(no title)

March 24, 2013

Stop Setting Goals, Pick Directions Instead

Now that you know about keeping those goals to yourself so you’ll actually work towards achieving them, I need to drop another bomb on you: stop setting “goals” for yourself completely.

Ask yourself: what is a goal? What comes to your mind when you think of one? A finish line, right? A specific point of time in the course of your life that you can point to when you will have successfully achieved your desired outcome or acquired your desired thing.

This kind of thinking is a problem. The reason is that it focuses your attention on getting one thing done in particular rather than changing your behavior over time. This is why New Year’s resolutions don’t work. Most people pick something they want to have or something specific they want to have done. Then, since they chose a goal instead of a direction, they have all year to get that one thing done, right? Except it never gets done because we aren’t training ourselves for change, we’re choosing to put all of our happiness on the event of one specific thing happening.

This isn’t really our fault, it’s the way our education system trained us. They want workers trained for the creation of a desired product. Any deviation from the norm is strictly discouraged.

As a result of this thinking, we don’t have realistic or healthy aspirations. We think about our body and decide that if we lost thirty pounds, we would be happy, because television told us so. The reality is that being plus or less thirty pounds has lot less to do with your overall health than just being more active and eating better. Not running a marathon a week or being a vegan! Just being more active and eating better than you are currently.

Training yourself to think this way or rather untraining yourself not to think incorrectly is difficult, but it’s a muscle that grows stronger with practice.

Make a list of what things you would like to accomplish, those pesky goals, and translate them into behavioral changes.

1. Lose 30 pounds = get your heart rate up for 15 minutes a day.

2. Write a novel = wake up earlier and write for 15 minutes before work each day.

3. Become a billionaire = sell your idea to one person tomorrow, then one person the next day.

Now make your list.

1 comment

March 21, 2013

Crisp but beautiful day in Tennessee seen from a National Battlefield.

Leave a comment

March 19, 2013

Living Simple: Leave Debate Alone

People like to argue. Nay, people love to argue. We all think that we have things figured out and that if only everyone could hear our eloquently-shaped argument the world would flock to our righteous side. Debate is supposed to get everybody on the same page, right? That has worked brilliantly in Congress, hasn’t it? But I’ve got another one of those life secrets to share with you: you can never really change someone else’s opinion. That’s it.

When you think about it, this truth will make your life a thousand times easier. You don’t have to bother telling off that other driver, they will always think they had the right of way. Don’t waste your time trying to tell your vegan friends that you think a carnivorous diet is part of nature. Just don’t. The only thing anyone really feels when they’re being debated is attacked, so just let it go. You’re going to save yourself countless hours of frustration, anger, resentment and disappointment. You’re going to save your relationships and a lot of your time. Not to mention enough high blood pressure that you could probably eat a box of Twinkies a week and still live as long.

Note: don’t eat a box of Twinkies a week, even if you can find them because I thought nobody was making them anymore.

If someone says something is red and you think it’s blue, just nod your head and walk away. If it’s true for you, then why waste one second of your precious life on convincing anyone of anything they don’t believe? You should be focused on being happy with yourself and secure in the knowledge that even though, to you, that thing is red, everyone else might see it as a different color, which makes your view wholly unique in the world.

I would much rather be the only person who saw things one particular way than be part of a group or larger society who all saw things and thought about them the exact same way as I did. How terribly boring that would be. Nothing new would ever happen, nothing interesting would ever be created. That’s not the world I want to live in, so let’s just leave debate alone.

Leave a comment

March 18, 2013

An Introduction to Tiny Homes

My love for Tiny Homes began like a lot of peoples, by running across a little video about a guy named Jay Schafer who built a very small house-like inhabitance on a trailer bed.

This was something I had never seen before, the thought was kind of revolutionary to me. You are trading time for money to trade for a living space. If that living space exceeds what you require or even want, you are trading that much more of your life to pay for it, for some people that means most of it. I might not love Jay Schafer’s bathroom, but his aim is dead on.

I don’t enjoy working that much. I don’t really want to spend the majority of the best part of my life working to pay for space that I don’t need to house things I don’t really use.

This was concept was perfect for me. I want to live my life, not work through the whole thing to pay for a house or other things that do not equal happiness because that is my only real goal, I want to be happy. Working all the time doesn’t make me happy. I suspect it doesn’t make most people happy, but they tell themselves they have to do it to pay for a lifestyle that they’re told will make them happy.

But I thought, this idea would only work for someone like me, someone single and without kids. That was my thought. Then I saw a couple of families that gleefully proved me wrong…

These are people that down-sized and live lives with so much more freedom than most people every can even conceptualize. They don’t have mortgages, they work minimally and if circumstances should suddenly change, their lives are not thrown into upheaval.

Next I found Derek Diedricksen’s work…

This expanded the possibilities in my mind even more. These structures don’t have to look like they’re designed by a professional architecture firm. They don’t even need to be made with fresh from factory supplies. They can be assembled with the heaps of excess waste this country throws away at little to no cost to ourselves, while making homes and living quarters that are homebuilt and one-of-a-kind works of art. Even more, Derek had so much interest in his projects that he started selling books about it, building his unique structures for other people and getting paid for it, and finally joining Jay Schafer’s Tumbleweed team and teaching other people about tiny living.

Now that I knew what I was looking for, I really started finding some gems.

How about a clever way to live mortgage-free in Hawaii…

Don’t think you can build one of these? How about watching a 16 year old show you how wrong you are…

Want to increase the revenue from your property? Build a tiny home and rent it out…

Use cheap and easily available materials to create different structures for yourself…

How about creating a holy unique and a laughably inexpensive home built with whatever’s handy?…

These are amazing possibilities thought up and achieved by people with the boldness to try something drastically different and buy themselves something that most people in America give away: freedom.

It really is past time to quest the beliefs we’ve been told in this country about what is necessary for happiness, mainly: that we decide for ourselves what is happiness, we don’t buy it.

Leave a comment

March 17, 2013

St. Patrick’s Day: The Day Everyone Turns Into Idiots

I’m going to be honest here: St. Patrick’s Day is bad holiday. I know this is sacrilege to say in this country, but it’s how I feel.

“But it’s a celebration of Irish culture!” scream the masses. No, it’s not. It’s an absurd take on what people think is Irish culture. It’s like having a day celebrating Greece where all anyone does is eat Gyros and watch My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That has NOTHING to do with Greek culture.

I’ve been to Ireland, a few times. I studied at Trinity College in Dublin, I’ve seen every county, I’ve driven on the other side of the road, I’ve had to stop for sheep crossing the highway, I’ve drunk pints in dim smoky pubs. I don’t think this makes me an expert or anything, I just think this gives me a little insight that most beer-swilling bar screamers lack and I can tell you, this is at best a bastardization of Irish heritage and at worst a complete hijacking and overriding of another country’s culture.

What do I mean when I say “overriding”? I mean that actual Irish culture in Ireland is being lost and replaced with this nonsense St. Patrick’s Day merchandising and packaging and bullshit like big box merchandisers on every corner in Dublin selling everything and anything with Guinness or Erin Go Bragh written on it is now the norm in Ireland. Since we’re buying the bullshit, they’ll happily sell it.

In reality, it’s just an excuse for people to go out in public and get ripped. From that point it goes from silly tradition to public nuisance when you have the hoards of drunken stumbling messes going through town, beating each other up along the way, and driving into every fire hydrant, telephone pole, and stop sign on the road. If you want to get drunk, to put all those toxins through your body and leave yourself needing at least 3 days to recuperate to normal functioning condition like it’s some kind of moron badge of honor, then fine, do it in your own home. Don’t subject the rest of the world to it.

A drink every once in a while is no big deal, though it’s a depressant, and no one ever feels better after drinking, but that’s fine. I have a drink every once in a while, I’m not a monk, but I don’t get drunk, haven’t in years, not since I realized nothing good ever comes of it. No one is ever truthfully grateful for getting trashed. No one has come up with a great idea or wrote a great book or said something that really made things work better for them when they were drunk. Instead you or people you know have probably wrecked something or ruined a relationship or said something you really shouldn’t have.

So if you really want to celebrate and further Irish culture, stay your ass at home and read a Joyce novel.

Leave a comment

Share:

Like this:

Share:

Like this:

Share:

Like this:

Share:

Like this:

Share:

Like this:

Follow “”