Change Your Life | Rock the World

For the most part, people are douche bags. For the most part, they’d rather rant and complain than try learning anything new or discovering facts about whatever they’re ranting about. For the most part, they just want to bitch about things being the way they are and then at the same time ridicule anything that’s different.

What they don’t realize, and will most likely never realize, is how scared they are. Yup, that’s right, scared. Like whiny, cry baby little girls who didn’t get enough love from mommy today.

There, I said it.

What are they scared of? Well frankly, anything that doesn’t fit into their idea of how things should be.

So why should you care? Well, because what they do and how they think affects you.

We can’t really help but have the people around us influence us, at least to some degree. It’s just sort of the nature of things. So it’ll often happen that when we’re faced with someone, or more likely many people, who don’t want us to be different than what they’re used to, a lot of us will just give up and do as they say, rather than go against the group.  Read more...

I might be stating the obvious here, but from what I’ve seen, I’d say that there’s a direct correlation between how responsible and capable someone is and how giving they are towards others.

I sort of see it as a long line, kind of like a string. On one end are the people who take care of their own shit, are helpful and supportive towards the people they care about, and generally have a very positive attitude. On the other end are the people who are lazy, selfish and negative. And then, of course, there are the varying degrees in between.

What the people at the negative end don’t seem to understand is that when they selfishly hoard more stuff for themselves, they actually end up with less than they would have if they were more willing to give it away.

Let me explain. First of all, I’m not talking about some some vague theory about the universe bringing you what you want when you’re creating good energy and being in tune with the world, or something like that. I don’t know anything about that stuff.  Read more...

A few months back, I was watching an episode of The Daily Show, as I often do, and good ol’ Jon Stewart had a guest on by the name of Atul Gawande, who was there to plug his book The Checklist Manifesto.

I was really intrigued by their conversation. The Checklist Manifesto is essentially about getting things done efficiently. Atul Gawande is a surgeon, and he found that going through a specific checklist to make sure that every last detail has been taken care of before starting any given surgery works infinitely better than just trying to remember everything, and prevents a ton of possible complications. He has exact numbers for comparison. You should check it out.

Having a written checklist kept a lot of the mundane tasks from being forgotten, or just ignored. Because too often, something would go wrong, and that mundane task that wasn’t completed and prepared beforehand, just caused a huge problem. And that’s not good in a serious situation, like, I don’t know, performing surgery.

So, OK, checklists are good, and they make people more efficient and better prepared. I’m not telling you anything new. What surprised me was when I found out how many people, particularly in the medical field that Gawande describes, are resistant to using them.  Read more...

You may or may not already know this, but I’m a little bit of a movie buff. I’m no Roger Ebert or anyone like that, but I do see my share of movies, good and bad. And it’s happened a few times in the past after telling someone about how bad I thought a particular movie was, that they’d ask me, “Why would you even bother seeing that movie?”

Why would I bother seeing it? Because how else would I know that I didn’t like it? The best I could do otherwise is guess that I probably wouldn’t like it, but that’s not particularly accurate.

It’s kind of like when someone complains that a book that they’ve never read is blasphemous and needs to be burned. Say what?

But anyway, the point is that it’s the experience, and what I’ve learned from that experience, that’s important.

What is life without experiencing as much as you can? Dull and kind of pointless.

And before I get any hate mail, I want to be clear that I’m not telling you to experience everything possible, like murdering babies or something crazy. Let’s be realistic, please. I’m talking about experiencing what you can within reason. And you know what I mean by “within reason” so don’t be a dick about it.  Read more...

Recently, my friend Dan Callahan wrote a little something on his blog about his mentor Jack Jackson, who recently had some medical complications, and Dan wanted to be sure to point out the amount of impact that Jack had on him and others during his many years as a drug and alcohol rehabilitation coach.

You can read Dan’s post here: http://www.rehabilitation-center.org/blog/purpose-of-life

I left a comment there in response, but I wanted to expand on what I wrote in full article format, if I may.

Dan made a great point about how important it can be to make a positive impact on another person, and I said that I agree and I mentioned how, as a result, I often recommend teaching as a possible career path for anyone who’s looking for a new line of work, and looking for something that they might find fulfilling and gratifying.

I realized that I recommend that to a lot of people, but I’ve never mentioned it here before. Which is pretty stupid of me. Sorry about that.

But here I am now. So let me explain what I’m talking about.  Read more...