Sep 11th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
Making mistakes – yeah, I’ve got it down to an art form. Now if I can make learning from my mistakes an art form that would be something. No promises here but some simple observations about mistakes and how we can learn from them.
Last week I had made the plan to attend an important event early on Friday morning. When I mean early I mean 6 a.m. early! In order for me to be there I would need to get up by 4:30 in the morning, get ready and leave my home by 5:30 to be to the event by 6:00. I’ve done it before and knew what I needed to do to be there.
Well, guess what, I blew it! I didn’t make it and was deeply disappointed in myself. I did what any normal person would do and beat myself up mentally. That’s fine but if I’m going to learn anything from this I’ve got to do more than just mentally beat myself up. I’ve got to analyze the situation, see what I did wrong and then change my ways. Continue reading →
Posted in: Choices, Habits, Master Your Mind.
Tagged: Choices · Improving · Mistakes · Planning
Sep 8th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
I want to talk today about the power of decisions. When you think about any change that you’ve ever made in your life, didn’t it really happen the moment you made a decision? Sometimes we say, “Oh it’s hard to change, it took me forever to change.” Usually what takes forever is getting yourself to the point of deciding. It’s the “getting ready to get ready to change” that’s takes so long. You really didn’t make any changes until you decided to change.
So you can say today, “That’s it! I’m done. I’m never going to do that again” or “this is the way I’m going to be from now on.” It’s the power of a decision. No change was ever made in anybody’s life without first deciding. Once you make a decision then you can move forward. A lot of times you say, “Oh it’s so hard to change, it’s so hard to do this, it’s so hard to do that” but really it’s not hard because you’re really not doing it yet, you’re really not making any effort until you decide.
The decision – when things begin to happen
Once you have made that decision, things start to happen in your life. Making that one single decision, saying from this point on, from this time, this minute, this second, I am going in a new direction. I am no longer going in the direction I was going. I have turned my life. I am headed in a new direction and everything I do and everything I say and everything I feel is different. This gets you on the road. You won’t totally change your life in a day but you will be amazed at how quickly you move in that direction. Continue reading →
Posted in: Decisions, Master Your Mind, Self-Image.
Tagged: Choices · Decisions · Self-Image
Sep 7th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
Let’s talk about habits. What are habits? I’ve been in the computer industry for nearly twenty years and I’ve written over a million lines of software code in that period of time. I understand how a computer works. I understand software. I know how a program works. A program is simply a set of instructions that tell the computer what to do. The computer can make decisions and perform operations based on those instructions. You can load different programs in a computer and it will follow different instructions depending of what program you have loaded.
Like a Player Piano
I kind of relate it to a player piano when I try to explain software to people. When I was a kid our family had a player piano. We had a lot of fun with it. It wasn’t electric so we had to sit at the piano and pump the pedals with your feet to get the air going which made the piano go. In the piano you would put a roll, a piano roll. It sort of looked like a paper towel roll almost. Actually more like a scroll. In this paper were punched little holes. Depending on where these holes were punched in the paper, that would determine what notes would play and how long the holes were would determine how long the note would play.
So you could take a piano roll and put it in the piano and it would play a song. You could take out that roll and put another one in and it would play a different song because it was a different set of instructions. That is similar to how a computer program works.
Like a Computer Program
You can install a computer program in a computer and it’s a set of instructions and it tells the computer what to do in given situations depending on the inputs that are given. Now a computer is a little more sophisticated than a player piano. A computer can detect mouse movements, it can detect keyboard input and it can detect a number of other things and make decisions based upon those inputs. A computer program can read data from files that are stored on the hard drive and make decisions dependant on the data. Continue reading →
Posted in: Habits, Master Your Mind, Thoughts.
Tagged: Habits · Mind · Software · Thoughts
Aug 28th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
Fork in the road
What if there was a key behavior that if you could master, would save you untold pain, worry, effort and time? What if this behavior could make your efforts to achieve total self-mastery ten times easier? Today I’m going to teach you a simple concept that seems to elude most people, yet is so simple.
One thing you share in common with nearly every one else is that your day is full of decisions. Dozens of times a day you are faced with a fork in the road and must decide which way to go. Humans are naturally lazy creatures so when you are faced with two choices you tend to gravitate toward the easiest path. Why choose the long, hard road when you can take the short, easy one? Or why do something when you just don’t feel like it? As you stand there at the fork in the road and evaluate the situation, the pull to the easy road becomes powerfully strong. More often than not, if you are like the average person, you are sucked into the easy road. Continue reading →
Posted in: Choices, Decisions, Goals, Habits, Master Your Mind, Self Mastery.
Tagged: Decisions · Forks · Goals · Habits · Thoughts
Aug 26th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
Is it possible to survive in today’s world without a credit card? The answer I get from most people is that it can’t be done. To do anything these days requires a credit card, it seems. If you want to make purchases on the Internet you have to have a credit card. You can’t reserve a hotel or buy plane tickets without a credit card. Most people use them now to buy gas. Fast food restaurants take them along with movie theatres, the post office and grocery stores. It seems everybody takes credit cards. So it would seem that you really do need a credit card to survive in today’s world.
The only problem with that statement is that it’s dead wrong. I have never owned a credit card in my life and I don’t plan on owning one. When I tell people I have booked airline flights, booked hotels, traveled to China and Sweden and other countries, gone on cruises and purchased all kinds of things over the Internet without a credit card they say, “You’re lying!” Continue reading →
Posted in: Credit Cards, Get Out of Debt.
Tagged: Credit Cards · Debt
Aug 7th, 2009
by Garold N. Larson.
Good morning! Today I want to talk about an interesting phenomenon that actually happened this morning. It has to do with your mind’s ability to block out what it’s not interested in and only let in what it is trained to let in.
What brought this up was what happened this morning when my alarm went off. I have to admit that I hit the snooze button and jumped back in bed to sleep for 10 more minutes. I actually set my alarm 10 minutes earlier than when I plan to get up. So I lay back in bed and slept a little longer. When my alarm went off again and when I woke up I noticed that my wife was already out of bed. She wasn’t there. She had already gotten up to go wake the boys so they could do their paper route.
I thought it was interesting that I didn’t hear her alarm at all. We both have alarm clocks. They are very similar. They each have a red digital readout and their alarms sound very similar. It’s that annoying beep beep beep sound that today’s alarm clocks typically make. The sounds of the two alarm clocks aren’t that different really. They aren’t exactly the same but very similar. I thought it was interesting that my mind, my brain, is trained to hear my alarm clock and not hers. Her alarm didn’t wake me up but mine did. I thought it was interesting that I hear mine but I don’t hear hers. How can that be?
It makes you wonder about what else in life we don’t see or hear because of what our minds have been trained to see or hear. There is a story I once heard that helps us understand this phenomenon.
WE HEAR WHAT WE LISTEN FOR
Two men were walking along a crowded sidewalk in a downtown business area. Suddenly one exclaimed: ‘Listen to the lovely sound of that cricket.’ But the other could not hear. He asked his companion how he could detect the sound of a cricket amid the din of people and traffic. The first man, who was a zoologist, had trained himself to listen to the voices of nature. But he didn’t explain. He simply took a coin out of his pocket and dropped it to the sidewalk, whereupon a dozen people began to look about them. ‘We hear,’ he said, ‘what we listen for.’ –Kermit L. Long, taken from ‘The Three Boxes of Life,’ by Richard Bolles
We hear what we listen for. What are our minds trained to hear? What are out eyes trained to see? What are we conscious of and what are we unconscious of? What are we paying attention to and what are we not paying attention to? Continue reading →
Posted in: Habits, Master Your Mind, Power of Focus, Thoughts.
Tagged: Focus · Habits · Listening · Mind · Thoughts
Making mistakes – yeah, I’ve got it down to an art form. Now if I can make learning from my mistakes an art form that would be something. No promises here but some simple observations about mistakes and how we can learn from them.