Slumps and Why They're OK

Sometimes we wake up in the morning and 'it' isn't there anymore.

What I mean is the feeling that we get when we are contented. Or driven. When our purpose is clear in our mind.
When we have satisfied why we're here and why we're up in the morning.

Sometimes that disappears and we're left with a void. A restlessness, a discontent.

It's the same malaise we are likely to get when we divorce ourselves from those modern implementations that seduce our attention, whether it be work, friends, activities, hobbies, holidays.

If we've ever had some spare time with nothing to do and nothing planned, it can creep in.

Perhaps it's an uncertainty about yourself or the world -- many people will experience this. Barack Obama felt as if he knew not where is place was in the world when he was 22.

There are two ways I have thought of dealing with this:

• Breathe. 

Accept that life is uncertainty and change. Now realise that uncertainty about yourself is peace. It is life. Existence is a jagged oscillation between warm receptivity and joyful challenge. The very uncertainty you experience, the slumps in your days or months - this will and must exist as certainly as the joy and exhilaration that life offers you exists. You cannot hope for change or completion - 'finishing' or 'doing' something never removes it. We must accept that it occurs and know its existence implies the existence of its opposite.

• Find your core - your deepest desires

These moments are opportunities to re-examine what it is that you want. It is the universe giving feedback to yourself. If we do not act from a place grounded in our deepest desires of what we want from the world and ourselves, we lose our centre. Our sense of why we are here. We get stuck in a job that we do just for the sake of continuing our existence. We follow a pre-fabricated path partly due to the expectation placed upon us, partly due to the ease in which we follow. We feel week. 

During these slumps, make it your purpose to find your deepest purpose. Immediately. Every moment spent without it is a moment where you do not love those around you from a position of deep fulfilment. We must find this core to align our existence towards it. Only from a position of alignment are we able to act deeply, to love truly. When we have found our core - our alignment, then the external validations such as a job, an education, others' respect - they are meaningless. 

Our core - the deepest desires within us - that is our truth. When we live with this truth, we are on a journey towards a thing that is eternal and infinite. A pleasure that is secure from all pain. 

It is true that the two points your correspondent has made are seemingly contradictory. How can one accept something yet simultaneously look for ways to expel it? The Kahunas described truth as being 'what works for you'. We may well heed their word. 

Intellectual Diets and Opportunity Cost - an Argument for the Scrupulous Reader

Economists - or those economically inclined - often speak of the concept of Opportunity Cost; that is, the value of the thing that you could have had if you didn't choose the thing that you just did. It's the value of your foregone alternatives, and, if you're speaking of economic predictions around a coffee table with your erudite and fiscally minded kin, perhaps the concept fits neatly into the picture. The thing is, we wouldn't usually apply this notion when choosing what we click on when browsing Facebook, or whilst looking up new links to enjoy, or even in the kinds of books that we read. But we should.

Economics, and the idea of Opportunity Cost, is really concerned with the study of choice and deciding on the best decisions to make in order to maximise whatever outcome we're looking for. This means that such notions can and should be used when we consider the choices that we make on a day to day basis. Here, I'm going to argue as to why it's so important to be scrupulous in terms of the things that you're reading and why you should be planning what content you consume on a daily and weekly basis.

Story Time
When we think of 'reading', a traditional view might include some bespectacled man dissolving into a couch by the fire with a fine leather-bound hardcover in his hands, leisurely perusing throughout the night, or perhaps a schoolgirl languishingly flicking through a prescribed text, waiting for it to be all over. Perhaps we're reading the latest eBook release on our eReader for a sustained period of time. But do we consider the mindless link-clicking that we do on our ever-shrinking portable devices as reading? I don't mean just 'reading' in the sense of looking at a word and understanding what it means, but reading as in consciously and deliberately choosing particular content to consume and mentally engage with.

I would argue that the mindless browsing so many of us fall victim to is reading - to a degree. The Facebook posts that we scroll through when we're avoiding writing our next essay, the links on Reddit or 9Gag or Lifehacker or any one of the myriad of sites on the internet that so many of us simply default to when logging on, the browsing on various clickbait-y news websites that we use to simply pass the time? During that particular moment when we've decided to click on whatever's distracting us, are consciously and deliberately acting. But not enough.

Reading Onions
But let us take a step back and examine what has happened. A hypothetical situation here is the young adult who's hopped onto a train and, finding the receding scenery unengaging, decides to pull out their phone and flick through the ticker tape of unwanted personal opinions before finding a news story that promises a healthy deal of righteousness and injustice. They then decide to read the title and perhaps even the first paragraph. At a microscopic level, we can argue that our young citizen here has indeed been deliberate in their choice of content - out of the suggested links that his internet platform, in this case Facebook, has offered, they've made a choice of one of them. However, look at the situation from afar and we must begin to ask some questions. Before they hopped onto the train, did they consciously decide that they would jump onto Facebook along the duration of the ride in order to find something to entertain them? Did our young man or woman contemplate the options available to her in terms of the content that was available, and make a choice? Or was it more of an automatic, reflexive reaction: the same kind that babies show when you put a bottle (stimulus) to their mouth, and they suck (response)? A baby wouldn't usually contemplate their choices when offered milk, and all too often we don't demonstrate our discretionary ability when we pick up our phones and mindlessly browse the net (response) if we find ourselves in situations that happen to be unplanned and boring (stimulus).


Reserve Bank of Time
Let us contemplate then. Consider a week, then remove all the time we (actually) spend doing activities that both require most of our attention, are necessary for survival, and preclude distraction such as reading, be this work, household chores, activities of daily living, sleeping, etc. What's left is time for entertainment, hobbies, social activities, and what have you. Out of what's left, consider the time that you spend doing any form of reading - deliberate or not. For most of us, it probably isn't an expansive amount of time.

Now consider what content you actually want to consume. Consider this: if you could have a gastronomical tour of the world in a year, what would you want to eat? You'd only have a limited amount of time in the year to travel, eat, and appreciate your food, and there would be an almost unlimited amount of different foodstuffs littered around the world for you to try to sample. In a situation like this, the decision-making process is rather simple: research and find what your favourite foods are and then find a way to get to the place that offers it and then consume it, before moving to the next. You, however, will know that if you choose to spend all your time in South Korea sampling their food, you won't have any time left to sample the rest of the world's food.

Our reading diets are much the same - there is only a limited amount of time that we have each week, month, or year to read. Have we considered our end goals in terms of what we read? Is it to be more informed? To be entertained? To absorb more knowledge about different facets of the world? To keep up to date with the latest news? Every book we read means that we could have spent that time reading something else. Every time we mindlessly browse, we could have spent that time consuming literary foodstuffs that bring us closer to what our goals are in reading. That's the opportunity cost we must consider in making the (often unconscious) decisions that we make each day.

Early Life Crises and Why You Wake Up in the Morning

I'm sure you clicked on this because of the catchy title and not this picture :P

It’s 1:30 pm, and I’ve shut off both of my alarm clocks an hour earlier. The problem is that I’m still in bed. I’m supposed to be at this institution of learning in half an hour. Whoops, nope. 29 minutes now. Rolling my torso around, I plant my face into the pillow and mess up the orientation of my blanket doing so. It’s warm inside my bed, with that nice, cosy haze of trapped body heat beckoning me like a classical Greek Siren to remain inside, immobile, safe. Twenty centimetres to the left of me is the edge of my bed and the entrance to a dark and dangerous world. A world where decisions must be made, where interactions are to be had, where futures are created. But at the same time this is a world which repeatedly strikes you down again and again in the guise of supposed ‘learning lessons’. A world where one’s meaning, one’s ikigai, must be forged out of the turmoils of emotion in one’s soul. With only incidental experiences and notions to guide us, and tools of which our mastery is amateur and novice at most in the carving of the sculpture of our lives. It’s also a world where oats and milk must be made in order to enjoy breakfast. I enjoy it with mango.

So some time later I’m at a lecture on positive psychology. Some stuff about how to have more happiness and better outcomes in your life. The lecturer whines in a voice that’s had many years worth of whining experience, so the effect of her whining is exactly as intended. It allows me to spend the most insipid, uninspiring hour of my life listening to someone who’s probably a regular attendee at Anthony Robbin’s and Dr. Phil’s concer— I mean, seminars, tell me, in a bunch of dot points, how I should live my life in order to become happier and more fulfilled. Thank you dot points.
What the lecturer doesn’t understand is that the aesthetic experience of life isn’t something that can be completely conveyed to us through second-hand experience. If I can’t appreciate life because of deep, ingrained self-esteem issues, because I’ve never worked on myself to develop the skills and talents to explore this world, if I’ve never been able to break out of the ‘me-bubble’ and break past the comfortable, solipsistic existence where my problems, my worries, my unmet needs, my wants, then there’s only so much that a powerpoint slide with 5 dot-points on the characteristics of Flow can do for you.

So what happened between the time of me ‘waking’ up and getting to this lecture? Something which caused the millions of (alright, maybe hundreds of) neurons in my mind to fire in a manner to establish a pathway of thinking that, roughly translated, would yield an amount of motivation that would allow me to overcome the resistance that I had at that moment to leaving my place of comfort and warmth. The question that I want to pose in this article today is if we didn’t have any commitments or necessary demands on our time, why would you get up in the morning? The only reason that I really woke up this morning was because of the social framework in which I had spent the last 18 years demanded my participation at a particular place at a particular time. For me, this was the agreement which I had engaged in when I signed up for a university degree. When we deconstruct this, it’s a very simple agreement. I provide funds to the university and spend time studying material, and they provide me the material and a degree at the end of a number of years. In order to fulfil my part of this contract, I have to wake up and be present at particular places at particular times in order to receive such learning material. Simple.

But this system isn’t something created out of my own intellect and mind. It isn’t an agreement that was drafted by me, written by me, or even thought up by me. It’s an agreement written up by something else. Hundreds of years of modification to the education system by countless senators and politicians, perhaps. Some town planner a number of years ago who decreed that x amount of people need to have x,y,z degrees in order to fulfil workplace shortages in p,q,r industries at locations, e,f,g. You get the idea. Is the system ’bad? I think it depends on how you think. With a great deal of things in life, simple comparisons of ‘bad’ and ‘good’ compress the numerous different perspectives and situations and their conclusions into a single positive or negative connotation regarding something. Doing so weakens our ability to truly understand and appreciate concepts. So in other words, it’s a long way of saying ‘maybe’.

Let’s break down this ‘maybe’. One one hand, there is the argument that a college/university degree is commonly recognized as an important (but not absolutely necessary) factor in attaining and maintaining a reasonable middle-class lifestyle. But lets ask ourselves why we want a reasonable middle-class lifestyle? Each of our reasons will be different, and they may all be equally valid, or the validity may differ from reason to reason. That’s not for me to judge. But what I can offer in this situation is a question. Is the reason behind your wanting of a middle-class lifestyle something that you’ve consciously thought about and concluded is in alignment with your values, or is it something else? Is it a situation where you’ve just done what everyone else has done for the last few years of your life - going to school, attending x, y, z, going and getting a particular degree, getting a job, getting married, buying a suburban house with a swimming pool and three bedrooms, saving up for your children’s college fund, and so on – do you do this because you’ve consciously decided to sit down one day and think to yourself what are the values and principles which are pertinent to your own life, and decided that to do something like this would bring you closer in alignment with these values and principles? Or are you like me and many other people who drift through life. Who never really think to question themselves the why behind what they do. When we don’t go and make it clear to ourselves what our why is, then the motivations in our lives for getting out of our bed in the morning become dictated by necessities which we have unconsciously forced ourselves into as a product of our lack of consciousness as to our direction in life. Ever had the alarm clock ring in the morning and you dread pulling back the sheets because you’re not really that excited or interested in the things that life could bring you today or in the future? I don’t doubt that that is a sentiment that is shared by myself and many other people in the world. Sometimes, I imagine that some of us want something more than just to show off our new watch/ dress/ book/ etc., or to just see whatever new movie some Hollywood directors have deemed appropriate for the particular season we’re in, or to attend a certain number of classes simply to meet a decreed set requirement in order to pass, or so on. I feel that too many of us live our lives in this walking daze, not driven or guided by consciously chosen ideals, but simply existing and allowing life to take us where it may, like ships in the middle of sea without oars or sails to guide our paths. Is this necessarily a ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ method of living life, I hear you ask. And of course the answer is no….t necessarily. I simply suggest that although there may be no difference in validity of one particular philosophy on life and living over that of another, there is a difference in the aesthetic quality of the existence that we experience when we are conscious as to why we choose to live our lives in a particular way, as opposed to when we do things just because we and those around us have never known anything else.

So where does this tension-filled, somewhat vague crescendo of an article end up going? Is the author going to tell you what he believes is a workable remedy to the conflict which he has just exposed? Yes. But if you really want to know what I think, go and read Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha right now. At this moment. It’s a book that’s about 100 pages and the words are printed really big because it’s the book that old people and literature majors enjoy reading in their spare time (sorry old people). If I have managed to encourage at least one person to read this masterpiece, then I can rest happily.
But if you’re like the majority of people who don’t read these things, here’s the TL;DR version, albeit with my own spin tacked onto it. Siddartha is a story about a Brahmin’s son trying to seek enlightenment and nirvana. Nirvana is, for those who may not have been exposed to the concept, the idea that you’re free from suffering in the world. Sounds like something pretty cool. I wonder if it comes in the form of a cheap Chinese import that they sell on eBay. Unfortunately for Siddartha, he can’t find someone to sell him (well, actually teach him) how to attain Nirvana. He goes around to different groups of people promising him enlightenment, and at every group of people – the Brahmins, the mystics, Buddha, and so on – he is disappointed, for he finds himself unable to achieve Nirvana. Eventually he gives up on his search and engages in the hedonistic lifestyle, having sex with women and bearing a child. He lives in the materialistic urban world for a while before rejecting this as well, and finally spends the end of his days with a guy who paddles a raft back and forth in a river. And it is here that he finds Nirvana.

What causes him to find this Nirvana? Is it the stillness of the trees and the flow of the river in the forest? Nope. He’s already tried that stuff and it didn’t work. By this time, he’s also got a son who pretty much hates him and who runs away from his father, and by all measures of conventional living standards, his life would be pretty shit. Like, WHO article-worthy shit. However it isn’t. What Hesse attempts to argue is that it is the conscious experience of the various manifestations of the different forms of human existence that allows one to attain peace, understanding, and fulfilment. We can’t achieve happiness and meaning and fulfilment through a single activity alone - rather, we must go through each of the stages of our lives, accept that at that time they will not bring us peace, enlightenment, or happiness, but also know that in the end, when we look back, we will be happy, have profound insight, and understand the world and ourselves because we have experienced the things that we have. It is the individual experiences of the multiple facets of life over a lifetime that will eventually bring us peace. Siddhartha needed to spend time sleeping with hot women and being disgusted at the inherent hedonism of doing so. He needed to spend time learning the ways of the mystics and being disillusioned when he realized their weaknesses and flawed nature. He needed to go through all of these experiences in order to be able to obtain and aggregate his cumulation of experiences and attain understanding of himself and the world. Perhaps that’s what we also need to do. Perhaps it is in those very days where you struggle to find your purpose that you are actually in the process of finding yourself.

In the beginning of this blog post I expressed cynicism towards the popular psychology of today – the idea that happiness and contentment and meaning can be compressed into a few dotpoints on a PowerPoint presentation talking about ‘flow’ and getting ‘in the zone’. Popular psychology like this appeals to us because it’s a quick-fix, fast-food, band-aid-esque instant application that says ‘use these 5 fabulous tricks and you’ll instantly know how to feel better about your life and your life’s meaning’. The thing is although this can definitely help, what a lot of these preachers of McAdvice may miss is that the concepts that they are teaching – being in the moment, self-acceptance, etc. – are merely the superficial expressions of an individual who has lived their fulfilling life and experienced all which they need to experience in order to find their meaning. We cannot confuse cause and effect – people who’ve done a Siddhartha may act in the ways expressed in the dot points, but not all people who follow the ‘5 Easy Ways to Improve Your Health and Wellbeing Today’ (also featuring ways to get slim for summer AND yet another uninspiring interview with someone we don’t give a shit about, going by with the initials Kim Kardashian), are going to have that life experience to back it up. And that’s the kicker.

So the take-home message of what I’m trying to say here is this. Those days and moments in your life where you question yourself; those times where you wonder why you go through the same old routine day in and day out; those days when you struggle in finding the meaning of it all – this kind of stuff is okay. Dare I say it might even be necessary - necessary to the development and manifestation of the peace which you may be searching for. Getting out of bed each morning is much easier if we allow our present struggles to work as a stepping stone towards the peace and understanding which we seek. Why should I get out of bed this morning? Not because I need to work towards x,y,z because someone other than myself thought it should be so, but because each day is adding to the wealth of experiences which will one day allow me understanding and peace and happiness and all that jazz. 

I'm Starting a Business

I'm starting a business.

When it was young it had the opportunity to flourish. To blossom. To create. To Inspire. But the moment it turned five years of age, its owners rushed towards its Wiggles and Ninja-turtled themed office and handed it a piece of paper, asking 'What service or function do you want to provide to resource-holders in return for financial compensation?' Maybe it wasn't exactly that; it probably was phrased 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' It didn't know.

At that time, this business that I wanted to start wasn't much of a business. To the investors, it was actually a bit of a flop. I tried to explain to them that what I was starting wasn't about the returns or profit column on whatever QuickBooks account they may have had open at the time, rather that I started this because of something thing called ideology. It wasn't even supposed to be a business. It was more of an honest appreciation of the world. But that kind of thinking doesn't stand in modern society. So I tried to convince them of the merits of my efforts. I said words like 'principles', 'virtues', 'creativity', 'exploration', 'character'. I tried to explain to them how this business would help us conquer abstract ideals such as 'the inquisition into the nature of a human psyche divorced from societal norms' or 'the freedom of possibility latent within the human spirit' or '[insert deep, meaningful, string of words of what we should do with our lives here]'. Sure, my business couldn't do very much when it first started - smearing paint in a motley blotch of different colours all over the kitchen table, or putting every goddamned thing it could find in its mouth is hardly suggestive of conventional excellence - but at the time, it didn't matter because this business was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.

But unfortunately in the world that I come from - that is, the world of letter grades, career progression and progressive taxation - that sort of whacko ideology stuff just doesn't fly. The only principles the investors cared about was that of competition and accumulation. Creativity meant achieving in the top 5% of all English students when it came down to end of year performance reviews. Character meant following Best Practice Policies consistent with the rest of the competition - since studying two hours a day and keeping up with extracurricular involvements, music, a bit of exercise, and holding some leadership position will set your product apart from others, so that when potential consumers scan your business's history, they'll be more likely to choose yours over a competitor's.

This is the kind of stuff that was important to those who invested in my business. Competition. Achievement. Performance Reviews. I still wanted to keep my business aligned with my principles, but have you ever met someone who knows how to 'run the show'? They know how to convince you. So I went and talked to these people who held all the cards with the intention of convincing them to my way of thinking, but as often happens with things like this, it was they who would be doing the convincing. I was prepared when they began talking about the money - with those who deal in commerce, this was to be expected. Yes, a business that prospers and succeeds will bring all sorts of monetary benefit, but I was happy how I was - I didn't need to run my own enterprise to get money. But then they started talking about how if only I built up my business a bit more, if I focussed on expanding and connecting with others to form partnerships, I could have an enterprise. Working on this would 'open doors' and provide 'lots of opportunities for the future'. Now, being just a simple person who writes every now and then on a simple blog, the idea of the future wasn't something that I had thought about a lot. I looked at the state of my business - it was just a business: what it did was what I told it to do. It didn't think about the future - it never had. If I left it alone, it would go back to what I originally wanted it to do - explore, create, enquire. But I had spent a lot of time augmenting this business of late. I had spent a lot of effort investing in the kind of R&D that these investors had suggested. Thinking back to all this effort suddenly made the principle of 'return on investment' far more clear and real than that of 'ideology'. If I had invested in so much, what was a little bit more effort if it meant 'better opportunities' in the future?

But thoughts of the future wasn't what convinced me.

What really convinced me was fear.

Because as a businessman, an entrepreneur,  the last thing I would want is for my business to fail. These investors told me that if this business were to fail, if the consumers didn't want to purchase my product at a high enough price, then I would be worthless as a businessman. While I had spent the last 20 years of my life working on someone else's investment, I had grown attached to how it performed. What it would do. What it could become. The line between running a business and living my life began to blur - that business and how it performed slowly and surely became more and more integral to the idea of who I was. What kind of industrialist doesn't increase their competitiveness by implementing the most refined and advanced production methodologies? What kind of CEO fails to market their product by writing down all of its qualifications, alongside glowing user testimonials, on an A4 document before showing it to potential consumers? What kind of person doesn't get a job, doesn't follow the roster, doesn't 'contribute anything to society'?

What if I never wanted to start a business in the first place?

You see, fear is what stops us. Fear of failing. Fear of going against the trend. Fear of what our friends might say. Fear of what our parents or teachers might say. Fear of the 'what if'. Fear of not being normal. Fear of not doing what everyone else is doing. But sometimes it isn't fear. Sometimes closing your business just isn't ever considered an option. We've never thought about doing it because in our world, it's a treachery unheard of.

This business's name is Eric. It's also Joe. Miguel. Alexandra. Amir. Jacek. Salama. Zhi. We don't necessarily all sell the same thing, but a lot of the time we've followed a similar programming. It's a great deal of us. And those investors I've harped on about? Anyone who's ever held the expectation that you or I should one day study, get a job, pay our taxes and colour ever so delicately in between the lines.

I'm not saying that a world without work, education, and knowledge is an ideal world - extremes are rarely a realistic representation and understanding of the world. Yet why is it that the question asked of our youth is 'What do you want to be?' or 'What are you studying?' As we age, this simply becomes  'What do you do?'. Is the extreme of simply following the programming set out for us really how we ought to live our lives?

I'm also not saying it's anathema for your work to be your passion, or for you to find great fulfilment, satisfaction, and enjoyment from what you do to make a living. It's when its the only the thing that defines us, when our value as human beings is boiled down to a qualification or an ability to earn that the alarm bells ring. When all of society has dictated that the greatest and most honourable way of living our lives is to labour for other people, to sell our labour and our skills so that other people may profit. Perhaps slavemasters don't need chains to enslave us - we now do it willingly. And perhaps our lives and who we are should be dictated by more than simply what another person pays us to do.

525,600 Minutes

It doesn’t have to be beautiful, but it could be different. It’s an interesting thing when we think about how much time there is for growth and progression in a year – as we age older and older, and each passing Christmas becomes that little less special each time it happens and gradually more and more a ritual to add to the ever growing list of ‘things to to’, and if we’re not careful, every day can become another set of actions which we mechanically perform without any direction or any wholly meaning purpose or meaning behind it.

We often think to ourselves that a year a large amount of time. That many things can be performed and achieved within the span of a year. And indeed, a lot of times, many things are achieved and areperformed – except whether or not these things really do help you become the person who you want to be, and help you gain that sense of fulfillment, freedom, happiness, joy, and the qualities that are inherent in the life that you want to live is often a question. Too often, the things that we do are the urgent, but unimportant things in our lives – the essay on circus-training in Alabama that is worth only 2.5% of your final grade, that project that your coworkers delegated to you which is due in two days, the stack of paperwork left on your desk – the things that have deadlines but really just aren’t that important.

All too often, I’ve found that many people end up filling up their lives with the endless barrage of unimportant, unfulfilling, but nevertheless urgent tasks. An individual day is lived performing a multitude of these urgent tasks, and then we eat, sleep, then wake up the next day and repeat the same kinds of tasks that we’ve done yesterday, the last week, the last month, and before long, it’s not difficult to imagine that our entire year has been filled up with unimportant yet urgent tasks. For what is a year but a day followed by another again and again and again?

I think that if we follow this kind of programming where we just do the things that are urgent, it can be easy to a) miss out on the things that are extremely important but not urgent, and b) end up looking back at our years wondering ‘what the hell have I really done?’. Following the string of unimportant, urgent tasks that are laid out before us in our daily lives and hoping to achieve happiness and the life of our dreams is like opening up Wikipedia and clicking on the first link that you see, then clicking the first link that you see on the new page, and again for each subsequent page in the hopes of landing on the article specifically about Pope John Paul’s perchance for paronomasia (no, that doesn’t actually exist, unfortunately). The kind of life filled with mundane and banal tasks can lead us to a situation where we look back to who we were exactly one year ago, and compare it to who we are now.

It’s interesting because if I take a journey back exactly one year ago, thinking about where I am in life, my sense of fulfillment, self-esteem, social competency and so on, I can admit that I’m not a lot different. And that scares me. I’m still often socially insecure, struggling with self-esteem issues, overly intellectual, and so on, and I’ve realized that without a conscious decision to change, and the discipline day in and day out to perform the actions, and realize the beliefs that will bring you to where you want to be, one can easily become static in the fog of banalities and tasks which are enforced upon us on a daily basis.

Unless we are, as individuals, content with simply ‘going along with the flow’ and letting our lives be defined by the unimportant yet urgent tasks in our lives, we run the very real risk of never giving proper attention to the important but not urgent things that we could be doing in order to really live the way that we want to be. What kinds of things am I talking about? The kinds of actions whose greatest benefits only come through a cumulative investment of effort into the particular task. Something like exercising often has an immediate as well as a long-term benefit, but consider something such as starting a self-reflective journal and unfailing updating it with ways in which you could have acted better in your life. Doing something as lacking in urgency as journaling your thoughts for a month may not give you any notable immediate relief, yet it’s the kind of activity which can change your course by that .1 of a degree that adds up so much over the long-run. Think of two planes which start off with an angle difference of a single degree, and let them fly apart for twenty years. The difference between them, although initially small, will be massive at the end of their journeys. I think that’s the kind of difference which comes from doing these important and non-urgent tasks day in and day out, and I think that’s a step in the right direction if we want to ensure that we live lives more of our own volition and choosing, rather than living lives which are dominated by unimportant and urgent tasks, which can ultimately leave us simply older, but not really that much different, versions of ourselves at the end of another year.

Education VS Schooling, Mark II.

I originally wrote this for a public speaking competition, but thought it might like some exposure out here. Hope you enjoy it.

Mark Twain once said that “I never let my schooling interfere with my education”, but how many of us actually make a distinction between the two? Just recently, I learned that the Spanish Armada attacked Britain in 1558. But how exactly does this knowledge aid my powers of reasoning or judgment? How does this aid in my mental preparation for my future life?

It doesn’t. As long as schools school and not educate, as long as they focus on the what and the how of things, there is a problem. Education requires us to ask ‘why’, and when the question is answered, it requires us to ask ‘in light of this, what now?’ It involves the development of human beings who will impact upon the lives of others. It involves pondering, imagination, creativity. It is a process of exploring the meaning and application of knowledge. It involves asking ‘what do we mean by that? ‘How can this be?’, and ‘Can this be right?’

It involves something that schools may never be able to provide.

What schools provide is accumulated knowledge, and a degree or ATAR score. I don’t mean to be disparaging – a degree certainly speaks of the hard work of its owner, and can lead to the development of skilled people who will better our living standards – but it is when we consider a degree an education that there is a problem. The end of four years spent in high school (or in any other educational institution, for that matter) is not the completion of an education. It is simply a point of departure. It is foolish to suggest that we can ever ‘have’ an education – the very nature of learning is that what we are exposed to in schools is only the tip of an iceberg of knowledge we will never be able to completely learn.

For us to acquire a VCE certificate, we needn’t need to learn much. Even to acquire a degree, we needn’t learn anything original. Instead, what we really learn in high school or university is how to navigate the system. We are taught how to conform. Upon completing our exams, we will have proven to our educators that we have learned to think exactly as they want us to. We will have written answers as they have wanted us to. Our formal education requires uniformity, measurability, conformity and submission. We will all have read essentially the same books, and will have drawn essentially the same conclusions. How can wisdom and insight develop in a system where knowledge is standardized? Without the gift of original thought, how can we become a force of social change?  Does our formal schooling ensure that we are just another cog in the wheel of society, promoting and living the thoughts and ideas of other people?

We must keep in mind that everything we learn from school is information we learn from other people. When we are children, we are told what things are, and what things are not. We are shown a world where this is right, but where this isn’t. The reality that other people have inflicted upon us may never be challenged. In the case of science, politics or humanities, our textbooks dictate reality. However, the expanse of our reality, the limits of who we can be, and what we can accomplish are not so clear cut. Interpretations of information should be welcome, rather than marked down. Questioning and challenging knowledge should be praised instead of languished. Many of the most gifted individuals will not do well in school – shaming them through lower grades is nothing more than a tool of conformity. It states that ‘you don’t perform well in my system, therefore I’m punishing you’.  Albert Einstein did not speak until he was 4-years-old and did not read until he was 7. His parents thought he was "sub-normal," and one of his teachers described him as "mentally slow, unsociable, and adrift forever in foolish dreams.". But today we regard Einstein as one of the most enlightened men who ever lived. It was his education, rather than his schooling that allowed him to succeed.

Stephen Fry said during his time at university, the learning that he really did was done while sitting with coffee in his rooms with friends talking about various topics such as the cosmos, God, Marxism, history, psychology and honesty. Education isn’t something we get from textbooks alone – we become educated through our interactions and relationships with other people. More than information, we need wisdom and discernment. More than standardized testing, we need interactions with people.  More than knowing, we must understand.

No amount of schooling will ever prevent a child from growing up to become another Hitler or Stalin. Similarly, no amount of schooling will ever develop the Mother Theresas of the world. Only education, that process that allows us to understand, to contemplate, to think, will allow us to really function and move forward as a society. The educated realize that we are common in our humanity but not our ideas. Education allows us as individuals to negotiate, to compromise, to work how the different people of the world will live together. It lets us know that we shouldn’t force people into thinking in one way, into believing that one set of ideas or values is right. It is something that schooling fails to accomplish.

If we allow ourselves to exist in a world of tin soldiers, where each individual is taught to think in the same way, to learn the same things, to ‘study hard and get a good job’ (a job, mind you, in which you work promoting the desires of another person), then schooling may be the way to go.

But for the rest of us, who long for a world of understanding and compassion, for progress and liberty, for knowledge that leads to a deeper understanding of oneself and for the bettering of the human race, then it is education rather than schooling which we seek.

Talk to people who are passionate about what they do. Criticize. Question. Ponder. Observe things. Make mistakes. Judge what is right and what is wrong. 

In the words of Margaret Mead “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.”

We are not cattle but men and women with minds to think and hearts to feel. Let us use the power in our minds to strive towards a bettering of our education and ultimately, to the bettering of all humanity.

Education vs Schooling

" I have never let my schooling get in the way of my education" - Mark Twain

It seems to me that sometimes, when a majority of us are placed in a highly academic, highly successful schooling environment such as selective schooling environment like Melbourne High School, we may end up overly focused on our schooling to the detriment of our education. Especially with the Secondary Education system which is currently in place, there seems to exist a vast discrepancy between the schooling we get from our formal educational institutions, and the education - the knowledge, skills, wisdom, philosophy, customs, values, etc. - that serve us for the rest of our lives. How many times have you heard someone complain (or it may have been yourself complaining) that the application of the information that they were studying in school would likely have absolutely no relevance to their future lives? That the only applicable use for this knowledge would be on the forthcoming test? There's a difference between the knowledge that is meaningful to us, that will serve us, and that will develop us as human beings, and the knowledge that we are obliged to learn as a part of an educational curriculum, and of which its only function is to demonstrate an individual's performance on an arbitrary test.

We obtain one form of education - a schooling - from our educational institutions. It would be safe to assume that the primary function (not by any means the only function) of a secondary school is to provide an environment in which students can assimilate a certain amount of certain information that they will later be tested on, and that eventually contribute an arbitrary measure of a student's intelligence 'ranking'. In plainer English, our schools are there to teach us information so that we can essentially regurgitate it on our VCE examinations. It is on the basis of a student's ability and performance on a test that the formal educational system seems to believe is a measure of an individual's level of education, but I would argue that our education extends far beyond a simple ATAR ranking.

Whilst many people may consider the idea of education to be synonymous to our schooling, I'd like to suggest that they are distinctly different entities. The majority of the coursework that we learn, whilst it may have some application in our non-schooling lives, is essentially just that - coursework. Somebody, or a group of people, high up in a particular facet of the government's education sector, wrote up a study design dictating the content that students would be tested on, and this is the information that schools will be teaching. An individual's education isn't simply the learning of 'facts', and then mindlessly presenting them on a test. Our education isn't simply the passive acceptance of a secondary schooling system that spoon-feeds us topics before expecting us to write out the 'right' answers - answers which are dictated as 'right' by writers of examinations/ textbooks.

The way I personally (and currently) would define education - and I by no means am any authority on the subject - is "the accumulated meaningful information and knowledge that an individual can employ to enhance their experience of, ability to deal with, understanding and appreciation of life and everything within it." Obtaining an education, to me, isn't about memorizing 'facts' - it's about challenging yourself to increase your knowledge of the world and about struggling to obtain the tools that will deepen our experience of the human condition and of society. Does that mean that our schooling and education don't overlap? Absolutely not - an individual's schooling can often be one of the most important things they ever have, but your schooling is only a part of your education. Education is about holistically building your mind, building your life, and building yourself. It's about learning to think for oneself, to contemplate ideas critically and to be able to come to meaningful conclusions about the issues we face in life, and to be able to have the knowledge to do so.

The elements which constitutes a person's education will be personal and individual, because each of our lives are personal and individual. I would suggest that there is no 'one-size-fits-all education', because the things that will enhance and better our existence will differ from person to person. Despite this, however, there may be some guidelines towards obtaining a fuller education which many may find of use.

Firstly, it is important to take one's life, and one's education seriously. Is knowledge and the development of your mind/ body/ self something that is a major part of your life? And secondly, are you willing to put in the work to obtain an education? If you interested and committed to something, then you will achieve it.
Education is self-development - the knowledge, ideas, concepts, etc. that we can learn and apply to situations (whether real or hypothetical) all aid in developing and improving us as human beings. My suggestion would be to learn as much as we can from the sources around us, with a focus on the things that the schooling system mightn't necessarily focus on - finance, sociology, literature, politics, philosophy, arts. Perhaps we can read about the lives of remarkable people - their biographies and autobiographies, and learn about them. Perhaps we can learn about global issues in a manner that allows us to make our own informed opinion on them, rather than us simply accepting the opinions that the media expresses to us. Maybe we can experience literature and arts, and allow ourselves to digest and think what we may about the works. We could read books on how other people have made their fortunes, we could learn about why politicians are really acting in certain ways, we could learn about philosophies and new ways of appreciating the world - the list is endless, and we are only limited by ourselves and what we want.

Schooling is undoubtedly an important aspect of our lives, but it is conceivable that for each student, there is an education that is out there which may ultimately be more valuable than the schooling we get. Lets expand ourselves and learn the things that will allow us to make the best decisions in life. In many cases, the 'facts' learnt in secondary schooling remain valuable up until that last test or exam, but an education will remain valuable until the day we die.

Living by Design

"...For yesterday is but a dream
And tomorrow only a vision
But today well lived makes every yesterday a dream of happiness
And every tomorrow a vision of hope..." - 'Salutation to the Dawn', Kalidasa


I heard someone saying once that 'most people walk though life in a walking daze', and upon thinking about it, that particular idea struck me as very interesting. How much control do we actually exhibit over our own lives? Are we doing the things that we really want to do? Or are we just walking about conforming to the rules, regulations and standards which society places upon us?


There are two ways that we learn in this world - through first hand experience, and socially. In other words, we learn from observing the effects of the things we do ourselves or we learn from other people, and from what they tell us about their own experiences. First hand experience is, well, first hand. Maybe you're trying out something new for the first time, and after observing the effects of one of your actions, you've realized that something horrible has happened. For example, this child will have learnt first hand that it would probably be a good idea to read the manual before building your new IKEA furniture. (Image from here)

First-hand knowledge is how all of us first learn about the world. When you were young, you might have looked at the flame on the stove, decided it'd be fun to touch, and then somehow or other, burn yourself. Thus, from the conclusions you've made about your own experiences in life, you would have (hopefully) learnt that flames can burn. Obviously our ability to learn from our own experiences can extend a great deal further in complexity than learning about fire; this is a nice example.

The thing is, although we all have an amazing ability to learn from our own experiences, one of the major strengths of us as human beings is our ability to learn from each other's experiences -e.g. socially. Have you ever shot yourself in the face? I'll go out on a limb and say that if you're reading this right now, the chances are that you haven't. But despite never having shot yourself in the face, I'd imagine that if I asked you what would happen if you theoretically did, then you would respond suggesting that shooting oneself in the face would very likely lead to death, or permanent tissue damage to your face, among other things. But how do you know this? Most of us personally haven't pulled the trigger on ourselves (on a serious note, if you are thinking about doing it and need help, call 13 11 14) but we know that if we did, it would likely hurt us. I'd make the assumption that we probably learnt this fact from other people - the newspaper report on how a gangland shooting leaves 15 dead/ your teachers telling you never to touch a gun, for it could hurt you, etc. 

How do we know what will happen to us when we drop off a 15-storey building? Have you personally tried it? If I were to tell you that I jumped off a 15-storey building this morning in order to get to the train on time, and I survived just fine, would you believe me? The answer would most likely be no. Even though you mightn't have had the first-hand experience of jumping off a building, you've almost certainly learnt from society and the people around you that it would most likely be against your best interests to do so. We might have attended a physics class, where the teacher tells you that if you were to jump off a building, the gravitational pull of the earth will cause you to accelerate towards the ground, etc., and that depending on how you land, you would most likely damage your body in different ways. And how would your physics teacher know that? Maybe he or she learnt that from their science teacher back in high school, where they themselves got that knowledge off someone else. Nearly all of us 'know' things that we haven't actually gone and tested or proved ourselves. This sort of knowledge is knowledge that we get socially.

So after reading my block of text, you may likely be wondering where this is going. Well, it's not only the information about the world that we get socially/first hand, but also the information about ourselves, and how we are supposed to act. We learn socially about how we are expected to carry ourselves, what we are expected to do, what norms we are expected to follow, and so on and so forth from other people. Think of the last time you did something slightly awkward or out of place around other people? Did you see their looks of disgust on their face? On an even more general scale, think about the clothes you wear, the types of food you eat, the bands that you think are 'cool'. How do you know what is in style? How do you know what is considered trendy? A great deal of our concept of how we think we should live our lives is influenced by social conditioning.

In this day and age we are constantly bombarded by external influences which give us another person's (or group of people's) idea of how we should behave and act. The radio bombards us with music whose content is about anything ranging from ballads on how true love is the only thing that matters, to hit singles about having one-night-stands in the middle of a nightclub. We turn on the television, and many Hollywood films reinforce the idea that the 'good guys' always win and turn out alright, whilst the 'bad guys' always get thrown in jail or end up dying. Disney films often paint an idyllic picture of true love, and express the idea of 'living happily ever after'. We see billboards telling us which brand of beer or model of car will give you the most success with women, our magazines tell us what colour scheme of design of our clothes are 'in', and the advertisements during TV shows tell us what we should buy in order to look cool or please our friends. Think about fashion, and how fashion always changes - my idea of why fashion changes (and I may likely be wrong) is that designers/people want to be different, and try things that haven't been done before. There's nothing wrong with that - and how maybe we've bought a piece of clothing or an accessory just because it was the 'style' right now. How did we know what was in style? Other people. 

We are often conditioned by society to act in certain ways, and believe certain things. iPods are cool. Slurping soup is bad. We shouldn't put our arms on the table. We should get a decent job. Marry. Have children. Buy a new house. Save up for retirement. Buy a new phone. Get life insurance. Get health insurance, and so on and so on.

Am I saying that social conditioning, and learning from other people is bad? Not at all. One of the main reasons that we as human beings are able to achieve all the things that we can is because of our ability to learn socially. If a caveman tells his fellow tribesmen that one type of berry is poisonous to eat, then the rest of his tribe learns that from him, and they are more likely to survive and live longer. We would not be able to function effectively in our society today without learning socially and from other people. But have you heard the old adage that you can't believe everything you hear? Although the world has a lot of knowledge to tell us, and other people's knowledge and opinions can strongly influence us, are we always going to look to other people to tell us what to do and how to think?

I offer the suggestion that it may be an idea to not look to other people to tell us what to think and do. Look at the world though your own set of eyes. Decide for yourself how you want to act, what you think, and what you do. Trust in your ability to judge life's challenges. When you make a decision, do you decide on something because you want it for you, and because the choice will make you happy, or do you do it to please someone else, or because someone else told you it was a good idea? Why assume that absolutely everything that the media/Hollywood/people around you tell you is absolutely correct? We do not have to go through life in a walking daze. I encourage all of us to make decisions and act for ourselves, and for all of us to trust in our own judgement.

Take care,

Eric.

PS: This video offers a beautifully cynical view on marriage and relationships.

Criticism and its Effectiveness (Or Lack Of)

Think of the last time you were criticized for something you did. Maybe it was for missing a pass in a soccer match or making a mistake on your Methods test, or perhaps it was something more subjective, like someone criticizing your personality or body. How did it feel? I'm guessing - and I don't claim to be a psychologist at any rate - that what you felt wasn't good. Perhaps your pride was wounded; you likely would have felt less important. You'd probably resent the person who criticized you. In short - it's not a good feeling. I'd even go so far as to say that 99% of the time, it's never a good feeling. And if the recipient of the criticism doesn't feel good, then why does criticism happen all too often? And what's the point of my blog post?

Criticism, to me, is one of those strange, natural urges and instincts that, when utilized, is often incredibly counterproductive. We criticize for a number of reasons -- to vent our anger at someone; to condemn someone's actions; or to try to influence someone's future behaviour. Parents (in most cases with the best intentions) often criticize their children's personality and activities. They likely fall into the habit of finding fault, and reprimand their children's actions with the presupposition that such criticisms will make their child better fit into the mold of the parent's expectations. Bosses may notice the lack of efficiency or proper following of procedures in their workers, and as a result, dish out the flack in the hopes that it will improve the efficiency of their staff. How many times have we trusted someone to do something for us only to have them fail miserably (well, probably not fail miserably, but not live up to our expectations), and as a result - let me put this as politely as I can - 'discounted their value as a human being'? We criticize for a number of reasons, and the expression of our disapproval is one of those incredibly innate responses that we yield to whenever someone doesn't live up to our expectations.

But we all know how it feels to be criticized. And unless you're the son of God/Allah/Buddha/The Flying Spaghetti Monster/ Chuck Norris, it's not a good feeling. Dale Carnegie, an American writer and lecturer, writes about how, when he was young, he decided to write a letter to a prominent author of the time, and when the reply simply read "Your bad manners are exceeded only by your bad manners", this rebuke ignited a feeling of indignation that stayed with Carnegie for a decade. When we criticize, we play a fine game with the recipient's emotions - their pride, vanity and self-esteem. That's actually an understatement - we actually shoot them down. Condemnation can drive people to give up the things that they love doing, just as it drove Thomas Hardy to give up writing fiction. It can ruin people's moods, cause them to burst into tears, quit jobs, commit suicide. It can ruin a person's self-esteem, destroy their feelings of self-worth and shatter their confidence. I'd vouch that we've all had the experience of being criticized, and it's not at all a fun one.

And just a side note before I finish this off, but I think for many of us, our worst critic is ourselves. Many of us hold such high expectations of ourselves and pass iron-fisted judgement on how we "should" act or behave that when something goes wrong - whether it's in a relationship, in an academic sense, about our appearance, or in other pursuits. Many of us tirelessly condemn ourselves, telling ourselves that we "could have done ____, ___ and ___ so much better", or that we "really shouldn't have done _____", or "you bitch. Why'd you eat that Jumbo Sized Mars Bar?". But what we could benefit from is increasing the amount of compassion we have for ourselves. Many cultures suggest that if we don't constantly criticize ourselves, we're lazy and self-indulgent. Winning is the most important thing - our best just isn't good enough. Even Yoda says that "there is no try". Bastard. (I'm kidding - I love Yoda). But humour aside, perhaps we could benefit from thinking about how we criticize ourselves, and what effect it has on us.

Anyway, back to wherever I was. So we've established that criticism makes people feel bad (you don't say). Instead of criticism, what can we do? Perhaps we could indulge in compassion and empathy (I hope this doesn't start sounding mushy). Maybe if we come across a chance to criticize, we could bite our tongue and do the metaphorical 'stepping into their shoes', and consider their point of view. It could have been an honest mistake - perhaps they tried their best. If they're doing something wrong, it's possible that they haven't been taught correctly. They might be tired, insecure or affected by some recent disaster. People are likely to justify and rationalize their actions, and as we know, criticism will usually only arouse resentment. Why not try words of encouragement, compassion, and understanding? Yes, being encouraging and compassionate about the downfalls we perceive in others may sound mushy and saccharine, but are we more likely to appreciate the person who appreciates our struggles, or the person who condemns our hardships?

Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was shut up.- Joe Namath

Till next time,
Eric.

More information on improving self-compassion :)

Stress and Giving Up

If you're a student studying in high school and reading this, then it's very likely that sometime during the last couple of months, weeks or even days you have had the mountains of homework and associated stress that comes along with it. Schooling and education takes up a major part of our student lives, and the amount of pressure that many of us may feel can sometimes take its toll on all aspects of our life, from our health, wealth and relationships, and at times we can feel like giving it all up.

Not to start sounding like the 'Student Wellbeing' section of your school newsletter or anything, but I thought I might document my thoughts on student stress and motivation. As students, we're told to study, but never how to study. Some rudimentary advice may be offered from our educational institutions, such as 'study x amount of hours a day', or 'organize your study schedule in a manner similar to the one shown in table 2.5', etc, but this advice is often incredibly basic and many do not get much practical benefit from it. Life as a student may seem incredibly chaotic, as we attempt to balance all the factors influencing how we spend our time - our motivation, the workload, the stresses, the pressures, our short-term and long-term goals, and so on, by ourselves. With so little official advice, how do most of us ever survive?

The simple answer is most likely this: we don't. An ideal reality would likely have most students follow a very mechanical, business-like notion that if we improve our time-management skills drastically, we can become incredible productivity machines. Productivity machines that could get home at a set time, work on one subject or another for a set time, take a __ minute break, then go straight back to work, before finishing with _ minutes of leisure. Ideally, study would be effective if we were to arrive home, and then work solidly for however long, have our leisure and sleep at an appropriate time. And I have no doubt that some people do achieve this, but I'm not one of them, and neither are many of the people I know.

Instead, many of us may arrive at our homes with the perfectly legitimate intention of following a meticulously thought out schedule, just to realize that you haven't done a thing and it's 11pm. Or we realize that there's some project or assessment task that's due in a couple of days, and that we've got time from now until then, and that it would make a great deal of logical sense to complete it in the next couple of days.... but the moment you try to begin, there's a sinking feeling in your stomach, a sensation of dread shivers up your body, and we realize that we just don't want to do the work. In cases like these, where we have the desire and intention to have the work completed, but can't seem to get into the right state of mind to actually get it done, I think that there's more to 'it' than the logical considerations that we take - in only mechanically considering our workload, we're neglecting the emotional, physical and mental aspects that coincide with any task we set ourselves to do.

Stephen Covey talks about how tasks can be separated into urgent and non urgent, and important and unimportant. He notes that the tasks we always seem to occupy ourselves with are the urgent tasks (both important and unimportant), whilst the tasks that we should be doing, but never get around to are the important, but not urgent ones. An assessment task that's due in a couple of days is important, but not urgent enough to provoke an adrenaline response that forces us into action. Instead, many of us sometimes linger about, with a level of longing that makes us want the work to be done, but not enough to motivate us to actually sit down and start. Or if we do start, we're disliking the work. This study is important enough for us to want to do it, but it isn't urgent for us to have to do it. "We still have time", we can still procrastinate...

A Time Management book that I read once stated that there are three main reasons to procrastination: You don't know enough about the task at hand, there's not enough interest in the task as it is is boring/unimportant, or you don't know where to begin. Addressing the first issue, the book suggests that we attempt to learn about the task bit-by-bit, by breaking the larger project into small, manageable chunks. It suggests that if we find a task boring or unimportant, we attempt to see how it relates to the larger scheme of things, and asks us to identify what value the particular project can bring to us, or to drop the task entirely if it is of no objective value at all; and when we don't know where to begin, we should just jump straight in and correct our mistakes afterwards. It's far easier to go back and edit something, than to sit around thinking of the perfect first sentence.

I've tried that advice, and some of it worked for me, and some of it didn't. Advice always seems to sound good on paper (or on your computer screen, in this case), but sometimes when you're sitting there with a blank document open, the logicality of advice can conflict with the emotions that you feel against working. When you get down to it, procrastination and student stress is an emotional phenomenon. We don't sit down and think "hey, I think lack sufficient knowledge of Trotsky's vision of the Russian Revolution to successfully write a 3,000 word essay describing my thoughts on it, so I'll just sit here, and in my intense fear of being judged negatively for the sub-par work I might do, I have officially decided to procrastinate and Facebook chat that cute girl I met last week". Instead, we get this sinking feeling in our bodies that 'stops' us from starting what we wish was completed.

So what can we do to change this? I imagine that a life without stress would be very desirable to many people, and the main way that I personally attempt to attack the tendency to procrastinate my work is through ... sleep and exercise. Yup. Uh huh. Let me explain my non-scientific, non-psychological and unproven technique to battle procrastination. Stress, motivation and the tendency to procrastinate are all emotions. You feel stressed. You feel motivated. You feel anxious. Generally speaking, our actions as human beings are guided by our emotions - if we feel anxious, stressed and procrastinate-y, we're not likely going to begin to start our work. But on the flip side, if we feel wonderful, motivated and happy, then getting through work may very well be a breeze. I personally find that a 30 minute power-nap before starting study, and some exercise during the day really helps fight off any negative emotions I might be feeling towards the workload I have - and for me, this works.

The real key is to find out what works for you - what sort of environment do you work best in? Some people can't work with mess, some prefer the intimacy of a messy workplace. Are there any idiosyncrasies that you have to entertain in order to keep yourself happy? (personally, I hate when my keyboard is sticky) But the main point is to see what puts you in the mood to work, and then from there what tools and techniques you can use to get your work done. If sleep and exercise work for you, then go ahead and use it. If breaking a task into small chunks work for you, then use that.

Here's a tip though: I'd encourage you to write down what you're trying before you try it, and then afterwards go back and see whether it worked. If not, then try something else, and before long, when you find something that works, you could be writing long, wonderful rambling pieces of prose like the one you're reading right now.

Take Care,
Eric