Podcast: Play in new window | Download
It’s hard to make sense of things… because everything seems to be true, and then the opposite seems to be true too.
This is especially true nowadays, in the year of Covid whatever it is, and the election year. Global warming, and rapidly approaching uncertainty about the economy, about the future, about our ability to make a living.
Is this a conspiracy to enslave humanity?
Is this an accident? Is the virus manufactured and released? Are the face masks do anything worth doing? Should we worry, or should we look for the silver lining, and use the time as a way to become our best self?
If you were prepared like very few have been, this Covid thing can be, could be an opportunity… but very few ever does anything that prepares them for an opportunity.
And even the ones that could use these new circumstances as a springboard to go higher, don’t.
Do I? I think I am, both in my health and in my business.
The resistance, the ‘thermostat’ effect that reliable brings everyone back to their own set point is working in me too… and it is like swimming upstream.
When I lived with my parents, until 1971, we used to spend weekends at a cabin on the shore of the big European river, the Danube. I used to row, kayak, and swim. Swim upstream, row upstream. Some weeks we would also spend on the shore of the big European lake, Lake Balaton. What a difference. it is so much easier to swim, so much easier to row.
But I fell in love with effort early on, probably when I learned to climb trees.
Effort makes you move aware that you are you. Much like the strong spray of the showers, back in 1969 jolted me out of my depressed state, and made it clear to me: I am I, and everything else is not I.
Most of us exist in the world much like a beach ball in the water, being pushed this way and that, with no sense of who we are, where we are going, no power source.
When I look at the dynamic, inner dynamic, of a person who is purposeful, they have two sources of power:
1. A force that pulls them (propeller)
2. A force that pushes them (jet engine)
If you want to continue with the swimming upstream analogy, the desire to get to someplace… like the next upstream swimming/boating dock about 100 yards away is the pulling force. And the resistance of the fast flowing water is the force that pushes him.
Without resistance you cannot have a meaningful life… coasting doesn’t feel like life. Complacency kills your sense of being alive. Comfort is deadly.
In life you are either growing or dying.
How am I dying? you grumble, but you ARE dying.
One foolproof sign of dying is your brain.
Your brain is a potentially powerful organ… but it is, just like your muscles, needs to be used.
Having thoughts, reading crap, texting, being on social media do not count as using your brain.
Even typing doesn’t count.
For the past decade I have been pondering how come this famous and prolific female British author got Alzheimer’s disease… Google says: DAME Iris Murdoch, author of 26 novels and one of Britain’s most intellectually brilliant writers suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. I watched a TV drama on Netflix, a decade ago.
But today I know why.
When you do what is easy for you to do, what doesn’t challenge the brain in many different ways, the brain become weak and diseased…
I won’t go into the physiology here… it is all new to me.
What is new to me is to the degree using your hands and your memory influence brain health, and the size of your brain. Or hand-eye coordination. Bouncing a golf ball on a rubber mallet.
Making changes, going from a complacent, lazy, comfortable existence to one where you challenge yourself is not a 1-2-3 done phenomenon.
Two years ago I was quite fit, climbed my neighborhood 200 steps vigorously, every day, without fault. I went to an exercise class. I was thin, and I was quite well.
A series of mishaps laid me up, and put me out of commission for quite a while… and I am attempting to return to fitness… and it is taking me one step forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back… a lot of time and will power.
And so it is with any and all change.
It is really like turning a huge oceanliner, like a cruise ship, around in a tight bay…
you can’t just willy nilly do things… or you’ll get hurt, or you’ll forget something that even though you want to change, still needs to be taken care of.
But if you are not impatient, you can do it.
Tai Lopez has a pair of distinctions, impatiently patent, and patiently impatient.
The first one says: start now, but be patient: it will take a while
The second one says: wait until you are ready to start (patient) and then expect things to happen overnight.
Obviously you want the first mode: start right away, and have patience, consistency, determination to do every day what you need to do to make what you intend to happen.
I am interested in increasing my brain’s functioning.
It functions at 70%. When I listen to things I said 7-8 years ago, I see the difference… I have become complacent, and my brain is not firing on all cylinders.
So I am undertaking the Whole Brain methodology I am learning… And I have taken my first tiny step: I ordered three rubber mallets, different weight. I have a golf ball. I’ll learn to bounce the ball on the mallet… and will do that every day, 5-10 minutes.
I am also practicing my handwriting. I am appalled how chicken scratch it has become. It takes all I have got to control my hand.
And I am excited.
Now, what about you?
Most of my clients and students, and people who I have just measured, clock in a brain that functions between 1% and 10%.
And consequently, their lucidity, their astuteness, their ability to have access to their adult capacities is also between 1 and 10%… pitiful and puny.
It is like hoping you can cut your steak with a butter knife… not going to happen.
Your brain is like a skinny kid trying to wrestle a sumo wrestler… Not going to win, not even a little bit.
Surprisingly simple hand-eye coordination exercises and memory building exercises can change this for anyone.
In life you are either growing or you are dying.
Many of my students are letting me know that they are looking at starting, but they are stopped by not having a mallet… Really?
