities you possess. It is only by fully embracing those qualities that you are able to be truly happy.

So what does this all mean? Be you! Don’t try to be who someone else thinks you should be. It is only by fully accepting your uniqueness, honoring it, embracing it, that you can attain maximum happiness and contentment. There is no other way. You simply can’t live your life on someone else’s terms and expect to be happy. It won’t happen.

At every turn, society attempts to force people into molds. Regardless of your special talents, your desires, your dreams, society, at all levels, want us to conform. Individuality is frowned upon. Uniqueness is not valued, at least at face value.

But society is dysfunctional when it comes to individuality. Religion, family, politicians, teachers, friends and others do their best to keep people more the same than different. However, when we deify our pop stars, television personalities and athletes, we want them quirky, odd and anything but normal.
Sure, we give lip service to embracing individuality. You hear people say they are open minded. But the truth is the vast majority of us (including me) are often being the person we think others want us to be, not the people we really are, and that’s not good.

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Everyone wants to improve their lives. I sure do. I’m sure you do as well. Perhaps that’s why you’re reading this right now. The pursuit of a better life has been the subject of countless writers, and this blog adds one more to that list.

In the pursuit of a better life, I have been a lifelong consumer of self-improvement information and advice. I have read books, watched instructional films and shows, participated in discussion groups, attended seminars, taken classes, listened to an array of speakers, reflected on various spiritual and philosophical teachings, attempted to practice what I’ve learned, and thought long and hard about how to be a better me and have a better life. Many people have done the same. And in all likelihood you have as well.

Then one day I realized something. Woven throughout all of the self-improvement information I have been exposed to are common threads of guidance in the form of basic principles. These principles form the foundation of all of the self-improvement philosophies and systems. This was an epiphany!

No longer did I feel held captive by any single self-improvement system. No longer did I feel I needed to pick and choose from among the many ways of thinking about living a good life. Gone was the stress of having to abide by every rule and guideline a particular self-improvement approach dictated. I was finally free of the shackles imposed by years of thinking that each author, philosopher, speaker, teacher or fellow searcher had the better answer to the eternal question of how to live a better life.

So, here in front of you is my blog that will discuss the basic principles and truths that I have noticed during my many years in the pursuit of a better life. I call these the Principles of Life. I use them as the guiding principles in my life and perhaps you can too.

Along with these discussions I will add in any information, news, research or resources that I think you might find of value as you work at improving your own life. The goal here is to share my own personal journey to a better life in the hopes that it inspires and assists you to do the same.

I look forward to the journey with you.

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