Be An Asshole Today

Posted by on Apr 30, 2007 in Rant | 22 comments

Chris Brogan blogged this morning about today being a day to be nice to someone, so I figured I’d take the contrarian view (sort of) and recommend that today, you be an asshole.

Specifically:

- commit today to no longer communicate or work with people who are poisonous to your well being. You know who they are – rumor mongers, gossips, backstabbers, energy vampires, and generally not nice people. No matter how may debts, markers, favors, or chits they owe you or you owe them, declare your entire relationship null and void, and get away from them. They’ll probably call you an asshole, but that’s life.

- commit today to defining what you will and will not stand for, in relationships, in life, in work. When someone or something tries to push that line, push back. Be firm and resolute about your choices, knowing that you’ve committed to your values. Some people will probably call you an asshole for no longer letting them walk all over you.

- commit today to no longer follow those persons and ideals who lead you nowhere. If your goal is success, why emulate the non-successful? Emulate, follow, and deeply study those people, ideals, and creeds who have achieved what you want to achieve in life. You may find yourself at odds, then, with those around you who have grown comfortable with who you are today, and not who you want to be – and yes, they’ll probably say you’ve become an asshole.

Obviously, you don’t have to be as blunt or direct as I’ve posted here, but if your goal is accomplishment – be it social good, profit, fame, fortune, salvation, whatever – make today the day you reaffirm your commitment to your goal of accomplishment, and begin to leave behind all the obstacles to that accomplishment.

Superhero Powers You Have Right Now

Posted by on Apr 30, 2007 in Jedi mind tricks | 2 comments

Here’s a breakdown of some popular superhero powers – and the means by which you have them right now, with no additional work on your part.

Clairvoyance/Remote Viewing:
- Google Earth
- Google Maps
- YouTube
- UStream.tv
- Flickr

Telepathy/Empathy:
- Blogs
- Twitter
- RSS
- Email
- Server log files

Telekinesis/Psychokinesis:
- EatNow.com
- Webcams
- Stickam
- Buying anything online

Psychometry:
- Google

Precognition:
- Google
- RSS
- Data Aggregators
- SPSS

Astral Projection:
- Second Life

Clairaudience:
- Podcasts

Omnilinguism:
- Google Translate
- Babelfish

Mind Control:
- Online marketing

Encyclopedic Knowledge:
- Internet access

Second Life, Superheroes, and The Greater Good

Posted by on Apr 29, 2007 in New media, Ninjutsu, On ko chi shin, Second Life, Technology | 6 comments

Another fantastic seminar with master teacher Stephen K. Hayes has come to an end, and this one is even harder to put into words. Meditations, martial arts, and mind science all blended together for an eye-opening weekend. A few takeaways that I can put into words come to mind…

Second Life. Was there Second Life at the seminar? No. Second Life is a technology that came along about 600 years after the period we were studying, but Second Life provides something to many people that has not been previously available – the ability to visualize and see visualized other people’s internal mind images on a grand scale. During the guided meditation, we were asked to construct some mental images in our heads about the topics at hand, and I found myself creating imagery with greater ease than ever before, and much of it looked like stuff you’d see in world. Second Life has given me more mental flexibility to do that kind of internal vision work than I thought possible, and that was really eye opening.

Super powers. So many of the “deities” in Buddhism have ascribed attributes. This one on the mandala is the power of healing, this one over here is the power of compassion. In the Buddhist tradition, these things are archetypes – ideals, essences, distillations of the quality, as opposed to being an external entity. You wouldn’t ever go to a church to worship, say, Yoda or Superman, but you might in a time of crisis envision yourself having Yoda’s wisdom or Superman’s strength. The same is true of the Buddhist superheroes painted on these iconic images. One of the takeaways from the weekend for me was not just learning about a particular superhero power or quality, but making use of it, bringing it out of your head and into the world so you can generate results with it.

Think about it this way – how selfish would it be, if you had X-Ray vision or could fly or bullets couldn’t harm you, to simply live a quiet life and not make use of those powers for good? We talked a lot this weekend about the state of the world, about how fast the world is changing, and not necessarily for the better. We in new media have super powers. We can talk to thousands, millions of people with the push of a button. We can gain “telephathic” insights into our friends’ inner thoughts with an RSS reader, know where they are via Twitter and other location-aware devices. We can see life through their eyes via Flickr, YouTube, Blip.tv, and more. In olden times, the ability to see from afar was called remote viewing, or clairvoyance. Now it’s called UStream.tv. The ability to foresee the future like a Jedi or Sith seemed magical 30 years ago when George Lucas put Star Wars on the big screen. Today, you only need aggregate multiple data sources, and patterns emerge that might as well be a map.

YOU are the superhero, or have the potential to be and the tools to do it with, right now. You don’t have to become a black belt in a martial art, or spend decades meditating in a cave somewhere. Just turn on your computer, connect to the Internet, and you have tapped into your power source. You have activated your superpowers. You can save lives with your powers, you can make the world a better place, or you can advance its destruction. Choose wisely.

Human technology. The Internet is the great leveler. It’s the great equalizer, if we let it be. The power of the Internet has made some careers and lives and broken others. Most importantly, it allows us to connect to each other, to organize, to share, to grow, and to be greater than the individual. The power of our network is spectacular when you step back, when you stop letting life’s mundane chores and daily grind blind you to your powers. The same technologies are available to everyone who connects (for the most part). Jewish? RSS works for you. Muslim? RSS works for you, too. American? A blog post by an American has the same technological foundation, broadly speaking, as a blog post by a Russian, Australian, or Kenyan. The Internet isn’t a group’s technology, it’s human technology. It’s all of ours.

One thing that has always stood out to me was an experience I had in 1993, at a Billy Joel concert. The energy of that concert was unbelievable, at Nassau Colliseum, not far from where Joel grew up. At the end of the night, he sang his signature piece, Piano Man, for a crowd of 30,000, and nearly everyone in the audience sang along. 30,000 people unified their thoughts, words, and actions together to sing this one song and the energy and power of that moment was awe-inspiring. I thought to myself afterwards, imagine the potential that humanity has if we could unify like that for longer, on a bigger scale. What would we be capable of?

The same thought repeats in my head now. What could we do together – what heights could we achieve, if we stop thinking of ourselves as small little individuals in a hostile world, and take charge of our experiences of life? What could we BE if we are all together working for good, fully awakened to our powers, fully able to tap into them?

Have some toilet paper for your mouth…

Posted by on Apr 28, 2007 in Rant | 6 comments

… because what’s coming out of it is a load of shit.

From an MSNBC article:

Oda said banning guns on campus might do more harm than good. He said people bent on violence might resort to other, perhaps bloodier methods, such as swords. “A person that’s got skill with a sword in a very big crowd could put a lot more people down with a sword than a gun,” he said. “They’re silent. You’ll have people screaming, but nobody knows what’s going on.”

Please put your head back in your ass so that when you talk, no one can hear you. You, sir, have clearly never picked up a sword in your entire life. Here is what it is like to cut with a sword. Take a three foot stick and smack a radial tire swing with it. If you can get the tire swing to fly out of the way without transmitting a massive amount of vibration back into your arms, or without bouncing the stick back up in your face, then you may be competent with a sword.

Sword cutting is HARD. It takes thousands of hours of practice to be able to cut effectively with a sword, no matter how sharp it is. It takes thousands of hours, too, with a gun on a range to be able to kill with pinpoint accuracy, but if you shoot wildly into a crowd, you’ll do some pretty serious damage, probably even fatally wound some people. If you swing a sword wildly into a crowd with no training, you will probably cut a few people. Depending on the time of year, they may need stitches. If it’s winter and they’re wearing leather coats, you’re just going to ruin their coat. Then they will beat you to a bloody pulp. Even a talented, skilled swordsman would have a hard time in a crowd. Think about this – which will get people wet faster, a super soaker that you just shoot randomly, or running around trying to tag people with a wet sponge?

Last thing to think about. If you cook, you know how hard it is to use a knife skillfully on a raw chicken or fish. You’re cutting with a blade. Now multiply the difficulty of making good, clean cuts by a thousand, since you have a target that can and does move, and what would have been a clean cut a half second ago is now a complete miss.

Hey, if you can actually get criminals to give up firearms for swords, the world will be a safer place.

Steve Garfield says it all.

Posted by on Apr 27, 2007 in New media | 4 comments

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