Improvement Blog

I found this on Craigslist. It’s actually pretty good and makes a lot of sense. I can’t disagree with any of it. It’s a long one so read the whole thing.

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man
1. Don’t pick on the weak. It’s immoral. Don’t antagonize the strong without cause, its stupid.
2. Don’t hate women. It’s a waste of time.
3. Invest in yourself. Material things come to those that have self actualized.
4. Get in a fistfight, even if you are going to lose.
5. As a former Marine, take it from me. Don’t join the military, unless you want to risk getting your balls blown off to secure other people’s economic or political interests.
6. If something has a direct benefit to an individual or a class of people, and a theoretical, abstract, or amorphous benefit to everybody else, realize that the proponent’s intentions are to benefit the former, not the latter, no matter what bullshit they try to feed you.
7. Don’t be a Republican. They are self-dealing crooks with no sense of honor or patriotism to their fellow citizens. If you must be a Republican, don’t be a “conservative.” They are whining, bitching, complaining, simple-minded self-righteous idiots who think they’re perpetual victims. Listen to talk radio for a while, you’ll see what I mean.
8. Don’t take proffered advice without a critical analysis. 90% of all advice is intended to benefit the proponent, not the recipient. Actually, the number is probably closer to 97%, but I don’t want to come off as cynical.
9. You’ll spend your entire life listening to people tell you how much you owe them. You don’t owe the vast majority of people shit.
10. Don’t undermine your fellow young men. Mentor the young men that come after you. Society recognizes that you have the potential to be the most power force in society. It scares them. Society does not find young men sympathetic. They are afraid of you, both individually and collectively. Law enforcement’s primary purpose is to suppress you.
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I spend an incredible amount of money in Tescos for the average person. I would estimate that my food bill might be something like £150 a month, for one person. Part of the reason, is that I am a bit of a brand snob. I would have to get the good stuff. This was until, I happened to chance upon some tomatoes, and I considered the Tesco value range.

Now, a few years ago, when the crappily-packaged Value range emerged, I remember thinking that they would sell a hell of a lot more of them if they put a bit of work into the packaging. But, having thought about it now, the crap packaging is intentional - and deliberately designed to target only the people who ‘have’ to buy it. In a great marketing attempt, average people like me are steered towards the good stuff - ensuring good profits for the stores.

Let’s take the case of the tomatoes. You can buy a value pack for 59p, which contains maybe 10. A standard Tesco pack costs 89p for 6, admittedly bigger ones in shiny plastic. And the whole hog, you can get ‘Finest’ for £1.39. For this you get a polythene tray, and also a stalk, so the pack can boast ‘on the vine’. 

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Sometimes, we don’t reward ourselves enough. What is the purpose of a reward? Obviously, it is like the carrot, compared to the stick - a motivator, to get us to do something. In the big picture though, rewards can improve our happiness, improve productivity, and accelerate progress towards your own big goals.

Now, some of that may sound a bit strange. The trouble is, although self-rewarding is built into us - gratification is built into our psyche in concepts such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - our brains may make an assumption of what is good, and we act as if that assumption is true. Ergo, there are activities that may seem like ‘rewards’ but in actual fact are anything but.

An extreme example - a cigarette. A smoker would understand that this might be a reward for completing a task ‘oh, I’ll do this, and then I’ll have a smoke’. A non-smoker would agree with me that this reward is anything but. But then, we can also look at other false rewards - junk food, spending money on rubbish, porn surfing. No-one is perfect, but perceiving these type of ‘activities’ as rewards is not going to be good in the long run. If you want to do it, then do it. It is more about the bigger picture.

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As part of my course, I’ve come across something called Management By Objectives, the concept of which is actually rather straightforward, but like many academic things, people find the necessity to wrap it up in theory, studies, critical analysis and arguments for and against, so they can make you write about it in an exam setting. I was recently whinging that I had little to write about in here but I’ve been using this theory for the last two months with good effect.

Management By Objectives (here in called MBO) has the basic premise that a task is more likely to be acheived if it is broken down into is constituent parts, which can then be used as targets. So a strategic big goal, such as ‘grow revenues by 20%’ could be split into something like ’service 20 transactions a day’. Day to day attainment leads to the bigger goal.

Everyone has goals. Obviously, some of the big ones take priority. For example, earning enough to pay the rent or mortgage. Earning enough to eat. Behaving well enough so that your partner doesn’t leave you. The motivators for these are pretty clear, and for most people, it’s automatic. Motivation just happens, even though the brain may resent it. But, there are loads of goals that we, as complex beings pursue either conciously, or subconsiously at one time. What about a goal like ‘get a six-pack’, ‘get qualified’? These are big goals where motivation can be big on certain days but the sight of these goals may be lost in the hum of everyday life.

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Recently, I happened to stumble on a site called:                                                                                            

Now, I’m here to promote this fantastic cause of microfinancing - the provision of small loans to people in developing countries who would not be able to secure finance any other way.

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“Action may not always bring happiness, but there can be no happiness without action”.

“I thought it would be hard, but it wasn’t…”

Ho hum. There hasn’t been an update here in a while, but for the past 40 days, or the period of Lent, I have been on a challenge to abstain from masturbation, wanking, or whichever name you wanted to call it.  At the start of this mission, the task seemed quite daunting. I mean, a week is probably a long time by anyone standards but the challenge was for almost seven. I was bravely joined on the challenge by Gos, and after seeing his Xbox hard drive, would also have a hard time.

Gos advocated the use of a ‘wildcard’, which, in retrospect was a good move. I had to look the date up but I used it on the 23 Feb, which is a month ago. In my defence, I had to get up extremely early the next day and needed some sleep, but that is still a pretty crap excuse.

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Well, it’s been a while. Partially amnesia and partially that I’m not actually that good at writing these blog things.
That’s not to say that I’ve forgotten about the whole thing; I’m still getting up 1 minute earlier each day (7.13am and counting).

OK, I want to talk about anger. It may not sound like the sort of topic that is related to this but I believe that it is. I’ve always practiced unreactiveness to situations, even emotional detachment. This means that emotions such as anger are all internalised. I was watching a program last night about the oldest people in the world and when asked about the secret of longevity, one woman replied ‘I am honest… because I am honest, God looks after me’.

Now, I don’t subscribe to this sort of sanctimonious bullshit. I mean, what are we saying, a four year old girl with cancer is a serial liar? But, on another level, maybe our internal state is one of the keys to long life. Repressed anger could be killing us slowly. I think that there’s been times where we have been pissed off, angry, for a whole day, and you can literally feel the anger reverberating around your body. This can’t be a good thing.

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OK, it’s time for an update, given that I am halfway through my test without TV or other assorted distractions. I will be truthful as possible and say that this has been quite difficult and certainly harder than I thought. After all, Monday, Wednesday, I have been to the gym, Tuesday, Thursdays, to the library. I was out on Friday and Saturday night.

Avoiding such time-wasting activities requires a lot of concious thought - several times I turned the TV on out of pure habit and it took of couple of seconds to remember that I was not allowed to watch.

I suppose the strange thing is, I don’t miss the actual programmes themselves, but I do miss something else which is hard to explain. It’s the same with computer games, and browsing mindless internet sites. There is not one individual thing that I miss but overall there is a small part of resentment that I do not have total freedom of choice.

What have been the effects? Have there been improvements?

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You know, the most obvious challenge but worthy in its own right. This wouldn’t be a temporary one either, but something that is more ambiguous. Generally being a better person. I say generally because some people might think they are a better person purely for the fact that they donate to charity… but in retrospect, they could be wanker’s to people and this I think negates any minimal effort on their part to justify themselves each day. Justifiability is a good word. If you think about it, its just conditioning yourself to accept how much you do, and how other see you, but that belief is partial, as its formed mostly out of ignorance. The term, “Ignorance is bliss” fits nicely with this one. I knew someone, who despite the fact that I couldn’t see good in them, and other commented on the fact that they were indeed a bad person, would not, under any circumstance believe that they needed to change to be better or nice in any way. Another, is so neurotic that they don’t see that despite believing that they are right all the time and that they can’t do or say wrong, they can walk with an air of arrogance. God, I don’t like hurting peoples feelings but there is a line, and both of these people have crossed it, meaning I have reacted. Despite my efforts they still don’t see themselves in the wrong. Anyways, I’m not here to rant, I’m here to throw down a challenge.

Each day, when you are faced with a choice, which will have an outcome which will effect others, not yourself, think about your choice and make it a good one. Not just one which will benefit yourself!

Come back a week from now and see how it went!