Today we start a new series that I hope will become a tradition every Friday around here at Mobiusman.com. It’s borrowed from an idea that I saw recently being done quite expertly on Donnie’s blog. I’ve just given it a little half-twist (in true Mobius fashion) of my own and called it “Quotivations”.

What is a quotivation? It’s a mash-up of  two words: quotes and  motivational.  Get it? I thought you would you brainy thing you. You knew all along that good quotes, just like all well-assembled word pictures, have the power to motivate and inspire didn’t you?

So here goes our first submission in the “Quotivations Day Series:

“Failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success”

I found this quote in an email I got last week. It’s a quote from one of my most favorite authors of the success/failure dynamic – Napoleon Hill. I like him a lot. Not because he wrote one of the best selling motivational self-development books of all time but because he himself – like a ton of modern-day self-helper/coaches after him – failed to deliver the raw goods and instead skillfully side-stepped the most important “how to” information everyone was needing but no one was aware of yet.

Of course that’s one of the reasons he got away with it. The other is the fact that his was still an age of innocence.  He became a masterful user of the language of his time and that was enough to placate his hungry audience. Enough that they bought his stuff in droves.

Unfortunately, Hill was a great salesman so no one ever noticed that he never got around to actually explaining the mechanics of persistence and determination that lay at the root of what he was trying to say in his books.

Is it because the English language had not evolved enough by his time so that he could use it to explain this mystery cogently? That might be part of it. We do have a better understanding of how human immune systems work these days than we had back then. But, of course, he would have had to have realized the esoteric connection as to what role mindset immunity plays in success attainment.

No one that I’ve ever come across has ever done it yet. A quick search in Google for “mindset immunity” just brings up results tied to this blog right here.

So, what exactly is the “seed of an equivalent success”?

I can sum that up in this one little three-word statement of fact: Failure causes immunity.

More power to you.

Do you have a favorite quote you think should be included in this series?  Please, just leave it here together with your comments. I greatly appreciate your help and involvement.

Want to know more about mindset immunity? I’m creating a new DVD called “Immune To Failure  – Essentials” and you can get notified of it’s release here.

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Although I usually write quite a bit about “mindset immunity”  a while back someone asked me about my “Mobiusman” handle. This post is in response to that. It‘s also an add-on to a series of posts I had previously published beginning here.

Most people will not know what a mobius is although they might recognize it if they saw it. I have explained it in previous posts but here’s a quick refresher.

It’s an invention that, about 150 years ago, was credited to August Ferdinand Mobius.  He was a professor of advanced mathematics at the University Of Lipzig where he contributed to the advancement of a very esoteric sub-field of geometry known as “topology”. When he created the first mobius strip his interest was the examination of two-dimensional forms in three dimensional space. Originally he took a strip of paper and, before joining the ends to each other, gave one end a half-twist.

When I first saw it I was a young boy of ten or eleven years old. It was in an illustrated book on mathematics and I was immediately intrigued with it.

Many years later, when I developed the H.E.R.O. eMachine together with the theory of mindset immunity, I immediately employed the mobius strip as the perfect metaphor that symbolized the key points I was attempting to communicate to the rest of the world.

What better image then a simple construct like the mobius. In an amazingly elegant way it suggests a continuous stable loop of motivation as well as infinite possibilities. For myself and for others it has become an appropriate symbol of personal transformation caused by using the H.E.R.O. eMachine format just once.

There are a few key points that I like to use the mobius strip to help me illustrate. 

Key Point One: Duality Principal

I was continually invoking the idea of the double nature of humanity in my work. I’m a visual guy so I needed a physical structure with which to model the story of how the integration of both mindset and physical immunity work to improve the efficiency of the entire system.

In fact the mobius was so good at illustrating the phenomenon of transformation it was chosen by Gary Anderson in 1970 as a base for his design for the symbol for recycling. It’s still in use today.

Industry leaders, entrepreneurs, educators, and average families today need to get more out of existing resources because it’s more efficient to do so. This applies to physical as well as creative or intuitive resources as these produce results quicker and time – as they say – is money.

The idea of duality is deeply involved in what it means to be human. The idea of the two human natures, the physical and the ethereal, go back a long long time.  Discussions about these elements can be traced back to the times of the great philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato.

Key Point Two: Infinity

I really like the idea of infinity as it relates to how endlessly dual immunity can work to support each of its two parts. The symbol for infinity in mathematics is called the “lemniscate”. It basically looks like a figure eight lying down on its side. Lemniscates, if drawn in three dimensions and then rendered in the third dimension as a flat band, becomes a mobius strip.

Key Point Three: Freedom

It is clear to all of us that negative thinking makes us “stuck” and unable to move forward as we should. In a story, the first ever published on the surface of a mobius strip, I told of the opportunity for freedom of mindset that transformation brings.

I like to think that the mobius is a story about potential. I tell this story often with special emphasis on the two directions that information can travel. It can go to you or it can come through you. The latter being more easily comprehended at a gut level.

So, what’s your handle?  Do you have one? If so tell me about it and if it’s visual send me a picture of it. I’d love to hear from you.

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James Ray's organization is now a tumbling house of cards. Photo: Flickr

A few days ago I was watching the news on-line about the situation surrounding new age guru James Arthur Ray’s fouled up retreat experience that left three participants dead. I picked up on a post by an astute writer who happens to run a New Age type blog. So I checked it out.

While I was reading her post I learned that she knew one of Ray’s victims, a woman by the name of Liz Neuman. Seems that Ms. Newman had been a greeter at the door to the Unity church in Savage, MN. where they both attended. She apparently was heavily into the teachings of James Arthur Ray. So heavily in fact that she was downright effusive and giddy when she talked about him. One night the blog author decided to give in to Ms. Newman and attend one of Ray’s free presentations.

She reports that Ray made her feel herself questioning her own spiritual growth and how she wanted to attend his Retreat just to prove her “change-worthiness” to him. Luckily though, in the end, she felt there was something wrong. “He was just too smooth” she writes.

This blogger was indeed lucky and I told her so. Here’s how I ended my comment on her post:

“If your friend was into this (New Age) stuff, as you seem to be, you should thank your lucky stars that you missed (by a hair’s breath it seems) your chance to be with her and Mr. Ray in that sweaty stinky lodge out in the Arizona outback.”

It seems to me that to be a seeker can be good thing but these days, as the shortened life of Liz Neuman can attest to, it can also be deadly. You need to retain some street smarts. Although I suppose in the dreamy, drifty, air-headedness of the New Age thinking process that’s probably a tall order.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Steve Salerno, author of “SHAM“, points out that the general attitude of Americans towards Self-help is fairly benign:

“OK, we all know this is a silly and sometimes expensive exercise in navel-gazing. But really, where’s the harm?”

The game has now changed. Three people are dead and many more are injured. The rope is tightening around James A. Ray’s neck. His organization, once worth millions  is now an unstable house of cards.  Police in Arizona are conducting a homicide investigation and by month’s end will announce whether charges will be laid in the case of the deaths at the “Spiritual Warrior Retreat”. At least two lawsuits have already been filed.

The media spotlight is already on James Ray.

But his colleagues, who appeared with him in the on-line movie “The Secret”, are running as fast as they can to distance themselves from him. According to Mr. Salerno they have even made a few quick  changes to some of their websites.

What Mr. Ray has wrought is financial turmoil in what is currently an 11 Billion Dollar industry. The other gurus fear that their own very profitable businesses could get hammered by these developments. It’s hard to put a good spin on death from Self-help.

Maybe now’s a good time for all of them to consider an extended retreat of their own  in some far-off island paradise. You know, take some time to mull over things.  Chill out and grab some rays… before the cops come calling.

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From the earliest days of my working life I have been hearing that I could do anything I set my mind to. Perhaps you have too. For me though it didn’t always turn out to be immediately true .

That’s because I always seemed to run into things.

They’re called barriers.

Those little (and sometimes not so little) difficulties we all run in to. These barriers could be things like lack of money, distance between places, or other people. Sometimes they ganged up on me to a point that it caused me to take no action at all; thinking any action I took was going to be useless. That’s how they attacked my mindset and caused me to fail.

I failed grade nine twice. I failed at several businesses. I failed at relationships.

Then I made a discovery that changed the way I looked at failure forever. I was the magic of the mobius strip that made me see it. This is the little paper strip invented over 150 years ago by Dr. Ferdinand Mobius. I now use it in my presentations to show that failure is only a stepping stone to success and that in fact failure, if you can withstand enough of it, always leads to success.

Success, it turns out, is a mathematical certainty. All you need do is to keep showing up.

I also discovered exactly how anyone can gain the strengths needed to endure the bitterness of repeated failures and not give up. And Instead to gain the intelligence that such experience brings. (No books on the subject do that.)

This has become my life’s work and my greatest contribution to value in the world.

Like Thomas Edison said after trying to make a practical light bulb: ” Now we know 10,000 things that won’t work.”

If only I’d heard that little gem in grade nine.

More power to you my friends and the best of the Christmas season to you and yours.

…David

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In my last post I talked about the invention of the mobius strip 150 years ago. I described how I was so struck by it when I first saw it that I named my company after it: Mobius Transformations. I briefly mentioned that to me, and to the work that I do, this funny little band of paper with a half-twist in it has an enormous metaphorical meaning.

In this post I’d like to detail some of the more important aspects of that meaning and how they all relate to the building of an amazing mindset that, for you and for the sake of your future, will be as solid as a rock.

The Human Mobius

If you look closely at a mobius strip the most astounding thing you’ll discover about it is that, while there was once two sides and two edges on that flat strip of paper, there is now only one. This in essence is the main qualifier for the mobius strip becoming our mascot. It involves this dualness becoming singleness and by extension it suggests the relationship between how the human ‘thinks” and “feels”.

Side Note: In case you may have missed it my main interest is the proper construction of your mindset. My passion is the discovery of a little known phenomenon that gives your mindset an unusual strength that resists all ongoing negative factors working against your success. I believe this type of strength is an absolute requirement for any entrepreneur today especially given the uncertain times we are now living in.

“I believe that the center for thought lies in the heart and that the brain helps cool the body” -Aristotle 384-322 BC

This quote has always interested me since it seems to go against today’s prevailing tradition that the brain is king above all. If it’s true then we might have to re-think the way we think.

Aristotle, who was personally involved in the training of Alexander the Great, clearly indicated that the duality as it exists in man, is something that he was looking at with great wonderment.

Personally, in making this statement I believe he wasn’t far off the mark. Twelve years ago I noticed an interesting article in the New York Times that reinforced that belief.

Working in a lab at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New-York, Dr. Michael Gershon a professor of anatomy and cell biology, made an important observation: The human body has two sets of brains: the one we’re familiar with that exists in the head and a lesser-known one placed deep within the human gut!

Gut Feelings

Now, I wasn’t there and neither we’re you but, what do you think Aristotle could have experienced or observed that caused him to say such a thing concerning the human brain and gut? Do you think that maybe he identified something like a “gut feeling” or a “hunch” besides his usual conscious analytical thoughts?

I know for sure I’ve experienced the odd “hunch” more than a few times and I’m almost certain that you have too. Is it the “center for thought”? Well, it certainly has helped a lot of very seriously successful entrepreneurs to make on-the-spot critical decisions there’s no denying that. You can read about it in the written accounts of their lives. I know in my own case it has literally helped to save my proverbial bacon on more than one occasion.

Ok, now what about that “head helps cool the body thing”?

Interestingly, medical experts have long said that you can loose a lot of body heat through your head. Up to 50% based on the relative size of area exposed. This becomes pretty real if you just go for a brisk walk around the block in freezing temperatures without a good hat on. You’ll realize your mother was right.

Aristotle’s observations turn out to have a reality of truth to them wouldn’t you say? This head and heart thing is again pointing to a duality in man isn’t it? What’s interesting about it is that this duality in humans again points back to our reference of the “human mobius”. Could this then be the key that opens up a whole new world of power for you as an entrepreneur?.

If these observations have stirred something in you just wait. It gets even better and I’ll be talking you deeper into this rabbit hole in my next post.

Until then,

More power to you my friend.

Mobiusman

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I’m willing to bet that the day he dreamed it up 150 years ago he never thought it would come to mean so much as it does today.

He was lucky though. It was a super- elegant design but was so simple that anyone could have thought of it but… no one did. I’m sure he would be pleased to see that so much is being made of his ” little parlor trick”.

That’s what they said about Ferdinand August Mobius’ little invention back in 1858. After all it was just a flat strip of paper with a half-twist in it and joined end to end. No big deal except it had some very cool and unusual properties. Only one surface and one edge!

Ferdinand was a mathematician and an astronomer who had a liking for forms and one-sided objects in particular. By the time he discovered the strip that would bear his name he was becoming a recognized pioneer in the branch field of mathematics known as topology : the study of the properties of objects. He described his creation in typical scientific terms: a “linear fractional transformation” he called it.

I didn’t care about all that stuff though.

When I first laid eyes on the famous strip I was just twelve years old after all. I had received a subscription that past Christmas to one of those wonderfully produced book series by Time/Life. You know the ones. They had big easy-to-read pages with hard covers. They we’re loaded with lavish diagrams, illustrations, and photographs in full color. This particular one was on Mathematics and, while math was never my long suit, to me that book made a dry subject look absolutely fascinating. I immediately knew that the mobius was something special and unforgettable. When I actually constructed one myself I was hooked.

Years later I would recall that moment. There I’d be sitting in my bedroom looking at that page featuring the Mobius strip. To this day, now 57 years later, I still have one sitting on my desk. As it turned out it truly was unforgettable.

And impressive.

So impressive I even named my company after it: Mobius Transformations. For me it would come to be the perfect metaphor for the phenomenon I had discovered: the effect of two different things becoming one.

The mobius strip would be a perfect symbol of the transformation that takes place when the two most powerful motivational forces that operate all of humanity blend into one homogeneous system. It would demonstrate so elegantly how this phenomenon operates to naturally buffer the negative effects of the stresses of life as they occur in real time. I call it the “Mobius Effect”.

For me, and a few others who experience it, that effect was absolutely profound and life- changing. I’ve since come to understand that it’s what it does for the strength of one’s mindset and how it does it that is the really big story.

I’ll be telling you a lot more about it in upcoming posts in this series so be sure to get back here often.

Part 2 will appear here in a couple of days.

I hope you don’t mind waiting.

I’m sure Ferdinand wouldn’t.

More power to you.

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