These three questions have stuck with me since then. Asking them of any book you read allows you to begin to ponder the preconceptions of the author, the possible polemics and propaganda it contains and that effect – of any – he intends the book to have. A book on Judaism written by a German scholar in 1942 would, for example, probably contain very different information than would, for example, Judaism for Dummies. This is not because we’ve learned more about Judaism in the 59 years that have passed between the books but rather because the answers to the three questions are so different. They have different authors, different raisons d’être and different intended audiences.

Try to ask yourselves these questions about the books you read, and I am sure you will find a completely new way to enjoy them.

Also; because of this, it is important to also ask yourselves, as authors, these three questions about your own writing.

Who are you? What preconceptions do you bring to the table, what prejudices do you have, what do you believe in, etc?

Why are you writing this book? Is it to educate, entertain, confuse, impress or something else?

Who is the intended audience? Sometimes, the intended audience turns out to be yourself or just one specific person.

The answers to these questions will give you better insight into your own personal writing process and allow you to fine-tune the book into being what it was meant to be.

Reading and Writing with Purpose and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

His punishment for this transgression was to forever more push a boulder up a hill and then watch it roll down again, only to repeat the process.

The interpretations of this story are legion, ranging from it being an allegorical explanation of the movement of the sun across the heavens to being a tale about the hard work that it is to be a human. Some have chosen to regard it as a story about the punishment one gets when one transgresses the law of the Gods. According to Albert Camus, the story of Sisyphus was a personification of the absurdity of human life.

My own interpretation is not far from that of Albert Camus. I chose to interpret it as a strict warning by means of example. We all look at Sisyphus and his endless task and pity him; it must be thankless work to push the boulder up the hill, only to see it roll down and have to start all over again. There is nobody there to congratulate him when he gets it all the way up the hill and nobody to commiserate with him after it has rolled down; there is only his mind-numbingly dull routine. He knows that he has no means of escape from these tasks and that he will never be free again.

Despite this terrible warning, all of us fall into Sisyphusian routines of our own.

I’m sure that all of you, given time, can find your very own Sisyphus. It may be your job; the place where you go every day and drudge through, not getting any pleasure, respect, recognition or the salary you deserve. It may be the relationship you’re in; the partner that you know is bad for you and which gives you the impression that he/she doesn’t really care if you live or die. It could be the computer game that you sit down in front of every evening, going through the motions of having fun instead of actually enjoying it the way we used to. It may even be the creative project you started – a book, an album, a web page or a quilt you’re sowing – but that you’re now just spending time on without getting anywhere in particular.

We are all Sisyphus and we all owe it to ourselves to identify these areas of our lives. We all need to ask ourselves if what we’re doing is truly worth it or if we’re just going through the motions because of sheer force of habit or because of we fear what we would have if we were to abandon it.

Find your Sisyphus.

Escaping Sisyphus and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

Lists like these are always difficult to write. Sometimes you need to artificially inflate them to include exactly the number of items you were gunning for; sometimes you need to shorten the list down. This time around, it was definitely the second alternative. I could have made this list 20, 30, 40 or even 50 items long, but I decided to go for what I consider to be the ten most important ones.

1. Improve your existing skills! I cannot explain often enough how important this one is. We all have some skills; things that make us who we are. We may be good at writing, singing, playing an instrument, speaking foreign languages, speaking in front of audiences, dancing or mediating. However, there is almost always room for improvement in all of these areas. Take the time to analyze what skill set you are using on a daily basis and see where there is room for improvement.

You may, for example, enjoy playing music on your MIDI keyboard in the evenings. Why not start studying some more musical theory to improve this skill? Why not set yourself the task of writing a short story (say, for example, 5,000 to 10,000 words) every week? I’m sure your skills will improve dramatically – and faster than you expected!

2. Stretch the limits of comfort! Most of us live in a far smaller bubble than we’re capable of. We tend to gravitate towards the same meals during lunch at the office, we take the same route when we go out jogging or walking the dog, we buy similar clothing and we go to the same clubs and pubs during the week-ends. Why not challenge yourself? Try something new? Go to a restaurant where you’ve never eaten and order something that you’ve never had! Try going to a random night club with a friend – or even all by yourself! Some of the best experiences in your life will have come from times where you actively went out of your way to do something you’ve never done before; why not make a habit of this?

3. Challenge yourself! Sometimes, you need to grab hold of yourself and really force yourself to make changes in your life. Say you’ve decided that you’re going to quit smoking, go on a diet or start a healthy exercise routine. Set yourself the challenge of doing said thing for four weeks – 28 days – and have a clearly defined penalty for what you will have to do if you fail. It could be, for example, that you have to donate $100 to a specific charity, treat your closest friends to dinner at a fancy restaurant or something similar. Make sure that the penalty is big enough to motivate you. If you decide, after the 28 days, that this new habit isn’t for you, then you’re free to stop, but make sure that you definitely stick with it for these 28 days. After all, what’s 28 days in the grand scheme of things? You can avoid eating fast food for 28 days, can’t you? … right?

4. Study the people who inspire you! There are many people in life that we can look up to in one way or another. I could easilly list a number of authors, martial artists, personal development coaches, psychologists, philosophers and mucisians who have traits, skills or abilities that I admire. In some way, I want to have those particular skills, but maybe not the rest of what makes that person who he is. What better to do than to study that trait in that person? What is it he does that makes him such a great martial artist, for example? Is it the amount of hours a week that he trains? Is it the general philosophy that he has towards his art? Is it the art itself that is superior? By studying a person and his traits in this way, you may find out what has been holding you back from growing and developing in that area.

5. Design your future self! This one is often brought up in personal development circles. If you’re improving yourself, you must have some sort of notion about what goals you have, right? Why not clearly define them? Write down what sort of person you want to be, what type of life you want to be leading and everything that is related to it. Pick a point in the future, say five or ten years down the line, and write a short description of who you are at this point. Then step back for a moment and look at how you differ from the person you’ve described. Maybe this will help you recognize what actions you need to take to get where you want to be.

6. Read more books! One of the greatest pleasures in life comes from indulging yourself in a great story. Also, one of the best ways to learn a new subject is to read what other people have written about the subject. Avoid pulp literature and the cheap dime-a-dozen crime dramas that hardly bring anything more to your life than insomniac page-turner evenings – unless, of course, you feel like taking a break from more ‘difficult’ literature for a while. Read the classics in various fields, but always try to mix up your reading to avoid becoming bogged down in a specific area. Jump between Goete, Dante, Freud, Dostoyevsky, Shakespeare, Tolkien, Hume, Chauser, Jung, Austen, Dumas, Nietzche, Wilde, Locke, Voltaire and Kafka.

7. Learn a new skill! I’m sure there’s something you’ve decided you’d like to learn, so why not actually go out and learn it? Whether it be a new language, juggling or knitting, a new skill adds to your identity and makes you understand the world better.

8. Find your flaws and acknowledge them! We’ve all got flaws, no matter how high and mighy we might think ourselves to be. See if you can’t figure out what flaws you have – ask your friends to be brutally honest to you if you can’t think of any for yourself. Don’t try to defend yourself with explanations or excuses, just accept that this is who you are and that only real hard work will change this part of you. It will be difficult and you will try to reject these things, but only through acceptance can we truly grow.

9. Keep a diary, blog or journal! It can be very interesting to go back and read the thoughts, interests, habits, hobbies and friends we kept a few years ago. Looking back at my own life, I sometimes feel like I cannot even recognize the person I was as little as five years ago. Seeing this sort of growth and development can be a huge motivation, but the journal has another very important function. When you re-read the story of your life, you may be able to see habits or behaviors that you were previously unaware of. In the heat of the moment, you reacted in a specific way without ever considering that this is a pattern that you’ve fallen into many times before. Maybe it’s time to change?

10. Most importantly – don’t stress things! Sometimes, the very best thing we can do to ourselves is to set all of this growth, development, personal enhancement and excellense nonsense aside and sit in the sun for a few hours with a good mindless book. We could throw a frisbee with friends down at the beach, throw a tennis ball for the dog to fetch a few hundred times or just invite friends over for an Indiana Jones movie marathon. While growth and constant development are important to us all – you wouldn’t be reading this post if it wasn’t! – it’s just as important to just take a break and relax every now and again.

Treat yourself to it. You deserve it.

10 Ways you can Improve your Life Today! and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

1. We tend to try to protect our earlier choices. This is human nature; we don’t want to admit to ourselves that we made a mistake, we try to plow along and act as if the thing we did a day, week or month ago was the best possible thing we could have done. Be ready to admit to yourself that you may actually have made a mistake somewhere on the way and that the best thing you could do is to scrap whatever it was that you did and start over.

For example; assume that you’ve bought tickets to a rock concert. You’ve been listening to this band for a few months and feel stoked to go to the concert. However, the day that the concert comes around, you’re asked to fill in for a colleague at work. You know that this opportunity would pay off greatly; you’d be getting overtime money and the respect of both your boss and your colleague. The boss has hinted that there might even be a promotion involved down the line! Unfortunately, it’s just too late to try to resell the ticket to the concert and none of your friends want to go! And the ticket was so expensive, too! What to do?!

Either way you go, you’ve already paid the money for the ticket to the rock concert. It’s a sunk cost that you won’t be recouping either way. This means that we don’t have to consider it in the equation; no need for the “But I’ve already paid for the ticket …”. Your decision is now down to “Go to rock concert” versus “Perform admirably at work and get a raise”. Hopefully, this should make the decision far easier for you.

2. We tend to follow along in what others are doing. Just because three of your friends bought a Plasma TV doesn’t mean that they are automatically better than the LCD alternative. Their musical tastes, likes and dislikes, their political opinions and subcultural affiliations don’t have to be your own. Just because something is popular doesn’t have to mean that it is right – or even good!

Have you ever wondered why the Da Vinci code was on the bestseller list for so long, without actually being any good? It managed to reach a tipping point where the popularity simply fed on itself and drew even more attention to it. “Well, if Bob, Mary, Claire, David and Brandon are reading it, it simply must be good!”

3. Think for at least ten seconds before guessing. This one is tricky. We always seem to try to guess how something is going to end up or what qualities something has. Especially when it comes to probability, we’re absolutely awful at judging how things will go. People buy their “lucky numbers” every week for the lottery when rational thought should tell them that any group of numbers is just as probable. They look at various statistics and draw outlandish conclusions without considering that there may just be other factors involved.

For example, a popular ‘proof’ of the negative effects of immigration by far-right activists has often been the comparatively high amount of crime commited in people with high immigrant density. With only these two pieces of data (crime density vs. immigration density), there seems to be a clear link, but we need to remember that Correlation Does Not Imply Causation. This rule is so important that it should be capitalized. The link may be, for example, the high amount of poverty in said region. It could be because of the alienation that these people endure. There might be something else entirely that causes this.

4. We form wildly incorrect conclusions when we have insufficient information. Many of the times that you’ve been wrong in your life, it hasn’t been because you were given the wrong information. It was because you weren’t given enough information to draw the right conclusion. Say, for example, that you’ve been told that Mary’s boyfriend was once charged with assault and battery. Then, today, you meet Mary and see she has a bruise on her arm. You may draw the conclusion that her boyfriend grabbed her violently, but there could be literally hundreds of reasonable explanations. The boyfriend may have been incorrectly charged with the assault and Mary may have recently begun training a martial art. As long as you don’t know enough information, you are prone to jump to incorrect conclusions.

5. Misjudging averages. If I were to ask 1,000 people whether they were more, less or equally intelligent than the average person, what do you think the results would be? Many people have tried similar studies and found that almost everybody thinks that they’re more intelligent than the average person. The same holds true for them being better drivers, better lovers, better athletes and better – well, anything else, really! – than the average person. Naturally, this can’t be true, so either the average intelligence is far higher than we think it is or we must be misrepresenting ourselves! Which do you think is more probable?

Well, both of them, really. It’s very easy to misjudge ourselves and lose track of being humble in many situations. We want to think that we’re better than we really are, so we convince ourselves that we are and lose track of who we really are. We often notice the people who are ‘below’ us and snicker to ourselves in joy that we’re so superior, but rarely notice the times when somebody else is ‘above’ us.

The five traps that I’ve mentioned here are nothing but extended versions of five of the literally dozens of cognitive biases that you can read about on Wikipedia. Please visit the site and read up on them, as I’m sure you’ll recognize many from your every-day life.

The Traps We Fall Into and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

1. Always assume you will succeed in whatever it is that you’re doing. This is far easier said than done, but it pays off. If you’re expecting failure, you will set yourself up for failure. Even things that seem so outlandishly difficult that you’re almost guaranteed to fail; ignore it and assume that you’re going to succeed anyway. It will mentally prepare you for it and will allow your mind to focus far better on your task.
2. If you can’t solve a problem, change the rules. This doesn’t work in all situations, but you’d be surprised how often it does work. If what you’re doing isn’t giving you the results that you want, you can assume that there is a better way of doing it. See if you can’t change the rules.
3. Don’t try to explain to yourself why you do (or do not do) things. This one is extremely important. If you’re, for example, having difficulties with your ambition to stop smoking, don’t lie to yourself and say that “But I’m so stressed right now; I’ll quit after this hectic period”. Don’t try to invent explanations for yourself just to avoid losing your self-respect or something similar. At the very best, you’re only lying to yourself. At worst, you’re creating a barrier to self-knowledge and insight into how you really work. Honesty is always good, but honesty towards yourself is essential.
4. If you cannot change a bad situation, stop worrying about it. Too many times we worry about things we cannot change or which are otherwise out of our control. We waste energy and countless hours of our lives just worrying about things for nothing. It’s never bad to plan ahead, but building up images of worst-case scenarios doesn’t help anybody.
5. If you want something done, do it yourself. While other people might be better at doing it, do it faster or have more experience; the best thing is to do things yourself. You will build self-esteem, possibly gain a new skill set and grow in the eyes of others. Naturally, try not to do too much; after all, we all need other people in our lives to help us out.

While these rules are anything but simple, try to think about them every now and again. You’d be surprised how much easier they make your life.

Five Golden Rules of Thumb and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

It turns out your mother was right; good posture is important! We’ve all heard it; our parents admonishing us to “sit up straight!”. They would give us millions of tiny tips and tricks for what the best way to do it is. Hold your stomach in, push your shoulders back, imagine the back of your head is being pulled up by a wire, relax your shoulders, etc. But why is it that we want a good posture, what does it do for us? Also, most importantly, is there anything we can do to get there?

(Image: Beach yoga in Patagonia, a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from ostrosky’s photostream)

Most of my entries lately have been about purely mental things; our attitudes towards life and the way that we think about things. Today, however, I’d like to talk about how important a good posture is and why we should do our best to improve upon it.

First of all, we can’t ignore the obvious improvement that good posture does to the way that you present yourself to the world. People with good posture look thinner, taller and more confident; I think these are all desirable traits to most people. Secondly, the internal health reasons are very important as well. By slouching or assuming bad posture when sitting, standing and/or walking, we are causing unnecessary strain to our muscles, joints, ligaments, bones and organs. This can cause them to wear down or weaken and will eventually leads to injury. Lower back pain, something that a considerable portion of adults today suffer from to some degree, can very often be linked to incorrect posture. As if that wasn’t enough, bodily systems like digestion, elimination and breathing are affected.

So how do we do it? What can we keep in mind if we want to get a good posture? Are there any exercises, mental tricks or even tools that you can use to get better posture?

Of course there are.

We can divide the things you can do into three separate areas; flexibility, awareness and strength. I’ll cover them individually.

Flexibility has to do with creating better mobility in various places in your body. In the blog Mark’s Daily Apple, there are three excellent write-ups about improving thoracic spine mobility, hip mobility, and shoulder mobility and scapular stability. There are plenty of exercises with great video examples included in these three posts and I would definitely recommend that you examine them well. Most require no tools or exercise machines beyond a tennis ball or two.

Awareness has to do with reminding yourself often enough not to slouch that it becomes automatic. In many ways, this is the hardest part. When sitting by a computer, it becomes so easy to begin to lean towards the screen. We spend more and more time sitting down; being the most seated generation in all of human history. Since our heads are so heavy (roughly 15 lbs), our spine has to support them well. By thrusting our heads forward, we have to use a couple of muscles to support them instead. We also injure ourselves through bad sleep support, stress, careless habits, weak or imbalanced muscles, improper shoes, obesity and bad work spaces. Keeping a few things in mind will help us here. For example, try sitting all the way back in a straight-backed chair. If you want/have to, place a small pillow in the small of your back, where it arches in slightly. While walking, try to hold your head raised high, chin forward, shoulders back, chest out, and stomach tucked in. Keep your weight on the balls of your feet, not your heels. Keep your head level, not pushed forward.

Strength is the least important of the three factors, but cannot be ignored. Many people want to build nice stomach or chest muscles, but forget that they need to balance these muscles with back/shoulder muscles. Imbalance in the muscular build-up will cause imbalance in your posture.

A simple test to see if you need to improve your posture is the mirror test. Stand in front of a full-length mirror with your eyes closed and stand as straight as you can. Then open your eyes, look in the mirror and double-check to ensure that:

1. Your shoulders are level.
2. Your head is straight.
3. The spaces between your arms and sides seem equal.
4. Your kneecaps face straight ahead.
5. Your ankles are straight.

If not, you should definitely start working on improving your posture; there is some great benefit in this for you.

Straightening Up and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

The article is about a man who meets a woman named, simply “Zora”. He interviews her and talks to her at length about her rather unique profession and life style. Apparently, as a child, she had dreamed a dream about a fantastic woman – a superhero – and decided that this is who she wanted to grow up to be. The article continues:

Zora took the dreams seriously, so seriously that at the age of 12, she sat down and composed a list of some 30 skills she needed to learn if she wanted to become as close to a superhero as any mortal could be. She even gave herself a deadline: to master these skills by the time she was 23. Zora pulls out the old spiral notebook that was her diary at the age of 13, and turns to the inside back cover.

“Yep, there’s the list. The list included martial arts, electronics, chemistry, metaphysics, hang gliding, helicopter and airplane flying, mountain climbing, survival …”

Throughout her teens and 20′s, each time she started a new diary, she would update the list and write it in the back of the book. Each one with the same format, each one titled The List.

It’s so simple, really. If you know what you want to have; if you know who you want to be; if you know where you want to be – why don’t you write your own list of all the things that have to happen for you to get there? Then make sure to check these things off one by one as you get closer to your dream life.

Here’s an exercise for you: Write down a couple of sentences – no more than ten – describing what you want your life to be like. Be as extravagant as your sense of imagination allows you to be. Write down what you do for health, who you surround yourself with, what you do for money, how you spend your days, etc. Then write down everything you can think of that would bring you from your current life to this new life. If you’re (amongst other things) a vegetarian tennis player who enjoys swimming and surfing in your dream life, but today you’re an overweight meat-eater that gets winded by watching tennis on TV; you will have to break things down into many steps to get where you want to be – so write them all down and check them off one by one as you get there!

Your dream life is closer than you think; all you need is a dream and a plan for how to get there.

Long-Term Planning for your Dream Life and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

In the spring of 2007, I had stopped studying at the university and was back in the hallowed halls of the workplace. I had been employed by an ISP and was doing second-line support for their Internet customers. It was an intensive job with a high tempo. It consisted in doing nearly the same thing, day in and day out. I was finally earning money, but – as we saw in my last entry – I was abandoning some of my more important values for less important values. Worse yet, I ended up in a situation where I was experiencing more of my negative life values.

In essence, a negative life value is something that you have a desire to move away from. It can be something as easy as pain or something as complicated as frustration or annoyance. The negative life values are things that motivate us to move away from a thing, place, person, situation or phenomenon. Ten of the most common negative life values are (again in alphabetical order to avoid creating artificial prioritization):

1. Anger
2. Depression
3. Failure
4. Fear
5. Frustration
6. Guilt
7. Humiliation
8. Loneliness
9. Rejection
10. Shame

When I began working in my new job, I ended up in a situation where I had a great deal of routine, something which I consider to be very frustrating. In my personal scheme of things, frustration is amongst the very highest up on the list. I hate being frustrated, especially when I’m frustrated in a situation that is impossible for me to affect.

Like I mentioned before, everybody seems to organize these in their own hierarchy. For some, the absolutely worst thing that could happen in their lives – the thing that they would do the most to avoid – is shame. You can imagine how a person driven by the need to avoid shame would establish a life very different from the person who moves away from Failure?

Also, consider how the negative life values and the normal life values have the ability to reinforce or weaken each other. What do you think would be the life of a person whose two top life values were “Adventure” and “Passion”, but whose two top negative life values were “Failure” and “Fear”. Wouldn’t this person have big problems trying to live their adventures and their passions, as any failure or mistake along the way would affect them badly?

Try to organize these as well? See if there is any way for you to see what the absolutely worst thing on your list is, the thing that drives you the most. Assume you have ten things in your life; one that angers you, one that depresses you, one that makes you feel that you’ve failed, one that scares you, etc. Which of the ten would you most like to get rid of first? Then which one would you get rid of second?

Do this exercise and compare it to your results from last week’s exercise. Do you have any conflicts of interest?

10 Negative Life Values and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

I’m still reading Awaken the Giant within by Anthony Robbins, and happened upon another exercise that I would like to share with you, in slightly modified form. It has to do with how people make decisions and how some of the things that we think we want to do still end up making us feel miserable. What it all boils down to is that we’ve forsaken one of our values for another, less important value.

A few years ago, I was living a pretty happy life at the university, learning fascinating things about religion, literature, psychology and sociology. Still, I wasn’t earning any money, and many of the things that I wanted to do were impossible due to this lack of money. One thing led to another, and today – roughly four years later – I’m sitting with a well paid job, earning more money than I thought I could spend and getting to travel the globe on business trips. Success, right? Not quite; I feel miserable compared to how I felt while in school. It all boils down to the ways in which my values compare to each other.

Most people have a number of values in their lives, but they don’t sit down and actively think about them or how they relate to each other. When we finally stop and think about it, most people’s values contain the following ten values, to one degree or another. Here listed alphabetically:

1. Adventure
2. Comfort
3. Health
4. Freedom
5. Intimacy
6. Love
7. Passion
8. Power
9. Security
10. Success

There are, of course, other values that several people may chose to have on their lists. Celebrity, amusement, curiosity and ownership all take up a great deal of time in many people’s lives and should not be ignored.

Most of the things we want in life stem from one (or more) of these values. For example; my mistake in searching for great sums of money by taking a job was that I was looking for the freedom associated with money. It didn’t register to me at the time that I would be sacrificing roughly 50-55 hours a week to have that ‘freedom’. Suddenly, the freedom wasn’t so free any more. While we all strive for these values to be fulfilled to one degree or another, we have our own priorities amongst them. The person who values adventure, freedom and comfort the most will certainly chose a different ideal life than the person who values health, intimacy and love the most.

As an exercise, see if you can’t reorganize the values that I have listed to fit yourself. Which one is the very most important? Which one comes second? Using this new list of personal values, you will be able to look at your life with new eyes; analyzing each aspect of it to see what is being fulfilled and what isn’t. I’m sure you’ll find that many of the things further down your list are being fulfilled by your work, hobbies, partners or friends while many of the things higher up are not. Might it be worth sacrificing something in your life to get something that you actually want more?

10 Life Values and their Hierarchies and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

I’m currently reading Awaken the Giant within by Anthony Robbins. In one of the chapters near the beginning, he asks us to perform an exercise to help us along the way of self-discovery and growth. I decided that the best place to do this exercise was right here in front of my readers so that you better can understand both the process and where I’m coming from.

The exercise has many parts, and begins with brainstorming the beliefs that we have, both those that empower us and disempower us. The little beliefs that don’t matter and the global beliefs that do.

Beliefs that empower me:

• I believe that I am intelligent and that I can understand and learn almost anything if I just decide to do so.
• I believe that I am good looking.
• I believe that people are inherently good.
• I believe that my friends and family would help and support me through any crisis that could happen in my life.
• I believe that technology, science and human ingenuety will ultimately cure most, if not all, of societies ills.
• I believe that good things ultimately come to people who do good.

Beliefs that disempower me:

• I believe that it is a difficult thing to stop smoking.
• I believe that many of the things that I know I should do are less interesting than their less important alternatives.
• I believe that I could always start adding new positive habits later.
• I believe that I deserve more recognition and reward than I get for the things that I do and the person I am.
• I believe that I am never fully good enough.

In the next part of the exercise, one works with improving the empowering beliefs and diminishing the disempowering beliefs. The first part is important, but difficult to describe in writing here. The second part, however, is very feasible. It deals with asking seven questions to each of the disempowering points. The seven questions are:

1. How is this belief ridiculous or absurd?
2. Was the person I learned this belief from worth modelling in this area?
3. What will it ultimately cost me emotionally if I don’t let go of this belief?
4. What will it ultimately cost me in my relationships if I don’t let go of this belief?
5. What will it ultimately cost me physically if I don’t let go of this belief?
6. What will it ultimately cost me financially if I don’t let go of this belief?
7. What will it ultimately cost my family/loved ones if I don’t let go of this belief?

As the first two beliefs that disempower me are the ones that bother me the most, I will start off by answering these questions for each and every one of them first. I may write a follow-up entry on the remaining three later on.

I believe that it is a difficult thing to stop smoking.

1. This is an absurd/ridiculous belief because I know that other people have managed to stop smoking previously. So far, I have been unable to successfully stop for a prolonged period of time, but this does not mean that it is a difficult thing, only that it has been difficult for me.
2. As far as I know, I haven’t modelled a specific person for this belief, but rather learnt from many people over the years. I cannot answer this question easilly.
3. The emotional cost of this is large. Ultimately, it will mean that if I continue to try – and continue to fail – to stop smoking, I will lose a great deal of self-confidence in my own ability to change my life.
4. The cost in relationships is also large. Friends, family and loved ones will lose their respect for me if they find that I constantly go back on my claims to stop smoking. They will begin to wonder if other things that I promise to do are dropped as easilly as I fall back on other habits. They will begin to doubt me.
5. The physical cost of smoking is huge. The links to cancer are too prominent to ignore, but a host of other physical symptoms follow smoking as well, including difficulty of breathing, reduced stamina, reduced sperm count, bad skin, reduced appetites, worse sleep and irritability.
6. The financial cost is also great. Cigarettes are not cheap, and smoking is nothing if not burning money.
7. See question 4.

I believe that many of the things that I know I should do are less interesting than their less important alternatives.

1. This is an absurd/ridiculous belief because I am substituting long-term joys for short-term joys. While playing World of Warcraft, having long baths or watching TV series please me in the short run, I know that practicing my martial art forms, working out, eating better and sleeping longer are ultimately more important. Still, I don’t do these things because the quick fix is more interesting.
2. As far as I know, I haven’t modelled a specific person for this belief, but rather learnt from repeating the same sort of habit over the course of many years. I cannot answer this question easilly.
3. The emotional cost again is large. It makes me stagnate and feel as if I’m not getting anywhere in life if I substitute proper physical and emotional growth with short-term entertainment.
4. The cost in relationships with friends, family and loved ones comes from their perspective of me changing to a person who doesn’t get things done, but who prefers sitting by his computer fiddling with trivial inanities.
5. The physical cost is also very large; I fall behind on my martial arts training if I don’t do my “homework” by practicing forms at home and I grow physically tired if I don’t sleep enough.
6. The financial cost is not too great; at least in the direct perspective, although I suppose that some of my “get rich schemes” would have worked out by now if I had only stuck with them instead of falling for the next quick fix of joy, entertainment and distraction.
7. See question 4.

By writing the answers to these questions down, I immediately see how I am setting myself up for failure by holding on to these beliefs. The next step in Anthony Robbins’ plan is to write down the replacements for the two limiting beliefs that we have eliminated. We need to change the meaning of these beliefs and how they work in our lives.

As for the belief that it is difficult to stop smoking, I need to replace this with a belief that it is easy to stop smoking, once the reasons are there. I know intellectually that so many people have managed to stop smoking with a single conscious decision in their lives. I need to learn to believe that it is easy to stop smoking. I need to learn to believe that I can do it and that it will be easy for me.

The second belief seems to me to be more difficult, yet even there I can see a potential replacement of this belief. After all, isn’t smoking just one of the many things that I do when I could be doing something that is more constructive in the long term? Isn’t it true that the time that it takes me to perform the Sil Lim Tao actually shorter than the time it takes to smoke a cigarette? I could decide to change this belief into one where I focus more on the pain than the pleasure. After all, today I see it as the pain of doing something now (that gives me pleasure in the future) being so great that I rather do something that gives me pleasure now, even if it gives me pain in the future. If I learn instead to focus more on the future pain of doing the things that I do today, I will better be able to motivate myself by contrasting it to the future pleasure of the things that may give me pain today. Instead of looking at how I will feel during and immediately after doing something, I could learn to have the perspective of seeing how the action or behavior will have affected me in a week or a month’s time.

All in all, this is a very powerful exercise and has certainly gotten me thinking. I’m sure I will have more to write on the topic in the near future.

Empowering and Disempowering Beliefs and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

One of the first statements in the mnmlst blog post on Minimalist eating was that “A minimalist would more likely eat less, prepare food simply with few ingredients, eat mindfully, and eat sustainably“. While this is probably essentially true, eating food with few ingredients is seldom a good idea. A problem in the modern (western) diet is already that we’re eating too few species (of animal and plant), so a suggestion to reduce it even further cannot be condoned. Instead, we should try to eat more species than we’re eating today. The New York Times article named “Unhappy Meals” claims that:

Today, a mere four crops account for two-thirds of the calories humans eat. When you consider that humankind has historically consumed some 80,000 edible species, and that 3,000 of these have been in widespread use, this represents a radical simplification of the food web. Why should this matter? Because humans are omnivores, requiring somewhere between 50 and 100 different chemical compounds and elements to be healthy. It’s hard to believe that we can get everything we need from a diet consisting largely of processed corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.

However, if we open the floor to interpretation, the recommendation to eat “few ingredients” still holds true in a different way. A quick look at the list of ingredients on a Twinkie, for example, contains the following (according to its Wikipedia entry):

• Enriched Wheat Flour – enriched with ferrous sulphate (iron), B vitamins (niacin, thiamine mononitrate [B1], ribofavin [B12] and folic acid).
• Sugar
• Corn syrup
• Water
• High fructose corn syrup
• Vegetable and/or animal shortening – containing one or more of partially hydrogenated soybean, cottonseed or canola oil, and beef fat
• Dextrose
• Whole eggs
• Color added (yellow 5, red 40)
• Sorbic acid (to retain freshness)
• Caramel color

Twinkies also contain 2% or less of:

• Modified corn starch
• Cellulose gum
• Whey
• Leavenings (sodium acid pyrophosphate, baking soda, monocalcium phosphate)
• Salt
• Cornstarch
• Corn flour
• Corn syrup solids
• Mono and diglycerides
• Soy lecithin
• Polysorbate 60
• Dextrin
• Calcium caseinate
• Sodium stearol lactylate
• Wheat gluten
• Calcium sulphate
• Natural and artificial flavors

It doesn’t take long to realize that most of what we see on this list isn’t food, it’s ingredients. The recommendation to reduce the amount of ingredients, if interpreted as not reducing the amount of things identifiable as food, now becomes a rather good piece of advice. I hope this is how they meant it. You can still eat pasta, vegetables, cow, fish, fruit, nuts, ham, and all of the normal foods, but once you start looking at foodstuff that has a long list of ingredients, you’re probably no longer eating food.

Recent studies have shown that while vegetarians are the healthiest people among us, flexitarians are no less healthy. This seems to indicate that eating meat is not a bad thing per se, but that an imbalance in the diet where one eats mainly meat can be quite harmful. As long as meat is treated as one of many pieces of food on your plate, and as long as it doesn’t have to be there, you’re probably eating healthy. Imagine a plate with salad, cucumber slices, an apple, five slices of ham, half a baguette, some carrots, a leg of chicken and two potatoes. None of these foods is the main part of the dish, but all play together to create a whole meal. Now compare this to a BBQ steak dripping with sauce along with some french fries. While you’re getting proteins, fats and carbohydrates, the lack of biological diversity in your meal is staggering.

Lastly, one of the tips from the Minimalist Eating article that I can completely get behind is their suggestion to eat less; to reduce your overall calorie intake – unless, of course, you are underweight. Instead of eating a meal until you feel ready to explode, it is suggested to eat until you are approaching a feeling of being full. Say 75-80% full. This eases the digestive process and is far friendlier on the digestive system, but also reduces the chance for heart attacks, cholesterol buildup and other related problems.

All of this can be summarized in the three sentences that contain everything you need to know about healthy eating.

Eat food.
Not too much.
Mostly plants.

Minimalist Eating and Nutrition and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

My notes are all over the place. For those of you who remember my previous entry on the subject (and I urge all my new readers to read it first), you’ll remember that I mentioned three major note-taking locations. They were:

• My Moleskine Notebook, where I add new thoughts, ideas, notes, plans, suggestions and other that I need to remember in the future. A short thing will do, such as “Buy Birthday present for mom!” or “Research weaving in mythology” or “Maybe Book Character X should be a veterinarian?”. These ideas will later be made into either notes or tasks by being transferred into one of the following two pieces of software.
• Things is a wonderful piece of software from Cultured Code that I use to handle my tasks. It reminds me 10 days before any of my contacts has a birthday (and again on the birthday, just in case), it keeps track of my work-related tasks, my personal tasks and my more long-term projects. It’s a fantastic piece of software and I would recommend it to everybody.
• VoodooPad is another fantastic piece of software, brought to us by Flying Meat. Basically, it’s a local wiki-type installation where you can create notebook pages that interact with each other. My first page has a number of different topics that then have sub-topics that link back and forth to each other. My book-writing project has a VoodooPad-project of its own where I have notes on all characters, places, religious festivals, seasons and historical events that are relevant to the planning and writing of the book. Again; it’s a fantastic piece of software and I’m only sorry that I didn’t discover it sooner.

In most day-to-day cases, this is enough. However, sometimes situations pop up where I need other software. Sometimes I need to save information that isn’t as simple as taking notes. Enter four more applications:

• I use OmniGraffle to help me visualize the family trees of the characters in my epic fantasy series that I’m writing. It makes it easy to add and edit things as I move along instead of having to update multiple pages in VoodooPad every time I make one little change.
• I use OpenOffice when I’m working on my book. It’s a great combination of minimalism (when you turn off enough visible features) and functionality. Unlike Microsoft’s Office package, OpenOffice still hasn’t come to the point where there is feature bloat with features that actually come in the way of your writing and editing.
• I use Evernote when I see quotes or pictures that make me feel “I’m sure I’ll need that in the future”. Over time, as my Evernote Inbox swells, I begin sorting things into distinct categories that may (or may not) crystallize into a blog post, a short story or a new project. Other things are just discarded as their relevance or my interest in them dissipates.
• Lastly, I use Instapaper for all of my “Read Later”-things. I very often happen upon interesting things on the Internet while I’m at the office or just about to go to bed. Using Instapaper, I can queue these things (and get rid of sidebars, advertisements and other pointless trivia) for reading later, usually on my commute to or from work on my iPhone. I’m really looking forward to seeing an iPad version of Instapaper as this would make things so much easier to manage.

What’s beginning to become more and more apparent to me is that all these four main applications have overlaps in functionality and purpose. I open Things for my planning and give myself a schedule of 2 weeks to finish creating the family tree of a certain person in my fantasy series. Then I’d use OmniGraffle and VoodooPad to plan and plot everything. Finally, once the information is available, I’d have it as reference material once I started writing about the relevant people in OpenOffice. There must be better ways of doing this?

That’s why I’m going out to you guys, my readers. Do you have any suggestions for ways that I can improve upon this process? I’m open to the suggestion of trying new software or new ways of using the current software that I’m using. Pitch me ideas and suggestions; I’d love to hear from you!

The Note-Taking Conundrum and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

The books that I’ve been reading have mainly been random books by Philip K. Dick. The latest one I finished was Our Friends From Frolix 8, a story about a man living in a totalitarian surveillance-heavy society containing – in addition to ‘normal’ people – two transhuman groups; the Unusuals and the New Men. The Unusuals have psychic powers in one form or another; they may be able to read minds, move objects with their minds, start fires or something similar. The New Men are like Humanity++, they have the same skills as us, but super-charged. They can do trigonometry before their tenth birthday, look better than the rest of us, are healthier, and so on.

The predictable adventures occur – okay; semi-predictable, actually, since this is, after all, a Philip K. Dick book – and the protagonist eventually gets the girl (no, wait, she dies) and the ruling order of Unusuals and New Men is toppled.

Since Philip K. Dick wrote this in 1970, a number of things we take for granted today weren’t even thought of at the time. The characters in the book actually walk to phone booths to talk to each other; but these booths have video functionality. The thought of picking up a phone that fits in your pocket was so foreign at the time that it didn’t even fit into the mind of this, one of the most visionary of Science Fiction authors of the past 100 years. The Internet didn’t exist at the time, so nowhere do we have any mentions of widely accessible databases of information that are stored and accessible from across the world. Instead, we have filing stations with microfilm that are accessible from anywhere within the building where one is sitting. People travel from one part of the world on flying ships to meet each other instead of engaging in telepresence. Cars don’t just drive on the streets, they can fly now … and they’re called squibs.

While the book was fun and had some very interesting plot twists, it – and the others that I read – have gotten me thinking. A lot of people have wild dreams about the future. They might be technology-optimistic immortality-yearning Extropists. They might be expecting aliens to come destroy the world. They might think feminism, Greenpeace and whale-saving will make the world a fantastic place. They might think overpopulation will ruin all hope for the future. They might be espousing a specific economic or political theory that will change everything, but they all tend to do one thing wrong.

They do it expecting their own paradigm to be the one to dominate in the future.

Imagine, 300 years ago, when a person was asked how the world would look if it would grow to contain nearly seven billion people who all need to travel long distances to get to where they need to be on a daily basis. This person, stuck in their own paradigm, would imagine carriages drawn by horses littering the streets, the masses of farms needed to sustain such a huge population, the complete and utter chaos as the aristocracies of the world try to maintain order. Fast forward 300 years to today and notice that none of this is a problem; science and social progress has created a complete paradigm shift.

We don’t even need to look at centuries as a time scale to see things like this, Moore’s Law can be applied to society as a whole as we see accelerating change all over the world. Only twenty years ago, it was rare for a person to even know what the Internet was. Ten years ago, people had dial-up and ISDN connections to the Internet and were able to do basic tasks over it. Today, most people in the western world carry an Internet connection in their pocket on a daily basis and access Twitter, Facebook and their e-mail from wherever they want to be.

I was recollecting my dreams and hopes with a friend of mine yesterday. We both work within the telecom and datacom industries and remembered how we, ten years ago, dreamed about how Wireless LAN would be rolled out and be accessible to everybody everywhere, with maybe ten or twenty Megabit connections available to all! We can try to imagine what the ruling paradigm will be in ten years, but it’s almost impossible to do so today. We just have to wait and see or try to take part in changing the future.

What I suppose I’m trying to say is this. If you try to predict the future, try to step outside of your current paradigm.

Don’t expect the future to resemble the present in any way.

The Science Fiction of the Past and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2010. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

As some of you are already aware, I’m working on a fantasy series and have gone through several different pieces of software during the course of the past eleven years. My first notes were taken, aptly enough, in Microsoft Windows’ Notepad (back in Windows 95, if I recall correctly), and now writing in OpenOffice and planning in VoodooPad. It’s working out quite well, I think.

Or rather; so I thought. A few days ago, I discovered Ommwriter, and it changed my entire perspective on writing. You see; I’ve always had problems with distractions and jumping from one thing to another while writing. Ommwriter, with it’s minimal layout and Zen-like audio score, does everything possible to remove any distractions you may have. It gives you the text you’re working on and nothing else.

You could argue that it’s the same concept as Writeroom, and you would be right. You would be right in the same way as one is ‘right’ when one claims that McDonalds and Fuddruckers is essentially the same thing. What Writeroom does well, Ommwriter does better.

However, there are a couple of flaws that I feel I have to bring up. For one, there is no formatting. It is, essentially, a more beautiful version of notepad. If I were to want indentation for the first line in every paragraph, a phrase in italics, or something similar, I’m out of luck. Writing a book in this would be impossible due to the extreme amounts of formatting that I would have to do in post-processing. Blog entries also become difficult due to the inability to add links.

What it all boils down to is that Ommwriter is good at one thing – writing text – but it is extremely good at that one thing. Until it gets better at doing other things, I think I’ll continue to write in OpenOffice with Full screen-mode turned on.

Ommwriter and Distraction-free Writing and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Be kind to those less fortunate.

1. When you’re experiencing something or being in a place you’ve never been, try to avoid letting your mind wander to more familiar vistas. Allow the experience of this new thing engulf you and be as full and vivid as it possibly can. Who knows when you’ll experience it again?
2. Don’t bother trying to cater to everybody elses tastes and opinions. If you’ve got a specific opinion; stick with it – even if it makes you unpopular.
3. If you’re ever in doubt about something, just be honest about it – both to yourself and other people. Tell people you’re uncertain or that you have doubts. Over time, this will definitely be a better alternative than not saying anything.
4. In almost every situation, there is a choice between safety and risk. The safe route will usually be easier, less gratifying and have fewer rewards. Try to become more aware of what choices you’re making and when.
5. If you want to do something, then just do it. Don’t dismiss it as frivolous, stupid, pointless or too difficult. The worst that can happen is that you fail, and most of the time that’s not as serious as you might think.

Please comment on this post if you’ve got opinions on these five suggestions. I’m very curious to hear what people might think.

Five Brief Suggestions and its contents are © Breki Tomasson, 2009. | Be kind to those less fortunate.