You can’t become extraordinary if you live an ordinary life

I am getting a lot of requests to teach people how to become people who live a life worth living, who excel in all four areas, all four pillars of the good life.

My answer is almost always: Sorry I can’t help you.

But why?

Today I got lucky and got my answer in a pristine form.

My University classmate, Panni called me. We talk once a month. She is, of course an architect: we were classmates in architecture school, a five year study.

And she is a mother and a grandmother.

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The Matrix… one method of the Matrix is confusion…

As a mad scientist, my job is to distinguish the “things” that are in your way of direction, in your way of clarity, and to devise ways for you to go around them or through them. One tool that has proven invaluable is isolation. Isolating what you want to see. Seeing it by itself. So […]

What kind of soup are you?

everything soupTai uses an analogy that really talks to me. He says that we need to be like a soup, our knowledge, our lives.

You can’t make a good soup with just a few ingredients. You need a lot of ingredients to make a soup that you don’t have to make edible by crumbling crackers into it, or bread. ((Some poor man’s soups, onion soup, garlic soup, “rue” soup in Hungary, are so uninteresting that you can’t eat it without putting bread in them. The versions with poached egg, cheese melted on top, etc. are the restaurant versions of the same soups… but the soup itself is a poor man’s soup. Poor as in not having much to give.

Not surprisingly, one of my all time

If your life feels like a roller coaster ride… If all your attempts at improving your life make it worse…

Cone vision can be wide and narrow, or Short and long… This distinction was driven up today by a student question: He watched the movie “The Founder” about Ray Kroc of MacDonald’s fame.

I haven’t watched the movie, but in it, according to the student, Ray Kroc was offered the chance to sell franchises to the MacDonald method of making and selling food. To the student’s sensibilities: Ray Kroc was shortchanged: the deal was not a win-win. And having to always be in an obvious win-win is one of his preferences… and therein lies his no success… Let me talk about what is happening in a long article.

Everything you see can be looked at many ways. In this article I will talk about seeing inside the visi

Do you have a core identity? Something that will not change? Something that can lead you to greatness?

Some countries need to manufacture a history for their people. Other countries created one by following a credo, an ethic, that is personally binding.

Father Geoffrey invented a history for England.

The question we’ll look at: can you invent greatness for another… Can a great path that doesn’t oblige have any positive influence on the person, or instead it will give them wrongful pride… “I am better than you” nationalist or racial superiority?

Let me examine the difference between the different stories of different peoples, so I can explain the difference between the individuals who hail from different cultures.

I am going to bumble my way through this… so expect this article to be a little chunky… I apologize ahea

The dangers of having empathy…

understandI saw something really important this morning.

One of my students is planning to build a business that he can do while working for a big corporation full time.

He knows what he wants to do. He knows why he wants to do it. He has the skills: he is good at it. If he gets a client: the client will be happy.

But… having a product, a service, is one thing. Selling it is another thing.

To sell anything doesn’t need you to be good at doing the service, or creating a good product.

Selling is a whole other business.

You either need a partner who can sel

Can you be selfish and generous at the same time?

desire for the self alone is the only evil there isI am reading Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. The genes that use humans as vehicles, and are only interested in procreation, and not in the life experience of the vehicle.

But, as I have said before, there are 160 intangible capacities, mostly dormant, in the human DNA. The ones that we are going to look at in this article are the capacities (genes) of generosity (altruism) and trust.

Trust and generosity seem to be at odds with the selfishness of the genes… but they don’t have to be.

The crucial decider… is that a word?, is whether the gene of envy is turned on, or

An Atlantic article: What does ISIS really want?

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What ISIS Really Wants

from the Atlantic

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comme