I asked him to describe his mental process, and he willingly lectured, handing out self-evident truths.
"The mental side is broken into three areas or levels. One: the idea, the visualization or conceiving side. It's hard to equate it to anything other than those positive-affirmation, self-help type of things. Olympic skiers visualize the course. For me, I do it for everything I do, not just fighting. Now that I'm commentating on live TV, I play it out in my head a bunch of different times, seeing ways it could go, making sure I hit the points I want to hit. "The second part is replicating just practice. It's hard to believe something will work if you've never pulled it off. You practice the moves. The fighting ones are obvious, but for this last press conference I rehearsed with the fighters, I walked them through it, got them used to the sound of my voice. It chilled everyone out. "The third part is doing, and every time you do it you get better. It takes less energy and stress." "There is a belief in our system"-he was referring to his school-"that I came up with years ago, that it takes three people to make you into the best person you can be. Somebody better than you, someone equal to you, and someone less than you. People hear that and get freaked out, because they want to be better than everyone, or at least equal. The goal is actually to put yourself as the last person, even if you're the guy in the lead. You can always find something other people are better at. So teach me, show me, let's work on that. If you can accept the humility and understand why it's important, you'll grow so strong in every way. Imagine if you did that to every person you came in contact with? You put yourself underneath them to learn? I always stay a student." The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Gameby Sam Sheridan "You need to have a brutal honesty with yourself. Did I do everything possible to win that fight? What didn't I do? And analyze honestly, without bias, from a technical standpoint. And then ask yourself, `Did I do everything in my training to prepare?' It's about moving forward. We plague ourselves with stupidity, with bad thoughts. We put our brains in that prison. You can carry that fear with you, inside you, and it can keep you from changing for the better."
You prepare your mind to suffer and inflict suffering. You delete a part of your compassion. There's a certain amount of brutality-to offer violence. Or you're vulnerable. I didn't always feel that way. Before the Sherk fight it was always just part of my job, just compete. Now I want to kill that guy. Whatever I can do within the rules with the utmost brutality. I won't hesitate. Every fight there's more wood on the fire, more bad intentions the closer I get. I've been programmed." Because without it you're a sitting duck. Emotions always run out. You can't fight on emotion or adrenaline. At the end of the day, you have to have a love for it, something that lasts forever, because that will carry you. You can only be mad for so long. It can help you, but anytime you make decisions based on emotions you'll make a decision without all the information, it's inconsistent." He continues, "Whereas if I'm just focused on the techniques and strategy of the fight, on the fluidity of the fight, on what needs to be done tactically, then I'll make the right decisions. Instead of just being mad, `Oh, he punched me, I'll punch him.' That changes things. You need to be able to stay calm. The Fighter's Mind: Inside the Mental Game by Sam Sheridan Someone just wrote me, for instance, and said they want to write a novel (they have the idea) but don’t know how. The answer is really simple: first practice staring at a blank screen for 20 minutes a day. Then start writing 500 words a day. A novel is 60,000 words.
500 words a day is 180,000 words in one year (and that assumes breaks for 5 holidays). 500 words is only 2-3 paragraphs. So you can write 3 novels in one year. Or one good, highly edited novel. And that’s if you limit yourself to 500 words. With practice you’ll go up to 1,000 words, 2,000 words, etc. Any small improvement (staring at a blank screen to get used to the idea of writing) will add up to success beyond belief (who would think you can do 3 novels in a year so easily?) Walter Mosely (one of my favorite mystery writers) has written that if you just write 500 words a day (three paragraphs) then in 100 days you have 50,000 words. Which is roughly the length of a small but publishable novel. So you can write 3.5 novels a year. Or write one really good one that you’ve rewritten quite a bit. Try it. Faq Me by James Altucher Yet simplicity has been difficult to implement in modern life because it is against the spirit of a certain brand of people who seek sophistication so they can justify their profession.
Less is more and usually more effective. Thus I will produce a small number of tricks, directives, and interdicts—how to live in a world we don’t understand, or, rather, how to not be afraid to work with things we patently don’t understand, and, more principally, in what manner we should work with these. But simplicity is not so simple to attain. Steve Jobs figured out that “you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.” The Arabs have an expression for trenchant prose: no skill to understand it, mastery to write it Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb Most people's life quality can be drastically improved by just finding 5-10 of their limiting beliefs and changing them. Each single one of your beliefs has the power to create either depression or joy in your life.
This means that whenever I refer to a belief as negative or positive in this book, I am only talking about whether or not it is improving the quality of your life. Now that you understand that all beliefs are also meta-beliefs, and vice versa, I will just use the word belief from now on, in order to make things as simple as possible. The Model I work with a model of behavior that is very simple to understand: Belief --» Reaction + Justification This simple model is determining how you are constantly reacting. The first step towards free will is to understand the underlying principles. Belief: An understanding about a given area of life or a situation. Reaction: How you ''choose'' to react in different circumstances and to different experiences in life. Your reactions are completely determined by the kind of beliefs you have running in the background. Justification: This is the story you build around a given reaction and your justification explains why you did what you did. In 9/10 cases your justifications are NOT the real reason why you reacted as you did, your beliefs are. Let's look at some practical examples of how this model works in relation to your limiting beliefs, so that we don't get too caught up in the theory. You think you are in control, but in reality your beliefs are controlling everything. This isn't problematic in and of itself, because no matter what you do, your beliefs are always going to be in control If we couldn't rely on our beliefs as a means of operating in daily life, we would never evolve or grow, because we would constantly have to learn the same thing over and over again. But how are we going to become the master of our experience, if our beliefs are always going to be in control? We are going to do so by choosing the beliefs we want to operate with. The Mind-Made Prison: Radical Self Help and Personal Transformation by Mateo Tabatabai CHANGE UP, DON’T GIVE UP.
I was the guy who “gave up” on the thirty-ninth try when trying to sell a novel I had written. Sometimes the odds are just too stacked against you. Maybe it would’ve worked on the fortieth try. I don’t know. But I’m glad I gave up; I “changed up” instead. Rather than focusing on fiction as the only creative medium, I started looking at both TV and the brand-new World Wide Web as creative media. Which led to a job at HBO. Which led to my first company focusing on building content-heavy websites for entertainment companies. I didn’t give up on being creative. I expanded the power of my creativity by not limiting myself to one domain, and vowing to return to book-writing later, ultimately to fiction-writing. Maybe I’ll do it, maybe I won’t. But the “Change Up” certainly released me creatively, and I was able to use it to build both my financial life and creative life. We’ll see if it ever comes full circle. Choose Yourself! by James Altucher (Just finished this book - its great, make sure you get it.) You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
Ray Bradbury Wake up early.
Avoid distractions. Work three to five hours a day and then enjoy the rest of the day. Be as perfectionist as you can, knowing that imperfection will still rule. Have the confidence to be magical and stretch the boundaries of your medium. Combine the tools of the medium itself with the message you want to convey. Don’t get stuck in the same rut—move forward, experiment, but with the confidence built up over experience. Change the rules but learn them first. A creator can’t ever rest. No matter what you do, no matter what your creation is. Every moment is the audition. Every time you create is a chance to go on the roof and do something new, in a way that hasn’t been done before, in a way that is potentially disruptive, playful, unique, and vulnerable. People will hate you, people will love you, people will climb on the rooftops to see you before the police arrest you. The Beatles passed the audition that one last time. Now it’s our turn. Choose Yourself! by James Altucher Nobody can tell you what to do.
No matter what they pay you. No matter what obligations you feel you owe them. Every second defines you. Be who you are, not who anyone else is, or who anyone else wants you to be. An entrepreneur, for instance, has investors, customers, partners, employees, and competitors. Everyone wants his input heard. But only you can act to change the world with your ideas. Choose Yourself! by James Altucher Goethe had now come to the conclusion that all forms of human knowledge are manifestations of the same life force he had intuited in his near-death experience as a young man. The problem with most people, he felt, is that they build artificial walls around subjects and ideas. The real thinker sees the connections, grasps the essence of the life force operating in every individual instance. Why should any individual stop at poetry, or find art unrelated to science, or narrow his or her intellectual interests? The mind was designed to connect things, like a loom that knits together all of the threads of a fabric. If life exists as an organic whole and cannot be separated into parts without losing a sense of the whole, then thinking should make itself equal to the whole.
A few months later, he wrote his friend, the great linguist and educator Wilhelm von Humboldt, the following: “The human organs, by means of practice, training, reflection, success or failure, furtherance or resistance…learn to make the necessary connections unconsciously, the acquired and the intuitive working hand-in-hand, so that a unison results which is the world’s wonder…The world is ruled by bewildered theories of bewildering operations; and nothing is to me more important than, so far as is possible, to turn to the best account what is in me and persists in me, and keep a firm hand upon my idiosyncrasies.” These would be the last words he would write. Within a few days he was dead, at the age of eighty-three. Mastery by Robert Greene |
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