How to Direct Your Self-Development: Become a Center of Attraction

Following on our post building on the excellent LinkedIn post  “What I Wish I Knew At 22“, one particular comment has also raised my attention: “Stop chasing the girl, the promotion, and the raise. Become the person who attracts the girl, earns the promotion, is worthy of the raise. Spend your time growing into a more interesting person, and the gravitational force of the universe will shift towards you.”

Beyond the limited list of things to aim for (!) that would certainly need to be extended, I like this hint that we need to seek attracting the good stuff in general, rather than constantly chasing it. It is the ultimate aim of any marketing campaign: get people to come to us rather than having to seek them one by one.

It is also quite true on a personal level, and it is interesting to take this viewpoint or objective when considering possible direction for self development. Let’s evolve into someone that attracts what we want in life, and spend less time chasing for it.

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How Social Media Ratings Can Be Tricked – Lessons Learnt on Personal Freedom

Tricking social media popularity has become quite an industry, and this includes social media fake user factories in many countries. One of the funniest testimony on the matter is the excellent “I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor“. It is unclear if it is fully genuine, but it is worth the read nevertheless, if just for the creativity of the author (and the fake food pictures make-of).

The interesting point in this post is how the author managed to trick the fraud check of Tripadvisor (on the basis that nobody would fake a restaurant). It shows that the creativity of individuals is always greater than the creativity of the institutions behind the most popular services.

Of course this also leads to the question of how much we rely on those social services for taking daily decisions (because they add so much value to our lives compared to the previous guides and similar solutions), and if we are manipulated, to what level. We are certainly somewhat manipulated, if indirectly by other social media users, restaurant and hotel owners. Does it exceed a limit that really jeopardises our freedom of decision? Is it really more than before when we were manipulated by the editors of well known guides? The question is open. The level of scrutiny on the topic of fake news and fake ratings will certainly give us a clearer view on the matter.

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How To Account for Impermanence in Our Decision-Making

I quite like this LinkedIn post that had some success and widespread readership: “What I Wish I Knew At 22“. It is full of interesting recommendations. One of the main recommendations is about the impermanence surrounding us and the fact that success or failure one day means nothing at the scale of a life.

“There are very few decisions in life that are permanent. Very little in your life will be definitional unless you choose to make it that way. You aren’t defined by your last success any longer than you are defined by your last failure. The only one super-focused on your story is you, so move on and keep going.”

This has an interesting direct consequence in our personal decision-making: as long as it does not kill us (or bankrupts us, which is the equivalent in financial life), decisions can be reversed – and a bad decision is not the end. Therefore, there is no need to agonise over it too long.

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How To Negotiate the Diplomatic Way

I like the famous proverb that states “Diplomacy is the Art of letting someone else have your way“. It is quite an essential quote, that is of course valid in the context of any negotiation.

I like it particularly because of the emphasis it puts on getting the other party finally move in the direction we desire. Of course this might border on manipulation, but still it is an interesting viewpoint to consider any negotiation.

The ultimate point of any successful negotiation should be to seek a win-win outcome, and in that sense, finding a way for the other party to move in the same direction is a given.

The quote leaves open the possibility that a third party might also move in our direction and not directly the opposite party. It is also an interesting strategy to consider in any negotiation.

Quite a wonderful quote that leads to interesting considerations!

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How To Organize Creativity in Cycle and Seasons

I came across a very interesting quote from Robin Sharma: “Creativity comes in seasons. There’s a time to harvest your ideas. And there’s a time to let the field sit fallow.”

From my experience I concur that there are times where I am very creative, and other times where I rather gather material and let my creative spirit rest. It is some kind of rhythm that was until now imposed by my energy level.

It also means that it is all right to have periods of lesser productivity, of resourcing.

There might actually be several rhythms embedded in each other: a daily creativity rhythm, with a specific time of the day more suitable; a weekly/monthly rhythm; and a yearly rhythm. All those interdependent rhythms can merge together into a variable, personal and natural rhythm.

It is one further step to organize this rhythm voluntarily like Robin Sharma suggests. I find the suggestion quite worthwhile and worth trying. And you?

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How Experience Allows Us to Tackle More and More Complicated Challenges

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote “Life is a succession of lessons which must be lived to be understood. All is riddle, and the key to a riddle is another riddle.”

The first part of the quote is well known (and attributed on internet to various other people). What I find interesting is how the second part of the quote complements the first.

What he says is basically that experience comes from living through a number of lessons, and that can’t be fully understood theoretically by for example reading other people’s experience. The interesting part is how he describes that the key to life challenges is to be derived from one’s experiences, and that with experience we can overcome more and more complicated challenges and riddles.

As I become more experienced with things in life, I find more and more challenges and situations that need to be understood. I did not see them before. On one side I see how foolish I could be when I was younger, and and the other side I see how many the secrets of life remain before me, but that I have progressively the resources I need to tackle them. And that’s what makes life so interesting.

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How Procrastination Can Be an Escape Mechanism

Robin Sharma writes “Procrastination is an escape mechanism for people scared to do their best work“. The concept is quite similar to the concept of ‘Resistance’ developed by Steven Pressfield in the ‘War of Art’.

Still it is an excellent reminder that we should note procrastination as a symptom that Resistance is trying to make us escape from doing our Work, that is to say, our best creative work, the work that takes all our resources to be achieved, the work that can change the world.

Procrastination is not good or bad. It is sometimes quite good to postpone something or to relax. But when it comes while we should be doing our best work, it is a sign that we try to escape from our responsibility and from our capability.

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How Insurance Companies Are Already Offering Discounts for Automated Driving

In this excellent post ‘Insurance Companies Are Now Offering Discounts if You Let Your Tesla Drive Itself‘, we discover that insurance companies are offering discounts for Tesla owners that use the self-driving feature, both in the UK and in the US.

Tesla on autopilot

It appears that it is not yet due to some visible statistics about less accidents but rather to gain some useful data insight into the benefits of autonomous system driving. Still, it shows how closely insurers do follow this evolution and how they expect it to change (for the better) the accident and incident statistics.

Autonomous driving has the potential to substantially transform the way we drive and the insurance industry at the same time. And it has already started!

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How We Are Not Supposed to Understand Everything

Robin Sharma writes: “It’s human nature to wish for an explanation to everything. We create a mental architecture from the time we’re children and then try to fit the events of our lives into these neat intellectual models. Why? So we feel safe and secure and in control.”. But it does not work that way. We need to understand “we’re not supposed to understand everything“.

This statement is powerful, because we hate positively being in situations where we don’t understand what happens around us. But it happens much more often than we care to admit or even realize.

We need to raise our ability to live with uncertainty and not understanding everything that happens around us. Ancient people invoked gods and demons, we invoke complexity or lack of information, but it is irreducible. It will always be the case. Instead of spending too much time trying to understand what can”t be understood, let’s spend our energy learning to adapt to the unexpected.

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How To Reach the Peace Beyond Right or Wrong

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” – Rumi.

I like this quote because of the peacefulness it inspires. It is a respite from the violence of the ideas of right or wrong.

Right or Wrong, Right or Left, Opposites are the marker of the Industrial Age. In the Collaborative Age with the emergence of complexity, we now understand that the world goes beyond opposites. That richness derives from finding the common ground between what appears to be contradictory at first sight. That contradictions are often only apparent.

Let’s meet on this field beyond opposites.

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Let’s Launch a ‘Protect My Cognitive Capacity’ Movement!

As mentioned in our previous post ‘How Cognitive Overload Can Influence Our Lives: the Example of Poverty‘, we need to be extra careful when it comes to the usage of our limited cognitive capacity. And this is of course also quite true for well-off people too, in the particular in view of the increasing number of attention grabbing devices that surround us.

Cognitive capacity management may become the biggest hurdle in the Collaborative Age. We are gifted with marvelous mechanisms that decrease quickly cognitive load when we get used to some activities (such as driving or riding bikes for example), but it seems that modern life conspires to add constantly more devices that waste cognitive capacity.

It is almost an epidemics of sort. As it is understood that value lies in attention, more and more devices and gadgets compete for attention and thus cognitive capacity. Issues like accidents when driving and texting are direct illustrations of the problem. The world becomes more complex requiring also more difficult decisions and adaptation.

We all need to learn to protect our limited cognitive capacity; learn to relax and give it time to regenerate; and most importantly not multitask that often, which is a very perverse way of reaching our limits without realizing it.

Let’s launch a ‘protect my cognitive capacity’ movement!

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