Random Thoughts (not mine—yours)

12/08/19 • 11 min

Stream of consciousness – not

The good news is that this podcast is not about my “random thoughts.” If you’ve listened to my two podcasts on writing that book you know that I’m not a fan of streams of consciousness as your first book, or your second, or your fifth. So I will never burden you with a podcast that does the same thing. Instead we are going to talk about your random thoughts.

Random Thoughts

Everyone has them. If you are a person that focuses on work, does your thing and just gets on with your life you may just completely ignore them. If you consider yourself a “creative” you may embrace them—even shape them—to fit what it is you want to be creative in. Sometimes they are silly and sometimes they are annoying. Sometimes they are curious and sometimes they might even inspire you. Sometimes it’s all of the above for maximum confusion.

Let’s walk through some quick tips on how to recognize, capture and even put these thoughts to work for you so that you can give them a chance to produces something interesting for you.

At the simplest core it is just making a list, however we’re going to pursue some clever ways to store them.

Establish a place to write them down – notebook, email to yourself, software or even one of these cool things
Write a brief description – if you can’t, it’s not distilled enough. Then leave it alone
Delve into it further – this will happen because you wrote it and left it alone
Present it – to yourself, or even the world

Productive, helpful and fun

As always it’s just ten minutes (11 minutes and 15 seconds actually, but who is keeping track?) so you can get back to what you want to do this morning—or whenever you’re listening to this.

Homework

As I say in the podcast, if you try any of these simple tips and they work for you I’m always happy to hear from you. Feel free to contact me through the forms on the site, or on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Give it a week. Feedback is always appreciated.

The post Random Thoughts (not mine—yours) first appeared on Alchemy For Life.

Stream of consciousness – not

Random Thoughts

Let’s walk through some quick tips on how to recognize, capture and even put these thoughts to work for you so that you can give them a chance to produces something interesting for you.

At the simplest core it is just making a list, however we’re going to pursue some clever ways to store them.

Establish a place to write them down – notebook, email to yourself, software or even one of these cool things
Write a brief description – if you can’t, it’s not distilled enough. Then leave it alone
Delve into it further – this will happen because you wrote it and left it alone
Present it – to yourself, or even the world

Productive, helpful and fun

As always it’s just ten minutes (11 minutes and 15 seconds actually, but who is keeping track?) so you can get back to what you want to do this morning—or whenever you’re listening to this.

Homework

The post Random Thoughts (not mine—yours) first appeared on Alchemy For Life.

Previous Episode

Scott Adams

Scott Adams is often introduced as “the creator of Dilbert.” Indeed he is, however he has done so much more. His latest creation is the best-selling book, LoserThink: How Untrained Brains are Ruining America. Like his other books, it focuses on persuasion, success and strategies about success.

Join us for a great, cordial, in-depth discussion on elements in the book as well as his daily Periscope, his dynamic twitter and his other books too.

Scott offers that anyone who owns the book has his permission to take a photo of one of the pages and send it to someone who is having a disagreement. It carries more weight and is not a personal attack, he explains. I have been following Scott Adams for some time, and have also read most of his books.

Books

We talk about not only his newest book, but previous books such as the non-fiction How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life, as well as the fiction God’s Debris. Having read both of those and having also written both fiction and non-fiction I was particularly interested in the genesis of both. Writing fiction is decidedly much different than writing non-fiction. The same goes for marketing them.

Our conversation

Just some of the things we talk about:

Cognitive dissonance
Confirmation bias
Mental prisons
A/B testing
Persuasion
Hypnosis
Mind Reading – as in, people think they can do that but they can’t
His books
The talent stack
The persuasion aspect of politics

Periscope and The Simultaneous Sip

Scott hosts a daily Periscope in which he talks about the day’s news and interacts with his audience. Each is started with having a sip from whatever beverage you have—he likes coffee. The action is tongue-in-cheek and demonstrates elements of both hypnosis and persuasion (he gives us insider info on this in the podcast). It has really caught on as an a group activity, and has resulted in him recently meeting a number of sippers who introduced themselves as such. I’ll admit that I participate as well. It’s fun, and having him sort through the news with a very scientific method of discovery is fascinating. I liken it to a college professor conducting a class. I mean that in a good way.

If you want to break out of a mental prison you may have placed yourself into it’s a great listen. If you follow politics but wish someone would just clearly sift through it, you’ll want to listen to the podcast and then follow Scott.

I’m grateful for the time he spent with me, and it was wonderful to has such in-depth discussions on so many interesting topics.

What he said at the end, in closing, made me smile. No this is not a “listen till the end” trick.

Find him on the web at:

scottadamssays.com and dilbert.com

Twitter: scottadamssays

The post Scott Adams first appeared on Alchemy For Life.

Next Episode

Passion

Do you have passion? Do you have passion in your life? Are you a passionate person? People use that word quite often... and it’s kind of annoying.

Everyone has heard the phrase “follow your passion.”

For those that don’t seem to have a passion they can feel left out and rightly so. I addressed some of this in my Job career or calling podcast in which I talked about how you can have a passion that is not your career or your job, but instead the former is supported by the ladder. In other words your job or career supports your true passion. And you don’t have to make money at your passion either.

Having said all that that’s not what I’m trying to tell you today. Today I just wanted to find passion. I’m not talking about the romantic kind—I’m talking about the thing that drives you and your juice of life and the thing that gets you out of bed and all that good stuff.

See, the problem is we are not really taught to find our passion and to make matters worse most people think passion is a thing when it is typically something else. As I have found so many times in this experiment of life the truth is usually not what you think it is. What does that mean? Confused?

What passion is not

So here’s what I’m really saying. If you don’t have a passion or think you don’t have a passion you need to look at the things that make you happy—selfishly privately happy

And your confusion will lie in the fact that you seem to have a passion for simple things or things that are disconnected. But more likely than not those things are connected.

As an example a lot of the things that I did didn’t seem to be connected or make any sense and I just thought I should just forget all this nonsense. Once I figured out that I didn’t have a passion for building a dating site, or speaking or even writing but instead it was something behind all that. It was something above and below all that. It was the thing that drove me to do all of that.

See where I am going now? You will find the thing that drives the passion, not the end result.

Yes, metaphysical and thought-provoking, yes?

In the result above it is my core passion of examining things from a different perspective than the norm and then building, creating, adjusting and ultimately distilling and explaining that is my actual passion. And the end results are things like roleplaying games, self-help books, a podcast, working in the client level of technology, building interactive web sites and now a fiction novel. All related, all from the same driving passion. I,magine how confusing that was for me before I figured that out?

I’m sure you can because you may be one of the people that is still confused over what their passion is. And if you’re like me you may be beating yourself up over it, or feeling left out.

Listen in on how to find the real passion, served up with a little humor. And don’t beat yourself up.

PS – There might be homework.

The post Passion first appeared on Alchemy For Life.