I started this blog 16 months, hoping to develop my writing skills, connect with smart people around the world, and create a new income stream.

By those standards it’s been a success. But more importantly, I’ve learned a lot. Namely, after 266 posts on the subjects of self improvement, motivation, and productivity, I can say without a doubt that life is completely and utterly pointless.

That’s right. PickTheBrain is throwing in the towel. If you need me I’ll be embracing hedonism, sloshing around in my own vomit, and doing absolutely nothing to further myself or the human race.

Why? The top 5 reasons are as follows:

1. You’re going to die. No big shock here, but do you realize how many people fail to grasp the consequences of this? Even if you live some awesome life, make a ton of cash, and go down as the great person ever, all your accomplishments will eventually go to some undeserving brats and people will exploit your words and ideas to further their own selfish ends.
2. Working is hard. I mean really hard. And it just never seems to end. It’s just one thing after another. More more more. If there’s no way to win life, what’s the point of trying?
3. Most people are terrible, the others are faking. The more good I’ve tried to do, the more people jump up to insult me. And it works. That stuff really hurts. I’d rather be on the dishing end of trollish insults.
4. Vice is nice. Really, it feels great. Have some pain? Take this. Feel guilty? Drink that. Indulging is the one act that has never let me down. It always delivers. That’s more than I can say for the law of attraction.
5. Civilization is doomed. The human race has been around what, a million years or so? And this is where we are? It seems like the only developments have been new ways torture, enslave, and incessantly bicker with each other. Let’s hope that giant meteor headed for earth doesn’t get deflected by the sun’s gravitational field

Wow, I feel a lot better now. Or maybe it’s the liter of Jack Daniels I used to wash down a Wendy’s Baconator.

Difficult people are a fact of life. At home you can avoid them by surrounding yourself with agreeable people, but in the work place most of us don’t have that luxury.

While your natural tendency may be to avoid them at all costs, it’s better to deal with them in a thoughtful manner. This is crucial to your career. If you develop the ability to work with anyone and handle the tough nuts, you’ll be the natural choice for promotions and leadership positions.

The following are some suggestions for resolving potentially awkward work situations. Just remember, if we can learn to effectively deal with difficult people our work life will become much less stressful and far more enjoyable.

Self Confidence

When our lives are made difficult by unsympathetic and dominating people we can quickly lose our self-confidence. To avoid this it is important not to value the opinions of negative people. If we can maintain a self confidence and self belief then it will be easy to ignore the criticisms of difficult work colleagues. Self confidence will not be built by heavily criticizing the difficult person. Self confidence comes through remembering our own positive qualities.

Should You Find a New Job?

Sometimes the people we work with are so awkward that we want to move and get another job. This is a difficult choice. The first thing to remember is that if we move jobs, there is a high chance we will meet similar problems, just with a different set of people. If we keep moving jobs with the hope of finding an office full of saints, we will be continually on the move.

The first thing is to try and deal with the situation; we need to be detached from the awkward person as much as possible. However, if we have really tried everything possible and work is still making us miserable, then is it worth considering a new job. We spend so much of our waking time in our job that we can’t allow unpleasant people to spoil it.

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Depending upon our life experiences, each one of us has a different definition of abundance, much of which is learned during childhood. We are taught at an early age to either want for nothing or yearn for more. We learn how to react to those who have much more than us, and we develop our thoughts and attitudes about sharing with the less fortunate. We decide which things we hunger for the most, many times based upon those things that we lacked early in life.

As we grow and develop, we are constantly bombarded by messages regarding wealth, power, money, and greed. Magazines, newspapers, television, and movies all express society’s thoughts regarding such matters, and as time has progressed, we have developed into a more materialistic society. More emphasis has been placed on the ownership of elaborate possessions and such things as spirituality and family values seem to have been cast aside.

This sets us up for great disappointments, since we are taught that we can never have enough. It leaves us striving to reach an ambiguous and unattainable goal – to have “enough.” Yet there is never any definition of what enough truly is.

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Has this ever happened to you?

You’re happily going about your day when, out of nowhere, someone criticizes something you say or do. Suddenly you lose focus and can’t stop thinking about what they said or wrote. You know you shouldn’t be bothered, but knowing doesn’t help you stop thinking about it over and over and over.

In the past I have spent hours, days even, thinking about even the smallest of critical comments. It still happens to me every so often, but for the most part I have learned how to effectively handle it. I guess you could say I am a sensitive person, and truth be told I don’t think there is anything wrong with this for the most part. However, being sensitive to criticism is a major problem if it causes you to lose focus on important tasks or makes you stop acting in a certain manner due to fear of being criticized.

Since putting myself “out there”, in particular with my blogging, I have had to implement a number of strategies for dealing with criticism. And for the most part these strategies have worked well. That is not to say I don’t still feel the sting of criticism, but for the most part I don’t let it hijack my thoughts or stop me from acting in my normal manner.

Understanding Criticism

To effectively deal with criticism, it is important to first understand that there are different types of, and reasons for, critical comments.

It is not always about you. The truth is, there are some angry, jealous and insecure people in the world who are critical because… well…. that’s just the way they are. That’s not to say that sometimes they are not critical for good reasons, but other times it is just a case of you being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It is inevitable. Recently I read how Drew Barrymore was criticized by some people after donating $1,000,000 to charity. To me, this just shows that when it comes to how we act or what we say often we are caught in a Catch 22. That is, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

It may be justified. We each have our imperfections, and this means that sometimes we do something wrong or say something stupid. When this happens, any criticism we receive may be well justified.

How to Handle Criticism

We now know that not all criticism is the same. The key is to be aware of what type of criticism you are receiving and then act accordingly. The following are some strategies that I find to be effective:

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In last weeks article The End of Wealth, we offered a small prize of a $20 Amazon gift certificate to one person who left a comment.

The winner we have chosen is Bruce from Brucisms. He said:

“I believe we are turning a corner. After two decades of working 80 hours per week to have the nicest house, car, clothes – a lot of people are just tired and empty.

It is my (possibly overly optimistic) belief that there is a true movement toward responsibility and values. I think we see this both in terms of increased interest in both spirituality and conservation. I think a lot of us have awakened after a couple of decades of materialism to a hangover, and realize that we aren’t kids anymore.”

But that wasn’t all. As a follow up, Bruce had the following book suggestion:

“As a follow up for your readers – I would highly recommend Jason Jennings’ wonderful book “Think Big, Act Small.” After researching the top public and private companies in the US, he and his team narrowed the field to 10 companies that had achieved 10% increases in profit every year for 10 or more consecutive years. The extraordinary thing is that the common factor in all these companies were exceptionally high values!

It seems that doing the right thing pays the best over the long term…”

Thank you to every one who left a comment. You had some very interesting things to say, and it certainly wasn’t easy to pick just one winner.

Being able to acquire bigger and better things in life is not making us any happier. In fact, you may be surprised to hear that our happiness levels peaked in 1957. According to David Wann, co-author of Affluenza: The All Consuming Epidemic, the most affluent countries around the world are the same ones experiencing the most stress. Despite the fact we live in larger homes and have more gadgets than our parents ever dreamed of, depression and stress are very common problems.

Our addiction to consumption and getting the biggest, newest or trendiest thing is taking us further away from what really brings deep satisfaction to our lives. We have reached a place in our evolution where time is becoming a precious and valued commodity. Our souls are craving a simplicity with the underlying want of feeling less pressure and less stress in our lives.

If you are not yet convinced of the value in living a simple life, the following are 8 reasons why you should consider embracing a simpler life:

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“Success happens not by chance, but because you were given a chance and took advantage of it.” – Kevin Geary

To most people, being born in a free country is the greatest gift. To others, it’s a fleeting thought. For the latter, I feel sorry.

Before I go any further, I must admit that not everyone will find success. There will always be those who sit around waiting for success to find them. There will be those who are simply not willing to achieve it. And then there’s the fact that success would not exist without failure. All of these things create what we know; a world where success and failure are experienced by different groups of people.

Everyone in a free country has the opportunity to succeed. So why doesn’t everyone succeed? Because success and failure are choices made consciously and subconsciously and failure is chosen by many for various reasons.

Here are 7 undeniable reasons why some people fail where others succeed:

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It’s natural to experience nervousness when meeting new people. So much hangs in the balance of that delicate first impression. Act the wrong way and you might be perceived as stupid, weird, or worst of all, the dreaded creepy.

To prevent this from happening, its important to understand body language and the way it affects perception. By reading the body language of others and managing your own, you can create the first impression that represents you best.

The Basics of Body Language

The idea of reading body language can seem like voodoo, but the truth is you’re already doing it. The mind subconsciously interprets body language and uses it to form impressions.

Do you ever have impressions of people that don’t seem justified? Maybe they strike you as strange or untrustworthy, but for no particular reason? Chances are, their body language is giving off bad signals that your brain is reacting to subconsciously.

Once you start paying attention, these signal are easy to spot. It’s a language you already speak and it’s extremely intuitive, you just need to become consciously receptive to it. This post is intended to be an overview of the basics, but there is more good info here and here.

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Unless you have been living under a rock, you will know there are some major problems in the world’s financial markets at the moment. Working for a global bank, I guess you could say I have a front row seat for this debacle that in recent days has worsened with the stunning collapse of Bear Stearns.

Much of what I have read has blamed Wall Street for turning the problems related to subprime lending into a major global problem. But I also recently read this Newsweek article where a former mortgage broker shares his insights into the fraud and greed that has plagued his former industry:

Lenders… which underwrote loans offered up by brokers and resold them to giants like Countrywide, spent much of their workdays trying to spot the stupid tricks brokers routinely used to get unqualified borrowers approved for loans. They’d say a buyer intended to live in a house when it was really an investment property. They’d falsify the buyer’s income by having a relative pose as his employer, or use scanners and software to forge W-2 forms. They’d find ways to hide debts (like a car payment) by looking for a credit report that omitted key data. They also routinely gamed the appraisal system, encouraging appraisers to look for “comparables” that were far nicer homes in better neighborhoods—all in an effort to drive up the appraised value of the home they were mortgaging.

Perhaps because I know a lot of people in this industry, this article really got me thinking about wealth and the ways in which we go about trying to accumulate it.

Greed and shady business dealings are obviously nothing new, but what are we to make of them? And how does it relate to self improvement?

Ends and Means

Now, the last thing I want to do in this article is come across as self-righteous in the moral advice that follows. Let me state here that I am far from perfect, and I am not always proud of the ways I act. But this current chaos in the world’s financial markets, and other recent examples of greed (eg Enron), reminded me of Gandhi’s teachings of the seven things that will destroy us. These are:

• Wealth without work
• Pleasure without conscience
• Knowledge without character
• Commerce without morality
• Science without humanity
• Worship without sacrifice
• Politics without principle

As Stephen R. Covey points out in The 8th Habit, each of these admirable ends (eg wealth and commerce) can be accomplished through an unprincipled or unworthy means.

Many people give little attention to the means as their ego tells them the ends justify the means. This approach was infamously promoted by Machiavelli in The Prince, which suggested, amongst other things, the shrewd methods an aspiring prince could use to acquire the throne (remind you of any modern day politicians?).

If you live according to this philosophy, I would like to invite you to consider a very different way of looking at ends, and the means in which you go about accomplishing them. If we are to quell our ego, and instead live a life where we follow our conscience, then the ends and means become inseparable.

According to Stephen R. Covey, if you reach an admirable end through the wrong means, the ends ultimately turn to dust in your hands. It may appear that you can, but there are unintended consequences that are not seen or evident at first that will eventually destroy the end. The example he gives in The 8th Habit is:

• The parent who yells at their kids to clean their rooms will accomplish the end of having a clean room. But this very means has the potential to negatively affect relationships, and it is unlikely the room will stay clean when the parent leaves town for a few days.

Now, to return to the topic of wealth, I think it is possible to see much of the world’s current financial problems as stemming from people who wrongly believe the ends justify the means.

My advice? It is wonderful to aspire to wealth, but don’t lose sight of the means of accomplishing it as you go about your journey.

What do you think? We would love to hear your thoughts on anything discussed in this article. As a small incentive, we have a $20 Amazon gift certificate to give to one person who shares their thoughts.

Peter writes about how to enjoy life at The Change Blog. If you enjoyed this article, you may wish to download his free e-book, A Year of Change.

You have superpowers – it is absolutely true!

You have the power to do things so far beyond what you can even imagine right now. In fact, you are capable of things that you would probably consider bizarre or even maybe supernatural. Your mind is a vast, largely unexplained source of energy and power. In fact, your thoughts even have the power to alter reality.

Unfortunately, because we don’t understand how these powers work, most people dismiss them. In so doing, we limit ourselves and our success in life. I will reveal here how you can tap into these superpowers and take advantage of them to make drastic improvements in your life.

Stay with me here. I know the tendency of many will be to immediately dismiss this as just a bunch of nutty ideas. But let me submit to you that many very successful people have believed in these powers and used them to create incredible fortunes and success. Also, if you just look at the facts, it is easy to conclude that there must be some truth to this. Where there is smoke, there is usually fire. These powers have been written about for centuries. They have been researched and acknowledged by very notable people. They are mentioned in most of the classic wisdom literature. They exist whether you are willing to admit it and use it to your benefit or not. If you don’t, then you are missing out on getting the very most out of your life.

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