LeWeb took place in the early part of December and by early indications it was a huge success and on it’s way to becoming the premier tech event in Europe. Some very big names in technology and online were there, but some of the biggest buzz was around the announcement of Queen Rania Al Abdullah as one of the Keynote speakers.

One of the attendees was Timothy Ferris, author of The 4 Hour I’ve been wanting to read “The 4 Hour Workweek” for quite some time now and thought this was a nice quick summary.

Good Day Readers and livers! Today I am reassessing my goals for this year and trying to hone in my focus.

However, before I go there I want to discuss an understanding that came to me this morning. I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel about black holes. For those of you who don’t understand the dynamic of a black hole I will break it down very simply. A Black hole occurs when a large star dies and implodes on itself. So basically you have something incredibly massive with tons of matter and mass suddenly condensed to a fraction of a fraction of its size. In the process all this mass and matter creates an enormous amount of gravity and it begins to attract everything around it and begins to suck it all in. It begins to have so much attractive force that it begins to inhale other planets, stars, solar systems, everything. It is inhaling things at such a high rate and with so much power that not even light can escape, hence the term black hole.
On the show I was watching it was explaining that a black hole the size of a marble would be able to completely inhale our planet. That is not something that we need to worry about but I found it incredibly interesting. You see if you can understand the functions of nature, you can understand the rules of the game of life and win. What do I mean? Sir Isaac Newton began to understand what all this gravity(in our case attraction) was all about. The most basic thing to understand is that where mass is, other mass is attracted, the more mass, the stronger the attraction.

To be ultra clear, the rule is if you want to attract the life you want you have to find the ways that you can embody that life from where you are now and increase in that embodiment. Increase Increase Increase. Don’t be anything other than what you want to attract. Think, live, talk, train, learn, teach, eat, do everything that you possibly can to take on the role of the person who you believe exists in that life that you want. The more you are that person, the more you are that persona, the more you will attract that relates to that lifestyle and the less of the old life you will see. Soon the old life will disappear and you will realize that it was only a misperception of who you are that actually doesn’t exist. In other words by concentrating your energy, focus, and life mass you increase your attractive power for the things and experiences and opportunities you want in your life. It sounds so simple and obvious and it actually is simple and obvious but making those habitual changes, life style changes, life changes, relationship changes and shifts can be very challenging. Which is why you need to take the steps in your life that will begin to create chain reactions and get you to that critical mass point where all change is absolutely eminent. Like Anthony Robbins would say, you need to create leverage on yourself. With a long enough stick and the right lever you can change the course of the world, the course of anything for that matter.

When we know how to apply this simple rule to our lives, we can access the secrets of the universe and more importantly, the secrets of our lives.

Why am I talking about this? Because I am creating more and more mass, something necessary to increase my gravitational pull. Just by writing, and focusing my energy on my goal the amount of mass that will pull other people, opportunities, and the things I need into my life increases. Eckhart Tolle said in order to be enlightened, you must be enlightened. Then he laughed because it is almost a ridiculous statement. He went on to explain, enlightenment is always something we are trying to achieve like success for example. It is always a goal, something out there that isn’t in here, or experienced by you yet. The problem is that enlightenment, just like success, or even joy is a state of being. It is something that you are naturally. However, you know that you are that intensely and at the same time effortlessly. Most of you are probably reading this and saying okay Paul, you obviously don’t know what the hell you are talking about because you seem to be talking in circles. I am not. The point is if you want to be successful first you need to define what that means to you and then you can begin to be successful simply by embodying that definition. Be careful and understand that as you grow in knowledge and understanding your definition of success will most likely change and don’t be afraid to evolve into your new understanding and embodiment of that new definition.

The point of this blog/documentary of my journey to $3 million in 365 days and living on a catamaran sailing the world, becoming the dad I wanted to be, building a family with a woman that I love, getting in the best shape of my life, working 4-10 hours a week, teaching people, writing, becoming a speaker, comedian, and impacting the world in the most positive way I possibly can is not to just achieve that for myself but also to leave a detailed road map so that everyone else will be able to see all the minute details and do it themselves. Every book I have ever read about success was after the fact. Or you always have to buy another book, or one on one training or coaching to get you there. I’m not doing that. This is an exercise in the game of life and I aim to win. The fact is I often feel like $3 million is too small of a goal. Every book I have read says that it is easier to raise $30 million than it is $3 million. This is another reason I want to talk about my goals again today. Today I am going to up the anny. Not to be cocky, only to be more focused on what is truly important for me to embody and pass on to others.

It is now 4:18 pm on day 21 out of 365 days to $3 million. I have earned a total of around $600.00. I have a long way to go. But I am not worried because I have a plan and I am this path. I’m not just on this path, I am this path. While I walk to the bus, while I am riding, while I am on the phone at work(I made 170 calls while writing this today), when I am talking to people, every second all my being is this. It has solidly become who I am and now steadily the world is getting to understand it as well. I now have around 40 hits a day. Not bad for an unadvertised website that hasn’t been optimized and only been up for 21 days. At the end of 60 days that will be more than 500 a day. There is a momentum that is building. Neil Armstrong said “Its one small step for man…”, it only took one step for him to be the first man on the moon, but it took years, thousands of hours of man power, billions of dollars, all the accumulated knowledge of our modern history, and the smartest people in the country and allied nations for him to make that one decisive simple step. I don’t have to worry if I don’t make all the money until the very last day. I can make the step a grand one on tv if that is the case. That is not my goal. That is not the way I am going to do it but I am only trying to make a point.
I digress…

So what are my goals? Timothy Ferris where are you? I need to find the guy. The writer of Four Hour Work Week. Excellent book. Loved it. Read it, listened to it three times. Now it is time to put it to action. I want his help directly as a part of this. The plan, I will continue working these 60 hour weeks for the remainder of the first 3 months to build up a little money. Each Quarter I have to Cut the hours. I have to make it a rule. Here’s the rule. In Q2 I can only work 40 hours a week. In Q3 I can only work I can only work 25 hours a week. In Q4 I can only work 15 hours a week and they need to be completed remotely, from the house, or another country. I just can’t be bound to an office.

That means that in my spare time I have to commit it to myself, my son, my body, the things I always wanted to learn, the things I always wanted to do, and being the guy I always wanted to be. Loving deeply, living richly, and helping other people to do the same thing by showing them that it is possible.

How do I do it? I keep writing. You keep reading. I keep calling more people to interview, close more real estate deals, make more relationships with companies and networking opportunities to be in front of more people all the time. I will go into more detail on the how to, step by step for the future tomorrow because this has been a really long post and I need to begin to wrap it up.

This morning I went and showed apartments for a new rental client of mine in Brickell and downtown Miami. On Thursday I am showing him units in Miami Beach and Sunny Isles and then I will be done. The big deal is that he is a sports agent, has 40 athletes under his belt and I am going to make the best possible relationship with him I can so I can sell his whole squad properties and get them on my radio show to talk about how they became successful.

I have more to tell but I am going to keep the rest a mystery.

Have a good day, keep trying and be persistent.

Paul Kohler

June 2009

Once I had written a business plan, my dream suddenly felt like reality.  It was the first time in the entirety of this process where I actually felt as though I had something to show for my work.  After all, while working at an investment bank for two weeks, all I did was sift through different business plans, and my business plan was better than most of those.

The only problem was that I had no way of actually putting the website together.  When I would get home from the office, I would ask friends if they knew anyone who was experienced with web development, but I couldn’t seem to find anyone interested.  As I put it back then, “I’ve got this great idea, but I need to find someone to build the thing!”  At work, I often went to career websites to look for college students who might be interested.  The logical thing, I thought at the time, was to find a technological co-founder, and have them build the website from the ground up.  I looked at a number of resumes online, but I really had no way of evaluating talent in this field.

Unfortunately, it was extremely difficult to mount an effective search at work because of the website blocks the firm had in place and because every time I would start to gain some momentum, the associates and managing directors would ask me to do something for them- how inconsiderate!  Didn’t they know I’m trying to build a business?

…

I should mention that at this time, I was still sending my resume out to different investment banking and consulting firms.  Although I had written a business plan, I am still a realist.  This internship was supposed to be temporary until I could land a full-time job, so I would use some of my free time at work to send out resumes.  Fortunately, I didn’t get any bites… at least while I was still an intern.

…

By the end of the third week of my internship, I began reading The 4- Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. (http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/)  I would describe Timothy Ferriss as an expert in marketing and working the system (two of the most important skills anyone can have, in my opinion).  While it would be difficult to follow his advice word for word, he does provide a ton of useful advice about how to succeed and lead a more fulfilling lifestyle, which is why I recommend this book to anyone.

I guess The 4-Hour Workweek spoke to me because I quit my job that Friday to follow my dream.  While I told my superior that I needed more time to send out my resume and look for a job, I knew that I really needed more time to find a developer and get the ball rolling on the business.  I’ll admit, I was kind of nervous quitting, but it turned out to be one of the greatest decisions I’ve ever made.

It’s so easy and so common to get into this way of thinking. As you grow older- even if you are in your mid 2os- you hear this phrase a lot. People talk about how late it is to start over. How late it is to make a dramatic career change.      To start a new relationship. As depressing and somewhat convenient to feel that way, it’s also insanely ridiculous. It is hard to shake the thoughts if you are living in to a society where people seem to be dying to start their careers and get married and have kids. And it looks like a lot of societies are like this. Hell, the first time I heard the words “my biological clock is ticking” was on American TV and the woman was merely in her late 20s. Come on, give me a break! I don’t know why people are so willing to conform to such inconvenient stuff. The fact that some people met the love of their loves in high school doesn’t automatically oblige you to marry your boyfriend at the moment in a rush. And if your friend has gotten his/her dream career at the age of 23, it is her life. Not yours. There is not a timeline everybody can follow or has to follow. Luckily, I manage to isolate myself from this syndrome most of the time. I ıısed to have strategy to cope. Whenever I seemed to be lose hope, I would remind myself that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t just work my ass off and didn’t do everything humanly possible. But then I read a great life story and well, I figured the advice in that book was much more effective and efficient. A Turkish drama student went to the Stated upon graduation. He was 26. He started to live the starving actor’s life, in a different country and at the age of 26. His name is Aykut “Ike” Ogut and about a decade later he was pretty much where he wanted to be – with still a lot of things to do for himself. Oh, and believe me the guy didn’t have it easy. He went through poverty, drinking too much, having health problems, depression…But he didn’t give up. And he made it. He jokes that he is yet to be in a movie with Tom Cruise. But from where I look, he is doing pretty good. He lived in L.A and New York, he played both little and big parts, he directed sound departments. He is happy, well-off and quite successful. Not the mention, it is quite a long and complicated journey. But he did it. First he had to start and he started at 26. So it is only natural that he would write a book on self-growth and motivation and how to achieve the stuff you want to achieve, no matter how insanely difficult it might seem. His words work just fine for me and I’m 25. And my plans are just as complicated, including the whole going to L.A. and making it in Hollywood thing. Of course he is only human and he does occasionally get depressed and wonder if he can pull some stuff off.Like writing this book when he was 35. Writing is hard and I can imagine how much endurance books will take. But he didn’t give in. This time he just read about the accomplishments of authors who got published after the age of 35. See? It’s a wonderful way for the mind to work.

Ogut’s adivce relates all areas. I f you want to be an actor, but you are yet to start, you are supposed to encourage yourself by reading about people who have gone through similar paths. It is ridiculous to compare for an actress to be in her 20s to compare herself to Jodie Foster and say “Boy, I’m too late! I’m too old to start!” Well, by Jodie’s standards everybody is screwed. I mean she was acting in commercials when she was in diapers. She was acting with Robert De Niro when she was 13. You are not supposed to think like that. But by all means, please think about Gerard Butler. He actually has a law degree. He didn’t start acting until he was 25. Sure, he did fantasize about it but he didn’t even really try. He was from Scotland, and already in his mid-20s. But he hated the office and took his chances. Have you checked him out? He is one of Hollywood’s most sought after leading man. And Britain’s. He got to play Irish, Scottish and American roles. He did action, comedy, drama, romance AND musicals. He did theater and movies. This is the guy you should be reading about. Not Tom Cruise who got his first acting gig it in 19. You should also avoid the failure stories. Sure, not every one makes it but it doesn’t mean you are not going to be able to.

It is not just about acting. It’s about everything. People can find true love at 50, or at 15. You can make your dreams come true at any age. Of course it might be tough if you try to be olympic-good at an athletic sport after 30,as Seth Godin puts it in his book “The Dip” . But other than that, you can bungee-jump at 83 (has been done and the guy is live. make sure to get some tests before though, just in case), you can be American and get to play in Japanese TV shows after you hit 30 (Timothy Ferris) or you can also get yourself published at 60. Of course I am not telling you to take it slow ans wait. I am just saying that whenever you get stuck, there are plenty of real life examples of people who come from similar backgrounds as you and that their stories are the perfect way to get inspired.

Oh sure, you will have a pessimistic friend who says he/she gets more depressed with stories like that. Hell, maybe even you are that easily depressed friend. You can always find an excuse not to put yourself out there. I am just trying to help out with finding the reasons not to stop trying.

“The key to having more time is doing less and there are two paths to getting there, both of which should be used together: (1) Define a short to-do list and (2) define a not-to-do list.”

“There should never be more than two mission-critical items to complete each day. Never. It just isn’t necessary if they’re actually high-impact. If you are stuck trying to decide between multiple items that all seem crucial, as happens to all of us, look at each in turn and ask yourself, ‘If this is the only thing I accomplish today, will I be satisfied with my day?’”

Timothy Ferriss, The Four-Hour Work Week

Recently I met up with Leah Busque, internet entrepreneur and Founder & CEO of Cambridge, MA based RUNmyERRAND (view recent appearance on Hubspot TV). Prior to our meeting, I was astounded that a math and science grad who had spent virtually her entire career (7 years) as an IBM engineer, had conceived of the on-demand errand service just a year and a half ago. You’d never know it by the traction and buzz RUNmyERRAND has already generated, albeit limited to the local Boston market (for now). After our 1 ½ hours together, it was clear Leah is not your stereotypical engineer. Putting her passion, energy, resourcefulness, keen business instincts, and acquired marketing acumen to work, Leah has almost singlehandedly created a solid foundation for success. Aside from Leah’s impressive leadership qualities, here’s a short list of what RUNmyERRAND has in its corner:

• Clear and Compelling Value Proposition. The demands for our time and expectations for results are greater than ever. Leah has done a fabulous job addressing the various target personas and messaging how the service works. The site’s branding, look-and-feel and ease-of-use were initially what caught my eye.

• fbFUND Winner. RUNmyERRAND was the only east-coast fbFUND finalist. Being selected for such a prestigious program has afforded the company unique opportunities. Leah has had the privilege of tapping into Facebook wisdom and resources. Networking opportunities abound, it also means she stands a far better chance than most to raise additional funding when needed.

• Zipcar Synergy. Fortune Magazine recently named Zipcar the best new idea in business, and Zipcar’s Scott Griffith is on RUNmyERRAND’s Advisory Board (along with Timothy Ferris, author of #1 New York Times bestseller, The 4-Hour Workweek). Like Zipcar, RUNmyERRAND promotes green living by reducing urban transportation (in this case by consolidating errands to fewer individuals). Hence, RUNmyERRAND has participated in Zipcar marketing campaigns, including the recent Low-Car Diet Challenge, for which the company gave away free “runner credits” to reduce the urge for participants to take back their cars. RUNmyERRAND will likely follow in Zipcar’s footsteps and only expand to other cities once its initial hyperlocal model (relying on  demographics, supply/demand economics and other operational logistics) is optimized in Boston.

If the points above don’t have you convinced that RUNmyERRAND has great start towards a bright future, consider this. Though it’s an ambitious endeavor to say the least, think about how useful it would be to have an auction site like eBay, but focused on services instead of products. Or put another way, imagine an online exchange version of CraigsList.

What do you think? Are there other impressive startups meeting this need? Please share your thoughts…

Since being published in 2007, and hitting #1 on the most prestigious business sales rankings, The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss has gotten a lot of mixed reviews.  Obviously since it has done so well in its sales numbers, people like something about it.  I have seen and heard that many people do not want to even open the cover because of the title.  Whether this fact is because the title seems so out-of-the-box thinking, or people are scared to think of such a lifestyle, they should truly not judge a book by its cover.  This review will give you an unbiased view of the book so you can have a little more insight about it.

First a little bit about the author. Timothy Ferriss is a learning and experience-gaining-addict.  As you can see by his personal blog (named experiments in lifestyle design), his life goal is to gain as much time flexibility as possible in order to have self-fulfilling experiences throughout his entire life (what he calls mini-retirements).  He explains in his book that during and just after his time at Princeton University, he began his life in business and as a business owner.  Through experience with his software  and nutritional supplement business working 50+ hours a week while constantly being chained to his computer screen, he decided to make a change in his life.  This is how the ideas for The Four Hour Work Week arose.

He learned and practiced Pareto’s 80/20 rule (a rule every business owner should live by), automated his business with virtual assistants and more efficient practices, and was able to take a year-long hiatus from his companies. He traveled the world for the year, only to come back to find that his companies had made more money while he was gone than the previous year while he had been working his butt off!

After settling back into the United States, he continued to use many outsourcing practices which were very successful while he was gone, and was able to free up a lot of his time in order to pursue other ventures which were truly important to him.  He has now been able to publish a #1 selling book, give a TED.com talk, start an educational charity (which I think is awesome), and enjoy the finer things in life a whole lot more.

Making more money without putting any hours into his business is what most people find hard to believe, or they also think that they would not be able to do as he did, but it truly is possible.  In the book Timothy explains in detail exactly how he was able to outsource his life and companies while gone, and there is definitely at least a couple things any business can benefit from by reading his book.

There is also a lot of hoopla about people saying ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I had a four-hour work week!’  Unfortunately these people are missing the big picture.  The book is ultimately not advocating a 4-hour workweek, it is only titled that in order to gain curiosity and exposure.  The book should be looked at like a tool to increase profit and quality of life for anyone who would like such a thing  (and possibly a mini-retirement here in there instead of staying in the rat race the rest of your life while looking forward to a retirement when you are too old to enjoy it!)  Tim defines ‘work’ as something we truly would rather not do in order to gain income.  You are definitely encouraged to spend as many hours on things you enjoy and which bring happiness to your life and those around you.

Technology and the internet has allowed those who want to take control of their lives an unprecedented segue into an ideal lifestyle of happiness and financial freedom.  I have learned from Timothy Ferriss and thank him heavily for sharing his experiences and wisdom with me.  I enjoy incorporating many of his ideas into my life and teaching them to others.

You can even see how I have created my own four-hour work week and found financial freedom by visiting http://InternetWealthfortheWorld.com

To Peace and Happiness

What is wrong with me? I refuse to do anything that I do not want to do, no matter what it makes me look like in front of everyone. My personality is such that I refuse to do something if I do not want to do it. That results in dire consequences.

I am bored to tears right now. Is there something wrong with me? Why do I get bored with each job that I take? Am I doing something incorrectly? This is supposed to be my dream job. Every job has boring parts to it, right? I like what Timothy Ferris, said in his book, The 4-hour work week. He said, that most people dislike their job, because they are supposed to dislike their job. Jobs are not meant to be enjoyed, that is why, it is best if you try to reduce the job part of your life to as little time as possible, hence the title – 4 hour work week. Instead of that, most people increase the number of hours they work to 90 hour work weeks, and more. Do they enjoy their job that much?

There cant be anything wrong, with wanting to live my life, rather than have a full-time job. I will not be very rich, I will not have a lot of things, but I will be doing things and living life, instead of sitting in a cubicle with an open concept under fluorescent lights. No matter how much an employer makes their offices comfortable, and engaging, putting Nintendo Wiis and nap rooms in it, there is still going to be aspects to that job, that the employee will dislike, and will want to drill a hole through their skull.

Maybe I am just being melodramatic, like I always am, about everything in my life. I just say that I cannot wait to be done. I cannot wait until I can leave for my 2-year (or more) sabbatical. I really cannot wait. Everyday I dream that today is August 28th and that I have four days left until I leave work. Everyday I shudder at the thought of leaving my family and friends, and rejoice at the thought of utter and complete freedom. Everyday I also worry about what I am going to tell my company about my resignation. What will my resignation letter say? Im sorry but I am moving to Australia. Im sorry I have to leave due to a family emergency.

I want to be completely honest with my company, but I wonder if that will have negative repercussions. I have always believed in the adage, The truth will set you free. But will that be true in this case? I really do not know. I have 1 month and 10 days left according to my countdown timer that I have on my computer. And I really cannot wait for it to come. I am really trying to live in the moment, but boring days at work, really make me wanna quit right now and leave before plan.

Obviously, I will not do that, because that would be bad. Or would it? Stop it, dont put ideas in my head (Please ignore crazy person talking to herself).

Olen tutkaillut viime aikoina monenlaisia kirjoja ym. liittyen siihen, miten voi tehdä elämässään asioita, jotka muuttavat suuntaa entistäkin positiivisemmaksi. Uskon, että yksi kultajyvä löytyy Timothy Ferrisin ajatuksesta: “Älä mieti, mikä tekee sinut onnelliseksi. Mieti, mikä saa sinut innostumaan.”   Kun ihminen innostuu jostakin, hän saa paljon enemmän aikaan ja varmasti on myös onnellisempi.

Reading my alma mater’s alumni magazine makes me feel bad about myself.  I makes it seem as though all of my fellow alums are doing brave and amazing things–some of them at extremely young ages–while I sit here spinning my wheels.  Web sites (blogs especially) also make me feel bad about myself.  They present a world that is overflowing with creative people and all of them, including the hobbyists with non-art day jobs are more creative and prolific than me.  No one will ever hire me in such a world.

It’s bad.  I’ve been spending nearly two hours every morning reading about other people’s projects, ideas and successes, bookmarking the ones I want to post on this blog or try some weekend 37 years from now.  I go back to maybe one in five hundred of these pages.  The rest just waste my time, cause feelings of inadequacy, and make me feel both overwhelmed and behind the times when I review them later.  I get so frustrated and tired with my work as a result that after dinner I just want to veg out.  Then it’s another day wasted, another reason to feel bad.

These feelings only got worse when I turned 29 last week.  Only one more year to accomplish all the things you thought you’d have in the bag by 30!  I decided enough is enough, and A. and I have been on a “media diet” as of Monday.  I’ve been wanting to try something like this for months, but what finally got me going was having a plan already laid out (in Timothy Ferris’ book, The Four-Hour Workweek), and having someone to do it with me.

Here’s how it works: for seven days, we avoid all non-fiction media and severely limit our intake of entertainment media.  In other words, no magazines, newspapers, blogs, NPR, Facebook or Twitter and only one hour per day of fiction reading, fictional TV or video games.  There is no limit on music or interpersonal correspondence.  We are allowed to post things to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and to write non-fiction, since the point of this whole exercise is to make us more productive and confident.  We are also allowed to use the web for project-specific research (like collecting the links for posts) but no idle surfing.

We’re about halfway through now and I’ll admit, it’s difficult.  We watched the premiers of Weeds and Nurse Jackie tonight so now I can’t touch the Wii game I’ve been wanting to play until tomorrow.  I can’t click any of the links to funny/interesting stories that my friends e-mail me and I had to put down the copy of Omnivore’s Dilemma I just borrowed after wanting to read it for years.

Next week when this is over, I will definitely try to schedule my media intake a little better.  I will probably allow myself two hours of “leisure media” per day and go back to setting NPR as my default station in the car.  But I will not open my Google reader every day.  I will open it only once or twice a week, to look for specific things I can use in a post that same day.  No more saving things that “just seem cool” for some nebulous future purpose like a digital pack-rat.

Have you ever tried some sort of media diet?  How did you limit your intake and what happened afterwards?  Did it work?

Una brutta notizia….non credo che sia veramente possibile lavorare 4 ore alla settimana…almeno da noi. Una bella…Timothy ha dannatamente ragione su quello che é il valore del tempo e della ricchezza. Un libro che fa molto meditare su tutto il tempo che perdiamo durante una giornata. Un libro necessario per aumentare la propria efficienza ed il proprio benessere..sia questo anche solo un ora in più con le persone care.

Un libro in cui in soli 2 capitoli é sintetizzato tutto il meglio del web marketing con una linkcografia davvero impressionante.

Se vuoi avere un idea delle cose trattate nel libro fatti un giro nel sito di Timothy Ferris www.fourhourworkweek.com e ne rimarrai incantato.

E’ un libro che ti consiglio vivamente di leggere e di comprare. Edito da Cairo Editore costa 15 Euro.

Follow Timothy Ferris, the author of the 4 Hour Work Week, on Twitter and he will donate $3 to the poorest of the US school system. Here are the details: http://bit.ly/paynejd_tferris.

Deras mål är “1 000 grejjer bort på 100 dagar”.

De skall börja rensa bort alla prylar i hemmet som de inte använder. Allt sånt man sparar för att det kan vara “bra att ha” någon gång skall nu bort!

Läs bloggen om deras experiment och fundera på – Antar du utmaningen ?

Jag tycker det låter som en strålande idé och har själv nosat lite kring dessa tankar, men absolut inte tänkt så långt som deras projekt.

Min synvinkel har varit mer ur perspektivet att förändra konsumtionen. Om jag köper fler tjänster, behöver jag inte så många prylar. Om jag inte har så många prylar har jag mer tid till annat. Ju färre prylar jag köper desto bättre är det för mijlön och desto fler tjänster jag tvingas köpa desto bättre är det för Sveriges ekonomi.

Istället för att jag har dyra verktyg och maskiner som jag nästan aldrig använder köper jag tjänsterna istället och skapar på så vis fler arbetstillfällen och ledig tid för mig och min familj. Känner på mig att gräsklipparen ligger i farozonen nu…

Timothy Ferris, författaren till boken 4-Hour Workweek har även han gjort sig fri från sina prylar, för att kunna leva ett friare liv. Han är en entreprenör som byggt upp sin tillvaro så att den skall var så fri som möjligt och sitt företag har han byggt upp så att han själv inte behöver vara med i det operativa arbetet.

Detta liv bygger på att man outsource:ar så mycket som möjligt och han ville testa vart gränsen gick – hur mycket kan man outsource:a?
Tillslut anlitade han ett outsource:ing-företag för att lägga upp hans profil på ett antal date:ing-sajter. Resultatet blev att han fick fler bokade date:er än när han själv försökt…

Oavsett om man tänkt outsource:a sitt date:ande eller ej, så är boken mycket läsvärd !

Duas variáveis aparentemente difíceis de conciliar. Tim Ferris, autor norte-americano e teórico da produtividade, acha que não. Parte de alguns conceitos básicos re-inventados por si e que se consagram na expressão “na realidade há poucas coisas que realmente importam” nas nossas actividades profissionais. Quando nos concentrarmos nelas e conseguirmos gerir o nosso tempo de forma a fazê-lo da forma mais eficiente possível… alcançaremos a fórmula nirvânica pouco tempo/muito rendimento.

Os três pilares da teoria:

1. Eliminar o que não é importante (veja-se a Lei de Pareto que nos indica que 80% dos rendimentos que geramos se alcançam apenas com 20% das nossas actividades laborais )

2. Cultivar uma ignorância selectiva – é impossível estar constantemente a ingerir informação sem a digerir e editar; portanto é importante decidir ser ignorante nas áreas periféricas para a nossa productividade

3. Externalizar areas do nosso trabalho – subcontratando por exemplo assistentes pessoais que possam tratar de áreas que consumem muito tempo e geram pouca rentabilidade

time to break my internet absence with an off the cuff and incomplete year in recap……

Speaking of internet absences, they are great…….I just got back from a  glorious vacation in Mexico….sans blackberry and internet.  Basically I just replaced them both with guacamole.

And it was great!  Taking a break from the world of instant gratification gives your mind a chance to slow down and take in the intricacies of simple pleasures…….like guacomole in my case.  I made it a high priority to just sit on the beach for hours every day, doing literally nothing, just to see what came up in my head, how I felt, and just to relax in general of course.  I know this whole concept of  breakling off the grid is over-played, but I still can’t stress the importance of taking a sabbatical from your electronic friends for a while.  Your sanity will thank you.

Which brings me to one of my favorite products

Super Salve  Sunscreens:

I bought a small jar of this at the local Whole Foods, and I just can’t say enough about it.  Someone reminded me the other day that you shouldn’t put anything on your body that you can’t eat.  It’s an intuitive guideline for any skincare product, because the skin is like a sponge, immediately sucking everything from the skin and transporting it right to the bloodstream.  If your putting synthetic chemicals on your skin, then your adding an extra burden for you liver.  This cream has so many amazing ingredients, you don’t even need the excuse of sun to spread some on!

Health Communities

Popping up all over the place.  Going solo to try to and enhance you health is hard in the modern world.  You’ll encounter all kinds of people that think your crazy (why being healthy is crazy, is beyond me…..to each his own).  Communites are out there on the internet for every kind of thing you can imagine.  Access to real world info AND living examples of health are paramount to any good health program.  

Crossfit:  

despite my many critiques, they’ve got something going here, and they’ve succeeded in making exercise exciting for a lot of people.  I feel ridiculous even saying that, just because exercise is one of the things I like to do most, but I’m not naive……I hear that there is this place outside of Boulder, and in this mysterious place, some people…..*gasp*……don’t exercise!

They post daily workouts, which as you’ll see, are pretty damn hard!  Have YOU ever done 100 pullups in one workout?  

Obviously……this isn’t for everyone, I simply commend them on putting some fun stuff out there.  

We Like it Raw/Give it to me Raw

Take raw food, remove hippie nonsense, and you’ve already got something big.  I’ve never liked the connotation of healthy people being dreadlocked, smelly, sun worshippers anyway…..whatever

I suppose it’s a tradeoff for New York hipster-ness…….but at least we’re going in the right direction here.  They’ve got a blog that comes up with a lot of innovative and remarkably tasty recipes and health tips, products, etc.  I don’t eat raw.  I probalby never will.  But once again, they’ve got a health community that’s putting a “cool” image on being healthy, which is a huge step in my opinion.

I mean come on…..who doesn’t want to eat THIS?!

Raw Desserts.......13 on a scale of 1 to 10

Blogs:

Tim ferris, of four hour work week fame.  His ruthless breakdown of human thinking, habits, and the workplace in general are totally invaluable.  And just in case you live on the moon, his book’s a good read too, there’s no way you won’t leave with some new views of your woking life.

We Like it Raw…….see above

Josh Rubin on Youtube……..Lots of great little 9 minute thought pieces on health

Origin of Energy on Youtube.  Aaron and Alana, both running a studio out of Australia, eat like champs, train like champs, and post up almost every workout they do.  Greta living examples of how to workout and live

More later-

Tim Ferris

Lifestyle Design guru Tim Ferris speaks on increasing productivity via office design…

“Thanks to a sophisticated office structure, the headquarters of Interpolis insurance in the Dutch town of Tilburg has freed up 51 percent of their working areas, cut 33 percent of construction and equipment costs, and reduced office usage expenses by 21 percent.

How it works: In the morning employees take their laptop and mobile phone and look for the workplace for the day. Documentation of joint projects and operations that were formerly located on the desk, are now replaced by common electronic folders and virtual databases, accessible for everybody.

The man behind this revolutionary and visionary concept of the 7000 square metre and “Tivoli” project was Gijs Nooteboom of the consulting firm Veldhoen + Company. In an interview, he explains to me why the Interpolis concept represents all future office building, the reasons why we will spend more time working from home and on travel and why offices are basically old-fashioned but still needed… (Link)”

Richard Feynman has always been one of my role models. I have many role models but not that I like everything about them, just some particular traits. However for Feynman I was never very sure what i liked but I really like him. I hardly discussed Feynman with anyone but I gradually noticed that he was very popular, with a popularity amongst people who had heard of him rivaling Einstein.

[Richard Feynman: Image Source, Wikipedia Commons]

I never thought about it seriously on why he became so popular as he did, I mean there have been many physicists who did fundamental work but people have hardly heard of them. Take for example Poincaré and Einstein, Poincaré worked on the same things as Einstein and did very fundamental work, but people today have hardly heard of him but everybody knows Einstein. However the reasons for Einstein becoming popular are not very difficult to understand.

I had been provoked to think about it a few times after some discussions on a forum on Feynman that I own, a brief discussion in comments on Reasonable Deviations and once with a professor of mine. However I never thought about it beyond a point.

I have not read anything related to Feynman over the past year or so, but last week I just took out Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track from my own personal library and just read some letters that I had marked in my first reading a couple of years back as very incisive and insightful. I came across the foreword to the book by Timothy Ferris again and also a couple of reviews by Freeman Dyson on books on Feynman in Scientist as Rebel. I entirely agree with the analysis these two gentlemen give. And I would like to share it and add my own ideas and thoughts.

Being a great scientist and being famous are two separate things, like Ferris rightly points out that for every great scientist who became a public figure like Albert Einstein, Marie Curie and Werner Heisenberg there are others who have done fantastic work like Subramanyam Chandrashekar, Linus Pauling etc who did not.

Let’s take a case from the above: Werner Heisenberg.

After the first world war, the dominant mood in Germany and in most of Europe was of doom. Dyson mentions in a review of the book “Weimar Culture, Causality, and Quantum Theory, 1918-1927: Adaptation by German Physicists and Mathematicians to a Hostile Intellectual Environment” that a theme song that represented this mood was Der Untergang des Abendlandes or Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, after the German defeat on the eastern front the book took Germany by storm and within some years almost everybody had read it and everybody talked about it. Even people who strongly thought that Spengler was indulging in false rhetoric were highly influenced by his work.  He said that the decay of the western civilization must bring with it a destruction of the rigid ideas in Classical Physics and Mathematics. Quoting him:

Each culture has its own new possibilities of self expression which arise, ripen, decay and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the other, each limited in duration and self contained…Western European physics let no-one deceive himself has reached the limit of its possibilities. This is the origin of the sudden and annihilating doubt that has arisen about things that even yesterday were the unchallenged foundation of physical theory, about the meaning of the energy principle, the concepts of mass, space, absolute time, and causal laws generally.

There were many similar works to follow up by other authors that built upon this environment. At about this time Hermann Weyl and Schroedinger were highly influenced by Spengler’s work and the mood in the country and the rest of Europe that was of revolutionary expectation. So, when Heisenberg actually came up with his theory it at that time was seen to challenge the primacy of causality in Physics. It was revolutionary.

[Werner Heisenberg]

The point being that Heisenberg became famous for reasons that largely were extraneous to his actual work. His work came in a period of great intellectual and philosophical turmoil and expectation. And hence he became as famous as he did.

Feynman worked with the Manhattan project and gained some notoriety from it but seldom made any headlines otherwise, and his work was not “revolutionary” in the broad sense above so again it is not clear what made him famous.

Actually that way Feynman was not a “revolutionary” at all. Quoting from Scientist as Rebel:

Great scientists come in two varieties, which Isaiah Berlin, quoting the seventh-century-BC poet Archilochus, called foxes and Hedgehogs. Foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are interested in everything, and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are interested only in a few problems which they consider fundamental and stick with them for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs. most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things and foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein was a hedgehog, Richard Feynman was a fox

Feynman was a great storyteller as is apparent from “Surely You are Joking..” and “What do you care What other people think“. People of all ages always like storytellers. And his stories were very very spicy, very funny and very interesting. And through this his personality came to be known. Feynman’s appeal as Timothy Ferris rightly points out was more in his core conduct as a working scientist. His enthusiasm, freedom and integrity, reflected the spirit of science in action.

Feynman loved his freedom. He wrote home while on the Rogers Commission probing the Challenger Space Shuttle crash:

“I am completely free, and there are no lovers that can be used to influence me”

He always advocated in his own style freedom of choice for his students. Something that resonates with almost all of us when we look around at the rigid ideas about what is right and wrong and loads of bureaucracy. Most of us sometime or the other are harried by the “politically correct” ideas that infest social structure and academia. Feynman embodies a welcome change that finds favor with most people. As Dave Brooks wrote about him:

Feynman is the person that every geek wants to be: very smart, honored by the establishment even as he won’t play by its rules, admired by people of both the sexes, arrogant without being envied and humble without being pitied. In other words he is young Elvis, with earth shaking talent transferred from the larynx to the brain cells and enough sense to have avoided the fat Vegas phase. Is such celebritification of such scientists good? I think so, even if people do have a tendency to go overboard. Anything that gets us thinking about science is something to be admired, whether it comes in the form of an algorithm or an anecdote.

Another thing about Feynman was his integrity and humility. As Ferris rightly puts it and I agree with him from my own personal experience, once someone gets in a position of power he or she starts wielding that to defend their own views. As Einstein himself once remarked:

To punish me for my contempt for authority, Fate made me an authority myself.

[Source: American Physical Society]

Such use of position though in a psychological way understandable, can be extremely irritating for the newbie, which everyone is at some point right? Feynman never got into that business. Again quoting Ferris:

He remained the instinctive rebel who sympathized with the students in the hall than the sage on the stage

He was a great authority himself. However he always preferred clarity of thought than anything else. He extremely disliked authority and honors. He thought they had no point and it was a rotten system in which a group of individuals would decide who is “good enough” to get an honor. He nearly declined the Nobel prize but later decided to take it at the insistence of his wife Gweneth. He said this when asked if it was worth winning the Nobel:

I don’t know anything about the Nobel prize. I don’t understand what it is all about and what’s worth what. And if the people in the Swedish academy decide that X,Y or Z should win a Nobel prize then so be it. I won’t have anything to do with it. It’s a pain in the neck. I don’t like honors, I appreciate it for the work I did and for people who appreciate it. I notice that other physicists use my work. I don’t need anything else. I don’t think there is any sense to anything else. I don’t see any point that some one in the Swedish academy decides that this is work is noble enough to receive a prize. I have already got my prize. The prize is the pleasure of finding things out, the kick in the discovery, the observation that other people use it. Those are the real things. The honors are unreal to me. I don’t believe in honors. It bothers me, honors bother me, honors as epaulets, honors as uniforms. My pappa brought me up this way, I can’t stand it, it hurts me.

Feynman was always willing to admit his ignorance. Most of the times people around us talk in a way that is “clearer than they ACTUALLY think”, he never got into the trap. If he did not know anything then be it. He was never afraid of being uncertain and admitting that he did not know something. Look at the video below and let him talk about it himself (05:00 onwards)

A lot of people have read “Surely You are Joking..” but few have read the great Feynman Lectures in Physics. He was a great teacher, always taught in a racy non-linear style which was as if he was thinking out aloud instead of reading from notes prepared in advance. I still read some chapters from the Feynman lectures whenever there is the time. If you have such a teacher in your lifetime, it would be one of your greatest achievements. We are only lucky that we can have access to such books. Also one thing to note is that Feynman never really wrote a book, all the books that bear his name are actually compilations edited by somebody else, mostly from his audio-tapes.

In fact his seminal paper on the famous Feynman diagrams would have never been published had it not been for coaxing by friends. There is a funny anecdote regarding that, but let’s not get into that. For about a year after his work on Feynman diagrams he refused to publish it. He said he was just too lazy to do it, he could talk to anybody who wanted to listen about it. But he would not publish it. He frequently said he was a fool and extremely lazy. People avoid saying that, but he was just reflecting on human condition. Again something that strikes a chord equally amongst the less gifted and the well gifted.

The world has known him as a great scientist, a great teacher and a great clown. But in Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track we see another side of him. That of a wise counselor. He is not trying to be smart in any of the letters, just trying to be clear. He never spoke of his research or what he wanted to do in those letters, but they were only meant to help those who wanted to learn. The letters are a pleasure to read. Do read them if you have not.

And to think that people around us have SOME work and they start cribbing that they are just too busy to reply to a letter or even a text message, and here you had a great scientist, a Nobel laureate, a great teacher writing personally to the letters he used to get from all parts of the world, doesn’t it sound too good to be true? Every single letter in the collection is personal.

As Dyson writes:

I described him in a a letter to my parents as “half genius and half buffon”. Here in the letters he is neither a genius nor a buffon, but a wise counselor, interested in all kinds of people, answering their questions, and trying to help them the best he can.

He wrote letters to Kings, scientists, politicians, students, fans and just about anybody. Amongst these letters are some letters to his first wife Arline. Which describe day to day difficulty they had between their marriage and her death from TB. For most of these years Feynman was at the Manhattan project and Arline was at a nursing home some sixty miles away.

His letters to his second wife, Gweneth are full of anecdote about his travels. Some writing about the stupidity and snobbery of kings and some writing about the wonderful things in life.

He is famous as a great joker who played to the crowd. The prankster who found it was cool to break safes at Los Alamos or when it comes to trying to decode the Mayan Hieroglyphics or talking about adventures in topless bars. Feynman admired people with practical skill and said philosophers had no use. He controversially maintained that it was only through science that one could admire the true beauty of nature. He was a person of strong opinions.

But inspite of being a joker, a regular guy the general public could connect to and a genius he was a wise man.  When people came to him for help or wrote to him about problems, he spoke truth. His answers to most problems made a lot of sense and they still do. Be it concerning freedom, life, government etc. He mostly made great sense. I liked this part by Dyson most,

Like Einstein and Hawking he had come through times of great suffering, nursing Arline through her illness and watching her die, and emerged stronger. Behind his enormous zest and enjoyment of life was an awareness of tragedy, a knowledge that our time on Earth is short and precarious. The public made him into an icon because he was not only a great scientist and a great clown but also a great human being and a guide in time of trouble.

—

Recommended Reads and References:

1. Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track

2. Surely you’re joking, Mr Feynman!

3. What You care what other people think

4. No Ordinary Genius

5. The Scientist as Rebel

—

Onionesque Reality Home >>

Timothy Ferris is a popular science writer. In Interstellar Spaceflight: Can We Travel to Other Stars?, he starts writing about space travel but ends up speculating about an interstellar internet.

Living as we do in technologically triumphant times, we are inclined to view interstellar spaceflight as a technical challenge, like breaking the sound barrier or climbing Mount Everest – something that will no doubt be difficult but feasible, given the right resources and resourcefulness.

…[But] the technical problems involved in traveling to the stars need not be regarded solely as obstacles to be overcome but can instead be viewed as clues… that point through other ways to explore the universe.

…

The high cost of interstellar spaceflight suggests that the payloads carried between the stars… are most likely, as a rule, to be small. It is much more affordable to send a grapefruit-sized probe than the starship Enterprise. Consider spacecraft equipped with laser-light sails, which could be pushed through interstellar space by the beams of powerful lasers based in our solar system. To propel a manned spacecraft to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, in 40 years, the laser system would need thousands of gigawatts of power, more than the output of all the electricity-generating plants on Earth. But sending a 10-kilogram unmanned payload on teh same voyage would require only about 50 gigawatts – still a tremendous amount of power but less than 15 percent of the total U.S. output.

What can be accomplished by a grapefruit-sized probe? Quite a lot, actually, especially if such probes have the capacity to replicate themselves, using materials garnered at their landing sites… The probe would mine [an] asteroid and use the ore to construct a base of operations, including a radio transmitter to relay its data back to Earth. The probe could also fashion other probes, which would in turn be sent to other stars. Such a strategy can eventually yield an enormous payoff from a relatively modest investment by providing eyes and ears on an ever increasing number of outposts.

…

[Another] clue – that radio can convey information much faster and more cheaply than starships can carry cargo – has become well known thanks to SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI researches use radio telescopes to listen for signals broadcast by alien civilizations…

When SETI was first proposed… in 1959… the object most frequently raised to the idea of interstellar conversation was that it would take too long. A single exchange – “How are you?” “Fine.” – would consume 2,000 years if conducted between planets 1,000 light-years apart. But… conversation is not essential to communication; one can also learn from a monologue… We learn from Socrates and Herodotus, although we cannot speak with them…

In 1975, when I first proposed that long-term interstellar communications traffic among advanced civilizations would best be handled by an automated network, there was no model of such a system that was familiar to the public. But today the Internet provides a good example of what a monologue-dominated interstellar network might be like and helps us appreciate why extraterrestrials might prefer it to the arduous and expensive business of actually traveling to other stars.

…

The most profound gulf separating intelligent species on various star systems is not space but time, and the best way to bridge that gulf is not with starships but with networked interstellar communications.

The gulf of time is of two kinds. The first is the amount of time it takes a signal to travel between [civilizations]. Therefore, it makes sense of send long, fact-filled messages rather than “How are you?”

The other gulf arises if… communicative civilizations generally have lifetimes that are brief by comparison with the age of the universe… Even if we manage to survive for a robust 10 million years to come, that is still less than a tenth of 1 percent of the age of the galaxy.

Any other intelligent species that learns how to determine the age of stars and galaxies will come to the same sobering conclusion – that even if communicative civilizations typically stay on the air for fully 10 millions years, only one in 1,000 of all that have inhabited our galaxy is still in existence. The vast majority belong to the past. Is theirs a silent majority, or have they found a way to leave a record of themselves, their thoughts and their achievements?

That is where an interstellar Internet comes into play. Such a network could be deployed by small robotic probes like the ones described earlier, each of which would set up antennae that connect it to the civilizations of nearby stars and to other network nodes… one could get in touch with many civilizations, without the need to establish contact with each individually. More important, each node would keep and distribute a record of the data it handled. Those records would vastly enrich the network’s value to every civilization that uses it.

If there were any truth in this fancy, what would our galaxy look like? Well, we would find that interstellar voyages by starships of the Enterprise class would be rare, because most intelligent beings would prefer to explore the galaxy and to plumb its long history through the more efficient method of cruising the Net. When interstellar travel did occur, it would usually take the form of small, inconspicuous probes, designed to expand the network, quietly conduct research and seed infertile planets. Radio traffic on the Net would be difficult for technologically emerging worlds to intercept, because nearly all of it would be locked into high-bandwidth, pencil-thin beams linking established planets with automated nodes. Our hopes for SETI would rest principally on the extent to which the Net bothers to maintain omnidirectional broadcast antennae, which are economically draining but could from time to time bring in a fresh, naive species – perhaps even one way out here beyond the Milky Way’s Sagittarius Arm. The galaxy would look quiet and serene, although in fact it would be alive with thought.

In short, it would look just as it does.

Here is a PDF of the full essay.

I wanted something unique for each of my bridesmaids because they all represent different phases in my life and have been there to support me at every turn.  I am very blessed to have such amazing friends and was really happy to have 9 of them standing beside me on my wedding day.

After almost a year of trying to figure out what to get my bridesmaids, I finally decided on 9 different silver necklaces, which I found at Blue Ruby made by local designers, 9 different books that I thought each may enjoy and 9 USB keys with a playlist of songs that reminded me of each of them saved on each drive.  It wasn’t easy.  It took time but in the end, I was happy with the gifts.

I commented on Timothy Ferriss’s blog yesterday on the Martin Luther King, Jr. quote he put up.  The quote was inspiring because King chastised those who would not risk their lives or current situations for an ideal.  Basically, he said that if a person refuses to stand up for something to believe it because it is not safe, that person is spiritually and emotionally dead.  They have sacrificed a chance for a better life for the status quo.  This resonates with me because I am a pretty risk-averse person.  I don’t do things on a lark, I don’t jump at the latest thing, and I certainly don’t like to lose money.  I don’t even gamble because I know the odds are against me! 

But I also know that my life could be better.  Right now I have tenure at a second-tier state university.  It doesn’t pay a lot, I have a heavy teaching load, I don’t get a lot of perks, BUT I have a steady income, benefits and job security (at least I will as long as our shortfall doesn’t drive the administration or Board of Regents to cut tenured faculty).  So I have been examining my skills and ways to supplement my income.  I see that there are opportunities out there.  Some are as risky as leaving academia (maybe going to law school, working in the private sector, starting my own business) and some are low-risk, such as looking for part-time opportunities.  The logical thing would be to go back on the job market for a better position, but personal reasons and a nagging sense of low self-esteem hold me back.  So I look for opportunities that are minimal risk.

When I think about opportunities, I realize that I miss or refuse to seize them because of laziness, low self-esteem.  The chances are out  there and some of them require minimal capital or disruption of my life.  So why not take them?  I’ve been making myself more useful and involved in my department, read voraciously about the subjects I’m interested and gathering resources, and now is the time to act.

when it comes to choosing the right technique, way, or path to follow in life, spirituality, realtionship, or business for example; any path well developed/lived and well communicated/taught by another is a potentially good guide for one to follow. so to answer the question up front, all the well developed ones are all good. i’ve found many different ways to look at the road to success, no matter which one i pick, they all lead to success given they’ve been lived and presented well by another. “all roads lead to Rome.” a good book on your subject of inerest is a good place to look. the effort to ensure value and accuracy of the information presented throughout the writing and publishing process of a well written and well presented book is not to be underestimated. finding a mentor who you work well with can also be extremely helpful. in zen it is practically required.

the key is to get an initial feel or gut instinct about it. if the initial feel or gut instinct is good or better, try it out. it is not so much the subject matter, that matters (hee, hee); it is the way it is presented. in other words it’s not so important as to what information is presented that creates significance for the individual as compared to how the information is presented that creates true and lasting significance for the individual. i feel that each individual has a way that information is best encoded for them. when you find a subject that interests you and it is also encoded for you, then bam!, you’re plowin’ right through it. as my brother relayed to me once: he had read various books on the power of being in the moment. but, until he read The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle, it didn’t stick. the way it was presented made the difference. in fact, it not only stuck, but my brother enjoyed the book more than other books on the subject. this is the beginning of how a bonafide guru or an expert creates themselves. it’s interesting how one looks up to the “experts”, “gurus”, or “authorities” on a given topic. why? because they do not possess any more skills than you or i. the difference is that they kept trying things out until something stuck, and further that they did not give up until that something stuck. the willingness to make mistakes gracefully (or ungracefully) and to let the journey be an experiment are the other pieces of the puzzle. the final step is to put your experience out there in the world to share with others. in case you not only want to truly know and feel that you are and expert for yourself (which is most important), but would also like other individuals/group(s) to validate this, author Timothy Ferris in his book The 4-Hour Workweek has some great advice (pg’s 159-160).

finally, just try many things and know that you are on your journey to finding right livelihood or pursuit by doing so. it’s not that nothing will stick for you, it’s just that you haven’t found it yet. don’t worry, you will find it. it will come.

good luck in your journey, and never give up!

learn to ask to help from others if you need it!

-kudos!

see also: http://fluxlife.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/which-one2/

P.S. which site do you like better? this one, or:  http://fluxlife.blogspot.com ? (same content different format)