Category Archives: Action

Behold The Mighty Language

How The Ends Can Justify The Means

Ends and means are easy to confuse.

I never really quite understood the problem with “the ends justify the means.”

It’s something you talk about in high school.

It’s generally frowned up to accept that any ends is justified by any means.

But I was never one to go along with how we were “supposed” to think about things.

Our teacher would say, “suppose you have an end to get money. Does robbing a bank justify getting money? No, it does not, therefore, the end doesn’t always justify the means.”

I would always argue.

I would say that the “end” was poorly defined.

That having a well defined end is justified by any means.

In the above example, you just re-define your “end” as “legally getting money.”

Of course, I was never one for blindly obeying authority.

When you tell somebody that the ends doesn’t always justify the means, it also presupposes that there is some entity that is capable of which “means” are acceptable, and which are unacceptable.

Even in my high school days, I was arguing against authority any way I could.

My idea then, and my idea now is that if you create a well enough defined end, which precludes any immoral, unethical or otherwise negative behavior, then any means you use is perfectly fine.

And perfectly justified.

In fact, you might say our entire lives are based around satisfying our never ending “ends” with as simple and effective “means” as possible.

But people who like having any authority will sneak that authority in any way they can.

And unless you know how to linguistically stand your ground, it’s very easy to get taken advantage of.

Humans are goal setting machines.

We cannot NOT set goals.

Most of the time, these are unconscious and automatic.

Getting up to use the toilet.

Getting something to eat.

Talking to friends.

But that inner structure is always there. And it happens hundreds of times a day.

You feel a desire, and you satisfy that desire.

This is why people LOVE taking advantage of others.

They can very carefully and covertly take over your natural goal setting ability.

So you’re not getting outcomes for YOU, you’re getting them for them.

Usually this is fine.

This is the conscious and unconscious “tit for tat” that makes relationships work.

They become a problem when one person is benefiting at the expense of somebody else.

You don’t need to get defensive.

You don’t even need to be assertive.

Just learn how to ask some very simple questions.

Questions that will force them to rethink their strategy.

Very powerful.

Very subtle.

Very effective.

Learn How:

Weaponized Hypnosis

He's Watching

The Attacking Bear Technique

It’s common for humans to look for shortcuts.

Especially in any self development area.

Tons of books and courses offer “secret” techniques.

The one “weird trick” to lose belly fat.

On the one hand, we know that change takes time.

Learning things takes time.

Developing skill takes time.

A common idea or even “meme” is that if you practice something for 10,000 hours, you will become world class in that particular area.

For example, if you started practicing the piano today, you would be world class in 10,000 days, or 27 years.

15 years or so if you practiced for two hours a day.

But that is if you are competing with everybody else on Earth.

For most of our skills, we can apply the attacking bear theory.

What bear?

The one that was running at the two hikers.

And one of the hikers started putting on his running shoes.

“Dude, you can’t run faster than a bear!” protested his buddy.

“Don’t need to,” replied the hero. “I just need to run faster than you.”

When you are in a job interview, you don’t need to be the best in the world.

You just need to be the best in the group.

If you get into a street fight, you don’t need to be a kung fu master, or even a decent fighter.

You just need to better than the bully who decided to pick on you.

And when it comes to anything involving language, it’s easy.

Because few people even know that language, and how you use it, is something you can practice and enhance.

Most people assume that some people are good at it, and some people aren’t.

Imagine if you lived on pushup planet.

Where everything was determined by how many pushups you could do.

Yet nobody had any idea that you could practice doing pushups, and get better.

Some people might be able to do 10 or 20.

But the people who ran society could do 50, some even 100.

And you were the ONLY ONE who realized that in only a few months, you could get up to a couple hundred pushups, through practice, and rule the planet.

Language is the same way.

And when you practice just a little bit a day, you’ll soon be able to dominate.

Get Started:

Weaponized Hypnosis

She Is Waiting For You

Fast Food Rush

One of the best feelings is forward momentum.

Another good feeling is being in control.

Not control-freak control, but a feeling of control over your life.

Of being at cause, instead of having to always respond.

When I was in high school I worked a lot of retail.

Mostly food.

It was fun, in that there were plenty of kids my own age.

And when there was a rush (lunchtime or dinner) it was pretty cool.

It was super busy, the time went by pretty quickly.

And it felt good to get through the rush.

One of the reasons it was so cool was it was temporary.

It would maybe last an hour or two.

The orders would come quick and relentlessly.

We’d be running around trying to keep up.

It was the kind of challenge that feels good.

The right combination of external pressure, internal focus, teamwork, and a genuine appreciation from management once we were done.

Underlying all of this was the sense it was out of our control.

Meaning once the crowd came, we were utterly dependent on forces outside of us.

“Reality” would demand a response from us, and we had to keep up.

Doing this once per shift for a couple hours is pretty cool.

But living your life like this is horrible.

Always feeling that you are “on call” to whatever is outside and more powerful than you.

And if you don’t perform “correctly” you’re going to get into trouble.

This is the kind of thing that makes one feel trapped and hopeless.

This is why people always figure out ways to carve out private time to work on private things.

It’s another reason why people practice partial arts.

Even if they NEVER intend to use them outside of the training room, it FEELS like they are building up the skills to fight back.

Even if it’s just a mental knowing of a certain level of skill, it makes one feel MUCH LESS like they are always an effect, rather than a cause.

Just knowing you have a certain level of skills will help you feel much more like a cause in more places.

And that feeling will inform your body language and non-verbal communication.

Which will invite a completely different response from others.

And if you ever DO need to use these defensive skills?

They’ll know what hit them.

Learn More:

Weaponized Hypnosis

Blast Off Butterfly!

Are You Jumping Without A Parachute?

There are a lot of “law of attraction” type sayings that sound pretty good.

And like a lot of things, if we repeat them enough, we feel like we “know” them.

But there’s a difference between being familiar with the words (and examples) and actually discovering them on your own.

If you’ve experienced this, it presents a strange problem.

For example, many people have heard the expression, “Fake it till you make it.”

And most people can give a couple examples of why this is true.

All without ever having actually faked it until you made it.

But then something happens, and you actually have to fake something, and then you make “it” (whatever “it” is) and it hits you.

It’s true in an experiential way, whereas before it was true in an intellectual way.

But when you say it, while recalling your own true life experience, it sounds EXACTLY the same.

It’s somewhat similar (but only somewhat) to the famous Bruce Lee quote.

(Paraphrased)

“Before Jeet Kun Do, a punch is just a punch. During Jeet Kun Do, a punch is a careful combination of energy, focus, balance, concentration, and intention. After Jeet Kun Do, a punch is just a punch.”

It’s the same thing, but very, very different.

One of the often said truisms (much like faking it till you make it) is that you need to have belief before you have results.

Most people say this, but few people have the experience of believing something BEFORE they believe it.

It’s also easy to rewrite your beliefs so that you can pretend you believed it before you saw it, when in reality, you had your doubts.

The human brain is very clever at always making us the heroes of our own stories.

But one area where you MUST believe in what you’re creating is when you are purposely creating relationships with others.

This is when what you WANT to do is usually the direct opposite of what you SHOULD do.

But if you believe in what you are doing, and you can NOT do what most people do, you will GET what most people don’t get.

One way to make it much easier is to get an intellectual understanding of what you are doing.

Kind of like having an intellectual understanding of the physics of parachuting before jumping out of a plane.

Still pretty terrifying, but not nearly as terrifying as jumping out of a plane WITHOUT a parachute and hoping for a miracle.

The “hoping for a miracle” strategy is what most people use.

But when you understand the structure of relationships, you can create them with as much scientific precision as the air that lets you and your parachute drift gently to the ground.

Learn More:

Love Hypnosis

Dreamland is Loveland

Plant Emotional Seeds

When I was very young my sister and I tried to make a pizza.

We threw a bunch of stuff haphazardly on top of some bread.

No idea what we were doing.

As expected, it tasted like crap.

I’ve been on a lot of backpacking trips.

Some of the coolest parts are the meadows that are way up there.

No humans around, gorgeous streams and flowers.

A single trail going through a huge valley.

Some people get pretty intense with their gardens.

They spend a lot of time planting and pruning and weeding.

The result is very nice.

Even though they know exactly what it’s going to look like, it’s still beautiful.

Compared to the naturally occurring wildflowers up around eight or nine thousand feet, which is more beautiful?

They are both beautiful in their own way.

One is because of the setting, the backdrop.

The other is because it’s a creation of the mind, and of the soil.

Which is doing more work?

The mind or the soil?

The mind can understand what seeds to plant, how much work to put into the weeding, how much space to allow, etc.

But the seeds do everything else.

Sure we can describe what’s happening.

At least, up to a certain point.

It’s nice to think of ourselves as creators of the garden.

But in reality, we’re just putting the right ingredients together in the right proportion.

Then we only stand back and wait for nature to do what nature does.

How or why THAT happens is anybody’s guess.

But you don’t need to understand it to create a beautiful garden.

You just need to appreciate it.

Many things are that way.

At the same time they are mysterious, but also simple.

Food is simple to cook, but the emotional gratification we can get from eating is indescribable.

Human relationship are the same way.

At least they CAN be.

You don’t need to understand how or why they work, only enough to mix everything together in the right proportions.

And give it the space to happen.

And just like a garden, if you create it correctly, it will grow.

Learn How:

Love Hypnosis

Alchemy Of Love

Scientific Emotions

There’s a pretty cool video on YouTube on chord progressions.

It shows a ton of different pop songs that all have the same chords.

This is one of those things you’d never notice unless you learned enough about music.

Then after you notice it, it’s hard to not notice it.

Same with story structure.

Most modern movies and books have the same basic structure.

The “Hero’s Journey.”

Usually starts out with the hero as an orphan of some kind.

Then he or she is more or less forced to go on some kind of journey.

Could be a metaphorical journey, or a real one.

Along the way they meet friends, learn skills and eventually have to fight the bad guy.

Or overcome their internal demons.

But even if you study music, or story structure, we can still enjoy movies and music.

Sometimes even more so.

In order to become a world class chef, you’d have to know what tastes good and what doesn’t.

While they are making pizza and burger robots, they’ll never make a robot that can invent new dishes and tastes.

Because a robot will never have the purely emotional experience of tasting something for the first time.

In order to “test” a new recipe, a robot would HAVE to have some kind of pre-programmed ranges or parameters.

Human senses, on the other hand, have an infinite amount of range.

An infinite amount of capability to somehow “transfer” between purely chemical combinations, and emotional descriptions of flavor.

Robots will likely be able to create things with absolute precision.

But they’ll never be able to enjoy things from a human experience.

Only we humans get to do that.

But just like chefs can produce delicious dishes and musicians can produce emotionally moving pieces, we can both create and enjoy a wide range of emotions.

All it takes is being able to shift outside, as the creator, and then shift inside, as the enjoyer.

Learn How:

Love Hypnosis

What's That Buzzing Sound?

Waiting For Magic Corn

Imagine you were out driving around.

And in this hallucination (which will require a bit of suspended disbelief) you were thinking about a new career.

Let’s say you passed by a guy who was harvesting corn.

In this metaphor, you don’t really know much about anything.

In fact, you don’t really know where food comes from.

(other than on the shelf at the supermarket).

So you drive onto the farmer’s land, pull up, and get out.

“Where does all this corn come from?” you ask, absolutely flabbergasted.

“The ground,” the farmer says, smiling.

“But how?” You ask.

The farmer smiles. Let’s suppose, for the sake of this story, that he’s a church going farmer.

“Have patience, and Lord will provide,” he answers, not quite sure he understands the question.

“But it just comes up out of the ground like that?” You ask, still trying to wrap your mind around this mysterious concept.

Food coming straight out of the dirt? That’s crazy!

“Like, every day?” you ask. The farmer smiles and shakes his head.

“No, not every day. You must be patient, and the Lord will provide,” he answers.

You get back in your car and think about it.

If you could get food out of the ground, you could sell it!

When you buy corn at the store, it’s a dollar an ear.

And that farmer had HUNDREDS, maybe THOUSANDS of ears!

You’re going to be rich!

So you find some land.

And you sit in the middle.

“OK, Lord,” you say, looking up to the sky.

“I’m ready for my corn!”

And you wait patiently for it to spring forth.

But you’re waiting a while.

The only thing that grows are weeds.

You think maybe you didn’t ask correctly. Or maybe you weren’t thinking correctly.

So you ask again, only with more enthusiasm.

“Lord, I promise. I’m really ready to receive this time,” you say.

After another few weeks pass by, the weeds are over your head.

How in the heck did that farmer get corn out of the ground, when you only got weeds?

The farmer, however, misunderstood you. He just assumed you know about farming, and planting seeds, and taking care of the soil.

But all you saw was the end result.

Not the daily consistent behaviors that were REQUIRED to get the result.

And in just sitting there, staring at the sky and asking for magic corn, you looked kind of silly.

Hopefully you’re seeing some parallels in this metaphor and how people go about getting (or trying to get) good things.

Most people focus on the outcome, rather than the required daily behaviors.

But the required daily behaviors to get anything are pretty simple.

So simple you could get started today.

Whatever seeds you plant, they will grow.

Learn How:

Seven Disciplines

Jigsaws Of Time

Three Operator Mindset

Long time ago, I got a job selling cars.

I was running out of money, and jobs were hard to come by.

Plenty of places like retail sales, especially if you don’t need a license, will more or less hire anybody.

They hire people based on the number theory.

The same kind of statistics some guys use when approaching girls.

If you chat up ten girls a day, you’ll eventually run into a few you click with.

And among those you click with, you’ll eventually find a pretty good one.

It is a very common sales strategy, referred to as the funnel.

A bunch of prospects go into the top, and a few sales come out the bottom.

Sales places hire people this way.

They hire about twenty new salespeople a month.

Every month.

They figure even if 19 of them eventually quit, they’ll end up with a team of skilled sellers.

On the other side of the equation is that once these skilled sellers realize that they are, indeed, skilled sellers, they go somewhere else.

If you are good at selling things, a car lot is the LAST place you want to be.

Stand up all day, usually outside. Really long hours.

But one thing that surprised me the most is the transition people make.

They come in terrified of the salespeople.

Most customers give of a dangerous kind of body language.

The kind that says, “Don’t you DARE come near me!”

This is why so many people quit.

But once you get past that “defense zone,” they open up pretty easily.

Talk about what they want, show them what you’ve got, and one out of ten or so will end up buying something.

What always got me was their internal transition.

From when they walked onto the lot, to the time they bought something.

They went from looking like they wanted to kill me, to acting like I was their best friend.

Since they’d overcome all their internal objections, all they had was pure desire.

Everybody loves buying stuff.

When we want it and can afford it, it’s a pretty good feeling.

Even if you’re buying lunch, that feeling when the waitress sets down your plate is a pretty good one.

One way to look at sales, (and all persuasion) is by imagining three operators.

There’s you, and the part of your target who wants to get something, and the part of your target who’s afraid to get that same thing.

Most people look at persuasion and sales as “one on one” battle.

But EVERYBODY is conflicted when buying something.

Even when ordering food in a restaurant, most of us have to think about it.

So when persuading, (or selling or seducing) think about the three operator mindset.

You, the part of them that wants what you want, and the part of them that isn’t so sure.

Three things will happen.

One is it will now be two against one.

Two is you can use plenty of sneaky patterns to HELP the good guys win.

Three is when you DO help the good guys when, there will only be two of you left.

You and your grateful friend.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Angels In The Hallway

The Either Or Pattern

We humans like choice, but not too much.

Choosing between 3 or maybe 4 things is pretty easy.

Which makes sense.

They say we can hold between 5 and 9 (7 +/- 2) things in mind at once.

So looking at three kinds and choosing one means we’re really thinking of six things at once.

The pros and cons of each choice (pro and con times 3).

When we get up to four, it’s kind of stretching our brains.

Looking at five things, it starts to get difficult.

This is what marketers have found when experimenting with different choices on supermarket shelves.

Three variations seems to be the sweet spot.

But there’s another way to look at choice.

How we compare things to one another.

Students were asked to put their hands in a bucket of water, and guess the temperature.

The “test bucket” was always the same temperature.

But their “guess temperature” was dependent on what their OTHER HAND was doing.

If their other hand was in warm water, they under-estimated the test bucket.

If their other hand was in cold water, they over-estimated the test bucket.

So when offering a choice to somebody, how you present that choice will have a HUGE impact on how they choose.

Example:

A marketer was trying to sell a kitchen gadget. It had a few features and was $150.

People would look at it on the shelf, all by it’s lonesome, and only a few people would buy it.

All he did was take a much more expensive gadget ($400 or so) and put it next to the $150 gadget.

The $400 gadget had only a few more features.

So the $150 looked CHEAP by comparison.

Simply by rearranging his shelves, he sold WAY more stuff.

There are tons of ways to leverage this.

Especially if you already have two choices, and there is ONE that you prefer.

Just present the costs of the other choice (the one you don’t want them to choose) as being disproportionately higher than the associated benefits.

Then when they choose, it will be THEIR choice.

Even though you “helped” them make it.

Luckily, this is pretty easy to do conversationally.

Just take a little bit of thought before presenting your ideas, and present them accordingly.

Learn How:

Seven Laws

Circular Loops of Passion

The Best Loop of All

Feedback loops can be pretty cool.

They can also suck.

If you’re in a “good” feedback loop, life seems awesome.

Whatever you do works, which boosts your confidence, which makes it easier to take risks, which work (because you’re confident and operating more efficiently), which boost your confidence, etc.

On the other hand, it can be horrible to be trapped in a negative loop.

Whatever you try doesn’t work, which KILLS your confidence, which makes you less likely to succeed next time, which makes your confidence drop even lower.

How do you move from a negative loop to a positive loop?

Take a break, clear your head, do something different.

Even professional athletes need to be taken out of the game from time to time to kill a slump.

The best feedback loops happen when every success makes MORE success MORE likely.

This tend to stay intact for a while.

But they can also take the longest to get going.

An exercise program is an example.

If you haven’t exercised in a while, getting started can be tough.

But if you stick to it, you’ll reach a “tipping point” where the IMMEDIATE benefit (rather than the expected long term benefit) is greater than the amount of willpower you need.

This is when you get to the point where you can’t NOT exercise.

It’s become part of who you are.

You can think of your brain the same way.

If you’re stuck in a “lazy” rut, where all you do with your gray matter is pass the time (TV, video games, social media, etc) then it be tough to break out of.

But when you reach a “mental” tipping point where learning things, reading non-fiction, etc., give you MORE pleasure than what you USED to do (TV, video games, etc) then you’ve found the BEST positive loop there is.

If you’re getting in shape, there’s really only so much you can do.

If you were a runner, for example, once you got down to 4-5 minute miles that would be it.

But with your brain, the are NO limits.

Which means if you become somebody who has a HOBBY or even a PASTTIME of learning, you’ll NEVER run out of interesting things to do.
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