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...

Our Darkest Day is Here and Now


Quiet, isn’t it?

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

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

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

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

We will live to rue the day.

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

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

Hardly anyone said a dickie-bird about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

People die.

That’s a fact of life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the unfought battle is already lost.

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

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

The story so far:

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

And the future?

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

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

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

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

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

You were warned, oh yes you were warned.

The Thursday Thesis – 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 – 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]
 
 

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]
 

Episode 112 - Losing My Religion

The Thursday Thesis  - 06/08/2018

You - like me, and like pretty much everyone else around us - grew up in the shadow of Science and Mathematics , the so-called “Queen of the Sciences”. To keep it simple, I’ll lump Mathematics and Science together and call them “Science”.

Science was drummed into us in school and was generally considered to be a very good thing indeed. Our science teachers were – at least to me – the keepers of The Knowledge – handing down morsels of erudition from the high table of the great minds: Newton, Einstein, Rutherford, Darwin, and the rest of that rabble.

In the absence of evidence for other people’s gods, science became my god – because it made everything understandable with its Laws and Universal Constants.

Then there was this thing called The Scientific Method – this is the route by which ideas are suggested, tested, reviewed and proven.

It goes something like this: let’s say that I have a brilliant idea (stop giggling, because it could happen) a spark of genius so dazzling that it will change the world forever. I cobble together an experiment that proves my idea to be an absolute belter and I write a properly formatted scientific paper and send it off to other scientists for “peer review”: this is their chance to poke holes in my idea and prove me wrong. This is a good thing: giving other people the chance to disprove my idea, or “falsify” it is Science’s way to eliminate the unworthy. In Science, nobody gets a pass and every new theory has to stand up to scrutiny.

Now, just to add a bit of intrigue, I’ll mention that theft is common within the peer-review process and there are plenty of well-documented cases of intellectual theft in the history of Science. This is not just a modern problem where vast amounts of money, job security and fame are at stake. In fact, Newton seems to have been a particularly good thief – and, as President of The Royal Society at the time - he could behave more-or-less as he pleased and knobble anyone who stood in his way.

“Why are you banging on about peer-review?” you ask impatiently.

Well, here’s the thing: Scientists are reviewing new theories and ideas from the standpoint of Science, and there are jobs, money and prestige at stake. Now, if I show up with my brilliant idea and change everything, then the Scientists reviewing my work are suddenly out of work. That’s where my faith in Science faltered and fell: the gatekeepers appear to be more interested in protecting their positions, incomes and the status quo than expanding the range of human understanding.

Real scientists follow the observable facts – the data – rather than dismiss the data because Science says that the data is wrong. And God forbid that any data breaks Science’s Laws makes it through peer-review: these strange phenomena are called “anomalous” and conveniently parked out at the fringes of mainstream Science, rather than dragged into the centre.

Anomalous data are a challenge to what we think we know, a red flag that there’s a hole in the theory or that the Laws of Science are not really laws but entrenched ideas that demand to be updated. That’s how Science – if it is to be worthy of the name – should be done: fact should determine theory, rather than the theory determining the permissible facts.

The current darling of Science, Quantum Theory, is busily attempting ever more tortuous ways of explaining everything in terms of itself, instead of holding its hands up and saying “buggered if we know” when confronted with the apparent paradoxes of what we understand as the real Universe.

Science has no clue at all about remote action at a distance, which defies the Law that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and is at a loss to explain the observer effect, where the mere presence of a human being will affect the outcome of an experiment - depending on the human’s intention for the experiment.

Then there are the well-documented cases of remote viewing, precognition, the power of meditation to control machines – not to mention all those inventions that have been confiscated and disappeared from the public records.

And there’s Dark Energy and Dark matter, where “Dark” means “we can’t find it or explain it, but we think or know it’s there or should be there.

And please, please, please don’t get me started on medicine that hasn’t been able to do a thing for a person’s chronic pain for thirty-plus years, but I can turn off that pain in a few minutes.

And then there is the problem of Universal Constants...

The problem with Universal Constants (like “Big G”, or G – the gravitational force - and C, the speed of light on a vacuum) is that they change. Science has fixed the speed of light problem by creating a circular reference, rather than facing up to the fact that it ain’t a constant at all. In short, Science is lying to itself and to you and I about the speed of light – and if it’s lying about that, getting caught in that might lead you to ask what else it’s fibbing about.

You see, Science doesn’t know everything – not by a long chalk – but it pretends to. Things that happen but which break the Laws of Science are too often shut-down in peer review or dismissed as anomalous data.

That’s why I don’t believe in Science any more: it is a useful tool, as far as it goes, but it doesn’t cover everything. And it’s a dangerous situation where a single point of view dominates the discourse and intellectual fascism rules.

Science lays claim to absolute knowledge, when all it really has is a rag-bag of contingent theories that don’t always meet the challenges presented by observations of reality.

Science is no longer my religion and my faith, but is - at best - a rabble of dubious dogma fit to be debunked by a long, cold examination of the evidence.

Science is a self-reinforcing belief system – a fundamentalist religious sect, able only to see with its own eyes, narrowing its perspective day by day.

Belief – certainty, often without evidence – is static, ossified, and immovable. Logic and reason cannot assail it, because belief is irrational and not subject to examination.

And belief is the barrier to understanding.

Belief is the full-stop that ends thought.

And everything begins with a single thought...


© 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]

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!
 

Sharp Dressed Man...

The Thursday Thesis  - 08/02/2018


Steve Jobs was never known for being well-dressed, was he?

The Apple founder was invariably seen wearing jeans and a black turtleneck jumper, sort of scruffy, but very much in keeping with Steve Jobs’ projected personality.

Why would such a successful entrepreneur wear the same clothes every day for most of his life?

Where are the gorgeously tailored Armani suits, the hand-stitched shoes and mega-dollar watches?

Not a trace of them.

Now here’s the thing: Jobs was both making a statement and defining himself. Effectively he’s saying “here I am, I’m not interested in conforming to how you expect me to be: you must accept me on MY terms”.

It ties into Apple’s famous “Think Different” ad campaign, as Jobs defies the conventional image of a corporate success.

But the real power of that turtleneck is what it gave Steve every single morning: clarity.

You see, selecting an outfit from a huge wardrobe takes a certain amount of effort – it’s actually a stressor.

Steve Jobs was savvy enough to know that his finite attention was too precious to squander it on the trivialities of how he dressed from one day to the next, so he made a strategic decision to only buy blue jeans and black turtlenecks.

That turtleneck eventually became a part of Jobs’ personal brand – it shows up in almost every photograph of the guy.

Inevitably, I decided to try out having my own dress code for a little while...

All of my T-shirts went into black bags for the trial, and were replaced by 6 long-sleeved grey jerseys and 6 grey T-shirts – nothing fancy, just Marks and Sparks’ own brands.

The first few days were strange – the drawer missed my brightly coloured T-shirts, and I was close to rummaging in the black bags for that red shirt I love. But, in the name of research, I stuck with it – even though it was weird.

After just one week I found myself relieved that I didn’t have to think about what to wear. Now I just open the drawer, take out a grey jersey, and get on with the day – it’s so easy.

Bizarrely, having a huge choice of colourful T-shirts was actually a bad thing; and having no choice was a very good thing.

Steve Jobs was no dummy, was he?
 

I confess... last night I bunked-off.
When I really should have been writing this post I was mucking around doing a Facebook live video, aiming to share the way that poor/inefficient technique gets in a guitar player’s way and makes life harder than it need be.
Why do I tell you this?
Because of the responses it produced.
Now, some folks “got it” and liked the clip, but a lot more people didn’t get it and gave me some feedback, suggesting that I am a “soulless hack” and a “limited player” on the basis of me explaining mechanical principles as they apply to guitarists.
This was to be expected though, because I understand that it is our human nature to defend our current belief systems in a drive to prove ourselves “Right”.
As a species we absorb and adopt all sorts of ideas and beliefs, usually without being aware of it happening. If an idea works once, we’ll probably try to do it a second time because it worked before. If it works a second time we’ll use it again and again until it becomes our normal way of operating.
Now here’s the thing – clinging to one idea and refusing to test or consider alternatives locks the mind into a prior point in time, shutting-out the chance to learn and grow, to do something better.
We humans are funny creatures, aren’t we?
What we currently know, we will defend. Opinions which contradict our current understanding of how things are make us feel threatened, so we will usually fight back against new ideas. That’s why the comments were mostly from those who didn’t get it.
The risk is that the scary new thing could be exactly what you need.
That new thing could be the mental equivalent of an upgrade to your computer software that finally fixes that bug...
What we currently know could be causing us to push away the thing we really need to know.
History is littered with the bodies of dead dogmas which have been superseded by innovations and discoveries.
That’s progress.
What do you currently believe that you’d like to be wrong about?
What do you “know” that you’d like to change?
What is it that you are sure of, right now, that you would like to be unsure of?  

The Thursday Thesis  - 30/11/2017

Just suppose that you figured out how to transform almost everything that you currently hate or are bored by into a joyful experience – how would that feel?

You can, all you need is drugs.

Seriously, drugs do the business: but the drug I’m talking about is dopamine - your body’s natural feelgood chemical.

Your amazing body floods with dopamine every time you complete a significant task or achieve something you consider to be important.

Unimportant things are sort of “Meh!”, whilst important ones are “Yeah!”. The key is the importance we attach to the things we do: if it’s important, we are rewarded with a rush of dopamine.

The secret – I believe – is to make it all a game, then get busy playing.

Since everything is a game, everything is fun.

And since I’ve chosen to play this game, it must be important to me, right?

When I’m teaching guitar, the game is to outwit the student’s blocking mechanism and make a commando raid on their preconceptions, freeing their imprisoned potential to make music. When that mission is accomplished I get a MASSIVE buzz of dopamine and I want to do it again.

If I’m working on a book, the game is to herd all my thoughts into an order that makes sense, then rummage around for the right words to express my thoughts, pulling them one-by-one from the ragbag of my mind.

And when I’m working in my property business, the game is to outwit my own fears and preconceptions, to go into battle with – and slay - the dragons that roam my psyche.

Am I working, or am I just playing?

To be honest, the borders blur and work becomes play: I haven’t done a day’s work since I learned this principle, and there are days when I resent sleep and the need to put away my toys for the night.

So here’s the deal: Go Fun Yourself.

Spend 17 minutes, today, re-framing the dull stuff into a game or two – then go play.

Game On!

 
 

The Thursday Thesis  - 16/11/2017

People are strange creatures, and some are stranger than others – perhaps that’s where you and I fit in...

So here’s an interesting phenomenon with parallels in everyday life; see if it resonates with you, and if you know any crabs.

Take your kid crab fishing for a few hours...

Hopefully you’ll catch a load of crabs and drop them into your bucket, then you can watch them doing their thing.

Now, do you see that greenish one over there – the one trying to climb out of the bucket?

 Notice that he gets so far, then that other crab reaches up a claw and pulls him back down?

Yes, crabs in a bucket actually prevent one another from escaping from captivity. And here’s the thing – people do that, too. The people around us – and they’re usually the people who sincerely have our best interests at heart, because nobody else cares – try to hold us back, pull us back into the bucket. They want to protect us from danger and preserve the nice, safe status quo.

But if the status quo is making us unhappy...?

How is keeping us stuck in a place we don’t want to be in, a job we despise, a relationship that is toxic, ever going to help us?

Those grabbing claws are now another thing from which to escape, aren’t they?

Our best hope is to find an eccentric crab with a thick carapace who will allow us to climb on their back to assist our escape. Better still, find a crab who has already escaped from the bucket and who will give us an escape map and then pull us out of the bucket.

I found my helper crab in a book, after a helper crab named Norman, pointed a claw at it. Here’s the book: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoloeon Hill.

The book shops and libraries of this world are full of helper crabs - where will you find yours?

The Thursday Thesis  - 5/10/2017

I love a good Goal, and - as far as I am concerned – the bigger the better.

If it’s a goal you can hang a number on, make it a big number; if it’s a Goal with a date or deadline, make it a real deadline with real consequences. I like the idea of pledging a slug of cash to an organisation you dislike – the only way they don’t get your money is if you beat the deadline you set for yourself.

But there are two big problems with having a big Goal.

Firstly the big Goal itself. It’s an outcome, a snapshot of the future, distant, remote, and not actionable today. You can’t build a business or write a book, craft a fit body or build a relationship with your life partner in a day.

All too often, nothing happens today...

The second problem with that Big Goal is its pervasiveness and its hugeness. Certainly, clever people keep their Big Goals in their minds by regularly reminding themselves of what the Goal is and how it looks, feels and sound. But it’s a Big Goal, and it can too easily terrify and overwhelm you, instead of inspire you: I see this all the time with students and coaching clients.

So here’s the solution to being overwhelmed by your own Big Goals: just do something, every day, which moves you in the direction of your goals.

Simple, isn’t it?

That means paying attention to the activities – the PROCESS that produces PROGRESS – every single day.

Instead of rocking back on your heels and staring awestruck at your Big Goal, take one tiny step forward towards it.

In my book Elephant Sandwiches I shared the simplest, daily tick-box system that I invented to get my own chronic procrastinator arse into gear. The basic idea is that your Big Goals are your Elephants, and that Elephants are indigestible if eaten whole. But slice them up very thin and eat a slice every day, and they are delicious.

So the Elephant Sandwich is the breakfast of champions.

Get into the Process that produces Progress, every day.

Do something. Write 500 words, walk for 10 minutes, make the time.

Do Something, today, that brings your future toward you. If it’s a thin enough  slice, you can eat it, and tomorrow you’ll be hungry for another.

Get started and do something.

Today.
 
 

 

The Thursday Thesis  - 21/09/2017

Malcolm Gladwell devoted a chapter of his book “Outliers” to the idea that it takes around 10,000 hours of practice to achieve Mastery in a field.

The book sold well and made Gladwell a ton of money, simultaneously propelling him to the status of credible pundit and positioning the journalist as an expert on learning.

But here’s the thing: the 10,000 hour rule was Gladwell’s invention, and it didn’t reflect the essence of the research that he referred to – a 1993 study at the University of Colorado.

So when Gladwell declared 'Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours', the chief of the research team, Anders Ericsson, was royally pissed-off.

“Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalisation to a magical number", Ericsson said, then wrote a rebuttal paper entitled “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists”.

Nice one, Anders.

Gladwell’s snappy 10,000 hour “Rule” didn’t take much notice of the real conclusions of the researchers: significant variation of time taken to acquire skills, a variety of practice methodologies, and the apparent non-existence of anything that could be identified as “natural talent”.

I get it. I’ve been teaching guitar for 18 years, and I don’t believe in talent, either. There are a pile of books out there discussing Talent with a capital T, but I believe in acquiring the necessary skill – and that means learning from someone else, testing the skill by doing it badly at first, then refining it and making it automatic by consistent repetition. This is exactly like tying your shoelaces or learning to drive a car or ride a bicycle.

When was the last time you had to think about tying your laces?

So the 10,000 hour fallacy entered the canon of conventional wisdom, along with a load of other unhelpful “wisdom”. If you want to know more about how nonsense like this infects people you’ll find plenty in the blog archive and in my book 9 Weird Things Guitarists Do.

You see, I have a problem or six with conventional wisdom, and I have a problem with Gladwell’s assertion of certainty in areas where he is not a practitioner.

The 10,000 Hour Rule is a journalist’s opinion, rather than the conclusions of the guys who did the work.

And, tragically, the 10,000 hour fallacy deters people from pursuing their dreams because it sets up a high barrier to entry to a new activity – such as learning to play the guitar or any other musical instrument.

As my friend and former student, Tom Boddison observed in a recent email questioning Gladwell’s opinion, “10,000 hours is a bloody long time!”

And what about Mastery – did you notice that the idea of an observable standard snook in on the coat-tails of the 10,000 Hour Rule?

There’s a presupposition that one must achieve Mastery, isn’t there?

Bunk!

Mastery is neither or relevant when one is pursuing one’s own pleasure and following one’s own path – as one must when engaged in any of the so-called Arts.

I say we murder the myth of 10,000 hours!

I say we murder the illusion of Talent!

I say we murder the mischief of Mastery!

I say, let’s get these monkeys off our backs and do our own research!

Are we foolish enough to just accept the opinion of a journalist when deciding whether to pursue our heart’s desires?

Get yourself a guitar, flute, sax, or whatever – a football or golf club and start hacking. Play some bum notes, miss the net and hack up a few divots - who cares if you suck?

This is supposed to be fun, isn’t it?

Am I making sense, here – am I convincing you?

Get out there and have some fun, make lots of mistakes and enjoy every single minute of it.

Fail gloriously - because only by learning to miss the net can you ever hope to score a winning goal.

The Answers Have Changed.

Albert Einstein famously gave the students on his course the same examination paper two years running.

Einstein’s assistant asked the professor if he’d noticed it was the same paper with the same questions he’d set the previous year, to which Einstein replied “It’s not a mistake, the questions are the same; but you see, the answers have changed”.

Back in the 1920s and 30s scientific theory was advancing rapidly, so Einstein wasn’t just kidding his assistant – the answers had changed in the intervening year.

And isn’t that true of almost everything in life?

The answers we have as children and teenagers are different than the answers we have when we are older and our lives have changed: parenthood changes everything, divorce and the death of our loved ones; accidents, injury and illness all conspire to keep the answers we need on the move and elusive.

Because everything you currently know is only your best guess, based upon currently available evidence, and that’s the reason why it’s so important to keep learning and to stay curious – because the answers have changed: that’s a fact of life.

If you’re not busy finding out those new answers you’ll probably keep on using your old answers, even though your old answers don’t produce the results you want anymore.

Think of life as being a long corridor with doors all along both sides: you can’t open a door until you’re right in front of it, so unless you are moving along the corridor you only have access to the one door. Learning and growing is what allows you to progress along the corridor, open more doors and find the answers that you need.

So, what are you learning today?

It might not be The Answer, but it could be a clue to where The Answer is hiding.

Stay Curious.

Magick - The Science of Success
Part 2 – The Rituals

The Thursday Thesis  - 7/9/2017

Every single one of us has our own daily magic rituals, but don’t panic - we haven’t gone over to the Dark Side or contracted religion, so breathe...

What I mean is that we all perform rituals every day: we brush our teeth, tie our shoelaces, commute to our workplace, and do a hundred other things every day without really giving it any thought. Our daily rituals help us to get through the day in much the same way that we did yesterday, the day before that, and the day before that, too.

Forming a ritual or habit allows us to have a reliable, pre-set way of performing an action. Once we have a ritualised way of doing something we don’t need to think about it, we just do it the same way that we always do it.

Ordinarily this is beneficial to us, as we can delegate our performance of a routine task and free-up our resources for other things.

So it makes sense to consciously craft our daily rituals to serve us, doesn’t it?

Because when we design our rituals to produce what we want we are truly using "...The Science and Art of causing change to occur in conformity with will..." as Aleister Crowley put it when he defined Magick.

If you are not already consciously challenging your normal, habitual ways of doing things then today would be a great day to start thinking about how you do things. Chances are good that most of your habits and rituals were learned accidentally and without a thought as to whether they were going to advance you toward your biggest ambition or hold you back from it.

Change your rituals and it will change your life.

Simply ask yourself “is this helping me or is this hurting me” when you do anything – especially if you do it in a certain way because that’s how you’ve always done it. If it helps you to achieve your defined goals, let it continue: if it isn’t helping, then do something else.

Build your own rituals, rather than doom yourself to repeat other people’s unhelpful ones.
If you are overweight, change what you ritually buy when you shop: make a list of healthy foods and ONLY buy what’s on the list. I know a guy who does this, and then (bizarrely) rewards himself with a bag of cookies for being such a healthy shopper! That’s certainly a ritual that he might want to change.

If you smoke, change your habit of reaching for instant relief whenever you feel a pang of craving: do something else – anything at all - other than lighting up. Prove to yourself that you are not a helpless, pathetic slave to a manufactured addiction.

Each morning I use a handful of designed activities to kick-start my day and move me towards my short, medium, long, and lifetime goals – I call them MAGICK, and it’s probably no surprise that it’s an acronym.

Movement: exercise and stretching to keep my body fit for purpose.
Affirmation: reinforcing my positivity, goals and my reasons for living.
Gratitude: recognising the great things in my life and nudging my mind to find more of them.
Inner-vision: solitude, meditation and self-examination.
Creation: bringing my dreams into reality – I have to do The Work, nobody is coming to the rescue.
Knowledge: keep learning and challenging what I know.

 So there you have it – my MAGICK rituals.

What about you – what are the rituals you want to keep in your life, which ones will you change, and which ones will you begin?

The Thursday Thesis  - 31/08/2017


I am a huge fan of self-help books – I’ve read or listened to hundreds of them since I gave up my glittering career as a teenage drunk – and I’ve noticed that they all have two big ideas in common. Since both ideas are super-important and interesting, I’m going to cover one this week and one next week.

Firstly, there’s the theme of our will and the power to choose the changes we make in our lives: as Gandhi put it, to “be the change you wish to see in the world”.

Call it self-mastery, success, or the secret – call it what you will – it all comes down to "The Science
and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will".

That’s the thrust of what almost every self-help writer and guru preaches.

But hold on a minute - that definition didn’t come from Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn or Napoleon Hill - it came from the English writer and occultist Aleister Crowley, as he explained what Magick is.

By the way, Magick is the archaic spelling of the word – it’s not a typo – and since this is my blog, I’m going to flit from one spelling to another, so there!

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in the self-help field who would disagree with that definition as a recipe for success.

So, who was Aleister Crowley?

Born in Leamington Spa in 1875, Crowley was the son of a successful brewing family who held Christian Fundamentalist beliefs. At Cambridge he captained the university chess team before dropping out to spend his fortune pursuing esoteric and occult knowledge, sex, drugs and adventures of every kind. In time, his infamous lifestyle earned him the title “The wickedest man in the World”, according to the British press, though he preferred to style himself The Beast 666.

But he wasn’t just a sex-mad, drug-taking, bisexual, eccentric genius – though that would be enough for many of us. Crowley was also a journalist, novelist, poet, painter, ceremonial magician, mountaineer, and – quite possibly - a spy for the British government.

Yet this libertine defined Magick in terms that closely resemble most modern day definitions of success - as extolled in thousands of self-help books, DVDs, online courses and 3-day “Ra-Ra” guru events in arenas all over the World.

It’s interesting, isn't it?

Every time you see someone who is exceptional at what they do you’ll notice the same thing: they make it look easy, effortless and completely natural...

Almost like magic.

Non-experts, like you and me, wonder how they do what they do, what their secret is, and how they make it look so easy.

There is something magical and spellbinding about mastery and expertise, but it isn’t magic – it’s just technique and technology.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” wrote Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, many science fiction books and the inventor of the communication satellite.

Our experts don’t have magic on their side – they have advanced technologies and techniques which we don’t have, yet.

And the most important word in that sentence is “yet”.

“Yet” tells us that we can acquire the skills and habits of experts, adopt their practices and become experts ourselves – “yet” implies that the skills are learnable and that we can learn them, sometime.

Follow your “yet” with “but” and you’re really opening the door to change: say aloud “I don’t know how to do it, yet, but...”

What else do you want to add to complete the sentence?

If you said “I’m gonna” or “I will”, you’re going to learn how to do it, aren’t you?

Words are powerful – perhaps even Magical.

But there’s no magick to excellence: I ask you, is effective time management magic, weight loss mystical, or success in business esoteric?

I don’t think so.

And there's no Magic involved when you are learning to play guitar or any other musical instrument, either. Just find an expert guitar teacher, find out how they do it and do what they do. Not what they appear to do, but how they really do it, because if you learn how it’s really done, you know it’s not magic and you can do it, too.

Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) tells us to model very specifically what experts do and how they think in order to perform just like they do.

That sounds like learning to perform a ritual, doesn’t it?
 
Next week we’ll look at the practical implementation of Magick into your everyday life and how to harness the power of Rituals.
 

The Thursday Thesis - 10/08/2017

It is always 99% easy.

Yes, easy: the hard work, day in, day out, that produces the bulk of a project - that is the easy part.

The problem is always that last 1%.

At university the last 1% was submitting the assignments; today it is publishing a finished book or piece of music.

You’d think it would be easy to just press the button and breathe, wouldn’t you?

It isn’t easy - the fear contained in that last 1% can paralyse even the strongest person.

But that last 1% is all that stands between the work and the audience: the people we wrote, composed, worked and dreamed for.

In soccer, it’s the last 1% that makes all the difference. Between a goal and a miss, between winning and losing – that’s the 1%. If the ball never crosses the line – the game ends in a nil-nil draw: that’s all that gets written on the score-sheet.

In life, it’s the 1% that sorts out the wannabes from the gonnabes; those who succeed and complete the job, and those who give up on the one-yard line.

What’s the point in writing the world’s best novel, symphony, pop song or movie script if it sits, forever in your desk drawer or lurks in an obscure folder of your hard drive, unread, unheard, unsung and unseen?

To paraphrase Oliver Wendell Holmes: “the tragedy of the average man is that he goes to his grave with his music still inside him”.

The last 1% is the showdown between hope and fear.

And fear fights to kill.

Game on!
 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2017
 
 
Please Like and Share The Thursday Thesis with your friends, family, your cat and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.

Love Overload...

The Thursday Thesis  - 27/07/2017

It’s a funny thing, but most people complain of being overloaded – you, yourself, might even think it’s a bad thing.

You would – of course – be wrong.

Every piece of research I’ve ever read suggests that Overload is a Good Thing – with capitals!

Here’s how it works: every time you overload a muscle it suffers damage. But our bodies adapt to that damage and overcompensate: they seem to assume we’ll do the same stupid thing again and provide us with more muscle in a bid to protect us from future damage.

A similar process occurs in our brains, that trembling network of connections and cells. Use it, push it, load it up and it will begin to morph into a faster and better brain. The process even has an expensive-sounding name: neuroplasticity.

So we are built to grow, but it takes the threat of damage and a crisis situation to trigger that growth – it’s all tied in to our innate fight or flight response to danger.

No crisis, no growth.

So it’s essential that we do things that Overload and scare us: how else can we develop and grow stronger?

I’m currently training to improve my public speaking abilities, which are already pretty good. But what’s fascinating to watch is how I and the other trainees smash through our fear and emerge unscathed.

Within three days, one lady went from Overload and total meltdown to confident speaker: a little more practice and she’ll be rocking the house down.

How did she get there?

Incrementally doing a little more, a little more, a little more...

Things stuck, ideas gelled, words tumbled...

Do a bit, add a bit, do a bit more.

Now repeat.

Rest and sleep complete the process.

I love Overload, so give me more, more, more!


 
© Neil Cowmeadow 2017
Remember to Like and Share The Thursday ThoughtCast with your friends, family, and anyone else. I’d love to hear your comments, along with any ideas you’d care to hurl at me.
[email protected]
.

The Thursday Thesis  - 20/07/2017

The very excellent Angi Magic’s favourite word is “Outrageous!” – with an exclamation mark.

And, a couple of days ago, I got to thinking about setting some “Outrageous!” and unreasonable goals for myself – wondering what I could do to power-up my productivity and catalyse myself into action.

I asked myself “How can I share what I teach - music, guitar, happiness, and all the rest - with the 7 billion or so people I can’t work with face to face?”

After one too many espressos it dawned on me that if I got my sorry arse into the chair every single day and wrote for a couple of hours every single day, I could probably finish a book a month – that would be a start, wouldn’t it?

Outrageous!

Unreasonable?

Do-able?

Let’s see... I already have over 140 outlines and/or ideas for books sitting on my hard-drive, where they are doing no good at all and helping nobody. My “Outrageous!” Idea looks like a great plan to get them off the drive and into ink...

It’ll keep me busy for the next few years, at least.

I’m up for the challenge, and I realise that going public with my “Outrageous!” goal is going to nail my backside down: if I miss a deadline, I know I’m going to hear about.

Going public with your own Goals and Ambitions might just light a rocket under you, too.

The poet, Mary Oliver asks, in one of her works, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

But don’t tell me – tell the people who will inspire you to do it, and who’ll hold you to account if you don’t.