Category Archives: Confusion

Admit Your Cluelessness

Accept Cluelessness

One movie I particularly like is, “Shooter,” with Mark Walhberg.

It is about an ex-sniper who is hired to reverse engineer what they say is an attempt on the president.

But it turns out to be some big conspiracy, with all kinds of cool plot twists.

There’s one scene that’s one my movie favorites.

The main character and his sidekick go and visit this old guy. He’s the archetype of the old wise character who’s been around, knows all about everybody’s dirty laundry, etc.

One line he says has ALWAYS stuck with me, after he goes on and on about how deep government conspiracies run.

“Just when you think you know, you’re wrong!”

Meaning we humans are good at convincing ourselves we know things. When we are really pretty clueless.

If you want to do an experiment, ask a bunch of people a difficult questions. One that HAS an answer, but one that most people don’t really know.

You’ll find that most people will have a hard time looking you dead in the eye and saying, “I really don’t know.”

What many people do is try to come up with an answer that “sounds” good. So we look like we know what we’re talking about.

But the secret is accepting that you DON’T know, or you COULD be wrong is the best thing ever.

Because it will OPEN your mind to NEW ideas, thoughts, models of the world, ways of looking at things.

One of the maxims from NLP is that whoever is most flexible will prevail.

If you have a flexible mindset, and can look at things in many different ways, you’ll generally be much more resourceful than people who need to be “right” all the time.

The natural way of learning (not sitting in school) is frustration, then curiosity, then exploration, then testing, then knowledge.

You are frustrated because you want something or you can’t do something. This leads to becoming curious about how you can get it. Then you start to take action, trying different things. Then you get feedback, and pretty soon you can get what you want.

Until this process starts all over again. The more you go through this, the more you’ll learn. The more you’ll learn, the more you’ll be able to get.

If you need to KNOW the TRUTH all the time, you’re stuck. Since you KNOW, there’s no reason to EXPLORE. To find out. To grow. To improve.

Knowledge in and of itself can be pretty boring.

Continuously searching for NEW knowledge is what life is all about.

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Intelligence Accelerator

How To Ignore Those Pesky Doubts

Confused?

How Did I Get Here?

It’s easy to get confused.

I mean, really, really, what-the-heck-is-going-on confused.

Unless you have very clear goals of what you want, it’s very easy to run around in circles.

Sometimes you may be running in circles so long you forgot why you even started.

All of us have some very vague, yet incredibly strong desires.

Food, money, companionship, safety, social acceptance and recognition.

Which means it’s pretty easy to go chasing something because we THINK it’s going to get us one of those things, but we haven’t really thought it through.

And we get halfway through (whatever it is) and we start to rewrite our original intention.

Maybe we sort of thought we were going to get one thing, but we ended up getting an experience instead.

So we tell ourselves things like, “Well, at least I know better.”

It’s both incredibly simple and potentially very difficult to get what we want out of life.

It’s simple in that all you’ve got to is clearly define what it is you want, and take some kind of action.

If you get closer, do more of what you just did. If you didn’t get closer, or you got something else, do something different.

This requires we first set a very clear, and very solid goal of what we want. Without this, it’s VERY easy to get sidetracked.

Imagine what would have happened to some of the great inventors of all time if all they wanted was to make something “cool” that would get them some money and social recognition.

The only reason they kept going forward, despite all the obstacles that the world threw up in their path, was that they had a very clear idea of what they wanted.

Not only that, but they also had a VERY STRONG belief that it would happen. Not a hope, not a wish, not a “one of these days” kind of vague idea that most of us have.

That’s really the only difference between greatness and mediocrity.

Maybe most of us are too afraid to set goals. After all, what if we fail? What if people find out what we want and tell us we’re fools for trying?

Well, guess what? All those men and women throughout history that invented great products, medicine, methods of travel, all the things today we take for granted, they had those doubts too.

But they simply ignored them. They focused on their dreams, rather their fears. They turned their dreams into goals and plans they KNEW they’d achieve.

What about your dreams? 

If you are bold enough to turn your dreams into a plan, you WILL achieve it.

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