All posts by Aaron Simmons

I’m figuring out how to be the best possible version of me, a journey that takes me down many roads — like Leonardo DaVicinci, but not nearly as awesome.
New Year, resolutions, self confidence, self improvement

You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby!

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Well, another New Year’s Day has come and gone. You’ve probably been reflecting on your life a lot lately, if only because this is the time that many other people choose to do exactly that! But where have those thoughts taken you?

A Brighter Future From A Darker Past
When people are planning a brighter future, they often find themselves looking at a dark past. Why do you want to get a new job? Isn’t it because your current job just isn’t satisfying you any more and the work is no longer worth the money they pay you? Why do you want to lose weight? Isn’t it because you’ve looked in the mirror and were disgusted by what you’ve found? Why do you want to quit smoking? Isn’t it because you’ve become shocked and humbled by your lack of self-control and have begun to notice some frightening health problems?

Since so many of our goals are predicated on a dark past, setting goals can be very discouraging. But this discouragement is unavoidable. You cannot set a path in a direction you want to go until you understand why you don’t want to be where you are.

Half The Motivation
The question is, how do you motivate yourself to move in that new direction? Certainly the need to leave those negative emotions behind you can provide a lot of energy to fuel your march toward a new you. But the nudge of a negative past only provides half of the motivation you will need to accomplish your goal.

This, I believe, lies at the heart of all failed New Year’s resolutions. How can you step into a brighter future with confidence if you have seen yourself only as a failed specimen? The answer is that it cannot be done. The negative energy of the past is not enough to create a new you. You must also discover your glorious past.

A Chance Discovery
I am frequently drawn to journaling. I don’t journal consistently, but about every six months I feel the urge to write down my assessment of who I am, what I’m doing and what I want.

One day, after writing a very negative and frustrated entry in my journal, I happened to flip back and read an entry from nearly 5 years before.

As it turned out, that was also a frustrated and desperate entry. But I was shocked to find that every single problem that I complained about in that entry had been resolved over the next 5 years!

I laughed when I read that I feared I would never be able to quit smoking, because I knew that I did eventually quit — and easily at that! I was ashamed to be a college dropout and believed that the opportunity had passed me by forever, but I returned to college only a year after I wrote that and eventually graduated. I was frustrated with my career, but I finally found exactly the kind of job I was looking for.

That journal entry was liberating!

Finding a Shining Past
By realizing how easily I had overcome things that at one time seemed insurmountable to me, I found that my confidence grew by a factor of ten! Instantly, I found the things that I had just finished complaining about in my journal’s newest entry were no longer a burden. I knew I could overcome obstacles, even if they seemed impossible to me, because I had already done it in the past.

If you are having trouble finding the motivation to succeed at your resolutions this year, do yourself a favor. Take a moment right now and search for your bright, shining past. Yes, there are things about the past that you do not like.

But force yourself also to recognize that you have already come a long way. You will find moments in your history that show you at your best, able to confidently face great challenges and overcome them with ease.

And that bright, shining past will give you the power to build the brighter future you seek.

apologetics, Christianity

Peering Into The Manger

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As I write this post, Christmas is rapidly drawing to a close. I had a great Christmas this year, and I hope that you have as well (if you celebrate Christmas, that is). And I have a question for you as another Christmas ends:

Who did you see in the manger?

A Baby In The Manger
Each year, we are drawn to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the one who would grow to become our savior by reconciling the sins of man with a holy God. When we read the Gospel accounts of the nativity story, many of us see a beautiful baby boy, dreamily sleeping as shepherds and wise men graciously visit him with gifts and reverence.

And if on Christmas you see a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger, then I would humbly ask you to look deeper into the manger to discover the full wonder of the Christmas story.

God Almighty In The Manger
All too often, we see the baby in the manger and forget that there is more to the story — the baby Jesus is also God! For me, this is what makes the story of Christmas indescribably marvelous.

In our daily lives, we constantly seek to improve our skills and increase our learning so that we may steadily improve our station. We seek ever to improve our influence and our importance among our fellows. We strive to know more, have more and to be more.

But imagine having created the entire universe and all that exists within it. Imagine having ultimate power and perfect knowledge. God had it all, and yet lowered himself to the smallest possible position of humanity so that he might elevate us.

This is the miracle of Christmas: that God chose to come from Heaven to Earth, placing himself among us as a baby so that we may one day leap from Earth to Heaven.

The Christmas Spirit
Our need must truly be great if a supremely powerful being must take such a surprising and humbling action to broker a reconciliation to him!

Often, we don’t realize the depth of our need. Often, we don’t recognize sin’s poisonous influence in ourselves. In a world where people daily carry out atrocities against each other, like a serial killer that coolly slays his victims solely for the joy of watching them die at his hands, it can be pretty easy for us to look at ourselves and think that we are basically good people.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we can readily see that we fail each day to abide by God’s precepts. He asks for us to merely put our trust in Him and to treat each other with loving kindness. Yet we find that we often fail to do so or miss opportunities where we could have done so, despite our honest desire to do good.

And yet, despite our great failings, God has already done the work required to reconcile us to him and view us as holy and blameless, beginning with his work on Christmas day.

How then should we respond to the miracle of Christmas? I believe the most appropriate response is, in gratitude to God for his extraordinary love, to reach out to each other with loving kindness and to renew our trust in God — for he has shown himself worthy, time and time again.

epistemology, impossibility, logic, philosophy, science, wordplay

Impossibility Is An Impossibility

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If somebody were to claim that he could turn lead into gold through the power of concentrated thought, what would you think about that claim? You’d think it was impossible, right?

Then you would be wrong!

A Matter Of Semantics

Lest you should think that this article is about startling advances in the field of alchemy, allow me to explain: it’s a matter of semantics.

It is certainly improbable that lead can be turned to gold at all, much less with only the power of thought. It could also accurately be called unlikely, impractical or unrealistic.

Impossibility, however, is difficult to make a case for. For a thing to be impossible, it must not be able to happen, by anyone or anything, at any time, under any circumstances. To confidently declare a thing to be impossible is to assume way too much about the quantity and quality of what we know.

Standards of Knowledge

Claims regarding possibility and impossibility carry with them implicit demands for knowledge. To say a thing is possible, for instance, asks for a very broad range of knowledge. The standard is only can such a thing happen, ever? If it has happened even once, it is then known to be possible. The circumstances that made it possible may not be fully understood, but it happened. It may not even be known if it will ever happen again, or when. All that is known about a thing that is possible is that it could happen again. The degree of understanding required to define possibility is very small indeed.

Compare that to a thing that is imminent. To correctly declare an event to be imminent requires a wealth of knowledge about the factors and circumstances that typically lead to such an occurrence. You have to know so much about an event that you can readily understand the patterns that lead to it — indeed, to understand it well enough to know that there are patterns involved.

To say that a thing is uncommon also implies some degree of knowledge about the event. To say it is uncommon implies that it does in fact happen, and that you’ve seen it happen often enough to understand its frequency of occurrence. Implicitly, it means that such a thing actually happens quite often — just not as often as other more likely outcomes under similar circumstances.

But impossibility is a breed unto itself. Impossibility demands that a thing will not occur under any circumstances and at any time. Therefore, to accurately claim that a thing is impossible implicitly demands total knowledge — certainty of impossibility demands omniscience!

In essence, impossibility is an impossibility. If we are intellectually honest with ourselves, we’re forced to admit that we don’t know enough about what we know to know what we don’t know enough about.

Mistaken Impossibility

Often, when we say that a thing is impossible, what we actually mean is that it is difficult to achieve or that it has not been achieved in the past.

But take note! A thing that has never happened, even after a large number of attempts, does not qualify as a thing that is impossible. All that we can be certain of is that we have not yet discovered the conditions that would make such a thing possible.

If we were to mistake what seems to be impossible for what truly is impossible, we would put a permanent end to innovation and advancements in all fields of thought and scientific advancement. If people allowed themselves to stop at what seemed impossible, we would not have airplanes, wireless handheld computers or genetically engineered wheat, to name only a few examples.

Impossibility and Sensibility

But even in a world where impossibility is uncertain, there must also be sensibility. For instance, it wouldn’t be sensible to doggedly continue to attempt something, taking your encouragement solely from the prospect that nothing is impossible. Although things may not technically be impossible, they can still be practically impossible.

Consider the case of alchemy. Many people in history have wasted many efforts attempting to turn lead (or other elements) into gold. The track record shows that such a thing is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish. We could continue to fight that fight, armed with the comfortable fact that we do not fully understand quantum mechanics. Indeed, as we continue to learn more about what makes atoms what they are, we may well discover some day that alchemy is ridiculously easy!

But making it happen requires a LOT more knowledge than we currently have. And therefore, it would not be practical to pursue.

An Intelligent Approach to Impossibility

If you want to make the impossible happen, here is a rule of thumb: take it a step at a time.

For instance, if you wish to build a teleportation device, you wouldn’t just go to the local surplus store and start putting something together with the expectation that you will get there by trial and error. You need to take it a step at a time!

The first step is to determine not whether a teleporter is possible, but to determine under what conditions a teleporter could be possible. Then, determine what events might create such conditions. Are there things that could be done (by a teleporter, for instance) that could manipulate those factors? Continue working along those lines by nailing down how it could be possible instead of whether or not it is. As the idea becomes more concrete and better understood, then you are ready to approach its particulars.

As you can see, much of the initial investment in such an endeavor is only time and thought. If you put considerable thought into the matter, and you feel that you are no closer to a solution, then you have discovered only that it is beyond your understanding at the time (and not that it is impossible).

Impossibility is Liberating

There’s something particularly liberating about the malleable nature of impossibility. Too often, we limit ourselves by claiming that things are “impossible” for us — even if they are quite simple things! We can feel trapped in a dead-end job and despair that it is “impossible” to get a better job. We can become disheartened after several lousy dates and begin to believe that it is “impossible” to find a person that we belong with. We can look at an overwhelming amount of debt and worry that it would be “impossible” to ever catch up.

But take heart. A sense of impossibility is only an indication that you’ve given up too soon. It says that you haven’t explored all of the avenues yet. Impossibility is a call for greater creativity and for new ways to approach a problem. Remember, impossibility is best tackled when you start with the assumption that it IS possible, and then determine what conditions would make it possible.

It becomes possible to pay off a sizable debt, for instance, when you ask for a much deserved raise, sell your house and apply the proceeds to your debt, live in an apartment or with family while you get back on track, stop eating fast food for lunch, and so on.

It becomes possible to find a better job when you get clear with yourself about the things you don’t like about your current job and the things that a new job would have to do to be better. It becomes possible when you define what work you want to do, and then tell everybody you know what you are looking for.

It becomes possible to find the love of your life when you are clear about what kind of a person that would be and brainstorm the kinds of places where a person like that can be found.

Impossibility is only a problem that either hasn’t been properly defined or a search for a solution that has not been exhaustive. So, what are the areas in your life where you have allowed the “impossible” to hold you back?

accomplishment, goals, life lessons, nanowrimo

Writing A Novel Is Impossible, Then Easy, Then Challenging

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As any of my faithful readers may have noticed, my blogging dropped off the face of the Earth toward the end of November. My apologies. I was participating in National Novel Writing Month, an endeavor I highly recommend to anybody.

NaNoWriMo
National Novel Writing Month (affectionately called NaNoWriMo) is a contest of sorts — its participants are challenged to write 50,000 word’s worth of a novel between November 1 and November 30. That’s a pace of about 5 pages a day!

The novels don’t need to be finished products, or even be good. They only need to exist at the end of the month. There are no prizes for winning. In fact, there isn’t even technically a winner.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo for three years now, and finished two of them. One of the many things I have learned in the process is that NaNoWriMo is a wonderful metaphor for any of life’s challenges. NaNoWriMo, like life, is a challenge against yourself. For when you set out to do big things, you are often your biggest obstacle.

In NaNoWriMo, as with any major task, you move through three distinct stages on your way toward your goal: Impossibility, simplicity and challenge.

An impossible challenge
At first glance, a major goal can seem almost impossible. In fact, the subtle fear that its accomplishment may not even be possible is often a good indicator that you are embarking on something significant.

This feeling of impossibility is an important measuring stick, for the value of an action is often relative. Going to the grocery store to pick up some shampoo, for instance, is not normally a significant action. But, if you have spent the past fifteen years struggling with intense agoraphobia, it may well be a life-changing experience.

Remember also that the key here is for a project to seem ALMOST impossible. That can be a fine line, but you will know when you’ve struck that balance. A balanced goal is characterized by a calm, confident sense from the heart that the project can be done, even though it may seem too big for you on the surface.

An easy challenge
Next, you become surprised by just how easy the project turns out to be. This is the most empowering part of the whole journey, and practically guarantees your eventual success. Sadly, this is the stage that quitters never get to. This is unfortunate, because it is so easy to reach.

We are all familiar with the old maxim that a journey of one thousand miles begins with a single step. In NaNoWriMo, the truth of this leaps into view. If you focused solely on the immense workload that stands ahead of you, you would never dare to begin. But a funny thing happens when you instead focus on a single day’s workload. Writing 5 pages, though challenging, is easily done. And when you’ve written those 5 easy pages, you don’t feel like you’ve done a mere day’s worth of work, but actually feel that the entire project’s success is within your grasp.

And the real fun happens when you’ve made it about 25% of the way toward your goal. Those first days of work, in addition to being surprisingly easy, also help to set the tracks for the remainder of the work. You don’t realize it at the time, but your early work actually simplifies the work that lies ahead.

In NaNoWriMo, this is clearly evident. In the beginning, you aren’t necessarily sure who your characters are, much less what they are or will be doing. But eventually, things in the novel being to take place as a natural result of the things that have transpired in its earlier pages. Soon, it becomes incredibly easy to write a novel — it practically writes itself! But you will never experience the thrill of being carried off by your goal if you do not take those first steps.

A worthy challenge
Eventually, even the thrill of the surprising ease of your work dies away. And finally, the project becomes a worthy challenge. Though the work may be relatively easy, there is still a lot of it to be done. The question is no longer one of whether or not the goal can be accomplished but whether you are committed to doing the work that needs to be done to get there. You are now locked into a battle of self-discipline.

In NaNoWriMo, there are many reasons to write a novel in such a short period of time. But not all of those reasons will lead to success. If you merely wanted to “try something new”, for instance, writing the first 20 pages might be new enough. After that point, it can be very difficult to finish. But if your interest is to train yourself in self-discipline, completing the novel becomes absolutely necessary. What self-discipline have you learned if you quit before the task is done?

The novel gets done only when you diligently sit down at the keyboard (or take pen in hand) day after day, for as long as it takes, until the job is done. That is the ultimate challenge of NaNoWriMo.

Discipline is the key discipline
In every major undertaking, there is a time when the fun disappears. There is a time when the task is no longer easy. There is a time when the reasons no longer seem reasonable. It is at those critical moments when the only thing that stands between you and your goal is the ability to put one more day’s work into it despite all of your feelings to the contrary.

Discipline is the one skill that carries you through to the accomplishment of your goal. Discipline is what gives you the courage to keep going, even when you don’t feel like it. And you know that your work is not in vain, for nothing compares to the euphoria of accomplishing a major goal.

So, what major goals do you want to accomplish? Do you have the discipline that it takes to accomplish it? The only way to know is to get started — and to keep going.

creativity, independent thinking, individuality, wisdom

Collective Wisdom Ain’t

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Collective wisdom is no kind of wisdom. A look at the major breakthroughs in thought throughout history shows that defying collective wisdom often leads to the purest creative solutions to the questions that are pondered. The history of science and technology particularly is a progression of one case study after another that shows how new advancements rely on stepping outside of what is at the time considered by many people to be an obvious fact.

Consider the case of Ptolemy. He developed a beautifully detailed and well reasoned model of the universe in which the Earth stood at the center. To account for the motion of the heavenly bodies, Ptolemy reasoned that they sat upon fixed spheres which rotated around the Earth. Since he realized that stars, planets and comets all seemed to have different trajectories, he reasoned that there were in fact several of these spheres.

The most important thing about Ptolemy’s model is that it worked. He had the evidence in front of him and constructed a model based on that evidence. Because Ptolemy’s model explained things so well, it became widely accepted. This model, along with the remarkably detailed records that he kept regarding the motion of the stars and planets, proved to be useful for navigation and astronomy for centuries to follow.

Although people periodically hypothesized that the Earth might actually be orbiting the Sun, Ptolemy’s model remained the commonly accepted view of the cosmos for fourteen centuries! It was not until Copernicus arrived on the scene that a heliocentric theory gained traction. Prior to that time, people were largely complacent to accept the collective wisdom of others.

Let’s face it: we all have a tendency to be lazy thinkers. That in and of itself is not a bad thing. Lazy thinking helps us get through the day. At some point, you can button your shirt in the morning without any deliberate thought. And imagine what the world would be like if everybody had to discover everything by themselves, without relying on the knowledge and wisdom of others. Fortunately, we don’t have to understand how computers work, we just have to know how to use them. We don’t have to know the entire written works of physics and astronomy to enjoy watching the sun set. We can use the wisdom of our predecessors to leapfrog to our own discoveries.

But when we become too complacent about our thinking, we run the risk of preventing further progress and prevent increasing the quality of our knowledge. When we accept assumptions as fact solely because everybody agrees with the idea, we have something that is cause for suspicion.

This is not to suggest that all collective wisdom is wrong. Sometimes things are widely accepted as true because they actually are. People would generally agree that leaping off of a cliff is detrimental to your health. Most people agree that you should not eat rat poison. It would certainly not be wise to defy conventional thinking and leap off of a cliff or to feast on a box of rat poison “just to double check”.

The key is to ensure that you are always thinking. Challenge your assumptions. When you accept something as true, accept it because you have thought about it and found it to be true — not merely because somebody told you that “everybody knows” it is true.

apologetics, Christianity, faith, reliability of Bible, wordplay

This Sentence Has Over 100 Errors

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One of the classic arguments against the reliability of scripture is that there are tens of thousands of errors in the texts. You see, there are many ancient copies of the books of the New Testament. However, there are several errors among them, and many copies don’t completely match any of the other copies. Some are spelling errors, others are syntax errors. Some are paraphrases rather than direct copies. And so, the argument goes, there is no way to know what the original scripture is supposed to be. Such an overwhelming number of errors, as some assert, casts suspicion over what exactly constitutes the true teaching of the religion — or indeed the very legitimacy of such a religion.

Sounds convincing, doesn’t it?

Well, don’t throw your Bible away just yet. Here we have a situation where the facts as they are presented are technically accurate — there are indeed many discrepancies among the thousands of New Testament texts that exist. However, the conclusion presented (that there is no way to reliably know what the original text says) is false!

Perhaps a little experiment will demonstrate just how important accuracy among several transcriptions matters with regard to understanding what the original source says?

I will write a single sentence incorrectly 100 times. No sentence will match any other sentence, and no sentence will completely match the correct sentence. In fact, I will not write the correct sentence even once. My challenge to you is this: read each of the sentences and see if you can honestly claim it is “impossible” to know what the correct sentence is. Hint: It won’t require 100 sentences…you will likely determine the correct sentence after only the first few lines!

  1. When looking for the truth, look carefully.

  2. Wen searching for the truth, look carefully.

  3. When searching for truth, look carefully.

  4. When searching for the truth, look closely.

  5. When searching for the the truth, look carefully.

  6. When surching for the truth, look carefully.

  7. When searching for a truth, look carefully.

  8. When searching for the facts, look carefully.

  9. When searching for the truth, watch carefully.

  10. When for searching the truth, look carefully.

  11. Look carefully when searching for the truth.

  12. When searching for teh truth, look carefully.

  13. When searching for the truth, watch carefully.

  14. When searching for the truth, investigate carefully.

  15. When seeking the truth, look carefully.

  16. When you are searching for the truth, look carefully.

  17. When searching for the trueth, look carefully.

  18. When searching for the truth, look intently.

  19. When searching for the truth, luke carefully.

  20. When searching for the truth, look carelessly.

  21. When searching out the truth, look carefully.

  22. Whoever searches for the truth looks carefully.

  23. When searching for the truth, please look carefully.

  24. When searching for the truth, look carefuly.

  25. When “searching” for the truth, look carefully.

  26. When searching for fact, look carefully.

  27. When searching for the truth, look with care.

  28. When investigating the truth, look carefully.

  29. When researching the truth, look carefully.

  30. When searching for the trooth, look carefully.

  31. When searching for the truth, investigate carefully.

  32. When searching for the truth, research carefully.

  33. Look carefully to find the truth.

  34. When searching for the reality, look carefully.

  35. When searching for the truth, look karefully.

  36. When searching for the truth, look carefully

  37. When sEarching for the truth, look carefully.

  38. Women searching for the truth, look carefully.

  39. When something for the truth, look carefully.

  40. When searching fo the truth, look carefully.

  41. When searching for truth, look carefully.

  42. When for the truth, look carefully.

  43. Searching for the truth, look carefully.

  44. When searching for the, look carefully.

  45. When searching for the truth, carefully.

  46. When searching for the truth, look.

  47. Whe searching for the truth, look carefully.

  48. When searchin for the truth, look carefully.

  49. When searching for th truth, look carefully.

  50. When searching for the trut, look carefully.

  51. When searching for the truth, loo carefully.

  52. When searching for the truth, look carefull.

  53. When searching for the truth, look diligently.

  54. When searching for the truth, look patiently.

  55. When searching for the truth, look fervently.

  56. When searching for the truth, observe carefully.

  57. When searching for the truth, scrutinize carefully.

  58. When searching for the truth, look carefully.

  59. When when searching for the truth, look carefully.

  60. When searching searching for the truth, look carefully.

  61. When searching for for the truth, look carefully.

  62. When searching for the truth truth, look carefully.

  63. When searching for the truth, look look carefully.

  64. When searching for the truth, look carefully carefully.

  65. Whon searching for the truth, look carefully.

  66. When soarching for the truth, look carefully.

  67. When searching for tho truth, look carefully.

  68. When searching for the truth, look carofully.

  69. When searching for the truth, look carefully.

  70. When searching for the truth: look carefully.

  71. When searching for the truth? look carefully.

  72. When searching for the truth (look carefully).

  73. Who’s searching for the truth, look carefully.

  74. Where searching for the truth, look carefully.

  75. This sentence is totally in left field!

  76. When searching for the fish, look carefully.

  77. When searching for the truth, look lively.

  78. When searching from the truth, look carefully.

  79. When searching for the truth, look care

  80. When searching for the honesty, look carefully.

  81. For when searching the truth, look carefully.

  82. When the searching for truth, look carefully.

  83. Are you still reading this?!

  84. When searching for the proof, look carefully.

  85. W.en searching for the truth, look carefully.

  86. When sea.ching for the truth, look carefully.

  87. When searching fo. the truth, look carefully.

  88. When searching for .he truth, look carefully.

  89. When searching for the tru.h, look carefully.

  90. When searching for the truth, lo.k carefully.

  91. When searching for the truth, look ca.efully.

  92. Wehn searching for the truth, look carefully.

  93. When snihcraeg for the truth, look carefully.

  94. When searching for the tturh, look carefully.

  95. When searching for the truth, look clluferay.

  96. When hiding the truth, look carefully.

  97. When searching for the lie, look carefully.

  98. When searching for the truth, close your eyes.

  99. When reaching for the truth, look carefully.

  100. when searching for the truth, look carefully.

Surprising, isn’t it? How many lines did you read before the correct form of the sentence became obvious? As you can see in this demonstration, it would have been almost impossible to determine with any degree of certainty what the actual sentence is meant to be if there were only two or three of these sentences. But when there are a hundred, it becomes an elementary exercise to discern the real meaning. In the case of the texts of the New Testament, there are several hundred copies of parts of the New Testament, and thousands of copies of other parts!

The conclusion, then, as you can clearly see, is this: in light of the sheer number of copies of the New Testament that are available, the errors amongst them can be seen at worst as a trivial nuisance — and utterly incapable of clouding their true message.

introspection, life lessons, mentor, self improvement, subconscious

A Mentor For The Hopelessly Introverted

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You are only moments away from discovering the most intuitive teacher you will ever have access to…

A mentor can be a valuable resource for when you need to adjust your attitude, view your life from a different perspective or reflect on surprising new insights. Turning to a person that you respect and that has the wisdom to help you grow is a vital component to your continued success. If you are an introvert like me, however, you may have found that it’s quite difficult to find valuable mentors in your life, if only because you don’t meet many people.

Fortunately, your most effective mentor may not even be a person!

A number of years ago, I picked up an intriguing technique from Peter McWilliams’s book, “Life 101.” The only prerequisite is that you need to be comfortable with meditation. Once you have reached a state of relaxed concentration, then the fun begins!

Every student needs a school, so your first task is to visualize a place where you can go to relax and to learn. One of the best techniques is to imagine you are walking down a long hallway, and you come to a door. As you put your hand to the doorknob, you realize that you will soon open the door to your perfect place for mental relaxation and refreshment — a personal sanctuary. Then, open the door and let your mental sanctuary appear.

This is a matter of discovery rather than construction, so it shouldn’t feel forced. What you find should come as no surprise, for it is such a natural and obvious reflection of yourself. It is not an “aha” moment so much as it is an “oh…of course” moment.

Your classroom/sanctuary need not be indoors. While some people might imagine a cozy study in an old Victorian home, others might imagine an isolated spot on the beach. Some people might imagine a combination of interior and exterior locations. My perfect place is a clearing in a birch forest with a babbling brook trickling through it. There is a simple wooden bridge over the brook that leads to a modest cabin. The cabin itself is a single room, barren of all furniture and decoration. It is bright, clean, and quiet. Ah, I feel relaxed just thinking about it.

Now that you’ve found your classroom, you need a teacher. That is an easy process, for you find your teacher the same way you found your classroom. When you are ready to meet your new mentor, imagine a doorway across the room from you. If your classroom is an exterior location, you can still imagine a door a few feet in front of you…after all, we’re working in the realm of imagination. You see the doorknob turn, and are struck by the realization that your perfect mentor is about to come into the room. Then, watch the door open and allow your mentor to appear.

As with your classroom, this is a discovery instead of a creation. It will again be anti-climatic because it suits you so perfectly and obviously. But, even though you may not be surprised by your mentor, your mentor may very well be surprising. Your mentor may be somebody you know, or your mentor might not even be a person at all! It’s quite possible for an owl to fly through the door, if that’s what represents your perfect mentor.

And now, with your mentor at hand, you can begin your learning. What should you ask your mentor? He (or she, or it) is open to any question you have, but is such an amazing resource that you’ll find you don’t want to waste petty questions on him. You will find that, in a state of relaxed awareness, the right questions come easily. As always, it is best not to “sweat the small stuff.” How you work with your mentor will grow and adjust just as you will.

Your greatest challenge may be adjusting to your mentor’s style of responses. Mine rarely gives me direct answers, but instead asks thought-provoking questions that get to the heart of the matter. Or, in especially obscure moments, my mentor directs me somewhere else for answers. In response to the question how can I become more successful, my mentor replied, consider the leaves of the trees, or the water in the stream. Upon considering the water, I realized that if a river stops moving, it becomes stagnant and putrefied. I was getting lazy when a healthy, vibrant life is one of action. Considering the leaves reminded me that actions alone are insignificant. A leaf by itself withers and blows away, but it is full of life when connected to the tree. Any action is more effective when it is part of something larger. Having active goals, then, helps maximize the value of all of your actions.

Earth-shaking? Hardly. These insights are not special. Obviously, success is the result of action. Of course goals help you to achieve more. But the value of this exercise is that it reminds you of the exact things you need to be reminded of right when you need to be reminded of them.

In retrospect, my mentor has always provided the best possible responses to all of my questions. After all, great mentors don’t teach you new things. Great mentors challenge you to apply what you already know.

introspection, questions, wisdom

Fools Have Answers, Intellectuals Have The Questions

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Young children are the masters of questions. And for good reason – they have had very little experience in the world, and are doing the best they can to catch up. They realize that they don’t know it all, and they ask questions in order to learn more about the world around them.

And now, here’s a question for you to consider: at what point did you stop questioning like a child?

Sadly, many of us no longer have the capacity to ask questions like children. The causes are many. Some of us may feel self conscious about asking questions because we don’t want people to know that we don’t know something. Some of us may have grown weary of questioning because we have found that answers only lead to more questions. Others of us have given up on questioning for its apparent futility – not everything can be known. And others among us, albeit subconsciously, actually feel that we know all there is to know.

When looking back on the great creative geniuses of history, however, we find that they all share a common love of questioning. The status-quo is never good enough and their curiosity, like that of a child, was unquenchable.

By contrast, many famously bad predictions were delivered very matter-of-factly. They were spoken with the force of one who had ultimate knowledge, but in the course of time would be proved extraordinarily false.

Allow me to propose a notion that could rekindle your child-like need to question.

Consider the possibility that questions are not merely a search for answers. Questions do not exist only to increase our understanding, but to open a much larger door to the future. Questions, when used effectively, activate the ability for possibility thinking. This function of questioning has led to every great technological and sociological advancement in the world’s history.

Possibility thinking begins with replacing the classic fact-finding children’s question of why with the more powerful question, what if:

  • What if nations were ruled by their citizens?

  • What if people could fly?

  • What if people all over the world could communicate with each other easily?

  • What if we could mimic the sun’s power to provide electricity?

  • What if we could build an elevator into space?

“What if” lies at the heart of all progress. If you look around you, you will find that the people with the most influence and the most success are the ones that ask the best questions.

habits, haiku, Stephen Covey, wordplay, writing prompts

7 Habits of Highly Effective People…In Haiku

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Haiku, as you may know, is a Japanese poetry form that traditionally is only three lines long. The first line has five syllables, the second has seven and the third line has five. This form leads to incredibly terse statements that, remarkably, still deliver the message. In a recent presentation I gave at work on Stephen Covey’s classic book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People“, I summarized each of the seven habits as a haiku. Here’s what I came up with…

1. Be Proactive
Be responsible:
Don’t blame you and don’t blame “them”.
Action is the key.

2. Begin With The End In Mind
Select your goal first,
Then your path is determined.
Now, take your first step!

3. Put First Things First
Prioritize it:
Do first what is important,
Then do all the rest.

4. Think Win/Win
This is what I want:
We both get what we both want.
(That is the best way.)

5. Seek First To Understand, Then To Be Understood
Listen intently,
Never, never, ever speak.
Then, speak a little.

6. Synergize
I am only one.
One is also all you are.
But combined, we’re three!

7. Sharpen The Saw
Busy, busy, oh!
Stop, relax and be refreshed.
That’s how you’ll improve.

I hope you enjoyed those, they were fun to write! I also learned more about each of these concepts in the process of trying to find 17 syllables that would best explain them. And so, the moral of the story is this: to understand a thing better, put it under a different light.

politics, social problems, terrorism, war

If War Isn’t The Answer, Perhaps You Misunderstood The Question

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When the American embassy in Kenya was attacked, Muslim terrorists posed a question to our nation. When the U.S.S. Cole was bombed, Muslim terrorists posed a question to our nation. When Muslim terrorists destroyed the lives of thousands of Americans by flying passenger jets into the Word Trade Center towers, they posed the same question to our nation: can the “great Satan” of the West, America, be destroyed?

America has made its answer, and continues to answer by way of the “war on terrorism”. Naturally, there are some who protest, saying war is not the answer. Such a sentiment is completely understandable. War truly is Hell, and only a pure psychotic would gleefully and joyfully wage war. I, for one, fervently wish that war would never be necessary. Sadly, however, there are circumstances when war must be fought. And I believe the threat of terrorism represents one such circumstance.

Since war is so distasteful, it obviously must be used as a last resort. But to say that war isn’t the answer implicitly means that other options are not only available but also viable. Sadly, in the case of the war on terrorism, this is not the case. Consider the following alternatives:

Ignore the threat. This actually has been our approach in the past. It is the perfect reaction to threats in most cases, because often they are only that — threats. When those threats turn to action, however, they can no longer be ignored. Terrorism against America has continued for years upon years. The attacks of 9/11 show that, if anything, terroristic action is escalating. Clearly, ignoring the threat will not make it go away. Ignoring terrorism is no longer a viable option.

Diplomacy. This is the alternative that everybody would prefer. In civil disagreements, merely sitting down and talking things over can usually resolve the conflict. Unfortunately, terroristic threats do not constitute a civil disagreement. In addition to requiring a degree of civil respect between parties, the success of diplomacy depends on the goals of the negotiating parties. Sadly, the stated goal of terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda is the destruction of America and the death of its people. Perhaps such statements are merely hyperbole, but their actions certainly seem to confirm their absolute commitment to the stated goal. Assuming that Americans value their lives (I know I do), diplomacy with terrorist groups is doomed to fail because the outcome is unacceptable. When one party wishes only for the destruction of the other party, no negotiation can succeed. Diplomacy, therefore, is not a viable option.

Prepare for the worst and hope for the best. This method is strictly defensive. Rather than fighting a war, we can focus our efforts on reducing the impact of future attacks and in noticing warning signs in the hope of preventing such attacks. I believe a sports analogy works well here. After all, you have two groups in opposition, each with goals they wish to accomplish and each hoping to emerge victorious. With that in mind, ask yourself if a team that plays only defense has any chance of winning? Defense is important, but it doesn’t win the game. If our only approach to terrorism is to play defense, we will eventually be defeated. An effective defense only postpones that defeat. Defense is a vital component of the war on terrorism, but is not a viable response in and of itself.

Sadly, begrudgingly and resolutely wage war. The last option, and the only viable option under the circumstances, is to actively fight against the threat of terrorism. Make no mistake, it is an ugly choice. Lives will be lost. We have already lost fathers, brothers and sons in the war. We have already lost mothers, sisters and daughters in the war. But we know that their sacrifice has helped to protect the lives of the people they love. They know that their selflessness will offer better protection than ignoring terrorism will, better than negotiating with terrorists will and better than preparing for the next terrorist attack will.

Even as the most viable option, the war on terrorism has its problems. It would be naive to think otherwise. Like victory, for instance. Logically, the war against terrorism must continue as long as terrorists live. It’s reasonable to expect that terrorists will always exist, so then victory is impossible, correct? Well, not so fast.

Our war is against the threat of terrorism. It is not a pollyannish quest to eliminate terrorists, but to inhibit their power to destroy. As the investigation of the 9/11 attacks shows, large-scale terrorism (the kind we are concerned about) is not easy. It takes enormous preparation and coordination. By actively fighting terrorists, they now must use their time protecting their own lives (which dramatically reduces the amount of time they can spend plotting the destruction of innocent lives elsewhere).

The war on terror is not a war of vengeance. We have left many, many terrorist attacks unanswered in the past. The attacks of 9/11 were not the reason for the war — they were the last straw. It was the final event that showed to us, once and for all, that peace not only isn’t the answer, it’s not even an option. Terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda hate us not for what we’ve done, but for who we are. The war on terror, therefore, is a war to protect our countrymen both here and abroad from those who mean to do them harm.

The question has been posed. And, as distasteful as it may be, war is the only answer that responds, plainly and firmly, “NO!“