Too much focus on getting results instead of enjoying the process of achieving a result, caused me to struggle greatly against myself in order to get things done. It was always an uphill battle, with a lot of slipping and sliding back down again. Finally, I discovered that what really matters, in terms of living well, is to set and maintain the correct attitude that allows free-flowing action in each moment. Here’s the tale of how I learned this.

As children we are conditioned to obey for very practical reasons but to become adults we must develop the capability of independent thought and action and for taking personal responsibility. Unfortunately, society at large fails to do this. It’s a task that we must take on by ourselves or else forever remain dependent and needy upon other people and other things. Accepting personal responsibility requires courage because initially it entails risk and uncertainty.

“There is only one security and that is the development of our skills” - Aristotle

“It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult undertaking which, more than anything else, will determine its successful outcome.” William James

Just a short little post for you today about two questions that I have found very useful for getting started on new spheres of activity and following through.

In order to understand what might originally have caused certain behavioural responses to problems and symptoms I often carry out thought experiments where I imagine how humans might have behaved at the dawn of our species. In this article I explain some of my conclusions. This is a long essay so take a while just to sit back and enjoy some speculation.

Getting verbally abused in public is not a pleasant experience, whether we respond with outright expressions of anger or whether we seethe quietly with barely suppressed rage it’s something that we want to put an end to. We can do this through a thorough understanding of the cause and how to overcome it and also by coming up with better responses for it when it does happen.

I got severely out of kilter of late and lapsed back into bad behaviors. Fortunately, I brought all of my theories and understandings of how the mind works to bear and so it didn’t last long because I quickly recognized what was happening and how to adjust.

This article focuses on the essential practice of understanding and then controlling the desires that we have in order to free ourselves of negative emotions and to maintain a healthy mind and attitude. This article is 2300 words long and will take about 10-minutes to read.

This article describes how I came to question conventional wisdom and how I came to create my own pragmatic theory on how the mind works. This article is 2300 words long and will take about 10-minutes to read.