Improving The Quality Of Your Life

Our only security is our ability to change.
— John Lilly

Whether you want a better car, a better paying job, a bigger house, or a fluffier cat, you will have to face one big ugly spiky scary thing:  change. It’s not that scary though.

As living beings, we are constantly changing in order to adapt to our environment and live good thriving lives in it. Some changes are massive and difficult to make, while others are small and simple. But no matter the size of the change, there is a common pool of factors affecting almost all individual changes: Read the rest of this entry »

When I started working on this blog in June 2007, I was excited and motivated. Used to spend a lot of time working on it - content, marketing, networking, the usual stuff. That drive lasted for approximately seven months (until the end of December 2007), because seven months after starting it, I was tempted to try a MMORPG - you know, like some people are tempted to try coke, out of curiosity. I couldn’t believe people would get hooked on a game and actually play it for years, so I went on and tried one for myself to see what the deal was, ignoring all the warnings signs about addiction.

Soon after doing that, I was hooked too (maybe I thought I was special and would not / by the way, don’t try drugs). Read the rest of this entry »

Photo by: chrisjfry

One of the biggest enemies of a healthy mind is uniformity (lacking diversity or variation in its interactions). That is, having a homogenous interaction with the world and filtering out everything that does not fit one’s interests.

Imagine a John Doe who only watches horror movies, listens only to country music, eats only chicken, watches TV on a single network, spends all his vacations in Jamaica and all his friends are white, middle-class people from Madrid, Spain - and they have the same interests as him. Other than missing out on many of life’s experiences, this person is also narrowing down his outlook on life and the world around him. And not only will he be useless as the member of a focus group or as a consultant, but he will miss ideas that have the potential to improve him and his life, or the life of others. Read the rest of this entry »

As Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, once wrote, “happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.”

That most of us misunderstand happiness and look for it in the wrong places is not an unknown fact. We constantly suffer its illusion and blindly try to grasp its shadow. We look for happiness in the real world, in the ‘real’ realm of existence.

But the real world has many laws — natural and unnatural — which we must unceasingly overcome, and however fair, pleasant and happy we may be in it, we’re always moving controlled by them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Writing is the activity of giving thoughts material form, with the use of signs and symbols. Written materials, such as books, essays and webpages, are the materialization of someone’s thoughts. Thus, reading represents the assimilation of foreign thoughts in one’s own mind.

While we read, our mind is similar to a puppet in the puppeteer’s hands — we have no control over it, we are “thinking” with the writer’s mind. Obviously, that is not necessarily a completely bad thing, for when the source of our thoughts dries up we need to feed our minds new material. But too much reading creates mind atrophy (incapacity of thinking and judging), and probably even addiction to thinking with someone else’s mind. Further, it encourages a sort of “argumentum ad verecundiam” behavior, in which people support their borrowed thoughts with more borrowed thoughts. Read the rest of this entry »