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...

A little while ago I was talking with a young lad who told me he wanted to go to university to study philosophy. I was impressed at his high-falutin’ pursuit of wisdom and understanding – love or seeking of Truth so asked him whose ideas resonated most with him, and who his rock-star philosopher would be.

His answer floored me.

“I’ve never read anything about philosophy” he told me.
“Huh?!?!?!?” says I.

He’s talking about spending 3 to 4 years of his life at university  studying something he can’t even be bothered to crack open a book to explore.
WTF?

I really wanted to figure this out – he’s a bright lad, very sharp and from a highly supportive family. How was it possible he was ready to run up a massive student debt, potentially waste years of his precious time and pass up a ton of local opportunities to work, earn and learn – all in the name of, well, what exactly?

His reasons are his own, and I suspect they have a lot to do with escaping from under mum and dad’s feet and gaining more autonomy – perhaps even some structure to an over-indulged life - not forgetting the “culture” if i can call it that – of drinking, sex, partying and the like which are the backdrop to uni life.
I get it.
I don’t get the not reading thing though. Not at all.

Show me the books you’ve read this year and the audiobooks you’ve listened to – and I’ll pretty much predict how your next five years will go. I’m no clairvoyant, but it’s a pound to a pinch of chinaman’s poo that if you’re reading up on business and finance you’re going to do much better than someone who is reading books about military history or flower arranging.

Let’s say you read a book a week, plus another one a week when on holiday, when on holiday for a fortnight – that’s a staggering 54 books per year. Now, if you’ve read 54 books about anything you’re going to be pretty clued-up about it...

I’d contend that those 54 books will give you far more insight and understanding than a university course in the same field.

Now imagine how much further ahead you’d be if you read like that for three years – 162 books... and add to that the obligatory “gap year”  - 216 books read.
216 different opinions and modes of expression...

Immersion over four years... what would that do for my young friend?
It’s often said that “someone who can read but fails to do so has no advantage over someone who cannot read” – and it’s true. I’d put it more bluntly... “someone who can read but neglects to do so is intentionally ignorant and therefore doomed to remain at the level of what they last read or learned.”
If you haven’t cracked a book since school... where are you now?

If you’re reading regularly, what are you reading?

Another friend reads the sort of dark, disturbing crime fiction where seemingly everyone is a psychopathic killer-in-waiting; where abduction, rape, torture and murder are everyday occurrences... guess what – she has trouble sleeping and has frequent nightmares!
No shit, Sherlock.

I suggested she read something more jolly, positive and uplifting... I don’t know if she ever did read my suggested books, but I doubt it – they clash with her distorted world view ( not that my own world view is in any way undistorted – I just like mine better than hers, and I’ve read a bunch of books to prove it!!

So let’s cut to the bottom line – in short: show me your library and I’ll show you your future.
What book do you tell everyone about, share with those rare people you deem worthy of it?
Let me know what you think...

With something like normal life returning, after the whipped-up panic and the mass hysteria of the Great Covid epidemic, I'll be picking up the trail and posting on Thursdays again.

Frankly, I've missed the deadlines and the opportunity to stare out of the window as a vital part of the writing process - that's something we're discouraged from doing as adults, but it's a vital part of the writing process and the creative path as a whole.

Inner Voice: "stop looking out of the window, put away your pen and go do something real!"
Me: "I'm not listening to you - you're just a voice in my head"
Inner Voice: "you are SO busted for staring out of the window, young man!"
Me: "Aha - I see that you've mistaken me for someone who cares...how foolish of you!"

Inner voice just sulked off into the kitchen, looking for biscuits, I suspect...

The Thursday Thesis  - 30/4/2020

I love teaching guitar!

This won’t surprise any of my guitar students – they’re used to me grinning and laughing during lessons.

What does surprise them though is the simplicity of many of their favourite songs.

It’s a funny thing, but it keeps on happening.

Heads are shaken, brows furrow, and "it can't be that easy..." is regularly heard.

It's as though I'm breaking some kind of rule, making playing guitar so simple and easy...

But that's because there's a type of thinking error known as misattribution – the assigning of qualities to a person or thing which has nothing to do with the real qualities they possess.

I did it myself for years – decades actually – and it really didn’t help at all.

These days, not so much.

Here's how the misattribution error goes for music fans and wannabe guitar players, singers, and just about everybody else:

1. I like this piece of music: I judge it to be Good.
2. I’m a sophisticated music fan
3. Logically then, I wouldn’t like simple music because I am such a fan of music
4. It therefore follows that this piece of music (which I consider to be Good) must be hard to play.
5. That means it is going to be hard for me to play...
6. Produce evidence to confirm your assumption - the classic Confirmation Bias I've talked about before on the blog.

Obviously, there’s no causal link between liking a piece of music and it being a technical challenge to play.

In fact, the more popular a piece of music is the less complex it tends to be. If you don’t believe me, just listen to the mainstream radio stations: most of what you’ll hear are short loops of a few simple chords, assembled into blocks (usually called introduction, verse, chorus, middle 8, bridge and outro) and produced to make them more interesting and variable than their deep structure really is.

I’m not knocking it – I’m just pointing out that the reality of music is not what we think it is, most of the time.

So reflect on this little thought: before music became something you bought – as a recording of some type – music was something you did; something you made for yourself, just for the fun of it.
Back then, almost everyone would get up and sing, play something and join in with whoever else was playing.

Back then it was easy and commonplace – so how did so many of us get convinced that we needed to have a “gift” or a special talent?

We fell under the hypnotic power of marketing, hype, bullshit, and the loud voices who seemed to know what was what.

Did music get harder, or did we get stupider, less “talented” and less musical?

Or did we just allow ourselves to be deceived by charlatans - and our own assumptions?
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 23/4/2020

Warren Buffett – the World’s greatest investor – has a very simple way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in his life. It obviously works, because he’s grown his company, Berkshire Hathaway, from nothing  to billions, so we might be wise to take a tip or two from him.

And that’s the thing – most people take advice from their peers.

Big mistake.

Huge.

Why is it a mistake?

Because your peers are more or less your equal, and are often less informed than you are. They are also navigating from their own map, applying their own prejudices and biases to your situation – making judgements based upon their values and principles.

A far better plan is to get your tips from people who are doing better than you in the area of life you are concerned with.

So – if you want to be financially successful – don’t take the advice of poor people.
If you want to get into great shape – don’t take diet and exercise advice from fat people.

Got it?

Good.

So, what did Warren do to keep his mind ON what he wanted and OFF what he doesn’t want?

He made just two lists.

List One is the DO list – the half-dozen most important things in his life.

Half a dozen, max.

List Two is everything else – the plethora of things that he absolutely didn’t want to do.

He lives by List One.

How simple is that?

I wish someone had told me this when I was a spotty, long-haired kid.

D’oh!
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

Episode 200 - Content V. Principles
The Thursday Thesis  - 16/4/2020


There are two kinds of teaching, as far as I can tell: first there is the simple spoon-feeding of one fact after another into the student – old fashioned, monkey see, monkey do teaching based on content and regurgitation. This approach works well for simple academic “jump through the hoop” examination schemes of the type used in most schools.

Then there is the second type of teaching, based not on the ability to memorise and recall facts, but on the ability to absorb and apply principles.

Type One, content-based teaching lies in disrepute as teachers are compelled to teach the test or face the wrath of OFSTED and the threat to their jobs. The content teacher’s job is to successfully prepare the student to pass the exam – not to teach them to think.

That’s the state system – which is not surprising, since no state wants its populace to be educated and capable of thought. As one head teacher told me “...(the current state education system)...is a compliance factory complex, designed to turn out compliant and obedient drones who’ll do as they are told: pass the test, tick the box, move on to the next level.”

And then there’s Type Two teaching: teaching based on ideas and principles, creative thought and empowering students to think. This kind of principle-based teaching is harder to do than content-based teaching, usually more expensive, and – of course - it is politically very risky to have a mass of thinking people to keep under control.

Principle-based teaching can ignite a passion to understand and to learn, to question and explore. If we are lucky, the passion lasts a lifetime and every day is a chance to learn, grow, and think.

But, for many people, learning ends when they leave school, armed only with the narrow ability to regurgitate memorised facts and the acceptable answers to questions. Yet I’ve come to believe that learning really begins when one escapes the narrow confines and the straitjacket of content-based teaching.

It is our nature to learn, after all.

Humans are curious animals – as a species, we’re into everything. We can’t not explore, test, experiment, or generally get ourselves into mischief: that’s what humans do.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

Episode 198 - The Other Operation Paperclip

The Thursday Thesis  - 9/4/2020

Here’s another little idea I use to help me manage myself and keep a lid on my own stupidity – Operation Paperclip.
Now, it’s got nothing at all to do with the real Operation Paperclip: America’s offering safe haven and jobs in government agencies to Nazi scientists at the end of World War.
My Version of Operation Paperclip just helps me to manage my coffee consumption and my Wing Chun martial arts drills.
Here’s how it works:
I have a cup and saucer next to the coffee machine.
I place a number of black paperclips in the saucer, equivalent to the number of double espressos I’m allowing myself to drink every day.
For each cup of coffee I have, I move a paperclip from the saucer to the empty cup, and – as the beans are ground and the machine whirrs – I perform my Wing Chun drill of the day.
If I’m drinking milk I’ll remove a black paperclip from the saucer and add a single white paperclip to take its place – representing my one latte for the day.
When all of the ‘clips have moved into the cup, I’ve reached my limit for the day.
Simple.
To reduce my initial, ludicrous, cup-count, I just reduced the number of ‘clips in the saucer by one a week for ten weeks. The result was a gradual, manageable moderation of my caffeine addiction – without the headaches or cravings which accompany going “cold turkey”.
That’s how I got down from fifteen(!) double espressos a day to just five– that’s still a lot, but it’s less crazy than getting wired on thirty shots of seriously strong coffee.
You can use this simple idea to ease into or out of any repetitive action or habit – try it for yourself and see how it works for you.
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 2/4/2020, updated

Am I alone in noticing that the BBC has abandoned any pretence of being anything other than a single-issue propaganda channel?

If you apply what I call “Precision Listening” it’s obvious.

All you have to do is listen very carefully to what’s being said.

Listen to the words used to convey the underlying message, because the words are often deceptive, and this is no accident.

State broadcasters employ the best writers  to carefully craft news scripts: the words are carefully selected, ordered and tickled to do a very particular job and to convey a very particular message.

So – for those who understand that the words used (what Noam Chomsky called the “surface structure” of communication) can greatly modify the message conveyed (the “deep structure”) these are interesting times.

For weeks it has been ramping-up COVID-19 stories, progressively giving over more and more time in bulletins until we’ve finally arrived at today – where every minute of the BBC’s “news” coverage is scary stories and inflammatory opinion on the speed, severity and deadliness of this bogeyman virus.

If you ever suspected that there was an agenda being peddled by our state-funded (state-controlled) broadcaster, Precision Listening and recent events will confirm your suspicions.

Listen closely to the weasel-words in the scary stories and you’ll begin to notice that daily mortality figures are now referred to as “connected with COVID-19”.

Hang on a second – only a couple of weeks ago this COVID-19 was being portrayed as a deadly killer, but now it seems to be only a component in a death.

This sinister shift to weasel-words looks like a guilty person backing away from what they’ve done; for whatever reason, the Beeb has moved its position by changing the words of its carefully-prepared script.

And here’s a little quote from the Office of National Statistics, from their bulletin dated 7 April 2020:
“Looking at the year-to-date (using refreshed data to get the most accurate estimates), the number of deaths is currently lower than the five-year average. The current number of deaths is 150,047, which is 3,350 fewer than the five-year average. Of the deaths registered by 27 March 2020, 647 mentioned the coronavirus (COVID-19) on the death certificate; this is 0.4% of all deaths.”

(Source: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregisteredweeklyinenglandandwalesprovisional/weekending27march2020)

I kid you not – in the midst of this appalling, scaremongered “pandemic”, FEWER people are dying than the average for the previous five-year period. That’s the overview of REALITY, not the twisted, stilted and distorted story we’re being fed by the state’s media mouthpiece.

Consider this fact - from the ONS's figures: deaths from "Flu and pneumonia" are down, whilst COVID-19 deaths are up. 
The numbers nett-out to the normal rate for this time of year.

So the question must arise: is COVID-19 simply a bad strain of 'flu?

What do you think?

You won't find the answer in the Government briefings, the Fake News or the Weasel-Words of the mendacious bastards at the BBC.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2020

Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

Our Darkest Day is Here and Now


Quiet, isn’t it?

Hardly a car on the road, not a soul in the lane, no beer in the pub.

That’s the sound of submission and acquiescence; that deafening stillness is freedom’s dying, silent scream.

With hardly a murmur of dissent, the sheeple of Britain have applauded the theft of their personal freedom – all in the name of a disease less deadly than the annual ‘flu season.

Last Tuesday was the darkest and most shameful day in our history.

We will live to rue the day.

The blustering dolt we elected to the office of Prime Minister imposed sweeping draconian restrictions on every single one of us.

Yes, the loveable clown, Blundering BoJo, seized almost absolute power with hardly a dissenting murmur of concern.

Hardly anyone said a dickie-bird about it.

It was a supremely slick seizure of power: any common-or-garden dictator would be envious.

They call it “Lockdown” – because it’s so much less inflammatory than “House Arrest”, don’t you think?

The media praised and the public applauded, not counting the losses or considering the legacy we are bestowing on the next generation and many generations still to come.

And so began a suicidal, manufactured, economic catastrophe, in which our kids have been sold into future slavery to pay back the mountains of imaginary money borrowed by government to be thrown willy-nilly at the smoke and mirrors “pandemic”.

Cowardly people-pleasing politics, exalting the Sacred Cow of the NHS, or something altogether more dark and sinister?

Let’s be clear here: people will die of COVID-19, because viruses kill people – especially sick people.
Viruses are a fact of life.

People die.

That’s a fact of life.

But the choices being made “on behalf of the British People” seem to miss those two vital facts, and the ensuing immorality of selling my son, and all of your sons and daughters into a lifetime of debt slavery is beyond me. My gorgeous boy and every single one of your gorgeous girls and boys will be gifted the debts of these cowardly politicians, goaded into action by the corrupt media and the mass outcry of the gullible herd.

It sickens me to see Britain – and much of the World – spooked by a so-so disease which has been marketed as a “pandemic” by the corrupt World Health Organisation.

Frankly, it’s unbelievable that the WHO is taken seriously by anyone.

This is – after all - the same World Health Organisation which thought Robert Mugabe (the notoriously corrupt former president of Zimbabwe – yes, that Robert Mugabe) would be a suitable “Goodwill Ambassador”.

The same World Health Organisation whose Director-General is accused of suppressing news of Cholera epidemics in Ethiopia and Eritrea in order to shield political cronies.

Mugabe was forced out of the post after a day or two, but the stench of corruption hangs around the WHO and Dr Tedros, who remains in office to this day.

The WHO estimates that up to 650,000 people die of ‘flu every years – COVID-19 stands at a paltry 47,174 deaths.

Flu doesn’t blow-up the economy, neither does it rob people of their freedom of movement and association, the right to assemble, or put them under house arrest.

We’ve always had ‘flu and we probably always will.

We’ve always had freedom, of a sort, but not any more.

How many lives would Government spend to fight a hot war for freedom against an oppressor?

Many, many times more than C-19 will cost.

But the unfought battle is already lost.

Freedom will be returned to us, but not in full.

There will be no full roll-back of the “Johnson Decree”. We, and all our children – and all of their children - we will all be poorer as a consequence of this irrational madness and the monstrous theft perpetrated in broad daylight.

The story so far:

1. Loss of personal freedom of movement
2. Open, mass-surveillance imposed without shame
3. Loss of the right to assemble
4. Loss of right of free association
5. Loss of freedom to conduct business/trade
6. Loss of freedom of speech (censorship of material contrary to The Script)
7. Imposition of massive debt burden on every future citizen of this land
8. Damage to social relationships, friendships, (Divide and Rule policy) and family
9. Presumption of guilt in law, rather than innocence. You need to prove you have a reason to be out of your house/cell.
10. “Key Workers” compelled to do jobs they are not trained for, or face disciplinary action
11. There is more to come...

And the future?

1. Upcoming forced vaccinations? (I suggest the slogan “No Jab, No Job” and hereby claim copyright and all royalties for this. Ker-Chinng!)
2. Future hyper-inflation – this looks inevitable as the government ask the private banks (Bank of England, The Federal Reserve and their slimy ilk) to print more “fiat” currency: that’s “pretend Money” to you and me. This is “Quantitative Easing” – the euphemism for Devaluing the currency by printing more of it.
3. Economic hardship more severe than the Great Depression?
4. Mass unemployment?
5. Nationalisation of private assets and businesses?
6. State-decreed minimum wage/universal income
7. Headlong rush to adopt 5G technology – which research has already proven to be unsafe
8. Cashless society – everything can and will be taxed, everything will be surveilled
9. And much, much more...

I don’t know about you, but that looks pretty grim to me.

But the biggest loser was our collective ability to think. To dispassionately consider the facts, look beyond soundbites, disreputable politicians, self-appointed “experts” and government sidekicks, to ask difficult, penetrating questions and be courageous in the face of Truth.

The war has already been lost, and in War the first casualty is Truth.

Lockdown is the new Normal, so get used to it, because it will get worse – probably much worse. Little by little the ratchet will be applied: tightened, released a little, then tightened a little more; over and over again.

You were warned, oh yes you were warned.

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/2/2020

It was Monday, and the storm ebbed away after throwing her tantrum all weekend long, leaving a few gusts of rage hanging around like someone who knows they have lost the argument saying “and another thing...”

Outside, the blown-down trees were being cleared away, torn fences mended and ripped roofs patched up as the rain finally stopped and the wind piped-down.

Somewhere a tree has torn down the electricity lines to my little town, so I’m camped out in Costa coffee whilst the leccy company try to restore power, and I’m having a good time scribbling away at an idea I’m working on.

As usual I’m making a lovely inky mess as my fountain pen loops and scurries its way across the yellow pad I always carry with me, leaving a trail of deep magenta ink behind it, and I’m away with the fairies for a little while as my latte goes cold.

Suddenly there’s a voice, saying quietly “I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you, but it’s just so nice to see someone writing with a real pen for a change”. I look up to see a smiling, pretty woman whom I quickly thank before she wishes me a good day and trundles off.

The whole thing lasts maybe twenty seconds or so, and I take a sip of my lukewarm latte as I mull over the brief exchange and survey the other punters. Half a dozen of them are tapping away on laptops and tablet devices, the rest are phone-bothering. I’m the only person using a pen and paper: a singular luddite.

Gadgets have their place as a necessary evil of the modern world, but there are times when only a real pen will cut it: for real writing and the sheer joy of stringing ideas together, nothing beats a pen.

A proper pen.

A proper ink-pen with creamy silken paper and ink the colour of dragon’s blood.

I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I suspect it’s an act of rebellion against my schooling, against having my natural left-handedness knocked out of me and being made use my right hand because “left-handed people are the devil’s work...”

Bizarre, but true.

And it feels like I’m poking a finger in the eye of convention, raging against the crappy regulation biros with which I scratched away my school days.

And it takes me as far away as I can imagine from dusty classrooms and writing “lines”, the misery of detention , or the humiliation of the remedial handwriting classes which did bugger-all good and only left me feeling like an imbecile.

I now know that there wasn’t anything wrong with me: I’d just been told to do daft things with a pen which made it nigh-on impossible to do what I was told.

And many years later I came to recognise the stupidity of compelling a child to use their less able hand to write with, and to question the logic underpinning that decision.

Later still came the secret love of writing, the shape of words, and the appreciation of how beautiful the solitary act of writing could be...

My fountain pen is truly one of my treasures. Made from lava erupted from Mount Etna, heavy in my hand, yet poised and balanced;  it sighs as it caresses the creamy page like a lover’s skin, kept safe between the hard covers of my old-fashioned notebook.

If only I’d been taught that the process of writing could be innately pleasurable: like a beautiful dance, from the first contemplation of the virgin beauty of the empty page and the first kiss of inky colour. The hand simply moves, and thoughts coalesce into droplets of dragon-blood condensed from the mind, now given the freedom to flow – unimpeded by touchscreen or keyboard

Ink on paper is permanent and immediate, it doesn’t crash, and handwriting is rarely corrupted and seldom deleted by accident. A notebook remains present and instantly accessible, unlike the oubliette of a hard drive where files are saved and never seen again.

Few things are as cool as flipping open an old notebook and discovering something which one has written and then forgotten all about.

There are practical reasons for writing longhand, too: research indicates that we think differently when writing – there’s a sort of reprocessing of ideas which improves cognition and retention.
Most of all, writing with a real pen is simply a pleasure, unseen by the disapproving spelling and grammar checkers.

Set free the vagabond pen to roam and twist, spiral and swirl across, or up and down – the page. And perhaps it is this - the freedom of real writing - that compels us most. As the hollow promises and hype of digital technology are exposed, and that which was supposed to set us free enslaves us, there is a growing resistance movement and a resurgence of real writing – a sort of analogue underground – and I for one am proud to wear the inkstains of the writer on my fingers.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2020
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 23/1/2020

Well, here we are – three weeks into a new year and what’s changed?

For most people, nothing has changed. Just a few weeks down the line from making definite, potentially life changing promises to ourselves, most of us are already right back where we started – or we soon will be.

Our New Year’s Resolutions are beginning to fall apart, with around an 80% failure rate, according to Inc Magazine.

So the majority of people make definite decisions to take action and change their lives for the better, but 8 out of 10 of them will fail...

Once again, it seems that doing what most people do is not a good idea. If we are prepared to observe the masses and do the opposite, there’s a chance that the 80% failure rate could become a thing of the past.

It’s not that New Year’s Resolutions are bad, in themselves – who could argue that taking better care of one’s health, finances or relationships is a bad thing?

No, the problem isn’t the Resolution, it’s the implementation.

Here’s what doesn’t work, most of the time: we make a decision and try to stick to it. If we diverge from our decision in any way, even just once, we throw out the whole thing and beat ourselves up for having no willpower, backbone or self-discipline.

We have failed, and it is over.

Sometimes this leaves us feeling even worse than we did before we made that decision, and that can have profound ramifications.

But what if we were wrong about that failure – how would that be?

Let’s suppose your New Year’s Resolution was to give up booze, but last Friday you had a couple of drinks with friends. You didn’t want to break your resolution, but your friends were so persuasive and bought your drinks for you.

When you woke up on Saturday you felt disappointed – you’d let yourself down and everybody knew you’d broken your resolution. Now you feel like crap and begin to tell yourself that there’s no point even trying again, because everybody knows that New Year’s Resolutions always fail...

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

But what if we chose to think of that catastrophic and final failure to stay clean – that unwanted behaviour - as something other than the end of our resolution: suppose it was really a successful test?

What you really found was a successful test of a behaviour that you didn’t want. That test was necessary to make sure that you didn’t want to do it, wasn’t it?

If that were true, you could eliminate it from your list of potential actions and resume your ongoing tests of behaviour that will support your long-term aims, in this case you New Year’s Resolution.

The core of the problem is that we over-respond to a single, momentary failure and let it define us. If we had decided to stop drinking alcohol and “go on the wagon” at New Year, but had fallen off the wagon last weekend, the sharpest thing to do is to get back on the wagon right away. An intelligent person would ask themself what happened and what they could do differently in order to stay on the wagon, rather than curse themself and throw themselves back under the wheels.

The intelligent person reminds themself that it was just a test, and then asks themself “so, what might work better?” because they know that is a thousand mile journey, but it is lived in inches. The intelligent person recognises the inch of lost ground when they fail, then strides out to regain that inch and then some.

So, if your own New Year’s Resolution – or any other decision – has been broken, today is another inch of your thousand mile journey: another chance to test what works and what doesn’t work, another chance to become who and what you want to be.

Keep Testing.


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 12/12/2019

“You are all diseased” – George Carlin.

A couple of weeks ago I was reading about how much healthcare costs us here in the UK – it’s a lot of money, and it’s never enough. Just like churches appealing for more money (apparently God isn’t good with money and always needs more...) the NHS needs more money, despite the patently obvious fact that the health of our nation can’t be bought on our current budget – or any other budget, for that matter.

It occurs to me that we’ve got it all arse-about-face: completely arse-about-face.

We need to flip the model.

At the moment we pay doctors for treating sick patients – usually with expensive drugs which don’t treat the underlying causes of disease, but instead manage the symptoms. Of course, that’s what the drugs are designed to do – manage the condition, not treat the underlying problem.

It’s a good model – if you’re in the medical business.

Cure the condition – no more drug sales: it’s a transaction that happens just once. That’s Bad Business.

But manage the condition and you have a repeat business model that keeps the patient just sick enough to keep coming back for more of what doesn’t work.

I’ll say it again: The drugs don’t work because they’re not designed to cure.

And if you pause to think about the “payment-by-volume” medical model, you’d have to conclude that something is truly fucked-up.

Think about it – the more sick people you have in your practice, the more money you get paid...

Hmmm – is there a disincentive here?

Get to the root of the problem and treat it effectively and you’re going out of business...

A chronically sick patient is a long-term asset to a medical business, generating lots of repeat business for as long as they remain sick and in need of your attention and those all-important drugs.

Now, I’m usually an optimist when it comes to human nature, but a little bell rings in the back of my mind when I think about the Sickness Industry: how about you?

It’s obvious, isn’t it?

More sick people are good for business, whether you are a doctor or a drug company.

Just like any business, the job of a medical practice or drug company is to recruit, develop and retain a customer, maximising their Lifetime Value to the business.

As a pharmaceutical supplier you want to stimulate, grow and maintain demand for your products and services; pushing up prices and enhancing the perception of the worth of your offering.

The dream-ticket in the sickness business is to invent, and then profitably medicate, a condition. Do that and you’ve hit the jackpot: ADHD/ADD and Ritalin spring to mind here, though there are many, many more examples out there.

To whoever invented the diagnosis of “Stress”, I take my hat off to you. By making a person’s inability to deal with challenge into a medical condition (and inventing a drug which helps just a little) you’ve shown true genius and richly deserve the billions of dollars/pounds you’ve hoodwinked the foolish out of.

Nice.

Those who profit from disease and sickness run the show. In a nutshell – the foxes are in charge of the henhouse. Naturally, the foxes will suggest that what we really need are more foxes to guard the hens...

And more money, of course, to buy more of what doesn’t work.

So here’s my Genius Masterplan to save the NHS, reform the Sickness Industry, slash the cost of real healthcare to all of us, and improve the health of more people.

Are you ready?

Here we go: It’s simple.

On Planet Neil, the doctors are paid only when the patient is well. Let’s all pay a small monthly subscription, something like your current National Insurance Contributions, but used for promoting real health instead of paying Government debt and drugs that fail to cure. Should you become sick, however, the doctor receives nothing from you but must treat you.

It’s a simple idea. Incentivising the whole healthcare sector to move away from management of disease and toward curing the root causes of disease, thus promoting long-term health, rather than incentivising the prescription of ineffective, expensive drugs to manage symptoms.

Now, if your illness is the product of your own stupidity, indolence or inability to manage yourself and take responsibility for your own life (obesity, alcoholism, drug abuse etc) you get three chances to man up and run your own life, each of which is time-limited and designed to treat underlying behaviour issues.

Three Strikes and you’re out.

Should you fail to mend your ways after your third strike-out you are released from the system to fend for yourself, out into an unregulated market for private medicine and healthcare where you can re-connect with the old model of healthcare.

Should you be ejected from Planet Neil’s Healthcare System, that’s YOUR problem, because your health and what you do to yourself is YOUR life, YOUR decision.

Naturally, those who cannot manage themselves and their own health will tend to remove themselves from the healthcare system and ultimately from the gene pool if left to their own desires and devices.

I know that softy Pinko liberals will hate this suggestion, but – let’s face it – they live in a world of fluffy clouds and pink unicorns, having little or no connection with reality. I think it is spectacularly foolish to squander vast quantities of scarce resources upon those individuals who are determined to destroy themselves.

So let those who wish to kill themselves with drugs, booze, smoking and other poisons get on with it. The State (well, you and I, actually) should not support such self-destructive behaviour at the expense of others who are taking responsibility for their lives, because that is so patently unjust and absurd.

To penalise those who do right in order to maintain those determined to do wrong and harm themselves is an insult to common sense: it is the ultimate insult to morality and human dignity.
For sure I believe fiercely in Equality of Opportunity and equal provision of healthcare – but I have no time for the not unworkable fantasy of Equality of Outcome, because people are fundamentally unequal and do not live in equal ways.

That’s reality – and we should never delude ourselves that it is otherwise.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

The Thursday Thesis  - 5/12/2019

Back in the 90’s I lived and worked in Kiev, the capital city of the former Soviet state of Ukraine. During the brutally cold winters in the city I started to train at a local gym to stay active when it was too cold to be outside for long.

I’ve always been a bookworm so I read everything I could lay my hands on about training and exercise, trying to shortcut my progress and build muscles I could show off on the beach at Gidropark when the summer rolled around, instead of hiding my puny torso under a baggy T-Shirt.

The books gave me an exercise plan and I did everything they told me to do, I did the prescribed 10 repetitions (reps) of each exercise, grouped into sets, which I repeated in accordance with the guidelines and training principles laid down by the experts, adding new routines and exercises from the articles in various bodybuilding magazines.

Every morning I’d climb the stairs to the gym, unlock the outer steel plate door and the inner steel-barred gate, turn on the lights and watch the cockroaches scatter before I changed into my gym baggies and hit The Iron. An hour and a half later it was all over and I’d go home to bed.
Day after day I trained my arse off in that little gym, spent a fortune wolfing down the supplements advertised in the magazines and stuffed myself with as many calories as I could stand.

I just did what everyone else did and got what everyone else got: bigger muscles, chronic fatigue, burnout and injuries. Looking back, I realise that what I believed was keeping me healthy was making me ill and hurting me.

Daft as a brush.

That was twenty-five years ago. But to this day there’s a purity and honesty about weight training that appeals to me: it’s just The Iron versus Me, and there’s nowhere to hide. You can tell yourself you’re strong, that you are indestructible and fearless – but The Iron knows better and it will always find you out. The Iron will always beat you up and tell you that you are full of shit, because The Iron never sleeps and The Iron has no Soul – it just keeps coming at you and it will always tell you the truth.

Now, as I return to The Iron I bring a different understanding of how to train. Gone are the 10 sets of 10 heavy reps, splitting the workout over multiple days with split routines targeting my legs one day, my chest and arms another, and my back on another day.

Also notable by their absence are the downsides of training – chronic fatigue, burnout and injury.

I’m training only twice a week, now: one heavy-duty routine which targets all of the major muscle groups for just one set of around 8 reps, and one routine where I am doing something I would have thought absurd back in those Kiev days – one single rep of each of 5 exercises, using only moderate weights, and each rep takes FIVE MINUTES!

Five-minute REPS!

Like most people, I thought it was BS to train one rep for 5 minutes – NOBODY was doing it, but the science behind it looks way more robust than the workouts in the magazines and bodybuilding manuals, which don’t talk much about rest and recovery, or mention the vast amounts of drugs used by pro bodybuilders.

And I’ve rediscovered the fun of challenging The Iron, but this time on my own terms. I’m getting more out of the gym than I’ve ever got before, but I’m putting a whole lot less time and effort into it. This is a much more sane approach than going Old Skool – spending hours in the gym and not ever really recovering from a session before starting the next one.

Minimum input, maximum output.

What I’ve learned from my research into the science of training and the Freaks at the fringes is that Conventional Wisdom is frequently wrong, and what works best is what works best for you.

A couple of cheerful gym rats have told me that 5 Minute reps can’t possibly work and that they can help me to train more effectively, but I’ll do it my way and we’ll see how it goes. If unconventional works, it’s a win. If it fails I can always return to doing things conventionally.

Maybe I’ll prove them wrong – we’ll see.

It’s just a test. In life, everything is a test, all knowledge is contingent – a best guess while I wait for more information with which to prove myself wrong and update what I think I know. Understanding that fact means that I’m always looking for better ways to train, teach, play, write and do business: in this mindset of  ongoing curiosity, fun and adventure there is always something new to discover and explore.

It’s time to play.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

The Thursday Thesis  - 28/11/2019

In the cult TV show Star Trek, Spock - the half-human, half-Vulcan Science officer – coined the phrase “Live long and prosper” as a greeting to fellow Vulcans, accompanying it with a hand gesture dividing his fingers into two pairs with the thumb extended.

To me, it’s a great salutation – far better than “Good morning” or the ubiquitous “Hi”. Live Long and Prosper is an affirmation of life and all its potentials: therefore it is deeply cool in my book.

But there’s something missing, in my opinion.

Living Long and Prospering is all well and good, but how should we die?

Personally I’m a fan of being astonishingly active and rudely healthy, deep in to old age – enjoying perfect health right up until the moment when I drop Dead.

I want to arrive at my own graveside absolutely spent: exhausted, gulping my last breath as I skid my motorcycle sideways to a halt, tipping me effortlessly into the pit as the lady who I was having sex with dismounts gracefully and pirouettes away, just seconds after our final, tumultuously synchronised orgasms.

And as I look up at the sky from six-feet below the grass I smile, murmuring “What a ride – now I’m going to have a lie-in” as the vicar and the gravediggers start shovelling the dirt in – clearly terrorised by the thought that I might change my mind and spring back out of the hole before bounding off in pursuit of more fun and misadventure.

Sounds good to me; that was probably how life ended for a good many of our prehistoric forebears – long-term diseases were rare and (if you made it past infancy) life expectancy seems to have been pretty good.

Archaeologists tell us that heart disease was virtually unknown and cancer was rare in ancient times – ancient humans seem to have been on the go right up to the end of their lives.

The medical establishment tells us that cancer and heart disease are difficult to treat without spending vast amounts of money on drugs: funny how Johnny Caveman had no problem with the modern killer diseases, isn’t it?

As we grow older we are expected to sicken, weaken and decline before we die – but aren’t we buying into a dodgy model here?

When we accept that growing older must mean a loss of powers, declining strength and virility we accept the notion that we are victims of an irresistible force set out against us: we begin to adopt the habits, movements and lifestyle we have been told is appropriate for us and acceptable to society.

So life is good for a short time, just until we reach the tipping point where we cease to consider ourselves young and unlimited, transitioning into passive riders on the long, slow downhill path to a medicated dotage and ultimate release...

It doesn’t have to be this way.

There is a mountain of research demonstrating that most of today’s major diseases are caused by the dismal diet (built on false premises and the suspect recommendations of Governments) we are peddled by big Corporations, compounded by our lack of movement. What the research suggests is that changing one’s diet and walking around could just about transform your life and the lives of entire nations.

But you probably won’t hear about all that research, because it’s been kept out of the mainstream media by people with too much to lose if we ever find out the truth about the Western Pattern Diet (also known as the Standard American Diet – poetically abbreviated to SAD) and how its ideas poisoned the World.

Since much of the Western World began to adopt the SAD and looked to the nutritional guidelines of the US’s Food Pyramid (low fat, high carbohydrates, low salt etc) diseases and chronic illness have mushroomed. In countries all over the World obesity and type 2 diabetes (formerly called Adult-Onset Diabetes) have tracked politely behind the introduction of SAD.
It’s not a coincidence – it’s causation, not correlation.

In every Country where the SAD has gained a hold, the story is the same: rising levels of disease and obesity, with long-term sickness occurring earlier in life, necessitating vast spending on medication to manage the problems caused by the SAD.

And as UK’s the population ages, more and more of us will become sick, medicated, and helpless; reliant on drugs and healthcare to manage our symptoms – just like America - and every other country infected by the SAD.

We owe it to ourselves to be vigilant and to be difficult: to question the advice given to us about our food by the food industry, about our healthcare by the people who sell us drugs, and by a society whose “average” citizen is fat, sick and medicated.

That’s not how I’m planning to live out the next fifty or so years: I’m going to Live Long and Drop Dead - how about you?
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

Episode 178 - White Belt Mind

The Thursday Thesis  - 21/11/2019

It is said that when one begins the journey into Buddhism the hardest thing to do is to clear one’s mind: to achieve Shoshin – the so-called Beginner’s Mind.

Shoshin is an empty mind; no preconceptions and open to anything when studying a subject. And it is a mind without place-markers for meaning or a frame of reference the initiate can easily feel lost and disoriented.

In meditation we should try to simply be: to quiet the seemingly incessant chatter of our “Monkey Mind”    which is our usual waking state – unsettled, restless, capricious, whimsical, fanciful and inconstant; confused, indecisive and almost completely uncontrollable.

Monkey Mind's thoughts rise up inside us, capture and fixate our attention, then  fade into darkness like fireworks in the night.

The aim is to simply empty one’s mind and notice what comes and goes, without reacting or judging, usually by paying attention to one’s breath and the flow of air into and out of the body; to observe our Monkey Mind thoughts rise, subside and fade, only to be replaced by more thoughts, which – in turn – also pass and are replaced, endlessly and continuously.

All that Monkey Mind sounds pretty tiring to me.

In Beginner’s Mind we accept that we know nothing – because we are beginners (the clue is in the name).

When newcomers to the guitar come for their first lesson the biggest problem is that they already know that learning to play guitar will be difficult, that they have no talent, no rhythm, that there are no musicians in their family, etc, etc, etc. Their Monkey Mind has been yapping away for years – often decades – based on knowing bugger-all about playing guitar!

Yep, based on no knowledge of the instrument they (we, really – because I used to “know” how hard it was to play guitar, too) have convinced themselves of a whole bunch of unhelpful things, so the very first (and most important) thing in the lesson will be the systematic elimination of those beliefs – to engender their Beginner’s Mind and to clear away their unfounded certainty.

Subduing Monkey Mind takes time and...

And what?

Not effort, but attention.

Once you become aware of Monkey Mind and simply notice its prattle, you can let it talk and talk – allow it to rage and rail, worry and fret – notice that thoughts rise and subside, endlessly forming and drifting away. You come to realise that most of it is just nonsense and, over time, become less attached to your thoughts and reactions: the mind clears and empties itself.

We can come to understand that we know nothing and in so doing begin to learn the first lesson. The lesson is that it’s not what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know damned well and that isn’t true that hurts you.

Your Monkey Mind dances with untruth, worry and your own fears turned back in on yourself, and by stilling that Monkey chatter you can open up your mind to learning.

The first step to learning to play the guitar - or anything else for that matter - is to clear away the untrue, the second is to acquire the true.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019

Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

The Thursday Thesis  - 10/10/2019

When I was a freckly sprog I’d sit and watch the flames and glowing coals of my grandma’s open fire – it’s something I love to do, even now. Shapes change, bright spots flare and subside, and shapes shift to become....

Well, what exactly?

More often than not it’s a face – not the face that my great grandma warned me about, because that was always the devil’s face I had to be careful of – or something that looked enough like a face for my eyes and brain to connect the dots of randomness until they began to resemble the familiar.

We all do it – it’s a universal human trait with its own fancy name: pareidolia. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary it is “...the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern...”

It turns out that we humans are wired to sort for the familiar and especially for other humans – which is no surprise given our evolutionary need to find food and a mate.

But the most important word in that definition is “familiar” because we can manage what becomes familiar to us – it’s something we have control over.

If we have love and security, that’s what we’ll expect to be around us and we’ll seek out love and security.

Likewise, if we are surrounded by mistrust, hate, violence and division – such as our news programmes are crammed full of – then guess what...?

Yep – we’re going to expect to find that everywhere we go.

So when we begin to remove undesirable things from our lives (top tip: start with your television) that will begin to reduce our tendency to find those things in random events and objects.

When we don’t have doom, gloom and depravity forced down our throats every day, then guess what – we see less of it in our everyday environment.

Conversely, if we are surrounded by positivity and optimism, we will recognise those things in apparently random objects and occurrences, instead.

So, looking at ambiguous images such as the ten inkblots of the Rorschach inkblot tests can indicate what a person’s biases are, as the viewer “projects” what they think should be present onto the random shape of the inkblot.

So next time you glimpse a face in a cloud, or notice that a car’s front-end seems to wear a certain expression, relax – you’re not going mad, you’re just seeing things.

And that’s ok by me.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

The Thursday Thesis  - 03/10/2019


As a spotty teenage guitar wannabe, all I knew about feedback was that it was a hideous, high-pitched scream emanating from my Marshall amplifier when I had the volume cranked and I was too close to the speakers.

These days, my amps are smaller, my guitar playing slightly less bad, and electronic feedback much less common.

But feedback is the bread-and-butter of daily life – it’s how our bodies respond to our environment without us even thinking about it, and how we decide upon which behaviours to adopt, continue or abandon.

In fact, feedback is the core of human behaviour: look at any behaviour pattern and feedback will be present, one way or another. From our eating habits to our exercise patterns, sexual proclivities and spending habits (no connection between these last two), everything comes down to feedback.

So what is feedback, how does it work, and how can we hijack ourselves to get more of what we what and less of what we don’t?

In a nutshell, feedback is the tendency of a system - in this case, us – to respond to received information (sensations or feelings) in a consistent way in order to produce more or less of the incoming sensations.

If we are receiving information we find pleasurable or positive – say, a delicious taste, sexual excitement, rewards or peer esteem – we will continue to perform the activity which produces those desirable sensations. This is known as Positive Feedback.

And if the sensations being received are unpleasant or negative – for example, food we don’t like, pain, punishment or exclusion from our peer group – we will modify our behaviour to reduce or eliminate the unpleasantness.

Freud’s Pleasure Principle is a pretty good summary of how feedback works: “people to seek pleasure and avoid pain”. That’s really the nuts and bolts of feedback – it’s pretty simple.

So how do we hack our own feedback loops to be happier, fitter, wealthier?

Just two: words: pay attention.

Notice what is working for you and do more of it.

And notice what isn’t working for you, then do less of it.

It’s simple, and it only takes a moment of detached consideration and honesty to ask yourself the simple question “Is what I am doing now producing the kinds of results which will make me more like the person I want to become?”

If the answer is “Yes”, do more of it and improve it.

If the answer is “No”, stop doing it as soon as you possibly can.

Suppose you’re mouth is watering at the sight of a yummy fresh doughnut...

Before you wade in with all teeth blazing – just ask yourself “Is eating that doughnut going to help make me the sort of fit, slim person I want to be?”

And be honest with yourself.

If you're wrestling your guitar and getting nowhere, pause and ask yourself "is what I'm doing now helping or hurting my development and enjoyment on the guitar?"

"Success leaves clues", as they say - and so does failure...

If you spend your life doing things consistent with the actions of the person you’d most like to meet, you must – inevitably – become that person.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

Episode 170 - Strike A Pose
The Thursday Thesis  - 26/9/2019


Let’s play a little game – I promise you’ll like it – it’s the fastest mind hack you’ll ever have, so let’s play!

Stand up and remember a time in your life when you knew you’d triumphed – you made a plan and did the work, and you won that major prize...

Remember how that felt?

Stand the way you stood, breathe the way you breathed, hear what you heard...hold it for 30 seconds

Notice how your feelings change...

Chances are that you are in what is known as the “Victory Pose”, also known as “Pride” - a
universal human behaviour which is seen in all cultures around the world – even among people who have been blind from birth. You’ve seen it in pictures of winning athletes, children playing, politicians celebrating winning an election - it’s the arms thrown up and outward into a V shape, torso erect, chin lifted and eyes looking up.

Researcher Amy Cuddy has measured what happens to your body when you adopt this posture, and it’s amazing. Just two minutes of Victory Pose can spike your testosterone levels by up to 20% whilst sinking your cortisol levels by 25% at the same time. Testosterone is the dominance hormone, so more of this is good: Cortisol is the stress hormone, and less of this is good.

Boom, Boom!!

More of the good stuff, less of the bad – how cool is that?

Now, if the Victory pose is too extravagant for you, try the “Wonder Woman” pose for size: stand erect, shoulders wide and put your hands on your hips (no, we’re not doing The Timewarp!). This is a high-power, high-status stance which produces similar effects to the Victory pose.

Had enough of feeling good?

Let’s play at being depressed... just let your head sag forward, gather your arms toward your centre and slump your shoulders as you begin to look down...

Notice how your feelings change...

Cuddy’s work shows a reduction in testosterone of up to 10% in just two minutes of this low-power posture, whilst bad cortisol levels jump up by as much as 25%.

Sick.

Can it really be that easy to influence your biochemistry?

Test it for yourself: whilst you’re in this weak and miserable state, just try to feel good...notice you can’t do it.

Now jump back into the Victory pose and hold it for 30 seconds...hold it and try to feel bad... notice you can’t do it?

Can it be that easy?

You just proved it works, didn’t you – why do you want anything more complicated?

There’s a conceit amongst “Smart People” that simple ideas are not good enough; that for an idea or technique to be intellectually valid it has to be complicated. It’s the same kind of nonsense we tell ourselves all the time, usually about things only being of value if they are hard to do – like work, or learning to play guitar for instance.

So we have a choice: do simple stuff that works, don’t waste your time looking for a more difficult solution that does the same thing.

To paraphrase the 14th Century English philosopher, William of Ockham, “All else being equal, the simplest solution is usually the best solution”.

Want to lose weight - Just stop eating.

Want to save money – stop buying crap you don’t need, with money you don’t have.

So if changing your mood is as simple as moving your meat-suit, when do you want to start feeling more positive, more powerful, less stressed and more confident?

How about Now?

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

Episode 169 - Brainwashed
The Thursday Thesis  - 19/9/2019


Happiness is a choice, made in the  face of a toxic sea of negativity. Modern life’s turbulent dark waters engulf us in wave after wave of bad news, advertisements torment us with images of a life made good by products, without which we are nothing.

Now we are online 24/7 the onslaught has no let-up: our minds are under siege and nobody is coming to the rescue. Continuously updated with all the latest bad news, celebrity wankfesting and the propaganda masquerading as news,  we are herded – willingly – into a state of anxiety and given a sense of powerlessness, and from there we seek escape into more of the very entertainments (definition) that got us into this bloody mess.

This is reality, and failing to recognise it is to delude oneself – and that is the first step toward insanity.

Governments (to regulate and control), business interests, media, and the many agencies identified by their abbreviations are happy to provide us with the soundtracks and storyboards of our lives, based upon their agendas for us. Make no mistake – their agenda for you and for me will in no way have our best interest at heart: recognise this and deal with it. Only a fool would believe that other people are more interested in what we want than what they want – this is the great lie of the Communist ideal, even in its watered-down form we call Socialism. For Socialism/Communism to function the individual must surrender their freedom of choice and submit completely to the power of the state; in recognising this simple reality the deceit of “the common good” falls on its self-righteous arse.

Politics aside, what can you do about it?

Make a choice: either one chooses to bathe in the sewer of negativity or one chooses to extract oneself from it. You can’t swim in a shitstream without getting whiffy.

1. Turn off the TV. When a BBC anchorman rages against the bias and there is widespread shock about it, then something is fucked up. You can’t spend more than a few minutes on mainstream media without noticing the bias against the following:
   1. Men – feminists are happy to make vile generalisations about anyone with a penis, just like men used to make ridiculous generalisations about anyone with a vagina. It’s the same old game, the players have simply changed ends.
      
   2. White people: ditto the above, but substitute race for gender.
      
   3. Heterosexuals: there are so many positive portrayals of homosexuality that being gay is now cool, and gay voices shout and prate about how gay they are, lest we forget that they are special.
      
   4. Wealthy people: in the divisive rants about economic equality it’s easy to forget that wealthy people are usually wealthy becaue they got off their arses and DID something to become wealthy. Usually they work bloody hard, took risks and delayed gratification in order to accumulate wealth. These are very positive traits, not evil actions – why are we not encouraging our kids to strive, work and aspire, instead of coddling them in the false beliefs that everything will be ok? Everything will NOT be ok unless we – every single one of us – makes a bloody effort and makes a difference. Nobody is coming to the rescue.
      
2. Get away from the phone. Those pings and vibrations are constantly calling you to swipe, scan or PIN the phone. Missing just one message or notification, on e Tweet or status update could ruin your day, so don’t miss out... There’s constant anxiety and perpetual FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), cranking up your stress hormones and spoiling your peace of mind. Lock the phone away, on silent and out of sight. Don’t get me started on the fucking retards who plunge their 2-tonne steel boxes on wheels past my house at 60-70 mph (it’s a 40 zone) whilst clutching a phone to the side of their cretinous heads. Have we so lost touch with reality that we think this a good idea?
   
3. Stop reading the papers.  Choked with stilted stories, manufactured celebrity gossip, slanted editorials and adverts for more shit you don’t need, newspapers are just another way for negative programming to be entered in to your neck-top computer. Disconnect and debug yourself.
4. Offline Yourself. Have a whole day without the internet – no laptop, no phone. Revisit writing with a pen and paper, read a print book, walk, run, climb, knit...whatever you do, try it without YouTube, Facebook and Google. Shop without Amazon or Ebay, talk to real people and look at real scenery.
   

One way or another, someone will be programming your necktop – shouldn’t that someone be you?

I’m advocating positively brainwashing yourself in a way that’s positive and meaningful for you.

Given the choice between hearing bad news all day long, of constant disturbances and distractions leaving you in an anxious and powerless state,  and being exposed to good news and inspiring ideas all day – leading you to feel happy, optimistic and positive – which would you choose, knowing that you had the choice?

It’s a no-brainer, isn’t it?

But how many people that you know have made that choice – how many of your friends, family and colleagues even know they are making that choice every single day of their lives?

So now you know, what are you going to choose to focus on, what are you going to allow into your life?

You get to choose.

Choose well, choose wisely.


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

Episode 168 - The Art of Looking Sideways

The Thursday Thesis  - 12/9/2019


I can’t remember when I first heard the phrase “a sideways look”, but I do remember that it was in a story of a wise woman facing down a villager who accused her of witchcraft. In the story that Sideways Look was all suspicion and contempt as the wise woman cowed her accuser.

And it’s such a funny idea, looking sideways, that it stuck with me. Tumbled by time and stained by my ribald life it’s acquired a new meaning for me, no longer is it haughty contempt – not in my sense of the phrase, anyway.

No, for me it’s become a look of deep curiosity, this sideways look.

Maybe it’s like the look of romantic interest, sudden curiosity and potential passion, and maybe it is charged with suspicion; but whatever it is, you know a sideways look when you get one.

Time freezes briefly when someone looks at you that way.

We feel our souls are being scrutinised by a sideways look, our very essence assayed and examined.

And it all happens in an instant.

That Sideways Look takes nothing at Face Value, it asks questions and weighs things up.

When you Look Sideways you don’t just begin to think about what was said – you begin to factor-in who said it, how they said it, the context in which it was said, and what they did not say.

Whatever the delivery media - Speech, book, video, commercial, print ad, radio or TV show - you begin to probe the speaker’s motives, their choice of words, their body language and posture, vocal nuances and rate of speech.

Looking Sideways isn’t just about face-to-face encounters with real people, and it definitely applies to advertising, marketing, mainstream media, social media, music and the Arts

A sideways look is really critical thinking, looking beyond and around, as well as into and through, the surface of events, messages, conversations. It squints at what is being shown, listens intently for what is said, hears the creaking of distortion and the sly whisper of Spin – moreover, it reaches into the dark silences of what is being left out.

© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

The Thursday Thesis  - 05/09/2019


Comfort will drain your life of all meaning.
Comfort will make you irrelevant.
Comfort is your sworn enemy.
Comfort will kill you,
Stone dead.
 
I was talking to a lady a couple of days ago - you know, all about life and stuff. She’d had a successful career and was looking forward to a “comfortable retirement” in a few years.

That seems such an old-fashioned image: drifting off into a quiet life of pottering around, fading by degrees into invisibility, a thirty-year waiting room before the last, long, lie-in.

There’s something deeply offensive about the word “comfortable”, at least to me.

There’s a suggestion of irrelevance, of ineffectuality about it.

Humans are built to strive, learn and grow – it’s what really makes us tick.

If life is comfortable we are likely to become unhappy as we lack obstacles to overcome, challenges to meet, dreams to capture and dragons to slay.

There seems something disturbing about being comfortable – a curious sense of drifting and lack of purpose. It’s probably just me, projecting my own hang-ups onto the word.

But I would hate to be comfortable.

In fact, I shudder when I imagine having no reason to get out of bed.

Reason tells me that if I’m not busy growing I’m probably shrinking, because only making a demand on our bodies will stimulate growth and repair.

Without stress, without challenge, we may not even maintain our status quo.

I’m not ready to shuffle off into someone else’s dream of a comfortable retirement – are you?

That’s an old dream, peddled by people who were sold it themselves, only to find it hollow when they got there.

Get uncomfortable.

Do something that takes you outside of your comfort zone.

Push your boundaries, because they are shrinking in on you every single day, whether you like it or not.

If you don’t push back, you’ll shrink and fade away.

Keep pushing back.

Get busy doing that thing you’ve always wanted to do – you know which one I mean, don’t you?

It’s the thing that scares the living crap out of you: maybe it’s learning to play guitar, run a marathon, start a business, leave your job.

You know I’m talking to you, in particular, don’t you?

The time is now.

This is your moment.

This is your life ticking away.

Only you are standing in your way, because The Universe is too big, cold and indifferent to care about you, one way or the other. In fact, The Universe really doesn’t give a fuck about you, so get over it and get uncomfortable doing that scary big thing.

Get out of your own way and do it.

Don’t get comfortable.

 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Remember to Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]

Episode 166 - Observe The Masses...

The Thursday Thesis  - 29/8/2019

Within the world of business, finance and investing, Warren Buffet is pretty much a legend in his own lifetime.

Now in his 80’s the Chairman of the Berkshire Hathaway investment fund is still playing The Game he loves most – the Game of Money.

You might ask “Why would he want to keep on working at his age?”

Because it is his game – his fascination and his calling.

He certainly isn’t in it for the money itself: with a personal net worth of around 80 Billion dollars it would be hard to make much of a dent in his fortune. In fact, that amount of money invested at just 3% would earn him an eye-popping 2.4 Billion dollars a year, pre tax.

He's a lone wolf - happy to pursue his own passions and interests when it flies in the face of popular opinion.

Buffet is, by nature, a contrarian - believing that he should try be brave when everyone else is fearful, and when everyone else is brave – he should be fearful.

Part of his philosophy is, in essence, Observe The Masses – Do the Contrary.

There’s a curious logic to the way he thinks: reasoning that there are fewer successful investors than unsuccessful investors, those in the minority have the best odds of success.

Observe the masses...

It works across all areas of life – even learning to play guitar – where the most common approach is to “teach yourself” what you don’t know how to do, and only a minority book themselves in with a teacher to accelerate their progress.

 That’s why most wannabe guitarists quit or are frustrated and stuck.

Observe the masses...

Work surveys constantly report that around 70% of people hate their jobs, approximately 25% are indifferent and only around 5% of people actually get paid for doing work they really enjoy.

Observe the masses, do the contrary.


When everyone around you is moaning about the economy, Brexit, the state of the country, or how crap the local football team is doing this year, feel free to run the other way. Consciously choose to be positive instead – don’t get caught up in a game of one-downsmanship with people who are more negative than you are.

You know the game, don’t you?

It’s the one where – no matter how big their problem is, yours is so much worse.

When the usual crowd are milling around - moaning and bitching about the crap on TV last night, the price of a pint or that trollop from accounts and her new shoes – run. Just get yourself away from their tractor beams before you are sucked into their negative vortex and begin to compete for the “My Life is Crappier Than Yours” prize.

There’s a lot of competition for that award, but even if you won it, you’d still be a loser.

Given the choice between what most people do and what the minority do - day in, day out – do you want to run with the pack or howl with the lone wolves?

Be more wolf: Observe the masses, do the contrary.

Harrrroooouul!!


© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  -22/8/2019

Precise.

Specific.

They are two words I adore.

They’re solid words, and there’s something very reliable and dependable about them: they stand for accuracy and certainty, a gimlet-eyed no-nonsense attention to detail and a straight-backed “X marks the spot” rigour that borders on being finicky.

I love the words, but recoil from their rigidity.

Nobody could argue against Precision and specificity in the study of absolute measurements: mathematics, logic and the like.

But they’re words which don’t play nicely. Their strictness excludes them from the creative act, because they lack the sense of fun which is the hallmark of invention, creativity, the arts and true insight.

They are also the sworn enemies of learning.

So, how do we learn best?

It turns out that learning can be learned and accelerated - just like any other skill.

The trick is to begin with what I call Useful Generalisations: the core ideas which are true for the great majority of cases, the great majority of the time. In other words, find out what works most of the time, and which – logically – has the highest probability of being correct, most of the time.

With the most common and therefore most useful concepts secured, we can shift our attention to the next most likely occurrences: the most common exceptions to the Useful Generalisations. By noting their deviations from the Useful Generalisations we can develop a set of rules – an algorithm – we can now handle the great majority of situations and occurrences.

This learning pathway always delivers the most “Bang for the Buck” for us, because it always attends to the highest-returning investment of our time first, and prevents us from becoming lost in the fine detail of the seldom-encountered, the rare, and the unusual.

So to begin learning anything always try to find experts - teachers, coaches and mentors to show you the most important ideas first.

With hindsight, trying to teach myself something I didn’t know how to do was not a wise approach, and it cost me too much time.

Yet I tried it, and the chances are that you have done so, too.

The Broad Sweeps, the Big Ideas and the Useful Generalisations must come before the unlikely, the Rare, the Precise and the Specific, because (to quote Goethe) “...the things which matter most must never be at the mercy of the things which matter least...”
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your chosen deity. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]