I was up late the other night because I couldn’t sleep.  Lately I have been thinking about the future a hell of a lot.  All I could see in my waking hours was a dead end.  No way out.  I then picked up Think and Grow Rich and noticed something that I hadn’t seen the first few times I had read it.   Napoleon Hill is telling the story of Henry Ford and his instance on having a V8 motor in a single block.  Something that at the time was considered “impossible”.

When told that the V8 motor in one block was impossible Henry Ford didn’t change his mind.   He persisted and some would say with dogged determination, pushed his engineers to the point where it was possible.  He used nothing other than a concept of the future that he wanted, lots of money and a sense of unfailing conviction (in himself) that it could be done.  After some time it was a reality.  So there’s nothing extraordinary about that story really is there?  But here’s what hit me.

Ford like so many others had a vision for something that drove him to commit a lot of resources to it.  Some might say it was a sort of faith that drove him in this direction… others would say that it was a determination that crept beyond on the normal sense of common decency or the fact that he had loads of money.  However, the key lesson I got from it was this: you can’t expect the future to be different from what you expect.  That is, unless you are already expecting, looking and building a better tomorrow from the foundational idea that tomorrow will be better… than you are already behind.  In other words, what you have now is temporary… but that mind you have is eternal.   It will follow you through all kinds of circumstances right up to your death and beyond!

I need not stretch myself for evidence in this case.  Have a look around at the amount of uses the word ‘crisis’ has in modern media.  It is bantered around so much that every time there is a something terrible happens, the word ‘crisis’ is sure to follow.  However, if you think ‘crisis’ and ‘disaster’ then you are accepting the default.  What if you began to think of a better future, clothe that thought with an imagination that tomorrow is going to be better and actually saw it happening in the landscape of your mind’s eye? Think about this.  What if you began to imagine a better tomorrow?  You would expect it!  I am not promising that it would happen because bad things happen to all of us.  BUT, if you expect something better instead of something worse, you will, by the natural workings of your mind, begin to see new patterns that you couldn’t before.  Instead of being ‘reactive’ to the circumstances, you will begin to picture something altogether different.

This is not a major revelation for a lot of people, but for me it was so.   It was for me!  Unless I expect and actively begin to hope in the future, I will not believe anything that hasn’t already happened!  I will simply go through life reacting to whatever comes my way by saying, ‘well I knew that was going to happen.’  What Ford tapped into was that the future is not written in stone for us.  It can get better.  Sure, you may have bottomed out in a bad business deal or suffered a horrible loss.  Nevertheless, I believe that if we begin to hope for a better day and imagine what it will be like when get there, we will begin to see things that we didn’t previously see.  Hope will come our way and we will be all the better for it.

When we focus on what ‘we see’ as the evidence for what’s possible, we forget that almost every piece of technology we have came from someone who had some hope and said, “I believe it can be done.”  More to the point, they took actions to back up their faith and actually achieved what was ‘impossible’.   It’s very easy to be a downer and say all will go to hell.   How about you think about a good future.  Something that puts a smile of your face.  Of course it’s not that simple but it’s just as easy to have hope as it is to say none exists.  Try it, I did and made me feel a whole lot better.   It put me to sleep!

The dangerous thing about hitting rock bottom is that the floor you fall on is really the end of the line.  Most of us will never hit that floor, though we may go through periods of hurt, pain and distress.  Spare a thought for a moment for the extreme poor.  I am talking about the UBER poor.

I came from a meeting tonight where we were talking about how the price of rice had doubled in the last few months.  That seems like a small problem doesn’t it?  Rice, a common staple in many households has doubled in price.  When it comes to the extremely poor in places like the Philippines that literally means a lot more than it does to me here in Australia.

It means that they will go without much needed sustenance for longer periods than usual, greater problems with the health will emerge and all kinds of problems will ensue from there.  I don’t really want to get into the details here but the surging cost of food is really something that bothers me a bit… but I won’t starve as a result.  In places like Uganda the surging costs of food means a world of pain for people who were already starving.  For some it means what little they can afford they can no longer.

So I will end my short post here with something to remember… if you make $2 a day you are making more than at least 2 billion people.  Think about it!

In recent times I have found myself sensing a change in my life.  As per usual with my gammy brain I am not certain when or where or even what has to change I just sense intuitively that it’s time for changes.  I have felt like this for most of the year actually.   What caught my eye recently was how certain songs and certain sportstars have all pointed to a simple idea that most of us don’t pay attention to… you have to know when to walk away.

Why not take my word for it?  Listen to a classic and think about the words in this song.  What gets me in particular is this:

1. You got to know when to hold ‘em

2. Know when to fold ‘em

3. Know when to walk away

4. Know when to run

So have you noticed any changes in your life?  Any signs that it’s time to walk away or even run?  I have spoken about this before, but there is a real skill involved in finding out what you should be doing and knowing when to shift gears.

A key lesson in knowing when to walk away

I think the biggest sign of change comes from the intent through which you do something.  When you have a real hard time working up the energy to do what you used to love doing, then you have a key indicator from the deepest depths of your soul that change is coming.  Sometimes this means ditching friends, it means moving to a new city, sometimes … as I have done before it means removing all inhibiting factors from your life, just so you can grow.  Yet, in all these circumstances the thing that points to real growth, is knowing when to move on.  Pay attention to signs around you and how you feel.  If you have a developed sense of intuition you will know when it’s time to change.

You may get a push

Sometimes you may not have a choice and change may be thrust upon you.  Like in my job there is a lot of fear in our little pocket of the management school because the student numbers are down.  There are rumours of change, movements, forced redundancies.  If this is that case it could be God pushing you along!  Pay attention… those indicators are always there.  Other times, life just hammers you… so you have to grow whether you like it or not.  Good times

Let’s return to the song.  You have to know when to walk away… how can you really know that?  That’s sort of like saying how can you know you are a human.  You know.  Alarm bells are ringing on the inside and you haven’t been happy for a while.  Pay attention.  Remember… you gotta know when to walk away… only you know you so take some time to examine yourself and see if it is really time to change and begin to build it today.  Be courageous and have faith!

* Image Credit: OliverAlex

I have noticed recently that I don’t feel like I am getting older.  Sure, the outward evidence is there and yes there is enough gray hair to notice the effects.  However, the inside of me still desires much the same things that I did when I was younger.  This has left me with a question… do our childhood dreams leave us when we get older?

Having a childhood dream to start with

There many different types of childhood dreams.  There is the dream to play cricket or football for your country.  There is the desire to be an astronaut and so on.  However, there is another area of desire altogether that hangs around us and won’t leave.  This last desire that sits with us wherever we go.  When I was young I used to imagine myself playing cricket for my country.  Yet, I never really wanted it.  Playing cricket for me wasn’t fun.  I was slow to catch on to the basics of the game and even now watching the longer form of the game tires and somewhat bores me.   This desire to play for my country may have been just a passing desire of childhood fantasy.  However, there may be something in your childhood that’s hung around.  Something that gave you some concept of you.  More on that later.

Knowing the ever there childhood desire

There are some things that are the air you breathe.  You may have found that inward desire hard to conceptualise when you were a child because everything seems so simple.  When I ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up they simply say what it is and don’t worry about it.  To them it’s a done deal… taken care of.  Maybe because it’s a deferred future event and perhaps not really something that makes sense yet.    However, the reality of it is this: there is something in you that surpasses all other childhood desires and still remains.  I have it… so do you.  If you don’t have it… chances are you have buried it or maybe you are like some people I have met who didn’t discover it until they were much older than me.  Either way, look for it… it’s there.

You don’t have to think about what you know

The other thing that dawned on me, was that you don’t have to think about what you know.  When you are inwardly confident of something… you don’t need to be convinced.  When you know something intuitively you know it.  There are few times in your life when you will find this to be wrong.  We experience cognitive dissonance sometimes because we fail to allow room for the intuitive side of our beings to surface.  What we don’t realise is that us is us and even if we surpress us for a season… us will surface!  I like to think of it this way: Life is a crude mix of predestination and free choice!  Sometimes things are predestined but only if you make certain choices… or sometimes certain choices lead to predestined realities.  Sometimes things are totally random… so there you have it.

What remains is the desire after all is lost

The problem with impossible things is that they are impossible.   Bringing a desire to pass is a hard game for most of us.  It takes training, time, patience, philanthropy, prejudice, pride and injustice.  However, in the final battle it’s us versus us.  We can either spend time looking for avenues to begin releasing these inner desires (so long as they are LEGAL) and move into what I have come to know as “liberation”.  Here’s where my predestination versus choice bit comes in again: choose to follow that which you know you have to do.  If you don’t, it will still be there next year about this time when you are thinking about it again!

*Image Credit: Remind

Recently I went to Hungry Jacks (Burger King if you are overseas) for Father’s day.  I got to the counter and faced with the usual paradox of choice I wasn’t sure what to order.  Then my wife pointed at the “Ultimate Double Whopper”.  It looked great.  When I went to order I left out one word in the title of the meal and found myself eating a regular double whopper.  The word was “supreme” I was devastated… but I did learn something very valuable from this experience… always ask for exactly what you want.

The stinging disappointment of loss

There can be nothing worse that realising you have paid for something that you really don’t want.  I guess the step before that is to know what you want.  I never know what I want in advance… I know I want it usually when I have it… when is not to say I never wanted it.  It’s to say that I didn’t know I wanted it until I had it.  Having it, is not necessarily wanting it, but wanting it… that’s having it from another angle.  I digress.

When I ordered my meal I found myself realising that just one word caused this pain.  I wasn’t eating what I had ordered I was eating a smaller somewhat deplorable version of the meal I wanted!  All because I had not asked for exactly what I wanted.  There are times in life when you must know what you want so clearly that you have to understand it before you want it.  Now, that sounds wrong and it probably doesn’t make sense… yet if you ask wrongly you will be disappointed.

What you ask for you receive

And of course sometimes you don’t.  However, when you have a desire for something, being vague when considering the outcome of that desire is less than helpful.  Say you have a desire to put out fires.   You become a fire fighter and experience the cognitive dissonance of realising that you never really wanted it.  You notice your friends in the ambulance have a good time so you decide to become a paramedic.  You hate this job too.  In both cases you asked for what you wanted and got it… and were still left extremely disappointed.  What happened?  You hadn’t worked out the question.

The question comes first, then the answer

The question and answer to knowing what you want stems from the desire and what it means… not just the desire.  The inward desire to teach doesn’t mean you go and become a school teacher.  Find out what it means to you then reframe the question in another way.  Say you have a desire to fly.  Good, why do you have that desire and what does it really mean.  Don’t rush off and be a pilot yet… otherwise you may find yourself in a load of trouble.  Reframe it and ask what does this desire mean?  Trust me you can save yourself a lot of heartache by first sensing the desire and secondly interpreting it so thirdly you can ask specific questions that are sharp without missing words.  In other words, be sure of what you want by finding out you want it and need it, then focus on extracting that desire as a template.  That does NOT mean you will have it all worked out in advance… it simply means you will know that you know that your desire is clear and the way of articulating it is also clear.

The bottom line to this post

When you have desires they will remain that way until you decide to articulate them.  Remove materialistic constraints from your mind and think with me for a minute.  You will never totally remove desire from you.  The very least you can do is focus on that desire and begin to flesh it out.  In my own life I have a desire to teach or a very basic drive that says ‘teach’.  That doesn’t mean I will be a university lecturer my whole life.  Other doors for teaching may open up elsewhere.  That won’t change the desire but it may change the context in which I air that desire.

In all honesty the signage at Hungry Jacks is probably the main reason I didn’t get what I wanted.  But there was a lesson in it for me.  Focusing on the desire is secondary to understanding the context.  You need to know your desires, what they mean, how to articulate them before you begin to ask for what you want.  Quite often, what you want is not what you need to articulate that desire.  Still, if you don’t let it out of the bag it will let itself out in ways unexpected in times to come… trust me I know.  It was also the simple truth that I didn’t express what I wanted clearly enough to the lady at the front counter… maybe I should get my glasses checked!

Well that is a good question.  Recently, I have been extremely busy so I have not had a great deal of time to write to the blog as much as I would have liked.  Sure, it could be that I just got a new kick-ass television set or I have become addicted to House of the Dead 2 and 3.  That aside, I am in the process of a few exciting projects.   I am putting my ideas about strategic problem solving together for a business focused handbook.   That’s one, then there’s my feral information systems project, another project on wiki use in education (on-going), my emerging online fiction project and much, much more.  Add to that teaching, family stuff and the like and you begin to see that one has to prioritise!

On the other hand I am enjoying writing blog posts so I will continue to do so.  Though, until I have more time I can’t see myself writing copious amounts as I used to. There is one coming up shortly on saying what you really mean.  I apologise for the delays in posting… there is still good stuff coming… I promise!

This massive image above is the model phone I have recently purchased through eBay.   When it arrived  I unwrapped the box and got really REALLY excited when I saw it.  It was shiny.  Alas, my excitement was followed by bewilderment when I couldn’t turn the bloody thing on.  I tried everything… except pushing the little button on the side (see above picture).  Turns out the graceful person I sent the phone back to tested it and it worked for him… just fine.  OOPS.   Me being used to pressing the red button to end a call (i.e. the button you ALWAYS USE NOKIA ENGINEERS) thought that the phone would have turned on that way.  It didn’t.

My definition of the problem was wrong

When you start something from the wrong basis or the wrong starting point it doesn’t matter how well you analyse it… you will never find a cause because the cause ain’t there!  You defined the problem wrong in the first place.  Like me and my hapless phone skills you are labouring under the wrong assumption.  If you walked to the bus stop and caught the 533 bus into town when you wanted to go to the Gold Coast, you are going to the wrong place.

Same thing applies when we tunnel down to our favourite perception rather than testing our known definitions of a problem.  This is not easy but it might save you six weeks waiting for you phone to return!