Tag Archives: metaphor

Keep Your Focus

Compartmentalized Efficiency

Some people like to keep everything in their life compartmentalized.

Other people allow for plenty of spillover.

For example, if you absolutely HATE the idea of taking any work home with you, then you have a rock solid boundary between your work and home life.

On the other hand, you might prefer doing stuff at home, rather than work, because home is more productive.

Then there are folks who work from home, so home and work is the same.

The same table upon which they build their empire is the same table they make a pizza on a couple hours later.

Hobbies, work, social life, dating life, neighborhood groups, all are areas that can either overlap, or be separate.

Some people are so careful about compartmentalization that they don’t like the ice cream to touch the cake or the peas the carrots.

But as humans, we also have a drive to be efficient.

If you had to take a bunch of glasses from your living room into the kitchen, you’d naturally pick up as many as you could carry.

It would be silly to make a separate trip for each glass.

The more efficient you can be, the more time and energy you can save.

Of course, everybody has their own “set point,” or balance between how much compartmentalization they have, and how much efficiency.

One way to approach this is how you view your hobbies.

If they are PURELY “pastimes” then their only purpose is to make the time go by quicker.

On the other hand, they could be VERY PRODUCTIVE.

And if you can ENJOY these hobbies as much as they benefit your skills, then you’ve found an easy path to continual improvement.

If you don’t already do so, consider the hobby of “lifelong learning.”

Meaning try to some find something that would be interesting to learn, interesting enough so you would enjoy doing it, and would also improve your skills in some area.

Fortunately, there are TONS of online learning systems, courses, videos etc.

Which allows you to be able to learn pretty much anything.

And if you also “learn how to learn” this will rapidly accelerate your progress.

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Super Learning

Are You Shuffling Life Away?

A long time ago, Mother Nature had to make a decision.

When it comes to animals, we all have our own “selling points.”

Zebras have stripes. Tigers have teeth, skunks have stripes and a horrible stench.

We humans have our big brains.

Which gave Mother Nature a bit of an issue way back in the day.

Our brains were getting so big, it was getting kind of hard to be born.

If you compare all the other mammals, and how long they spend as “kids” vs. “adults,” we humans take a LONG TIME to “grow up.”

That’s because in order to be born “fully formed” our hips would have to have gotten really wide. Too wide to walk on two legs.

That was Mother Nature’s dilemma.

Either be born more fully formed, but not be able to walk upright, or keep our two legged advantage, and be born significantly LESS than fully formed.

And that’s what happens.

We are born with a pretty “empty” hard drive.

Sure we have a lot of “instinctive” programs, like getting hungry, being afraid of certain things, getting sexually attracted to certain people.

But we also have TONS of learning ability.

Something that ALL OF US are UNDER utilizing.

This is the one thing that we can NEVER maximize.

You’ll NEVER get to a point where you know EVERYTHING.

You can spend your entire life (or even two or three lifetimes if that were possible) and you would even scratch the surface of what there was to know.

Add skills and abilities into the mix, and you could spend your ENTIRE LIFE on self development, and NEVER learn out of new stuff to learn and figure out or even create.

Yet, most people figure once school is done, then it’s “same old same old,” every day, until you die.

(The “Soft Parade” as Jim Morrison described).

Slowly shuffling towards the end of our lives.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

Just spend a few minutes a day learning something new.

Pretty soon you won’t be able to stop.

THAT is when life becomes exciting.

Get Started:

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Conquer The Earth

Do You Use Genghis Khan Sales Strategy?

I read an interesting history book a while ago.

The author had a different take than most authors.

Most history writers focus on events and people, and people’s intentions.

But this guy was different.

He had a couple theories that the actual people involved in history had much less of an impact than most people give them credit for.

For example, many people consider Genghis Khan one of the greatest conquerors of all time.

However, what’s not usually known is that while he and his use horseback army were sweeping across the Earth, conquering villages and cities, that area of the world had unseasonably wet summers.

Once in a thousand years unseasonably wet.

Which meant a lot MORE stuff grew after the rains stopped.

Which for Genghis and his boys, meant there was a lot MORE fuel for their horses.

Allowing them to ride a lot further, and support a lot more of them.

Another idea this guy had was the bulk of human inventions were created for two very important reasons.

To make things easier and safer.

Since humans are scared and lazy, the safer something is the better.

And the easier something is the better.

Using these two “paradigms” (that humans are scared and lazy, and geographic and weather conditions played a huge role) history is pretty easy to understand.

Which is a pretty good model to work from.

At least the “lazy part.”

The greatest inventions of humankind were done to make things easier. So we could be lazier.

Air travel, microwaves, Internet shopping, all fantastic for lazy people.

Communication is the same way.

You can do it the easy, lazy way, or you can do it the hard, dangerous way.

The hard, dangerous way is the “hard sell.” Even if you aren’t selling, that’s what most people use.

It’s a contest of “ideas” and whoever can present their “idea” the strongest usually wins.

Kind of like Genghis and his boys showing up with thundering hooves and thirst for blood.

On the other hand, you can use the lazy way. The safe way.

Just sit back and pull out the other person’s desires.

If you make them big and bright enough, using the other person’s words and ideas, they’ll “stick” to anything.

Which means YOU won’t have to do any work at all.

THEIR desires will do all of the heavy lifting.

And they’ll LOVE it.

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Get Them Swooning Over You

Attach Their Desires To You

Economics is called the “dismal science.”

And it’s called that for a lot of reasons.

One is that it forces one to ask the question, “at what cost?”

Politicians HATE this question. Their whole angle is to promise us the moon and never have to worry about paying for it.

Another reason economics is called the “dismal science” is it forces us to understand something about human nature, and human action.

And that is that ALL HUMANS have unlimited wants, needs and desires.

But we’re all stuck on this planet with limited resources.

So figuring out how to best distribute those limited resources to us greedy humans is the billion dollar question of all time.

And as I’m sure you know, if you can get MOST of what you want, you’re doing pretty good.

But this presents a fairly unique opportunity.

Especially for somebody interested in learning language patterns and communication strategies to bring out the BEST in people.

How’s that?

Because using the truth about people from the “dismal science,” you KNOW that inside EVERYBODY you’ve met, and EVERYBODY you will meet, are those UNLIMITED wants, needs and desires.

All you’ve got to do is get them talking about them.

Since they are ENDLESS, you can get them pretty excited.

Ideal futures, dream jobs, dream careers, dream boyfriends or girlfriends, dream houses.

Just get them to open up about their ideal future, tap that vast UNLIMTED resource of wants, needs and desires, and they’ll feel better than they have in a LONG TIME.

Most people pass judgement, give advice, tell people why they’d better be careful, etc.

But when YOU come along and ONLY ASK about those unlimited wants, needs and desires, they’ll feel fantastic.

And they’ll associate that fantastic feeling with YOU.

They won’t think, “Hmm, this guy’s going to help me get that dream house.”

It’s more like advertising. When they put a bikini girl next to a car.

Nobody thinks, “hmm, if I buy the car, I’ll get the girl!”

They just have an UNCONSCIOUS association between the girl and the car.

Equally strong will be the unconscious association between their BIGGEST DESIRES and YOU.

(Or whatever you happen to be selling or recommending or suggesting).

All you’ve got to do is turn off your inner “advice giver,” ask the right questions and watch them light up like crazy.

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Truths Are Deeper Than We Realize

Secret Girl-Getting Quality

One thing many people confuse is cause and effect.

If we humans see two things happening, one after another, we’ll assume the first thing has something to do with the second thing.

They’ve even done studies where they look at babies, (less than a year old) and watch how they watch blips move around on a computer screen.

The two blips are made by two separate programs.

But the kids think they’re connected. They turn one of them off, and the kid gets all freaked out, as if something’s wrong.

They believe we have “cause-effect” generators in our brains.

It somehow made us think more quickly back in our evolutionary days.

But in modern society, we often get cause and effect confused.

One way the media likes to play us is to say things are “linked.”

Like they’ll say “diet soda is linked to obesity” knowing it will make for an interesting headline.

They know that most people will understand it to mean diet soda CAUSES obesity.

But linking doesn’t really mean anything.

Sure, people that are obese tend to drink diet soda.

But that doesn’t mean diet soda CAUSES obesity.

Another common way this confuses us is when many hot girls tend to end up with rich guys.

So we assume girls only go for guys that have money.

This is absolutely NOT TRUE.

All you need to do to disprove this common belief is find a hot girl with a rich guy that she absolutely CANNOT STAND.

If having money “caused” attraction, then she’s always be attracted.

There must be something else going on.

There is.

Girls are attracted to guys with a certain quality.

A certain quality that SOMETIMES translates into money, sometimes not.

But because our economy is so messed up, a lot of guys WITHOUT that quality can GET a lot of money. Think of goofs like Zuckerberg.

Not you’re typical “alpha male.”

The good news is that quality is EASY to develop, whether you have money or not, want money or not.

And when you HAVE that quality, you’ll have something ALL women are looking for.

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Secret Social Proof

Generate Social Proof

Social proof is crucial in creating attraction.

You walk into a bar by yourself, most girl’s won’t even notice you.

You walk in with a crew of dudes, and you’ll maybe get a bit more of a look.

But you walk in with a slew of babes, and every girl will want you.

But what do you do if you don’t have a slew of babes?

Rent some!

Just kidding.

Here’s a “trick” that will help. It requires that you practice talking to as many women as you can.

Not just women you’re interested in, but ALL women.

All you need is their name, and ANYTHING about them.

Let’s say you’re in the supermarket.

And you see a ninety year old woman looking at pasta sauce.

You ask her what she’s planning on cooking.

She tells you lasagna. You ask her if it’s good. She says yes.

You ask her name, she tells you it’s “Betty.”

So far so good.

Now, here you are a couple weeks later. You’re in a conversation with a girl you’d LIKE to create attraction in.

She mentions she likes pasta.

You say, “Yeah, my friend Betty likes to cook Lasagna. It’s pretty good,” and leave it at that.

The girl you’re talking to won’t know who Betty is. But she’ll assume she’s decent looking. And since you mentioned that she cooks lasagna, the girl you’re currently talking to will assume all kinds of things about you and Betty.

If you linger too long on Betty, it will lose it’s effect.

Just drop Betty and her cooking into the conversation, and then start talking about something else.

If you drop two or three female names in the conversation, and they are related to the conversation, the girl you’re talking to will only assume ONE THING.

That you are a mad player and have all kinds of women on your back burner.

Which will make her want you more than ever.

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Inside Out Thinking

How To Bake Your Inner Cake

One thing that confuses us humans is cause and effect.

Or more specifically, events that happen close together in time.

Much more often than is true, we tend to assume a causal link.

They’ve even shown that babies as young as six months demonstrate this.

They put a kid in front of a monitor, and they have two blips moving around.

Both are driven by two separate programs.

When both blips stop, it doesn’t cause the kid much worry.

The only thing that freaks the poor kid out is when one stops and the other doesn’t.

The researchers think this means the kid assumes there’s some kind of relationships between the blips.

So when one stops, and the other doesn’t, it messes up his “model of the world.”

As adults, we do this all the time.

It was what superstitions are made of.

The term, “Knock on wood” is from all the way back to when they thought evil creatures lived in trees, and you had knock on the tree to scare them away so they wouldn’t mess you up.

Another way this “cause-effect” misunderstanding pops up is when we try and put the cart before the horse.

Nobody is immune from this.

Even central bankers make this mistake.

Economists call it “pushing on a string.”

A causes B.

So they figure if they create B that will somehow make A happen.

This happens a lot when we consider human behavior.

We tend to copy “outer behavior” and wonder why we don’t get the same results.

That’s kind of like looking at a delicious cake, and thinking you can replicate it with ONLY the frosting.

You figure since the outer surface LOOKS the same, it will BE the same.

This is what happens when people try and copy outer behaviors with understanding what makes up the inner state.

More often than not, the outer behaviors are a natural OUTCOME of the inner state.

But if you try and copy the outer behaviors without the inner state, it will come across as incongruent.

The paradox is that with the right inner state, ANY outer behavior will do.

Kind of like a delicious cake.

The frosting, in many cakes, isn’t even needed.

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Confidence Beats Everything

Social Conditioning Skills

The other night I watched a sci fi movie on Netflix

Maybe you’ve seen it.

It’s called, “Paycheck,” with Ben Affleck.

He was an engineer, and he and his partner had an interesting way for him to take lucrative freelance jobs.

He’d go to a company, help them invent some new product, and they’d pay him.

And then his partner would erase the portion of his memory, so he couldn’t divulge the secret information to other companies.

But in the beginning, they showed him practicing some kind of martial art.

Even though he wasn’t a fighter, and the movie hadn’t gotten to the part where he had to USE any kind of “fighting,” it made sense.

If you are going to be a scientist and have portions of your brain wiped periodically, you need to stay in “fighting shape.”

Most people recognize that “staying in shape” is important.

Most sports can be improved if you have more endurance.

Boxing, basketball, tennis, even bowling or golf are easier if you’re in good shape.

Any lots of endurance-heavy sports like boxing or basketball sometimes come down to which athlete is in better shape.

Once you are too tired to lift your arms to block a punch, your boxing skills won’t count for much.

Kind of like Mark Twain’s truism about reading.

The difference between somebody who CAN’T read and the difference between somebody who WON’T read is NOTHING.

The difference between a boxer who CAN’T lift his arms due to fatigue, and a boxer who doesn’t KNOW HOW to lift his arms is nothing.

Both are going to get punched in the face.

What’s the best “conditioning” for “life skills?”

Social confidence.

Public speaking, debating, even acting skills can often boil down to who’s got the most confidence, not the best skills.

Even before George Clooney became world famous, and had to go to auditions like other struggling actors, he said confidence was WAY more important than skill.

Robin Williams started out in a TV show called “Mork and Mindy.”

(About an alien named Mork).

How did he get the part?

He showed up at the audition and ACTED like an “alien” the whole time.

When he was waiting, he actually sat in his chair upside down.

That’s not an advanced acting trick.

That’s advanced CONFIDENCE.

The more CONFIDENCE you have, the easier life is.

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Social Confidence

Expand Your Social Universe

Imagine if you lived in a large city, but you only went up and down three big boulevards.

Whenever you thought about going shopping, you’d only think of the stores on those streets.

Whenever you thought of checking out a band or seeing a movie, you’d only imagine what was available on those three streets.

Whenever your imagination drifted to the weekend, and you started to daydream about what you were going to do, it would ONLY cover those three streets.

A goofy example, right?

One of the common things they do in hypnosis training is to get people to forget letters or numbers.

Then they say the alphabet, without the vowels, for example, with a straight face.

Or they count to ten without five, thinking it’s normal.

Everybody watches and giggles.

But it’s really a metaphor for how we live.

Most people are interested in hypnosis so they can hypnotize others, or hypnotize themselves and get rid of some of the junk they’ve been carrying around.

But maybe the BEST thing you can do is to first DE-Hypnotize yourself.

So you can see MORE of the stuff that’s around you.

Because the guy in the three boulevard universe is not so far from the truth.

Most of us go to the same places, do the same things, talk to the same people.

Even about the same topics.

Consider that doing things specifically that you AREN’T comfortable doing can be a useful exercise in de-hypnotizing yourself.

Just going places you’ve never gone, or eating at new restaurants or going to new bars can be helpful.

But what is MOST helpful is to talk to people you’ve never talked to before.

Most of us are VERY closed minded. We tend to hang out with people with similar ideas and beliefs, so we reinforce those similar ideas and beliefs.

Pretty soon we think THOSE IDEAS are all that’s out there.

But there is much more than you could EVER discover.

Of course, you won’t get any ideas from buildings. Concrete can’t talk.

But the people there can.

And you’ll be AMAZED at some of the treasure people have to share.

But they won’t come to you.

You must go to them. When you do, you’ll realize it’s well-worth the journey.

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Destroy The Evil One

How To Easily Kill Fear

Reframes can be very powerful.

Especially if after the reframe things seem a lot easier.

Because when we humans give meaning to something, even if the meaning isn’t true, we act as if it is.

This happens under hypnosis all the time.

People can be hypnotized to think a lemon is a cheeseburger.

And when they eat the lemon whole, (in front of stunned observers) it tastes just like a cheeseburger.

Even after, when they KNOW they’ve been hypnotized, they remember it as a cheeseburger.

They “meaning” of that thing they were holding was not a sour citrus fruit, but their favorite food.

We do this to ourselves all the time, but in the opposite direction.

Sometimes before we do something, we imagine it’s going to be really, really scary.

And often times, this keeps us from doing it.

But if we do it anyway (feel the fear and do it anyway) then we realize there was nothing to fear in the first place.

While this technique works (to conquer false fears) it’s not very efficient.

This is why Milton Erickson ditched this method when he invented “Ericksonian Hypnosis” or covert hypnosis.

He used to have his clients to all kinds of crazy things to prove their fears weren’t real.

But then he learned how to destroy their fears by telling stories.

This is the power of reframing.

You can reframe things FIRST without having to “prove” the reframe.

This is essentially what the “feel the fear and do it anyway” theory is.

You reframe the fear through action.

But it’s just as effective (and much more comfortable) to reframe the fear by trying on different thoughts in different combinations.

This way, you can realize things are safe and enjoyable BEFORE needing to prove it.

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