Tag Archives: Acceleritis

Optimizing the value of feelings in decision making

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What are feelings? How are feelings optimized?

Besides the input from the five physical senses, human consciousness receives feelings. Upcoming posts will offer experiments focused on this input stream, which you can conduct yourself. These experiments will establish whether you can achieve measurable improvements in your own effectiveness stemming from better channeling or processing of feelings-type information.

To prepare for the experiments, let’s contemplate: what are feelings?
 Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
The Orion Nebula
Feelings are urges that arise to sensibility within us, within our minds and within our bodies. Feelings are experiences, states of consciousness resulting from motivations, sentiments, preferences or desires. These terms all really mean the same thing: motivations, what we value, what we want, what we are trying to get, what we want to avoid.

Feelings are the way we respond internally to external and internal phenomena, based on what we are trying to get and avoid, and how current events can help or threaten our desired outcomes.

Therefore feelings generally come in two valences, positive or negative. The feelings are positive if current events appear to favor our targeted outcomes, and they are negative if events seem to be heading away from what we want to have happen.

Positive feelings are valued universally in themselves. We don’t need to argue in favor of them, we all like them, and would like to have them all the time.

Negative feelings not only make us feel bad (by definition), they lower our immune system thus making us more prone to disease, and they distract our cognitive concentration thereby reducing our effectiveness. These bad feelings can also serve a positive function as an alarm system to get our attention to the problem fast. Ironically, if the bad feelings continue while one is grappling with the problem on a rational level, it will take longer to solve the problem.

When a problem arises and is sensed partially by the bad feelings within oneself, alerting us to focus on the challenge, it’s easy to say, “Turn off the alarm and get on with solving the problem.” However, it is not so easy because of attachment and Acceleritis.

Acceleritis, the unending acceleration of information entering the human brain each day, simply overloads the average human being’s capacity to do effective mental work of any kind. One kind of mental work we are supposed to get better at as we truly mature and “grow up” and become a “mensch” is to be able to sanely and in a balanced way take our feelings into account in our actions, without being stampeded or reduced to hand-wringing by those feelings. Acceleritis therefore also escalates the power of other mental subsystems that push in the direction of closure, black-and-white thinking, snap decisions, self-consistency and self-imitation — anything to simplify. Complexity is tacitly perceived as the main threat and pain causer. Acceleritis therefore lays many of us low with attachment — if Acceleritis were not present, we would actually have the mental and emotional maturity to cope with the situation without attachment.

What then is attachment?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Whirlpool Galaxy
Attachment is the excessive dependency on something. It is actually love carried too far. You love something so much (a wonderful thing) you cannot do without it, and so you fall prey to fear of losing it, and this distracts the mind so that Observer state and Flow state are impossible. Your mind tends instead — in the Acceleritis-induced state of Emergency Operating Procedure (EOP) — to go around in circles wallowing in the fear of loss or the sense of loss, or the anger and bitterness related to the loss or threatened loss, or the hopeless defeated depression of having lost it with no hope of regaining it. No useful mental work is achieved, no problem solving, no creative new leaps rising to meet the challenge sideways, as would occur in the higher states of effectiveness, namely, the Observer and Flow states.

As discussed in earlier posts, these effectiveness states are posited to be real physical states in the brain, differentiated from one another in measurable ways. Our Theory of Holosentience is based on the hypothesis that the primary dimension determining the state of the brain and consciousness is the degree of harmony among functional areas of the brain (inhabiting our entire sentience at once) — wherein thoughts, feelings, motivations, and the other aspects of self achieve a synchronous integrity in both the experientially measurable consciousness domain as well as the scientifically measurable biometric material domain.

This brings us back to feelings. Feelings have always been less studied and talked about than thoughts. Descartes did not say “I feel, therefore I exist.”

The word feeling originally may have related (Wikipedia says) to the sense of touch, and then its meaning expanded to include the ineffable internal sense that brings us more bits (information) than the five physical senses in terms of the way it affects our actions.

What evidence is there that we are generally more driven by our feelings than by our thoughts? Freud established that thoughts are more likely to be rationalized in support of feelings, rather than people being able to use their thoughts to control their feelings. And yet, how valuable it is to be able to do just that — to have the mental self-discipline to focus one’s thoughts effectively even when one’s feelings are in an uproar.

In a nutshell, feelings are a manifestation of our motivations colliding with the external world. What feeling would we have if we had no motivations?

Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Cassiopeia Galaxy
You can actually discover this for yourself, by meditating. While there are many specific methodologies for meditation, all of them have this mind/gut mirror effect of showing you what your own motivations really are, where they have gotten you, and why you have each experience you ever have. You can also achieve such objectivity that you can, as it were, turn off certain motivations for the moment and see what that feels like — what visions of future possibilities arise now that X motivation is gone, how are you breathing, how do you feel?

This gaining of perspective through meditation makes you feel good. In other words, it not only helps you inspect deeply your own feelings and their consequences in the world, it also generates a feeling, and a very good one.

What is that very, very sweet feeling? Is it happiness? Is it ecstasy? Yes, it’s all those things and more. Then what is it?

It’s love. A word that provokes instant uneasiness all round. It’s a word that makes us all feel silly. The guy has lost it. You don’t talk about such things. Verboten. Just for family talk, not public talk. What an interesting word to have such an effect.

The F-bomb has become popular in meetings with both males and females, at least in certain businesses I have moved through in the last decade. It is more acceptable than the word “love” in such venues.

Beyond getting the author in hot water, what is love?
Here you can contemplate this question if you wish, or just go on.
Pink sheer heart shape, computer generated fractal abstract backgroundIt is the master feeling, the one all the others come from. Love is white light whereas each feeling is a color.

Love is the residue that is left when motivations are tuned down into conscious perspective, in light of an open-minded empirical philosophy of demanding proof for everything, dropping every bit of information one has heard onto a trial workboard in the consciousness storage bin, and taking it offline in terms of decision making. This is the perspective of yoga. Zen. Meditation. Contemplation. Focused singlepointed attention. A way of life for millions of people today and throughout human history. These multi-strands of movements see themselves as part of a whole, although to those outside they seem like a bunch of cults that are all different. They are all the same in achieving perspective, distance from motivations that the bodymind otherwise assumes are immutable, non-negotiable. These methods are among those crystallized into simple steps in our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Why does love remain when one has achieved objective distance from one’s motivations? What evidence do we have for that assertion, and what explanation do we have for it?

As an individual my only evidence for any assertion here are my own experiences. Every time through meditation I clear away the built-in locked-in powerful sway of my own motivations, I discover that I am content, every tiny aspect of what I am experiencing is enjoyable and interesting, I simply love it, all of it, I love myself, and everyone. Others have reported similar experiences, enough so that I know I am not an isolated case. In the next post we will offer a meditative experiment whereby this may also happen to you.

Why should it be so? Why should we feel love when we are not being driven this way and that by irresistible motivations?

In my cosmological Theory of the Conscious Universe (TOTCU) we are all dubs of the master consciousness, like MP3 copies of a master recording of a song, each of us a microcosm of the whole universal consciousness. When we rise above the petty motivations that seem so all-important to us in our daily lives down here on this one planet, we partake of the carrier wave motivation we share with the master consciousness, the one that is always there under all the other motivations, from which they draw their power. Love that is omnidirectional is the wellspring, the source from which we splinter off love of money, love of power, love of sex, love of the idea of getting that big job, and so on. All other motivations are modulations of love. So when the splinter motivations are quieted, the background radiation that differentiates itself into these “local” motivations becomes visible. This is how I explain it to myself, that I have this omnidirectional love experience whenever I am centered and immune to the compulsions to protect and seize what I feel I must have.

Acceleritis makes it very difficult for me to communicate this so that it is widely credible, because Acceleritis works against the stopping of the momentum of the mini-mind —so it seems ridiculous to assert that we already have an abundance of love without having to get anything we don’t already have. And yet, if you allow the possibility of a universal consciousness of which we are all a part, what motivation would it have to be doing this universe if it did not love the doing of a universe as a game in itself, the master game, the master art form, the ultimate form of self-discovery.

Acceleritis makes it much easier to deal with information overload by focusing on differences and categorization into buckets mostly on a single continuum from good to bad. This goes on constantly below our conscious awareness. Making automated decisions that are often the wrong ones. This leads to all sorts of feelings, many of them bad. Clouding over the master feeling that exists already, unbrokenly from beginning to end. It is there underneath all this debris. It comes out when we clear off the rubble.

Now that we’ve explored “feelings”, the next post will describe an experiment you can carry out yourself on the optimization of feelings.

Best to all

Bill

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PS – Humorously, Wikipedia says that feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. This is funny because psychology defines emotion as the aspect of feeling that can be measured in the body, such as glandular secretions, muscle tensions, breathing rate, brainwaves, perspiration, etc., and you could just as easily say that feelings cause emotions as you could say emotions cause feelings. The leftover behaviorist psychology way of looking at it would be to make emotions more important — in fact 100% important, with feelings relegated to the trash bin of mind as epiphenomenon, a sound track that actually has no control of what the body is doing.

Such behaviorist Pavlovian thinking is now almost a century out of date, yet remnants of that thinking still creep into the generally excellent Wikipedia (which needs our donations incidentally to stay alive, and someone should tip them off to using advertising to support themselves, doing it in a PBS-like manner to the side all the way down from top to bottom, with true sponsorship tonality). Behaviorist ideas permeated so much of our thinking as a culture when they held reign that growing up we each got a dose of such ideas in the background conversations of adults we overheard. This is where we got the idea that we can just let the mind and body do their thing the way we always do and the way other people do, without any stopping to check out what the hell these operational action decisions are being based on.

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The Eternal Fight over The Holy Land

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Unlimited Productions, Inc.

DESTINY’S CHILDREN

Pilot Concept for a Television Drama Series
 

Students of many nationalities at the United Nations International School (UNIS) in Manhattan are concerned about the Israel-Palestine crisis. They find themselves forming a group to do something about it.

Arguments break out about what they can do, and what the solution is. The Iraqi boy has very different ideas from the Israeli girl, who although at odds are attracted to each other. The other kids, American, Russian, French, Israeli, Arab, and so on, all have their own perspectives.  

Interacting with UN officials and their parents who are in some cases UN diplomats, they evolve a step-by-step plan for averting what they see as the dominos leading to a possible world war. The plan all of them finally agree upon: the desired Palestinian state will come into existence under UN administration. UN peace zones have never failed*. Israel’s main concern about a secure strategically defensible border would be seemingly solved. There could be a long-range anticipation that one day perhaps the UN would leave the nation to its autonomy once the world was convinced of its maturity to handle that autonomy peaceably.

The Iraqi boy and the Israeli girl are now on the same side, and they become an item.

The kids distribute a paper about their plan at the UN but nothing changes, and in the kids’ minds they see a probable military powder keg explosion looming. A number of UN delegates explain to them the flaws in their plan and why it will never work, but other UN delegates encourage them and give them suggestions.

A few of them get interviewed on a television talk show and the next day their ideas are debated in the Security Council and in the General Assembly. The students are elated and inspired and decide that to continue to have an effect they should create their own weekly television series, THE KIDS’ UN. An interactive show utilizing social media in which kids can participate from around the world — with webcams even, and with the kernel of the show being a drama series about kids putting on a show like this.

As they struggle with starting a production with almost no money, and they and their families feel that the probability of a world war continues to mount, some of the kids come under family pressure because of differing ideas and the possibility of political reprisals. This tears apart the romance of the Iraqi boy and the Israeli girl.

The students put a rough pilot together and play it for key diplomats and video their reactions, hoping they will hear support. But the opposite happens. They meet objections for which they have no answers.

Mulling it all over afterward they strike on answers. The main objection is that “it’s not a brilliant new proposal: it’s been suggested many times before.” It would therefore need a twist to get attention, someone had said.

And so they change their plan: they will propose to rename the contested territories that the Palestinians want as their own state: “The First World State of Palestine”.

People around the world who believe in the idea of One World, will be asked to help make that idea a reality, by visiting The First World State of Palestine at least once a year. If they do so they get to carry a second passport as citizens of Earth. They need to revisit the First World State once a year to maintain this passport.

One of the students makes a guess at the tourism revenues that would be added to the region: if only ten percent of the people in the world today believe in the idea of One World, that’s 500 million people. If only one in five of them can afford to fly over each year and spend only $1000 each, that’s a hundred billion dollars a year. Surely a stabilizing boon to the region’s economy.

And with Israel replaced by the UN as caretaker in Palestine, the area would once again be safe for tourists. Once in the region, people would visit The Pyramids, Israel, and other places as well as Palestine. Other destinations in the region would begin advertising themselves…

The fiery debates between the Iraqi boy and Israeli girl in the kids’ councils are what gave rise to the First World State idea. The two are brought back together by it.

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Just retrieved the above from the archives. It was written in 1990.

Back then my contact at the UN was George LeClere, the media director, who liked the First World State idea. He put me in touch with the Israeli Foreign Ministry Undersecretary and with Palestinian Observer Zehdi Terzi. I met with Mr. Terzi in the UN Plaza Hotel, and he felt the idea was worth considering, especially after I showed him the encouraging letter from the Israeli Undersecretary. Later Mr. Terzi reported that Yasser Arafat had liked the idea too and was willing to go on TV saying as much. George LeClere offered me the UN video facilities to produce a talk special on this subject with all the key players. At the time we both imagined we could get Dick Cavett to be the host.

Jimmy Carter sent me a second handwritten note, this time saying that the peace talks had to be started ‘without crippling preconditions’. In the context, I took it he was saying to hold off on airing any idea. We followed his guidance. We shelved the TV show idea.

Before closing the door on the idea, we penned Destiny’s Children (the start of this post) as a fictional TV drama series, on the premise that it wouldn’t have the same negative effect Carter advised against. We never sent it to anyone, feeling that I was just rationalizing by thinking fiction could be less dangerous than nonfiction.

Now, 21 years later, we and the world are back in the same mess again in the Holy Land. The Palestinians are asking the UN for recognition as a nation, and the expectation is that they will drag Israel into a war crimes tribunal if they are granted statehood. This is ironic in the extreme since as recently as October 1, 2011 Hamas leader Khaled Meshal said “Palestinians must resort to resistance no matter how costly it is, until Palestine is free and Israel is destroyed.” Speaking at the same conference in Tehran, Iran supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said that the Palestinians should not limit themselves to seeking a country based on the pre-1967 borders because “all land belongs to Palestinians.” These are the people contemplating accusing others of war crimes while they plot the destruction of another nation.

One precondition that the UN should institutionalize for recognition of any new nation is that it officially accepts the existence of all states currently recognized by the UN and will not be an aggressor state against any UN member states. This would symmetrically establish that Palestine cannot become a nation without agreeing that its neighbor Israel has a right to exist there. And as a provision its inherent fairness is obvious. “We’ll recognize your right to exist, if you’ll recognize our right to exist.”

Maybe bringing up a crazy idea like the First World State can at least jog Acceleritis-paralyzed minds into some better-informed or out-of-the-box thinking than I can produce right now. Even if the FWS idea itself is a non-starter for some reason. I conjecture that my esteemed readership contains the top percentile of out-of-the-box thinkers of any media audience. If anyone can think up an idea worth considering it is one or all of you.

Let’s hope so.

Best to all,

Bill

* After this TV treatment was written in 1990, UN peace zones were perceived failures in Rwanda and in Lebanon.

If You’re Not Enjoying Your Self, Something’s Wrong

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Most of the time if we are not having fun we just assume “what else is new.” This method asks you to assume differently.

Assume that if you are in a bad mood or feel a negative physical symptom, this is a communication to you. The highest priority then is to decode the message and thereby reverse the emotional or physical quandary.

It could be that your subconscious is trying to tell you something. This is an autonomic alarm system we all have. If for example your current activities are not in alignment with your goals, or if you have set a goal that is not in alignment with your core values, parts of your mind will try to bring this to your conscious attention any way they can, and often the signaling will involve feelings of distress or something not right. It could start out one day as a bad mood you don’t even realize you are in, then escalate as the signal strength is gradually increased in an attempt to finally get your attention. If this persists long enough it can turn into physical symptoms. It is all about communication — in this case, internal communication.

Don’t get lost in the suffering so as to forget to decode first ahead of anything else. Act as if you deserve to be happy at all times. Getting lost in the suffering is what most of us do at most times, and this is a life-threatening waste of time. It also blocks your quality. No point in soldiering on in a bad mood because whatever you do in that state will not be in the range of high quality / high effectiveness. Better to let the work fall even farther behind while you figure out what is bugging you and dispel it by taking the action required, whatever it is.

One of the primary characteristics of Flow state (aka the Zone) is that the individual is doing something s/he loves to do, and is immersed fully in the playing of that game as a game, without over-motivation to win or over-concern of failure — and above all that, impregnable by attachments, free. This mood is a clue that you are in the process of moving into higher effectiveness and you just go with the flow enjoying it — and if you don’t distract yourself by subtly gloating over it, you go all the way into the Zone.

If something is bringing you down, that is going to block the Zone. So set aside your work and get yourself somewhere where you are uninterruptible, and see inside yourself to detect where the bad mood or sick feeling might be coming from.

It is likely you are attached to something that you now have fear of not getting. Or you are attached to something not happening that some part of you now expects will be happening anyway. What could it be?

You might find that taking notes helps, especially if you let the pen just write, without editing. This is because different neuron clusters become engaged when you go from just pondering to also writing notes. Shifting modalities like this is like sweeping a searchlight around inside your psyche.

Another way to shift modalities and bring different neurons into play is to turn aside from actively thinking about the question and instead just cultivate emptiness inside while paying sharp attention. This is a powerful shift of neurons, known to other writers. For example, adman James Webb Young’s 1960 classic A Technique For Producing Ideas speaks about a need to set aside all thought about a project after studying and thinking deeply about it, and sure enough flashes of inspiration will appear out of nowhere (usually within three days in this writer’s experience, frequently within hours nowadays after decades of practicing this and other techniques).

The effectiveness of this kind of internal gear shifting is perhaps most commonly observed when we are frustrated trying to think of a word or name. It is on the tip of our tongue and we keep trying the same file drawer in our mind certain that with enough effort we will remember it. But we don’t remember it until we give up and then it easily pops into our head a short while later. This appears to be because we were forcing ourselves into the wrong file drawer and therefore blocking the retrieval.

To recap, we are discussing micro-methodologies to carry out the imperative of not taking foul moods for granted but instead getting to the bottom of the causes, so that action plans can be made that will help to overcome whatever is secretly bothering you. This will also tend to improve your physical health and keep you looking young. However our main goal is to get you out of lower states into the highest performing state Flow state (the Zone) or into the next best thing, the access state right before that, which we call the Observer state. Thus our purpose steadfastly remains to improve the creative effectiveness of our readers thus improving decision making for as many people as possible.

Test this method over the next week or lifetime and see if you don’t agree that it works. There is no downside risk in the lifetime test — it can only help you, or at the worst change nothing.

This has been another installment of our summary release of psychotechnology here at the blog of The Human Effectiveness Institute. We suggest that the condensation of this kind of subtle guidance system is also worth testing by getting our book or video. Another word from our sponsor. 🙂

Let’s review the techniques presented in the last few posts:

  1. Create in yourself and your team a mood of optimization, where that mood has the highest priority over self-aggrandizement or any other more typical mood.
  2. Banish negativity as ineffective time-wasting and rechannel it into a stimulus to discern root sources and then plan / implement effective actions to remove those root causes of the negativity.
  3. Respect yourself and everyone and everything else. Disrespect blocks solutions and creates new problems.
  4. Remain open to the existence of all possibilities where you have not proven — with evidence that would stand up in court and to scientific public scrutiny — that some possibility does not in fact exist.
  5. Do not tolerate bad moods or sickly symptoms in oneself without seeking out the root causes and taking effective action to remove those causes.

These are but a few of the techniques we share in our book and video. Lately people have told me they love the book but their busy lives are spinning out of time control entirely nowadays so the book sits with other books half-finished. My suggestion is to not read the book but just open it at random — especially at times when you do not feel on top of your game. One of the most frequently mentioned ideas in the thousands of endorsement letters and emails we have received from readers is this use of the random pages method. This is the way we suggest circumventing Acceleritis to still get the benefit of our book despite “never having enough time anymore.”

Best to all,

Bill

Re-Imagine Your Life with Fewer Constraints

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Featuring two Mind Movies

What if you suddenly had more freedom? You could do whatever you wanted to do. What would you do? Before continuing to read, take a moment and jot down a few quick notes as you ponder this question.

Read on, and you will get one major step closer to that freedom in the next few minutes.

Now, take a look at what you wrote down (or thought about, if you didn’t actually write anything). This is supposedly what you really want out of life.

Is it? Is what you wrote/thought really what would make you the happiest?

If the answer is anything but a resounding YES!, then perhaps you have not been fully honest with yourself in the past, and perhaps your biggest current plans in life are still, deep down, something that you are settling for, because you believe you cannot have what you really want.

What would your ideal life actually be? Drop all constraints in your thinking — the question is not what might be realistic but rather what is the ideal, unconstrained and unrestricted.

Every moment we face choices. When we make these choices it is always in the context of our options. But we don’t consider all of our options. Therefore we make some choices that might be okay but without realizing it we just threw away a choice that could have been superb. A choice we didn’t even know we had.

Why don’t we consider all of our options? Hidden assumptions keep us from even posting those options on the bulletin board of our minds. We don’t have sufficient insight into our own thought process to even suspect that we only consider the options we think might actually be do-able — just a small proportion of our real options.

And by restricting our thinking to what we at the moment think is do-able for us, we are leaving out too much.

First of all we might discover that something has changed so what was unrealistic before is realistic now. But more importantly, unless we start from the ideal, we will never fully understand ourselves and so cannot be creative in bridging the gaps to get to the ideal. Settling for a “good enough” scenario, whether for our lives, or for our company, or for any situation, is not the way to generate creative thinking. The real value of the ideal is that it always generates creative thinking because achieving it seems out of reach.

Creative thinking is valuable because, even if it doesn’t always get you to the ideal, it gets you closer than if you just exclude the ideal from the beginning of your thought process.

We are operating within self-imposed constraints. We have been told so many things are impossible and advised to not aim so high because we will be heartbroken when we fail.

We also live in a reductionist culture that tends to lop off possibilities from our thinking —this would not normally occur to us, because reductionism is so ingrained in all of us. You might have a hunch taking a certain path could get you exactly what you want, but the reductionist culture says hunches are irrelevant, so the hunch gets left out of your set of alternatives. However, your hunch might have been right, and you might have just thrown away your biggest chance in life.

Hunches should not be thrown out. Include them in the list of possibilities you consider when facing an important choice.

From time to time in these postings we bring you summary insight into one new method for optimizing performance for you and your team — bringing you first into the Observer state and then into the Zone. We write these postings in hopes of directly lifting the probabilities that the largest number of people spend as much time as possible in the Observer state and Flow state (the Zone). We hope also to move more people to read our book, which contains much more than summary insight, including detailed instructions for spending more time in the Observer state and Flow state.

Recently we have brought you summary insight into the mood of optimization, negativity controls, and the power of respect. Today we are talking about the power of imagination.

Most of the population most of the time is in a mental state that has all but shut down the imagination. We have dubbed this state EOP, for Emergency Oversimplification Procedure. It’s what happens when there is an information overload. All parts of consciousness are negatively affected, none worse than the imagination.

Relaxation would be most conducive to imagination, but unfortunately Acceleritis — the acceleration of the global information overload — produces stress not relaxation. This robs mental energy needed to propel imagination, limits the perceived time to do something so seemingly impractical as using our imagination, and creates a mood that blocks imagination by focusing on a list of must-do’s under time pressure.

But even worse than any of these limitations, even when we give ourselves time and let our imaginations run free, our imaginations have been constrained for so long by a reductionist culture that we don’t even realize has stunted our assumptions about reality.

We find it hard to imagine things that quantum mechanics has already proven do exist. In our gut, even if we go to church, we may feel strongly that God is just wishful thinking and superstition, yet we may not realize that God could be something different than what religion teaches — something more than what religion teaches. A universe that requires an observer — the universe we live in, according to quantum mechanics and relativity — could have an original observer that came before all other observers. As soon as we realize this, the question of whether in fact God exists becomes a completely different conversation. Who was the original observer?

Our imaginations fail again to keep up with latest science in being unable to conceive of consciousness as just as primary as matter or more so — which is true in the universe we live in, according to quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, multiverse theory, and the latest scientific findings regarding extrasensory perception.

In a universe in which the observer is mathematically impossible to remove from the scientific picture, all of our materialistic assumptions about our personal identity, the existence of God, whether death is the end of consciousness, become equal to superstition in the degree to which they are unproven and unscientific.

It is time to live life with a conscious awareness that we do not know the truth about any of these subjects — that anything is possible, and our actions second-by-second need to factor in more possibilities than we ever imagined.

The fact that we would like one set of realities more than another does not automatically mean that the one we like is impossible.

Science today is in fact beginning to lean toward hypotheses conjecturing that by liking one reality we help create it. The mind does appear to be able to modify probabilities.

Some of what we think is impossible is probably not impossible. It’s time to loosen the assumption machine up and see how this changes things. It’s time to re-open our minds to the existence of all possibilities — just as science now has.

Stop saying “No” when you imagine possibilities, even if you do this just as an experiment.

Let’s try two experiments right now. We have opened up our minds together. Now without shutting down again let’s co-produce two Mind Movies.

Einstein rocked the world with his mind experiments. We like to use our Mind Movies in much the same way but on a more personal, less cosmological level.

First, the movie of your life. Get comfortable, remove any sense of time pressure, and imagine the rest of your life as a movie playing out from where you are now to where you would love to be. What are the little successes that add up one-by-one to take you to your ideal state?

Jot down a few quick notes of what you discover. Might be a few workable ideas in there that you can turn into reality.

Now, let’s write the movie of the world. Get comfortable again, free yourself of time pressure, and see a movie of how the world moves step-by-step from where it is now to a perpetual paradise — what steps do you see happening in the ideal world?

Jot down some quick notes again.

This exercise can be used when planning for your company. One clue is to look at competitors in terms of what they do best and what your company does best, and see which companies besides yours could continue to thrive by counterspecialization, without limiting your success. What bold or subtle moves could you make that would push the situation so that competitors would get the idea to follow specializations that are different from yours? How could you use coopetition* to bring about a counterspecialized situation that leaves room for more competitors to be successful?

This movie-of-the-ideal-outcome exercise can be applied to interpersonal situations or to pretty much anything. Our ability to stretch our imaginations is surprisingly resilient and can spring back very quickly despite decades of neglect.

All we have to do is let ourselves imagine the ideal.

Here’s a relevant selection from our book Freeing Creative Effectiveness.

Best to all,

Bill

* Coopetition refers to companies that compete finding ways to work together in specific areas.