Category Archives: Charisma

Develop Mental Super Powers

Autopilot Magic

A common sales technique is any kind of “auto pilot” system.

Make money on autopilot

Lose weight on autopilot.

Drive traffic to your blog on autopilot.

Why do we like the word “autopilot” so much?

It implies that “we” don’t have to do anything.

We just flip a switch, sit back and let some other “system” external to ourselves do all the work.

Is anything “autopilot” possible?

Absolutely.

We humans are on autopilot most of the time.

Every day we think the same thoughts, eat the same food, and hang out with the same people.

Because WE are on autopilot, we like that we can achieve success by using ANOTHER kind of autopilot.

So we, while running on auto pilot, don’t have to do anything different.

Just reach over, flip a switch on another autopilot system, and then get back to whatever we were doing on autopilot.

Of course, the data says something different.

Despite all these autopilot systems, most of us aren’t getting any better.

Most people are just as broke and overweight as they always were.

Even worse.

Are we doomed?

Not at all.

But if you think that some other “autopilot system” is going to save you, then you’re in for a shock.

But you CAN slowly adjust your OWN autopilot system.

Suppose for example, you decided to wake up ten minutes earlier every day.

For the first few days, it would seem a little strange, but pretty soon it would be normal.

Just suppose, that you even made sure it was easy, and woke up five minutes earlier every day for a week.

Five minutes earlier than today, same time, every day, for a week.

Then every week you adjusted the time, another five minutes.

Every twelve weeks, or three months, you’d be up an hour earlier.

If you did this for six months, you’d be getting up TWO HOURS earlier than you get up now.

Since you’d be doing it very slowly, you’d probably start going to sleep earlier.

Since mornings are generally much more productive than evenings, you would be doing a LOT MORE simply by shifting those hours from the non-productive evenings to the VERY PRODUCTIVE mornings.

What could you do with an extra two hours a day?

Write a novel?

Start a business?

Learn something cool?

All this is possible by shifting slowly, five minutes a day.

Taking yourself only SLIGHTLY off autopilot, until your NEW autopilot is a BETER autopilot.

If you think in terms of slowly shifting YOUR OWN autopilot, instead of looking for another “magic” autopilot, you will be capable of much more.

Learn More:

NLP Mind Magic

Hallucinate Your Way Rich

Think Your Way Out Of Trouble

A long time ago, they used to think that negative numbers were evil.

This was back when math was still in its infancy.

Since the idea of a “negative thing” (how can you have negative six apples?) didn’t seem to exist, the idea was considered heretical.

Slowly but surely (and luckily) people started to accept the idea of negative numbers.

Same kind of thing happened when they invented “imaginary” numbers.

But ask any mathematician, and they’ll tell you that “imaginary” is not really accurate.

But the name stuck, and here we are.

These “imaginary” numbers are necessary to calculate anything that has to do with sinusoidal fluctuations (like electronic circuits).

One of the famous scenes from the Bible is when Jesus threw out the “money changers.”

Why were they called money “changers”?

Isn’t that like going down to the bank and exchanging dollars for Euros?

Why would those people be bad?

The reason is that way back in the day, lending money at interest was considered a sin.

So the clever money lenders changed their names to money changers.

They would lend money in one currency, and collect in another.

And they collected their “interest” in the form of a “currency exchange fee.”

This is how they got around the ban against charging interest.

This isn’t to say money lenders today (or back then) are good or bad.

But if you are clever enough, and you can think abstractly enough, you can work your way around any limitation.

If you can’t think very cleverly, abstractly, or laterally, when you come up against an obstacle, you’re stuck.

You look around for somebody to tell you what to do.

This is the way most people run their lives.

But if you can think differently, think abstractly, think creatively, any problem is really just another opportunity in disguise.

To all the other simple thinking folks, it’s just a problem.

But to you, it’s an opportunity.

Seeing the world this way requires practice.

Consistent mental practice.

It’s not based on any magic switch in your brain.

If you are, however, willing to put in the few minutes per day of mental practice, you’ll soon see a world FILLED with opportunities that others only recognize as obstacles.

Learn How:

NLP Mind Magic

Social Super Star

How To Pick Up Good Habits

Modeling is often thought of as an esoteric NLP technique.

If you’ve ever studied to become a teacher, then “modeling” is one teaching technique in your bag of tricks.

Consider that modeling is like communication.

Meaning you can’t “not” do it.

When you were a kid, your parents probably had an idea of “bad kids” they didn’t want you to hang around.

The reason was that they didn’t want you “picking up” any bad habits.

And if you’re a parent, you know that kids have an uncanny ability to copy the very things you DON’T want them to copy.

This is all done through modeling.

Imagine what it was like way back in the day.

When life was simple, but hard.

There was no such thing as “book learning,” since their weren’t any books.

All the learning came from younger, inexperienced kids, (or young adults) watching and copying the older experienced adults.

The idea of one person talking and another person listening to those words is a very recent idea in human history.

Just imagine how hard that would be.

You listen to a bunch of words.

Then you have come up with an idea of what those words mean.

Unless those words represented a very COMPELLING idea, you wouldn’t spend a lot of time focusing on them.

Our mind-body systems are MEANT to learn unconsciously.

But this does not mean passively.

This means a lot of watching, copying and practicing.

Up until that last couple hundred years, this is how humans learned EVERYTHING.

By watching and copying.

This is also why learning from books is VERY DIFFICULT.

Problem is today we don’t have a lot of “models” that are doing what we want to do.

But we tend to copy them anyway.

Even if don’t want to.

We talk and act like TV and movie characters, often without realizing it.

Does this mean we are doomed?

Not at all.

But it does mean you have to be a bit creative in choosing whom to model.

Luckily, in the laboratory of your mind, you can invent your own model.

Which means you can model ANYTHING you like.

Learn How:

NLP Mind Magic

Trippy Trees

Which Metaphor Do You Prefer?

An old Chinese proverb says that if you wait by the river long enough, you’ll see the bodies of your enemies floating by.

Meaning with enough patience, you can conquer all enemies.

On the other hand, Keynes, a famous economist, said that on a long enough timeline, we’re all dead.

Meaning if you need to wait longer than a normal life span for something to happen, you might never see it.

Waiting patiently is fine if you are the Grand Canyon.

It’s been there forever, and it will be there forever.

From the Grand Canyon’s perspective, the time in which us silly humans came to look at it is really only a small blip over the course of its life.

Of course, this is just a metaphor, as canyons don’t really have a perspective.

They just sit there while the relentless trickle of water consistently wears down billions of tons of rock.

Patience is important to humans, but only under the right context.

Often times we pretend we are “waiting” when in reality we are just too afraid to act.

We even give ourselves things we are waiting FOR.

I’ll wait until I lose a few pounds until I start dating again.

I’ll wait until my next raise before I start to learn about investing.

I’ll wait until summer before I start my exercise program.

Of course, most people are very patient with how well they convince themselves they are being patient.

The real secret is that making big changes is a BAD idea.

It’s much easier to make very, very TINY changes.

And do them consistently.

Just like a relentless trickle of water can build a huge canyon, with small daily exercise, you can build some MASSIVE changes.

Ideally, you can start with thinking exercises.

Since you can do them while just sitting there.

If you learn a few NLP procedures, and practice them daily, pretty soon you’ll have a much more RESOURCEFUL outlook.

You’ll slowly whittle down fears, and slowly build up confidence.

Just a little bit a day is all you need.

Learn More:

NLP Mind Magic

What's He Looking At?

How To Think Like Einstein

One of the most troubling experiments from psychology is the Asch experiment.

They put a guy in a room, and showed him two images.

One was a single vertical line.

The other had several vertical lines.

The task was to choose which of the several vertical lines was the same length as the single vertical line.

Easy peasy, right?

It was, when he was alone.

But then they put him in a room with a bunch of other people.

And the other people PURPOSELY chose the WRONG line.

And the test subject also chose the wrong line.

Alone, choosing the right answer is easy.

But when humans are surrounded by people who are choosing the wrong answer, choosing the right answer is VERY DIFFICULT.

In over 70% of the tests, the test subject KNEW the right answer, but because of social pressure, they chose the WRONG answer.

One of the reasons we humans behave like this is we never learn HOW to think.

We only learn WHAT to think.

Or more accurately, are TOLD what to think.

And when we think what we are told correctly, we get rewarded.

When we think we what are told incorrectly, we are punished.

This is more or less how modern society runs its school systems.

Is it any wonder that by the time we are finished with school, we’ve LOST most of our creativity, and originality?

Luckily, the brain is like a muscle.

(They’ll never tell you this in school, quite the opposite).

You can easily PRACTICE the way you think and strength of how you think.

This will make you much more resistant to the goofy ideas of others.

Goofy ideas that they likely accepted unquestionably from somebody else.

(and those from somebody else, etc…)

Want to know precisely WHY Einstein was such a genius?

Because he THOUGHT differently.

He IMAGINED differently.

He wasn’t even that good a math.

When it came time to mathematically explore his ORIGINAL ideas, he had to OUTSOURCE the math to his buddy.

That capacity of thinking differently, of imagining differently exists within you.

You’ve just got to find it and exercise it.

Once you think differently, (about whatever you want) you can live differently.

HOWEVER you want.

Learn How:

NLP Mind Magic

Dragons Are Everywhere

How To Jump Over A Tree

Once upon a time a young student went to see the local Kung Fu master.

“What would you like to learn?” asked the old guy.

“I want to be able to leap over a huge tree,” the young kid said, not sure what to expect.

“OK, follow me,” the old master said.

“Seriously?” the kid thought, following along.

The old master planted a seed in the middle of a field.

“Jump over this,” the master said.

“Seriously?” the kid asked. The master nodded, completely serious.

The kid jumped over the recently planted seed.

“Perfect,” said the master. “Come here and do the same, every day. I will check on you in a few years,” he said, totally serious, and walked away.

The kid dutifully obeyed. After fifteen years, he was leaping several meters in the air.

By the time the master returned, the kid was now a man, and was famous for his physical skills.

Not only was he leaping over the large tree, but he was teaching the local kids all about patience and dedication.

That with only a small amount of daily effort, you can build miraculous skills.

Or as Kid Rock says in one of his songs:

“Persistence pays and if that holds true, I’m gonna buy this F—— planet before the time I’m through!”

Most people spend their entire lives looking for ONE secret that will give them instant riches, instant fame, instant sex, instant health.

But if they spend that SAME effort on just a few daily activities, they would have created a masterpiece with their lives.

Instead, they keep searching for secrets that don’t exist.

All that effort, wasted.

How do you spend your days?

All you really need is to shift how you spend just a few minutes per day, and you will be remembered forever.

Get Started:

NLP Mind Magic

run Like Crazy

What Hidden Secrets Have You?

When I was a kid I went through a kite flying phase.

Every weekend a bunch of kids would gather at school and fly their kites.

A few of the kids who had “cool” kites would have “kite fights.”

Once I tried to build a HUGE kite.

Of course, not yet being schooled in physics or aerodynamics, my kite was too heavy for me to even lift.

But making was fun.

I took two long boards, nailed them together, got a bed sheet (my mom was PISSED) and made a huge kite.

I didn’t even bother trying to fly it.

Much later, in Junior High School wood shop, I actually learned how to measure and cut stuff.

So you could build something that actually was useful.

One time in college I found a discarded oscilloscope.

I took it home and ran my stereo through it.

Kind of like a mini laser show.

Once upon a time, we humans didn’t have much.

Now we have TONS of stuff.

And when it comes to inventing new things, we can get pretty creative.

On one hand, it’s amazing.

On the other hand, it’s very puzzling.

Some inventions seem so obvious in retrospect, but it took a LONG time for people to come up with them.

For example, guys fought each other on horseback a LONG TIME before somebody invented the stirrup.

That little loop at the bottom of the saddle, to keep you from falling off.

At the same time, this is both crazy and fantastic.

Crazy because it makes us humans seem silly.

But fantastic because it means there’s potentially TONS of new things just waiting to be invented.

Simple things that might change everything.

All it takes is thinking a little differently than most people.

Looking at things differently.

Instead of using your mind as an echo chamber, consider using it as an experimental lab.

To try out different thoughts, just to see what happens.

You may be surprised what you find in there.

Learn More:

NLP Mind Magic

Under The Bridge

Become A Treasure Hunter

One of the things we humans crave are secret short cuts.

Plenty of diets are based on “one weird trick.”

I have very old email address that gets tons of spam every day.

And all of them are more or less based on solving age old problems with one new secret idea.

But if you can imagine way back in the day, before humans populated Earth, they also had that desire.

Otherwise they wouldn’t have ended up populating the entire Earth.

Which might suggest that our common desire for that one weird trick is really a MOTIVATIONAL desire.

Something we are meant to always be pursuing.

In a world that is very dangerous, and we have to work HARD to get our needs met, and work HARD to avoid danger, that would be a useful desire.

To always believe that somewhere over the next set of hills is the secret to a happy life.

This provides the pull, and all our daily needs that require daily effort require the push.

Even hero’s journey movies have this desire.

That there HAS to be something OUT THERE better than THIS.

Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, sang about Somewhere Over The Rainbow.

That mythical place that is NOT HERE.

Unfortunately, we humans seemed to have kind of boxed ourselves in.

We have SO MUCH STUFF that is easy to get.

And there is VERY LITTLE real danger.

We still have that same desire.

But without the necessary NEGATIVE incentives to keep us going, we only WISH.

That desire doesn’t motivate us like it used to.

So much today is easy, and instant, and effortless.

We think that desire should be easy and effortless as well.

Hence all the “one weird trick” solutions to ALL our problems.

However, if you are brutally honest with yourself, you must admit that there isn’t any secret trick.

Because people keep getting LARGER.

Obesity continues to INCREASE.

If you see health as a proxy for our desires (sex, relationships, careers, finance, etc.) we seem to be going in the OPPOSITE direction.

The more we WISH for an easy solution, the further away we get.

Consider switching how you think about things.

See that desire as not a magnet, that allegedly pulls things to you.

But rather a motivation engine that inspires YOU to move toward THEM.

You are, after all, a nomad.

Nomads are the ones that left Africa thousands of years ago and spread out across the globe.

There is still treasure.

Your job is to find it.

Learn How:

Ego Taming

Get Out There And Play

Ditch The Map

I remember when I first went away to college.

It was only a couple hours away, and I lived in the dorms.

One of the things I did a lot in my senior year of high school was cycling.

Me and my buddy would go on these long rides a few days a week.

So when I got all unpacked, I was eager to explore my new world.

Way back in those days, we didn’t have GPS or anything.

So I had to look at an actual map, and then try and remember the names of streets.

Needless to say, I ended up getting pretty lost.

And I ended up going through some sketchy parts of town.

You can’t really tell that from a map.

When I finally found my way back (a few hours later), I decided on a different strategy.

I’d ditch the map, and just feel my way around.

I would start in small loops, and just keep slowly expanding the area that I would get familiar with.

About a month later, I had all kinds of cool rides.

That I discovered on my own, without needing any maps.

Loops that went up and down huge hills.

Long flat rides that went to the beach and back.

This is a good metaphor for how we behave, in the moment.

Looking at the map is like trying to consciously think everything out.

While just winging it and going by your gut is like acting without thinking too much.

Without getting in your own way.

One way seems easy at first, but it can end up being very limiting in the long run.

One way seems scary and difficult at first, but in the long run it is much, much better.

It’s very hard for us humans to do things that are unfamiliar.

Part of the reason we perceive a ton of risk when there’s none there.

Especially social risk.

Everybody is looking out into a crowd of strangers and thinking the same thing:

“I’d like to meet some nice people, but only if they go first.”

Luckily, there’s a way to recalibrate this thinking.

So you can feel just as comfortable around strangers as you do around lifelong friends.

Learn How:

Ego Taming

Yeah Baby!

Why Junk Food Tastes Good

If you were a highly skilled chemist, where would you work?

Assuming you weren’t going to break bad like Walter White.

I had a friend once in that situation, being a skilled chemist and looking for work, and he took a job at a major cosmetics company.

Another place where chemists work is in food companies.

The kind that are responsible for food that is nearly addictive.

That is specifically designed to trick our taste buds.

If you’ve ever tried to eat healthy, you know how hard it is.

It takes a LONG TIME to “acquire” a taste for healthy food.

Or “re-acquire” since that’s the stuff we are SUPPOSED to eat.

Even fruit is a Frankenstein creation.

If you took a time machine back a couple thousand years, you’d find “natural” fruit that was nowhere near as big and sugary as modern fruit.

In some respects, it’s GOOD that we can trick our instincts.

That’s precisely why we enjoy movies so much.

We get to feel “non-normal” emotions (fear of death, love, loss, etc.) without having to actually deal with the consequences those emotions would normally produce.

In other areas, our instincts, especially our social instincts, are purposely being jacked all over the place.

Look in any crowded area, and check how many people are STARING at their devices.

Chances are they aren’t reading an in depth article about the economic and social implications of modern life.

Chances are they ARE getting their “fast food hit” from social media.

That “likes” and attention that feel good for about a second, but really only want them crave more.

Very much like those advanced chemists to carefully synthesize supermarket food to make us want more with each and every bite.

Luckily, training (or rather re-training) your social instincts is much easier than re-training your hunger.

Because social health food FEELS much better than social junk food.

And once you re-calibrate your social instincts, you’ll feel much better as well.

Learn How:

Ego Taming