The Results Are In...

Tallied up the votes just now, looks like the top winners are:

1.Core Vs. Ego, how to tell the difference. (6 votes)

4.Back to Basics, How to be a Man (Tough love post) (4 votes)

6.How to have an Excellent Conversation with a Complete Stranger (6 votes)

8.College Game: Meet to Lay (5 votes)

I'm glad that 1 and 6 are the top votewinners... those are the two I feel most in tune with right now.  I'm not sure I could write a tough love post right now with any sort of feeling, and I'm not at college.  Core vs. Ego tho, HUGE topic, and one that I have some valuable insight on.  Six is a community mainstay of course... but I think much of the community misses the mark on this one.

Getting laid and having an excellent conversation are two very different things... but they're not mutually exclusive if you know what you're doing.  I'll be tying in a lot of the concepts from the blog together in this one.

Stay tuned,

Matt

Change Your Life Now: Two Skills You Can Implement Right Now, to Change the Quality of Your Life

Above you see highlighted what might be considered the core of behavior change.  To the left you have your instinctual, on the spot decisions.   To the right, you have something much more unique (although not exclusivey belonging) to the human race:  Intellect, planning, self awareness.   But in the center, that is where the true behavior change master focuses their initial effort.  By making it a habit to control each of these four elements, you gain two huge advantages:

1. You learn how to consciously and easily switch between the Instinctual and Thoughtful Mind, which both have their own distinctive advantages and disadvantages

2. You make acquiring productive behavior both easy (Principle of Least Effort) and rewarding (Profit of Action Principle).  

So what are these four area?

Logic- Making a habit of being able to think things through, and Plan.

Values- Making a habit of taking abroader moral perspective on things.

Emotion- Making a habit of knowing, expressing, and effectively dealing with your feelings.

Exercise- Making a habit of being aware of, taking care of, and using your body.

These all sound vague, but they break down to specific skills, all of which are scientifically validated,  which through the use of The Succes On Autopilot System, you can turn in to habits.

So bringing this back to down to earth, what are two skills I can give you right now, which, if turned into habits, would immediately help you out:

Cognitve Reappraisal

This is used to go from the Instinctual Short Term Brain to the more long term focused brain.  It's especiall useful to combat cravings and desires for bad habits.

1.Label: Turn your brain on, by consciously labeling the desire, and go a step further by judging it. "I want a cigarette... this is bad"

2.Bring your values into it, by tying the reason that you can't do it in with your beliefs and values about what's right and wrong.

3. Bring your long term planning mechanisms in, imagine the long term awful benifits of doing the behavior.

4.After 10-15 minutes, the craving or desire should fade.... now that your long term brain is involved, offending excitors no longer have the same weight.

Beware of moral disengagement as portrayed in the first example in the video above.  The course also goes over "Cognitive Restructing", the process of changing your values and rules to make them more consistent and productive.

Motivational Priming

This technique is used to go from the Thoughtful Mind to the Instinctual Mind, and bring you to a state of immediatet positive action, it's effective when trying to defeat procrastination of a positive behavior.

1.Take a deep breath, relax every muscle in your body, release tension.

2.Stop Labeling, become intensly aware of the sensations provided by surrounding stimuli, but do not try to put words or thoughts to them.

3.Perform an action (such as a specific movement) or expose yourself to a stimulus (such as the above video clip) which gets you into a motivational or determined state.

4. You won't be able to help but doing the action you were previously procrastinating.  

The key to this one is identifying stimuli or movements (which are stimuli in themselves) which can induce positive states within you.  One particularly helpful way to do this is to take a look in the mirror, or better yet, videotape yourself, when you are in these positive states.  Replicating the body language and facial expressions of a state will immediately bring you into that state.

The course also goes over how train new stimuli to specific states, and even how to take two or more states and combine them with one stimulus, creating "anchors" to the desired states.

I hope these help you guys in your quest to become more effective, productive, succesful, and integrous individuals.  As always, I'm interested in getting feedback on how they worked for you, or any questions you may have about the techniques.  Leave a comment, or shoot me an email at MagicMattG(at)Gmail.com and I'll get back to you as quick as possible.

Thanks,

Matt

Human Cognition: A Simplified Scientific Model of our Actions and Behaviors.

This is the result of the rigorous research I have done into human behavior and how habits are formed.  The Succes On Autopilot system is a step by step process through which you can manipulate each one of the variables in the above picture,  to influence both your short term actions and long term behaviors.

4 Hour Work Week: Chapter 7 + Update

I'm still finding the low information diet and the media fast extremely difficult. I have the tendency to get an idea or thought in my head, then do hours of online research about to satisfy my curiosity. I find myself having to push these thoughs out of my head, and resist the desire to research them (You know you're a dork when you find yourself having to resist the urge to research :) ). I think that in order to get these ideas out of my head, I'm going to start writing the idea down on a sticky note and putting these sticky notes together as "possiblities for future research"... I think that as long as I know that the idea is down, and that I'm going to take care of it, it should hopefully take the issue off my mind.

I am having trouble remembering to constantly apply the the Pareto and Parkinson principle to everything. I think that as I do the daily chapter reading and applications, I should also review my posts from the previous chapters, and come up with new applications for the things I've learned. This will allow me to stay motivated and ingrain everything I learn as a habit. One problem with doing this is that as I continue to go through all my self help books, I'll have a list of ever growing concepts, principles, and habits which I'll have to review every day. However, I'm confident that patterns will quickly emerge among all the self help material, and I'll be able to group the concepts together thus making things less complicated.

Chapter 7

This chapter is about eliminating interrruptions, which are a key contributor to loss of productivity. Tim breaks up interruptions into three types:

1.Time Wasters
2.Time Consumers
3.Empowerment Failures

1.Time Wasters

The first thing that Tim mentions, which I mentioned in my discussion in the last chapter, is email. He recommends setting up an autoresponder, then checking only twice daily. I love this idea, but I'm not ready to do it just yet... once this semester is over, I should be able to set this up.

He then talks about phone calls... screen incoming phonecalls, limit outgoing phonecalls, and check voicemail twice a day.

He then talks about meetings, and how you should really avoid them at all costs. His preferred method of contacting is 1.email 2.phonecall 3. meeting. I've been trying to do this, but people seem resistant... he recommends the better way to do things is to just say you can't make it... people in my group have been using this excuse to great success :).

If someone does manage to get a hold of you, he recommends saying that you're busy, and urging them to get to the point.

I like all the suggestions here, and I'm going to start implementing them.

2. Time Consumers

These are things which take up a lot of time, and distract you from the truly important things.

Tim has a simple method of dealing with them: Batching.

Batching is taking a task such as laundry, and letting it accumulate, then doing it all at a specific time. This eliminates the extra start up and ending times that you would have to deal with if you had done smaller versions of the task.

The amount you let to accumlate is determined by a cost benifit analysis... the benifit is time, the cost is any number of things, depending on the task.

This is a great tool... but I don't know how I'll go about measuring the cost and benifits.

Tim measures them in dollars, but that's because this is focused specifically towards business. I'll have to guesstimate: What problems does this create? How much time does it save?

The idea is to maximize the value of Benifits - Costs.

Empowerment Failures: Rules and Readjustments

Simple stuff here, as far as I'm concerned. Give people the power to make decisions, and have the power to make decisions. Then review results to see what changes need to be made. If any of these things are not the case, fix them.

4 Hour Work Week: Chapter 6

Very short chapter, the low information diet.

Only let very few things get into your field of view, and when you do, make sure their worth it and immediately actionable.

The exercise is to go on a one week media fast.

Like much of the book, I don't necessarily agree with Tim's short term thinking here, but I'm going short term for now because it's what I need.

I find the low information diet incredibly hard to follow, especially when it comes to online stuff. I find myself on facebook, rsdnation, or browsing the web for interesting shit without even realizing it, then remembering I'm on the low information diet and shutting it out.

I think I may want to keep this up for longer than a week... looking at such useless information so often is an awful habit, and one that I need to break.

I haven't been able to apply it to emails... this is a case where Tim's thinking is actually to long term for my situation. I'd just fuck myself over in the short term.

Chapter 7 coming up next.

4 Hour Work Week: Chapter 5

Here's where the real shit starts.  I skipped Chapter four because it's about figurig out what you want, and I'm pretty clear on that already. 

Chapter five is called "the end of time management", it talks about being effective, rather than just efficient.

There are three basics things thatI took from this chapter, which I applied immediately.  I managed to get 3 assignments done in a short period of time using them.

1.The Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle is this: in general, 80% of the output comes from 20% of the input.

80% of the positive results come from 20% of the actions you take.

80% of the negative results come from 20% of the actions you take.

So, if you absolutey make sure you do the first 20%, and absolutely make sure you don't do the second 20%... you have 80% more time and 80% less problems. This applies on both a macro and micro level.

On a micro level, I'll apply it to writing a paper or making a presenation.

Things I do that get me 80% of my results:

1. Writing a small simplistic outline

2. Stream of consciousness writing to hash out some ideas

3. Doing it in the library, were there are less distractions.

4. Rereading the book chapter or chapters that it's based on.

Things that I do that give me 80% of my problems

1. Spending too much time researching

2. Spending too much time coming up with an idea

3. SPending too much time trying to find evidence for a specific point.

So, I want to keep the 20% that help me, and remove the 20% that hurt me.

My new process for writing a paper:

1.Reread the chapter.

2. Go to the library.

3. Come up with an idea, if I don't have one, write stream of consciosness till one emerges.

4. Write a small simplistic outline.

5. Based on the outline come up with with specific goals which I need to meet for researching. 

6.  Starting with the first goal, start my research.

7. Write the paper, the research and outline are now already done, and the paper becomes just a matter of filling in the blanks.

This seems excessive, but it includes all the actions that get results, and eliminates those that don't.  If I later find that certain actions aren't actually helping me get results, I'll remove those (for instance, reading the chapter always seems to make everything else go faster, but it's also the most time consuming thing). 

2.Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law is this :A tasks perceived importance and complexity is directly proportianal to the time alloted for completion.

What this means:  Shorten a task, and it suddnely becomes simpler to do.  You're forced to focus on the bare essentails.

So, now that I've come up with the critical tasks to perform for writing a paper, I can assign a time allotment to each task... let's assume it's a five page paper.

1. Reread the Chapter (no time alotment)

2.Go to the library (no time allotment)

3. Come up with an idea (5 minutes)

4. Write a small simplistic outline (10 minutes)

5. Come up with goals for research (10 minutes)

6. Research the goals (3 minutes per goal, if I can't find one in this time period, eliminate it)

7. Write the paper (30 minutes)

3. Multitasking Doesn't Work

So stop doing it.

This is exactly what I did, for a five page paper, and it took about an hour and half... not too shabby.

I'm going to try to get more work down, and see how far I can push this.  Can I finish all my work for next week?  My deadline is 1 oclock, which means an hour for every assignment... I'll let you know how it goes.

4 Hour Work Week: Chapter 3 Questions and Answers

Read THIS first.

1.Define your nightmare, the absolute worst thing that could happen if you did what you are considering,

Get kicked out of school for a semester. Parents lose money or school year. I have to stay at home, with no means of transportation. Don't get to see any of my friends at school, work during the semester.

2.What steps could you take to repair the damage or get things back on the upswing, even if temporarily?

Take time for ACTION, instead of thoughts. Go back through relevant reading material but apply it using suggested applications. Use this material to start my new business, and make money. Work at regal as well, have relationships and friendships there. Buy a fucking car and be free to transport myself.

3. What are the outcomes or benefits, both temporary and permanent, of more probable scenarious?

I get shit handled learn to plan ahead, be reliable, and most importantly keep myself consistently focused on long term goals. Steve pavlina puled it off, I can too. Maybe make back a decent amount of money, be able to pay for gas to drive my parent's car.

4. If you were fired from your job today, what would you do to get things under financial control?

I can only go up from here.

5. What are you putting off out of fear?

Starting my new business. Writing things down and commiting to them. Going for the big goal and not succeeding.

6. What is it costing you-financially, emotionally, and physically-to postpone action?

I'm more stressed at college than I have ever been in my life. I'm out of shape, and I'm not making any money when I know I have the potentional to make a lot more. It's time to take action.

Self Help Application Challenge

Hey guys,

Time for a little personal shit. I'm doing pretty awful in school right now. I'm completely failing one class (to a horrible extent) and hopefully getting C's in all the other classes if I manage to do extremely well as the semester winds down. The thing that bugs me most about this is that this is not a problem of me understanding the material, nor is it a problem of me having the desire... I actually enjoy most of my classes, so homework isn't that big a deal. The problem lies entirely in execution.

If I had to break it down, I'd say there's three aspects of execution that I had trouble with:

1. Organization
This was a huge one. The class I'm failing was due to a bunch of stupid mistakes, like reading a chapter but not writing out the two required questions for the homework. Probably the biggest issue.

2. Clarifying and Remembering priorities.
This began to be an issue about half way through the semester. I forgot about my initial goals of doing exceptionally well at school, and began to make decisions based on other things. This led to a loss of momentum for me, which created problems with my...

3.Self Discipline
Once I lost that momentum, the next step would have been to use self-discipline to pull myself out of the hole and get back on track. I found myself thinking about priorities and making efforts to reorganize myself, but not following through because "I don't feel like it" or "I'll do it later" or "there's plenty of time".

Without that momentum backing me, I lacked the self discipline to say "fuck it, ACT NOW."

A lot of this stuff ties directly into empowering your inner-man, but that's for different articles.

Anyways, the second thing that really bugs me about this stuff is that I don't have any excuse for being bad at ANY of these things. Not ONLY do I read about them for fun, but the classes I'm taking (Art and Science of Management, The Art of the New, Psychology of Learning, and Entrepreneurial Communication and Influence)all relate DIRECTLY to these three issues. I probably have more information on how to deal with these three issues in my own room than many of my peers have seen in their entire lives.

The problem, again, lies in Execution and Application. I have the information, now I need to start USING it. Yes, I'm busy, but I can take one to two hours or so every day in the morning to read one chapter from a self help book, answer the questions it asks, and apply the material.  I'll write about my experiences here.

The book I'm starting with is 4 hour work week by Tim Ferris. I'm using this book because I think it addresses all the issues I've mentioned above from a short term perspective.  This is important because I only have about two weeks left of the semester.

The book is specified towards business, but I'm going to apply it in the context school.

I began this earlier today, then realized it was rather silly to be doingsomething so applicable to my blog and NOT be writing about it.

I started with Chapter Three, again, I'm applying these principles to school... and I think I even misinterpeted some of the questions to make them relevant.  But that's not the point, it's about taking action and applying his principles so that I don't fuck up again.  I'll post up the questions and answers from that chapter in a seperate post.

Need your Feedback

I don't know if anybody actually reads the blog... but either way I'm going to ask for some feedback.

I have a bunch of half written articles in the works, and I'm wondering which topics you guys would find interesting enough for me to finish. Leave me a comment and lemme know.

1.Core Vs. Ego, how to tell the difference.

2.How to be more likable

3.Community phrases we need to stop using, and their English equivalents.

4.Back to Basics, How to be a Man (Tough love post)

5.Things you don't talk about at the dinner table (a post on how to use sensitive and offensive topics as a way to get closer to someone)

6.How to have an Excellent Conversation with a Complete Stranger

7.How to be Compelling

8.College Game: Meet to Lay

9. The Wiseman (post on how to create a vibe of mystery, authority, and wisdom)

10.The Truth Thus Far (a list of principles in life which I have found to be overwhelmingly true and effective)

11. The Frame Snap Back: What it is and How to Avoid it

12. The Incredible Adaptability of Women

13. "Lusional Confidence"... The Alternative to Delusionsal Confidence

14. An Expansion of any of the Previous Articles I've Written

Response to Damien: How to Run Connection Game

This is one of those posts where you start writing your response, then you realize it should really be an article in its own right. It's in response to Damiens Excellent article : Skip Attraction - and still get the girl.

Fucking awesome article man. I've had some thoughts floating around in my head lately about this... would love to get your collaboration on this shit.

I never ever followed ACS model but I did notice that my club interactions pretty much followed it spot on... and I thought maybe Mr. E was right about that being the model for how interactions between male and female work.

But then I started doing daygame and I realized that my interactions would follow all sorts of weird patterns, but most commonly as I started getting deeper and deeper into the connection shit, it would be CSA.

So, it's not really Attraction that's necessary to start with in a club... it's attention.

The other interesting conclusion I came to from these observations was that Connection had NO bearing on attraction whatsoever. Listening to a girl, did not, as some community members advocate (and yes, I actually saw a post by an instructor an another forum advocating this position), kill attraction. Nor did it, as I originally thought, and you posit in this article, create attraction.

Rather, it just created an intense desire to be around you. And yet, there was attraction created in these interactions. The sexual tension was there, and I couldn't figure out where it was coming from.

At first, I thought it was the tiny bits of "attraction" material I was throwing in. My listening allowed me to see exactly when she was getting bored, and so I would throw in a bit of fun to keep the interaction positive, and then go back to active listening. It was this process that made me include the actual step of "acting" in my active listening model... something that most active listening ironically doesn't include.

However, I soon realized that again, I wasn't responding to lack of ATTRACTION in the girl, but lack of attention, and that this was what would build up when I would throw these fun bits in. While there where small BT spikes when I would do this, it wasn't nearly enough to justify the massive attraction that I was generating from these girls.

Additionally, there were TONS of guys in the so called "friends zone" that had great connection with girls, but absolutely no attraction from them. What was I doing that I was able to have SEX with all my friends, while they couldn't...

I soon realized that while my typical pattern was CSA, the guys stuck in the friend zone would typically attempt to do CAS. They'd get really close to the girl, then they'd start to test the waters to see if she liked them, and try to do attractive things to impress her, then they'd "make a move" and if she didn't respond well, they'd "realize" that they had no chance, and that would be it.

So here's the insight:
It's the SEDUCTION which creates attraction. Specifically, Sexuality and Escalation. All the massive attraction gains I was getting came from when I introduced these two elements. ESPECIALLY when the girl realized that I was unapologetic about these things, and that it was just part of who I was. This is why Shock and Awe works so well, and also why a makeout will ALWAYS be more intense the more she rejects your kiss... she sees that you are unapologetic about your sexuality and escalation, and that your identity is not reactive to what she does.

Finally came the last piece. I found that when I had this massive connection built, EVEN when I then built massive attraction through escalation, the girl would still be scared to have sex. Luckily, through my active listening process, I was able to determine exactly WHY she was scared, and through the fourth step: Act, I was able to correct it.

I began to notice a pattern of three objections, that, if dealt with before hand, would eliminate 90% of lmr when using the CSA model:

1. This makes me a slut.
2. I'll get attached, and you won't.
3. You'll get attached, and I won't.

As long as you can answer these three objections (the answers all depend on what you want from the relationship with the girl) you'll have dealt with all the problems associated with running connection centered game. You'll still get the odd lmr associated with social conditioning, rape victims, etc, but 90% will be gone.

And that's connection game in a nut shell.