It contains some pretty universal points so will be of help to any people who have struggled with things like self-worth, self-identity, growing older, lack of focus.

It also partially fills in a gap in the Special Theology of Relativity series (which I will finish shortly).

Musician 2.0 – Redefining Your Self-Identity

Enjoy!

Seamus Anthony

The secret to success in life is simple. It goes like this:

1. Decide what the One Thing you really want to do is.
2. Work relentlessly at being great at doing it.
3. After you’ve been working at it for a while honestly appraise whether you are talented enough in this area to succeed (believe me, I have seen enough live music to know that sometimes hard work just ain’t enough to cover for complete lack of talent).
4. Keep working at it.
5. Get it out there (don’t hide under a bushel).
6. Don’t get distracted.
7. Keep working at it until you succeed.

This is the conclusion I have come to after years and years of digesting just about all the self-help and “how to” literature that one man should ever read.

Of course everybody’s journey is different and I am generalizing, but my point is that at the end of any self-help journey this is where you end up if you are actually going to go on and succeed.

At one point in my life I needed to read all those books and blog posts, but it all lead me back to the conclusion that drove me onward and upward when I was younger adult (and was doing quite well for myself – before I got distracted). This conclusion is simple:

If you do things, things get done.

So if you are looking for a magic bullet, there it is. Put down the self-help book, unsubscribe from the How-to blogs and to quote one of the world’s more successful individuals, Jerry Seinfeld: “Just work.”

In case you simply aren’t ready to follow this advice, then here are links to two of the more to-the-point and useful “how to succeed” posts that I have come across (but you’d be better just to get to work right now and save the reading until their is no way you could be working, which is not very often).

How To Walk On Water

The 3 Secrets To Success (says it’s about online marketing success but the points apply across the board).

As for me – I am tired of reading self-help and how-to books (unless I need a specific piece of technical knowledge) and I am convinced that the only way forward is just to work hard towards what I want (and know I am good at). I am so convinced that this is true that I am as of 2009 – documenting my journey towards my goals to prove that I am right.

The Power of Monomaniacal Obsession

If you like it please do give it a digg or a stumble – cheers!

Seamus Anthony

The hits just keep on comin’

Cheers,

Seamus Anthony

I have a new two-part tale of high horseback adventure up over at LivingNow.com.au

How To Conquer Your Fear of Abandonment (and Horses) Part One

and Part Two is here … but it would be just plain contrary of you to start there

Hope you enjoy!

Seamus

8 Great Anti-Hacks to Fundamentally Change Your Life

This is some Rebel Zen in action right here. An anti-productivity rant from Clay Collins of Project Liberation and The Growing Life that advises us to “be flaky and denounce the cult of permanence”.

Sound advice that, denouncing the delusion of immortality that is, which leads me to my next recommendation for the day:

Death and Happiness – a Paradigm Shift for the West

This is a powerful article that reminds us all not to forget that at any time now we may die. I’ll let Steve Jobs sum up my opinion on this matter:

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.”

The Four Secrets to a (nearly) Perfect Relationship

But for now, we are alive, and that means getting along with people, not least our significant others (you know, the ones who think that all this blogging business is a bit weird and wish you’d just come inside already and help with baby? … oh, maybe that’s just mine … ). Anyway great tips here from Rebel Zen Master extraordinaire Jonathan Mead … although tread carefully around that ‘dog tip’ guys if you know what’s good for you

If you DO use the dog tip, and it just so happens to screw up your relationship and you find yourself all alone and penniless as a result, just read this following article and remember that …

Failure is a Blessing

An excellent story and gift to the reader from Stephen Cox, a talented writer from Sydney, Australia … the ‘other’ Aussie city

As you rebuild your life and go back over what went wrong – be sure to take my advice and let it go

This is a sentiment shared by Harmony over at Golden Zen, who gives us this fine list of ways to do just that:

7 Top Tips on How to Let Go

Speaking of which, time for me to let go of the mouse and go have dinner. Enjoy!

So seeing as I can’t do it myself – feel free join all those who have already dugg it or stumbled it (but only if you like it of course).

In other news I just read an article which kind of compliments the above mentioned article – and although it’s not a new post, it was good timing for me to read it today because Steve and I are busy blasting out some new projects which we will be able to share with you very soon.

That’s it for tonight, back with more in a jiffy, what what …

P.S. if you can’t be bothered scrolling through all that info on the post about ‘Stumbling without getting slapped’, the post author claims that the way StumbleUpon prefers you to promote yourself is direct to your Stumble friends by way of the “Send to” feature in the toolbar. I have been doing this and it is kind of like spamming, so I have been asking all my ‘friends’ (my we use that word casually these days don’t we?) if they mind me sending them my articles. I am getting some definite “yes” answers, but the silence is deafening from the rest, the trouble is now I have to keep some kind of list of who said yes and blah blah blah … yet another example of how complicated life seems to have become. (Fade to black to the sound of grumbling GenXer shuffling off to bed, tripping over a plastic toy panda in the dark, and swearing in a whisper through clenched teeth so as not to wake the sleeping child…)

Seamus Anthony

How to Climb Up the Ladder of Healing and Growth

Ari Koinuma gives us a short and a long version of this post. Having the attention span of a gnat, I went for the shorter version first but in fact the full essay makes more sense (although if I were Ari, I’d steer clear of calling something an essay, makes the schoolboy in me want to run a mile).

The concept he is exploring is that we are at any one time set to a default state-of-mind that appears on a scale of what he terms a “healing/growth spectrum”. This idea will be great for systematic minds that like classifications, numbers and graphs. That’s the complete opposite of how my brain works, but still I really enjoyed this post. Ari has good storytelling skills and the guts to reveal information about his personal journeys. And as a new father, I was especially interested in the idea of young children starting out at a fairly positive level, then moving up or down according to what cards life deals them. Definitely worth a look.

12 Techniques to Stop Worrying

This article over at PickTheBrain.com caught my eye because, despite my swaggering bravado, I am in fact a chronic worry wart.

Writer Cindy Holbrook runs us through some stats about worry which do a pretty good job convincing me that there’s not that much to worry about after all. Then we get the list of suggestions to help you stop worrying. I totally agree with most of them, especially to “get support” as I have found that discussing my concerns seems to dissolve a lot of worry. (I might add that this took me up until about 6 months ago to discover as being a typical male and all, I used to just clam up and tough it out. Not recommended.)

I also agree that gratitude or, as Cindy puts it, counting your blessings, is a fantastic way to change the mental channel you’re tuned into.

I wonder however, about the recommendations to “distract yourself” and to “get busy”. Sounds a bit like running from the issue. But then again, maybe it’s actually a good piece of advice and I am just a crazy opinionated hack!

I would add two suggestions:

One which is kind of hinted at in the first tip to “prepare for the worst” is to ask yourself, “what’s the worst thing that can happen?”. Usually it’s not that bad and if it is really, really bad then there’s usually not a whole lot can be done about it anyway.

Two is stop listening to the bullshit that mainstream journalists are constantly bombarding us with – it’s an unhealthy mental diet that plants seeds of worry and stress. (What’s with those guys anyway? Oh, that’s right, they’re arseholes, nearly forgot.)

Wilderness Shangri-la

Ok firstly I should admit that this is the latest post at a website built and managed by me and Steve (who also runs this blog with me). But it’s not ours, LivingNow are our client.

So full disclosure out of the way, it’s a lovely article. Admittedly it’s a bit hippy for Rebel Zen, especially the lame title, but it reflects a very pleasant state of mind that I experience quite often but (unlike violent rage) I don’t usually find the need to express: calm, peaceful and connected to nature.

Writer Steven Katsineris does an awesome job of describing how beautiful the Tasmanian wilderness truly must be. It’s just so important that we don’t screw these gifts up with our selfish ways, isn’t it?

I am actually off for my first visit to Tasmania early next year (about time too as it’s only a short flight from Melbourne, Australia). This article got me all freshly excited about it!

Anyway, there’s three great posts worth a look – I’m off to meditate before bed. Enjoy!

Seamus Anthony
Click here to get the first Rebel Zen e-book “Curly’s Law” – it’s free!

Ok, that sounds like a bit of a Web 2.0 cliche I admit, but nevertheless it’s true.

Our reason for starting this website was to help others to see that there is so much information out there now that everybody who is seeking what we loosely call “Enlightenment” can truly ‘do it themselves’. Hence the DIY Enlightenment tag.

As for what enlightenment means, well that’s not something that we feel we have the right to define for you either. Defining what enlightenment is (and realising this enlightenment) is a totally personal and subjective thing. You might completely disagree with us, for example, by believing that your guru is the one and only path to true salvation. That’s okay as long as you’re prepared to enter into a discussion about that.

Or to give a less extreme example, you might not be so sure that everybody is already enlightened. So write about that (or make a video or whatever) and let us and every body else know.

Can You Hear the Voices?

I personally have been delighted by the bloggers and thinkers that I have discovered are out there over the months since we started Rebel Zen. With the motivation of wanting to attract some “traffic” (horrible term that) to this website, I started taking the time to read more blogs, and follow their commenter’s links back to their own blogs and I must admit I have been surprised and impressed. I now truthfully surf around each day just because I genuinely love reading the words of all these awesome people that are out there, shining their lights for all to see.

There are so many great thinkers who have been given voice by the social internet and so many different opinions, ideas and strategies for personal liberation. I just think it’s a wonderful thing. Not just wonderful but, really, it’s quite amazing, especially if you stop to think about how things were in the past, when information of this type was a scarce, top-down commodity. These days, to get back to the DIY Enlightenment theme, it really is possible to wade through mountains of inspiring words, sounds and images, and even better, to start or join in conversations about ideas you either don’t get, don’t agree with, or just think are so amazing that you must share them with the rest of the world.

So stay tuned to Rebel Zen over the coming weeks and months, because we have plans to really “open-house” this little corner of the web. They’re loose plans, and better to show than waffle on about them (because some of these ideas might not stick) but these cautions aside, we hope it’s going to mean that RebelZen.com becomes a very useful place to visit if you’re interested in deciding for yourself what “it’s all about”.

To kick things off, and why I made up the new category of “Worth A Look”, I am now going to roll through some of the most inspiring stuff I have come across via the tubes today. Feel free to point our noses in the direction of anything complementary (or not, doesn’t matter) via the comments function:

A Singularity in Time Part II

Here author Peter Russel talks of the dawning of a Wisdom Age, sprouting off the back of the Information Age. He says, “Never before have we been able to access so much spiritual wisdom.” – and that’s exactly what I was yammering on about above. Further to this Russel says, “Something completely new is emerging: a single spiritual teaching that is a distillation of the world’s wisdom traditions” and he gives the reason for this as being the amazing availability of information that the internet has facilitated. I couldn’t agree more. I see the perennial philosophy being discussed around the cyber-traps every day.

Don’t be a Sellout: A Guide to Staying Real

Jonathan Mead is back with a cracker of a post over at Illuminated Mind. This dude’s getting real popular and it’s in no small part due to the uncompromising stance he takes on a number of issues, mostly how to live an authentic life on your own terms. He includes a couple of links in this post, the following two of which really rocked my little socks.

What is the Meaning of Life?

Good question.

Umm, is it cheese cake?

I’m pretty sure it’s a cake of some kind…

Zen practitioner Mary Jaksch offers up some words for the wise here – pointing out that if you see life as a path then you’re likely to miss the point. You’d be forever projecting into the future instead of actually being aware of the present moment (i.e. reality). I like her quirky suggestion that life is better viewed as a spot than a linear progression.

Not Being a Real Person: The #1 Self-Development Anti-Hack

As I said in its comments section, this post really made me feel better about being a freak. I mean to say, I’m pretty cool with that fact most of the time, but today I was sort of feeling a bit guilty that all I really could be bothered doing was just lazily surfing through my RSS browser and eating butternut snaps.

Well – good God damn – why the hell shouldn’t I? For I am an “unreal person” not some lame-arse ‘fraidy-cat conformist.

Shit yeah.

And the late, great, drunken Rebel Zen Master, Alan Watts supports this unreservedly in Life and Music.

Don’t fall for the hoax kids! Live the here-now with passion and leave the future be.

Cheers,

Seamus Anthony