failure – Mobiusman

Getting down on the up-stuff fluff.

by David

Man standing on directional arrows pointing in three different ways — Has self-help lost it’s way?

It’s starting to show up.

The problem with people trying to help you with your mindset issues (other than giving the vaguest advice possible), is they fill your head with “one-liners”… things like…

“Repetition is the mother of skill!” — Tony Robbins

“Fall down 7 times, get up 8 times!” — Ancient Chinese proverb

“80% of life is just showing up!” — Woody Allen
And those things are helpful once or twice, but I know way too many people who have all the sayings
memorized, but they don’t follow them…

– Quote from a major internet marketer’s recent email.

I’ve waited a long time hoping to see it burst to the surface but now maybe it’s beginning to. Is traditional self-help loosing some of it’s footing?

For as long as I can recall, over the last three decades, no more than a handful have confided their true doubts in the lasting benefits offered by the self-helpers. I’ve been looking for people for years who might be open to admitting that, for the most part, they’re fed up with those who market personal development that costs a bundle but goes nowhere. Maybe now, because the stresses are so high, some brave and even well-known marketers (like the one I quoted above) are starting to call a spade a spade.

Napoleon Hill, for example, in all of his writings, talks about the importance of persistence and determination as being critical for success. But he never nailed it. Never actually told anyone what or where or how to locate these critical energy drives that are known to cause success in almost anything.

I’ve departed from the motivational conversations long ago. I don’t even see it as “motivational” any more since that is such a head-based thing. But these are not “head-based” energies. Persistence and determination are “gut-based” energies. I see it as much more advantageous to be more “immune-full” rather than “mindful”.

That’s because I’ve discovered something that I call “mindset immunity” and I believe it’s more descriptive of what we need now than what more advice and lame feel-good sayings might deliver. It’s a system of healing from failure the degree of which mirrors what the physical immune system does for the body. Timely and automatically.

It’s not naturally quick though. Fact is, in most people, mindset immunity it’s so slow and subtle you’d think it’s not even there at all. That’s why so few get to be hugely successful, at least financially, then the other 98% of us. Yet most do recover from defeat and a host of other emotionally-charged life events all by themselves without any outside help.

The time-worn methods of self help, personal development, positive thinking, (whatever you want to call it) is finally beginning to hit the glass wall. Not everyone can be fooled all of the time now and they’re beginning to put a voice to that thorn in their side.

I knew it would happen but didn’t think it would be so long coming. Of course I see that we have some super-critical types out there. Nego-commentators in this field are a rarity and I sometimes see them as good for entertainment value but not much else. They typically provide arguments that wildly spear the credibility of the famous – and some not-so-famous – self-help leaders but fail to provide workable alternatives to what’s being offered. I find them interesting but overly-radical although they do have a point when it comes to telling it like it is concerning all the hype coming of the numerous self-help promotional machines.

I recognize that people everywhere are in trouble. They are looking for something real. I myself have in conversations not been kind to the self-helpers – that’s true. I’ll admit to that. But at least I do usually finish up by explaining what it is exactly that’s wrong with their approach (hint: what they’re offering is almost always a “cocktail” mix of already old worn-out head-brain methods that they spin together so they can then call it their own… but don’t get me started on that now okay?)

I always try to turn it around and offer something to replace the broken methodologies that they’re desperately trying to work into their hapless lives. I tell them that the biggest problem is that they’re placing the cart-before-the-horse. The energy of natural motivation comes from something bursting out from the gut area that then causes a success to happen. Not getting all hyped-up on someone’s story of achievement and then tying to duplicate that same success for yourself.

Sorry. It’s not attractive but it’s true. You need to fail and sometimes often before you’ll ever see success. And the timeline can be long. That’s just the way it is.

I was not one of those early achievers myself and good thing I wasn’t. Without as much failure as I’ve had over the years I don’t think I would have discovered anything as significant a game-changer as an immune system that takes care of failure effects if I’d been in the class with the high-rollers. I needed something myself so I was forced to examine the unexplainable. It was critical in order to continue down a difficult, seemingly endless road. It’s a road that I’d not recommend to anyone without a tolerance for frustration or a lac of endurance to be sure.

That’s why I ended up building something that’s natural, organic, and is a part of what people are already truly made of. Persistence and determination are very personal. I have mine and you have yours.

All my new innovation does is help you to root out the core source of it so that it’s more manifest, more visceral, and even more visible. It re-defines us by making us aware of a strength we didn’t think we had. Thus re-making our own self-belief more real, more believable, and absolutely non-negotiable.

It re-aligns the shape of the new self-belief you could soon have in yourself. I’m just hoping that more and more strangely self-confident people with immune-powered mindsets soon break to the surface.

We need more like that to help us move on.

More power to you my friend.

PS: I’m still looking for more people who may be starting to feel that their personal development journey is not as good as advertised. If you’re one of those I’d love to hear from you. Please leave a comment in the box below or connect with me on Skype: “DavidtheMobiusman”. Make sure you mention this post or I won’t recognize you.

Skill Of The Creative

by David

The simple paperclip can be a doorway to a creative moment

The ultimate skill of the truly creative person is their ability to survive change no matter how varied it may be.

Acquiring and then expertly utilizing already structured knowledge is the attribute of the very learned.

The creative person is uniquely interested in newness.

That, coupled with a passion for what they do, fires a gut-drive infused with persistence that sustains a vision that never changes.

It’s different than a dream.

It makes the timeline from start to finish, even if it’s very long (and it often is), seem more bearable.

Even when it looks like failure is following failure yet again this drive wins out because it won’t let them give up easily.

Another word for a creative person like that is “entrepreneur”.

In the 1920’s, and for many years after, Napoleon Hill interviewed one hundred and twenty-five of the most financially successful men of his day.

Know what he discovered? The top two attributes for their success was their persistence and determination. Not intelligence or connections. Too bad Hill himself never nailed down exactly what the nature of persistence and determination was and how to get more of it into your life. He instead got wrapped up in laws and lists of principals. More head brain work for you to do.

All that is a far cry from finally finding out what exactly it is that allows some to survive long periods of discomfort and to maintain a motivation through it all. For creatives who want to ‘make it’ on their own terms it’s as essential as air.

More power to you.

Welcome the September Mindset

by David

Looking east from our new home — Glorious September

September 5th. 2011

Well, here we are in September already. How is your mindset doing?

Summer is over and now it’s time to set new things in motion for the next ten months or so till, once again, summer comes back to give us respite.

For me September is way more a time of newness than January first is. That’s just a turn of the calendar to month one. Not really as big a deal as what usually happens in the month nine.

When I was in my school years it meant moving from our family cottage beside a large lake back to the city. I believe that was a contributing factor to me not liking school all that much, at least not at first anyway. That was how I saw it. The real reason I think was that there just too much newness happening and a situation like that always opened the door to the possibility of failure visiting me again.

You know how it goes: Trying something new = failure.

I remember my first year in high school. It started and soon was so deeply lost in the curriculum I could hardly breathe. It all crashed the next June when my marks proved me right about my grasp of that horrible failure formula. I had failed for sure and I had the numbers to prove it.

Ouch! I hated it. Still do if I stop and think about it.

But now, as an entrepreneur, this time of year is more like a slingshot pulled all the way back ready to fire. Just have to define the target and then let go and follow the plan. The possibility for failure still exists of course but the possibility of a successful outcome exists too.

For my wife and I it’s a whole new start.

We’re in a new location is a larger more spacious home on a beautiful acreage that even includes its own blueberry patch. The mornings bring us sunlight just at the right angle that we can comfortably sit out on the huge deck and eat our breakfast comfortably without the strong light blinding us. These warm September days aren’t bad either.

For me it’s a continuation of anew internet show ( update: After 6 months at it I’m cancelling my weekly show and moving on.) I’m doing for marketers every Monday night at 11PM Eastern. It’s only been going for a little while and tonight is my fourth show. I’m excited and so grateful to be able to do it from my new home office and being able to reach so many wonderful people with my message of mindset immunity.

This could be a very good year. But we can talk about that next June.

Yeah, it’s September alright.

Happy newness to you.

Positivity Fail

by David

Mobius Monday Minute – June 20 , 2011

Do you dream about how good an ideal future outcome is going to be? Do you follow the typical common coach’s suggestion about visualizing yourself in the winner’s circle?

If you do you could be heading for failure.

Reams of studies put together by psychologists over the years have shown that indulging in positive fantasies actually makes people’s ambitions less likely to become reality. But no one had yet figured out why.

Until now that is.

A new study carried out by researchers at New York University’s Motivation Lab points to evidence that positive fantasies sap our energy. “By allowing people to consummate a desired future”, the researchers explain, “positive fantasies trigger the relaxation that would normally accompany actual achievement, rather than marshaling the energy needed to obtain it”.

It looks like fantasizing about successful outcomes makes the task of putting out the energy to do the hard work seem unnecessary. If success seems like a forgone conclusion then why work so hard?

Apparently, the study revealed that when the fantasizing sets in even the subjects seem to get so relaxed that even their blood pressure dropped. (Although that correlation to motivation is still being looked at.)

So, should we stress ourselves to success? Or fantasize ourselves into relaxation?

Could this be why we see so many successful people with heart problems and dreamers who are flat broke? It’s quite a serious trade-off at either end of the spectrum don’t you think?

Personally, I’ve never been much of a fan of dreaming about the future. I prefer to go with future vision. Dreaming about great tomorrows that might never come is not productive. Dreams tend to be just shinny new objects in the distance that we see through the eyes of our imagination. They often appear like a movie with lots of movement and plenty of drama. But they also change a lot from session to session.

Vision is different.

With vision all you see is one frame of the completed movie. It’s always the same each time. Solid and sustained over long periods of time.

But that’s not all.

Vision allows you to actually feel its truth… it’s absoluteness that the future will be that which has been seen. Accomplishment happens through hard work sustained over time. That takes a high state of motivation that apparently dreaming can’t call-up. Dreams may be nice things that can appear fuzzy and warm but vision is a manic steamroller on its way to the finish line.

Choose wisely.

More power to you.

Taking Care of Your rent

by David

Mobius Monday Minute

# 12 – Feb 14 , 2011 [display_podcast]

A rent is another word for a tear or rip in a fabric — Photo: Morgufile

Are you taking care of your rent?

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.

More power to you.