Tag Archives: story

Why Most People Will Remain in Mediocrity

Most people will never become truly successful.
“It’s lonely at the top. 99% of people are convinced they are incapable of achieving great things, so they aim for mediocre. The level of competition is thus fiercest for ‘realistic’ goals, paradoxically making them the most competitive.”
-Tim Ferriss
Most people will never be truly successful.

The pull towards mediocrity is too strong. As David Schwartz once penned, “All around you is an environment that is trying to pull you down to Second-Class Street.”

Most people will never escape the pull.
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Want to be the one who is making the decisions in your life?

This week has been a success for Life, and a disaster financially. Everyone was spending their money on turkey, I guess.

So I am going to announce some sales for this coming week. I’ll make them good… so you’ll buy.

Now, about the successes that lead me to a huge insight.

Everything that people do is guided by memes, and they think they decided to do it. And you think they decided to do it from the goodness of their heart, from the badness of their heart, whatever seem to be the case. But in fact they never decided anything… It is the memes that are doing the deciding.
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Vocabulary and it’s connection to conscious awareness

We throw about big words, and we pretend that we know them. Even ‘scientists’ only pretend. If they didn’t, they would be explaining, clarifying the words, but they don’t.

In the Starting Point Measurements the vocabulary number is what indicates this. I originally intended to call this clarity, but then I decided that if it refers to words, then maybe it can be instructive.

It hasn’t been.

So this article will be, mostly, about words.
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How to get your brain to read?

How to Get Your Mind to Read
Americans are not good readers. Many blame the ubiquity of digital media. We’re too busy on Snapchat to read, or perhaps internet skimming has made us incapable of reading serious prose. But Americans’ trouble with reading predates digital technologies. The problem is not bad reading habits engendered by smartphones, but bad education habits engendered by a misunderstanding of how the mind reads.

Just how bad is our reading problem? The last National Assessment of Adult Literacy from 2003 is a bit dated, but it offers a picture of Americans’ ability to read in everyday situations: using an almanac to find a particular fact, for example, or explaining the meaning of a metaphor used in a story. Of those who finished high school but did not continue their education, 13 percent could not perform simple tasks like these. When things got more complex — in comparing two newspaper editorials with different interpretations of scientific evidence or examining a table to evaluate credit card offers — 95 percent failed.

There’s no reason to think things have gotten better. Scores for high school seniors on the National Assessment of Education Progress reading test haven’t improved in 30 years.

Many of these poor readers can sound out words from print, so in that sense, they can read. Yet they are functionally illiterate — they comprehend very little of what they can sound out. So what does comprehension require? Broad vocabulary, obviously. Equally important, but more subtle, is the role played by factual knowledge.

All prose has factual gaps that must be filled by the reader. Consider “I promised not to play with it, but Mom still wouldn’t let me bring my Rubik’s Cube to the library.” The author has omitted three facts vital to comprehension: you must be quiet in a library; Rubik’s Cubes make noise; kids don’t resist tempting toys very well. If you don’t know these facts, you might understand the literal meaning of the sentence, but you’ll miss why Mom forbade the toy in the library.

Knowledge also provides context. For example, the literal meaning of last year’s celebrated fake-news headline, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President,” is unambiguous — no gap-filling is needed. But the sentence carries a different implication if you know anything about the public (and private) positions of the men involved, or you’re aware that no pope has ever endorsed a presidential candidate.

You might think, then, that authors should include all the information needed to understand what they write. Just tell us that libraries are quiet. But those details would make prose long and tedious for readers who already know the information. “Write for your audience” means, in part, gambling on what they know.

These examples help us understand why readers might decode well but score poorly on a test; they lack the knowledge the writer assumed in the audience. But if a text concerned a familiar topic, hab
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Should you become a client? Would I even accept you as a client?

For decades one of my sore spots was that people refused to serve me, even though I paid them.

I remember saying to myself: my money is not good enough for you? and wept.

I had no idea how I “accomplished” that… in 20/20 hindsight it is still a little spotty.

What wasn’t clear to me, never even occurred to me, how my attitude effected the service provider. My “To what degree you think of yourself:” starting point measure was, at the time, 70%. From my behavior I would have guessed it was higher.

Mainly I overrode what they said. I argued, I knew better, I acted with contempt…

What I didn’t know then is that being a service provider needs to be a win, or no service.

A customer who is not happy is a drag on an provider, and not worth the little (or even a lot of) money they pay.

I was that kind of customer…

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31 Quotes That Will Give You Chills

Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75. ~ Benjamin Franklin

 

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry. Their passions a quotation. ~ Oscar Wilde

 

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying. ~ Arthur C. Clark

 

Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. ~ Albert Einstein

 

Of all sad words of mouth or pen, the saddest are these: it might have been. ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

 

I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks, but I do fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times. ~ Bruce Lee

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Scarcity, abundance… big words… again. What are they, and how can you get into abundance?

Both are context words. Neither talks about the stuff that is inside the context… inside the wrapper. The wrapper tells you how to look at the content.

It has nothing to do with the stuff, or the quantity of it. It can be great, it can be plenty… the context, scarcity or abundance will tell you what to feel, what to think, what to do.
Why? Because context is decisive.
You can have plenty inside the context of scarcity, and feel that you don’t have enough. Enough time, enough stuff, enough happiness, enough whatever…
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The narrative… the story that creates who you are

The narrative

A student of mine, after listening to my last Sunday call recording, asked why Jews turned to a different strategy than the slaves from Africa. Or Native Americans.
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What is the negative energy you are trying to eliminate?

Before i say anything else, all the illustrations about negative energy, negativity I use in this post are b.s. and harmful… The Hungarian Christmas pictures… I remember being a child…

Yesterday I was on a group coaching call where a so-called energy practitioner…
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What is the truth about the 10 dark years, 10,000 hours and 10,000 experiments

If investing 10 years in service of learning a profession, learning an art would make you a winner… then there would be a lot of winners. A lot more than there are…
There must be something more that most people don’t know or don’t do…
…and neither do or know their mentors, their trainers, their managers, their teachers.
Capacities, DNA capacities are invisible. They are the seed level of any ability, of any success.

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