For years now I’ve been talking about how I love to study shapes. As a visual artist I’ve long been interested in working with three-dimensional shapes rather than flat 2D drawings for example.
I enjoy drawing but with three dimensional material you can make structures that occupy real space. In a drawing you’ve got to suggest it or devise a way to fool the eye.
The movie Avatar comes to mind.
Lately a very interesting and very new material has become available that enables anyone with an internet connection to try their hand at forming new shapes out of it.
What is it? It’s human protein.
Now I know this sounds a bit weird so let me explain.
Seems there are some very creative scientists at the University of Washington who have worked up a type of video game called Foldit. It allows users to manipulate a virtual human protein chain into a shape on a computer screen.
New shapes for proteins, something known as protein design, are what the scientists are after. They know that human intuition can be useful at arriving at new solutions that computers can use and learn from. They are hoping that their game might someday lead to new combinations of protein shapes that could be used to cure certain diseases.
Proteins are the workhorses of every cell of every living thing on earth not just the human body. But for us they carry out many very important tasks – everything from breaking down food to power your muscles to transporting nutrients through your blood.
That’s how vitally important shape is. In fact we could not live productive lives without our proteins being folded in their correct shapes.
Hummmm.
If shape is a critically determining factor maybe my idea that human thought systems have a right and a wrong shape isn’t so strange after all.
No, not the stuff you’re compelled to fork out every month to your money-grubbing landlord. Not that rent.
I’m talking about the “tear” in your motivational fabric every time you have one of those events we all call a ‘failure’.
Of course I’m playing with words here because, in case you didn’t get the mildly insane insinuation, a “rent” is another word for “tear”. But this is not meant to be a lesson in etymology.
No, not at all. It’s a comment about what happens to our mindset after we experience something that we tried and that didn’t quite make the grade. The “f” word is of course almost always a reflection of how we judge our past actions that didn’t render the result we had in mind. It’s really nothing else.
Upon closer inspection we can even get some good learning juice out of it if we dare to look for it. He wasn’t alone in this but a guy by the name of (all things) Samuel Smiles the author of the classic 1882 book SELF HELP once said:
“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”
Now, those 33 words alone may not help you completely recover from the battering you gave yourself after the fact, but at least you should feel a little bit better knowing that many others have ventured down this dark road before you.
I suppose that there is one thing I should add to this tidbit of information here. It’s this: The hurt you feel when bad things happen is like a bruise on an apple. Except being in the thinking it’s not a physical bruise like one in the meat. It’s an emotional or an ethereal one. These typically take way more time to mend. Maybe that’s why your mother may have advised: Sleep on it. It’ll look better in the morning.
Sure mom.
I don’t know about you but after a day of blowing it big time I never could sleep it off. It wasn’t till years later when I came upon the concept of mindset immunity something that took me down another interesting rabbit-hole, the understanding of which, has since become a huge part of my life’s work. Once I realized that there appears to be another immune system that does for the thinking what the other one does for the body I was hooked.
Makes a nice bookend for the fact that humans have two sets of brains – one that thinks but doesn’t feel, and one that feels but is not designed to think much at all.
This is sort the kind of things I like talking about on this blog. So if you have any questions or comments I’d love to see them. Just put whatever you’d like to say in the box below.
On my Roboform web file manager I have a folder labeled “Happiness” and it’s filling up fast lately.
Just in the last few days I’ve added three more entries. One was for Dr. Robert Holden’s “Happiness Project” one for Lord Richard Layard’s movement for social change “Action for Happiness” and the other was for a guy named Ludwig.
Sometimes we work away at things and it doesn’t seem like we’re getting anywhere. The timeline from start to finish, if there is ever a ‘finish”, can sometimes be a long one.
It’s easy to choose not to make it better and fall into discouragement. It’s easy to quit when it appears that reaching the goal is still far away around a corner or over yet another mountain.
But artists, and we’re all artists in our own right, have always struggled for newness even if that newness was just getting to the next day.
I’m not here to tell you to never quit – your mother told you that. I’m here to ask you a question: Can you continue to keep up the struggle through the timeline for another day another month another year in order to find out what your true calling is?
If you can, I can guarantee you, it will result in you making it way way better.
Mean is a word that can have some very diverse definitions, even alarming ones.
The first that might come to mind is the one associated with all the vile stuff we hear about on the evening newscast.
But that’s not what I want to talk about today. You get enough of that in other media so here’s a little break from all that.
The word I’m using today is just another way of saying medium. You know. Not too hot and not too cold but just right. Sort like Goldilocks and the 3 bears sort of thing.
This right in the middle thing is sometimes looked at as the “average” on a certain scale.
And while “average” can accurately describe the position of being in the middle there is another derivative of that word meridian.
This has a famous connection to it as in the prime meridian. This is the invisible line that runs north and south and divides the globe into two distinct hemispheres of east and west.
The prime meridian has a historical connection to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich in London. In fact it’s drawn right through the center of it. If you go there you’ll see a line painted on the floor.
This is the same observatory that used to be the keeper of the measuring of time for the rest of the known world. Greenwich “mean time” was the standard for the world’s clocks for many years until it was replaced by Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) for scientific purposes.
But Greenwich mean time is still the time for you and me and is based on the sun’s position at a particular point as it passes over the earth’s meridian.
But what’s all this got to do with my main theme for this blog which is Mindset Immunity?
Glad you asked.
It appears that there is another important mean measurement term that I haven’t yet introduced you to.
I’ll refer to it as the “mood mean” It’s a state of mindset equilibrium. It’s kept nearest it’s middle point thanks to something I call mindset immunity.
Let me describe it this way.
The body maintains its temperature at approximately 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Much hotter than that and you probably should stay home and drink plenty of fluids. Colder than that and you’ll be in a chill that could have serious consequences unless you get yourself cozied up by the fire or head off to the nearest hot tub.
It’s well known that a natural state of good physical health is largely maintained by the built-in mechanism provided by the immune system. It automatically works on three levels:
to protect
to heal
to remember
Mindset immunity provides similar protection except it does it for the thinking mindset. In other words it keeps your mood closer to “normal” so that you can function and make good sound decisions even in the face of ever-changing realities.
But there is a problem.
I believe that, the average human today has a mindset immunity that is moving at a snail’s pace. That account’s for why it takes so long for many of us to get over a situation that was not seen as positive.
But I’ve figured out a way to speed things up quickly and permanently. It’s a process that I call H.E.R.O.; an acronym for Honest Examination of Real Occurrences. It entails reverse-searching your past success history in a structured way in real-time in an on-line platform with a live guide to assist you.
Mindset immunity is everyone’s birthright. You have it now. All it needs is to get untied and it will do its magic as it should.
That means it can smooth out all those otherwise rough spots in your thinking so you have more energy to do better at living a quality life.
