Tag Archives: EOP

Recall the Moments When You Shined

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Not for ego gratification, but to be that You on command

We’ve got to start taking daily vacations. Not only is that what life is all about — what it is meant to be every second of every day — but on top of that, we then give far better service to each other.

Emotion is more powerful than Will in the average person today, because of Acceleritis, and the EOP condition it causes, bringing us down from Observer and Flow states where our Will is stronger than our emotions.

Emotion is the body casting its 800-pound vote through a cascade of brain chemicals, resulting in specific neuron energy gains in the amygdala and other brain locales, specific neuron energy reductions in the prefrontal cortex and other places, glandular secretions, and adrenalin. There are so many powerful brainwashing mind control technologies in play that you are typically helpless, in EOP, to do anything but be swayed into whatever those tyrannical electrochemical drivers impose on us.

It’s not at all dissimilar from what happens in the brain from chemicals such as sodium pentathol and more modern/secret drugs used in paramilitary and military interrogations. In the case of emotions the brain’s chemical process doesn’t necessarily get us to tell the truth. What it often does is restore sovereignty of our actions for a time period until we get out of it, to a loop between our limbic system and left brain, which is our “lower self”. Call it the ego. 

You believe your self to be that being.  (I know “your self” is one word, but made into two words it has a different meaning and is a provocative subconscious stimulus to a more empirical mental stance) You unhesitatingly fall back into those positions that are so easy to slide back into. You have those rapid flashes of envy, resentment, fear, etc. that you are so used to you don’t even notice them or consider them abnormal. You say things to your self that if you were listening like you do in the Observer state, you would see you are just wasting time trying to project an image to yourself of your latest achievements, or some other useless folly. You are not showing the noble side of your character.

You are highly unlikely to get flashes of insight, inspiration, happiness, gratitude, or love in EOP. These things are not at home in that state because the brain signatures are very different. The allocation of energy armies across the various parts of the brain is not conducive to these more beneficial and enjoyable experiences. Nor to high performance for your organization, your family, the world in general, your self, or the Universe (the power and brains behind which, some call “God”).

High performance is our obsession at The Human Effectiveness Institute. It is so easy to move the world toward improved decision making. These little tricks are not so hard. They make us feel so good that they fairly quickly take over as our preferred state of being. Challenges can kick us out of that state and in the early going it takes us a while to notice and then work our way back up to Observer/Flow states. With practice, we are kicked out, clear the mechanism, and get back in. Sooner or later we are almost always there, with rare relapses. But from the start, the process just makes us happier.

Don’t you know people who seem to be so mentally strong that they almost always seem happy, positive, never say a bad word about another person? There are more of us every day. It’s happening already. It’s happening all around us. More and more of us practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty. Loving our neighbors as we love ourselves. Our actions coming from the knowledge that “with all beings and all things we shall be as relatives” (Sioux Indian proverb).

Sure, some of those people are still basically egotistical. It’s a phase. They’ll grow out of it. At least they are enthusiastic about something even if it is their own self.

An upbeat attitude goes a long way to inciting higher performance in one self and others. The affective/emotional is more powerful than the intellect. Negative emotion — even mild background radiation so-used-to-it you forget that it is inherently negative — conditions and entrains weak intellectual strategies/tactics, whereas positive emotion does the opposite to the cognitive faculties.

It’s worth a lot to get your self into a good mood. And where’s the penalty — what’s there to lose? It’s all upside — it feels good — you feel good — and you make others feel good. A total no-brainer.

So how do you get your self to feel good? A daily vacation is a great start.

All it means is you take a break and do whatever you want to do. Create a space away from other people (sometimes that is not necessary but it usually is in the beginning). Then you just do whatever you feel like from second to second. You play. Like a child again. Like who you really are.

Take notes if you feel moved to do so. Only then — no pressure.

If you’re home, empirically seek inner detection as to the feelings evoked in you when you gaze at objects in your home. Best to start with one and stay on it for a minute.

The point of this is in part just being attentive in the moment, slowing down, deceleration from Acceleritis — but it’s also to reconnect with parts of your self that might be buried just beneath the surface. Things that are so familiar to you, you no longer notice how you feel about them. The fact is, you probably love practically everything that is in your life right now. You probably would miss some of the things that you suppose you hate. Maybe I’m wrong but you are the only one who will know, you’re the only observer who can tell what the truth is about your own feelings.

When you’re on vacation, you want to be in bliss. It’s the whole point, so why not do little experiments that are fun and are part of checking out your feelings, in order to make sure they are in bliss — and if not, you get them there.

You aren’t in a hurry when you’re on your daily vacation. You won’t accomplish the vacation objective fully if you are conscious of how soon you have to get back to work and thus trying to cram in the fun, still speeding, still in the clutches of Acceleritis.

A personal experience as an example. I was taking a vacation alone at home on a Saturday, my day for most of my weekly nonprofit work and writing. I always feel great on the Sabbath as a result of it being a vacation day for me.

So I happen to be in my closet and my eye falls on a particular shirt. I feel a wave of love wash over me. I love that shirt. It is like a human being to me or a pet — I feel such tangible love for it. I realize that wherever I look I am still feeling love. It’s not just the shirt. I love all of this. I love life. It feels like it’s been this way continuously for as long as I can remember, although that’s not quite the case. Yet the way I feel at this moment is that I’ve always loved everything and how could it possibly be otherwise. I feel like I am looking at the Universe the way God would — the way God does.

I am back in the original consciousness in terms of the affective dimension, although not omniscient not omnipotent. I think of God then and a wave of gratitude comes over me — reverence too but mostly gratitude. What a great game you/I/we created. I love this game!

When I go back to work it is not because the vacation ended but rather it’s what I really want to do. A flood of ideas later validated by experience rush me so fast I have to write in my own shorthand, leaving out letters.

Start giving your self these daily vacations, please. And during vacation whenever you feel like it, jot down the times you were at your best in this lifetime, whatever times you shone mightily like the Sun. There is a richness of positive emotion at these times, and it’s good to bask in that feel-good-ness, to remember what it feels like rather than to bask is ego-glory. Capture it as an Observer not wallowing in ego about these events. Scientific detachment. Objective honesty with your self. Record the facts as a scientist in your diary or journal or whatever note keeping system you have for these vacation journeys.

Go back and look at this “Possible Flow State” record whenever you feel like it.

The point is to deeply realize without blockage or limitation that you can do this again. You can be that you on command.

In fact there is no scientific reason why you cannot live in Flow state virtually all the time. You might need a five-year ramp to get there and along the way there may be more Flow experiences each month, which you can record in your objective log.

It’s not just to pump your self up. It’s to manifest more Flow and Observer state in your life, so you enjoy life more but particularly so you can give high performance in your work and your love life and your life in general.

This I wish for you! And you can do it with no help from anyone. And it is not effort-laden work because it is vacation. So please, start now!

Love to all,

Bill

Who will be the next Google?

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Looming opportunities for technological innovation

Google is a rich company because it developed the first search engine that really worked.

Someone was going to do it. There were a bunch of search engines. There still are. But Google got it right ahead of the others.

They did smart things after that too of course. Quickly did a 180 on advertising, from considering it bad to making it their business model. And they saw sponsorship of keywords as the way to generate billions fast. They did all of that really quickly. Some might say they were shallow in their original anti-advertising positioning, or cynical in being able to turn on a dime on what they considered a morality issue, but those are not the real answers. I think they were smart. They got the message quickly. That’s a good thing. Not being stuck is a good thing. Being able to look at things anew by sheer self-will is a good thing.

Imagine if back when the Greeks invented the alphabet, there were competitors with alternative alphabets. That was sort of the way it was with search engines, which are a kind of alphabet for finding things in endless meme space.

Apple is a rich company again because they continue — ahead of others — to give consumers the easy and beautiful way to get into computers and other computer-based technology based on computers. It’s really simple to get on the mental emotional side of the consumer and see what they are going to love. But simple does not imply easy or common, in the context of reality as it is here on Earth in 2012. Love is simple but people screw it up all the time. Simple, today, is not so simple to achieve.

AOL was a rich company for awhile because it was the first to make email and chat and an Internet-like experience available to people who were not gadget-minded or technology-oriented.

Facebook is a rich company because it was first to activate people to celebrate themselves and their friendships. The name helped, although MySpace is a good name too, so it wasn’t just that. MySpace somehow did not make it something one had to do. Facebook became something everyone had to do, even if one’s wall is being painted by everyone else including people you don’t know, and you never have time to update it yourself.

The relative yesterday-ness of AOL and Yahoo appears to be the result of not constantly re-inventing themselves to leapfrog ahead with still more technological innovations. Instead falling behind in figuring out what their users love, as our formidable editor Yana Lambert points out.

Perhaps they lost focus on technological innovation when they got caught up in learning the advertising business, which is a complex Glass Bead Game that can take up all one’s perceptual, intuitive, intellectual and emotional capabilities. The lesson at any rate is that if one wants to continue to be a rich company one has to continue to innovate technologically and not just in terms of advertising methods.

Where do the opportunities lie in early 2012 for technological innovation that will totally disrupt the playing board once again in terms of our everyday lives?

  1. Discovery Engine. Like Pandora, but for all content. Helps people discover things that interest and delight them that they are not discovering today. Collaborative Filtering Technique (CFT) as used by Amazon et al is just not good enough. Some degree of scalable content coding (keywords) is needed in order to add insight into why readers who bought Hermann Hesse also bought Thomas Mann. What keyword-codable qualities can be attributed to both authors? (My former company Next Century Media is still nurturing some technology that I started in this area — by way of full disclosure as I still have a little stock.)
  2. Self-Discovery Engine. Same thing but pointed inwards to find out more about yourself. Perhaps a program in whatever replaced Prolog. Carries on a conversation with you. When it strikes a chord, it brings out and shows you content that reveals a side of you, validating that you can now see a new side of you, because you find that content does resonate with you. This technology ideally gets developed in the same stream as the Discovery Engine. Xyte is a company to watch in this field. Freud was the first inventor in terms of popular self-knowledge in modern times but the quest goes back to the Vedas.
  3. Voice/Hand Signal/Eye Signal Command. Military technology carried over to the consumer world making cellphones, tablets, PCs/Macs, TVs etc. more capable of starting processes from simpler commands rather than screen and keyboard touches. Touchscreen is already far ahead of keyboards, but still they require many steps to get to what you want, where a single spoken word could get you there in a second. Today’s smartphones already have some voice command capabilities. One day you will be able to say “That” and look at something and your screen will fill with colorful thumbnails of things the world can tell you about the object you are looking at. Vizkinect is a company to watch. They are bringing down the cost of eye tracking and are currently focused on advertising but the implications of their work are much broader.
  4. Biofeedback for the masses. For years work has been going on to bring down the cost of biometry so that it can scale into a consumer market. One day it will get there and we will be able to afford yarmulkes with sensors and eyepieces that together tell us instantly the truth about our inner state. We can then learn that e.g. the last sentence I thought in my mind is not speaking from my prefrontal cortex but it is coming from the corpus callosum and limbic interactions that drive my ego. People will use this instead of drugs. It will literally get them high — higher than EOP that is.
  5. Agent. Apple in the era of the failed Newton device talked about a “consumer agent” — a bot that you could send forth to roam the Web for you, tirelessly doing your bidding to bring you insights, schedule your calendar by dealing with other bots and with real humans, etc. This will be a huge productivity booster when someone invents one that is really usable.
  6. Idea Mobilization. Technology that brings ideas and thinkers together automatically and suggest the ways their ideas already fit together. You get an email from a bot that links you with other people who turn out to be exactly the right people you should be meeting and working together with to solve problems you are both working on. LinkedIn being a baby-step model.
  7. Marketing the Individual. This turns advertising around and advertises the individual over the Web. The next natural evolution of Facebook. The kind of thing I have long thought would be the perfect premium incentive to offer people to opt-in to ongoing research online. Is this where Facebook is going with its new Timeline feature?
  8. Genomics. Seattle is a hotbed of innovation in this field. We are not far from the day when every person can afford to know his or her own unique genome early in life. Genomics should not be used to limit opportunity as in the State deciding the course of a person’s life based on the person’s genetic strengths and weaknesses as in the movie Gattaca. People should use their self-knowledge the way they want to use it, freely. They would do best to focus on their potential genetic strengths. Will be interesting to see if genomics correlates with astrology.
  9. The New Grid. As more people begin to generate their own electrical energy (solar, wind, biofuels, geothermal, etc.) they will have surpluses that can be uploaded as a way of gaining discounts on their energy bills, and later as a way of earning income. This is being held back by the old energy grid that sends electricity outward but is not everywhere capable of two-way traffic. Ironically the cable companies have some of the right-of-ways. If such a two-way grid existed everywhere, T. Boone Pickens would have gotten his Texas wind farm and could have sold cheap electricity to the whole country. Con Ed is said to be one of the players working on two-way grid.

Those are some areas where technological innovation will be popping disruptively in the years ahead. Companies will get rich by being first to get it right in each of these areas.

Best to all,

Bill