Archive for ‘Mental Performance’

August 13th, 2010

Reading and Writing with Purpose

Most of the time, the words of my teachers back in Junior High went in one ear and out the other. One thing, however, stuck with me. It was an English-teacher, who was talking about how important it is to read critically. He told me that every time he reads a book, he asks himself three questions; “Who wrote this book?”, “Why did he/she write this book?”, “Who is the intended audience of this book?”

These three questions have stuck with me since then. Asking them of any book you read allows you to begin to ponder the preconceptions of the author, the possible polemics and propaganda it contains and that effect – of any – he intends the book to have. A book on Judaism written by a German scholar in 1942 would, for example, probably contain very different information than would, for example, Judaism for Dummies. This is not because we’ve learned more about Judaism in the 59 years that have passed between the books but rather because the answers to the three questions are so different. They have different authors, different raisons d’être and different intended audiences.

Try to ask yourselves these questions about the books you read, and I am sure you will find a completely new way to enjoy them.

Also; because of this, it is important to also ask yourselves, as authors, these three questions about your own writing.

Who are you? What preconceptions do you bring to the table, what prejudices do you have, what do you believe in, etc?

Why are you writing this book? Is it to educate, entertain, confuse, impress or something else?

Who is the intended audience? Sometimes, the intended audience turns out to be yourself or just one specific person.

The answers to these questions will give you better insight into your own personal writing process and allow you to fine-tune the book into being what it was meant to be.

CategoryMental Performance, Think About It | CommentNo Comments »

June 1st, 2010

10 Ways you can Improve your Life Today!

I’ve posted a couple of list-type entries these past few days, and I promise this will be the last one for a while. I’ve got a number of other entries planned, but I wanted to get this one out of the way. In many ways, this is one of the more integral entries that I’ll ever post on this blog, as it ties into the grand theme of the blog in so many ways. This being a self-help blog, most entries mention how you can improve yourself in specific areas. Today I want to look at ten things you can do to improve your overall state of mind, health and enjoyment.

Lists like these are always difficult to write. Sometimes you need to artificially inflate them to include exactly the number of items you were gunning for; sometimes you need to shorten the list down. This time around, it was definitely the second alternative. I could have made this list 20, 30, 40 or even 50 items long, but I decided to go for what I consider to be the ten most important ones.

1. Improve your existing skills! I cannot explain often enough how important this one is. We all have some skills; things that make us who we are. We may be good at writing, singing, playing an instrument, speaking foreign languages, speaking in front of audiences, dancing or mediating. However, there is almost always room for improvement in all of these areas. Take the time to analyze what skill set you are using on a daily basis and see where there is room for improvement.

You may, for example, enjoy playing music on your MIDI keyboard in the evenings. Why not start studying some more musical theory to improve this skill? Why not set yourself the task of writing a short story (say, for example, 5,000 to 10,000 words) every week? I’m sure your skills will improve dramatically – and faster than you expected!

2. Stretch the limits of comfort! Most of us live in a far smaller bubble than we’re capable of. We tend to gravitate towards the same meals during lunch at the office, we take the same route when we go out jogging or walking the dog, we buy similar clothing and we go to the same clubs and pubs during the week-ends. Why not challenge yourself? Try something new? Go to a restaurant where you’ve never eaten and order something that you’ve never had! Try going to a random night club with a friend – or even all by yourself! Some of the best experiences in your life will have come from times where you actively went out of your way to do something you’ve never done before; why not make a habit of this?

3. Challenge yourself! Sometimes, you need to grab hold of yourself and really force yourself to make changes in your life. Say you’ve decided that you’re going to quit smoking, go on a diet or start a healthy exercise routine. Set yourself the challenge of doing said thing for four weeks – 28 days – and have a clearly defined penalty for what you will have to do if you fail. It could be, for example, that you have to donate $100 to a specific charity, treat your closest friends to dinner at a fancy restaurant or something similar. Make sure that the penalty is big enough to motivate you. If you decide, after the 28 days, that this new habit isn’t for you, then you’re free to stop, but make sure that you definitely stick with it for these 28 days. After all, what’s 28 days in the grand scheme of things? You can avoid eating fast food for 28 days, can’t you? … right?

4. Study the people who inspire you! There are many people in life that we can look up to in one way or another. I could easilly list a number of authors, martial artists, personal development coaches, psychologists, philosophers and mucisians who have traits, skills or abilities that I admire. In some way, I want to have those particular skills, but maybe not the rest of what makes that person who he is. What better to do than to study that trait in that person? What is it he does that makes him such a great martial artist, for example? Is it the amount of hours a week that he trains? Is it the general philosophy that he has towards his art? Is it the art itself that is superior? By studying a person and his traits in this way, you may find out what has been holding you back from growing and developing in that area.

5. Design your future self! This one is often brought up in personal development circles. If you’re improving yourself, you must have some sort of notion about what goals you have, right? Why not clearly define them? Write down what sort of person you want to be, what type of life you want to be leading and everything that is related to it. Pick a point in the future, say five or ten years down the line, and write a short description of who you are at this point. Then step back for a moment and look at how you differ from the person you’ve described. Maybe this will help you recognize what actions you need to take to get where you want to be.

6. Read more books! One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from indulging yourself in a great story. Also, one of the best ways to learn a new subject is to read what other people have written about the subject. Avoid pulp literature and the cheap dime-a-dozen crime dramas that hardly bring anything more to your life than insomniac page-turner evenings – unless, of course, you feel like taking a break from more ‘difficult’ literature for a while. Read the classics in various fields, but always try to mix up your reading to avoid becoming bogged down in a specific area. Jump between Goete, Dante, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Hume, Chauser, Jung, Austen, Dumas, Nietzche, Wilde, Locke, Voltaire and Kafka.

7. Learn a new skill! I’m sure there’s something you’ve decided you’d like to learn, so why not actually go out and learn it? Whether it be a new language, juggling or knitting, a new skill adds to your identity and makes you understand the world better.

8. Find your flaws and acknowledge them! We’ve all got flaws, no matter how high and mighy we might think ourselves to be. See if you can’t figure out what flaws you have – ask your friends to be brutally honest to you if you can’t think of any for yourself. Don’t try to defend yourself with explanations or excuses, just accept that this is who you are and that only real hard work will change this part of you. It will be difficult and you will try to reject these things, but only through acceptance can we truly grow.

9. Keep a diary, blog or journal! It can be very interesting to go back and read the thoughts, interests, habits, hobbies and friends we kept a few years ago. Looking back at my own life, I sometimes feel like I cannot even recognize the person I was as little as five years ago. Seeing this sort of growth and development can be a huge motivation, but the journal has another very important function. When you re-read the story of your life, you may be able to see habits or behaviors that you were previously unaware of. In the heat of the moment, you reacted in a specific way without ever considering that this is a pattern that you’ve fallen into many times before. Maybe it’s time to change?

10. Most importantly – don’t stress things! Sometimes, the very best thing we can do to ourselves is to set all of this growth, development, personal enhancement and excellense nonsense aside and sit in the sun for a few hours with a good mindless book. We could throw a frisbee with friends down at the beach, throw a tennis ball for the dog to fetch a few hundred times or just invite friends over for an Indiana Jones movie marathon. While growth and constant development are important to us all – you wouldn’t be reading this post if it wasn’t! – it’s just as important to just take a break and relax every now and again.

Treat yourself to it. You deserve it.

CategoryMental Performance, Physical Performance, Think About It | CommentNo Comments »

May 30th, 2010

The Traps We Fall Into

We all like to think that we’re pretty intelligent people; right? We like thinking that our thoughts are crisp, clear and precise. We like telling ourselves that we analyze problems clearly and rationally and never ever act in any way that goes agains some golden rules that we’ve set up for ourselves. Naturally, this is probably as far from the truth as possible. There are a couple of things that we all do, almost all the time, that should go against every rational fiber in our bodies, but never tend to do so. Here’s a list of five of them and the things that we could do to avoid these pitfalls.

1. We tend to try to protect our earlier choices. This is human nature; we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we made a mistake, we try to plow along and act as if the thing we did a day, week or month ago was the best possible thing we could have done. Be ready to admit to yourself that you may actually have made a mistake somewhere on the way and that the best thing you could do is to scrap whatever it was that you did and start over.

For example; assume that you’ve bought tickets to a rock concert. You’ve been listening to this band for a few months and feel stoked to go to the concert. However, the day that the concert comes around, you’re asked to fill in for a colleague at work. You know that this opportunity would pay off greatly; you’d be getting overtime money and the respect of both your boss and your colleague. The boss has hinted that there might even be a promotion involved down the line! Unfortunately, it’s just too late to try to resell the ticket to the concert and none of your friends want to go! And the ticket was so expensive, too! What to do?!

Either way you go, you’ve already paid the money for the ticket to the rock concert. It’s a sunk cost that you won’t be recouping either way. This means that we don’t have to consider it in the equation; no need for the “But I’ve already paid for the ticket …”. Your decision is now down to “Go to rock concert” versus “Perform admirably at work and get a raise”. Hopefully, this should make the decision far easier for you.

2. We tend to follow along in what others are doing. Just because three of your friends bought a Plasma TV doesn’t mean that they are automatically better than the LCD alternative. Their musical tastes, likes and dislikes, their political opinions and subcultural affiliations don’t have to be your own. Just because something is popular doesn’t have to mean that it is right – or even good!

Have you ever wondered why the Da Vinci code was on the bestseller list for so long, without actually being any good? It managed to reach a tipping point where the popularity simply fed on itself and drew even more attention to it. “Well, if Bob, Mary, Claire, David and Brandon are reading it, it simply must be good!”

3. Think for at least ten seconds before guessing. This one is tricky. We always seem to try to guess how something is going to end up or what qualities something has. Especially when it comes to probability, we’re absolutely awful at judging how things will go. People buy their “lucky numbers” every week for the lottery when rational thought should tell them that any group of numbers is just as probable. They look at various statistics and draw outlandish conclusions without considering that there may just be other factors involved.

For example, a popular ‘proof’ of the negative effects of immigration by far-right activists has often been the comparatively high amount of crime commited in people with high immigrant density. With only these two pieces of data (crime density vs. immigration density), there seems to be a clear link, but we need to remember that Correlation Does Not Imply Causation. This rule is so important that it should be capitalized. The link may be, for example, the high amount of poverty in said region. It could be because of the alienation that these people endure. There might be something else entirely that causes this.

4. We form wildly incorrect conclusions when we have insufficient information. Many of the times that you’ve been wrong in your life, it hasn’t been because you were given the wrong information. It was because you weren’t given enough information to draw the right conclusion. Say, for example, that you’ve been told that Mary’s boyfriend was once charged with assault and battery. Then, today, you meet Mary and see she has a bruise on her arm. You may draw the conclusion that her boyfriend grabbed her violently, but there could be literally hundreds of reasonable explanations. The boyfriend may have been incorrectly charged with the assault and Mary may have recently begun training a martial art. As long as you don’t know enough information, you are prone to jump to incorrect conclusions.

5. Misjudging averages. If I were to ask 1,000 people whether they were more, less or equally intelligent than the average person, what do you think the results would be? Many people have tried similar studies and found that almost everybody thinks that they’re more intelligent than the average person. The same holds true for them being better drivers, better lovers, better athletes and better – well, anything else, really! – than the average person. Naturally, this can’t be true, so either the average intelligence is far higher than we think it is or we must be misrepresenting ourselves! Which do you think is more probable?

Well, both of them, really. It’s very easy to misjudge ourselves and lose track of being humble in many situations. We want to think that we’re better than we really are, so we convince ourselves that we are and lose track of who we really are. We often notice the people who are ‘below’ us and snicker to ourselves in joy that we’re so superior, but rarely notice the times when somebody else is ‘above’ us.

The five traps that I’ve mentioned here are nothing but extended versions of five of the literally dozens of cognitive biases that you can read about on Wikipedia. Please visit the site and read up on them, as I’m sure you’ll recognize many from your every-day life.

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