5 Reasons to Abandon Television

by Ron Haynes @ The Wisdom Journal

Abandoning television is a serious step in today’s society. Television is both a fantastic resource and a faceless attacker of wealth. It has the ability to inspire and the ability to depress. It can make you happy and scare you to death, it can inform and educate, but it can also help you waste your most precious resource: time. That’s just one reason I’ve decided to abandon most television shows.

Before I discuss why I am choosing to abandon television, let me say that not all television shows are bad. I don’t disparage anyone who choses to use their time watching parents change the diapers of their youngest child (of 27), or watching someone completely disrespect another person because of the t-shirts she chooses to wear, or watching a talk show host give marriage advice to a couple when the host has never been married. There are some great shows on various channels that help you better understand the world and help you learn valuable information that will improve your life. But those shows are the exceptions. What passes as entertainment and enlightenment today is an utter joke. So, I’ve made the decision to severely restrict the amount of time I waste in front of “the tube.” TV has abandoned most of what I think is important so here’s 5 reasons I have decided to return the favor and abandon television:

Reason #1. Television has abandoned understanding. Though there is a wealth of information available via the tube, for the most part, the information you gather via television is devoid of deep understanding. What is more important is drama, excitement, and the illusion that it projects. If you want to get a completely skewed view of the world, do nothing but watch television and form your opinions only based on its shallow information. Where else can someone get shot 14 times, fall off a building from 3 stories, get up and drive in a car chase, crash the car, then jump into a helicopter and fly it to some exotic island with an Italian supermodel?

Reason #2. Television has abandoned responsibility. News programs depict the crying children of famines and wars, the bodies that lie exposed to the elements and wild animals, the human devastation of a terrible natural disaster, then cut away to a commercial. “Now this.” Now that we took you to the edge of an emotional cliff, now that we’ve exposed the most horrible of human conditions, now that we’ve talked (briefly) about an intense tragedy, we want to make sure you see our commercials! Then we’ll just go merrily along to the next story after briefly shaking our heads. Now on to sports. Read more

Imagination is Power!

By Melissa Zollo

John Lennon entitled a song “Imagine.” Thoreau once said: “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams! Live the life you’ve imagined.” Neville once said: “Imagination is the very gateway of reality.”

Are you waking up to a new way of being? Can you feel something rumbling deep within you, calling out to live more creatively, successfully, joyfully? The fragmented ways of your old thinking cannot bridge the divide between mind and matter, body and soul, challenges and dreams. What if you build your finances, your business, your health, your relationships and your life around imagination and use your mental images, thoughts and feelings to attract the fulfillment of your dreams? By intentionally shifting into new states of consciousness you can change your blueprints of reality and affect your world. Imagination is power and you have it! Imagination creates reality.

Life is a banquet

Life is a banquet, so why are so many starving to death with unfulfilled desires? Laziness, complacency, no time, fear of the unknown – you name it and the excuses line up. It’s up to you to impress your subconscious mind with beneficial images of success. Doing this allows you to shift from undesirable patterns of being disempowered into habits that empower you.

Everything begins with a dream, a purpose or a goal. Being able to focus and concentrate in the midst of chaos gives you the winner’s advantage. You are a “focuser of energy.” Focus plus uplifted emotional moods are the keys to your success. Whatever you do, never lose focus!

Everybody Wants a Better Life

Everybody wants a better life, but if you do the same old things in the same old way you will get the same old results. If a farmer plants corn seeds, he gets corn; he doesn’t get tomatoes. If you focus on failure, poverty, or violent ideas how will you harvest (attract) success, wealth, or peace. If you want to change the results you are getting, you must change your images, because thought is creative. How to begin? First you must have a desire that is far greater than what you are currently experiencing.
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10 Imaginitive Ways to Pump your Mind for Ideas

Ever play with Tinkertoys as a kid? This toy where you had wheels with peg holes in it, and wood stems of various sizes in which you could create anything. Well, I ran across this book, Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques, by Michael Michalko, has inspired my creativity… I’m only about 28 pages into it!

He has ten ways to help drive your creative juices. I have paraphrased them for us to use.

1. Set an Idea Quota. - Give your mind a workout every day. Set yourself a n idea quota for a challenge you are working on, such as finve new ideas ever day for a week. you’ll find the first five are the hardest, but these will quickly trigger other ideas. The more ideas you come up with, the greater your chances of coming up with winner. Having an idea quota will force you to actively generate ideas and alternatives rather than waiting for them to occur to you.

2. Get Tone. - Fighter pilots say, “I’ve gone tone” when their radar locks onto a target. That’s the point at which the pilot and plane are totally focus on the target. “Getting tone” in everyday life means paying attention to what’s happening around you.

Ordinarily we do not make the fullest use of our ability to see. We move through life looking at a tremendous quantity of information, objects, and scenes, and yet we look but do not see. Paying attention to the world around you will help you develop the extraordinary capacity to look at mundane things and see the miraculous.

3. Don’t Be a Duke of Habit. - Stretch yourself and take a the road less traveled occasionally. Deliberately program changes into your daily life. Make a list of the things you do by habit. Try driving a different route to work. Change your sleeping hours, Read a different newspaper, Try different recipes. Take a bath instead of a shower. You would be surprised how your mind reacts to new things in this way.

4. Feed Your Head. - Leaders are Readers. So are creative people. Lets feed our heads full of amazing information, and have a larger database in which to pull ideas from. Read Magazines on varied subjects. Read Nonfiction. When reading them, practice thinking up solutions for any problems presented in the book, before they reveal it in the book. Think as you read, and take notes. Write in the margins of your book, write in a notebook the ideas you have captured from the book, highlight passages. Also, feel free to OUTLINE a book prior to your reading it, to help you know what you are going to learn. Also, maybe you could outline the book after you read it, without looking at the table of contents.

5. Do a Content Analysis. - Check things out! Do a scan of your junkmail before you throw it away, in fact, put all your junkmail in a big box for about a month, then scan it to see if there are any emerging trends or ideas to be gleamed from it. When you are on the road, scan local newspapers for interesting ideas. Observe popular culture and find out what people are interested in and why they are popular. Attend many business lectures and seminars as you can. Listen to different radio stations every week to get a variety of input.

6. Create a Brain Bank. - I love this idea. Collect and store ideas like a pack rat. Keep a container (coffee can, Tupperware, shoebox, etc) of ideas and idea starters. Begin collecting interesting ads, quotes, designs, pictures,questions, cartoons, doodles and words that might triggers ideas by association.

When looking for a new idea, shake up your BrainBank and pull out a couple ideas and free associate, you will be pleasantly surprised how this will help you.

7. Be a Travel Junkie. - When you are bored, GET UP AND GO SOMEWHERE! Go to a trade show, a quirky store, an antique shop, museum, or flea market… just go. And when you are there, walk around with an open mind and allow yourself to be DRAWN to something. Once there, use your mind to make a connection to something else in your life, and it may creatively help you solve some problem.

8. Capture your Thoughts. - Record your thoughts, Carry around a little moleskin in your back pocket. Scientists say that we can keep 5-9 ideas actively in our mind, then they float away. We remember some, and some are gone. By, keeping the notebook in your backpocket, you will capture the thought when it is there. Then you can review it, and perhaps your mind may be able to make a better connection with it later on.

9. Think Right. - Consciously work to make your thinking more fluent with your thinking. So, making descriptive lists as a way to capture thought fluency.

10. Keep an Idea Log. - Take a Moleskine or a Composition book, and divide it into sections that you want to captures ideas. Marketing ideas, Home Improvement Ideas, special projects, planning ideas, comedy skits, or whatever you wish to capture.

After you read the book, you may want to consider purchasing the accompanying Thinkpak: A Brainstorming Card Deck which gives you additional exercises to help you tap into your creativity.

Hope this helps you!

Successfully,

Travis Wright

According to Jung, Which Type of Person are You?

I came across this great site that goes over the Myers Briggs Personality test. This is a very powerful test that will give you valuable insight into your personality and what makes you tick. This will also tell you some of the people throughout history that also have the same characteristics as you.

So, please feel free to spend 10 minutes on the test, and leave a comment describing your personality type, and how this information might affect you moving forward.

Here is the Carl Jung test

For me, I am an ENTP (Extroverted iNtuitive Thinking Perceiving) is one of the sixteen personality types from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter.

The ENTP has been described variously as the innovator,[1] the originator,[2] the lawyer,[3] the inventor,[4] the explorer,[5] and the visionary.[3] They also fall into the general categories of thinkers, rationals, and engineers.[6] Through their primary function-attitude of extraverted intuition (Ne), ENTPs are quick to see complex interrelationships between people, things, and ideas. These interrelationships are analyzed in profound detail through the ENTPs auxiliary function, introverted thinking (Ti). The result is an in-depth understanding of the way things and relationships work, and how they can be improved.

The following blockquote describes me pretty accurately. It is interesting to me to find out that the following people share the characteristics with me. Walt Disney, Benjamin Franklin, Ray Kurtzweil, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, Alexander the Great, Lewis Carrol, George Carlin, Weird Al Yankovic, Alfred Hitchcock, Tom Hanks, and Steve Jobs.

I can deal with that. Read more

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