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Persistence is a boring but necessary virtue. You might not think anything is changing in your career life or love life, but if you are persistent you will eventually see change. Remember! True failure only happens when you abandon your quest. Keep on questing!

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Living in the past is like driving forward while staring in the rear view mirror.     Believing is seeing.     Be an over-fright success story.     One's actions convince louder than one's words.     Make progress. Make new mistakes.     All work and no play makes Jill want to reach for the Prozac.     The purpose of your life is to find the purpose of your life. It doesn't matter how fast you get there if you're heading in the wrong direction.     If at first you don't succeed, you're doing something stupid.     You're nobody until somebody hates you.     Behind every successful woman is someone who pissed her off.     To get where you need to go you must first see who you really are.     Be a warrior, not a worrier.     Be a winner, not a whiner.     If the coyote had stopped to catch his breath, he might have caught the roadrunner.     A pack of puppies led by a pitbull will always be feared more than a pack of pitbulls led by a puppy.     Brainpower is as important as horsepower. Read, read, read!     You should always pick a job for its passion value not cash-in value.     Don't let a blame preoccupation ruin your occupation.     It's always better to go for longterm greed over short term greed.     A shortcut is often the longest distance between two points.     Time is money...and time wasters are money wasters.     Don't wait to make heaps and heaps of cash to have heaps and heaps of fun.     Every member of the Fortune 500 Club could also be a member of the Misfortune 500 Club.     Money doesn't bring you true happiness...but happiness can bring you true money. If you love what you do, the money will come.     Whatever business you're in you're in the people business.     Fail Faster. Succeed faster.     Behind every successful woman is someone who pissed her off.     Follow the fuscia brick road.   Failure is in many ways like "fullure" - it is always full of lessons to be learned.     Believe in a laughter life.     Don't let your convictions become your restrictions.     Invest in "Fresh Air Fun." Take a walk outside once a day.     If you want your body to be smoking, you've got to stop smoking.     Sometimes, all you gotta do is ask. Duh.     Taking no action is an action. Duh.     Happiness is not about what happens to you -- but about how you choose to respond to what happens.     Comedy = tragedy + 3 months and/or 3 margaritas!     Practice that tongue twister "NO" today.     Take the fat out of your fate. Slim down your schedule to what matters.     It's not just what you know...but what you do with what you know.     The grass is greener on the other side - until you get there and see it's astroturf.     When you grow - you often outgrow.     The only constant is change.     You are a human being, not a human was or a human will be.     Self honesty is the only path to happiness.     Sometimes we're "mad at" someone whom we should merely be "sad at."     Be so proactive you're preactive.     Fast doesn't always last.     Love is a boomerang. What have you and give away is what you get back.     Fear of commitment: it could happen to you...or someone you can't love.     Saying difficult things now is better than fixing even more difficult problems later.     It is better to have loved and lost - than to live with a psycho for the rest of your life.     It is better to have loved and lost - and had some really amazing hot sex - than never to have lived and loved at all.     A man is not a project. A man is a man. And a project is a project.     It's better to have a short bad relationship than a long bad relationship.     It's worth it to hold out for a soul mate and not settle for a cellmate.     Assess breeds success.     Turn all bad experiences into good inperiences - take them in fully, and change in a positive way.    
 

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

can you raed tihs? i cdnolt blveiee taht i cluod auclaclty uesdntnrd waht i was rdanieg.


the pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. the rset cn be a taotl mses and you can siltl raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? yaeh and i awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!if yuo can raed tihs psas tihs bolg on.

The above is from a terrific book I am reading by Madeleine L. Van Hecke, PhD. called BLIND SPOTS:WHY SMART PEOPLE DO DUMB THINGS.

Dr. Van Hecke explains that for the very same reasons you can read this gobbly-gook above -- you are also destined to do dumb things sometimes.

Basically...as an adult your brain is now filled up with lots of beliefs on how things should be -- in the same way you have a sense of how words should be. The problem: some of your beliefs are totally incorrect -- or very much correct -- but stubbornly single-minded.

As a result, when you look at an event, problem, new person, you will often fill in the open gaps of missing info with just plain dumb conclusions.

You know when you say: "WHAT WAS I THINKING?" Or..."HOW DUMB OF ME?!"

Those were all because you were diong waht the tset abvoe shwoed you hvea a tnendnecy to do -- flling in blnkas wthi wrnog infrmomatoin!

"Blind spots" are why bank robbers have been known to write stick-up notes on the back of their very own check-book receipts. Or... why you might initially think "Chateaubriand" is a new wine -- or yell at someone in public for their demeaning behavior -- thus doing the very behavior you're trying to correct.

The good news: Dr. Van Hecke argues that you're not actually always stupid when you do or think stupid things -- you're just experiencing a "blind spot" moment -- due to your projected thinking getting in the damn way.

Luckily, there are specific techniques to increase your range of vision -- beginning with developing stronger BEGINNER'S MIND.

In Buddhism "BEGINNERS MIND" is described as the pure lens with which someone who is absolutely new to a situation can see the world -- with full clarity.

There's a famous Buddhist quote: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilties. In the expert's mind there are few."

Children unwittingly have BEGINNER'S MIND -- hence why kids are often smarter than adults at problem-solving puzzles.

If you'd like to learn a dozen helpful specific techniques to aid you having less "blind spot" moments -- please join me and the good doctor on my Sirius radio show BE HAPPY DAMMIT on August 20th, 8am to 9am EST - on Lime 114.

Feel free to call in to confess your most silly "WHAT WAS I THINKING?" moments -- and get advice from Dr. Van Hecke on curing your particular blind spots.

If yuo dnto wnat to lsiten thtsa oaky. Jsut konw bilnd sopts mghit stirke wehn laest epxecetd!

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posted by KAREN SALMANSOHN at 4:02 PM

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1 Comments:

Blogger Senia said...

Karen,

This is one of my favorites of your posts so far - so clear why people have these blind spots! The destructive yelling example, the bank robber example.

Gladwell writes in a sense about blind spots in his book "Blink: the Power of Thinking without Thinking." People sometimes just don't realize what they're doing - like the cops who released something like 43 bullets into an innocent man in 3 secnds in the last chapter of his book.

Jon Haidt also refers to this as the Hypocrisy Fallacy (you can see the ch. 4 description here). He says we're pretty wired for hypocrisy just because of what we naturally focus on.

Thanks - really enjoyed reading this.

Senia
www.senia.com

4:44 PM  

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