COLD FUSION LIVING: Owing a Little Dried Grape

Salut Christian & Faith...

Have you figure out yet what the title means?

"Owing a Little Dried Grape"

1. When you owe something that is called a, "debt."

2. A little dried grape is called a, "raisin."

Put those together and you get, "raisin debt."

OK ... so it was a really lame way to say, "raison d'être."

Yep - I'm still harping on the purpose thing ... do you know your raison d'être ... your "reason to be?"

If not ... get on that. if you do ... then life is already making more sense to you than it does to most people because the fact remains ....

.... most people don't owe any little dried grapes. And they really should.

Love you.

Dad

PS ... not every blog needs to be long to make the point.

COLD FUSION LIVING: Life at the speed of light

Happy Easter Weekend Kids...

I hope you both are taking advantage of the long weekend and getting some down-time and recovery. That's an important part of the whole human energy equation.

Today, I'm adding on to where I started in last post. 

Did you know that you can make the clock stop? As in ... time stands still! 

Today's title is "Life at the Speed of Light."  What the heck am I getting at? Quite simply this; Einstein showed us (111 years ago) that time is relative to how fast you are moving ... and for things moving really fast, time appears to move slower than it does for slower moving things ... at least relative to the slower moving things. The fastest that anything can move is the speed of light. But here's the thing ... at that speed, time doesn't move. You can't really wrap your head around it you just have to understand the math and then accept that truth. For a photon of light moving at its unique speed, time stands still ... it is always in the present ... there is no past or future. Weird, I know.

Well there is a time, when, for we human beings, time can really slow down ... and sometimes, almost appear to be stopped. It is when we are doing something at which we are highly skilled, and our task is also highly challenging ... but just a bit more challenging than our skill permits us to accomplish without extreme concentration.

What I just described is a mental state in which you are fully immersed in doing something and you have an intense or energized focus. This condition, named "flow," by Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, has been described by many (myself included) as being amongst life's peak experiences. You might have heard it described another way: "being in the zone."

In flow, your emotions are not just contained and channeled, but they are actually energized in a way that aligns with the task you are doing. Your focus is so completely drawn into your activity that you are unaware of anything else, including yourself ... and it's as if time is standing still.

It is a spectacularly joyful experience. I believe that we were made this way so that we would enjoy mission-oriented activities ... especially when we understand the mission that we are on (more on this in the next couple of weeks).

You may know the Law of Architecture ... that, "form follows function." This is very logical; a building's form should be dictated by it's function. That's why an outhouse looks like it does and why an airplane hangar looks like it does and why a hockey rink looks like it does; they are all designed according to the function that they will serve.

The Law of People is exactly the opposite ... function follows form. Anyone who argues with this simply hasn't lived long enough to get it, or they have never experienced flow. The function we serve does not dictate how we have been formed. How we are formed dictates the function we should serve. This is how we properly define strengths and weaknesses: a strength isn't something that you are good at ... a strength is something that strengthens you and makes you come alive when you do it. And, of course, if an activity is highly enjoyable then you are more likely to spend more time doing it ... and after enough time you will get very good at it just out of sheer practice. Your high skill in that activity now makes it possible to get "into the zone" when doing it if you tackle things that are just a bit harder than your skill permits.

Therefore my children ... as much as possible ... put your efforts into building skills in areas that are already personal strengths (things that jazz you). It was this thinking that dictated my planned early retirement and has taken me on a very different (and joyful) journey over the last decade, beginning before I even retired.

Let me leave you with this image below ... I created it a decade ago when I first stumbled on this teaching. The annotations are mine but the main image can be found on the Wiki site called, "Flow."

I love you ... see ya in 2 weeks when I look at, "Owing Little Dried Grapes."

Dad

.

I have also discovered

COLD FUSION LIVING: Spontaneous Human Combustion

Let's light 'em up today guys...

The next theme I'm calling COLD FUSION LIVING. Christian knows what cold fusion is ... Faith, I'm not sure you do .... so here it is in a nutshell.

Cold fusion is a speculated kind of nuclear reaction that can occur at room temperature, which essentially means that you can get more energy out than you put in. Some claim to have discovered it, but their experiments have not be able to be reproduced. It would be amazing if it were possible because it would essentially be seen as a source of "free energy."

I'm putting this next series of posts under this title because I've discovered in my life that is absolutely possible to get "free energy" ... at least in terms of life-energy.


Spontaneous Human Combustion
Surely you must have heard about this ... the phenomenon where people suddenly burst into flames where no accelerant or outside "spark" has been provided. 

Well, in a less dramatic, but more personally amazing kind of way, I have found the way to initiate an intense spark inside of me that ignites into white-hot energy. It is called purpose.

OK, before you cry foul and remind me that I've already spoken about this a couple of times (including the very last post), let me explain why I'm mentioning it again .... because there are fewer things in your life that will ever matter more. Without purpose life is a soul-sucking drudgery. But with purpose, a limitless cold-fusion-type thing inside you keeps you endlessly energized ... spontaneously igniting passion and desire and interest and focus until you almost feel ready to combust .... in a very very good way.


That's it. Just make sure that you do what you do for a reason ... for a purpose ... and never ever allow yourself to live without it.  There really isn't that much more that is more important.

OK guys ... see you in a couple weeks when I talk about living at the speed of light.

I love you both.

Dad

PERSONAL CRAP DETECTOR: Spiritual BS

Happy leap-year day mes enfants....

OK, so I didn't complete the blog by this date because I knew you guys weren't both reading it so I decided to not focus my energy on something in vain.

Now that you're back ... I'm back.

I've also decided to ease up on the speed of delivery and post bi-weekly rather than weekly. I already know that this will be fine with you. I'll start a new theme in a couple weeks and will shift my post-dates back to Saturdays .... so the next theme will begin on Saturday March 12.

Now let's wrap up the BS. Literally. First you need to make sure that you've read my previous post from August 24, 2015 ... otherwise this one won't make sense.

OK, read it? Back now? Good .... here's the graphic again. And you'll be pleased (I think) to see that this post is short. And there's a good reason ... because it is an easy point that I need to make.

The spiritual point of life is the focal point ... where "X" marks the spot. This is the force of your life energy. Not the source of it ... but the point to which all of your energy is directed. And here's a fact; when you have a clear focal point in life, it actually feeds more energy into the system (I believe at the emotional level by burning away some of the clouds).

You have probably already figured out what I'm talking about. Purpose!

What is your life purpose? Now this can be the large existential question, "what are you doing with your life?" or it can be the day-to-day, moment-by-moment matter of, "what are you doing right now .... and why?"

When life has been not good for me it is almost always because I have had a blind spot (the first kind of BS) to one truth; I lost my sense of purpose. Boredom comes when we are not clear, in a given moment, about what our purpose is in that moment. It is disorienting. It is debilitating. We are purpose-driven creatures and living any other way is soul-crushing.

Time again for me to tell you that if you are coasting and living without purpose on any given day, week, month or year, you need to cut the crap (the other BS). The graphic above shows that our inner energy system hinges entirely on having an ultimate point (purpose) to which I need to direct my energy .... even if that means sometimes that my focus is to disconnect and recharge. That in itself is also a focal point.

I've asked before and I'll ask it here again to wrap up the BS theme:

"Do you do what you do because you have a reason to, or do you do what you do because you don't see a better reason not to?"

If the former ... excellent. 

If the latter ... cut the crap ... that's no way to live. Trust me. I know.

I love you both very much.

See ya March 12 as we launch into the next theme.

Yer Fadder

I'm baaaaaaaaaaaaaack!!

Morning Guys...

Well, I've been away from the blog since August. Why you ask?  Because you weren't reading it. I know that at least one of you said you will read it all someday ... so I figured that I would get back to writing it: someday!

Now that one of you have asked the question, "where is the blog?" I shall resume .... beginning on Monday Feb. 29 ... the day that I had originally expected to be ending it. But no worries ... I still have half my thoughts and ideas yet to share. So, stay tuned for

BLOG - PART 2 in a couple weeks.

Love ya

Dad

PERSONAL CRAP DETECTOR - Mental BS

Ciao

Quite the day on the economic markets yesterday. Black Monday! The Chinese are a powerful force in this world, whether they know what they are doing or not.

OK, before I get into today’s theme of learning to detect your own Mental BS, I want to sidestep back to something I introduced on June 8 when I spoke about the looking-glass analogy … the whole business of managing our personal energy.

I’m bringing it back here to elaborate on some things I only introduced back then because it’s important to this discussion about our personal BS. Here is that model again:

The Physical – the Quantity of the Energy
Our pure raw energy comes in physical form, controlled by our eating and activity level … the whole metabolic thing is huge to understand. But since you’ve both proven that you understand this I skipped that topic this month. In the analogy, this is the strength of the sunlight that we can access. If we start off with low physical energy there’s less to work with in life, regardless of our ability to harness it.

The Emotional-Social – the Quality of the Energy
Our emotional state (which is tied closely with the social) is analogous to clear or cloudy skies. Being stressed or self-absorbed or fearful or angry or (insert a hundred survival-based emotions) clouds the skies and keeps the energy from getting through; being emotionally connected and well-adjusted and maintaining a results-based (and also faith-based) optimism really helps to clear the skies. Any emotional troubles at all can significantly reduce the available energy that can be harnessed, regardless of how good you are of making use of what you have.

The Mental – the Focus of the Energy
Our minds are where transformation begins because it is with our minds that we can learn to focus whatever energy is available to us, not to mention using it to learn to control our metabolism (and get more raw energy to begin with) and emotions (to keep the skies clear so that more energy is available for use). I want to talk about some of the mental stuff today.

Our mind is like the magnifying glass … which can focus the available energy or waste it. In the analogy, the magnifying glass harnesses the sun’s light (physical energy) and focuses it on a specific spot with a chosen intensity … in order to accomplish something (like burning your girl-friend’s name in a block of driftwood). (in reality, our mind isn’t just like an ordinary magnifying glass though; it’s like having a magnifying glass that can increase the sun’s power as well as burn away the clouds!) But here’s the problem … here is where the BS shows up. Despite having this amazing tool to harness all available energy and use it to do some amazing things, we waste it (some people waste all of it) because we don’t take the time to learn how to use. Here are 3 ways in which we waste or negate our mental power to focus:

1. Multi-tasking: by definition, means we are not focusing on just one thing.
2. Unstructured thinking: this leads to having zero skill in focusing the mind.
3. Faulty storytelling (allowing bad lines of “code” in our head): this creates negative feedback to the energy quality (the emotions).

I want to FOCUS on just the first one today (so that I’m not guilty of the very thing I’m talking about). Let’s talk about the BS associated with multi-tasking.

Multi-tasking is one of the greatest deterrents to personal growth and development and it is certainly in the top two reasons why most people under-perform (the other reason is lack of clarity in what they are trying to accomplish). You have heard me speak about this for years … multi-tasking is a dysfunctional mental state that guarantees mediocre performance at best. Psychologists call it “polyphasic activity,” and in my experience, any time psychologists give something a fancy name it usually isn’t a good thing. Where’s the BS part? Many (most?) people actually believe that multi-tasking is a good thing … especially your generation and ones even younger than you. Study after study after study has proven that multi-tasking is mutually exclusive with high-performance. High-performers, from any field, actively work to defeat this in their life … even when not performing. Why? Begins how we train our minds in non-battle conditions is how our mind will respond when actually tasked with something important.

Here’s how the magnifying glass analogy makes sense of this. Imagine holding the magnifier in order to catch the sun’s rays so that you can burn a hole in a piece of wood. How long does it take to get the burn started? 10 seconds? 5 seconds? What would happen if you moved the glass every 2 seconds to a different spot? You could even move it continually back and forth between just two spots … and nothing would EVER burn. Why? Because some tasks/missions require focus and intensity and persistence in order to accomplish them. There is simply no workaround for this.

This mental BS has stolen people’s ability to concentrate for any length of time as attention spans have diminished to microscopic proportions. The hand-held technology is perhaps the single greatest contributor to this dysfunction, training people that it’s acceptable to be distracted by something every few seconds. I too have been sucked in and mesmerized by this Medussa, but I’ve learned enough to know that there must be times that I intentionally MUST ignore these distractions … just for the good of my mind. Thinking has almost become a lost luxury and workers around the world are complaining that they have so many competing demands and so many “number one priorities,” that they don’t have time to think. This is a big blind spot if we don’t think that this isn’t hurting us. It’s just BS.

One final thing about the magnifying glass; you know that your ability to control the sunbeam so that it can burn exactly what you want requires knowing how to hold the glass, as measured by 3 skills:

a) Finding the right distance from the wood (the focal distance);

b) Orienting the glass perpendicular to the sunbeam (for maximum intensity);

c) Keeping the glass steady.

In our mind, these three things are:

a) Establishing the focal point (discussed next week) so that we know where our energies must come to bear, and then focusing that energy through intentionality;

b) Our orientation towards optimism (results/faith-based) or pessimism (survival thinking);

c) Clarity and persistence and know to not give up.

With all love I say this to you:

“Cut the crap guys.”

J

Dad

PERSONAL CRAP DETECTOR - Emotional-Social BS (Part 2)

Good morning Mr. and Miss Bowyer

I can’t wait to talk some more about YOUR BS.  Ha ha ha

Last week I wrote about our Blind Spots (the real meaning of BS) being a function of our own personal bias. I want to explore this a bit deeper today.

As you know, or are learning, I am fascinated by the wealth of social science data coming out these days … data that show how and why human beings act the way they do. Some of the data are like, “Yep … that just confirms what I’ve always known to be true,” while other data are like, “Wow … this is fascinating … and it sure explains a lot of what we see.”

The word “noise” is the technical term used to describe anything that interferes with the communication process. People’s emotions significantly affect communications, especially as it relates to an ability to listen (listening is an enormous part of communications). Emotions of a listener can be one of resonance, in which case the message is accepted, or one of dissonance, in which case the message is rejected. We accept and reject messages all the time.

But what happens when the entire communication process happens within our own heads? A message is sent and also received all between our ears, and the only standard within us for making a judgment about the validity of the message is highly influenced by our personal bias: that thing inside of us that usually gives us the benefit of the doubt. As psychologists point out (and experience has proven to me), this is a huge problem because it is what leads to us having an almost infinite capacity for denial and self-deception. It’s where we get our Blind Spots. It’s what leads us to not perceiving our own BS (the other one).

Ultimately, this “noise” inside our own heads makes it very very difficult for us to look honestly and objectively at ourselves … while still being quite capable of accurately evaluating others.

This emotional blocking of information can be an enormous deterrent in your life. Why? Because when you are presented with information which disagrees with what you already know, believe, or want to believe (even if the information is factual), it is dissonant and not readily welcomed or accepted; especially if it is about you.

Illusory superiority is a form of bias that causes people to overestimate their positive qualities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. For example, here are some of those data I spoke about: in a survey of the faculty at the University of Nebraska, 68% rated themselves to be in the top 25% for teaching ability; similarly, 87% of MBA students at Stanford University rated their academic performance above average; 70% of US high school students rate themselves above average leaders; and 85% of US high school students rate themselves above-average in getting along well with others, while 25% put themselves in the top 1%.

We can laugh at these numbers as we shake our heads at how “blind” people are to their own strengths and weaknesses … but we are the same. YOU are the same.

This is a really important truth I wanted you to hear from me in this year of posts because if you can learn to recognize this then you will have a hope of defeating this weakness within you … and defeat it you must, because it is the only way you can ever truly mature. This kind of blind spot is what keep smokers smoking and over-eaters eating, despite overwhelming evidence that it puts their health at serious risk. It is what allows you to see the speck of dust in your friend's eye, all-the-while being oblivious to the log in your own eye. Another example I see all the time is when people summarily reject the notion of God’s existence even when presented with clear and sound reasoning. And here's how the brain does this ... emotions often block the information before the logical part of the process even begins. Cognitive dissonance provides the mechanism for denial so that you do not feel compelled to respond or change your mind.

The path to true freedom begins with being able to see yourself honestly. This requires humility. The Bible speaks about this very thing in two famous passages. 1) the first is in Psalm 139 where David asks God to help him see himself as clearly as God sees him, and for God to show him the honest truth about himself; 2) the second is in Mark 4 where Jesus gives a parable about our receptivity to the truth of His Word … and the 4 different emotional/mental states that result in our blindness or our ability to see clearly.

Maturing requires you to be able to see your own emotional noise, and then learn how to quiet that noise so that you can see yourself honestly. That’s when freedom will become a possibility for you.

I love you both very much.

Dad