NEIL COWMEADOW - THE EXPERT GUITAR TEACHER IN TELFORD. GUITAR TEACHER AND AUTHOR. GUITAR LESSONS THAT WORK! DEDICATED TO TEACHING SINCE 1999 - ACCELERATED LEARNING TECHNIQUES: LEARN FASTER, PLAY BETTER, AND UNDERSTAND...

Episode 144 - Close to The Edge

The Thursday Thesis – 28/3/2019

The buzzard’s wing flashed white at around 900 feet, just off to starboard, turning easy circles in lift and I eased the stick into a gentle banked turn, feathering the rudder until the variometer wolf-whistled me into the twisting, rising air where I settled in  below the great bird.

“Nice...good” said Dave the instructor, his voice calm and steady.

The vario whistled contentedly as we gained height, 1300... 1400...1500 feet.

“What are you thinking?” Dave asked

“I’d rather be in my studio, playing guitar” I answered. “I think I’m done, Dave.”

“Ermmm... what do you mean?” he said.

After a few words I exited the thermal and began to circle down and back toward the airfield, enjoying the scenery and the feeling of release. This was my thirteenth flight and I was well on my way to earning my glider pilot’s licence – and I couldn’t have cared less.

For most of my life flying had been the ultimate confrontation with fear.

I think it all started when I scared my mum by climbing onto the flat roof of the shed – I’d be about six years old at the time: six years old and fearless. Before then I can’t remember being afraid of heights, but since then – like a fissure in my character – it’s always been there.

“Feel the fear and do it anyway” is one approach that’s become a mantra in the self-help world, and it’s helpful – up to a point. But the fear never goes away, it’s always there, ready to defend its residence in my mind.

Old beliefs, childhood indoctrinations and phobias have deep roots; the older the belief, the harder it is to shift, and whatever gets into our minds first always resists most strongly.

But in our moments of greatest fear and closeness to death we feel the strongest love of life and the greatest clarity.

Looking our own fear of death in the eye and staring it down puts things nicely into perspective, so they say, and I can personally verify that a Glock 9mm shoved in your face is a tremendous focus-puller.

No wonder we get hooked on the adrenaline released by massive risk or danger, chased up with a jolt of dopamine when we escape from whatever bloody stupid position we’ve gotten ourself into.
It’s a lethal combination...

The guidebook says that deaths are a regular occurrence here.

And the Mountain Rescue people told me it was “extremely dangerous”.

I walked past the battered sign that read "Danger - Crib Goch" and scrambled toward, then up over The Pinnacle stones standing sentry to the west .

Edging along until I reached the sharpest of the knife-edge where the drop-offs to either side were 300 feet or more. If I stopped I’d be crag-fast, afraid to go either forward or back; certain that if I slipped it would be sudden, a handful of seconds – whirling and spinning downward over sharp remorseless granite... earthward gliding.

Inch by careful inch until the edge became blunted and the exposure was less fierce, finally rejoining a well-worn path down to the valley road where my boots thundered down as I starined my eyes to catch a glimpse of my girl's car, slogging up the snake-road throught her boulder field to the pass.

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more glad to be alive or more grateful to see anyone than at that moment.

And that’s what I mean about fear and immediate danger of death being great clarifiers: they point out who and what it is you want to stay alive for.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 21/3/2019

Bored...
That was Sunday

Overwhelmed...
That was Tuesday.

Today is Thursday, so god knows what will happen: nobody knows what will happen on any given day.

We can best-guess, but we can’t be sure – and this is entirely for the best, in my opinion. Close your eyes and imagine how unutterably dull life would be without the constant change which goes on around us...each new day merging seamlessly with the same grey sameness of the preceding day...for ever.

Could you think of anything worse than that, the eternity of changelessness mediocre grey sterility?
So it’s for the best that we live constantly between extremes of behaviour and opinion; that's humanity’s greatest gift – consciousness and sensitivity to change.

The truth is that we need both change and sameness in our lives: too much change we call “overwhelm”, and too much sameness we call “boredom”.

We’re always on a continuum, between the extremes of one thing or another: between wealth and poverty, optimism and despair, love and hatred – we move from one point on the line to the next.

Seldom do we realise that our position on the continuum is largely a matter of choice. Mostly we are buffeted and blown around by circumstances, social norms and the expectations of others – overlooking the fact that external factors will vary, but our responses to those factors is a matter of choice.

So try this – it works for me when things look bleak, and hope begins to fade. Out loud, I chant my mantra: “nothing stays shit forever, nothing stays shit forever...” over and over again.
Pretty quickly it dawns upon me that nothing stays shit forever – what a divine revelation!

The very next thing I say out loud is “I know that whatever happens, I’ll handle it”. I gesture and flap my arms around a fair old bit, too, emphasising to nobody in particular that I absolutely believe my own words.

And do you know what, I find that my position on the despair/optimism continuum has shifted, and I know I can handle just about anything – just like you can.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 14/3/2019

According to the Bible story, God rewarded King Solomon for his sacrifice by granting the king a wish. Solomon was no mug and asked Big G for the gift of Wisdom, which God duly bestowed upon him.

Wisdom has always been associated with older people – youngsters seldom have it – and It seems such an earnest quality that we should definitely try to get our hands on some.

But what is Wisdom?

I’d define it as a deep and wide understanding of a situation or a field of study: the depth comes from prolonged attention to one’s theme or idea, the breadth from wider interests both connected and seemingly unconnected to one’s field.

To put it another way: paying attention to one thing for a long time, whilst remaining curious about everything else.

So Wisdom isn’t the uber-geek’s obsession with the minutiae of their fixation: neither is it the superficial casual interest in whatever is flavour of the month. To the Wise Person, everything is germane and pertinent – everything counts - either within their field or setting it in context with all other things.

This thought crystallised for me as I listened to an audiobook whilst driving. The author said that “A fool sees only the differences – the Wise Man sees the sameness”.

Ping – message received!

That was what I’d been niggling at as I tried to define Wisdom in my own mind: the Wise Man saw that everything was the same because he’d lived a long time and could observe patterns because he’d been paying attention all that time.

Tribal Elders were revered for their wisdom, their treasure hoard of accumulated experience and condensed time.

Deep insight into one’s speciality, coupled with an understanding of its context and place in the universe is Wisdom.

As a teacher and coach, this is my stock-in-trade.



© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 7/3/2019

A wise man once told me that if I wasn’t happy with the answers I was getting, then I should learn to ask better questions.

Back then I was groping blindly for a better understanding of the world, of people, and – most importantly – of myself. I wanted to know the answers to the questions I asked myself almost every morning, as I woke up and felt so sad that I had to live yesterday all over again; sometimes sobbing under the duvet until the very last minute and I had to go to work.

How did I get here?

Why do I do a job I loathe?

Why can’t I make more money?

You get the idea, don’t you?

It’s very common for people to feel that way: I know, I’ve been there.

So when Peter talked about “better questions” I started listening to people much more closely. I listened for clues from the people around me who were more successful and happy than I was.
Just about everybody seemed happier and more successful than I was, so I heard a lot of good stuff. Over time I began to distil what I’d learned down into simple questions that I could use to help myself and other people.

And as I continued to learn and absorb information from increasingly successful and influential people I tweaked, reworked and re-jigged my questions. And over time this has become a way of thinking and approaching the business of life, at least for me.

So I’d like to share just three of my magic questions – perhaps you’d like to try one or two of them out for yourself:

1) “What’s good about this?”

Just asking this question prompts me to think that – whatever the hell is going on – there will be a positive aspect to it.

There is always a positive, but you might have to hunt around to find it. The very best way to start to hunt for anything is to define what it is you are looking for: until you know that, you  can’t even begin. The old “needle in a haystack” you are looking for is even harder to find if you don’t even know you are looking for a needle: true or true?

Asking myself to find the positive in a situation distracts me from magnifying the negative aspects of it, so I tend to remain optimistic in the face of adversity. This is why I wake up every morning (and I’m still not dead, so I must be on a winning streak, right?) and ask myself “...what’s good about waking up today?”

That’s such a great question, isn’t it?

2) “...And before that?”

I am a big fan of goal-setting and making plans – I did it for years but achieved very little in the way of results. What I learned about goals is that they work, but only if I work.

When I think of goals I think fifteen years out from now, and imagine big things. Usually this means that my goals are too big, too far away and altogether too fuzzy to draw me towards them.

In NLP terms they are big chunks, and I needed to be dealing with small chunks...but how?

Well, I just ask the magic question “...and before that – what did I do before I crossed the finish line of that great big chunky goal?”

Now I have to think about, and write down, the step immediately preceding the achievement of my massive fifteen-year goal.

“...and before that?”

I ask the magic question again, and write down the step preceding the penultimate step before I hit my goal.

“...and before that?”

The magic question works backwards from the final goal to something I can crack-on with today. It will be small enough and close enough that I can handle it, and it will get done. If it’s still too big, I’ll re-ask the magic question again until I can find a small enough chunk of the task that I can do, then deal with that chunk before I move on to the next chunk.

Now that is a great question, don’t you think?

3) “...And what else?”

I use this a lot when I’m coaching and teaching – usually when my client or student has a moment of insight or clarity into their previous situation, solves a problem or experiences a shift in perception.

They’ve just had a singular moment, a revelation, if you will – but why stop at just one?

Asking “...and what else?” sends the brain off in search of more revelations, insights, solutions and answers.

Why stop at one?

If you are capable of having one great idea, the chances are that – if you ask yourself to find it – you’ll find a few more, won’t you?

So there you have it – three of the best questions I never used to ask myself, but now I ask all the time.

And whilst they’re not difficult questions, they are unusual and useful questions, helpful questions. And if you try them for size, they might work for you.


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis – 28/2/2019
 
Don’t you just love deadlines?

When my old boss told me there was a deadline for hitting my sales figures I’d squirm inside; not because I had any doubt about hitting those targets, but because “deadline” is one of those words for me.

There’s a certain implied menace in a deadline – the very word summons the dark presence of an executioner into the mind, stalking across my wall planner wielding a big axe...

That’s hardly surprising, because the modern usage of deadline is thought to be a carry-over from the prisoner of war camps of the American Civil War. In the camps it was a practice to designate a line about twenty feet inside the perimeter stockade. Any prisoner encroaching on, or crossing, that line would be shot and killed without hesitation. Deadline – simple, menacing, ruthless.

Today a deadline is the point in time where your ability to effect change ends. After the deadline, however good your work is, it will not be admitted or considered. As one of my mentors once said, “...they didn’t want it perfect, they wanted it Wednesday.”

So I’m playing another of my stupid mind games on myself this week (the Department of No Surprise have been informed of this already, and they were not surprised). This week’s daft plan is to eliminate the D word from my vocabulary and replace it with a word that is less intimidating, less final – less fatal.

I don’t want a fluffy word that suggests a troupe of gilded unicorns, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, prancing on my lawn – that would be far too distracting – but a solid, working-clothes kind of word with a pencil tucked behind its ear; a word that calls a spade a bloody shovel and whacks me round the back of my head with the aforementioned digging implement.

And if the word can then tell me to get up off the bloody floor and stop being such a softie, preferably with a Yorkshire accent, that’ll be grand.

So today I’m having a rummage through the rag-bag of my word horde for a suitable candidate...

Pivotal moment...?
Nope, a bit too airy-fairy for me.

Moment of Truth?
Better, but not doing it on a gut level.

Crunch time...?
Now we’re getting there.

Turning Point...?
I like this one, particularly if I use the German word “Wendepunkt”, because anytime you want to make a word more gritty and forceful just look up its German counterpart.

Current front runner is the Bosnian word for deadline, “Rok”. I love this – because it sounds solid, immovable and brutally hard like granite – and of course, I’ll take action to avoid smashing into the Rok.

So maybe it’s a rok, maybe it’s a deadline; but whatever you call it, a deadline gets things done.

That’s why I care about deadlines - because they give me something to aim for, something to navigate by – and they compel me to focus on taking action.

No deadline means that there is no sense of urgency to kick-start me into action on that task that’s going to make a difference. I’ll invariably put it off until tomorrow and kid myself that I will get it done.

You might know someone else who does this, too: not you, obviously, but perhaps someone you know very well...

You could even ask yourself how much you actually get done during your long holidays, and be honest about it. The chances are that you – like me – will achieve the square root of sod-all when there’s no deadline for a job or task that you want to get done.

That’s why we are mortal – to give us a real, hard deadline, and in this case the mot juste really is “Deadline”.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 14/2/2019
 
I’m talking about “FUN”, of course – not the F-word that has become worn smooth in our mouths through overuse.

I’ve nothing against a good, well-placed “fuck!” to add contrast and dramatic tension to a story, and few words are quite as cathartic when one sustains a shovel-blow to the temple from one’s nearest and dearest.

But whilst I’m partial to the odd fuck, I’m absolutely passionate about the other F-word: fun.

My first wish for every day is to “have fun and help people”, and mostly I live that wish. I know that to teach guitar (or anything else) effectively I have to make it as much fun for my students as it is for me.

My reasoning goes like this: student sees teacher having fun – student realises that there is no threat from teacher – student relaxes, makes mistakes and gathers the data they need to improve – student notices progress and becomes happy – teacher notices student’s changed state and is encouraged to have more fun... At this point everything loops around and starts again.

Hardly rocket science, but there you go.

In all things, Fun is good: so how do you get it?

You look for it, sausage-brain!

Every situation has some fun hidden inside it: your job is to disclose that Fun and to enjoy it.

And it turns out to be really simple to do. (Cue the drum-roll).

Ask yourself this question: “what’s funny about this?”

No matter how crap life is, how tired you are, however things are – ask that question of yourself.
Immediately you ask the question, your brain will start to look for the Fun, bringing back scraps of happiness, silliness, levity and creativity to lay at your feet in a feast of fun.

Whilst most people around you are grumpy / intolerant / impatient / angry / all of the above, we can become the opposite by repeatedly asking ourselves the question that seeks the F-word question: “Where’s the Fun?”

WTF!

I don’t know what fun is for you, but I know you’ll find it when you unleash your bloodhound brain and set it upon the scent of the Almighty F-word.

You might like to try it, or you might choose to stay a miserable git.

You could, but where’s the Fun in that??
 
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis – 7/2/2019

Think of a trial – what do you think of?

For me it’s a judge in a wig looking over his spectacles at the accused; his gavel is poised, ready to pass judgement.

That might be a product of watching Crown Court when I was a nipper – ITV’s weekday afternoon dramatisation of the court process and fictionalised cases.

Words really mess you up, don’t they?

“The Trials of Life” conjures the oak panelled courtroom and the red robes, the seriousness of everything. As a cliché, it passes under the semantic radar for years – and it did for me, too. But a little while back it blipped: naturally I did nothing about it, but it kept on blipping and the noise was driving me mad.

Ping, Ping, Pingitty-Ping!

A friend of mine said that we all faced The Trials of Life, and it was normal to feel as pissed-off about certain things as I was at the time.

So I was on trial – seemingly for my very life. This was not good.

So I started buggering-about with other words (inside my own head, of course – don’t want to get  carted-off to the funny farm for thinking differently or anything).

What might be less crushing than being on trial?

To cut to the chase, I sort of settled on Choices.

Yes, The Choices of Life – that felt better than being on trial. No bloke in a robe and wig, dry language and wavering gavel.

Just Choices.

So whatever happened with my life’s biggest challenge to date, I had a choice.

Rethinking it as a choice gave me the power - all of a sudden - to control the result. One word booted me from the victim in a soulless sytem to master of my own fate: it all span on a single word in a worn-out phrase.

Everything is a choice.

How we feel, how we talk, think, feel, and how we pass through the world and how we make people feel; how we will be remembered – everything is a choice.

Whether we fall or rise, love or hate, repel or attract: everything is a choice. We each make the choices that shape and sculpt our own future.

Choose well.

If your choice is flawed and doesn’t work out the way you wanted you get to choose again because this is not a one-shot deal.

Day in, day out, you choose.

If what you are currently doing isn’t giving you the kind of life, health, relationship and future you want, it’s time to consider your choices.

We each have the power to choose, but we don’t use that power very much.

So, what are you choosing that doesn’t help you?

What are you waiting to begin?

What would you choose?

And fundamentally, who are you choosing to be?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis 24/1/2019

The Thursday Thesis – 24/1/2019

It’s and eternal truth that – at any time – there are hundreds of things in my life that I haven’t quite got around to finishing. Ranging from the tiny day-to-day items of unfinished business, though an old blog audio to upload, to the unfinished house renovation project which inches forward once in a while...

You may even know someone who has similar issues...

The stress of carrying around – and inventing reasons not to finish – all of that stuff is massive: it may even be easier to get the jobs done, tick ‘em off the list and crack on with the next thing on my ever-lengthening To Do list.

That’s not a joke or hyperbole either - there’s a deep truth hidden in the joke: The Zeigarnik Effect.

Back in the 1920s, a Russian psychologist named Bluma Zeigarnik ran a study on memory and how we are affected by our uncompleted tasks. Whilst at dinner she’d watched a restaurant waiter handle big, complex orders from her table. No problem – the waiter got everything right and the group enjoyed the meal, leaving later in good spirits. Zeigarnik realised she’d left something in the restaurant and returned to collect it, only to find that the waiter didn’t recognise her and could remember nothing about her or her companions.

The results of the study were conclusive: once a task has been completed we will have less ability to remember the details of that task than an uncompleted task. It’s as though our brains tick their metaphorical box as “Job Done” and dispose of the memories it had needed to get the job done.

How useful would it be to use that phenomenon to forget what didn’t serve us?

This week I’m going to be experimenting with a couple of old issues – the unfinished business that I can do nothing about and have no need to hang on to.

I’ll be reminding myself that those things were over a long time ago and they are dead and buried, that they have been shredded, destroyed and forgotten. I’m calibrating the big issue (an ex-friend who borrowed money and stiffed me for the payments) at 7 out of 10 for grumpiness when I think about it, and I’ll re-calibrate at the end of the week, just to see if running that reminder speech over and over makes things better.

How about you – any issues you’d like to try that with?

Let me know how you get on with it and if it helps: you never can tell if a daft idea can  work wonders.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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Waiting...

The Thursday Thesis – 10/1/2019

Looking back, we can usually see the steps that got us to where we are now – the lucky breaks and the mis-steps, the moments where we fluked a win out of our own incompetence or watched our best-laid plans crumble for no apparent reason.

That’s life – everyday is like falling backwards into the unknown, with our pasts streaming out in front of us. We can’t see where we are going, only where we have been.

As Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously put it: “You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

Wherever we are in life, looking back at our own dots can be helpful. We can ask ourselves what went right, what we could have done differently or better. In so doing we might gain the insight to re-orientate our backsides as we fall backwards into the next year or two, or ten.

We’re falling backwards into the future, and all we can do is move our ass and join the dots.

The Thursday Thesis – 3/1/2019

Well, well, well...

Having successfully “bah, humbugged” my way through the Christmas period, retreated into the cave and quietly read an intriguing book whilst the rest of the world got drunk and let off fireworks for hours on end last night; then being dragged out of the house at stupid-o’clock this morning by a couple of my friends who think that running around in the cold is a great way to start the year – frankly, it’s a joy to be back at my keyboard.

The Christmas break is always deeply unpleasant, as the well-oiled wheels of life have the sticks of social expectations poked between their spokes.

Anyway, as a slid in the mud and turned my left ankle over this morning it struck me that I should pay a bit more attention to the negative occurrences of life. I mean, it’s all very well me being insanely optimistic and positive, but what about all that bad stuff that crops up?

Having trained my depressed and moping twenty-something self to “think positive” all those years ago, I’m very good at it now.

Perhaps too good.

Before you howl me down for being “too good” at thinking positive, based on what you read in Episode 108, bear in mind that unconditional positivity and optimism have one drawback – you tend to negate the importance of problems.

There’s a real danger that being unconditionally positive, belligerently happy and generally a pain in the arse could make me miss something, completely - something that I need to know, hidden in that very adversity or problem.

So here’s my New Year’s Resolution: to pay more attention to the adversities, the difficulties and the problems – because tucked away inside every single adversity is a chance to learn, grow, solve a problem or make a change for the better.

I suppose that I’m going to be more positive about negatives.

Adversities are warnings that the chosen path isn’t working; that I’m drifting off-course and need to make a correction.

Inevitably, some will be the products of my own stupidity: that’s a given.

And some will hit me from the blindside on a sleepy Tuesday afternoon, when I’m expecting nothing more dangerous than a small fine for returning my library books late.

However they arrive, this year I’m going to honour the adversity, treat it with more respect and figure out what makes it tick, why it’s showed up in my life and what it’s trying to tell me.

Then I’m going to flip it around, spank its arse and make it my best friend.

Bugger! There I go again – being ridiculously positive towards negatives.
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

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The Thursday Thesis – 27/12/2018

Have you ever looked back at something you believed in and wondered “How did I ever believe that load of old cobblers”?

We all get fooled sometimes, and it’s human nature to cling to our beliefs. We resist change and tenaciously hang on to what we think we know – even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

When we are very young we are told stories by our most credible sources, featuring characters such as Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Bogey-Man. Eventually we grow up and realise we’ve been misled and shrug it off as naivete: we were just kids, how could we know?

But as adults our beliefs’ defence mechanisms are much more developed – we’ve had years of practice and our beliefs have become much more entrenched as a result.

The more I’ve read, the more I’ve learned, assimilated and synthesised – just as you have. And as a consequence, some old beliefs have toppled – mostly about the “guitar heroes” I was peddled as a spotty teenager with a Mr Spoon haircut and a fashion sense that thought flares were a great idea, deep into the 80’s...

But I had another hero, and he had feet of clay, too : Apollo 11 Mission Commander Neil Armstrong.

I grew up fascinated by space, science and the “Space Race” – the Cold War battle for supremacy between the USSR and the good ol’ US of A.

At the head of the exalted ones was always Armstrong, with Buzz Aldrin, Yuri Gagarin, Ludmilla Tereschkova, Gus Grissom and the others trailing a mile behind in the parade of spacefarers who led the way to the New Frontier for off-planet exploration and colonisation by my generation.
These days, of course, I don’t believe a bloody word of it.

Nope, not for a moment do I now believe that America landed on the moon in 1969.

I suggest you brace yourself for 2019’s inevitable US tub-thumpin’ and flag wavin’ celebration of the Apollo 11 mission, because it’s going to be laid out right in front of us all over again, and it’s the greatest lie ever told.

We are invited to celebrate the passing of 50 years since Neil Armstrong supposedly set foot on the lunar dust.

Now, 50 years later, we can’t go back. According to NASA we’ve “lost the technology” that took the boys there.

We can’t go beyond the Van Allen radiation belts until NASA has “proven that it can be done safely”.

Odd – they seemed to do it routinely 50 years ago...

They could just use the old space suits that the Apollo guys had – except that they did not feature radiation protective layers...

NASA are busy developing the rocket to go back to the moon...

50 years ago the Saturn V rocket did this routinely.

NASA could easily refer to the old mission data and simply re-run the Apollo missions instead of spending billions developing a launch vehicles...except they’ve “lost the data”.

You couldn’t make this up: the evidence supporting Man’s Greatest Achievement isn’t there any more?

You’re shitting me, right NASA?

Not a bit of it.

“Oh, but there are the photographs from the moon” I hear you cry – outraged that I should doubt a branch of the US Government.

The cuddly old USA wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

Of course not.

America is the World’s Number One aggressor state, with a tally of military and CIA interventions ranging from subversion and covert perversion of free and fair elections to out-and-out invasion and mass murder, so we can trust them. If they say they went to the moon, they went to the moon.

I just can’t buy it any more.

You see it’s the photos that NASA say proves the story which demolish the myth. They are the smoking gun of fakery.

In fact, my own doubts really began with the Apollo photographs: those stunning images of a glorious moment in man’s history.

Back in the day I was a keen photographer, shooting freelance for the local paper, weddings and portraits. I shot vast numbers of photographs and even had some featured in the UK’s top photography magazine. I did my own darkroom work, too – all the processing and printing; avidly studying every part of the process from composition to final image via re-touching, image manipulation and finishing.

Busted: I was a geek.

And that’s the problem: I began to look at NASA’s finest images from a geek’s-eye view. That’s when I knew something wasn’t right, that NASA’s story made no sense at all. The more of NASA’s information I read, the less things made sense.

First there were the cameras used “on the moon” – the Hasselblad EL model. ‘Blads are still the Rolls-Royce of cameras – and naturally I couldn’t afford one, but I’ve owned several similar medium-format cameras over the years so I understand their operation and limitations.

Even back in the 80’s with cameras of that type, you had to do everything manually – there was no Automatic anything.

Before you pressed the shutter you had to meter the light and calculate shutter time and aperture settings to ensure that the film would be correctly exposed. Too much light burned-out the highlights, too little light and details would be lost into shadows as highlights became murky grey splodges.

Apollo 11 carried no light meters, and without a light meter, every exposure setting was just a guess.

Focusing had to be done by eye, peering into the viewfinder onto a matte focusing screen to make sure the inverted image on the screen was sharp.

The cameras had no automatic exposure controls, no light metering, and no automatic focus.

And that’s what NASA sent to the moon!

The astronauts’ EL units didn’t even have viewfinders to set up the shots, since they were mounted on the chest of the spacesuit and the helmet assembly didn’t allow the astronaut to see the camera’s controls.

Then there was the film in the Hasselblads. Some films coped better with under or over-exposure than others and some films were famously difficult to expose correctly – especially films that produced transparencies (slides) instead of negatives. Among the most notoriously flakey films was Kodak Ektachrome - a transparency film with little latitude for errors in exposure.

And naturally, NASA sent Kodak Ektachrome to the moon.

To allow for the lack of latitude of film or in particularly important circumstances, it was usual to “bracket” every shot. That meant taking two extra shots at higher and lower exposure settings than normal, ensuring that we had the best margin for safety on critical images, such as weddings and special occasions.

But at the singular moment of man’s greatest technical triumph, every shot was a one-off. NASA didn’t even bother with bracketing.

So here’s the problem: we have gorgeously composed, beautifully exposed, dead-on-balls-accurate images with no bracketing for safety; allegedly taken by men in armoured gloves, operating blind with no way of seeing what they were shooting, no means of measuring light, in a hostile environment, using all-manual cameras to expose one of the world’s most picky films at the unique moment in man’s history where nothing could be left to chance.

That’s why the Apollo 11 moon pictures are the smoking gun that proves the USA’s moon landing story is fake - because nothing about them makes sense.

Every single technical detail about them is wrong.

And that’s before you begin to analyse what is in – or not in - the actual images; their multiple light sources, the absence of star-fields, the cross-hairs that disappear behind objects in the images...

It’s all on NASA’s website, go and check it out for yourself.

And what about my hero, Neil Armstrong?

Well, he and his crew squirmed and flinched their way through a couple of press conferences, before withdrawing from public life to a great extent, reluctant to discuss their supposed adventure.

Screw that!

If I’d gone to the moon I’d want to tell every single person I met about it, wouldn’t you?

Watching the press conference footage now, I see three scared men, embarrassed and unsure of their answers; only able to answer questions in language that distances them from their lunar odyssey. Not one of them says “I saw...”, “I did...”, or “I felt...” because  they never went to the moon and couldn’t bring themselves to use such direct language to describe what they hadn’t done.

Between them they couldn’t even decide whether they could see any stars from the moon’s surface – despite its lack of atmosphere and the desolate blackness of the bitter-cold lunar night.

Back in 1969 the lie was easy to pull off. In 2019 we’ll be sold the same lie all over again.

I’m not buying it – what about you?
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your domesticated Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
Neil@cowtownguitars.net
 
 

The Thursday Thesis – 20/12/2018

“So, what do you do?”

Once you’ve eased past the Great British obsession with the weather, that’s one of the most common questions you are asked when beginning to make someone’s acquaintance, isn’t it?

Back in Episode 111 I rolled-over the difference between being a guitar teacher and doing the work of teaching guitar, so there’s no need to re-visit the question of identity versus activity: you can find that episode in the blog archives.

No, I’m mulling that question over for another reason, which will inevitably take me down the rabbit-hole of human potential, where The World went wrong and what we can do about it.

You see, last week I was asked what I did...

“Pause, Neil. Pause and think...” I told myself.

That wasn’t going to happen, was it?

After all, I’m stupidly enthusiastic about what I do: just give me a sliver of a chance and I’ll soak with my enthusiasm and emanate passion for teaching guitar. Just ask me about it, I dare you!

That also makes me a general pain in the arse to anyone who wants to be boring.
So I gushed – I couldn’t contain myself!

“I’m glad you asked, Olga, because what I do is unlock the secret code that makes playing the guitar easy, setting my students free from years of frustration and self-doubt, and by giving them the secrets of music they unleash their own creativity, find self expression and develop unstoppable self confidence...”

The lady looked puzzled and asked again, “So, what do you do, really?”

Damn – I’d only paused to snatch a lungful of air before I started on the good bits...

We laughed and pinged back and forth until she (sort-of) got the idea that what I do is hang out with my wonderful friends, laugh, tell jokes, and play guitar – all the while infecting people with insane positivity.

“How long have you been doing that?” She asked.

“Nineteen years, with the last ten being full-time.” I said.

Then it hit me: TEN YEARS!!!!

That’s why today seems like an opportunity to mark that anniversary and remind myself that I’ve been blessed to make my living doing what I love most: helping people to get what they want.

Ten years ago I quit my job in finance, because I didn’t think that the company’s products were something I wanted to be a part of.

My old boss, David, was probably glad to see the back of me, and at the time I was glad to be getting away from him, too. With hindsight, I recognise what a good, honest and diligent man he was. I didn’t see it back then and missing the opportunity to learn from him was a great loss and my mistake.

David thought I could do better with my abilities – and I think we all can. Every single one of us is capable of way more than society thinks we are, whether that’s behind a guitar, singing, in business, relationships, health...every single thing you can think of, you can be better at it than you think.

I reckon that if a washed-up pudding like me can turn themselves around, anybody can.

It takes effort, but we can all do, be and have more of what we want. Most people won’t try, because they’ve been told not to be “too ambitious / driven / weird / selfish / rich / successful /etc, etc, etc.”, they’ve been told to fit in.

For the last ten years I’ve put in more time and effort than most people would consider sane, worked 90-plus hour weeks and earned a First, written a couple of books, a lot of songs, and a ton of other cool stuff.

Maybe I’ve been lucky – maybe I’ve just worked really hard.

But here’s the thing: I haven’t done a day’s work in ten years, because my work is my favourite game.

Every day I get to follow my natural inclination to teach what I love and to help people see themselves better, to rekindle the vital spark of humanity and creativity, fun and joy that school, university and the world of work bullies into submission, causing the spark to die down to acceptable, manageable levels.

But the spark never goes completely out. It flares when we sing in the car, dance in the kitchen, marvel at a sunrise or cradle our firstborn.

In those moments we remember what we were before we learned to turn down that flame until it dimmed to almost nothing...

My friend, fight, every single day to keep that spark alive. Guard it, nurture it and feed it, then fan it into flames, then make it grow into an inferno.

That spark is the essence of who you are when nobody is around to make you fearful, to make you need to fit in, submit or conform.

I ask you, “Why do you work so hard to fit in, when you were born to stand out?”


© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your domesticated Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
Neil@cowtownguitars.net
 
 
 

The Thursday Thesis – 6/12/2018

Have you ever been told “If you want to learn a foreign language, the best thing you can do is fall in love with a native speaker who speaks little English”?

I have, on more than one occasion – by friends I both love and respect.

But is it true, or just another old wives' tale?

At first flush it seems sensible: we become involved and rapidly absorb the language of the beloved.

Why is this?

Some of the process is down to trusting our lover whilst we fumble around their syntax and bludgeon their grammar.

We presume they will be patient and forgive us as we foul-up and gradually improve - like a parent patiently encouraging their child to walk.

The parent encourages and supports the youngster, enthusing over every attempt at the vertical and smiling at each tiny progression.

Patience and safety work: that’s why almost every child learns to walk – the parents don’t watch junior tumble for the first time, then say “this one’s not a walker...” and abandon the child.

Better still is the gentle delivery of feedback – the “Breakfast of Champions”, though I always thought toast was what they ate.

But there’s something else which might just play a large part in the acquisition of a lover’s language: a natural hormone called oxytocin, which is manufactured by your body’s hypothalamus and pituitary gland.

Oxytocin production is stimulated by – amongst other things – bonding, falling in love, cuddles and orgasm; good old fashioned love ‘n’ sex.

Here’s the bit that matter most: as well as virtually eradicating the stress hormone cortisol, oxytocin is associated with neuroplasticity – your brain’s natural ability to reconfigure itself and learn new things.

Your brain is always changing: it’s a “trembling web”, according to Ian Robertson in his book Mind Sculpture: Your Brain's Untapped Potential. (See the link below) 

A rush of oxytocin is like an earthquake in that trembling web.

To put it another way, just imagine your brain is made out of chicken-wire, with connections criss-crossing all over the place...now heat up that chicken-wire with a blowtorch and notice how squishy and pliable it’s become.

That’s your brain on oxytocin; that’s your brain in love.

Seems to me that those old wives knew a thing or two and science is just catching up with them...




Link to MIND SCULTURE: Your Brain's Untapped Potential  https://amzn.to/2PpqvN9

© Neil Cowmeadow 2018

Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your domesticated Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.

Info@NeilCowmeadow.com
 
 
 

The Thursday Thesis – 22/11/2018

Left, right...left, right...left, right...

You don’t even think about it – you just think “I’ll go over there” and magic happens: the teetering stack of bones, tendons, muscles and fat just goes – seemingly effortlessly.

In essence, a walking human is a collection of four perfectly synchronised pendulums, both supporting and supported by a gristle-bound scaffold of calcification: bones.

But here’s a funny thing: if I had a pound for every one of my guitar students who’ve told me that they have no sense of rhythm, I’d have a ton more dosh in my pocket.

Some of those guys (and it is mostly the guys) are serious about their condition, and some of them make a joke out of it. But it’s still there, hogging their mindspace and stinking-up their thinking – despite the evidence to suggest that they are so obviously, so screamingly phenomenal at rhythm.

Way too many of us are convinced that we have no sense of rhythm, and – as a consequence – we lose our inborn capacity to sing, dance, play the guitar, piano, drums: this is malware for your mind.

If you had a virus in your computer, you’d fire up the toughest, most kick-arse, anti-virus software you could lay hands on and annihilate the virus.

If you were ill and couldn’t sing or dance – wouldn’t you seek medical help to restore what you’d lost?

In the same way that a person who doesn’t read has no advantage over someone who cannot read:

if you don’t dance, sing or make music you are no different to someone who can’t do those things.

Here’s the thing, though: every child sings, every child dances, every child will pick up a drum, pluck a string or pound a piano key.

So why are we born with music and rhythm, but grow up to believe we have none of that good stuff in us?

We’re born rhythmic because – as far we know – humans evolved as a pack animal; something like wild dogs or hyenas.

Ancient Homo Sapiens used their natural endurance and unique ability to cool-off as they ran, chasing prey animals to the point of collapse before moving in for the kill.

It’s called persistence hunting, and it is still used in isolated places where “civilisation” hasn’t choked the practice out.

Pack animals have to communicate with one another whilst on the move, and in the absence of language or in noisy environments sound may not be an option. Thus humans became masters of non-verbal communication and rhythm as our ancestors bounced along in perfect synchronisation with one another so they could maintain eye contact and pick up on one another’s body language.

Look at that group of joggers next time they come pounding past your window – they’ll all be in step with one another. Nobody is keeping them in time: they just instinctively fall into step together.

Ever see a couple who are out of step with one another?

What might that tell you about the state of their communications or relationship?

So don’t ever tell me that you have no sense of rhythm, because you, me, and everybody else...

Well, we are all just rhythm monkeys.

It’s our ancient inheritance, our birthright, and it’s what we do when we think there’s nobody watching. We dance when we are alone, when are inhibitions are lowered by alcohol or narcotics, or we are in a socially sanctioned place where dancing is acceptable – clubs and dance classes for instance.

When was the last time you saw someone dance in the street or in their workplace?

It’s been a while...

We all have rhythm, we all have natural – effortless timing – until someone tells us how hard it is and that we shouldn’t try, just in case we make a mess of it and look stupid.

Isn’t it time we let our rhythm monkeys out of their cages?

So shut up and dance, Monkey-face!
 
 © Neil Cowmeadow 2017
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your domesticated Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
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The Thursday Thesis – 15/11/2018


You know the bass-line I mean, don’t you?

It’s the most-sampled bass line in music: three short pulses of a deep note, a pause, then a walk up a scale to three short notes at a higher pitch, then a funky turnaround before the whole business repeats itself.

No wiser?

Try this: Bom, Bom, Bom – baba ba baba ba ba baba bom, bom, bom  - badaba baba ba bap baaah... ba-boppa bum...

No?

You might know it from The Sugarhill Gang’s Rappers’ Delight, but me – I know it from the source: Chic’s Good Times.

It’s my favourite bass guitar line, and there’s so much about it to love. So when I was in search of musical insight, it seemed only natural to go to the source of my favourite bass-line and ask for wisdom.

The only problem is that Bernard Edwards – Chic’s bass guitarist and the man who wrote that bass-line - died in 1996.

Strangely, earlier this year I spent ten minutes being Bernard Edwards, using a process known as Deep Trance Identification, all under the supervision of NLP’s co-creator Dr Richard Bandler and best-selling author and media personality Paul McKenna at a training event in London.

The idea of DTI is that a person – the subject - enters a state of trance and inhabits the body of a target person from whom the subjects wishes to elicit knowledge, insight or understanding.

The hypnotist acts as an interviewer, asking the questions and posing the problems upon which the subject wants the target’s viewpoint and wisdom.

One of the key ideas that make this such an effective technique is that the subject is addressing their own questions from the point of view of the target person, and draws upon the resources of the target person, experiencing it all from the perspective of the target person.

As a trained hypnotist I’m used to seeing unusual things happen – it’s part of the process. But I hadn’t touched DTI in over ten years, and I’d pretty much forgotten about it.

So, my questions for Bernard Edwards were these:

What’s the most important thing in music, in your opinion?

What makes the difference between a good bass-line and a great bass-line, in your opinion?

What’s the one thing you have learned during your career and your life which has made the greatest difference to you?

Armed with my questions, Jason (my training partner for the morning) guided me into deep trance and into a seat beside Bernard, from where my consciousness drifted across into Bernard’s body, my mind reaching into his fingertips as my posture shifted to sit like he sat.

Once I was comfortably installed, Jason started with the questions:

“So Bernard, What’s the most important thing in music, in your opinion?”
            “Rhythm. You know, rhythm is everything in music – it’s the difference between music and noise. Hit it on The One and let the music tell itself to you. Trust the music, because it already knows what it wants to be, and you and I are just the faucet on that flow: our mission is to remain open to it.”

Some of it I already knew, so it was kind-of expected. But what I didn’t expect was to be speaking with a Queens, New York accent – just like Bernard Edwards did.

Strange.

Jason made notes and thanked Bernard. I listened closely, knowing that I would remember everything, because hypnosis is mostly heightened awareness, rather than the zombie-like state often portrayed in films and telly.

“Bernard, in your opinion, what makes the difference between a good bass-line and a great bass-line?”

            “Shhh! That does – it’s the spaces between the notes, the little air-gaps where the music catches its breath and the listener can’t help but lean in to the song, just trying to catch the first whiff of the next phrase. That’s what makes the difference: the spaces between the notes.”

Right on: Mozart is reputed to have said it, and I say it all the time. We instinctively know that silence is the other half of the music, because – without silence and the discontinuities it creates – music is...well, rubbish.

And again, that voice; I sound like an African-American from Queens.

Peculiar.

“And finally, Bernard - What’s the one thing you have learned during your career and your life which has made the greatest difference to you?”

            “Hmmm... You know, I think that the most important thing of all is to give all that you have and trust in the power. Empty yourself and more will be given unto you.”

This I did not expect – delivered in someone else’s voice, out of my own mouth – there’s a pointer to deep faith and something beyond the self. When we broke for lunch I was still marvelling at the DTI experience and what I felt I had been told – I’m anti-religious, so Bernard’s last piece of advice rattled me a bit, as did the biblical form of words “more will be given unto you”.

Maybe it was Jung’s collective unconscious, maybe it’s The Force of the Jedi, or maybe it’s just god, with a little g or a big G?

Who knows?

But it’s interesting to ask yourself who you would like to become, for just long enough to have them answer your questions.

So – over to you – who would you like to be, and what would you ask them?
 
 

The Thursday Thesis – 8/11/2018


When the tough cop Dirty Harry suggests that the freshly shot bank robber should ask himself “...do I feel lucky?” you might think Harry is just taking the piss: after all, the dude is lying in a pool of his own guts and blood while Harry - the bouffant-haired cop - stands over him toting a .44 Magnum.

By definition, it ain’t the felon’s lucky day.

But what is luck, anyway?

I’d describe good luck as an innate tendency to attract positive situations, circumstances, people and things into one’s life.

Bad luck has the opposite effect.

So what about you – do you feel lucky?

Ask yourself if you are lucky, neither lucky or unlucky, or plain old unlucky. There’s no right or wrong answer, but your answer is important because you’re going to need a baseline of how lucky, or otherwise, you are right now.

You’ll need that baseline because – from today – you’ll know how to be lucky, every day of your life.

How would you like to be lucky every single day of your life?

Suppose I told you that there is a way to be lucky – how suspicious would you be?

Would your bullshit radar start bleeping, 8 to the bar?

Mine would!

Don’t take my word for it, have a gander at the work of Professor Richard Wiseman, an English psychologist, who set up a study of more than a thousand people, that lasted 10 years.

According to The Prof, luck isn’t anything unusual or supernatural; neither is it a gift – it’s a mindset and a behaviour.

So, chuck out your lucky rabbit’s foot, your four-leaf clover and your lucky horseshoe, and check yourself in to the School of Luck.

Wiseman’s study divided its subjects into three groups:

1. People who believed themselves to be lucky – the Lucky People.
2. People who believed themselves to be neither lucky nor unlucky – the Control Group.
3. People who believed themselves to be unlucky – the Unlucky People.

Then the fun started...

Across a variety of tests, the Lucky People consistently spotted opportunities which were only spotted half of the time by the Control Group, and which were spotted rarely by the Unlucky People.

After much testing and thinking, Wiseman concluded that Luck was really the combination of four key factors:
1:     He thinks that Lucky People create and notice opportunities. They are optimistic and curious, open to possibility, and see opportunities everywhere.         

Furthermore, Lucky People tend to be sociable, outgoing, helpful and likeable. They are attractive to other people, and their helpfulness generates reciprocation from others. That’s why Lucky People always seem to know the right people – they simply  know more people and those people know them in a positive way.

Unlucky People were more pessimistic and less sociable, helpful and less likeable.

It seems common sense that you’re not likely to meet the person of your dreams or have that life changing idea if your are uninterested, holed-up in your room for days on end, and don’t experience much in the way of real human contact with a number of people. Maybe this is why stroppy teenagers who live online think that they are unlucky and life is unfair?

2:     According to Wiseman, Lucky People make lucky decisions by trusting their intuition and instincts: They trust themselves and their decisions much more than Unlucky People do. Consequently they are much more likely to make any decision and take action on that decision, which naturally increases the likelihood of a positive outcome.

This conclusion of the study is just another way of saying “make a bloody decision and get to work” and “trust your gut” – two very old ideas that still hold true.

3:     Wiseman’s study concluded that Lucky People create self-fulfilling prophecies: they know what they want and make plans to achieve it, based on their idea of what should happen.

This is no surprise to anyone familiar with the vast body of research on the effect of goal planning because Wiseman’s idea of the self-fulfilling prophecy is really the common sense idea that a person with a plan will achieve far more than a person who has no plan at all.

4:     Finally, Lucky People are resilient and turn “unlucky” events into “lucky” outcomes: which is another way of saying that Lucky People are determined, resourceful and are able to see the positive potential in any situation.

Again, none of this is news: the annals of history are full of the stories of people who experienced unfortunate events but who were able to transform that event into the springboard to greatness, fame and fortune. 
 
So, all in all, the science seems only to re-state a few unfashionable old ideas that our forefathers knew:

1. Stay positive and help other people; be nice and be interested in the world.
2. Don’t wait for everything to be perfect – make a decision and get to work.
3. Know what you want and make a plan, then work your plan and make it happen.
4. Stay strong and stay focused on your outcome: when things go wrong, make them right.

I’m not sure if we really needed a ten-year academic study to verify that Luck is really nothing more than a placeholder word for these qualities and processes, but Professor Wiseman has sold a mountain of books based on his research – the lucky bastard!

For a fuller read of Wiseman's findings, get the book here:
https://amzn.to/2RKmNPE

The Thursday Thesis – 1/11/2018


Last episode you read about the difference between zero and one - the biggest difference you can imagine: the difference between nothing and something.

You may recall that going from zero to one is absolute, but going from 1 to any other number is just a difference of quantity.

I know that going from zero to one takes balls of steel, whilst going from 1 to 2 to 3 is easier, because you’ve done it before and it will be easier next time.

But following someone else’s pathway to success is altogether less scary.

Ever hear of Conrad, Gordon and Bean?

They’re not a law firm, they’re the crew of Apollo 12, and you’ve never heard of them.

You probably remember the name Neil Armstrong, but who was that other bloke in the Apollo 11 Lunar Module...Buzz something or other...Lightyear?...no...it’s gone...

If you believe that NASA managed to put a man on the moon nearly 50 years ago – something they can’t do today because they have ”...lost the technology” - think of the difference between the first mission (Apollo 11) and the second mission (Apollo 12).

Apollo 11 proved the concept, Apollo 12 merely reiterated it.

Another great first was the Four-Minute Mile and Roger Bannister: once RB proved it was possible, how many more sub 4-minute miles were there that year?

Well, just one actually – John Landy.

“John who?” I hear you ask...

Since Bannister’s breakthrough, hundreds of other runners have clocked a mile in less than four minutes. It’s a great achievement, but they all followed Bannister’s lead.

And that’s my point: whatever you want to do, just have a look around and see if anybody else has already done it. If somebody has already done what you plan to do – get rich, lose weight, write a book – whatever it is, you have a precedent.

Success, as they say, leaves clues.

One of the smartest things you can do is look at someone who is already successful in your area of ambition – a role model or mentor – and once you have found, get busy digging. Find out how they managed to become successful, find out what they did, how they thought, what their beliefs were.
Then steal their best ideas to help you get what you want by taking consistent action that moves you in the direction of your desired outcomes.

There is an abundance of wonders in the world, opportunities are everywhere and there is plenty to go around. The pathways to success criss-cross the world, they are the biographies, books, teachings and wisdom of people who have achieved their own version of success.

Hidden in plain sight, in the multitude of bookshops and libraries, online archives, podcasts and teachings are the pathways to your own success – there, right under your nose.

You don’t have to be the first to be successful.

In fact, there may be a reason why nobody has done it before.

But if you can find anyone who is crushing it in your field, watch and learn; read and understand, listen and assimilate.

Success leaves clues.

The Thursday Thesis - 25/10/2018

Two years ago, today, I bought my first investment property – Happy Birthday to me!

As the completion date approached I was edgy and nervous: at that time I was terrified of taking money out of the bank to invest in a house I wasn’t going to live in. Deep down I sorta-kinda knew my limited knowledge of property investing increased my risks, but the stubborn part of me was seeing it through, no matter what.

The truth is that fear had me in its grip and I almost pulled out of the deal at the last moment.

And when the deal was done and my bank balance was emptied, fear rushed in to fill the hole. That fear got a lot of attention from me, so it should have been no surprise that it stayed around, stinking-up my thinking for weeks.

But something had changed: me.

Doing that first property deal moved me from Zero to One; flipped my mindset from “I want to...” to “I do...”

Your first guitar lesson willl be the very worst, ever - you'll never be that bad again, I promise.

And that's because the difference between zero and one is the biggest difference you can imagine.

It’s the difference between nothing and something.

From 1 to any other amount is just a difference of Quantity: zero to one is a difference of Quality - it is a fundamental change of nature.

Going from 1 to 2 to 3 is easy, because you’ve done it before and it will be easier next time.

Going from zero to one takes balls of steel, because it is virgin territory and you’ve never been there before.

The difference between zero and one is absolute: it is the shift from infinite nothingness to finite somethingness.

After that, it’s just a process of refinement.

That’s why Episode 1 is the hardest, why your first child is the toughest, why the first deal is the most fearful.

The first time for anything is usually terrifying – think of the first time you had sex!!

The fear didn’t stop you trying it though, did it?

Armed with the certainty that you were SO not a stud or a total sex-kitten, you still went for it, didn’t you?

And you’re worried about your first poem, book or deal?

If you’re looking to do a business deal, first reconcile yourself to the fact that your first deal will be abysmal, the second one will be a little less bad - just north of Shittsville – and your third deal so-so: the fourth might rise to the dizzy level of OK.

By the time you are 5 or 6 deals in, you’ll know what to do, based on experience and a trail of cock-ups and disasters. You’ll learn faster by doing it than by waiting, learn deeper from experience, and have light-bulb moments and flashes of inspiration along the way.

If you are learning to play guitar, your first chord or riff will be bloody awful, but you are a guitar player from the moment you pick up the guitar and play your first bum-note.

And what’s most important is that you’ve done it, for real. You cannot deny that you are the genuine article, since your first deal is incontrovertible proof. It’s that concrete, that simple – that easy.

The fundamental transition from Zero to One is the greatest possible change: after that, all that changes is the size of the numbers.

So trust me on this: whatever it is you want to do, whatever it is you want to become, learn or begin – begin it.

The first step, the first deal, the first chapter will be dreadful, but it will change you from a Wannabe to a Gonnabe, and the second step, the second deal and the second chapter will be better...

And you will have become the person you wanted to become.
 
Have a Fantastic Day!

The Thursday Thesis - 18/10/2018


The seminar was about to close and the delegates began to fidget, eager to gather up their folders and bags before heading out on the long drive home.

The speaker had been an absolute barnstormer – boundless energy and charisma from beginning to end: he had everyone fired-up and ready to bench-press the World.

“Remember to drop all your notes and folders in the bin on your way out!” he called, grinning, as we filed out.

I approached the stage and shook hands with him, thanked him for an inspiring experience and asked him what he’d meant by that comment about notebooks and bins.

"It’s kind of a joke, except it isn’t”, he said. “You see, most of the audience will never open their folders or notebooks ever again – they leave, and it’s over. Nothing happens for them because they don’t take action. As good as my stuff is, and as passionate as I am about helping people, most of them will do precisely nothing with what I’ve shared with them today: it’s really sad.”

The two-day finance seminar had been the easy part: the hard part lay ahead of us all.

What I’ve learned over the last two years is this: to really get maximum value from a course you must pay for it twice.

First there’s the easy part – the cash and time investment in the course. Whether you spend a few pounds on a book or tens of thousands to hire the best mentor you can find, there’s an investment of money involved. Then there’s the time – in the course or seminar and travelling to and from it..

Once you’ve paid your “Entry Fee” you have to get busy paying all over again.

And this is the hard part, because this time you are going to have to pay for it with a lot more of your time – the most precious of all your resources.

Within the Personal Development industry there’s a saying that goes “The people who take the courses take ALL the courses”, and there’s a lot of truth in that.

“Course junkies”, as they are known in the trade, stride purposefully from venue to venue rather than take meaningful action in the direction of their dreams.

All too often, Course Junkies delay action until they’ve finished the next course.
Inevitably, once that course is completed, there will be another course that is essential before they unleash themselves...

So, when I next bump into that guy from the ABC course at the XYZ conference, the chances are he’ll grimly tell me he’s no further down the road than he was at ABC, six months previously.
I’ll try not to look surprised.

He’ll doubtless marvel at the work I’ve put in and the small amount of progress I’ve managed in that same six months – possibly he’ll tell me I’m “lucky” that my hard work has paid off.

This “Lucky” business makes my teeth itch with rage, because luck has very little to do with success, as far as I’ve been able to discover from researching successful people, their live stories and business book.

“The harder I work, the luckier I get”, as the old saying goes. In other words, they work hard and prepare for when opportunity shows up. Luck is an opportunity wearing working clothes.

What I’ve noticed about the many courses and seminars I’ve attended, the webinars I’ve sat through, the Expos and Fairs I’ve spent precious time walking around is this: the vast majority of attendees do absolutely nothing as a consequence of taking the course or attending the event.

This is very good news for me, and it’s all a matter of simple math.

Only around 3% of the population voluntarily take part in personal development of any kind. Yep, less than 1 in 20 of the people around you and I will ever set foot in any kind of Personal Development or educational seminar.

And here’s the really amazing part of what I’ve been able to discover: of that tiny minority who actively do any kind of Personal Development training, only around 8% will take meaningful action based upon the course or seminar.

So, 3% show up, and 8% of them execute, which gives me a ball-park figure of 0.0024% of the population investing in themselves and then taking action on what they’ve learned.

That’s also why you and I shouldn’t worry too much about competition – because there’s not much of it around, when you stop to think about it.



© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat, unicorn and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
Neil@cowtownguitars.net

The Thursday Thesis - 11/10/2018

Every so often I like to find somewhere remote and quiet to just sit and think; to plan the next few months – what to do, when to do it, and make sure I was doing it for the right reasons.

I ask myself one of life’s great questions - which I got from Gary Keller’s book “The One Thing” (link at the bottom of this post), here it is...

What's the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be made easier or unnecessary?

My normal response is to scratch my head, adjust my headphones and make my pen start to move on the paper, brain-dumping all of my current and potential projects onto the page so that I could see them and objectively assess them.

There are easy and fast projects, challenging and slow projects, and overwhelming projects which could take the rest of my life to complete.

But now I have the buggers on paper I can begin to eliminate the low priority/low return projects, along with the ones that did not fit with my Vision of how I want the rest of my life to pan-out.

Last time I did this I found my One Thing – and it’s the same One Thing that I had twelve years ago.

Yep, 12 years on and I still haven’t finished version 1.0 of my project. I have three bulging lever arch files crammed with my notes, but nothing even close to a draft. What an arse!

So I started brain-dumping my key ideas onto my yellow pad, line after line of Deep Magenta ink filling 8 pages of bullet points and sketches. It’s a mess, but the mess is marking the places where the good stuff will go, and the few bits of good stuff are already done.

I am certain that speed is the key in these scenarios: you have to write fast enough to outrun your fear.

Over the next few weeks and months I’ll re-write and fettle those notes, expand those bullets and pay somebody else to draw the pictures so that another human being can make sense of them. I will complete my “Shitty First Draft”, my SFD 01.

Then the fun really starts!

By the time I’ve been through SFD 1 a few times, edited it, stripped out the clunky parts and sharpened things up in SFD 2, SFD 3, and probably SFD 4, it will be tidy, ready for formatting and the day when I finally get out of my own way and hit the big scary button which says “PUBLISH”.

Once that’s done I’ll ask that great question again: “What's the ONE Thing you can do such that by doing it everything else will be made easier or unnecessary?” and burn through another yellow notepad.

Keller reckons that we must focus on, and do, only our high-percentage stuff – the things which matter most.

It’s commonplace for people to spend too long perfecting things which are low-percentage activities and pay the price in lost opportunities.

There’s not enough space on the internet for me to ‘fess-up to all of the low-percentage things I’ve wasted years on;  for now I’ll just mention that I played nothing but “Smoke on the Water” for months when I began to learn to play guitar. That’s low, low, low percentage stuff, but I was just a kid then, and I honestly, sincerely, truly - cub’s honour - NEVER play that riff now.

As a guitar teacher, I always start with the highest-percentage stuff first. If the student gets that in place first, a great deal of what follows will be a smooth progression towards their goals: without it, every week will be tougher than it needs to be, every new skill will be slower and harder to acquire, remaining less secure for longer.

In every field of endeavour there are high-percentage and low-percentage activities. It doesn’t matter if you are young or old, employed in a job, working for yourself, or not working at all – figure out which activity is your most important, the one which – once completed – will make everything else easier or unnecessary.

Deep down, you probably already know what it is already, don’t you?

It’s the elephant in the room for most people; I know it was for me.

When things matter most, we tend to skirt around them, because they’re too big and scary to tackle, despite us knowing that they are vitally important - crucial to our hopes, dreams and goals.

Are you nodding, right now?

If so, you might want to grab a pen and paper and start jotting down all the “stuff” you would like to get around to one day.

Which one of them scares you most?

That’s probably the thing that matters most and which could make the most difference.

I don’t claim to know what your high-percentage stuff is, but you know what it is, don’t you?
 

Here's the link to Gary Keller's book: 

https://amzn.to/2OjzmnR

The Thursday Thesis - 4/10/2018

My friend gushed about her upcoming podcast, about how awesome it was going to be, how good her guests were going to be, how crisp and clean her audio was going to be, and  once she’d got that nailed-down...

Spot the pattern?

This lovely lady didn’t need a better microphone, she didn’t need a new recorder, the very best guest, just to get things started with a bang: she needed to let the handbrake off and start moving.

I see this all the time – people are afraid to start doing their Epic Shit because they:

• Don’t know how
• Haven’t finished the course
• Don’t have a degree
• Have no experience
• Are too old, too young; too black, too brown, too  white; a bit too male, female etc etc etc

Sometimes they’re just plain scared.

I see those people, because I’m one of them!

And all the time, we are feeling worse because we see people who are not as good, bright, insightful or talented as us making progress. How dare they do that – they’re nowhere near as good as we are, and we’ll show them, just as soon as...

It’s like we’re sitting at the traffic lights of life in a hot car, maybe it’s a Lambo or a Ferrari, the engine is purring, eager to respond to the slightest twitch of our right foot. In our mirrors we see a little old man on a clapped-out, 50-year old Honda Super Cub moped slowing down to wait for the light, too.
No problem, we’ll leave him eating our dust, won’t we?

When the lights change we dump the clutch and stall the car, having forgotten to release the handbrake. We watch in disbelief as that clapped-out Honda lurches past us and pootles off down the road.

And did we hear somebody shout “wanker!” as they passed our window?

This is the moment when we decide that a Bigger Engine is the answer. Our Bigger Engine might be a higher dergree, a course, an internship or a mentoring program – all of which will give us more knowledge and thus, more power to apply to our sticking-points. We're convinced that we need that extra horsepower before we can move an inch.

But more horses - more courses, more degrees, better mics and better guests - won’t move you or me a millimetre, unless we release the brakes. Nothing happens until we learn how to take that bloody handbrake off!! Until we do that we’ll remain stuck at the traffic lights in our Lambos -  waiting, waiting...

We have “All the gear, no idea”, as the saying goes.

We are impatiently waiting to be perfect before we begin: wanting to perfect – right out of the box. And as we wait, our Lamborghini slowly rusts around us, the gas-tank runs dry and the engine falls silent.

Whilst waiting to be ready, the clock runs out.
We may die with our song still inside us, our greatest work a prisoner on our hard-drives or trapped in the labyrinth of our minds.

Imperfect action beats waiting to be perfect, every time. Rob Moore says “Start now, get Perfect Later”, and he’s right: I’ve used that phrase for decades: with guitar students, coaching clients and mentees, trainee croupiers and friends.

Do it badly, at first, but do it. I promise you that you’ll never be this bad at it, ever again. It will get better, you will improve.

Start Now.
 
 

Episode 118 - What Price Slavery?

The Thursday Thesis - 27/09/2018

If someone offered you the chance to buy yourself a job as a slave, to be on-duty 24/7, required to respond to the pettiest of things without delay, to never have a day off or to leave the office; to be tracked, followed and recorded everywhere you went, records kept of everyone you spoke to, and everything you wrote or read, what would you say?

You wouldn’t take that job, would you?

I jumped at the chance, myself – as most people have.

For me, it began with brick-sized Orbitel mobile phone, back in the early 90’s. A couple of years later it was The Internet and the speed of a roaring 14K dial-up connection.

As a relatively early adopter I even thought I was treading boldly into the future!

Over time the technology has improved: faster data speeds, mobile apps, GPS and a host of other gizmos.

Analogue phones have given way to digital networks, second-generation, 3G, 4G, soon we’ll have 5G networks promising better connectivity and coverage, faster speeds and lower cost.

And it’s gradually dawned on me – as it has for others – that I am little more than a slave to my devices. A slave who pays to be enslaved, because every month EE take money from my bank account -  they have written permission from me to do exactly that.

And every time I use my phone or my laptop I provide data to EE, BT, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and just about everybody else, it seems. My data – and yours – is used to develop algorithms that are supposed to make things better for us.

But here’s the thing: it doesn’t make things better – it makes things worse, because all the harvested data is used to develop insight into us, our thoughts, our beliefs, relationships. Where we go, how we move, and what we say is used to develop better programming for artificial intelligence – AI – that learns and evolves faster than organic life-forms can.

The Big Brother state of Orwell’s 1984 has nothing on the current state of affairs. Orwell’s horrors were the Telescreens, which watched and listened from their place on the walls: ours do it from our pockets and handbags.

Personally, I have a ton of issues with mobile phones, here are a few of them:

• Distraction by alerts, pings and ringtones
• Separation anxiety – “OMG, I’ve forgotten my phone!
• It’s something else to carry around
• Conversation killer
• Attention lowering effects
• Encourages the inability to delay gratification
• Expectation of immediate response
• Trivialisation of communication
• 24/7 tracking – you bought yourself an electronic tag
• Remote access to camera / microphone – Orwell’s telescreen is in your pocket
• Microwave radiation next to your brain...not the best idea, ever!
• Retards driving and texting – what kind of cretin believes a text message is more important than watching where their two-tonne metal box is heading at 60 mile per hour?
• Remote working means there’s no escape from work – business overheads are now your problem, and you have lost the ability to leave the office at 5pm
• The ridiculous expectation of immediate response. Grow up!
• Above all else, remember that EVERYTHING you do is under surveillance.
  • Big Brother is not only watching you, he is listening in to every conversation you have.
  • Security Service computers are analysing your speech patterns and assessing how much of a security risk you might be.
  • Your every text message is analysed and searched for “dangerous” keywords and “suspect” patterns.
  • Your every move is plotted and recorded, 24/7.
  • At any moment, your device’s camera and/or microphone can be remotely switched on without you ever knowing about it.
  • What you search for, buy, or chat about is analysed and checked, so that your next search or purchase can be influenced...

I’m not talking about hackers and criminals doing this – I’m talking about the people who make your devices, your mobile phone network company, national security agencies, elected officials and the non-elected agencies. These are organisations with a naked interest in knowing everything about you and me, and a greater interest in maintaining the population of willing digital slaves, like us.

We slaves pay out masters with our taxes and our monthly direct debits.

We are slaves who worship our masters

Slaves who are anxious when parted from our masters.

Slaves who crave the sound of our masters’ voices.

Slaves who willingly pay to be enslaved.

If you thought that your mobile phone would set you free of the need to be in the office, or would mean you never had to wait in for that special person to call, then I can guarantee you won’t have seen it coming.

So, here’s a challenge – I call it the Freedom Day Challenge - can you go for one day, just 24 hours, without your phone, PC, Mac or tablet?

Any takers?
 

If this got under your skin, made you smile or pissed you right off – hit the like button to Share it with your friends, family, and anyone else.

Email me at Neil@cowtownguitars.net
 

The Thursday Thesis - 20/09/2018

Every so often we see something in a new way: our perspective imperceptibly shifts, snapping issues and puzzles into pin-sharp focus.

You probably know how it feels, because we all have moments of clarity and revelation: problems evaporate, conflicts ebb, and our way is clear at last.

It’s that sudden “Aha!” moment...when you and I “get it” and know that we can never go back to our old ways – that’s what I’m talking about.

I had one a while ago – a massive, punch-you-in-the-face “Aha!” moment – at a seminar for entrepreneurs.

The speaker was talking about the perennial fear of failure that everyone has. He told us his story of having a great idea for his business but holding back from getting started. He was afraid that it might not be perfect and the business would fail, exposing him as a nincompoop and proving right everyone who had told him he’d never amount to anything.

Perhaps you can relate to that fear?

Despite being a successful serial entrepreneur with multiple businesses which earn him millions of pounds, he is still subject to the fear of failure. He encouraged everyone in the room to take action on the business they wanted to start, on that great idea they’d had. And, as he talked, he drew a little picture that explained something with a clarity and precision that I’d never quite had before.

He started with a big square, then divided it into four smaller squares, forming a 2 x 2  matrix. Above the left column he wrote “your stuff doesn’t work”, and above the right “your stuff works” – nice and simple.

Then he wrote next to the top line of the grid “you don’t try”, and next to the bottom line “you try”.

Then he said “if you stay in the top line – where you don’t try – then it make no difference if your stuff works or not, because you will fail by default”.

He drew thick black crosses into the two squares of the top line.

Then he continued, his voice punching the message into my ears “Only in the bottom line can you win. If your stuff doesn’t work at least you know it doesn’t work: you can either improve it and make it work, or you can move onto something else that could work”. He drew a black cross in the bottom left square, paused and said “But if your stuff works, you get a “YES” here in the bottom right square”.

That was when the penny dropped: only when you try can you have a chance to achieve. The possibility matrix brought it all home with a clarity and force that had me speechless – I “got it” like I’d never “got it” before. I think it was the absolute certainty of the top line that did it; the 100% certainty that if I never tried I couldn’t win. There was no room for doubt in the starkness of that top line: not trying was the very best way to guarantee failure – how had I never seen it so clearly before now?

And that bottom line?

Well, that just looked like a coin toss – heads or tails – and if I called it right I could keep the coin and flip another coin. If I called it wrong I could flip the coin again, over and over, with an infinite number of coins.

But only when you try can you ever do anything. I’m constantly using this idea when teaching guitarists to improvise: often they are afraid of playing a wrong note that they are paralysed into absolute silence – unable to play any notes at all!

They’re stuck in top-line thinking, and my job is to move their thinking into the bottom-line, where there is at least a chance of success.

And I’ve come to understand that that’s what life is all about – giving ourselves a chance to succeed, but that can only occur if we are prepared to try. We must be prepared to risk failure in order to give ourselves a chance of success.

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/09/2018

Did you ever see one of those old Road Runner or Bugs Bunny cartoons? You know, the ones where a character flies off a cliff and pauses in the air as the full force of their situation hits them...just before they plummet earthward?

There’s a bemused look of incomprehension that they wear just before there’s a loud “P’tyooooh!!” sound...

That’s how it feels when you’ve finally completed one of your massive goals – one of your life’s great ambitions. You’ll have had a story in your mind of nailing your big thing – of taking the medal or lifting the prize - but you probably won’t have created a story for what you were going to do after you nailed it.

I had that feeling when I finally published my first book “9 Weird Things Guitarists Do - The Common Myths & Misconceptions that Poison Your Playing - and How To Defeat Them” back in 2016.For months I’d written and edited, edited and written, refined and tweaked it until it was as good as I could get it. I’d striven for perfection, but ultimately decided that imperfect and done was better than perfect but never published.

Man, I felt like I’d just bench-pressed the whole damned World when the book went live and began to sell on Amazon. But with the book published and my box ticked, I began to drift; a curious aimlessness set in on me as I failed to begin the next book straight away, in order to sustain my momentum as a writer. Of course, I still had this blog so I could con myself into thinking that I was still being productive, and I began to invest in property at around this time, so I wasn’t being lazy or slacking-off – honest, Guv!

So what happened?

The best way I can make sense of it is that I’d simply ran out of story. I had a plan to write the book and to publish it, and that was great – except it was also what was wrong. My story only took me as far as it went, and as soon as I reached that point everything stopped.

Of course, I should have started to write the next book as I completed 9 Weird Things, and I should have planned to continue with the same daily ritual of writing 500 words per day.

I should have written it, but I didn’t – not for a while.

And – for the record - this world doesn’t deal in shoulda, woulda or coulda, because it’s too busy and too indifferent to listen to you and I making bullshit excuses for our cluelessness pleading to be let off, just this once.

Ditto for completing my first marathon: I ran the course, sauntered over the line and promptly ceased to run for several weeks.

My story got me to the start line and over the 26-and-a-bit miles, but after that – nothing. Zilch, nada, bugger-all, zip, squat.

Now you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’d know better than to let my plan peter out as I crossed the finish line – but that’s what I did.

I’m not an isolated case of stupid, either, because we all run out of story unless we have a plan that extends beyond successfully achieving our goal. Whether you’re getting married, running a marathon or playing a new song on your guitar, you’d better have a story that continues after the event is over. If you don’t have an ongoing story, all you’ll have is a sudden and unpleasant sense of running off a cliff-top and finding that the emptiness beneath you isn’t pushing you up.

“P’tyooooh!!” won’t be far behind.

So ask yourself, as you head off towards your Big Thing – “what are you going to do after you get there?”, because loitering in mid-air is not an option, trust me.