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]
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The Thursday Thesis - 18/7/2019 Steve Jobs of Apple told the graduating students of Stanford University “...you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” To put it another way, when you are further down the line, you can look back and see the turning points and decisions that got you to where you are: you can see how everything connects up along the way and – from the future’s perspective – make it seem inevitable that things turned out the way they have. For most of us, “Looking forward to the future” is a pretty good description of how we think, because when we imagine the future we usually create images and visions of the future in front of us, and usually dead-centre. Maybe it’s because humans’ normal direction of movement is forward that we hold the future in front of us, as though we could step into it in the same way we walk to the corner shop. But the future is more like a fall, backwards into the unknowable, looking at the “dots” which preceded the fall. This is why imagining your future is vital to any kind of planning and personal growth; by visualising our future we can “step in to” our idealised, imagined future and observe our course from that position. We can visualise the steps of the journey which culminated in that imagined future, notice the turning points and critical moments, the decisions and actions which shaped the pathway to where we imagine we want to go - our imagined future. You can’t do it from where you are, but you can fast-forward into the future and look back, joining the dots and admiring how perfectly the route you took got you to where you wanted to be. What’s your future going to look like - and when you look back from it, which dots will you connect up? © 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 155 - The Wisdom of Baldrick The Thursday Thesis - 13/6/2019 Baldrick: Wait a moment, My Lord! I have a cunning plan that cannot fail! Blackadder “The Witchsmeller Pursuivant” Yep, even Blackadder’s sidekick – the downtrodden yet optimistic Baldrick – had a plan. And Baldrick’s plan was always very cunning – at least to Baldrick. And it’s a funny thing, but growing up in Wolverhampton in the sixties and seventies, nobody mentioned plans for our lives: certainly not at school, and not at home either. At no point did anyone suggest that having a plan for your life would be a good thing, or that aiming high was to be desired and admired. Though, come to think of it, I probably wouldn’t have listened to them if they had: I was always a stroppy little sod. As the seventies ended and the decade tipped over into the eighties the story was still the same: plans for your life were not talked about: they were not what you did. I do distinctly remember being told that if I were foolish or arrogant enough to dare to make a plan, I could expect Fate to thwart and frustrate me at every step. It seemed that Life Plans were for dreamers and delusional oddballs; the know-alls and nutjobs. And there was something comedic about these people with plans, too – as though they were dreaming a little too hard... Now I understand that if we don’t have a plan for how our lives should be, we’ll end up working for someone else who does have a plan for us and whose plans probably won’t be much to our benefit: I just wish I’d found that out forty years ago! You don’t have to look far to see people making plans – invariably the wrong plans. It’s commonplace to spend a very long time planning one’s wedding or annual holiday – but it’s much less common to really plan a life for oneself, based upon what might be a fun way to spend the next seventy or so years. Doesn’t that strike you as odd – or is it just me? If you have a plan, then there’s a chance of things going the way you want them to. Without a plan we are unlikely to end up with what we want. Like a beautiful ship without a map or compass, we can sail and drift for years – sometimes for a lifetime – even though the rudder is working and the sails are full of wind, but without a course to steer by, even the best ships wreck and run aground on unknown shores. In the military it’s often said that “no plan survives contact with the enemy” and it’s true. The armed forces are masters of planning, and the phrase “planned with military precision” has become synonymous with effective and efficient operations. Here’s the thing, though: the army knows that its plans will not survive contact with the enemy, but it still invests time and effort into making plans to ensure that the desired operational outcome is achieved with minimal losses – after all, what kind of army goes off to war with the idea that they’ll maybe go and “...wander around – probably in that country over there - and maybe do some fighting...”? It would be ridiculous for an army to act in that way, and it would be ridiculous for anyone to act in that way, too. For an army many lives may depend upon the operational plan: for us as individuals, we are entirely dependent on our plan, or – more often than not – no plan whatsoever. We march forth into each new day, becoming too focused in the day-to-day business of daily life to pause and look a little further down the road, survey hazards and scout for opportunities, and to make plans for their evasion or exploitation. Lost in the fast-paced busy-ness of everyday life, crisis of the moment and our immediate needs, we forget to plan what happens after today’s crisis has passed. So I think it’s a great idea to take time off, once a year, and get away from work for a day or three. Isolate yourself from anything that could distract you from figuring out how you’d like to spend the next ten, twenty or more years and deciding what your life might be after those years have passed. Write it all down and review your plan – in depth, every month; refer to your plan on Monday morning and notice how things are progressing or not progressing; then identify the short-term activities which will move you closer to your desired outcome. It’s not rocket science, but a plan is usually the thought-foundation upon which everything else is built. You see, making a plan is just like creating a blueprint for your life. There will be changes and amendments, re-thinks and re-drafts along the way, it will never be completely right, and it will never be perfect, because no plan ever is - but even a fairly good plan has a better chance of success than having no plan at all. © 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 – 2/5/2019
Humans are funny little creatures. This is not news, by the way – it’s a stone-cold fact. Give a human one thing and he’ll immediately want the opposite, give her what she said wanted and it will immediately change. Bit of a bugger isn’t it? And here’s the thing: everything is a continuum with us. Somewhere between extreme X and extreme Y we’ll settle...but not for long. The overwhelming impression is restlessness and a need for change, accompanied by an infuriating need for sameness and familiarity. When we experience too much sameness we say that we are bored, that everything is routine and life is dull. Give us too much change and we feel out of control and insecure, that we are stressed and scared. The minute we have too much of one or the other we react by trying to create more of what we were trying to get away from! Infuriating, but oh-so-human. And this change-versus-boredom pattern shows up in music, too. We like music to be sufficiently similar to everything else we’ve ever heard that it’s familiar and relatable; whilst at the same time needing it to be different enough to be interesting. You hear this all the time, when people say “Ooh, that reminds me of that old song by so-and-so...” or “All their songs sound the same...” There’s a reason for the similarity between songs: if a band or “artist” (pretentious terminology alert) suddenly switch genres or styles, their audience has a WTF moment and there’s uproar. Such reinvention is a risky strategy for a performer or a brand – having built an audience by being one thing, there’s a real danger of alienating that audience by suddenly becoming something else. Fans want their favourite acts to produce more of the same, but new versions of it. Every band or performer has their little quirk, their stylistic wrinkle on things; this is what their audience unconsciously identifies and resonates with. And every song has this continuum, too: verses establish the basic idea, but after a couple of verses we begin to want something new... that’s where the chorus comes in, to disrupt the pattern and change things...but now we begin to want more of the original verse idea, don’t we? Pretty soon, we’ll tire of the verse/chorus pattern, too – so that’s an opportunity for a guitar solo or a breakdown section, a “middle 8” that takes the music in a different direction. It’s fractal, as the same pattern emerges across all of life: sameness versus change. Do you recognise the pattern in your own life, just like I see it writ large in mine? Sameness keeps me comfortable, but too much of it and I’m bored rigid: massive change is scary and uncomfortable. Somewhere between the two extremes I find a tolerable compromise – and immediately begin to destabilise it. Infuriating, or what?! © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] The Thursday Thesis – 18/4/2019
Yesterday, the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was in flames. Today, the people with the means to donate millions of Euros – of their own money – are being vilified for being rich enough to do that. Yes, hard-working, successful people are giving away vast amounts of their own money...and some people are actually getting the hump about this? I ask you, is it really anybody else’s business what Bernard Arnault or Francois-Henri Pinault do with their millions? Why is the media giving airtime to self-appointed loudmouths who decry people for being successful and wealthy – what gives? Why is social media lit up by keyboard warriors spitting hate at those who have dared to break the rules and become successful? Is it just me who thinks that being successful and wealthy is something to aspire to, not revile? Am I the only person who gets pissed-off with this sort of self-righteous “rich people are evil” crap? If we are free to make choices for ourselves – as we surely should – are we not free to strive, thrive and flourish; without being lambasted for our pains? And the greatest travesty of all is the misuse of the magic word “Equality” by the haters, who mistakenly think their precious Equality governs outcomes: it doesn’t. Think about it for more than a few knee-jerk seconds and it will become clear that Equality must be given at the point of opportunity, and the individual must be free to pursue their own legitimate goals from that point, because, if you are denied the freedom to choose your own path, you are not free at all: you are either a prisoner or a slave; you are not a free man. Equality must not be confused with the imposition of uniform mediocrity upon everyone – because that condition is mere slavery. So tell me, is it just me who thinks that a person who has grafted for decades, created businesses and employed thousands, who has given their customers what they wanted at a fair price – not stolen from them at gunpoint, as our governments traditionally do – should be free to give away their hard-earned cash to rebuild an old church, just because they want to? Yes, there are kids who could use the money, hospitals that could be built; any number of worthy causes who’d love to get their hands on Arnault and Pinault’s dosh: but the point is that it’s THEIR dosh, and how they dispose of it is none of your bloody business. And if the Freedom and Equality gobshites have a problem with that, they maybe need to look up what the words Freedom and Equality actually mean. © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] Episode 146 - So Right, It Feels Wrong
The Thursday Thesis – 11/4/2019 Her eyes narrowed and she seemed to twist bodily on her stool, just to give my diagram a sideways look. After twenty years of teaching guitar, I’ve grown to know that look and the body language that goes with it. I recognise the uneasy brow and the needling eye... I feel suspicion daggering at me... They’re waiting for the other boot to fall; for the dreaded “but” that snatches away what they want most of all. And they’re deeply weirded-out by the whole thing. It’s my own fault, naturally. Ah, if I’d only been content to let her continue to believe in the Unicorn of Cleverness... But that’s not how I roll. I knew the signs and the symptoms, because I’ve had them myself - over and over again as I studied with great teachers, read hundreds of books, trained with experts and blended what I’d learned. It’s a sudden insight, a moment of clarity: where one glimpses the elusive obvious and gasps. It’s when the problem we’ve been wrestling with finally shrugs its shoulders, stops playing hard to get and solves itself before our very eyes. That’s when the new problem begins... After years of struggle - sometimes decades of confusion – everything makes perfect sense. We can see it, we know it works and we know why it works. Everything makes sense, at last, and we hate it. We squirm uneasily and tell ourselves that we must have made a mistake. “That can’t be right...” we say, as we look for the pitfall. It’s known as “Cognitive Dissonance” in psychological circles: the uncomfortable feeling a person has when facts contradict that person’s beliefs. In an unexpected moment of clarity and insight, everything we thought we knew is called into question and dragged kicking and screaming into the bright light of critical thought. For this particular new student – let’s call her Sonia - Cognitive Dissonance was playing an absolute blinder. Confronted by a reality that was a radically different from – perhaps even diametrically opposed to – what she thought it should be, Sonia was not a happy chicken: this was not how it was supposed to be, surely...this was too easy, wasn’t it? And here’s the thing: if we set out in the belief that something is difficult and hard to learn, or that it is joyless and boring, then our tiny, pea-sized brains will fight like demons to prove us right – even though that will thwart us in our endeavours. So maybe we should ask ourselves the question “do I want to learn quickly and easily, or do I want to be right?” It’s up to you... © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] The Thursday Thesis – 21/2/2019
As everybody knows, we live on a mis-shapen spinning ball of rock. It’s a very nice ball of rock, casually hurtling through space at a breathtaking 67,000 mph – that’s around 18 ½ miles per second; which is knocking on in anybody’s book. But that’s just its orbital velocity – its speed around the massive ball of bad-tempered plasma and nuclear fusion reactions which we call The Sun. That very same Sun is also in motion around the centre of our galaxy, at the brain-frazzling speed of 137 miles per second – that’s a whopping 493,200 mph. Naturally that means the numerous celestial bodies in orbit around The Sun are also zipping through space at stupidly fast speeds. So, The Earth is doing 67,000 mph, plus 493,200 when travelling in the same plane as The Sun’s motion around galactic centre, for a total of 560,200 mph. Now imagine yourself standing on the equator, where there speed of rotation around The Earth’s axis is greatest – just a smidge faster than 1000 mph. Add that to The Sun’s meandering speed and Earth’s orbital velocity and we’re doing up to 561,200 mph while we sleep. Now we have to remember that our own galaxy itself is in motion – at around 1.084 million miles per hour! Stop The World – I want to get off! That’s why I never tire of watching the stars at night in some remote nook or other. Sometimes there will be meteor showers, and every so often – for instance a few weeks ago – a lunar eclipse. The sky is beautiful, magnificent, terrifying, unfathomably vast and ever-changing; sprinkle in the fireworks of meteors when we pass through the debris fields of ancient comets and it’s a sight like no other. When was the last time you stood, silent and still, in the inky blackness and just looked upwards? And here’s the thing: Go and do it. Grab a flask of steaming coffee and take yourself to a dark place, then sit back and just watch the skies. See what you see, drink it in and notice it. If it makes you feel good, go “Wheeeeeehhhh!” at the thought of how fast you are travelling, all the time rooted firmly on the spot. If you want a puzzle to mull over whilst you’re there, here’s one I like – the ISS, or International Space Station. Measuring almost 110 meters long and 73 meters wide, the ISS is about the same size as a football pitch, looping around Earth at 17,500 mph. This is what puzzles me: I’m out in the wilds at night, on the shadow side of The Earth, looking up at a football-pitch sized structure that’s whipping across my field of view at nearly 5 miles per second. And the ISS is not self-luminous, but it still appears as a bright dot traversing the sky. So I’m wondering how it is that I can see an unlit footie pitch 250 miles away, in the dark, as it wazzes past at seventeen and a half thousand miles an hour? Buggered if I know, to be honest; but it seems to be incredible unlikely to me - how about you? © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] The Thursday Thesis – 31/1/2019
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 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible supernatural friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] Waiting... The Thursday Thesis – 17/1/2019
Listen. Can you hear it? Just there – in between words and slid between the burble electronic s. Do you hear it? That’s where the magick lives, where the world of noise ends and the otherworld begins. Silence. Once upon a time I believed that silence was a simple thing, it was just a lack of sound, and absence of something. These days I understand that Silence itself has a peculiar substance all of it s own. There’s a texture to Silence, but you have to reach into the quietness to fell the distinctions between absence of sound and Silence. There is a difference. Silence is the rich, smooth and infinite darkness of sounds: the endless black onto which sounds are played, like the dark screen on which images are made to dance. And every silence is its own thing, distinct and different to its noiseless neighbour. The silence of your warm bedroom is not the same as the silence in a graveyard at 3 am. The silence after the storm is a lifetime away from the heavy, pressing air that came before the bellow of thunder. The belligerent hostility of silence after a row is unlike the Silence that mourns a lost love. And there is no silence like the loss of a child. As a musician I think of Silence as the other half of the music – the space in which the sound finds its breath, gathers its energy and collects its thoughts. I ask my students to play beautiful silences... Silence – which is something more than just quiet time – is life’s breathing space: Silence is where we listen to the spaces between the sounds, gather our own energies and shepherd our headstrong and wayward thoughts. Where will you find the beautiful silences in your day, today? © Neil Cowmeadow 2019 Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your invisible supernatural friend. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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. [email protected] 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. [email protected] The Thursday Thesis – 13/12/2018 If you’re lucky, Death will tap you on the shoulder and cough politely. If you are luckier still, you’ll notice the tap, hear the cough, and heed the impending call – because Death is coming to usher you and I into the next world...but not just yet. Maybe the tap you get is a serious illness, a near-miss as you try to text mobile while driving or get so mindlessly drunk at the works do that you nearly choke on your own vomit or decide to go skinny-dipping in a swollen, icy river with the hottie from accounts. No matter: Death coughs politely, reminding us of his presence. “Just letting you know...” he whispers. Fact is, Death is always with us – every waking moment of our short and squandering lives – patiently waiting for the ordained moment to scoop us up into the folds of his midnight-purpled cloak and enfold us in darkness. It’s not personal: he’s Death, and he’s just doing his job. We’re going to die: so what? Well, this is what: it’s something I’ve ached to get off my chest for a long time, and with Christmas looming and everybody being all jolly-bollocks about it, I feel the need to point out to a tiny minority that if you are not yet dead then you are a million miles ahead of the curve – and you should be grateful for this day – this sacred, ineffable gift – that has been bestowed upon you. Whether you think that life is nothing more than the playing-out of cosmic permutations, evolution, or an ongoing experiment conducted by interfering space aliens; it doesn’t matter a damn, because today you are not dead, and there is still hope. Today you are not dead, so there is another golden chance to write the next chapter in the story of your life, a chance to forgive and to atone, to love and redeem. Death ushers us into oblivion, where all is changeless and still; where our regrets endure forever and the last chance has gone wherever last chances go to when they are gone... Death is the longest, lazy-arsedest lie-in you’ll ever have. So, my dear friends, when you wake up tomorrow and find yourself gloriously, rambunctiously alive – reborn after the little death of sleep – or when Death taps you on the shoulder and immediately realises there has been an administrational error at head office...thank your lucky stars for that simple first observation of the day; that you are not yet dead, that the man with the scythe wasn’t looking for you after all, that no matter how crappy your bored, frustrated, skint and lonely life is, you are among the blessed. Get busy living, because we are already dying – you and I, man woman and child. If waking up isn’t the finest thing that happens to you today, then you’ve missed the whole bloody point of it all. If you wake up and want to cower beneath the duvet because your life is so shit, that’s Death, tapping you on the shoulder and whispering in your ear “Do something else, because your time is running out, my friend. Do something else, and I’ll be back soon enough...” Get off your arse and do something – preferably something that makes you happy, makes you uncomfortable, and makes you feel alive! Don’t lie there whimpering because it’s Monday and you have to go to the job you hate – I’ve done that, and it sucks. Do something about it. However painful or inconvenient it might be, will it be worse than proving – yet again - that the way things are makes you miserable? And if (like me) you’ve ever entertained dark thoughts of ending it all, just stop: you’re just a self-indulgent queue-jumper who can’t be arsed to make the effort and live until your turn to die comes around. You’re dying, I’m dying; Man, woman and child. How shall we live before we shuffle to the front of Death’s queue? That’s the great unanswered question, isn’t it? © Neil Cowmeadow 2018
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, and your Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me. [email protected] 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. [email protected] 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. [email protected] 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:
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:
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. © 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. [email protected] 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. [email protected] |
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