How do you motivate yourself? Do you struggle with motivation? I sure do and it really is a bummer when you have great ideas but can’t seem to get on with it and make them work.

Well folks, roll up, roll up! I have the solution to your problem and then some – read on!

How I Get Off My Lazy Butt And Get Things Done

You see I love to dream but to act is another matter. I am just not a huge fan of ‘hard’ work (I am sure many of you can relate). But still I manage to get a lot done. I put this down to two factors.

1. If ‘work’ is ‘hard’ then I find it very, very difficult to get going on it. However (and I am aware this is not a revolutionary concept) if I find the ‘work’ fun, then I love doing it and things get done.
2. However even when you are working on a project that is fun to large extent, there are still usually moments when the Big Fun Project requires some not-so-fun hard work. For example when I was in a band, the concerts were so much fun as to be almost unbelievable, but the hanging around all day, sick in the stomach with nerves, grinding through another boring sound-check? That was just a hard slog. But it had to be done …

And here’s the Greatest Motivational Secret In The World (Hey, it made a good headline, OK?)…

FEAR IS A GREAT MOTIVATOR

Put a gun to my head and I will do pretty much anything you ask.

Plonk me in a strange land with three kids to feed and I will work like a dog to make it in my new country of residence.

Tell me that 500 tickets have sold for the next show and I will rehearse all week and stick through the sound-check until everything sounds perfect.

Why?

Fear – that’s why.

Fear of a bullet in the head. Fear of starvation. Fear of public humiliation.

Fear of whatever – it’s a kick up the pants every time for sure.

How I Got Out Of Cubicle Hell By Burning My Boats

Last year I was at the point where I just couldn’t handle it anymore – working for the man that is.

But the trouble was even though I was forever coming up with truly excellent business ideas, plans and even launches, I never seemed to make enough money to be able to let my depressing full or part time employment go.

Until I realized that I wasn’t making my own entrepreneurial exploits profitable because I just wasn’t concerned about money. I have reasonably low living expenses, and even with the family to support I could just work half or three-quarter time and scrape by comfortably enough. Therefore I would work on the 1% of business ideas, the creative, inspirational aspects of them, until it was time to crack into the 99% hard work part of the game, then I would just let it slide and move on to a new idea because I had enough money to get by on.

I am just not that motivated by money; I need stimulation. But the flip-side to this was the work-a-day jobs were eating away at my soul. I needed to do something to force the change…

Introducing – the Fear Factor

So what I did was I burned the boats – I quit my job and told myself that it was sink or swim time.

This scared the shit out of me because while I don’t care about money much I sure as hell can’t live without it – and I have a wife and daughter to support!

Well, now our business, SquareEyes, (which I run with Steve who also manages this blog with me) is starting to do really well and I put this down to the Fear Factor.

Every morning I sit down at my desk and I know that if I don’t hustle then there’s no money coming in next week. That makes me scared – and that fear motivates me.

There Are Many Ways To Motivate Yourself

The trick is finding which motivational technique works for you.

The reason I got to typing about this topic this morning is because I just got a copy of The Essential Motivation Handbook by Leo Babauta, of ZenHabits fame and my online mate, Eric Hamm of the excellent and popular Motivate Thyself blog.

I haven’t finished the book yet, as of writing, but it’s not the kind of book that you read straight through because after you read a page or two you get all revved up and ready to rock.

By this I mean this book is sure to make you want to get on with it; it will you motivate you to get out there and achieve your dreams and then some.

I know it certainly got me going this morning. It got me thinking about what inspires me to act; what gets me off my lazy butt and into top gear. It inspired me to write this post.

And hey – you may not agree with all of their techniques but some of them are sure to work for you.

For example Leo says that he likes to use public accountability to motivate himself, but for me this doesn’t work so well.

Don’t get me wrong – in my endeavors I find that a certain level of indirect public accountability comes into play: when you quit your job it suddenly becomes everybody’s business (I wouldn’t be surprised if my friends and family are secretly taking bets on whether or not SquareEyes succeeds or fails). But for the most part I have found that publicly announcing “I am going to do THIS” just leads to failure. I am not sure why but my guess is that I am just too secure in myself (and too used to public failure!) that I don’t really care what people think of me beyond being seen as a good-hearted, constructive and law-abiding father, partner, friend, relative and member of society.

What I am saying is I have an ego with skin as thick as a rhino! If I fail, I fail. So what? I won’t stay up at night caring what any one else thinks of that. It just doesn’t concern me.

So there you go – try out the Fear Factor – see if it works for you. And I heartily recommend you click our affiliate link and buy this awesome new eBook The Essential Motivation Handbook – it is sure to get you off your couch and pushing on towards success, especially on those days where you just. can’t. be. bothered.

In case you need further convincing here is a list of the chapters. I think you’ll find this fine tome is choc-a-block full of motivational goodness:

1. How To Motivate Yourself
2. The Only Two Secrets to Motivating Yourself You’ll Ever Need
3. A Guide to Beating the Fears That Are Holding You Back
4. Task Ninja: Form the Action Habit
5. Top 20 Motivation Hacks
6. The Ultimate Guide to Motivation – How to Achieve Any Goal
7. Progress, Progress, Progress! 5 Tips To Keep You Moving Forward
8. 7 Steps to Turn Your Self-Improvement Desires Into Reality
9. 25 Killer Actions to Boost Your Self-Confidence
10. 6 Small Things You Can Do When You Lack Discipline
11. 16 Ways to Motivate Yourself When You’re in a Slump
12. 5 Tips For Motivational Recovery
13. The Magical Power of Focus
14. 10 Ways to Beat the “Can’t Get No Satisfaction” Syndrome
15. 30 Incredible Places to Turn When You Need Inspiration
16. How To Deal With Negative Feedback
17. How to Doggedly Pursue Your Dreams in the Face of Naysayers
18. Achieve Your Dreams Despite Pressures of Work and Family
19. Why You Should Celebrate Your Mistakes
20. How to Actually Execute Your To-do List
21. The Yin And Yang Of Persistence
22. Enduring the Valley to Get to Success
23. How To Relax And Why It’s So Important
24. The Simple Guide To Single-Tasking Success
25. Stop Reading About It and Do It

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I enjoy meditating. Personally I wonder what would have become of my life if I hadn’t discovered it at the time I did.

Recently I have decided to put my own personal meditation techniques down into a more general eBook about meditation (which is finished and coming out shortly).

A meditation book, that is, more general than Psychedelic Meditation, which sells quite nicely and in fact contains meditation instructions which will suffice anybody, but is if course angled at the “get high without drugs” niche.

Admittedly, using meditation to get high is a pretty obscure reason to practice such a noble art, and as I was doing some research to assist with the writing of the book I noted (not for the first time) some of the many reasons people meditate. From what I could tell, the two main reasons can be loosely categorized as:

1. Health
2. Happiness

And with good reason; meditation is well and truly proven to be excellent at improving your health and helping you to feel happier. I myself have more than once used meditation to help me to focus become healthier when I have been a slack little fatty and to fight off depression when it came a knockin’, it’s foul stinkin’ breath comin’ in under my door.

(Hey a bit of poetry there, cool!)

Now – health and happiness are two fine over-arching categories for the reasons people meditate, but they are not very specific. I want to know in closer detail, why people “sit and do nothing”.

Here are some of my guesses, maybe you have some more, if so please add them to the comments section:

Reasons To Meditate

• Mental Clarity
• Improves Physiological Health
• Facilitates Healing
• Decreased (effects of) Stress and Anxiety
• Increased Happiness and General Feelings of Well-Being
• Lowers High Blood Pressure
• Increases Energy and Vigor
• Increased Creativity
• Increased Ability to Focus
• Supports efficient post-operative recovery
• Increases serotonin production, which affects your mood (low-levels can cause depression)
• Helpful for those suffering from insomnia
• Helps Eliminate Headaches
• Can Help You Overcome Addictions
• Can bring on blissful “Cosmic High” type experiences
• Helps manage symptoms of Pre-Menstrual Syndrome
• Greater Self-Knowledge
• Can help you identify your life purpose or ‘calling’
• Sharper Intuition
• Spiritual insight and enlightenment

Photo by Manaki5

Continued from Part One

Everything Is Appropriate

The above three words were scribbled on a whiteboard in the office of Feedwell Café.

Feedwell, now closed down, was a famous, old, ramshackle vegetarian joint in the hipster suburb of Prahran in Melbourne, Australia. It was the spring of 1998. I had been working in the cafe for a week, squeezing vege juices for hungover groovers and health conscious yuppies.

Next to the words was a very crude drawing of five or six interlinking lines that basically looked a branch of a tree.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Alan, the cafe owner.

Alan was a tall, thin, white-haired fellow in his 70s who, I was vaguely aware, was into ‘all that New Age stuff” as I would have put it at the time.

He was definitely a dude – for example he chose his staff by holding a crystal pendulum over their resumes (apparently mine caused the pendulum to spin in the affirmative direction, something that, later, probably caused him to wonder if his crystal needed replacing).

“It’s true” Alan replied “Everything is Appropriate”

There came a choking noise from the corner of the messy office-cum-lunch room. It was Sashaan, the punk-haired chef who I also had pigeon holed as a “New Ager” simply because she had a “Magick Happens” sticker on her car.

“Wouldn’t be very appropriate if somebody ran in here with an axe and starting chopping heads off now would it?” She grumbled, her mouth full of lunch.

“It would actually,” said Alan. He spoke with a calm that was, in those days, foriegn to me. “Like I said … on a Universal level everything is appropriate.” With this he shuffled off, so tall he had to bow his head to walk through the doorway.

Sashaan didn’t say anything, she just rolled her eyes which were twinkling like she was enjoying a joke that I wasn’t in on. I didn’t know what to think, my mind was blown, but I suddenly felt a strong desire to know more.

For example, what were all those squiggly lines about?

And how could Alan be so sure of his rather brave proposition?

My mind was naturally open enough not to be offended by the statement, but I was pretty sure that a lot of people would be outraged by this kind of talk.

But what if Alan was in fact right? What would that mean and how would that affect my life?

The Five Year Hangover

All of this was set against the backdrop of the unraveling of my life.

I refer to the period from when I was about 22 years to about 27 years old as the “Hangover Years”. Not just because I woke up every day with one, but because from high school to 22 years old, life had been one fantastic trip, a joyous, invincible journey of discovery and fun. I was in a band that was hugely popular in my hometown and was fairly convinced that I was some kind of new God sent to bless the Earth with my presence and talent. I was basically living out a wonderful, ego-movie in which I was the headlining star.

But then, suddenly, it turned to shit.

I found myself alienated from my loved ones. Broke. My local fame had failed to spread and mature into any kind of a sustainable career (entirely my own fault – I know now – but at the time it all seemed very unfair and tragic). I was hooked on alcohol, cigarettes and weed.

Nice one.

So I did the logical thing, I ran away to another city to start all over again, which is how I found myself at Feedwell Café.

While on the one hand, I was having a blast meeting new people and playing in a new band, I was a little disconcerted to discover that not only did my problems follow me over to Melbourne, but they were getting worse and I was getting more and more depressed.

I had no idea how to deal with this other than to keep moving, keep working, keep joking, keep drinking, smoking, tripping, shagging.

I was a mess.

So, desperate to change for the better and inspired by the calm of people like Alan and Sashaan (who despite her healthy cynicism, was a very enlightened soul) I began to investigate a very different kind of ‘spirituality’ to the Christian dogma I had been brought up with. Always a big reader, I began by devouring Buddhist and New Age books, and thus began my fumbling start along the journey to Do-It-Yourself Enlightenment.

This journey would take me into the realms of not only Buddhist and New Age concepts, but Contemporary Western Meditation, Zen, Taoism, QiGong, I Ching, Yoga, Tarot, Naturopathy, Psychedelic Meditation, Traditional Chinese Medicine, New Thought, and much more.

All of the above brought me greatly increased inner peace, health and happiness, but there was still a lingering unease, a nagging fear that I just couldn’t put my finger on, an unease that kept me awake at nights … all until a certain flight from Malaysia to Europe that is …

Continued in Part Three.

So you’ve downloaded our free eBook, Curly’s Law, about the need to identify your One Thing, your True Life Purpose – but did you actually read it?

And if you did read it – have you managed to actually identify your One Thing?

It’s not always easy is it?

I gave my method for figuring out my One Thing in the book, but that was just one way.

I don’t really know what other ways there are, or at least I didn’t until I read Brian Kim’s excellent “How To Finally Find What You Love to Do AND Get Paid For Doing It!”

The Trouble with the “Do What You Love” Theory

When it comes to careers, the clichéd advice is to “do what you love” if you want to succeed BUT what do you do if you don’t know what you love?

And hang on a second – don’t you know plenty of artists, writers, healers, musicians and wannabe-entrepreneurs who know very well what they love to do but just can’t seem to make it pay?

Well, if that’s you – relax. Brian’s excellent little eBook (with the very long title) is a Godsend for those who are undecided as to what their true purpose is or who haven’t got a clue how to make their passion pay-up some cold hard cash.

4 Reasons I Highly Recommend this Book

I don’t know Brian Kim personally, but I have been twice now impressed with his work (read about the other time his writing blew my mind here). The reasons I so heartily recommend “How to Find What You Love To Do AND Get Paid For Doing It” are:

• There’s no hippy-drippy nonsense; no “open your mind to the Universe and let the love flow in” crap. In case you haven’t woken up and smelled the coffee yet, all that Law of Attraction baloney doesn’t work – not on its own anyway. You can sit around and wish for success all you like, but if you do, all you’re really doing is settling for a life of mediocrity. Instead you need concrete, practical advice about how to get off your butt and make it happen already. This book provides just that.

• It’s a very structured book, a practical workbook that gets you to work it out over a period of time. Brian will have you delve deeper and deeper into your own nature until you find your True Purpose inside of you, just sitting there like a brilliant diamond waiting all this time for you to discover it.

• It’s specific – you’ll learn “What” and then “How”. First you find ‘what’ it is you truly should be doing with your life – your calling. Once you know what this is (and you will) then you move on to ‘how’ to make it pay. If you know you can’t be happy while you’re working a dreary, dead-end day job that doesn’t leave you with enough energy to pursue your dreams, then take my advice – buy this book now and get moving. Life is short! Stop wasting time!

• There’s no fluff. Coming in at 52 pages, this book gets straight to the point and will have you up and at ‘em in no time. In fact Brian says that the book was originally over 200 pages long but he boiled it down to the bare essentials so as not to overwhelm you with too much superfluous information and padding. If only more authors would do this! I don’t know about you but I am a busy man and I like to just get in, get the information I need, and then get on with it.

Who Else is Ready To Get On With Fulfilling Their True Life Purpose?

If you’re happy in your work or have figured out what your life’s passion is – and how to make it pay so that you don’t need no stinkin’ day job, then don’t buy this book. It’s not for those who are content with their station in life and feel they have no more learning to do, no more adventures to go on.

But if that isn’t you then you need to find out what your One Thing is now and how to go for it and succeed. What are your other options? Keep working for the man forever?

Consider these pertinent questions from Brian’s website:

Why sacrifice almost half of your day (if you include commuting) 5 days a week just to enjoy your nights and weekends?

Why sacrifice the best time period of your life so you can enjoy your golden years?

Why put yourself through all this pain and misery for the majority of your adult life?

When did people lie down and accept drudgery, boredom and dissatisfaction as a fact of life?

It doesn’t make any sense.

As I said at the beginning of this article, I already know my true life purpose – and I am making it pay already – but reading this book made me feel even more resolute to move on up to the next level and “go for gold” as the cliché goes.

Now – I paid 25 bucks for “How to Find What You Love To Do…”, but for a short time Brian has reduced the price to about $19 so click through now to check it out and ask yourself this – if you spend $19 on a book that finally brings you the success you have craved all your life – then isn’t that worth it?

I reckon it is, so hop to it and Click Here Now to find out more about the book.

Photo by kirtaph

Do you find yourself confused as to what your main direction in life is? Do you find yourself exploring This and then That and then berating yourself because you reckon you should have spent that time working on One Major Purpose instead of allowing yourself to get distracted?

Well, if so, RELAX!

Maybe you aren’t wasting time at all!

Maybe – just maybe – you are in the process of creating something amazing and highly original by combining different concepts and fields into One New Thing – a new category even!

READ

Can’t see how this applies to you and your disparate interests? Well, then maybe you need to explore this concept a bit more. Some good books to read are “Purple Cow” by Seth Godin, “Blue Ocean Strategy” by W. Kim and R. Mauborgne and “The Medici Effect” by Frans Johansson. All great books about the importance and methods of creating extraordinarily original offerings.

DRAW

Another awesome method of seeing where the connections lie is mind-mapping. If you are such a tech-head that you need to, you can find software to help with this, but personally I prefer a pen and the back of an envelope – this way I just bang out the ideas in my head, explore the connections, and move on to doing some real work. I don’t recommend spending hours fluffing about with this kind of thing, because it’s not real work, but a quick mind-mapping sessions can certainly help when inspiration strikes – or when it doesn’t.

Fly in the Face of Convention

This concept of combining seemingly unrelated fields of endeavor into a new original category or offering can be difficult for others to understand if you try and spell it out to them as a hypothetical theory. For example, my (always evolving) offering involves combining original music, humour, writing, personal development and entrepreneurship into my One Thing, but unless it serves a purpose (such as to illustrate my point), I don’t try to get people to understand this ambitious plan. Why? Because …

A) I don’t need the let-down when people don’t get it (because it sounds ridiculous to them) and tell me I’m crazy.I know I’m crazy anyway – and I don’t give a fuck! I like it!

B) I don’t fully understand my One New Thing yet myself! It’s an ever-evolving exploration of Self, through which I hope to help others to realize their own True Nature and/or simply to enjoy living more.

C) Because you don’t have to be able to explain it as a theory. It’s just not necessary!

Have a look around and you will find that truly original Creators are Do-ers and tend to either not be very self-analytical, or if they are, they keep this to themselves and just get on with creating the Original Work.

Then what happens? Other, not-so-original thinkers come along, formularize the original innovations, and reproduce lame Robo-Creations that have no soul and are in every way inferior.

Case in point? Jimy Hendrix. Originality oozed out of the man’s pores; he was instincively unique. Since he blew everybody’s minds his style has been rehashed to the point where it is in itself a sanitized and overwrought cliche.

Don’t do the same old shit. Try harder! Combine your different interests and see what you can come up with! Analyse everything about yourself and find what it is that makes you You.

It’s not always easy, but actually being original, then working really hard at getting that “out there” is one of the major laws of success. Good luck!

If there is something you are truly shit scared of doing then I reckon that the best gift you can possibly give yourself is to step up to the plate and do it. But how do you get yourself off the couch and into the fire? Here’s a couple of personal examples of how I managed to confront my worst fears and come out reasonably unscathed.

Flying into the Face of Fear

Ok – so “feel the fear and do it anyway” has become one of many clichés in the Personal Development world, but nevertheless, like most clichés it contains a powerful truth. I have repeatedly found that if something is worth doing then it is probably going to be a bit scary. Why? Because it means stepping outside of your comfort zone and risking failure.

I can think of several occasions where this has been true for me: getting on an airplane to fly from Australia to Europe for example. Despite all the comforting statistics, my Taoist/Zen philosophies and my deep breathing techniques, I still hate flying and the longer the flight the more jittery I get. Nevertheless, it meant a hell of a lot to me to see Ireland, the country of my immediate ancestry and France, my wife’s country of birth, so I got on the damn plane and strapped myself in. The failure I was scared of was fairly remote (crashing) but like most fear, rational thinking had nothing to do with it. I was shitting bricks for months in advance and had repetitive nightmares (about falling out of a disintegrating airplane hull and down through the air to wind up bobbing about in a burning sea waiting to drown) in the weeks leading up to and during the trip away.

Well, suffice to say, the plane didn’t crash, although it did seem likely at one point. We were flying over the Himalayas and the old bird relentlessly shook and bumped like a bronco for three hours while lightning strikes outside briefly illuminated grim stewardesses faces, their South-East Asian complexions looking decidedly pale and disconcerted. Meanwhile my wife, who isn’t scared of flying – just of apparently imminent and genuine catastrophes – was sobbing uncontrollably into my lap about how she didn’t want to die this way.

That bit wasn’t so cool, but apart from that I enjoyed the trip immensely. If I hadn’t gone the pain of the real failure would have slowly have eaten away at me. Some opportunities you just have to take, not to do so would just lead to future dissatisfaction and remorse – and this would have been the real failure.

How To Puke and Shit at the Same Time

The airplane journey from Hell was a couple of years ago now, but just yesterday I confronted another fear and transmuted it into achievement: I stood up in front of a large crowd and delivered 5 minutes of my own original stand-up comedy material.

The reason I decided to do so was twofold. Firstly, I am a solo singer/songwriter and after many years of hit-and-miss banter between songs, ranging from brilliantly executed comedic genius to embarrassing, lame nervous mumbling, I have long desired to get my act together to the point where the bits between the songs are as reliably entertaining as the songs themselves. Secondly, I just love stand-up comedy so, so much and I have been writing my own material for a couple of years and secretly coveting this particular flavour of the limelight – after all, I know I am a funny guy, I just get too many laughs out of people to doubt this. So why not?

I’ll tell you why not … because cracking your mates up with spontaneous one-liners and standing up on stage delivering quality (funny) stand-up comedy are two very different things. I didn’t even need to have done any stand-up to know this is true – it’s just a well known fact. And making a mug of myself in front of rows of un-amused faces just scared the willies out of me.

So for years I avoided acting on it, but as part of my renewed commitment to my live music show this year, I decided it was time to bite the bullet. So I signed up (in a fit of bravado) online for the annual Raw comedy competition here in Melbourne, Australia. (Home of the International Melbourne Comedy Festival, Melbourne is an awesome place for live stand-up comedy.)

As the event drew closer I began to wonder if I should just call up and drop out. But no, I didn’t. Not because I am particularly brave but because the true extent of the fear I was going to have to face just wasn’t kicking in yet. Unlike long plane flights, I don’t get that nervous in advance of stage performing, mainly because I have been getting up and singing in public since I was eighteen (so that’s nearly half my life). But, I do get quite nervous the night before and all during the day of the event and I knew I would be super-nervous before this because of that fact that when it comes to stand-up comedy, quite obviously, I had no idea what I was doing. I was (and still am) a complete comedy noob.

Watching other people do something doesn’t prepare you for doing something. Reading “how to” books about doing something doesn’t prepare you for doing something. The only thing that prepares you is having a go and getting some experience under your belt.

Two weeks out from the event I realised that if I didn’t start preparing soon then I was a dead duck. But the trouble was I wasn’t sure where to rehearse. I sure as hell wasn’t going to do it at home on front of my wife and child, and I wasn’t about to shell out to hire a rehearsal room so I found a novel solution. I have been in the unenviable position lately of having to drive into the city between two and four times a week (for work). This drive takes me about an hour in the traffic, and everyday I see people apparently talking to themselves in other cars. I presume they are talking to people on speaker-phone into their cell phones. So, I figured, if I were to be practicing my stand-up routine aloud in the car to myself as I fly down the highway at 100 kilometers an hour, other drivers would probably assume I was just another tosser using his mobile phone on the go. Perfect!

After nearly two weeks, I had a routine that I hoped was good memorized, but I hadn’t yet bothered to time it. Often I would actually stop for a few seconds while I was running through it in order to concentrate on driving (it wouldn’t be very funny if I crashed while cracking funnies to myself now would it … or would it?). So I decided the time had come to go out to my bungalow office and put up with the fact that my wife and my neighbours could probably hear me and run through the routine with a stopwatch.

It came to 12 minutes! Whoops – the competition only gives each contestant 5 minutes each – and unlike the music business where people just tend to do little more than complain privately about stage-hogs who go over their allotted timeframe, in the comedy world you get a very blunt “fuck you” in the form of a red light in your face, followed shortly by loud music and a dead microphone should you fail to take the first hint!

So I went through the material and chopped it ruthlessly back to five minutes. Trouble was I had been over and over this stuff so much without any audience feedback that I had little idea if I was cutting out the funny stuff or not. I would just have to wait and see on that one.

The big day arrived, and although my wife (a classic ‘shrinking violet’) was apparently catatonic with fear, I felt ok. A little highly strung perhaps, but apart from a few truly non-Zen moments, I was cool … or so I thought.

It was an afternoon gig, and as I drove into town to face the music (although strangely not literally for once) I ran over my material one more time for good luck. Suddenly I was struck with a terror powerful enough to stop a nation. As far as I could tell, there was absolutely nothing funny about the useless drivel I had been rambling on about to myself over the past two weeks, and it would be best for everyone if I just turned the car around and went home and got really drunk by myself in the dirty gap under the house.

But no, fool that I am, I continued on. I walked into the venue and, as it was a first round heat of a competition, there were about twenty other wanna-be’s there for a briefing. I felt relieved that nothing the organisers had to say was disconcertingly new to me. Do your five minutes and get off basically. Not a problem. Then the doors opened and as I sat there waiting for my friend to rock up and hold my hand, it was just me and a bunch of gloomy, sweaty-palmed hopefuls sitting around, trying to avoid eye contact and sipping on beers a little too fast. It was very similar to the atmosphere in a plane shortly before take-off. Actually (minus actual screaming, I suppose) this was more like the atmosphere in a plane, shortly after take off, in which the captain has announced that he’s a lunatic terrorist and intends to fly the plane really fast into something really hard.

I truly didn’t care about winning the competition, I just wanted to do the gig, remember my lines, and hopefully get a few laughs, nevertheless the nerves began to play major havoc, especially when actual people began pouring through the doors in disturbingly large numbers. I had imagined a tiny crowd of about twenty other funny guys and their girlfriends, but obviously others in the line-up were not so shy of inviting their entire Facebook friends list along to the gig! Fuck!

Crunch Time…

(…”crunch” being the sound my balls make when they voluntarily compress together in an attempt to form a new black hole to suck me into in order to save me from hideous embarrassment and a life of bitter regret…)

Once I had watched about two contestants be really, really good (funny) and two others really, truly woeful, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to puke or shit or both at the same time.

Then my moment came, they called my name out over the pumping music, the applause still continuing from the act before and I was walking up the stairs to hit the stage.

How it went isn’t important, or maybe I am just saying that because it didn’t go fantastically well. Not that I can remember it very clearly. I don’t know about other performers, but my time on stage is usually all a vague blur to me as soon as it is over and the more nervous I am the more this is true.

I certainly wasn’t the funniest there on the day, not by a long shot, but I did get a few laughs here and there. That’ll do me for starters.

I didn’t forget my lines, but I went so fast due to extreme nervousness that I ended up reinstating some of the material I had axed. Really what I should have done (and I knew it at the time but just couldn’t seem to find the brakes) was slow down and give the jokes some air.

I discovered just how fucking horrible it is when you crack a joke and nobody laughs … and I felt the sweet, sweet relief when people did. I spontaneously dropped in a couple of ad-libbed moments, and to my surprise they got the biggest laughs. I don’t think this was because the jokes were better, but because they didn’t come out sounding scripted, which, to my detriment, the pre-prepared stuff did (but that’s the key to stand up, apparently, appearing spontaneous when delivering tightly scripted material).

Oh, and I didn’t get through to the next heat, but I really didn’t care about this. Why? Because I know for a fact that many of Australia’s most successful comedians didn’t make it through their heat in this long-running competition, and they made it anyway. How? Well, I don’t know but I can hazard a guess: persistence and hard-work. Or maybe they knew who to sleep with, I dunno…

I went home that night happy that I had faced my fear and rode it through. And I went home determined to do it again, and again, until I get better at it and can relax up there in the (incredibly bright) glare of the spotlight and just ramble away like I do when I am cracking up my mates.

So how do I suggest you face your fears and do it anyway? Well, just make the initial commitment and then get ready for the ride. Buy your plane ticket, book your spot on stage, or lock yourself in for whatever it is you want to do. Then, when the time comes, – - just do it.

…and you don’t even need a new pair of Nikes.

Photo by Fluzo

But it’s true; life on Earth is actually pretty fucked up.

We live on an insane planet full of misery, illness and evil. Right now millions of people are dying of horrible illness, injuries caused by accidents, crime and war or they are starving to death. They are starving to death because of “man’s inhumanity to man”, in other words they are dying because those in power are too evil and selfish to do the right thing.

People, often innocent women and children, are terrified, injured and/or dying because of war. Stop and think for a minute what war is, how truly insane and disgusting it is: Governments sending armed soldiers (usually under-educated, immature men who have been encouraged to act like savages) with high-tech weaponry to tear other people’s flesh, to smash heads and bodies in a splatter of gore, to put other people through massive, unbearable agony, burning, disfiguring, severing limbs – babies, children, women, men. The horror is so hard to face up to, so easy to ignore and yet so real for a great number of people.

“Disgusting”, you mutter – but ask yourself this: did you vote for a government that willingly sanctioned this kind of behaviour? Even Obama, while I am more than happy to give him the benefit of the doubt (God knows we could use a saviour) is, unfortunately, more than likely to give the green light to acts of barbarism and violence at some point in his reign.

You Were Never Asked If You Wanted To Be Here

Think about it. It’s one of the greatest tragedies of life, that we were squeezed out of our mother’s wombs only to discover sooner or later that we landed in a world of pain and suffering, some unnecessary, but ultimately unavoidable.

And for what purpose? Nobody knows. Some claim to know, but truly, nobody has a clue why we exist.

And we don’t exist for very long either. If you’re in your twenties, then I’ve got news for you: in the blink of an eye you’ll be in your mid-thirties and you’ll be wondering where the hell all that endless time went as life forces you to work and work and work and work…

So there it is, we all live pointless, doomed lives, and before you and your loved ones eventually die, you will no doubt experience suffering to some extent – most likely by painful, drawn-out illness.

So What Are You Going To Do About That?

That’s my point: Life is precious so what are you going to do with it?

And what are you going to do about all the extra, needless and easily avoidable suffering that evil people and corrupt systems add to the heap on top of the unavoidable sufferings of life? And this question goes for me too because – mark my words – I am as guilty of selfishness and inaction as the next guy.

What are you going to do? Fiddle with another wordpress widget while precious time slips away and while children watch their parents maimed and murdered? Write another top-ten-ways-to-hit-the-front-page-of-Digg while parents watch their children die of curable diseases because drug companies are too profit-driven to reach out and help? Watch another episode of Law and Order when you could be letting your light shine and inspiring people to build a better world?

These are the realities I am facing up to in 2009. What about you? Because soon my friend, you and I will be dead – and what if we ARE held accountable at the end? Will we hang our heads in shame? At this point I still believe that I would, and given the fact that death can come at any time, I know that I need to change this about myself and get moving.

It’s time to mobilize, people! Get busy!

By Seamus Anthony

I like to meditate; I can do it for hours. It was a very liberating experience discovering meditation. Not because I became suddenly enlightened or anything unrealistic like that but simply because it gave me an excellent excuse to do what I already loved to do so well – NOTHING.

Because that’s what meditation is basically, it’s sitting around doing nothing.

Sweet. How hard is that?

Not very.

Not when you’ve had as much practice at it that I have. You see I come from a long line of very, very lazy dudes. When faced with the choice of doing something constructive or simply sitting down with a nice hot cup of tea, the people in my family always choose the couch and cuppa option.

But meditation gives you a great way to do much the same but come off as looking a lot more constructive than you really are.

It’s a bit like how governments reclassify unemployed people (by putting them into training programs) so that they can say the unemployment rate has gone down.

In the past, when my girlfriend walked in on me sitting on a milk crate staring at the plumbing attached to the outside of the back-wall of the house and asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, I used to have no choice but to mumble “uhhh, nothing …sorry” and then rush off to do the dishes or whatever to make amends.

Nowadays I puff my chest up, act all insulted, “DO YOU MIND? I am MEDITATING and you are disturbing me! GO AWAY!”

So I reckon being a Zen master teaching meditation would have to a pretty cool job. I would be perfectly qualified for that job. And what a job! Power over people and a complete lack of any task whatsoever. I should start my own “consultancy” and charge fifty bucks a head per hour…

I can imagine it now… (insert Happy Days-style ‘daydream sequence’ wobbly-lines fade-out here)

“How to Sit on a Cushion and Do Nothing” By His Supreme Holiness Zen Yogi Master Seamus Shrinduparindada LazynaraTao

The Master walked in, said “Right you lot – just sit there and shut up!” and promptly did the same.

After ten minutes one of the students put up his hand to ask a question – “I just wanted to enquire as to my posture-”

“Posture?” squawked the Master “POSTURE? What the hell has posture got to do with anything?” He stood up, revealing a back that has been trained as a child to fit perfectly to the contours of any couch. He was a human banana; a walking text-book example of full-scale scoliosis.

“Look at me – I am a MASTER! Do you see me worrying about my posture?” Sitting down again, the Master scowled at the class wearing an expression of open contempt.

“Stop thinking about anything, including your posture – and just sit there and shut up.”

A hand shot up.

“But sir, I read that you should sit up and …”

“Shut UP! How do expect anyone to learn how to meditate if you keep TALKING?”

Ten minutes pass. Most of the students, beginners all, can’t stop wriggling and shuffling on their cushions.

“STOP SQUIRMING!”

Another ten minutes ticks past. One young lady has dropped off to sleep and is snoring ever so slightly. The Master silently rises and walks to where this young lady is having her lotus-nap. He pokes her gently with his foot and whispers:

“Excuse me love.” No response.

“Hel-loooo.” Still nothing.

“OI! MATEY! WAKE UP! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE DOING NOTHING – NOT SLEEPING!”

That did the trick.

After the group had practiced sitting still and doing nothing for about as long as it took for two people to quietly leave the room (one of them sobbing) and another one to run out screaming about “the voices, the voices”, the Master glances at his Rolex and realizes that his hour of hard work is nearly up.

“Stop meditating and listen up” he barks, “It’s question time.”

(And this is the truly awesome thing about being a self-professed Zen master – you don’t have to know anything because it is in your job description to ridicule any question you are ever asked as being irrelevant and to speak in completely impenetrable riddles.)

Your Meditation Questions Answered

Student: So if I find that I can’t stop thinking while I am meditating what should I do?

Master: Last week I had a really tasty tuna sandwich.

Student: While I was meditating I had a really grand vision of a woman riding a white horse. She brought me a message of peace and prosperity and asked me to share it with the whole world. Was this vision a valid meditation experience?

Master: When we are done here I would appreciate it if you’d stack your cushions in the cupboard up the back.

Student: My back and bum gets all stiff and sore when I meditate.

Master: That’s because your posture’s all wrong – DON’T YOU PEOPLE LISTEN TO A WORD I SAY?

Student: I think I have reached enlightenment!

Master: Oh yeah – sure you have – one meditation class and now you’re the master already?

It’s not as easy as that you know. It’s not like you can just apply yourself and expect it all to fall into place!

It takes many years of training – you must learn to do absolutely nothing ALL OF THE TIME.

Your problem is that you are too motivated. Check your attitude kid or forget about it. I started doing nothing when I was a small boy – you’re forty! You’ve spent your life building up a business empire by always doing things! Being constructive. You’re a mess! Don’t make me laugh!

Student: Now that I have begun my journey into Universal Consciousness, what should I do next.

Master: You should give me that fifty bucks you owe me and get the hell out of here!

By Seamus Anthony

Do you secretly go for gold while publicly keeping your stated intentions down-to-Earth? And does this have any effect on your outcomes?

Here’s a scenario: you’re helping out an old friend or relative that you haven’t seen for a while, somebody who (thinks) they know you backwards when out comes the inevitable question:

“So … what are you up to these days then?”

I don’t know about you but I have long grown tired of being honest with those closest to me about these questions. And why? Because (God love ‘em) most of my family and at least some of my best mates are unfortunately, mired down in the bog of life due to a lack of self-confidence. And while I don’t think they do it intentionally, they tend to try and drag everybody else down into the quicksand with them.

It was a bit different when I was younger, I used to let ‘em have it: POW! Right between the eyes – here’s what I am going to do! How do you like them apples?

And I used to cop some flack too, but A) I was young and, frankly, full of myself so I didn’t care what they thought and B) they were still prepared to give me some benefit of the doubt.

But time has passed and at my age (35) men are supposed to be ‘sensible’ and ‘reliable’ and basically just bring home the bacon already and otherwise shut the hell up.

Yeah right… Believe me if I COULD be that normal and uncomplicated I would be but I is an entirely different beast. I am unconventional, problematic and basically a creatively-inspired fuck-up so let’s just forget about all this Mr. Steadfast palaver right here and now.

… Forgive me; I’m rambling … My point is…

DO YOU FEEL COMFORTABLE LETTING PEOPLE IN ON YOUR DREAMS?

These days I find it is better to keep my public announcements on the down-low. I prefer to let people in on my outrageous plans bit-by-bit so that they don’t freak out on me. This also allows me to change my strategy as I see fit, without having to wear the Doubting Legion’s accusations of inconsistency and megalomania. (Both of which I may well be guilty of … but that doesn’t mean I need my face rubbed in it!)

BUT sometimes I wonder if I should be a little more forthright, like I was in my early twenties. Time has taught me restraint and to be suspicious of letting too much information out into the light. I tend to play my cards close to my chest and this approach has served me well enough – but maybe it is also good to just stand up and state what you want so that others can help you get it.

In fact I know that this is the case. I certainly need to be more forthright about what I want in order to allow those I mix with to assist me – but frankly my goals are so ludicrous that I am still being cautious about it.

What I have decided to do, and I’d be interested to know your opinion on this strategy, is to publicly announce my plans very soon, not because I expect many people to give a shit but because I think it could be a good idea (on a personal level) for me to do so

I mentioned doing this in Part One of this series and I haven’t forgotten but to be honest, I am stalling on doing this out of fear of publicly failing. I’ve done that more than once and it’s not much fun, but still, I reckon that happened because I previously spent way too much time running off down side-alleys instead of remaining true to my deepest burning desires. I’ve come a long way to get back to the point where I have no intention of chasing anything other than my one Chief Definite Aim, my One Thing, and I feel it is time to share that with the world. I need to do so not out of ego but simply to free up the energy that has stagnated around my Dream and allow things to happen without the hindrances of fear and doubt.

But What About You?

Do you need speak up and let the world know what you REALLY want to do with your life?

Do you already freely and regularly enthrall the world with your big audacious plans?

Or do you keep your outrageous dreams stifled up inside like dirty little secret?

Feel free to come out of the closet in the comments section below; it might give me confidence to do the same!

Photo by a4gpa

For the uninitiated, Think and Grow Rich is pretty much the definitive work on applying your self to get what you want out of life (you can substitute “Rich” for any goal you want, be it “Lose Weight” or *ahem* “Get Laid”). And yes, with a title like that, it does sound like the kind of shit that any sane person would avoid at all costs, but then I am not sane and neither are most successful people.

First – Get Your Freebie

This book was researched and written over a period of twenty odd years and was first published waaaaay back in 1937, but don’t let the antique nature of the book put you off, it is easy to read and as punchy as the latest “thang” to hit the shelves. AND it’s in the public domain which means it is really easy to get it for free as an eBook and legally too … so whatever you do NEVER pay for an electronic copy of Think and Grow Rich.

I read it a couple of years ago and have become a fan of the process contained within. Despite the cheesy title, it is really quite a great system for getting what you need and want out of life and while it isn’t too complicated it certainly is the real thing as compared to miserable rubbish like the Secret that has been doing the rounds lately.

And yes it IS about Law of Attraction but that is just one component of the book. It is also about other things, much more down-to earth things, like *gulp* hard work and persistence.

So all-in-all Think and Grow Rich is an awesome book and I totally recommend it. It is also quite challenging to follow, but as I will explain soon, it doesn’t need to be.

But What About the Hidden Secret?

When you read Napoleon Hill’s book, you will no doubt become intrigued by the way he hints that there is a secret for success that was handed down to him by the then Richest Man in the World title-holder, Andrew Carnegie. Hill doesn’t spell it out for us because he believes that you will know it when you are ready and then it will jump right off the page at you.

Well, you guessed it, I have my own theory as to what this hidden secret is…

BUT

So does Brian Kim in his eBook “The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich”.

My Version of The Hidden Secret

Well I have to say it has never jumped off the page for me but without really doing any serious re-analysis of the book I did read this quote by Carnegie and just assumed that this must be the secret that he told Hill and which was somehow contained within the book:

“Here is the prime condition of success, the great secret. Concentrate your energy, thought and capital exclusively upon the business in which you are engaged. Having begun in one line, resolve to fight it out on that line, to lead in it: adopt every improvement, have the best machinery, and know the most about it. This is the great secret…” Andrew Carnegie

Now it seemed to me to be obvious that when he said “this is the great secret” that he meant what he said and that there wasn’t likely to be some other great secret out there that he also believed in. After all he said “THE” great secret not “A” great secret. And this was where I got the idea for my Curly’s Law eBook which, by the way, you can download free here.

However I recently saw the sales page for Kim’s “Hidden Secret” book and I couldn’t resist buying it to see what he made of all this … and I must admit I was pretty skeptical at first.

But as I read through it last night I came to see that while the above version of Carnegie’s secret is a pretty good one, Brian Kim’s analysis is also a very strong case in point.

Brian Kim’s Version of the Hidden Secret

I guess the main difference between Kim and me is that I am pretty darn lazy in a lot of ways and I was never going to sit down and analyze the crap out of some self-help book just to figure it all out – and good thing I didn’t because Kim has done it for me! He explains in his book how he became obsessed with the secret and poured over the book for weeks and months on end until he finally believed he had ‘got it’.

And while I still like my Curly’s Law version, the “just do one thing” approach, I can see now that Brian Kim has shown that this is really just one aspect of a 5 step process that Napoleon continually hints at over and over again throughout the book.

Kim reveals the secret pretty early in the book, and at first I was under whelmed, but the more I read through his painstaking analysis of what Napoleon Hill means and why it is so powerful and obvious (in the way that all great ideas seem obvious once some other genius has revealed it to you) the more I was convinced.

Once You Know The Second Version of the Hidden Secret Your Success Comes Naturally

Getting back to my comment earlier about how the Think and Grow Rich system can be hard to follow, Kim actually shows how it isn’t hard to follow at all once you realize that there is a specific order that you MUST follow in order to see the kind of massive success you desire. Then he challenges you to think about a time when you DID succeed in something and analyze the process you went through to see if it correlates to the Hidden Secret’s 5 step process. I did this for a few examples of my own success and was pleasantly surprised to note that I ABSOLUTELY DID unwittingly follow this process every single time I was ever successful in meeting a goal and that it wasn’t really hard work, but rather a spontaneous and enjoyable process of getting what I really truly wanted out of life.

So I am sold. The Hidden Secret in Think and Grow Rich isn’t one of those Rah-Rah-Rah books that leave you temporarily and artificially inflated but is rather a fantastic companion to the already brilliant original work that will make you feel both relaxed about your natural ability to succeed in life and will also motivate you in a very steady and true fashion that will last for years until the job is done. I have just signed up as an affiliate seller of the product (makes no price difference to you) and I have no problem in heartily recommending you pop over to the Hidden Secret webpage and invest in a copy right now. I have no doubt that it will really move you in a deep way, and if you haven’t read Think and Grow Rich yet then never fear because you get a free copy with the Hidden Secret Ebook.

And there is a money back guarantee so how can you lose? You can’t – so get to it. You have dreams to make happen don’t you? Well I don’t recommend any old shit so do yourself a favor and make a tiny investment in your own success already – you won’t regret it – click here now.

Cheers, Good to be back after some time off.

Seamus Anthony

P.S. Hold the Phone!

My brain must be suffering from the effects of all those tasty beverages I had during my holidays because I didn’t even realise that when you buy the Hidden Secret eBook now you get two other free bonuses THAT I MISSED OUT ON! Man! That sucks for me, but it’s good for you I guess! (I might have to write to Brian and ask if he will send me mine.)

Now I haven’t read them yet so I will just cut and paste what he had to say about these two bonuses:

BONUS#2: ($12 value) Get a FREE copy of my special report: The Three Biggest Mistakes People Make With The Hidden Secret – make sure to read this so you don’t make the same mistakes!

BONUS#3: ($15 value) – Get a FREE copy of The Hidden Secret Workbook – This 26 page workbook will help you apply the Hidden Secret and become consistent. It also contains helpful notes and summaries to help you remember and understand the information from the book.

If you are still reading this then you KNOW you want that eBook so click here to get your hot little hands on it now.