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...

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
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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
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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

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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
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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
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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
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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
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The Thursday Thesis  - 4/7/2019

Unless you - like me - are a geek, chances are that you’ve never heard of Warren Buffet, the American investor, businessman and philanthropist.

Now, Warren is an interesting guy – maybe even a genius – content to conquer the world of investing from Omaha, Nebraska rather than a glass tower on Wall Street.

In fact, Warren thinks differently about almost everything; “observe the masses, do the contrary” could almost be his mantra.

Here are a few key points about “The Sage of Omaha”

• He is 88 years old and is still in love with his work
• He has an estimated net worth of 88 Billion dollars, but reportedly takes a salary of only $100,000 per year
• He limits how many deals he does each year, to avoid becoming scattered and unable to go deeply into each deal
• He still lives in the house he bought in 1958 for $31,000
• He drives a standard Cadillac car – no Lamborghinis, Ferraris or extravagant supercars
• He plays bridge for 12 hours a week
• He has pledged to donate 99% of his net worth to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on his death: until then he wants to grow as big a pot to donate as he can.
• He plays ukulele and often breaks out into song at shareholder meetings of his firm, Berkshire Hathaway, and the businesses he invests in.

Apart from his philosophy of thinking long-term and being frugal, Warren has a pretty cool trick up his sleeve when it comes to managing his time – here’s an overview of the process:

First he makes a list of his top 25 goals.

From that list he identifies the top 5 goals.

His top 5 goals go on his List One: The Vital Few things which will make all the difference.

The other 20 goals go onto his List Two: the Avoid-At-All-Costs List.

I think that’s brilliantly simple – and I’m whittling away at the unnecessary things in my own life in order to focus on the “Vital Few” things which will be of greatest value to me and the people I love.

It’s a very clear system, but it requires discipline and focus to stick to it, because it’s hard to let go of things we love – even when they don’t serve us – and it’s hard to resist the temptation of short-term pleasure in order to achieve a long-term goal.

But above all else, Buffett’s system demands we understand what is important to us.

So, put the kettle on and brew yourself a nice cup of tea, then sit quietly and mull over the questions:

What would be on your Vital Few list?

What would you have to disregard in order to have only 5 things on your own Vital Few list?

Your answers could change your life.
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2019
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The Thursday Thesis  - 27/6/2019

Is classical Time Management missing the point?

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
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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
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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
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The Thursday Thesis – 8/11/2018


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

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

But what is luck, anyway?

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

Bad luck has the opposite effect.

So what about you – do you feel lucky?

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

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

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

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

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

Mine would!

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

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

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

Wiseman’s study divided its subjects into three groups:

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

Then the fun started...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Episode 118 - What Price Slavery?

The Thursday Thesis - 27/09/2018

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

You wouldn’t take that job, would you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are slaves who worship our masters

Slaves who are anxious when parted from our masters.

Slaves who crave the sound of our masters’ voices.

Slaves who willingly pay to be enslaved.

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

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

Any takers?
 

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

Email me at [email protected]
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 13/09/2018

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

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

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

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

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

So what happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“P’tyooooh!!” won’t be far behind.

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

Episode 113 - 8 Hours a Day...
The Thursday Thesis  - 23/08/2018
 
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in sleep.

Sleep fascinates me.

More accurately I’ve been interested in doing without sleep for most of my adult life. As a kid I tried to stay awake all night - night after night – in the hope that I’d be able somehow to forget to sleep once I’d established the habit. I reasoned that if I could eliminate sleep from my routine I’d have more time to read and learn, then I’d eventually know everything and life would be better.

It’s funny what you believe as a kid, isn’t it?

But, to a certain extent I still have the idea in my tiny, pea-sized brain, and I still have a load of unanswered questions about sleep:

1. Why do we sleep?
2. Why do we dream?
3. Why don’t we act-out our dreams?
4. Why are dreams bizarre and strange?
5. How do we exercise bladder control when we are asleep?
6. How does my sleep apnoea affect the quality of my own sleep?
7. Snoring...?
8. How does a person’s body-clock affect sleep?
9. What about naps – do they count as proper sleep?
10. Can I get paid to sleep? I could turn professional!
11. Who says we should we sleep for 8 hours every day?

Today I’m just going to stick to question 11 – “Who says we should sleep for 8 hours a day?”

Well, first of all, my mum did.

But I wasn’t going to take it at face value, so for years I experimented with sleep patterns of varying lengths whilst I worked shifts at a busy casino in Birmingham. Some days I’d get a long eight hour-ish sleep, and sometimes I’d only sleep 3 or 4 hours between 14 hour double shifts, bookended by my 20 miles there, twenty miles back cycle ride into the city.

Ever since then I’ve slept only 5 hours a night, and I’m not alone in this – several of my friends are short-sleepers, too. Medicine would probably tell us to try to get 8 hours...

Why 8 Hours?

It seems to have evolved since the 17th century, when street-lamps were installed in Paris, Amsterdam, and London.

With the coming of streetlights, being abroad at night became less dangerous, and mentions of the traditional/natural two-phase sleep pattern began to fade from contemporary literature and documents.

Humans were – until that time – accustomed to a two-part, or “biphasic” sleep pattern, with a “First Sleep” of around four hours, a period of two or three hours of wakefulness, then a “Second Sleep” lasting another four hours or so. This appears to be the natural way we sleep, according to psychiatrist Thomas Wehr.

Wehr observed a group of volunteers subjected to 14 hours per day of darkness. Within a few weeks, the group adopted the two-sleep routine without any prior knowledge of it, suggesting that this pattern is a biological norm when artificial light is absent.

But that’s still eight hours of sleep every day, which seems to be a lot.

Eight hours kip is a third of my life, and I’ve got better things to do with my time than have strange dreams, snore and suspend breathing for long periods of time before violently sucking in air like a man surfacing from a deep lake.

So now I sleep between 3 and 4 hours a night, but take one or two naps of 8-10 minutes each during the day, multiple-sleep pattern is known as “polyphasic sleep”. This means that my total time spent sleeping every day is only 4.5 hours per day, saving me 3.5 hours per day compared to the monophasic 8-hour model.

So, 7 days a week I have an extra 3.5 hours of awake time: that’s 24.5 hours more awake time, every week – an eight-day week!

Is this good?

Maybe... I get a lot done, but there are downsides, too: society isn’t geared-up for oddballs with unconventional sleeping habits, and no sane woman is going to put up with my crazy nocturnal habits.

Now, if I could just eliminate the residual sleep I do need, I’d have time to think up a solution to that problem...

It’s just a thought, but everything begins with a single thought...

The Thursday Thesis  - 09/08/2018

Say the words “I am” and your entire nervous system stands to attention.

Tell me what you do and I’ll likely drift off to sleep...

It’s a funny thing, but when you think of those two statements the chances are that you’ll conflate them down to being the same thing – even though they are chalk and cheese to anyone interested in making changes to their lives and behaviours.

Here’s why they are different: “I do” is an activity statement, whilst “I am” is an identity statement.

Whenever we say that we do something we are just talking about an activity, a behaviour pattern: it’s just something we do.

For example, when someone tells me that they play guitar, they are telling me what they do. This is different to when someone tells me that they are a guitarist: in this case they are telling me that playing guitar is a vital part of who they consider themselves to be.

The same goes for a person who repeatedly puts lighted cigarettes in their mouth but wants my help to stop doing it.

The subject who tells me that she “...is a smoker” or says “I am addicted to cigarettes...” has made smoking a part of who she believes herself to be. Making a change to her identity will be challenging and painful (for her) because it places her sense of self under threat: we all fight like demons to preserve our sense of self and what is right and proper for us.

Contrast this with the same person who says “...I smoke 20 cigarettes every day” or “...I have a smoke at break-time when I am at work”. This person is recognising – probably below the level of her conscious awareness – that smoking is just something she does. In this case smoking is not part of her identity, so change will be easier to implement and maintain because it conveys no threat to her sense of self.

So what?

Here’s the cool part: if you consciously make the things you want part of your identity, they will feel much easier to accept into your life and to integrate with other aspects of who you feel yourself to be.

Likewise, changing your unwanted behaviours can be made easier by de-coupling them from your sense of self.

Both of these routes are driven by language patterns and your sense of identity; simply changing the words nudges your behaviour either towards what you want or away from what you don’t want, and this is one of the reasons why daily journaling, affirmations and goal-setting are so effective.

The daily re-statement of desired outcomes, statements made in terms of our identity, realigns our sense of who we are and what is right and proper for us.

In essence, we believe the lies we tell ourselves about who we are and how the world is.

Try this for yourself, right now: say out loud “I am a singer”, and just notice how that feels, deep down inside...

Now say “I do sing, from time to time” and notice how that feels, deep down inside of yourself.

There’s a big difference between how those two statements make you feel.

Unless you are already a singer, the “I am a singer” statement will probably feel bigger, more significant and more uncomfortable that the “I do sing...” statement. After all, singing is just something you do, isn’t it.

This is why we resist the thing we want, rather than integrate it into our identity and do it more whilst having more fun along the way.

And here’s a little sidebar to stir into the mix: some people will add a situational qualification to their behaviour and constrain it to a place or time when it is acceptable – for example, singing might only be OK when we are in the shower, driving the car, or when nobody else is at home.

So what do you say about yourself, and what does that say about you?

I used to say (jokingly) that I was a good guy who did bad things – just to even things out. The problem is that my tiny, pea-sized brain doesn’t have a sense of humour and interpreted the joke as a mission statement, with disastrous and life-changing consequences.

D’oh!

Now I remind myself that I’m a good man who does good things.

And it’s getting better.

The Thursday Thesis  - 5/07/2018
 
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
 
I’m writing this on the 4th of July, the traditional - but erroneous – date on which the United States of America celebrates its declaration of Independence from British rule.

Now, it’s a little-known fact that the embryonic United States actually declared themselves independent from Britain – not on the 4th of July – but on the 2nd of July 1776.

Why the delay?

Paperwork.

Yep, it took two whole days for the Second Continental Congress to sign-off the Declaration of Independence, as drafted by Thomas Jefferson and the “Committee of Five”. That two-day delay is the reason America shuts down for a holiday on the 4th of July, rather than the 2nd.

An American friend told me “...that piece of paper changed everything”, and she was right – except that she wasn’t.

The piece of paper changed nothing – all the heavy lifting work was done by the words on that piece of paper.

With only words, the drafting committee changed the World.

Putting their beliefs and intentions down on paper transformed ideas into concrete principles and gave the thoughts of the committee members a sort of eternal life.

Words change stuff. The right words change things for the better - the wrong words...

American scholar Noam Chomsky theorises that communication has two levels: the Deep Structure is the meaning to be conveyed, whilst the Surface Structure is the form of words used to convey the Deep Structure.

Think about that for a moment.

Think about the deep, broad, unbounded and unfathomable bond, the innate emotional connection between a parent and child or between lifelong partners.

Love is too small a word for it, yet Love is the universal shorthand for it - in all of its stark simplicity and its infinite, baffling complexity.

Words change everything, especially the words we say about ourselves: they are the way we tell The World who we are, and – more importantly – we tell ourselves who we are.

The words “I do” change who we are in society if spoken in a marriage ceremony.

And the words “I am” change who we are in our own world.

Whatever you say about yourself, you will conform to it, because it is well known that we become what we think about most of the time.

Tell yourself you can’t do something, and you’re probably right.

But tell yourself you won’t quit until you’ve done it, and that’s a whole new ball game.

“So...” I hear you mutter, “...what’s this go to do with Independence Day?”

I’m glad you asked: it’s got everything to do with Independence Day. Without the words on paper which told America what she was and what she believed in, which gave her an identity, America would have remained a resentful colony of England.

And what’s this got to do with you and me on the 4th of July?

Everything.

Today and every day, we – like America - can declare our own state of independence, using our own words, not the dogma and helplessness of the zealots and the doomsayers, or the indifference of dullards.

What words would you like to speak, write, sing, sign or dance about yourself?

With our very words we summon our own realities

You and I are conjurors incanting “Abracadabra!”
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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Episode 104 - Resistance is Futile
The Thursday Thesis  - 21/06/2018

And then the alien bellowed “Resistance is futile, earthling!”

I used to love those old black and white sci-fi B-movies – the ones with titles like The Day The Earth Stood Still, Plan 9 from Outer Space, and the wonderful Invaders From Mars – when they cropped up on the BBC, late at night.

Resistance may be futile in the face of Gort, the inscrutable giant robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still, but what I’m thinking about today is a different kind of resistance: not a fictional alien threat arriving from outer space, but a real and thoroughly human kind of Resistance.

Call it Fear, call it procrastination, call it what you will – whatever stops you from beginning that one thing you’ve always said you’d do some day – that’s Resisatance.

Perhaps the author Stephen Pressfield put it best in his book The War of Art: “Resistance is experienced as fear; the degree of fear equates to the strength of Resistance. Therefore the more fear we feel about a specific enterprise, the more certain we can be that that enterprise is important to us and to the growth of our soul. That's why we feel so much Resistance. If it meant nothing to us, there'd be no Resistance.”

A man could catch religion from reading a thing like that...

 “Fear is good... fear is an indicator. Fear tells us what we have to do...The more scared we are of a work or calling, the more sure we can be that we have to do it.”

The thing that matters most to us, you and I, is the thing we are least likely to do. It’s absurd and messed-up, but it’s the truth, nonetheless.

Why do we fear to do the thing that matters most to us?

Because it matters to us.

Does it matter to anyone else, your mum and dad, your old schoolteacher, the lady in the corner shop?

No, of course not!

Most of these people are utterly indifferent to what you do: come to think of it, most of the people on the planet don’t care at all about what you are doing.

If you knew how little time other people spent thinking about you and your stuff, you’d be disappointed: most of them don’t think of you at all you’re not around.

Seriously.

The Universe doesn’t give a toss about you – so what are you afraid of?

The Universe is way too busy to notice anything we are likely to do, create, build, or invent – it’s just too big, too busy and too dark to know we even exist.

All that Resistance comes from inside of you and inside of me; but here’s the thing about Resistance: it’s useful.

Resistance can guide us and point us in the direction we already know we want to go. When we feel the fear and the repulsive force that stirs in us when we contemplate the big thing that matters to us, I believe it’s a strong indicator of the direction we must go.

If the thing scares us – we must go towards it. We must go resolutely towards it and brave the pushback and fear that is Resistance. Our degree of fear will ratchet up as the significance and importance of the task rises – as it becomes more personally significant to us.

Resistance is our Pole Star – the True North of our lives. Let’s see where our compass points and set our course towards the dark black heart of Resistance, through the badlands, deserts and jungles where the bandits, dragons and wraiths lie in wait for us...

What scares you most?

Ask yourself;

What would you dare to do, if failure was impossible?

What would you dare to do, if your ultimate success was assured?

What is the biggest, most audacious thing you can imagine doing?

That’s what you should do.



Link to: The War  of Art
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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Episode 101 - That First Date...

The Thursday Thesis  - 31/05/2018

As first dates go, this was a stinker – the food was divine, the service immaculate, and my date was... well, beautiful, graceful and vivacious.

So she was not the problem, but there was something going terribly wrong.

“Aha!” I got it, I knew what it was. Her friends had shown up, uninvited and en masse. Our cosy little table-for-two, tucked away in a tastefully lit corner of a carefully chosen Italian restaurant, was being overwhelmed by their incessant chatter.

I didn’t invite them to join us, but they came anyway, the bastards!

She reached across to pick up her phone once again, did the screen-swipe thing and stared at me.

I raised my eyebrow – a silent question...

That was the last time I saw her phone that night. Come to think of it, that was the last time I saw her, too.

It seems she didn’t like the message I’d sent to her across the table, via satellite: it read “Look at me. Talk with me. Put away your phone and let’s be human with each other, please.”

She texted to say that it wasn't going to work, but that wasn't exactly any kind of news to me.

“No biggie...plenty more fish...” I reasoned.

Look around you: you see it everywhere – people together, but estranged. From the couple at dinner to the family at play, phones intrude and headphones exclude.

How stupid have we become?

When you’re with someone, really be with that person; give them your undivided attention and show them some Love. Don’t put the things that matter most at the mercy of the things that matter least: don’t make your kids, your wife, your date or your friends play second fiddle to a Tweet, Facebook update, text message or anything else.

Be with them.

Be with them completely, and pay attention.

Leave your phone in your bag when you are at dinner with your date, partner or spouse. Leave it in the car when you’re with your kids.

Believe me, nothing that is more important than the person you are with will come through your phone in the moments you are disconnected from it.

Be with them.

Your antisocial media will still be there in all its self-indulgent glory when the special time is over and you’re back on the hamster wheel again.

Failing to honour the real, face-to-face skin-and-bone people is tragic and it is immoral. Taking a slice of time from someone’s life to be with them and then offering them only the fag-end of what’s left after you’ve “kept up to date” with everything else is a bloody insult to them. Don’t do it.

Be with them.

Look around you and you’ll see masses of people, hooked up to – and hooked on – their phones. Notice how often they (we) check for new messages – even at inappropriate times? We’re like a bunch of crackheads in need of a score every thirty seconds – it’s pathetic and it’s tragic.

Ask yourself, honestly, do you own the phone or does it own you?
 
Now do yourself a big one - write this down: Leave your phone in the car, put it in your bag, silence it completely.

If you have balls of steel you could even turn it off – if you think you’ll be able to cope with the anxiety that you will feel should you dare to do such a thing.

Put your headphones away and grow up!
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 24/05/2018

“One HUNDRED blog posts! How cool is that?” I gushed as I drove Alex to school last Thursday morning.I'd jammed my moonface into "Smug" mode and It wasn't getting any better...

The Urchin wasn’t impressed: he never is these days.

This week his affectation is being “utterly indifferent” to all suggestions and ideas that don’t involve him spending his entire weekend playing games online with school-friends.

The joys of parenthood...

“So, Dad” he asked, “why do you write your blog – what’s it actually for?”

I paused, and said “It’s a good question, when you stop to think about it: why does anyone write, especially when there is no expectation of reward?”

“So...?” he said.

“Firstly, Alex, I write for you. I hope that you’ll read my ramblings and “get it” – that you’ll have access to some of the things I’ve found useful, and have that access at a younger age than I did.”

“And secondly, I write for myself because I love the process of writing - the great distillation and clarification that I get when I write about things. When you think on paper you can handle bigger, more important things, I think.”

“But deep down, right at the bottom of everything I  do – teaching, writing, landlording, coaching, mentoring, blogging and podcasting – I really just want to help people – anyone, anywhere – to see themselves as better than they have been told they are. I hope that, in some small way, my words will resonate with another person - I suppose I'm trying to send out a ripple into the World.: I may never know that person, but if just one idea in just post helps just one person to raise themselves up and have a better life in some way, then it will have been worth my time and energy writing a hundred posts.”
 
Isn’t that what life is all about, too?

I ask you, please, to DO something - right now - to lift someone else up.

I don’t care how small or big a thing you do, just do it.

A smile, a hug, or a kiss; a kind word or a thoughtful act: do something.

To you, it might only be a smile you give away: but that smile might just change a tiny something in another person’s life.

It’s only a ripple, but it’s a start.
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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The Thursday Thesis  - 17/05/2018

I could have kicked myself.

Come to think of it, I felt so stupid at that moment that it would have been a better idea to hire someone to kick me instead.

There had been a dim recognition, somewhere in the deeper recesses of the old grey matter, that I’d soon bepublishing the 100th  post of this blog – The Thursday Thesis: I knew I’d been posting once a week for almost two years, I just wasn’t sure about how many posts I’d made.

My inner troublemaker was playing up again, telling me how awesome I was to have been so consistent and got something out every single week. He also said I should have a celebration to mark the event, and to be proud of myself for yada, yada,yada...

But I had a problem – I didn’t know how many posts I had actually made. I’d always posted by date, rather than by episode or post number, and I had no easy way to accurately track the number of posts.

Bum!

It takes a lot of work to re-name all the posts in a blog and add an episode number, then to re-name the original document file in the archive. It’s also intensely dull, unless you can transmogrify the process into a game and make it fun for yourself – perhaps by thinking of the process as “capturing and branding” the wayward episodes.

Life’s like that, too.

So, here’s the thing I want to share: start out as you mean to proceed.

When you begin something, be it health, relationship, financial, or whatever – begin with a vision of how things will look when they are done.

I hadn’t started the blog that way: I just thought it might be fun to share some of the things I wish I’d learned a lot sooner.

So I didn’t think of how many posts I might make, about the milestones and celebrations I’d miss out on if I didn’t keep score, or how to refer to previous episodes.

It was an embarrassing planning failure, frankly.

Next week I’ll post the 100th episode on this blog, so I am going to celebrate the milestone. Celebrating is something we could all do a lot more of – especially me.

When I was awarded a First I didn’t want to go through the rigmarole of attending a graduation ceremony – I think that I was secretly afraid of being rumbled as the imposter I knew myself to be. Fortunately, my then-girlfriend was a lot smarter than me and persuaded me to collect my degree in person. Without her intervention I would have missed a memorable day and more or less dismissed my achievement, so I’m grateful for her wisdom.
But we all do it, don’t we?
We all seem to dismiss our achievements; it’s a British thing, I reckon.
There’s a daft idea that anyone who celebrates their achievements is arrogant, big-headed and probably not very nice.

It’s totally wrong-headed, of course, but it’s very common.

One friend of mine has gone from not running at all to running 10km, solo, in less than six months: not too shabby for a woman in her sixties, is it?

But she’ll have none of it: none of your fancy-pants celebrations, no “well done” messages, and no recognition of her achievements in her own mind.

Personally, I’m impressed by people who set themselves a target, plan their trajectory, and launch. Oddly, their actually hitting the target is not the main thing for me – it’s the intention and the action that matter most, in my opinion. The medals, certificates, and T-shirts are just markers of what has been achieved. In themselves they are mere trash, worthless clutter – but they are concrete evidence of what happened before race day and before exam day.

If we examine each fresh new day we can find something to celebrate, every single day of our lives. Embracing our own achievements can release a spurt of dopamine (your brain’s feel-good chemical) into your system, setting-up the anticipation of more and greater rewards.

What’s your celebration going to be about, today?

What awesome thing was it that you did?

How awesome are you, today?

Write it down...

Do it more...
 
 
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2018
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Why Your Haters Hate You...

The Thursday Thesis - 03/05/18

A little while ago I posted a short Facebook Live video into a large-ish group aimed at guitar players. The clip was a simple explanation of the biomechanics behind one aspect of playing the guitar.

I was clear, unambiguous, and put my points across logically and sensibly.

That was when the hate began.

Oh my word – I had no idea that demonstrating reality meant that I enjoyed giving same-sex oral pleasure! At least, that’s what one hater said, in not so many words.

Other “keyboard-warriors” piled-in to demonstrate their ten cents’ worth of ignorance and intolerance, clearly angry that I should question their beliefs and their gods – their blessed Clapton, Vaughan, Hendrix and the rest of ‘em...

Then I got it: they weren’t talking about me at all – they were telling me about themselves.
It was beautiful – rather than consider the facts and my reasoning, the haters attacked and proclaimed their own positions.

I’d never seen it so clearly before: haters don’t hate You, they hate how you make them feel; and that’s a big difference. At the time it was a radical idea, but now it seems obvious.

Whenever you or I step outside of what other people think and believe to be right, we risk the opprobrium of those other people.

You see, when we suggest a different way of seeing things, a different opinion, or ideas which conflict with the groupthink, we provoke a defensive response from the group. The group tightens and “circles the wagons” to defend itself from the perceived danger of being outdone, bested, proved wrong or foolish. Very often, internal divisions within the group are set aside to defend the common interest against the outsider, the blasphemer, the heretic.

Such is life.

It’s never comfortable being different: ask anyone who has challenged the status quo, a governing elite, the prevailing wisdom of “experts” and the conventions of academics about the backlash and ostracism. That’s how power and influence are exercised.

Some people just hate you, and you are going to have to deal with that fact if you are to be of any consequence in the world, because the only way you are not going to upset someone is to be so insignificant and inoffensive that you might as well have never lived at all.

Getting your first hater is a marker, if you will, of significance: somebody, somewhere was so influenced by what you did, said, wrote, sang, painted, danced to or drove that they took time out from their lives to comment on your life.

How cool is that?

The hater gave more attention to hating you than they did to pursuing their own life!

So, get over one simple thing: whatever you do in life somebody, somewhere is not going to like it.

You’ll probably never meet that person, and they don’t know you well enough to hate you for who you are. They are strangers who didn’t like how you made them feel when their prejudices came under pressure from your ideas. That’s all a hater is – a faceless person who feels bad because you made them uncomfortable – lashing out at someone who dared to think differently.

It’s dangerous and stupid to shut ourselves down and censor our thinking or beliefs because it upsets someone we’ve never met.

Remember that the ultimate rational position is to please at least ourselves. Remind ourselves that other people’s opinions of us are inconstant and beyond our control, so remembering to please at least ourselves is the only logical course to follow.

Some people will hate you for saying “X”, others will revile you for uttering “Y”, and then there are those fanatics who go berserk when you dare to impugn their sacred “Z”...

Look, whatever you do in this life of yours, you’re going to upset someone, somewhere.

Deal with that fact and crack-on with living your own life.

The bottom-line is that haters always hate someone, and today might be your turn; so, take the hate – when it comes - as a compliment and a testament to your significance, then wave at them with one finger and carry on with making a difference in The World.