the oxbow lake effect

Aardvarks, especially smart ones, have an aversion to complexity. Their burrows can become veritable warrens until, at a certain critical moment, they are abandoned. Whereupon it is those natural lovers of complexity, nay, even chaos, the wild dogs who take over, and make more complicated the already labyrinth-like underground dwellings so recently vacated.

The labyrinth- navigated by Theseus with the help of Ariadne’s ball of string. A sliver of a link but one worth making. String, you see, can bundle up as we all know into one hell of a complex knot, a Gordian knot no less that only a lateral thinker like Alexander can defeat- slicing through it rather than trying to untangle it. He knew, you see, that tangle complexity can never be defeated.

Tangle complexity appears too in the strange case of the Norwegian coastline. As students of fractal geometry will know, the coastline of Norway is riven into fjords, and fjords on fjords and fjords on fjords on fjords. You get the picture: in a variation on Zeno, the coastline is potentially of infinite length and can certainly be never measured. What I’m projecting here is a sort of speeded-up vision of the coastline over eons of time, the fjords just multiplying and lengthening all the time. This is tangle complexity- it just gets worse. It just gets more and more complicated over time.

There’s no feedback mechanism to control the growth of the complications.

But not all complexity is tangle complexity, which is akin to, but not identical with, entropic decline. When we think of unavoidable complications which are brought on us in order to alleviate or solve some ongoing problem, then we’re in different territory; then we are in the realm of the oxbow lake effect.

As students of geography know, the oxbow lake is the result of a river running through easily erodible land. As it wobbles the curves are carved out (water flows fastest on the outside of a curve thus digging it wider) and eventually the river begins to loop back on itself. Finally, though, the two sides of the loop meet and a redundant lake- the oxbow- is formed- and the river is much shortened and much straighter. Until the process starts all over again.

So, in terms of complexity, the river gets more and more complex, ie. loopier and less straight, until at that sudden breakthrough point when the levels connect together and shorts out the bit that becomes the oxbow lake.

Shorting-out, or shortcutting-out is a good description. In any system, that becomes too complicated, but has some over riding purpose, the levels will shortcut out after a while. As Steven Strogatz has shown complicated architectures very often develop the ‘small world effect’; ie. six degrees of separation. (if a sample of 100 people each know 50 more people and this is repeated through six people the total pool is 31 billion- in other words much bigger than the world’s population. So you can connect to anyone in 5 or 6 people, even Saddam and Stalin). Implied is a certain degree of non-isolation. Inuit in the 14^th century would have to be excluded I imagine. The ‘mechanism’ of six degrees is: shortcuts happen when there is lots of connecting going on.

What the ‘oxbow lake effect’ does is take this further, it suggests that any system that is non-trivial will develop shortcuts causing an oscillation in states of complexity. In the oxbow lake effect the shortcuts happen because of the nature of the erosion. Over time the erosion effect exaggerates any wrinkle in the river’s length. It is pure positive feedback- making left turns more left and right turns more right. But when this uninhibited positive feedback effect is contained within a bigger system that limits it (in this case the limitation is the water flowing downhill to the sea) then the positive feedback eventually negates itself and the system as a whole exhibits negative feedback characteristics.

Students of history will be familiar with the law of unintended consequences: politicians, usually, set out to rectify something and end up exacerbating the very thing they wanted to improve. There’s some joyous poetic justice involved here- but only if your heart is a little cold. One of my favourites was the UN anti-desertification program that actually found the largest increase in desertification where all the research vehicles at the study centre were turning in and out and driving around and actually causing a major increase in…desert.

Then there’s the second world war, to change pace a little, where an attempt to avoid another catastrophic war by making the aggressor weak, ended up fuelling such resentment that another war broke out.

In fact you only have to study a few cases to realise that the law of unintended consequences is the RULE rather than the exception. People see something complicated, they try to fix it, they make it worse…until it somehow ‘shorts-out’ and fixes itself.

There is fixing something complicated by making it more complicated and fixing something complicated by creating an ‘oxbow lake’. Maybe we should look for potential oxbow lakes before we rush in to fix things that have defeated many many people before and are hideously complicated.

Perhaps the oxbow lake effect is evidence too of a motive power for the mysterious ‘black swan effect’ invented by Nicholas Taleb. Here, big strange things- like the recent credit crunch- just ‘happen’. Of course one needs to be wary of trying to predict a real world phenomenon from a few nice analogies, nevertheless, if one flies over a river a few months, years even, before the breakthrough is made and sudden redundancy happens, one can safely predict some pretty major falls in riverside real estate values on the soon to be formed oxbow lake.

One should, as a smart aardvark, be on the look out for the oxbow lake effect. What is overcomplicated and just begging for a shortcut? You might need only add one more plank to create a massive saving or create a great innovation. 

the smartpoint versus the tipping point

Most people are familiar with positive and negative feedback, otherwise known as vicious and virtuous circles. With positive feedback the more something happens the more it happens. It’s fuelled by its own increase. This is the vicious circle: a drunk man wants to drink more, a fat woman eats to assuage her guilt at being fat, which makes her fatter, so she feels guiltier and eats more, or global warming in its current projection- the warmer it gets the more CO2 there is in the atmosphere the warmer it gets.

Negative feedback is control feedback, a virtuous circle. A sober woman drinks a little, she feels a little different so she slows up drinking. A thin man eats too much, feels bloated and stops eating. The running man feels hot, starts to sweat and cools down.

Negative feedback takes care of itself. But many of the problems of the world fall into the positive feedback corner. Indigenous Amazon Indians have lost their land. They protest violently. The world loses sympathy. While the world looks the other way they lose more land. An explosive child gets frustrated by rules and explodes with anger. His parents punish him for breaking the rules of politeness. He gets even angrier as he has just violated even more rules. An unfit man doesn’t feel like exercising so he doesn’t, and gets even less fit.

OK- you get the picture. Now take the fat variant: fatsos  feel less fit, do less exercise, get fatter, do less exercise, get fatter etc. This is very hard to break. Where do you start? Do you cut into the food supplies, do you force the fatties to run and eat pain instead of breakfast, or a bit of both? How do you decide the targets though? How much exercise? How much weight loss? That’s not easy and that’s where attempts to solve problems fail.

But all you actually need to do is shift to a negative feedback situation. Ordinary shaped people feel fit enough to do exercise so they remain ordinary shaped. This is the Aardvarkian Smartpoint. The point where a positive feedback situation flips to becoming a negative feedback situation. Vicious becomes virtuous. Once it’s virtuous you can forget about it. It’s running itself. It’s solving itself.

Instead of fixing on hopeless or imaginary targets when trying to solve a vicious circle we should look for the aardvarkian smartpoint. The smartpoint becomes the focus of our efforts. With a fat person you have to ask them, or they ask themselves, not ‘what weight do you want to be?’ because that is unreal. Rather, ‘at what weight will you feel like exercising’. Chances are it’s higher than the ideal weight. But that doesn’t matter. Because once they are into a virtuous circle they can easily get down to an ideal weight since they are now in control of the checks and balances.

With an explosive child one should ask, not ‘how can I get him to behave’ but rather, ‘at what point does he not explode at rules’. All you need to do is keep the rules, and his irritability below that point. Let’s say you can’t get up early enough to do something that lacks urgency but is still important. Instead of focusing on an ideal ‘early time’ that is probably demoralisingly early, fix on a smartpoint, a time that is early enough for you to do a reasonable job and see the benefit of getting up early. You have become more aware of what is involved. Once convinced of the benefits it’s easy to get up earlier still.

The smartpoint is somewhat different from the tipping point. Tipping points are more concerned with macro effects such as contagion and the spread of disease. The tipping point is often a positive feedback loop created by a critical number of viral connections. It is about spreading and increase- good or bad. The smartpoint is about control. It is a precise micro effect: the move from a positive feedback to a negative feedback situation.

The smartpoint is an intervention device for breaking vicious circles. Most addictions are characterised by a vicious circle- even coffee drinkers think they’ll feel ‘better’ after yet another coffee, and so it continues. But take the coffee example- instead of trying to give it up think of how much coffee you need to drink to feel a sense of discomfort. Over the days find your smartpoint. That shift from trying to fight yourself to becoming aware is a first step to getting out of an addiction pattern.

Smartpoints help, too, when perfectionism spoils everything. If you have a project, say a novel, that won’t work ask yourself where the smartpoint is. At what point does this novel ‘work’ as opposed to ‘not work’. You may be surprised that what at first seems hopeless really needs only a few small but important adjustments. Once a novel ‘works’ you’re in virtuous circle land, as further improvements suggest themselves.

With an expedition I ask where the smartpoint is regarding team numbers. At what point does this expedition become unviable? (the circle being: too few people makes the trip feel ‘unreal’ which serves to turn off attracting people). I find that the viable number is usually not that many, lower than you first imagine. Once you have that core number the project feels ‘real’ and it’s easier to attract others if that is required.

I guess the essence of the smartpoint is that it shifts a vague desire into becoming real. It does this by causing an increase in awareness. And by utilising our knowledge of the benefits of virtuous circles. Instead of making people run the whole way its like saying ‘you only have to run to the bus stop- and then the bus will take you home.’ That’s a lot easier isn’t it?

how to make money from your passion

Money can arrive, like Manna, directly from the clouds above.

Mostly however, it chooses these four channels.

It arrives through:

Employment

Self-employment

Passive Income Stream- You are the Employer

Passive Income Stream- Automated ie. From book royalties, internet advertising, referral sales, rent.

You can lifeshift into anyone of these financial styles, though the more radical the lifeshift the more you will tend towards self-employment and generating passive income streams.

Follow the dream or follow the money

Your dream work, the work that is most meaningful to you, might come with a wage attached. If you want to be a commercial diver, bush pilot, tour guide- you will find work that is reasonably, sometimes very well,paid.

But many people have dreams that at first sight seem deeply unremunerative.

Richard Noble was salesman for the steel company GKN. His dream was enormous- become the fastest man on earth. This was a dream that would cost millions, you would think, and certainly not earn him anything.

Noble pursued his lifeshift relentlessly. He knew that if he looked like a contender others would back him. So he spent $2000 on an old jet engine, bolted it to a homemade chassis, got permission to use an airfield for a day, crashed- but in the process established himself as being in the business of record breaking.

He then set about finding sponsors. Finally he built and drove the car that beat the world record.

After that he was assured of making money from books, talks, and consulting. Instead he went on to break his own record and be the first to smash the sound barrier on land- for a budget of 10% of the £25 Million budgeted by race car team Maclaren.

He used the experience gained in these high risk ventures to develop a new light aircraft and to lecture to companies on his methods and experiences.

Noble’s book ‘Thrust’ is a great inspirational read and full of great ideas for potential lifeshift money makers. Noble’s talent is to build a team of lifeshifters- who see the project as the meaningful  work in their lives. By harnessing the incredible power of lifeshifting he achieves wonders.

He is a great example of how money follows the dream.

Peter Canning is a paramedic who lifeshifted from being a speech writer on health matters. He went from talking to acting. But he is employed by a company- one that he doesn’t always see eye to eye with. However the rewards of saving people’s lives out there on the street outweighs the straitjacket of conventional employment.

Frank Nasre started his carpet business as a self-employed salesman and shop manager. He was good- and innovative- the first to realize that under appreciated Afghan carpets suited the wood floors many Australians have. His breakthrough was when he realized “There are better salesmen out there than me.” He employed them and was able to devote his time to searching out locations for a new shop. He had gone from self-employed to employer.

Pablo lifeshifted from being a hedgefund manager to being an artist living in Ibiza. His art makes very little money- right now- so he lives by doing translation of business documents for one company. The work is easy and he can do it when he wants. His primetime is occupied by painting and employment serves this.

Peter Nelson does what he did as a child- build treehouses. He lifeshifted into his dream profession twenty years ago and now is both self-employed, is an employer as well as enjoying passive income streams from books and videos. Nelson has commandeered the niche (invented it you might say) of master treehouse builder. It sounds crazy- but last year Alnwick Castle- where the Harry Potter films are shot- paid $7million to build a huge treehouse that is also a 120 person restaurant. With lifeshifting anything can happen!

There are several basic principles involved with solving the money question. One is: what you may hate, others may pay to do.

Mike Treibold lifeshifted from an office worker to professional dinosaur hunter. Much of fossil preparation involves meticulous work chipping away the substrate of residual stone. He nearly exhausted himself doing this alone until he realized people were only too keen to volunteer just to be near anything to do with dinosaurs and to learn the trade. And then he found some were better at preparing dinosaur bones than he was.

No Money on the Horizon

At first your lifeshift may look like a non-starter when it comes to making money. Top aikido teacher Robert Mustard spent years in Japan learning his skills. He had no idea that he would one day do it for a living- for him it was just what he loved to do. He returned to Canada with a 6^th Dan and a towering reputation. Over time he built a good living  from teaching at his own dojo and at seminars.

One of my favourite lifeshifters is Peter Vido, the obsessive scythe enthusiast and co-author of “The Scythe Book” that has run to several editions and is still very much in print twenty years after being published. It would be hard to find a more obscure lifeshift  niche than scything (for those in the dark it’s a long handled sickle for cutting grass and corn) but Vido’s fascination comes over both in his book, website and instructional videos. He also runs seminars to teach scything (it’s all in the sharpness of the blade).

Long Tail Lifeshifters

The scythe man illustrates the so called Long Tail phenomenon where obscure subjects can be remunerative through the internet’s ability to link up enthusiasts from all over the world. The long tail can be put to work by lifeshifters worldwide.

There may be nobody in your town interested in finding new rock art in the Libyan desert. But Hungarian Lifeshifter Andras Zboray has built a business, FJ expeditions that links everyone in the world interested in Saharan rock art. Through his extensive website, CDs and translations Zboray attracts clients for his expeditions to search for new art- mining the long tail to make a good living in his chosen work.

By harnessing the power of the long tail almost any lifeshift can be made remunerative.

The stages of making money from an interest are:

1)Build your competence in your chosen lifeshift- not difficult because it’s your dream work, what you find most meaningful.

2) Establish a website with an information heavy content. Providing real value with updates in the form of news, reviews and useful blog material.

3) Publish a book on lulu.com publicized through the website. Produce dvds, courses, talks etc.

4) organize events that combine travel with teaching people your lifeshift skill.

5)Combine travel or tourism with your interest- courses in exotic locations that trade on the value added of being a holiday as well as a course.

I have followed this method with the successful Explorer School where my Lifeshift interest in exploration has been built into a business providing courses where people can learn exploration skills.

Enjoy MINTS- Money Is Not The Solution

Except it’s hard to because it very often is. You want to do a course, it costs money. If you had money you could lifeshift couldn’t you? You want to write a book, if you had a nest egg you could take time off and concentrate and write that book. But you don’t have money. So you can’t lifeshift.

Don’t get me wrong. Money is the ultimate supertool, one of the best combination spanners in the workchest. With money you achieve so much, so quickly. Everyone needs money.

But a solution is never universal. First you need to define the problem. When you know the problem you can address it. Perhaps you will need money, but perhaps not.

You want to go rock climbing- you could pay a lot of money for an adventure holiday or you could join a club and pay virtually nothing to learn.

You want to get the spare time to write- if you only you could afford a two week break at a special hotel you know you could do it. Quit the demanding job and get all the spare time you need working evenings to support yourself. Clive Cussler quit his high power advertising job to work in a divestore while he wrote Raise the Titanic.

You need a top camera to be a professional- if only you had the money to buy it you could make that lifeshift. Again you can always find a group, club or institution that owns such equipment, you can also meet people who can loan you their gear through such an institution, you can even offer to review such equipment and then use it while you have the chance. When I worked as a professional photographer I identified the cheapest pro-camera and borrowed it from a friend. The solution wasn’t money- it was people.

Money can be a snake, a motivator. The story goes: a man was dying of thirst in the desert. He collapsed and was about to expire when he saw a snake. full of fear he ran and ran...until he reached a well and his life was saved. After he had drunk his fill he saw the snake again and began to curse it. But the snake reminded him that he had saved his life...Money is needed to do certain things like travel and live. But it can get you to some interesting places and doing interesting things. Alright, get a job, earn that money, quit the job, use it for what you need it for. It’s that easy.

No question crops up more often than “so how do you pay the bills?” When you are doing, full time, what you want to do you have no status riding on your job. You couldn’t care less if you’re a dustbin man or a doctor. Ranulph Fiennes, the world famous explorer, was once seriously considering becoming a waiter at Claridges Hotel- the tips were so big he’d be able to take enough time off to make expeditions for half the year.

So the short answer to the money question is that you make a bare living in the time left over from doing your passionate interest. You can save money and live off that, or you can work odd hours- any hours as long as they do not infringe on your primetime.

The longer answer has to address how you make your lifeshift into your breadwinner. There are many ways to do this and we've examined some here. But first its important to think about money in a different way.

What usually happens is that people don’t really know how to make money from their passion so they restrain themselves from going full blown obsess ional which is sometimes all that you need to do before you start making money from it.

There are also transferable jobs which prey on any interest and make it a commercial viability. These are writing, video making both entertainment and instructional, sponsorship, equipment sales, photography, courses and seminars, lectures, tourism and hospitality.

When people want to change their lives they are usually looking for a way to also make a living. This is, in 90% of cases, what derails a lifeshift. In the beginning you cannot hope, expect or need to make your living from what you love. It’s the first commandment of lifeshifting. If you try to make money too soon from what you love then you run the risk of poisoning your interest. Yet at the same time, I believe it is possible to make money out of any interest given enough time and energy spent really mastering that interest. With Lifeshifting to make money you have to locate your interest in as high an earning a market as possible. For example, I once tried to make money selling a homebrew product I had invented. But the homebrew market as a whole, in the UK, is only worth about £2 million. The chance of making a good living is limited. You can therefore relocate your interest to either the teaching and educational market or the entertainment market. Remember if you can’t sell candles, sell candle making kits. Once you have a business that sells information and learning you can then piggyback product sales onto that. Ray Mears, as well as making TV shows, runs survival courses. After the course is over you have the chance to buy some of the excellent gear you have used. The sales of equipment naturally complement the courses.

positive thinking v. retaining the critical faculties of a smart person

I came out of my building the other day and I suddenly realised how hot and wonderful the sun was. It hit me, despite the smog and the cars, this country Egypt is a marvellous place to live because it’s sunny 320 days a year- and the sun really cheers me up.

But then I thought: what if I could make my own weather wherever I was? In wet cold Scotland, or foggy Maine, or monsoon Bombay?

Our mood, positive or negative, is affected by the weather. Setting aside light deficiencies, can we change our mood irrespective of the weather and other factors? Can we make ourselves feel positive? Can we make our own internal weather?

Is thinking positive all it’s cracked up to be?

Positive thinking has come in for a bit of beating recently. Probably because it is almost the second religion of American sales and personal development circles and also because it is very easy to mouth the words but somewhat trickier to know what they mean. I speak from personal experience. For many years, though I have always been drawn to positive people, and ALWAYS on expeditions favoured taking positive enthusiastic types over negative ‘intelligent’ folk, I have also been secretly cheered, in the nastiest schadenfraude kind of way, when someone who is ‘being positive’ finally cracks and gives way to a slew of negative thinking. Apart from proving they are human after all what else does it tell us?

First, the notion that positive thinking is delusional is itself inaccurate. Positive thinking simply means choosing to focus on the positive aspects of a thing rather than its negative ones. It’s that simple. There is no ‘objective’ perception of something when it is at the mental ‘chewing it over’ level. I think you can get flashes of objective perception when for example an art expert sees an object he just instantly knows is a fake, or, in my own case, facing a set of river rapids and knowing, sometimes, instantly, and correctly, which way to go (or risk losing the boat), but there are long periods in life when we kind of drop down a gear and get into ruminating about our past life and the future and whether we are ‘successes’ or not. I have met a millionaire inventor with a fabulous home, a thriving business and high achieving kids and he thought he was failure. He was a war hero too! I mean, come on! But you know- he probably had too much ruminating time courtesy of his wealth- and had started comparing himself to Einstein and Benjamin Franklin – usually it is comparisons that get the old negative self-perception going. ‘That bastard, I was at school with him and now he’s on TV calling himself an expert…’ etc.

Comparisons between people are a slippery slope best avoided, completely sidestepped. What someone ‘has done’ is secondary to what they have learned by doing it and what permanent benefit it has brought them, developmentally speaking.

This notion of permanence is worth pondering. Sometimes we make an advance, or feel it to be one, only to lose it a day or two later. Ranulph Fiennes, the English polar explorer, writes “a motivating mantra will last three days maximum”. In other words, there is a difference between lucking onto a slogan or even a snatch of a poem or song and endlessly repeating it to spur yourself on and making a qualitative and permanent shift. This is different from just acquiring a new habit. Habits can be acquired and lost. One of the most interesting, and successful polymaths of the 20^th century was the philosopher J.G.Bennet who was also a linguist, mathematician, chemist, businessman, and first chairman of the National Coal Board. He claimed that whenever he found he had a habit- good or bad- he would try and break it. He disliked anything mechanical being applied to human beings. His successes in the public arena show that ‘good habits’ aren’t quite the essential they have been made out to be. What is required is what lies behind the decision to successfully start a ‘good habit’- or what I prefer to call it: a momentum operation.

A momentum operation is some task, project, job or venture that will need a huge amount of effort to succeed. You’ll need start-up energy as well as momentum energy to keep it going. Instead of thinking of ‘habits’, which to me smack of boring rules handed down by people who are out of touch, I think of creating ‘an environment where failure is impossible’. This means an environment where momentum is maintained by the situation itself. I have heard writers complain of how hard it is to get any peace and quiet to write in. They are setting themselves up for failure before they have started. In order to write successfully you need a distraction free environment, an environment where momentum is maintained. For me this meant, aged thirty, the small ignominy going back to live with my parents, using the bedroom as a writing room, putting off all plans and writing 3-4 hours a day five days a week until the book was finished. Everything that could get in the way I removed BEFORE I started- in other words- a ‘momentum operation’.

On another occasion I had to attend an Arabic language learning course across Cairo. I am fairly bad early in the morning and to get up early, especially after a late night is not my idea of fun. But in Cairo a driver and car is cheap to hire. I had one call for me every morning- and I did my homework in the car. Usually I was the first there too- gaining a reputation for early rising that was unwarranted!

Are you going to achieve something or are you going to try and turn yourself into a fantasy humanoid, rather as body builders eschew strength in favour of looking good? I know what I would rather do- work within my limitations but achieve real things. I get up early during expeditions- usually  because I go to bed early, and I’ve had lots of fresh air. But when I’m in the city I rise right now about 7am because that’s when my kids get up. I’d get up at 8am if it was just me.

One day I may choose to change forever my getting up time- but that isn’t right now. If I want to write a book it’s crazy to add to the stress by forcing myself to get up earlier than I usually do. My point is: a good habit is all very well. More useful is identifying what stops momentum energy from building. With momentum almost anything can be achieved. Without it you’ll conk out like a the bunny without the duracells.

Create a momentum operation rather than a set of good habits. If you have a momentum operation that works for you then good habits are a luxury you can acquire and show off later like a six pack.

Bad habits are no different- you can lose them too. If you are less wedded to the notion of habits being the be all and end all then bad habits should be easier to shift. The way to do it is schedule other things to happen when the bad habit was previously going on. To combat smoking I stopped going anywhere where smoking happened, and if it did I always had something to eat.

We got into this by talking about permanent change versus acquiring a good habit. Permanent change is a permanent extension of how wide a perspective you bring to bear on anything. It comes from experience being digested. The experience of feeling that you can switch your inner focus onto the positive, together with the experience of realising how energising feeling positive is gives rise to a permanent change in how important we feel ‘being positive’ is.

Let me be more specific. Throughout my teens and early twenties I started out to walk a number of long distance paths but always failed or gave up. This track record of failure bugged me. When I was 25 I decided to walk the Pyrenees mountains from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The route I had planned this was about 700km. Over serious hilly country. I had mishaps and foot problems a plenty but I completed it. I then had a feeling that something permanent had been acquired that was an admixture not just of this success but all the failures that had gone before.

Then I grew cocky and had to give up on a simple summer 100km walk in the UK because of poor planning and inadequate preparation. So how can I talk of a permanent levelling up in competence in this area?

What is true is this: I knew I was being cocky. If I had taken it as seriously as the previous walk I would have succeeded. I guess the point is: once you have reached a permanent increase in competence you can still fail, but if you do you’ll know it’s your own fault rather than before, when it was always blamed on some outside agency such as poor boots or poor weather. The main point is that it isn’t aardvarkproof, but at least it works most of the time.

So can acquiring a positive mental outlook be a permanent acquisition?

First off I think everyone prefers to be in a positive frame of mind, 95% of the time. You may like a little ‘recreational negativity’ from time to time but it’s a bummer to be in that zone for too long. And it’s very contagious. Naturally there are certain activities that are more likely to make you feel positive and help maintain a positive frame of mind than others. For me it’s the ocean and the desert- in either of these places I can’t help waking up with a big smile on my face whatever the weather. So hanging out in such places makes sense if I want to boost my positive frame of mind.

But you can’t be on holiday all the time. And there are other people in my life besides me, who don’t like the desert and the ocean. Of course I could just get rid of them, but that’s plain nuts- these are people I love.

So I need a second level of mental operation whereby I can CHOOSE what frame of mind I am in. I think this is the whole key behind positive thinking. It’s not about being positive per se, it’s about being able to CHOOSE to be positive.

Do you see the difference? The ‘easy’ version of positive thinking pedalled in sales seminars is little more than brainwashing yourself to ‘think positive’- whatever that means. The real challenge, however, is to be able to CHOOSE to be positive- or even negative, though strangely, given the choice between the two most people opt for the positive- just as most people opt for holidays in the sun rather than the hail and rain…

So how do you CHOOSE that positive mental state? First you have to shed the culturally acceptable nonsense that ‘outthere’ has some kind of objective reality. Stuff that. ‘Outthere’ is whatever you choose to focus on and emphasise. Just now I walked with my wife through our neighborhood at night to pick up a basket she had bought. The lights shining through a half built block were fascinating and I got to thinking that if this walk was depicted as a series of photos interspersed with prose it would be a better story than prose alone. That set me off looking for interesting shots and the walk was almost like some kind of alternative reality rather than the usual stroll watching out for the incredible numbers of cars and cursing the invention of the internal combustion engine in general.

I just focussed on a different thing. And we all have the ability to do that. It takes no willpower. All it takes is the desire to do it. Curiousity, too, maybe. You have to get used to choosing what to focus on when your mind becomes ‘occupied’. If you start thinking about the past, choose to focus in such a way that what happened takes on a positive slant. One obvious way is to alter the timeframe. When you have a longer perspective events change in significance. If this makes something more positive adopt this perspective.

When you see a film or play that doesn’t draw you in focus on what you like about it, even if it’s the scenery. It really doesn’t matter how clever you are if you are negative and did not CHOOSE to be negative but simply REACTED to what was in front of you. By exercising the muscle of choosing to change what you focus on and give importance to, you are accessing what is the real energy of positive thinking.

Remember you aren’t doing this when you are trying to work out why something didn’t work. But how often are you doing that? Besides, we usually know why something didn’t work. As failure unfolds we get the picture. Analysis after the event is often another variant of procrastination. Mostly we host a mental chatshow in our brains. But the mood we are in affects everything. If the tone is positive we give off a positive energy that affects everything.

This energy controls ‘what you choose to see as important’. I’ve written before about judgement acquisition and how it resides in those who know what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Let’s circle back to that earlier set of remarks about habits. Habits are nothing compared to knowing what to pay attention to and what to ignore. Habits are a tool that help to get a certain job done. But you won’t even know how to use that tool or even what the job should be, unless you know what to pay attention to and what to ignore.

In a way the current era is really helpful because it has forced this requirement right onto the agenda of everyday life. I was just watching Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 with my kids (weirder than 1 but worth seeing if you have 8-10 year olds, I digress) and in it there’s a character who was a dork at highschool and now spends his time playing Wii, Nintendo and other games. Whatever your view of computer games, watching this makes you realise how utterly limiting they are. We have this amazing REAL world out there and grown men are sitting indoors fiddling with an Xbox. Yet you only have to play a little to get hooked. In other words, like most vices, you know they’re bad but keep right on. We live in an era where the distractions are unprecedented. Now it’s possible to live your entire life virtually. Instead of it being a theoretical question it’s in our face all the time: pay attention to all the kack out there and your brain will begin to resemble it.

What we pay attention to is either chosen for us: by the advertising and other distractions that get to us first, or what we choose to pay attention to. If you choose to pay attention to writing a book rather than reading books then you’ll have a different result at the end of your exercise.

The fact is, as anyone with kids knows, either you’re attention is being kidnapped by others (the child screaming for attention) or else you have planned ahead and found an activity for them to enjoy while you get some downtime. So planning ahead comes into choosing what you pay attention to.

And what you feed into your plans comes from your experience and the experiences of others. As the saying goes: the ordinary man learns from his own experiences, the wise man learns from the experiences of others. For an unusual example of this read Rebuilding the Indian by Fred Haefele, which I reviewed a few days ago. One way to discover more about from the experiences of others is to talk to old people, people who haven’t given up the ghost, who still have their marbles. All the ones I know have the ability to chose what they pay attention to and there is a strange correlation between the longer lived ones choosing to focus on the positive....

One of your own experiences may have been that it is possible to find a positive area to focus on in almost any setting. The advantage of this is not that ‘you feel better’. Rather it is the slow reclamation of your birthright.

Which is: the ability to make your own weather.

aardvark information

I love aardvarks. Here’s what wikipedia has to say:

The Aardvark (Orycteropus afer) is a medium-sized, burrowing, nocturnal mammal native to Africa. It is the only living species of all Tubulidentata, but there are known other prehistoric species and genera of Tubulidentata.

It is sometimes called "antbear", "anteater", "Cape anteater", "earth hog" or "earth pig". The word "aardvark" is famous for being one of the first entries to appear in many encyclopaedias and even abridged dictionaries. The name comes from the Africaans for "earth pig" or "ground pig" (aarde earth/ground, varken pig), because early settlers from Holland thought it resembled a domesticated. However, the aardvark is not that closely related to the pig; rather, it is the sole recent representative of the obscure mammalian order Tubulidentata. The aardvark is not closely related to south American anteater, despite sharing some characteristics and a superficial resemblance. The closest living relatives of the aardvark are the elephant shrews followed by hyraxes and elephants.

Aarvarks are rare, ancient, exotic, not as endangered as one might imagine, first in line, lurking in burrows but ready to take over the world. Aardvarks of the world unite!

what's your A level?

What’s your A level? How Alienated are you? The more alienated you are from the surroundings you live in the harder it will be to make a living in those surroundings. One solution is to move, or find a subculture to thrive in. Another is to just try and see the glass as half full rather than half empty.

If you want to make money it has been observed that the more alienated you are the harder it is to make money. This follows commonsense rules: the more you accept society and the world as it is, the bigger your potential market. If you refuse to deal with people who work for multinationals then your market is smaller. Which isn’t to say it is impossible to succeed- there are ‘cool’ subcultures that influence the mainstream- the thing is, you’ll feel like a sell out when you do make that cross-over. Or maybe you’ll be less alienated by then.

I know what I’m talking about because I’ve gone from a rather abiding alienation and rejection of most activity on this planet to a growing wonder and awe at the sheer diversity and energy of life manifested everywhere by human beings. That sheer abundance of activity and ingenuity I try to now make my reference point. It has, in the main, replaced my earlier dismay at all the ‘blunders’ mankind makes.

Rose tinted spectacles- not really. We all perceive reality through some kind of framework or lens if you prefer. You chose what kind of framework that is. Since life is dynamic and ongoing it is a matter of time frame for many judgements. A building site looks a mess if you have a time frame of a few weeks- it is simply part of a beautiful building if that time frame expands to a few years.

We don’t make the world with our thoughts. Rather we interpret what is there and base our action on that interpretation. And people react to us depending on how we see them and think about them.

By changing the way you see the world you can change how the world impacts on you and your influence on others- even if its just by being more cheerful and upbeat.

This is what happens when your A level is reduced. People want to spend more time with you, they trust you better and that makes doing business much much easier. Also you like them rather than resent them.

Of course having a high A level you'll feel a whole lot cooler hanging out with all the existentialists and grunge musicians etc. It wears off after a while though.

not zen and the art of rebuilding a motorcycle

One of my favourite books is Fred Haefele’s Rebuilding the Indian. You can get it on Amazon.

It’s a book about a guy who sees himself as a bit behind in the race of life, who works as a tree surgeon and has a younger wife and a child on the way and decides to spend 5000 USD he’s lucked into on a WRECK of an Indian Chief motorcycle. People think he’s crazy but he goes ahead and rebuilds the bike, almost as if he is rebuilding his life. And he succeeds- in both ventures really.

I am not sure he didn’t intend it but the book is actually a nice parable. In it, the Fred figure, who probably bears a strong resemblance to the real thing, goes around kind of at a loss being both helped and dumped on by all the Indian owning experts he meets. But in the end his is the only running Indian in town and everyone marvels at how it’s also the best looking. All Fred did was take the best advice he could find on each section of the rebuild and follow it through and keep going. He comes over as an honourable guy, a bit of a soft touch, resorting to bribing people with money and gifts to help him out. But he does it, he does a better job than the experts who are always getting distracted away from finishing their Indian rebuilds. The moral is: get the best help you can and follow it when it makes sense, follow your own instinct, have just enough money ready, and just keep on going. I love this book but I’m not even sure why, I’m not that into motorbikes and haven’t ridden one since I was twenty or so. I think it’s because of the way he evokes this life in Missoula Montana that hovers between desperation (he and a pal are on Zoloft anti-depressants one Autumn) and an idyllic lifestyle of canoe trips, arty friends and wild motorbike buddies. It’s such an honest read you feel you can diagnose the problems of modern life, to some extent, from reading it- we have too much stuff, we think we need more, we’re always trying to do things to make ourselves happy instead of just being happy. The book is transparent, or seems so, just presenting things, vignettes, that give you a lot to think about, even if you may disagree with the very few tentative explanations of his own situation Fred offers. I like the dissatisfied air that Fred often has, which is always brought back with a good coffee or the help of a friend. I think you get a feeling of the loneliness of the US that lurks so close beneath the friendliness. That may sound like a downer, but it isn’t- it's actually strangely uplifting, especially when the engine fires for the first time. It’s definitely worth reading.