Being Fluid In Your Motions

The world is changing so quickly that if your not readily adaptable to this change; you will have trouble keeping up with people who are ready. One of the best things that you can do is be fluid in your motions. Be able to adapt to what’s coming, view yourself as the water that sits behind a dam. If you want to get past that wall you can’t be a stone or you’ll never get past it. Thus, we must all be fluid and able to seep through the cracks, overflow the boundaries, or breakthrough with so much force we obliterate the wall.

Seeping Through is going to be slower than the other two ways to get through the path, but it will be more reserved and rational. This is a reasonable choice if you fear an abrupt change that would destroy the majority of progress that you made. You can still manage to get past the  wall, though you may be surpassed by others in the Overflow or Breakthrough categories.

Overflowing the Boundaries will be the most level of these ideas as it has an adequate pace and will fill the other side of the dam quite rapidly. This is for those who don’t mind risking a bit of their assets if something were to happen. You can outpace those that are just trying to Seep Through to gain ground and, also have a more consistent pace than that of someone who is trying to Breakthrough. This is the way to go if you want to be able to more reliably adapt and still move quickly.

Breakthrough is going to be the quickest once it happens, but the pace will be hard to maintain, without prior planning. You can destroy the barrier and quickly decimate your competition in the short-term, however, if you didn’t plan properly a change can ruin you just as quickly. If you pass the first dam and hit another down the line, you may not have enough pressure to cause it to buckle. Breaking through will not be for everyone, except for a few people who have it together, most people should try to just Overflow the boundaries or slowly Seep through.

If you were a stone you will sit at the bottom for ever and never find a path through to the otherside of  the dam. You may never know what lie on the other side and be just as happy and complacent for ever, slowly being wittled down by those that flowed past you. You do not want to be a stone do you? Most of all, be yourself and find a way to adapt to the change, pass  through the barriers and achieve your goals.

Motivation Through Over-Extension (A Pragmatic Approach At Decision Making)

I find that I’m either completely open or completely self repressed, complete bipolar personality. If I crack the door to possibility and opportunity, slightly ajar to the point of all or nothing. I’m going to follow through even if it effects something else I’m doing in a negative way. So, recently I developed a way for me to find a middle path that gives me some flexibility in what I do.

I make a decision early on that is an over-extension of what I’m capable of doing at this time. However, I allow myself time to achieve this over-extended goal with any problems that may arise(not so good for large short-term goals).

“Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again”~Harry Truman

I follow Truman’s outlook very pragmatically. I make the decision, but I allow my self to make shorter term goals as I advance toward the larger goal. This provides a less stressful approach to completing a task that doesn’t have a rigidly defined deadline.

One large thing that this could help with would be a Bucket List. Your not going to go running out and have all of these things planned to happen; you just want them to happen and along the way you find ways to make them happen. It is perfect example of pragmatic decision making is that you can still change the order of the smaller goals to slowly overcome the larger goal of things to do before you die, or some age limit.

Progression, Not Perfection

For probably the last decade I’ve been watching extreme sports(e.g. BMX, Skateboarding, FMX, and Inline Skating). These sports have developed rapidly and each has some large step of progression that come every year. In order to stay at the top of the podium you have to learn how to do these new tricks and do them very well(though not perfect). I was watching the Dew Action Sports Tour’s presentation of FMX and realized just how far these guys have gone in just the past 2-3 years; they’re whipping 250lb. motorcycles around 360 degrees, doing back flips with hardly any part of their body controlling the bike, all of this has come in just this short period. The first year a trick is introduced you don’t need to be perfect the next year it should be and then you have the new tricks that come along that year, also.

This is something that keeps the sports interesting, their always pushing the limits and perfecting what their doing, something I see media failing at. Media is something that stagnates and rarely see something that pushes the boundaries of what is possible. Newspapers haven’t changed in close to a century, movies and television haven’t progressed much either, just the technology that is used and the money spent on it, video games haven’t seen anything revolutionary in the last few years besides increase in graphics, the internet is still promising but has also began to stagnate.

Looking at the internet we’ve seen it grow from closed network to open network, basic text-on-screen to simple coloring and fonts, simplistic layouts of pages to divisible sections on a single page, and now we are seeing social media and web 2.0 for the past 5 years and it’s stagnating and spreading because it’s the new web fashion, and no one is stepping up to change this model. The way I see it is we need some form of progression, right now everyone is focusing on perfecting the web 2.0 model and no one is trying to make a step that shatters that boundary. Right now, the biggest step recently has been streaming live video and HD content. Everybody else is trying to perfect what they’ve already done by copying what their competitors are doing.

Nikola Tesla was decades ahead of his times with his innovative ideas that could have revolutionized the world in the early decades of the last century. We’ve seen a lot of what he had designed come to fruition but he doesn’t receive the credit, radar, radio, AC current, wireless transmissions of images, voices, and electricity, plus countless others. He was the Da Vinci of the late 19th and 20th centuries. What we need is a Tesla to come along for the Internet Age to renovate it’s stagnant models and provide the ground for future technological advances in the future. His progressions are finally being perfected for general use in our daily lives.

As you look around everyone is striving for perfection because they think that if something is perfect people will use it over their competitors. The problem is that you can’t steal people away with your perfect implementation because people will leave for something that has ‘progressed to a new standard’. You can try and provide the perfect solution but being perfect is absolutely unnecessary; try to be close to perfect by way ahead of the pack in what your doing.

The Time To Fail…

It is oft-stated that Thomas Edison once said, “I did not fail 10,000 times when creating the light-bulb; I have succeeded in finding 10,000 ways how not to create a light-bulb.” I have read it many times and I find that the number seems quite arbitrary and he was not the first person to create the light-bulb, merely the innovator who found a more viable filament source in tungsten steel. This article is not about him but, about allowing oneself to take risks in life and allowing failure.

I was watching Seth Godin on TED and, he was talking about how to market to the world by not focusing on the masses, but risking your gains on the people who actually give a damn about what you are selling.  “The riskiest thing you can do now is being safe.” You are going to have to take your risks to stand out among the ever growing crowd. Develop your product and sell it not to a crowd but to the few who care about your work. Let the few spread your product, all you have to do is find them and give them what they want.

Man is capable of perceiving risk and finding ways to manage it, however, the simplest way that man knows is to remove it all together. This is quite risky in itself as with higher risk comes higher failure rates but, also, larger success. We should not see these failures as losses but as knowledgeable gains for our future successes. When you truly develop an understanding of the risk you are taking it is no longer a gamble; you have developed a strategy to turn most fortunes, good or bad, into positive successes.

“The time you have is short, better to fail today and have tomorrow left to succeed; you will never know if your failure now will lead to a future success.”

Creating Better Material With 3 Simple Questions

When you want to express an idea; you need to create something worthwhile. How do you know what you’ve created is worthwhile? To figure this out you have to ask yourself these 3 simple questions.

1. Is this material worth my time to use? If it’s not, why would you feel that it was worth someone else’ time to read it, view it, or listening to it? If the material is just a piece of shit that you think will get overlooked; why would you introduce it to the public?

2. Will this benefit anyone? If it doesn’t, what relevance does it have being open to the public? Can this ever help someone; if not why waste your time with it?

3. Can it be better with just a little bit more effort? If it doesn’t take much more to make it an even more remarkable piece; why would you not do that to make your material better?

Pose these questions to yourself every time you go to create something. If you follow these three simple questions you will have something that you are confident in, is something that others will enjoy or think about, and you will know that you didn’t waste your time working on. Also, sleep on ideas and material; if you review your own material at a later point you will be more objective in your own bias.