Category Archives: Choice

Peanut Butter Or Ice Cream?

I used to play this game with my friends.

Either or.

We’d throw out two different choices, and whoever was on the receiving end had to answer FAST.

Often times it was a drinking game. If you hesitated, you had to drink.

The questions started off pretty easily.

Plain or peanut M&M’s?

Pizza or burgers?

But pretty soon they got intense. Of course, nobody really cared about the content.

The whole point was to try and come up with a TOUGH choice, so the person would hesitate when deciding.

Unfortunately, a LOT of us do that all the time.

Hesitate.

Part of us wants to do something, and we’d really like to get a good result, but we’re also afraid of not being successful, and looking foolish.

A lot of this stems from not having clearly identified goals. Not only short term, but long term as well.

Imagine if you KNEW beyond a shadow of a doubt you wanted a peanut butter sandwich, and you had five bucks.

Enough for a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.

You’d be in and out of the store in a couple minutes. Even walking from your car to the door, you’d imagine EXACTLY where the peanut butter was, and EXACTLY where the bread was.

Now think of the same situation, but you only have VAGUE ideas to fulfill your INSTINCT for hunger.

You’d wander around the store FOREVER!

A lot of people are afraid to choose. Because what if you choose, and get what you want, and it turns out it’s not all that?

Well, that’s what life is all about!

Make a choice, take action, and then see what happens!

So what if that peanut butter sandwich doesn’t taste as good as you’d imagined.

You get another chance to eat a meal pretty soon! Probably in a few hours!

Another thing that makes us vacillate is our emotions.

Few things are as simple as figuring out what to eat.

There are ALWAYS other people involved.

This means that interacting with others, which is ALWAYS going to be in flux, is something you’ll just need to accept.

Some people go to great lengths to avoid this. Avoid giving speeches. Avoid confrontations. Avoid selling. Avoid being the guy or gal on the spot at the meeting.

But what if all this was EASY?

What if talking to ANYBODY, no matter WHAT the situation was, was a simple as making a sandwich?

No matter what happened, (delicious or not so delicious) you’d have another chance pretty soon?

How would your life be then?

Get Started:

Emotional Freedom

How To Expand Your Comfort Zone

Become The Explorer

I love to go exploring.

When I was a kid in boy scouts, we used to go hiking. Getting to the campsite was pretty hard. Walking up steep hills in the hot sun for hours and hours. But for some reason, when we’d make camp, me and my buddies would get a sudden burst of energy.

Throw off our packs and go running around, checking the place out.

As an adult, I have done a bit of traveling. Once I get to a new city, get settled into a hotel, I like to go out and explore.

Once, after about a 16 hour flight, I arrived at my destination about 7 PM local time. I had the intention of heading out for something to eat, and then hit the sack early.

But once I lost myself in the wonder if a big and strange foreign city, once again I felt that surge of energy. I didn’t make it back to my hotel until dawn.

Humans are natural explorers. We aren’t content to live boring lives filled with easy and safe routines.

To be sure, sometimes having a safe routine for a spell can be JUST what the doctor ordered. Retreat and regroup, mentally, physically, spiritually.

And it can certainly be easy to fall into a rut. Same day different stuff. Work, home, TV, eat, sleep work, etc.

The good news is you don’t have to hike some huge mountain or travel to a foreign country to break up your routine (although it would certainly help!)

All you’ve really got to do is change things up a bit. Even going out to eat once in a while, when you’re used to be eating at home can be enough.

Once you start to shake things up a bit, you’ll start to reawaken your natural, creative, explorer self.

The one that sees life as an adventure, instead of a chore.

Of course, this requires that you’re willing to take some small risks. Go places you’ve never gone before. Meet people you’ve never met before. Talk to strangers, if only to experience the pleasure of meeting new people.

This can absolutely be scary and uncomfortable. But it can also be exhilarating, and lead to some pretty amazing discoveries.

Not only about the world, but about yourself.

No matter WHO you are, or WHAT you’ve already accomplished, making a decision to slowly but consistently expand your comfort zone can pay MASSIVE dividends.

But you’ll never know unless you try.

This will make it easier:

Emotional Freedom

Super Sonic Skill Learning

How To Model Others

One powerful way to learn something is to reverse engineer somebody who’s already doing it.

Ever since the first caveman picked up a rock and threw it at a zebra, we’ve been copying each other, and improving on it ever since.

Somebody opens a cheeseburger restaurant and does well.

Somebody else opens up a bacon-cheeseburger restaurant and does better.

Then some crazy entrepreneur shows up and opens a bacon-cheeseburger-avocado restaurant and the town goes nuts!

No matter what you’d like to do, there’s probably plenty of people who are already doing it.

To take this reverse engineering skill to a completely new level, you can take certain aspects of what people are doing, and combine them into your own, unique super skill.

This is what happened when societies reached a “tipping point.” There were so many ideas swirling around that they finally started to take on a mind of their own, and innovation and technology took off.

But this skill is very powerful on a personal level. For example, let’s say you see somebody giving a speech about the importance of flossing after every meal. Now, you might think the content is boring, but they could be a really charismatic speaker. You could copy their delivery method, and come up with your own content.

Or in the cheeseburger examples above, you could copy the structure, ordering system, even layout of the place, but sell pies instead.

One powerful way to do this is when you are around somebody who is behaving the way you’d like to behave.

And as you’re watching them, simply copy their movements and gestures, in your mind. Imagine you are mirroring them exactly. This is easy if you are seated and they are standing. Really easy if you’re watching somebody give a speech, even on TV.

Then you imagine that you’re watching yourself up there, talking about something different, but using their same delivery style.

Many people do this unconsciously when watching movies or TV. It gives us that catharsis the Greeks talked about so much way back when.

By taking it up to the conscious level, you’ll go beyond mere entertainment, and start to use movies as learning tools.

What’s even better is that no matter WHAT you want to learn, you can find somebody doing it on YouTube. Watch them, copy them in your mind, or in person if you’re alone, and then watch them while imagining it’s you instead of them.

This technique works not only in learning new skills, but changing your own history as well.

For example, what would happen if you could rewrite your own history so you’ve ALWAYS been a natural speaker, or you’ve ALWAYS believed making money was easy?

The possibilities are endless.

Learn More:

Emotional Freedom

Rediscover Your Inner Hero

Awaken Your Genius

A long time ago, you were an absolute genius.

You looked out into the world, with nothing but excitement and curiosity.

You had no idea what was out there, only that you wanted to find out.

And the more you found out, the more you wanted to find out.

A perfect balance between means and ends. The means of getting out there was an end in and of itself, but not so much that you forgot about the ends.

You enjoyed the process, but not so much you were content to run around in circles.

You wanted to get somewhere. Then that end, that thing you were going after, was merely a small step to a larger goal. Something you sort of knew about, but not really.

The more you achieved, the more you wanted to achieve, and the more you needed to learn.

A perfect balance of learning, achieving, appreciating, and wanting more, and having the confidence, curiosity, drive and pure love for the whole process to keep you moving forward.

Then something happened. Learning stopped being so easy and natural, and started becoming frustrating, and sometimes scary.

The results were good, but not nearly as good as before.

Why?

Instead of YOU choosing them, these “results” were chosen for you.

Not only that, if you didn’t go after them the way THEY they told you to, it made you less and less excited, and more and more anxious, nervous, and frustrated.

Why does this happen?

Why do we come into this world, filled with so much love, appreciation and desire only to have it slowly and meticulously pounded out of us?

Is the world evil?

Were we put here to suffer?

I think you know the answer.

In those quite moments of inner peace, those fleeting moments of clarity, you KNOW why you are here.

You might not give it name, or words. But you know. Deep down, you know.

Your purpose is to remember who you are.

To find that inner explorer, the fearless discover of the world around you.

Perhaps you knew this before you came here.

That only that small, brief taste of your true potential would be enough.

Enough to launch you into your life’s mission to discover your true purpose.

To not only rediscover who you are, but to maximize your ability to share your gifts with the world.

Get Started:

Mind Persuasion

Have You Started To Build Your Life?

Dreams Walking In Broad Daylight

It’s always easier to go with the flow, than go against the flow.

If you are swimming, for example, swimming with the current is a lot easier than swimming against the current.

Often times beaches have “rip tides” which pull swimmers out to sea. The instinct is to swim back towards the beach, but this can get you killed.

Since you’re swimming against the tide, you’ll get pretty tired, and unless you swim on a regular basis, you won’t last long.

Instead, lifeguards say to swim parallel to the beach, until you are out of the “path” of the rip ride. Then you can swim much easier, even though you may be a bit further out.

When I was in college,we had to write three essays as part of this English class. Then we had to rewrite one of them, for our final grade.

Naturally, we would choose the best one, since that we’d already got a good start. This would make it much easier to get a good grade than if we tried to completely rewrite one that wasn’t so good.

Any time we do something that’s congruent with our nature, it’s easier than something that’s not.

What is in our nature? Being social. Interacting with others. Sleeping at night instead of during the day. Having urges to make more people. Having urges to make money or create wealth of some form.

Sure, there are exceptions. Some times we want to be alone, sleep all day, and stay away from the opposite sex.

But for most of our lives, we are striving to improve ourselves along these lines. We want better relationships. We want more income. We want more intimacy.

This is human nature. The human condition.

How you do that in your own life will be based on your own personality, likes and dislikes, history, beliefs, and about a kajillion other variables.

For most of human history, we never really had to think about this stuff. We just kind of did what was natural, and that was good enough.

But now we’ve got an incredible opportunity. To create things with much more specificity. Much more control. Much more creativity.

Every year there are more and more millionaires, some for the craziest reasons, some for pretty boring reasons.

But if you just kind “go with the flow,” it’s not likely to happen.

But when you choose it to happen, and plan it to happen, you can expect it to happen.

Because it will.

No matter what “it” is. Money. Relationships. A better career. Artistic expressions.

What will you create?

Learn How:

Goal Setting

Who’s The Boss Of You?

How To Take Control Of Your Life

I love walking in the mornings.

Especially really early, when it’s still dark. Normally, I follow a pretty standard route. Down to the big park near the main library, and then back home.

But sometimes I take a detour. Sometimes I’ll see something down a side street I feel like checking out.

My only intention for walking is to let my mind wander, and as a side benefit get a little bit of exercise.

I’m not going anywhere in particular, just out and back.

This is a great strategy for a lot of things. When the process is more important than the outcome.

Going on holiday is another example. Sure, the destination is important. But most of the time, the main outcome of a holiday is just to relax and unwind.

Even some things that seem to have a clear outcome are really process focused. People that have certain hobbies for example. Building stuff with wood. Painting, other forms of creative expression.

The intentions is not so much the outcome (unless it’s your career or you want it to be your career someday), but the process. Just losing yourself in the creative process and seeing what happens.

Other things require a much more detailed focus on the outcome.

When you’re boss tells you to have a certain report by a certain date, for example. You wouldn’t write the report the same way you enjoyed one of your hobbies, would you?

Or if your job was a truck driver, for example, and you were carrying perishable materials. You wouldn’t lazily take the scenic route, stopping for photos along the way.

You’d have a specific outcome, to be in a specific place at a specific time.

Most of the time, it’s easy to tell the difference between process activities, and outcome activities.

One huge indicator is when somebody tells us to do something. Then it’s clear there’s some kind of outcome we’d better achieve.

However, only leaving those “outcome based” activities up to the directions of others is a mistake.

A potentially HUGE one.

See, the biggest process of all is your life.

And your life is filled with outcome after outcome.

Most people are content to let others choose each of these intermediary outcomes, and then just relax on process stuff in the middle.

This is certainly safe. It’s certainly low risk. If you get into trouble, you’ve always got somebody to blame.

But it’s INCREDIBLY limiting.

The truth is that choosing your OWN outcomes is a lot easier than many people realize.

Now, I’m not talking about vague wishes that most people have.

“I want more money. I want to lose weight. I need a partner.”

Everybody’s got these.

I’m talking about rock solid plans to make them happen.

This is what happens when you “become your own boss” of your life.

You can build whatever you want.

Get Started:

Goal Setting