But I digress.

The natural planning is the part of the methodology related to making plans. It is ‘natural’ because it takes profit of the way our brain works, instead of working against its grain as many ‘smart’ people do.

I won’t expose the whole model here (look at the ‘GTD’ tag in this blog for more explanations, or track it down the zillion of pages in the Internet about it). I just want to show an example of spontaneous application.

As in the rest of GTD, the main, crucial questions are ‘what’s the desired outcome?’ and ‘what’s the next action?’. This is the way we work: we visualize the result we want, and then our brain perceives that we’re not there and starts to join the dots to take us there.

That’s why when one speaks by telephone, after dialing the number and before receiving the answer, we usually, automatically clean our throats. The brain visualizes us speaking out clear (desired outcome), ‘what do we need to do that? A clean throat’ And what’s the next action to get that? Cough cough…

The Natural Planning Model In Action originally appeared on Zerebria on 22 February 2012.

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2. The GTD First Aid Kit (Part 2)
3. Very attracted by the law of attraction

• ‘Cockroaches and their stinking world’ (2012)
• ‘A cockroach becomes clean’ (2012)
• ‘I can’t marry you… I’m a cockroach!!!’ (2013)
• ‘The cockroach has left the building’ (2015)
• ‘Farewell, Cockroachland’ (2017)

Then one day you make a retrospective and look at the whole of your work. And you notice…

What are you talking about all the time?

What’s the impression you are leaving in other people’s mind?

You’ve filled the world with the thing you hate the most!

Because you are working from negative premises: what you DON’T want. The way NOT to go. It’s easy to criticize what there is, it takes a bit more of effort to propose an alternative. How about a film about eagles? Nobody would ever leave the projection room ever remembering what a cockroach is…

(All of this, if you please, has a lot to do with the law of attraction, I think.)

(Note: the paradox is that what I’m doing here is satirizing satirists. But hey, I hate them so much… )

Cockroaches are plain wrong

The Problem With Satire originally appeared on Zerebria on 8 February 2012.

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1. The Speed Of Technology And The Speed Of The World
2. The underrated art of talking to oneself
3. Sick (but not tired)

This issue is important because it is societies who use the technology they provide themselves with. I keep on suspecting that, in fact, admirable as it is, technology achievements are not as admirable as moral breakthroughs. The way of life must be radically modified, or else we’ll keep on doing really stupid things with really clever equipment.

The manufacturer, obviously, does not have moral dilemmas. It can be shipped, so they ship it. It can be sold, so they sell it. Once the money has changed of hands, however, each of us is on their own, and the price of avoiding such responsibility, don’t you get fooled about that, is high.

The other day I went for a walk and once in the street I noticed that I had forgotten my cell phone. “OK”, I said to myself, “a 70′s-like walk then”. On those days, when people were not permanently available to each other, human contact was in my view better valued. After that walk, you could go back home and if someone told you ‘this or that one just called you’, you felt that wonderful warmth in your chest (particularly if it was a girl ).

Giving up the advantages of being available would be just stupid, too. But moral level must be improved. Continuing the chain value above, the fact that you can make a phone call does not mean you can bug someone every single hour of the day. That ‘can’, again, is only technical. I have seen guys armed with a cellphone or a tablet doing really embarrassing things, just because they could.

I think that is, in our days, the reason why many people still live a very miserable life, in spite of all the advances; because of such gap between our ultrapowerful technology, fostered by millions of arms, and our moral level, that tiny plant that grows slowly in the solitude of each one of us. The incredible distance that goes from ‘what’ to ‘what for’.

Will be able to handle it? I hope so. The shock is like falling from a 5-store building, but we have done that before. We humans are so resilient, poor fellows…

"One of these at every home, running our programs..."

The Speed Of Technology And The Speed Of The World originally appeared on Zerebria on 6 February 2012.

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3. “I Love My Body Unconditionally”

I find interesting what sir Ken Robinson says about the way in which intellectual workers relate to their own body. It is true that most of us, severed from physical activity, are in a certain danger of thinking of our bodies as mere ‘brain carriers’.

I have forgotten of my own body more times than I would like to recognize, simply because there was ‘something more important’ I had to take care of. No wonder that then, one day, Herr Body has its say in the form of pain, its fool-proof way to get its message through.

And then, not used to pay attention to our bodies, we can start to feel fear. The brain, on its side, well versed in extrapolation, can start to figure out the gloomiest of futures, the darkest of -itis from a pang in the chest or a stupid wound in a thumb.

There is another factor involved, what I like to call ‘the machine fallacy’, a fruit of developed countries’ intense and quite obsessive way of facing matters. In short, it goes like that: because our bodies include mechanical parts (bone articulations are levers, for example), we tend to think of them as machines. A machine either fulfills its role silently or becomes clunky: a funny noise in the engine, a cartridge out of ink, etc…

But our body is not a machine, but an alive entity, composed (again) by 6*10 to the 13th power alive entities. By applying the machine paradigm to those alive creatures we are made of, the only possibility of expression we give them is through pain. Of course we don’t want pain, but we provoke it through our lack of balance.

How about using one’s body to express oneself? How about using it to enjoy? Even saying you ‘use’ your body is kind of a contamination from the machine-like stance, because in fact you ‘are’ (among other things) your body. I remember a funny way in which a Buddhist defined the body, as ‘the physical part of your mind’.

So love your body unconditionally, say hello to it every morning, give it things to make it happy (not to anesthetize it, which is very different); there is a lot it does for you every day.

(The machine fallacy presents another interesting branch: because a computer includes some of the features of a human brain, we tend to think our brain is a computer -when, again, we’re talking about an alive entity here; and we don’t exactly know what life is, btw. But that’s a different story…).

"...and we love you too, buddy!"

“I Love My Body Unconditionally” originally appeared on Zerebria on 3 February 2012.

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Speed up your neurons, and have a great time too

Long has been the selection process, toilsome the layout creation, but I’m finally willing to admit, me, a natural born skeptical, that I’m satisfied with the results. If I died tomorrow, I think people could get a good glimpse of my ways in life by looking at this book, both the aspect and the content. Furthermore, what is better: If I died tomorrow, I’m sure people would get benefits from this product of my crackling neurons.

‘The Nerve Of Zerebria’ includes 25 texts, covering both self improvement articles and fiction writing, and grouped into thematic sections. Two of the texts are brand new, as a bonus for my avid readers (yes, those of you who spend more than an hour in here, you are silent but I know you ).

The first one is ‘The Three-Legged House’, a biographical account out of which I extract a series of conclusions, many years later. Some of my readers have pointed out that this is my ‘voice’ they prefer, which makes me feel very satisfied. As I have mentioned in this blog other times, ‘I only have what I have given’, so I feel very happy whenever I can transmute events that perhaps were painful in their moment, into teachings for other people’s profit (even though I am perfectly aware of the traps of memory, but that’s a different issue).

As for the second, ‘Don’t Be A Madman’, is a text written with creators of all kinds in mind, but it can be perhaps extended to any person with a project. Perhaps I still don’t have the distance necessary to judge it fairly, but up to date I see it as one of the most motivational and encouraging texts I have ever written; I hope it helps people to get moving and abandon all prejudices. The publishing of this book itself is precisely a movement on that direction

The book is going to be available for some time in exchange for a donation, so if you are interested head here, go through the Paypal screen, and immediately after donating you’ll receive the download. Thank you very much, and I hope you enjoy it.

Introducing ‘The Nerve Of Zerebria’ Ebook originally appeared on Zerebria on 1 February 2012.

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2. ‘The Versatile Blogger’ Award for Zerebria
3. They Should Have Blogged: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Getting Started

I must admit that at first I had my prejudices against e-readers. Give me a break, I was born in the XXth century after all, my walls are covered with volumes from bottom to the top, and this Kindle thing looked to me like a severe case of ‘first we invent and ship it, then we find out what is it useful for’.

But then I slowly got indoctrinated into the Amazon church.

It is a very clever user interface they have in there, and anyone who enjoys a good read will find it hard to resist it. The tiered transition from ‘press here to see the first pages’ to ‘press here to order’ is almost unconscious, once you’ve gone through the toil of writing your data one single time.

So, long story short, one day, before I could know it, I had crossed the line and made my first deliver of rare books that I had to have. Oh, and what a day when I got the post office warning that I had a parcel!

But the transition had only begun; parallelly, by that time, I had already become aware of the incredible wealth of free PDF books out there in the internet. There came a moment when I was doing the bulk of my reading in non-physical format.

Reading PDFs on the laptop screen was burdensome and tedious: between the desire to read a bit and the moment you started, there could be several minutes of booting, finding files, etc. And besides, even if there wasn’t, long lines, as you can learn from any speed reading course, are not precisely the most efficient way to sail through a text.

So the lightbulb turned on and I checked a few reviews; could by chance the Kindle handle the PDF format? Yes it could! And, in addition to all those free PDFs out there, there were a lot of free Kindle books availables, most of them classics which do not yield author royalties anymore.

That removed any fear of becoming a ‘commercial slave’ of the-brand-who-provides-everything, which I always find dangerous and a bit suffocating. By the time being, I have already read maybe hundreds of pages with my Kindle, and I haven’t bought any online product from Amazon, and I could go on like this forever if I wanted to.

Another advantage of the Kindle, maybe you know, is that it handles PDF not only as a native format (which shows, in my opinion, the first drawbacks than in the computer version), but it also offers the possibility of conversion to its format, which is very nice to read. The process to do so is very simple: when you purchase your Kindle, you receive an email address called whatever@kindle. By sending your pdfs there with ‘Convertir’ (Spanish) in the subject, you’ll automatically receive the converted file to your Kindle.

Such conversion is said to be ‘experimental’, and sometimes misses one justification or glues two words here and there, but readability is perfect. To a book junkie like me that’s all that counts. It is gorgeous to read in the Kindle format.

The Kindle bookstore

Another major factor that made me choose the Kindle is that, after all, Amazon is, and has always been, a book seller. Other manufacturers, like Sony, for instance, are electronic manufacturers first, and then have created a specialized structure of their own, to get their share of the ebook cake. I did the simple test of searching some of the (quite nonstandard) books I was interested in at the different electronic bookstores, and Amazon won by a large difference.

I am also happy of having included the leather cover in my order. A object like this must have it’s ‘home’. And besides, call me a classic, but to me it reinforces the book-like or notebook-like look that we all avid readers like; besides, it is very beautiful.

What is it like

The whole kindle is beautiful and lean. It has page forward and page back on both sides, to ease handling with just one hand, and then four simple buttons for navigation on the bottom, and that’s it (there’s also a version with a full keyboard, as you’ll surely know). It really conveys the feeling of having been designed, as they say in the welcome message, to interfere the least in your reading process.

I hadn’t ever before realized how burdensome holding a book open is when it is heavy, or simply the effort you need to keep left page and right page at 180º so you can have the page you’re reading perpendicular to you. Or the toil to change from one page to the next one when you are for instance reading in bed (one of the best things in the world).

Another great point in favor of Kindle is the e-ink. It makes the battery last forever: the screen works through a chemical process similar to ink; this means that energy is consumed only when you flip from one page to the next one and, above all, e-ink reduces eye strain in relation to other options based on retro-iluminated screens (like, say, an Ipad).

The only usability flaw I can find to it, and is minor, is related to underlining; I think a great way to improve usability and the book-like factor, would be that the underlinings you take could be somehow transferred to your computer as text files. But maybe more advanced models like the Kindle Fire do have such feature. All beginnings are modest…

All in all, the Kindle is a great and quite cheap machine, and if you love books you cannot go wrong with it.

The original Kindle, you just can't go simpler

Amazon Kindle Review, Or God I Love This Thing originally appeared on Zerebria on 30 January 2012.

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2. A reader is not a steamroller
3. Problems with love? (Part 1)

(Just in case, ‘kinesthetic’, perhaps the only definition not self-evident, is the sense that gives us a feeling of bodily presence, and allows us to detect where is each limb and doing what, general tone, weight, tensions…)

Events like this make you realize that there are many languages within the same language, and as many worlds as persons out there to perceive it:

• A person who is predominantly visual can be alright with a noise rate that for an aural is unbearable.
• You can cram a lot of aural guys in a concert hall because they are absorbed with the music, but that kinesthetic on third row finds the lack of space suffocating, and the visual one gets easily distracted with absurd details in the ceiling.
• A piece of cloth will look completely different for a predominantly visual, interested in the color, and for someone more kinesthetic, more focused on textures, maybe one of those persons who likes to touch everything, who learns the world with his hands.

Many disconnections in relationships, many of those weird moments between people that one lets go with a shrug, have undoubtedly to do with things like these: moments where the sensation of speaking of the same thing is only an illusion.

On the other side of the coin, and maybe it’s easier seen by a third person, sometimes you find people connecting and engaging in ways that look a bit incomprehensible to you. Their conversation evolves in ways that do not look quite logical to you, but that seem to make perfect sense to them. The reason is because they are sharing a certain predominance, and perhaps their words appeal to senses that you are not that aware of.

Being aware of such a division can help us have more effective communications, by trying to detect the interlocutor’s main sensory channel and then adapt our language accordingly.

For example: if someone uses expressions like ‘taking the bull by the horns’, the chances are there is a kinesthetic predominance. Maybe you’re more aural and had been using phrases like ‘starting with a bang’, satisfied of finding such a vivid language, and then wondering why it has so little effect on the other person.

Training oneself on this awareness can be criticized as lacking spontaneity, or an attempt to ‘manipulate’ the dialog; but I prefer to see it as a challenging game, and above all, an act of politeness: if you have notions of Chinese, and find out someone is Chinese, you try to speak Chinese. If you find out someone is aural, you try to speak aural.

I’d also like to add that this classification of senses BY NO MEANS IMPLIES LIMITATION. I don’t want to see the mobs with torches in the streets: “Death to the aural!” “Kinestetic are superior!”. Every human being can and must enjoy and freak out via these three channels, and, notwithstanding our sensory predominance, we all know what is our left feet thumb doing right now; it is only that they come in a different order; the ‘minor ones’ are not to be despised; they are additional chances to grow, to learn and to explore, and a part of that incredible wealth of the human species that comes from our differences.

So, I have already said my order; which is yours?

...and then there's Leonardo Da Vinci, who had plenty of everything

Sensory Predominance: Which Is Yours? originally appeared on Zerebria on 27 January 2012.

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Seah’s creative forms had nothing to do with what I was looking for, but they turned to be exactly what I needed. What I like in Seah’s forms is not only the intelligent and beautiful layout, but also the application of a type of information technology (the form) to original new fields.

Emerging Task Planner - Click on the image to see detail

One usually associates ‘forms’ with nasty chores, like doing one’s taxes; with stuff repeated ad nauseam, like, you know, name-gender-address-age.

The repetition of those worn out patterns leads you to believe that forms cannot be creative, that there is something inherently ugly about them, and, well, that they are something that is better to run away from as soon as you can.

But enter David Seah. Suddenly the same old device is used in a cool way, to discuss serious, methodically, one’s own productivity. With instructions so simple to use and so appealing that, before you notice, you have filled the first field and are asking for more information about YOURSELF, about your work patterns. All executed with the rigor and taste that seemed formerly reserved for the corporate world.

I see David’s products as part of a nice wave of DIY in the best sense of the word; people looking for good ways to do things for other people, bringing back technology for particular using. I know Seah is not a big GTD fan, but to me his forms are somewhat in the same wavelength of David Allen’s insistence on getting oneself a labeler, of taking one’s stuff that serious. The ‘ancient stance’, that this kind of creators are helping to demolish, would go like this:

“…but of course it has a great design; it is part of a company project. This other thing here? Oh, this lousy paper and this felt-tip pen with almost no ink will do. It is only my life, after all.”

Obviously, such stance is no longer sustainable, mostly when information has become so easy to access to. We are visual animals; visual elements are one of the most persuasive ways to get a human encouraged, moved, influenced or inspired;

Concrete Goals Tracker - Click on the image to see detail

it is about time that we start to use visual elements to our advantage, not only to the Acme corp of the day’s (not meaning an opposition here: it is fair that any company uses any sensory mean to spread the news about its product; but ONLY as long as single individuals have that same possibility in their arsenal too).

So thanks David Seah for one more step in the contribution to the democratization of technology. The Emergent Task Planner, the Compact Calendar and the Concrete Goals Tracker are already an essential part of my organization; they also make my corkboard nicer to look at, so I come around there more often, as by chance, to see ‘what’s cooking’. And that, my friends, is productivity of the best kind.

David Seah’s forms have been around the web for a while but, if you haven’t seen them yet, do yourself a favor and check them out. They are available as free PDF downloads, and also as convenient pre-printed packs. Your workflow and your inspiration will thank you.

David Seah’s Lesson originally appeared on Zerebria on 25 January 2012.

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(Note: I paraphrase because the Emerson book from which the quote’s been extracted is in Spanish, and it is also a weird compilation, so I couldn’t track down the original quote).

It is easy to see that sentences like this, with all their motivational oomph, would do very good not only as blog posts, but even as very powerful Twitter snippets. No wonder Emerson quotes are to be found everywhere in the Net.

But isolated fragments can’t give a full idea of what a complete Emerson text can do to your brain. It makes you think of a carefully calculated time bomb.

It starts slowly, logical, now and then even a bit predictable to let your mind have rest periods.

And then, once it’s grabbed you, it speeds up, it starts skipping steps, and gradually appeals less to your rational side and more to intuition, passion…

At a certain moment, towards the end, words even cease to exist. The result is that you arrive to the other side of the text in a state of high exaltation, refilled with the proud of being a human, and the need to do, to try out, to strive.

For things like this, I know that, at some point, I’ll set myself to read the complete Emerson.

And then, when I’m done, I think I’ll move on to the complete Lake and the complete Palmer.

OK, the joke is perhaps a bit dumb, but it allows me to address what I consider Emerson’s biggest flaw: an absolute lack of humor. He takes himself and everything he says too seriously. There is something biblical in his style. Telling us his truth is not enough, he has to YELL it. He is so convinced that he is right, that he advances like a Panzer, one triumphal sentence at a time, to make sure that we all get to know.

Facing such ruthless march, the reader is left with only two options: a) 100% surrendering -with the undeniable advantages mentioned above-, or b) getting out of the bloody way.

There is a lot to learn from every Emerson book, but you feel that he is a guy you couldn’t have a conversation with. Books are written by people, and that stuff very often shows. And sometimes you are not in the mood for that kind of ‘tough love’, no matter how superb the quality.

For any other occasion, though, when you feel like your plant could use some more growth, then do yourself a favor and get yourself some Emerson. Because growing, against common belief, always implies some effort; especially when you aim to grow in the right direction.

R.W.E. (1803 - 1882) - "I'm ready to let you know"

They Should Have Blogged: Ralph Waldo Emerson originally appeared on Zerebria on 23 January 2012.

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So I am going to join a lot of wise men who are doing their best to spread this grrreat news. The Buddha spoke about it. Krishnamurti spoke about it. Eckhart Tolle spoke about it. Deepak Chopra speaks about it. Douglas Harding spoke about it. Etc, etc, etc. How not to feel pedantic in such a company?

But it is necessary. Words do not exhaust this phenomenon, and even though words cannot really grab the direct experience of it, maybe some people who have affinity with me can find something worthwhile in the words I choose by trying; so here are the words I choose.

The conventional conception about human life on Earth goes like this: there is mind =inner world, states, intangibility, and there is matter (=three dimensions, weight, shape, etc).

The new and liberating conception simply sets a different contrast: mind and image. It does not imply denying other properties of objects, but changing the focus to a more practical and advanced working model.

We have come to live in such a visual world that such a division should come intuitively and be easily to welcome. Maybe there hasn’t ever been an age that provides so much resources to promote that kind of enlightenment. Films, for example, are a rich resource of metaphors to compare consciousness to. The ancients did not have that. Using films as a tool, we can try to describe the new paradigm as follows:

think of your life as a film. A succession of images. You are not in your body, your body is in you; your body is constantly in the image, but there are always more things in there. And, in terms of image, there is no difference between seeing your hand, and seeing the cup it holds for example.

You are your body PLUS a whole lot of things. Perspective enlarged already. You, then, are whatever comes into the ‘screen’ of your life. It is vast and it is always changing. That’s what Buddhists mean when they say ‘everything is void’ (please notice there is a difference between ‘void’ and ‘nothing’).

Now close your eyes and recall what you were doing a couple of hours ago. Bring to your consciousness the precise images you had in front of you. Were you in your kitchen, or at the subway, or talking with a loved one? Were you using a telephone, driving a car, looking at the clouds? So, the question is: specifically talking about images; do they look alike what you have in front of you right now? Not the slightest similarity, even if you have a very boring life and you haven’t moved from the computer in six months. Because nothing is permanent, everything mutates. The river metaphor is very accurate.

And yet, different as they are, you never fail to register and perceive any of those new images that enter your radar. Your system never ‘crashes’ because of this or that image. It contains whatever arrives. In that sense, from an image point of view, you are unlimited.

And changing matter for images it’s such a relief! You suddenly feel lighter. The people who fully realize such a change live more and happier years. You are not the guy who looks at the screen, you aren’t even the contents within the screen; you are the screen itself. The day you get a glimpse of that, you’ll never have enough of it again.

(Although, generally speaking, it takes practice to stay in that state; the ego is trained to maintain stability, so such a radical change, even for the best, causes eustress… again Buddhists have that very beautiful metaphor of a child who learns how to walk: first only a couple of steps before falling, then a whole meter, then a long promenade maybe… till walking comes naturally).

That is the big switch indeed, and taking it is just a matter of choice; as the only rational creature known so far in this corner of the universe, you have the gift of making perceptual choices, of choosing the relevance you grant to the pieces, thus selecting the interpretation model that works in your best interest. Is like the visual trick of the young/old woman (see the picture below); at first you’ll predominantly see either one or the other, but once you’ve got to see both you get to choose.

So this is the Big Switch, I’m fully committed to it and I’ll discuss it furthermore in this blog; it is not only nice-it is necessary. And besides, as in many things, I have a feeling that the best way to learn is by teaching.

Have you ever experienced this Switch? Do you have tricks or ‘anchors’ to get back to such a state? Which words would you choose to define it?

Seen the old one? Seen the young one? Now you get to choose...

The Big Switch: From Mind/Matter To Mind/Image originally appeared on Zerebria on 20 January 2012.

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