The Value Of Providing Assistance

Over the weekend, I met a couple who had just gotten off of their plane, and had had someone drop their vehicle at the airport for them. Unfortunately, they were not informed of the location of their vehicle. Not having any other tasks at hand I decided to help find their vehicle and once found I offered to help them with their baggage, which they graciously allowed me to do. After, we had finished packing the luggage into the vehicle we talked for a few minutes and I waved them off as if they were my friends. I guess, technically, we were and we had created a relationship, in under 15 minutes, just by me offering to help. You read that correctly, “We had created a relationship in under 15 minutes.

How often can you manage to meet nice people and forge a relationship with them in so short a time? It’s rarely happened to me that it has occurred in the same way as it did in that situation. Normally, if I attempt to help people they get offended or are just genuinely unappreciative of the effort that I put into their happiness and satisfaction. No matter what their response I’m going to feel good for assisting.

I guess the value that I get is a good feeling and occasionally some single-serving friends, even if you didn’t meet them on a plane it’s a great term.

So have your ever assisted somebody and formed a relationship or just felt good about what you had done for them? Leave me some comments on what you think the value of providing assistance would be to both parties. Hope you enjoyed the post.

Reformation Of The Self

Lately, all my foundations have begun to collapse. My filing systems, both physical and virtual, aren’t functioning at a proper capacity to keep me organized. I’m overloading them with great stuff but it’s becoming harder for me to keep up with everything. At least until the New Year, I’ll be working on refiling and reprocessing pretty much every aspect of my life. Since, I’ll be working on this the next two weeks I’ll be putting up some (older) introspective pieces on myself to let you get to know me a little better, these are some of the defining moments in my short life, thus far.

Physical Filing Objectives that I’ll be working on is finding a way to organize my books and films so that I don’t have to dig through piles to find what I’m looking for; right now, I count 15 stacks of books scattered around my room. I’ll be going through and organizing all my bank and credit statements, balancing everything out of course.

Virtual Filing Objectives that I’ll be working on are setting up a better system for RSS feeds, right now I’m satisfied with the system but, with 3+ hours a day it’s just too much. I’ll be redoing my bookmarking so I can find web pages that I use on a more consistent basis and links from others saved for reading. I’ll be redoing the majority of my computers filing system as it has files scattered in random folders.

With the blog I’m working on a redesign that fits who I am and provides a cleaner interface than the one that your reading this on, even I find it hard to read on. I’m also debating on adding more content that fits the innovation theme. Originally I had planned on this being a more technology focused blog with a few political and philosophically innovative ideas; if you look back that’s not how it turned out.

So for the next few weeks I’ll be doing some introspection, try and clear my mind, and get set to roll out some better content in ’09. This is mainly for my benefit but hopefully it results in some positive effects for you also. I think I may continue this process every year if it turns out something that is effective. This idea of redeveloping your internal and external systems is something that everyone should try to force change on themselves.

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.

Why I Like To Think Of The Glass As Half-Empty

I thought of this Saturday as I was talking to a friend about my job and the other things that I have plans for in the near months. I’ve spent the last several months looking for problems/flaws in certain ideas. I realized that the idea of the half-full/half-empty glass question is flawed, while talking to him. This logic may be flawed as it was thought up in a pessimistic manner.

The logic of asking if the glass is half-full/half-empty is normally used to determine if a person is optimistic or pessimistic. Generally, pessimism is frowned upon when you are asked this question, however it may be flawed. The flaw in the question, is that I don’t think you gain more from being an optimist. Let me explain this more thoroughly.

If your ever out at a restaurant, the waiter normally asks you if you would like to have your glass refilled. This is were the question frays, if you see it as half-full your more likely to say no thanks, however, if it’s half-empty you’ll want it refilled. If you replace the liquid with ambition, would you not want to have more? Yet, many would say no, because they don’t need anymore; they are content with what we have. I say look at it half-empty and ask for more.

Ambition is something that you can never have enough of. So, I want you to go out; and every time you see your glass as half-full, know you need to see it as half-empty. Go after your dreams; be optimistic because your a pessimist with as much ambition as you can handle. You can accomplish your dreams just don’t be so pessimistic as to dismiss them.

It’s Not About You

I got to thinking earlier, “Why fight against another aggressor when it’s only going to elevate both parties aggressive stature?” Why not just sit back and let them remain aggressive and feed you with hints at weakness? An overly aggressive party could become reckless and divulge information because they became overly focused on landing a blow; however if you too are acting just as aggressively you may miss your chance. We all need to just slow the fuck down and listen to the clues.

Atheists get a bad rap because of the radical few, who vocally protest meaningless shit. If you look at the Newdow v Congress was it necessary to protest against the words “one nation under God”, yes it may have been his constitutional right; however is there any true harm to be brought forth from these words. His claim actually brings forth a stigma against atheists because he became vocal it added fuel to the fire of Christian aggression. The same amendment contains freedom of speech or the freedom to remain silent. I am just calling for a rescission of aggression in the atheists motion for the truth. Let the Christian’s aggression lead to there own gaffes.

This same principle can be applied to politics in broad or even warfare. You need to stay defensive and alert of your enemies tactics and where their coming from next. If your right-wing read The New Yorker and the Huffington Post; if your left-wing watch FOX, stay attuned to where their coming from be objective about it. This gives you the ability to strike them where their weak, or deflect their blows back.

“So just shut the fuck up and listen.”

This guy has been doing that for several weeks and it’s amazing what he overhears and quotes. He also is probably more knowledgeable about the strategic and religious flaws in this post.

P.S. I’m a right-wing Athiest.