• The Dilettante Way

    by Alexander Becker

    The dilettante way starts with ignorance is bliss.

    Naivete, paired with unfounded optimism and complete ignorance, often helps here.

    Remember: sometimes not knowing what you're doing is an advantage.

    Do something that no one else, no one in the know would even consider, because it doesn't work. Well, since you don't know that it doesn't work, you can just do it and succeed because your initial ignorance makes room for a positive outcome. The impossible becomes possible when you don't realize, accept, or admit that it's impossible in the first place...

    The dilettante is one lacking the required professional skill and ease in a particular pursuit: an amateur, a dabbler, a nonprofessional, a smatterer, an uninitiate.

    There are many who'd better stop writing, playing, singing, creating, ... or so it seems. There are many who lack the required skill for their profession, yet, they get better, everyday, better and better, going all the way from dilettante to excellence.

    No matter how bad you start, you eventually get better -- as long as you don't stop and don't quit. The key is initial output.

    What about talent or the lack thereof --

    ... to be successful, you must play to your strength. Each of us has different talents/strengths due to differences in character, personalities or inclinations. If your talents don't complement your pursues, then you will have to work doubly hard to achieve the same results that others do; you're handicapped right from the start.

    Is talent sufficient then? Dilettante and talent are not mutually exclusive. You can have all the talent in the world and still fail in your particular field because -- you lack the skill. But guess what? That skill, however elusive, will eventually come to you. Through practice and failure. By way of doing vs. not doing. To just do it gives you a head start. Just do it and start to practice and gather invaluable experience instantly.

    You will get better. That's inevitable.

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  • A Simple Technique to Experience Amazing Productivity Gains

    by Alexander Becker

    You plan your objectives in written form. You live Getting Things Done and the accompanying struggles.

    That is the easy stuff; mindsweeps, making lists of things, organizing and structuring the always up-to-date lists into contexts and working according to the circumstances, the environment, and the available energy. You will most likely end up with lists that grow longer and longer without even the slightest chance to ever satisfactorily complete any one sub-list.

    Enter the advanced stuff.

    Since you're working with and alongside intentions anyway, let's try to build a somewhat idealistic, but nevertheless fully functioning, productivity model based on only the best intentions.

    1. Start with the ubiquitous mindsweep.
    2. Recognize and accept the Must Do tasks.
    3. Collect your intentions for the desired outcomes of the Must Do and the Want-To-Do Really Badly stuff.
    4. Inject as much positive thinking as possible into your mental process. Sanitize every thought of potential auto-sabotage.
    5. Feel the synchronicities and the manifestations show up in waves depending on your faith in the actual reception of the intended goal or subject of desire.

    It is as simple as reaping what you sow, only more elegant.

    You act in accordance with your intentions, you set out your intentions and everything flows naturally, almost effortlessly, you take occasional glances at your plans and lists and you select instinctively, without much conscious thinking, the most appropriate and highest value-yielding task to subsequently accomplish in your sequence of events.

    Now that is productivity, where the world seems to run in slow-motion while you are, in high-speed mode and fully alert, observing the fulfillment of your laid out plans and the arrival of your results.

    The next -- and the last -- project you are going to tackle the old-school way will be the raising of your consciousness to the level where the magic becomes possible in the first place.

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  • 11 Ways to Improve Clarity and Start Getting Results

    by Alexander Becker

    Once you have found your purpose in life, you will have more than enough to do in never enough time. Here are some ways to make your experience even more joyous:

    1. List the top three objectives of your current endeavour. To do this, weigh the most important goals and assign them relative importances. You obviously have to decide which ones are not in the top three. Can you see where this is going? No two things are equally important.
    2. Be sure and confident about what you are doing and why and pursue exactly one project, single-mindedly to the end, until completion. This means you have to make decisions. Do not stand in your own way. Concentrate all your efforts and energy on one target at a time.
    3. Be able to present a written list, at any time, with your top priorities. Practice and pretend to be pitching your services and your goals every day.
    4. Define your #1 goal, its #1 project and its respective #1 task and start working on it, once you understand that this is the only thing there is, right now.
    5. Do not worry about the future. Stop worrying altogether. Apply your rage to the present moment. Transform rage into vigor. Do not fight the future and do not fight in the future. Be clear about the present, about this very moment.
    6. Your rewards are nothing to worry about either, they will come to you when their time has arrived -- worrying will only delay them and prevent you from receiving what you deserve.
    7. Realize that you do not have to suffer to achieve what you want. You decide whether suffering is part of your experience or not.
    8. Drop any goal that isn't worth pursuing anymore; do not let your countless started, semi-finished, and never followed-up upon projects divert your focus. They are worth nothing and only add to your sense of failure. Get rid of the clutter.
    9. Set up a hierachy of time and desire. You cannot have everything you dream of immediately. Even if you skip sleep and eating, you are not going to accelerate the pace with which your dreams are made real.
    10. Set yourself up for success by accepting what you have, as the ground in which to plant the seeds. Do not resist the situation you're in for you set up your future failure as long as you fail to accept the present.
    11. Do not break down and destroy your previous achievements in order to follow a new idea. Recognize the foundations that are laid out for you and your creation. Build on top of what you have -- whatever that may be.

    There is another way that runs parallel: see and set your goals as plans to improve your current experience of the present, whatever their outcome may be, regardless of the time it takes to successfully complete them, if they are ever going to be completed, that is.

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  • Reality Check: The Implications of Elite Training

    by Alexander Becker

    Is it possible to be in top physical and mental condition while at the same time participating in life with all its seductions, influences, and an environment that is, if not negative by definition, at least neutral, neutral as opposed to the maximum goals and achievements that are so not-average and pursued while training for life?

    Coming out of a controlled environment, mind and body, discipline and willpower are finally allowed to show what they are really able to achieve.

    Yet it seems that only in a controlled environment, it is possible to train and prepare yourself for heights formerly unknown. This creates a dual environment problem, where you train for the outside world but not within that world. I'd love to promote training for the real world in the real world but it doesn't work this way.

    You train with amazing results, you eat perfectly healthy, your thinking is positive and untainted, only to emerge from your laboratory immediately starting to effectively de-train your mind and your body. Life is cyclic.

    I'm still striving to attain the heights of the monk, always, and continuously, although I do not recommend living completely ascetic. Life has to be instinctual -- to a certain degree at least -- it encompasses ups and downs, exceptions, successes and failures.

    After a certain point, after accomplishing your goals for yourself, to go even further, to reach for the next impossible, the unreasonable, you have to decide whether to drop everything incompatible or accept satisfaction with what you have within easy reach.

    This is what is meant when the best is being defined as the enemy of mere good.

    WOW! You look like you're not from this world is not an exaggeration but a perfect truth.

    We're talking about the training of elite athletes here, with goals hard to attain, training levels hard to maintain, and rewards hard to believe but why not adopt some of the methods and include them in your everyday mindset.

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