The Power of Effortless Living

When I tell people I think life should be effortless, they usually laugh. They think I’m joking. Everyone knows life isn’t effortless, that getting things done and achieving anything worthwhile requires hard work, time and a lot of effort. Success costs, and people who become successful without paying are either cheats, crooks or just lucky.

Think, for a moment, about the metaphors you use to describe your experience of life. We often see life as a struggle, a battle, a war, a difficult journey with obstacles to be overcome, a test to be passed.  These images colour our actions and determine the way we go about doing things. We have come to see brute force as the best way to get things done. In the west, especially, we tend to carry around images of the lone pioneer, the individual battling against the forces of chaos, taming nature. To have achieved is to have beaten the odds, to have struggled and held on and never given up. Victory is for the tenacious, the resilient, the person who never gives in. Read the Rest of This Article »

10 Tips for Developing Resilience

Resilience or the ability to ‘bounce back’ after encountering problems is an essential trait. Inevitably, life will throw up some apparently adverse situations, and being able to deal with such circumstances in a positive and creative way is often a measure of how happy and successful a person is.

Scientific studies have shown that resilient people show lower levels of depression and are more likely to develop personally as a result of adversity than people with low levels of resilience.

Some people do seem to be more resilient by nature but, like most things, resilience is a trait which can be developed. The following are ways of doing so. Read the Rest of This Article »

7 Ways To Get What You Want According to Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte needs no introduction. Widely regarded as the greatest general who ever lived, his exploits are almost the stuff of legend. Like many great people, he is a controversial figure, and some historians regard him as having set back the Economic progress of Europe by a generation, though others dispute this.

Clearly, Napoleon was a driven man who aggressively sought power and had a great sense of his own personal ability. Whatever we might think about Napoleon and his legacy, however, he enjoyed enormous success as he built his empire, and much of his thinking has application for us today as we go about the business of building our own lives. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Key To An Effortless Life

A few months ago I had a toothache and so I went to see a dentist. He had a look at the problem and then knocked off a bit of my tooth and smoothed the rough edge down. I can feel it now as I’m writing this. He told me that he could try to build the tooth back up, but that a basic rule of dentistry is that removal strengthens and addition weakens.

I am not a Buddhist and I don’t know much about Buddhism. But one thing I know – and I think it’s probably all I need or care to know – is that Buddhism teaches a simple truth: suffering comes from attachment, and the end of attachment is the end of suffering. So whenever you can feel yourself feeling bad, you know you’ve become attached to something. Something matters to you.

There is no end to the list of things you can be attached to, no end to the things that can matter to you, things that you care about, things that have meaning for you. People sometimes talk about the ‘meaning of life’ – in the Buddhist view, meaning means suffering. So the way to stop suffering is to relinquish meaning. Let it go. Surrender. Read the Rest of This Article »

P T Barnum on Success

P T Barnum was a Victorian businessman who is remembered for his traveling circus – the ‘greatest show on earth’ – and the weird and wonderful ‘exhibits’ it contained. For some, Barnum was an exploiter and an opportunist, a man who took advantage of the weak and the vulnerable and who preyed on the credulity of his audience – the phrase ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’ was coined by Barnum. For others, he is the epitome of success and philanthropy. He established the Biology department at Tufts University, for example, and many of his ‘exhibits’ – the unfortunate individuals who were paraded in front of amazed audiences – became quite wealthy in their own right.

He lived in a different age, but whatever you might think about his circus, Barnum was a remarkable person who enjoyed fame, wealth and success. There is a great deal we can learn and apply from this master of entertainment in our own efforts to become successful. Read the Rest of This Article »

Time Flies: 5 Ways To Make Sure You Enjoy The Ride

Image courtesy of: Julia Kim Smith/Shamim Momin, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria

‘Tempus fugit – time flies. Life is short. I can’t believe another year’s gone by…’

People say all sorts of things about time, usually about how little of it they have. Many of us genuinely lead busy lives and do find it hard to fit everything in – work, family, hobbies, exercise. But leading a happy and fulfilled life and achieving all our goals does require the skill of handling our time well. Time is a resource and must be managed.

Keep a record of what you are doing with your time.

Keeping a proper record of what you’re doing is a really important first step in managing your time and hence being more productive. When I tried this for myself, it turned out that there were vast swathes of my time that weren’t being used productively at all. Although I always regarded myself as having no time and being far too busy to do any more than I was already doing, in fact there was plenty of time spent on pretty meaningless things such as watching TV, surfing the Internet (not in a productive way), or just lying around. Read the Rest of This Article »

6 Myths That Stand In Your Way

“Unzip The Truth” courtesy of ChubbaArt/DeviantART

I recently went to see the remake of ‘Clash of the Titans’ at the cinema. I loved the 1981 version as a kid and was keen to see the new movie.

Perseus’ quest to defeat the kraken, save Andromeda and fulfill his destiny is the archetype of everyone’s life. We are all on a journey and, like Perseus, we encounter plenty obstacles along the way. Many of them seem strange and frightening, and we can be tempted to give up in the face of what appear to be overwhelming odds.

But many of the terrors we encounter along the way are just phantoms – they disappear as soon as we stand up to them. When we face them down, they dissolve like a dream upon waking. Our real enemy, however, is much more dangerous. It is the dream we create for ourselves – the dream of comfort and security, the myths we feed ourselves on. These myths are dangerous because so many people believe them and they can be hard to spot.

We tell ourselves stories because we life to feel safe. They are comfortable and pleasant, and they keep us asleep. Anthony de Mello, a man who really understood human nature, wrote, ‘The first thing I want you to understand, if you really want to wake up, is that you don’t want to wake up.’ Read the Rest of This Article »

8 Tips For Guaranteed Success According To Paul Raymond

Paul Raymond was an entrepreneur, property mogul and lifetime purveyor of pornography. He died fairly recently at the age of 82. The rights and wrongs of the pornography industry are one thing (which I have no intention of debating) but it has to be said that Raymond’s life is an example of how certain traits, certain ways of thinking about and doing things lead to success.

I am not putting Paul Raymond on a pedestal nor suggesting that we should emulate him in every respect. Indeed, Raymond was not universally successful – though he became very rich and successful in his field, his private life was a bit of a mess and from what I’ve read, he didn’t appear to be very happy, living for many years as a recluse. This just goes to underline the fact that money does not lead to happiness – these things are independent. Obviously, Raymond failed to actualize himself fully, but there are lessons we can learn from his life – he has much in common with other materially successful people. Read the Rest of This Article »

Change Your Beliefs, Change Your Life

“Mosk” courtesy of Maciej Mizer

Our life is what our thoughts make it. Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil. ~Marcus Aurelius

A belief is something you consider to be true. You cannot decide to believe one thing this week and another, opposing thing, next week. You might think you can, but it really doesn’t work like that. I read recently that baby circus elephants are tied to a strong metal post with a heavy chain because they will try to escape and expend a lot of energy on pulling at their tether. After some time, they accept that they will not be able to escape and so stop pulling. The adult elephants are tethered to a wooden stake with a light rope: they could easily escape, but they believe they are unable to do so, and so the light tethering works as a kind of symbol of their bondage. It is clear that whether your beliefs are true or not is irrelevant. What matters is what you regard to be true. It seems to me that this is a good definition of ‘belief.’ Read the Rest of This Article »

How To Be Utterly Miserable

Life’s hard, isn’t it? There are lots of things in life that you shouldn’t have to do, and work is one of them. So don’t waste another second of your time in feeling good about it? With my top ten tips for feeling utterly miserable at work, you’ll soon be walking around with a permanent frown and a head full of misery!

Focus on problems, especially ones that you can’t control This is the most important skill to master. If you can crack this one then all the rest will be easy. Here we go. You should always look for problems in every situation. When one problem appears to have been solved, which does occasionally happen for some reason, look for others. The great thing here is that there are always problems – they are everywhere, so it’s really easy to focus on them. This means you don’t have to spend a lot of time finding problems because they tend to present themselves naturally, and you can focus all your energy on complaining as loudly and as widely as possible. As well as finding problems, it’s absolutely vital that you spend as much time and energy as possible complaining about them. This basic skill of complaining about problems is the foundation to a truly miserable life, and at work you have ample opportunity to practice this skill. Read the Rest of This Article »