Image courtesy of *Zara

Who’s in control of your life? Who’s pulling your strings?

For the majority of us, it’s other people – society, colleagues, friends, family or our religious community. We learned this way of operating when we were very young, of course. We were brainwashed. We discovered that feeling important and feeling accepted was a nice experience and so we learned to do everything we could to make other people like us. We didn’t want to be singled out by the crowd for being different because this wasn’t such a nice feeling. We learned this way of being so well that, as adults, we continue – mostly through mutual peer pressure – to keep each other in check. Like sheep without any need for a sheepdog, we keep each other in line.

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Many people find it hard to forgive. As we go through life, it’s inevitable that we’ll come across people who wrong us in one way or another. From the one who cuts you off in traffic to the one who puts you on hold and forgets about you, there’s no shortage of people out there who aren’t treating us exactly the way we’d like. Unfortunately, we’re rather limited in our ability to influence their behavior. But the good news is that we have a lot of control over how we react to them.

Why forgive?

First of all, keep in mind that it’s generally in your best interest to forgive people. Choosing to carry a grudge forever keeps you from ever repairing the relationship. Long after you’ve forgotten what the other person actually did, you’re still focused on being mad at them because you’re stuck in that habit. It’s very easy to blow something way out of proportion because you think too much about what went wrong instead of how to make it right. Don’t be too attached to your anger.

Another thing to consider is what you accomplish by not forgiving. You might decide never to forgive Hitler, and I can’t really object to that. In that case, many people would consider forgiveness to mean compromising their integrity. But what about someone who just made a rude comment about you? Do you really need to be mad at them forever? Is it really worth the stress and the higher blood pressure, or can you just let it go? Just because you might be justified in being mad, doesn’t mean it’s your best option.

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I’m going to ask you something you’ve probably not been asked before in the context of your work: Are you a ninja, a pirate, or a zombie? Or a bit of all three?

The Ninja Attitude

The Ninja is sickeningly efficient. He gets up at five am. He reads blogs about “life-hacking”. He custom-codes his own Firefox plugins. He multitasks by listening to audiobooks at triple speed whilst jogging to work. He sets up complicated systems to manage every aspect of his life. He knows twenty uses for a paperclip. His computer is, frankly, a bit terrifying.

You might be a Ninja if people have said:

• “I don’t know how you get so much done.”
• “Why do you need three computer screens?”
• “What do you mean, hack a moleskine notebook?”

The Ninja is efficiency taken to its extremes – without much regard for effectiveness. He has no hacks for finding purpose, joy or meaning in life. He treats all work as equal, and gets bogged down in trivia. The Ninja has achieved an empty inbox – but at the cost of an empty life.

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What do you want to be when you grow up? For some it may be a disturbing notion to consider that even in our late twenties, thirties and beyond we may still find ourselves asking this question of ourselves. Before I was ten years old I knew with naïve assurance what it was I wanted to do with my life. By the time I was twenty I was well established in the career I had decided on ten years before. Shortly after, life came along and swept the board clean.

If you can decide on a long-term career goal having it ahead of you can be a source of comfort and certainty that you can draw on. Knowing what you want to be when you grow up can serve as an anchor point in life. You know where you are and you know where you’re going. You know what needs to be done and have a plan for how to go about doing it.

On the other hand, indecision and uncertainty when it comes to deciding which career path to choose, which job to take or what training to pursue can become burdensome. Some may feel without a well-defined path to tread throughout their working life that they are at sea without an anchor. Simply drifting along to nowhere in particular. Achieving nothing in particular.

And that’s just what to do during work hours.

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More and more people are becoming aware that they have two distinct minds–the conscious and the subconscious. We are generally more aware of the conscious mind, because we spend most of our waking hours there, while we spend our sleeping hours in the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is like the tip of the iceberg that you see above the water, while the subconscious is below the surface.

We think, reason, decide, compute, and reason with our conscious mind. That would make it seem indispensable and far superior to whatever the subconscious mind does. And until recently, the vast powers of the subconscious mind remained fairly untapped. As science continues to explore its depths, we continue to learn more about its capacity as the quiet dynamo behind the conscious mind.

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The great playwright and Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw once said, “Take care to get what you like, or you will be forced to like what you get.” Wise words indeed.

The concept of lifestyle design was popularized by Tim Ferriss in his book The 4-Hour Workweek. The idea was to create a system that would generate enough money to meet your living expenses, while requiring only 4 hours a week to maintain it. And then by not having a full time job, you’d have the freedom to do whatever you wanted with your life.

As great as this sounds, the reality is that very few people will be able to make a decent income in only 4 hours a week. Most people will be lucky to work only 40 hours a week in the U.S. But that doesn’t mean that you just have to take what you get. On the contrary, with a busy schedule, it’s even more critical that you make the effort to design your own lifestyle.

Make no mistake, your lifestyle will be designed. The only question is whether it will be designed by thought or by chance. Here are some tips for making sure you get what you like, instead of having to like what you get.

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What can four letters tell you about someone (including yourself)? It turns out quite a lot.

“The Personality Puzzle” is the new e-book from Pick The Brain contributor Hunter Nuttall. Back in August we published Hunter’s first article for this blog: Introverts And Extraverts: Can’t We Just Get Along? If you enjoyed this article (and it seems many of you did – it received 90+ comments and 1119 votes on Digg), this book will be of immense interest to you.

What’s the book about?

“Sometimes I just don’t understand human behavior.”- C-3PO

“The Personality Puzzle” aims to help you understand what “makes people tick” via the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). The MBTI originated from the ideas of revolutionary Swiss psychologist Carl Jung. His work was continued by an American mother and daughter team, Katharine Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, and resulted in the MBTI being published in 1962. The MBTI did gain some popularity in the 1980s, but according to Hunter the usefulness of it is grossly underestimated.

What’s so good about the book?

One of the best aspects of Hunter’s e-book is the way he combines psychological research and real-world examples. Here are just a few of things you will discover in “The Personality Puzzle”:

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Some people consider worldly success, such as success in entrepreneurship, to be incompatible with spirituality.  “It’s a dog eats dog world.” they’d say, “If you want to succeed, you do whatever (dirty things) you must do. Then you dress up and go to church on Sundays.  If you want to embrace spirituality full time, stay in the convent, or at least stay in the clean low-paying job.”

I disagree.  In this article, I want to show you how spirituality can help new entrepreneurs in two major challenges they face in starting their own business.

For the purpose of this article, I am defining spirituality as our awareness of higher purpose and power.  That invisible something that transcends us as individuals.  I am not affiliated with any organized religions.

Spirituality offers sustainable motivation

I find it quite dangerous that so many people want to become their own boss because they hate their current jobs.  They want to escape from what they hate, be it the boring job itself or the demanding boss or the work environment.  I don’t say this is no good for moral reasons.  If you don’t like something or someone, then it is so, it’s not good or bad.  I find it dangerous because the escape mentality doesn’t offer any sustainable motivations.

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When you set goals for yourself, do you picture the benefits you’ll receive in a year, five years, ten years? Do you struggle on day by day in activities you don’t particularly enjoy – or actively dislike – because you want to reach a target some day in the distant future?

You might want to rethink your approach to goals, and goal-setting.

I’ve been reading Steve Pavlina’s Personal Development for Smart People, and one of his recommendations that stood out for me was this:

“Understand that you can only take action in the present moment, and you can only enjoy your results in the present as well. You can’t accomplish or experience anything in the past or future because you’re never there”. (Chapter 3, Personal Development for Smart People.)

When Happiness Tomorrow Means Misery Today

How often do you try to root your happiness in achieving some future state? Here are some examples showing how goal-setting can go awry:

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Whether you are an aspiring rock star or not, this list will help you achieve success in your field. It will also show you how some timeless ideas are still vital in your new-fangled social networking environments.

I Was A Teenage Rock Star … kind of …

As a younger dude – sans cell-phone and computer oblivious – during the “upside-down 60s” (AKA the 90s) I had the weird experience of being the lead singer in the biggest indie band in my home city.

Admittedly, it wasn’t a big city – Adelaide, population 1.1 million – but conquering that molehill was an intense trip nevertheless. (After that it all went pear-shaped, but that’s another story.)

Step 1: Don’t Just Dream – Obsess

When I was a pre-teen bookworm, I wanted to be a writer, but at 12 years old I heard the squeal of a heavy-metal lead guitar solo and my focus shifted instantly to becoming a fully-fledged, card-carrying “Rock Star”. It was obviously way sexier. (Pfft! Writer. What the hell was I thinking?)

From that moment on, while my musical tastes matured, my chosen career path remained fixed. It was Rock Star or bust. School was useless to me, so I just stared out the window and obsessed about becoming a Rock Star. Church was useless to me, so I refused to go anymore and lay in bed listening to this month’s flavour and obsessing about becoming a Rock Star.

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