[ファブリス]

The strangest secret ... is that man becomes what he thinks about.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Anybody familiar with these ideas?

What I find difficult is that when you set out your goals, the more you dream, the more you think about it.... you get too excited and then it makes it harder to sleep No wait, seriously!

So lately I'm just trying to hold some goals and think "It'll be done when it'll be done". Which is still frustrating. Ack.

That was good. Thanks ファブリス.

I don't have much to say, except the other day in the shower 45 minutes passed in a snap and I was still standing there, so excited and thinking of all the possibilities of the new idea that popped into my mind for what I can do with my life. So I agree with you, new goals and ideas can be really exciting. But then it fades later.

I got out a pen and paper and wrote down everything he said in the checklist. Hopefully I'll be able to implement it.

ファブリス Wrote:So lately I'm just trying to hold some goals and think "It'll be done when it'll be done". Which is still frustrating. Ack.

So true. When I begin thinking about my goals, the ideas and the possibilities make me want to jump all over it, to attack everything and achieve everything at once. My plans take over, and I get so energetic and fired up that it's easy, sometimes, to burn out.

It's happening now for me with formal study of Japanese. I'm still trying to find a comfortable yet challenging rhythm to my study pattern; I know it's better to hold myself back and be okay with steady progress, but it's hard not to jump all over every smart.fm course, every textbook, every idea that I get from this forum.

As for the recording, I've heard it before, though perhaps not the exact same version.
The best part for me is definitely the quote at the end, about doing your work. I think he says the quote is from a man called Dean Briggs, though I could have misheard. Tried looking him up to no avail. Does anyone know anything about this guy?

This kind of puts me off a bit, and it does so almost immediately when he sites 'experts' who weren't really experts about anything. He could just be misrepresenting them, but more likely he is representing them correctly, and they just weren't very good. Potential isn't something that we can quantify, so whatever experts he is sighting are just bullshitting their way along, saying we use 1% or 5% of our potential. They are, in a way, the same mediocre peers that he mentions throughout his talk, that we all blindly follow and judge ourselves by. Only, these mediocre peers have doctoral degrees implying in some way that they know more than these other mediocre peers, and the fact is that they don't. He even uses the phrase “all the experts,” hah!

(See this video:

He touches briefly on what it means to be this sort of 'expert' at about 3 minutes in. Incidentally, watch this from part one if you want an example of a man who is a lot more inspiring and has a lot more to teach us than any motivational speaker ever could. Not to mention, he was a man who really was a genius himself, and really did lead a ridiculous life)

Nightingale's advice seems to make sense in many ways, and certainly you should spend your time trying to improve yourself. But there are lots of individual points he makes, or information he uses, that seem to be silly or mistaken.

Reminds me of a Jukugo I just learned.

自業自得 (じごうじとく)

Or you reap what you sow, your own conduct determines your own reward.

theBryan Wrote:Reminds me of a Jukugo I just learned.

自業自得 (じごうじとく)

Or you reap what you sow, your own conduct determines your own reward.

In Swedish it's "Som man bäddar får man ligga" which means "As one makes their bed, one has to lie in it" literally.

Not in response to Nightingale, but the more recent wave of popularity of motivational secrets:

Ha, ha, ha...

[ファブリス]

Tzadeck Wrote:See this video:

He touches briefly on what it means to be this sort of 'expert' at about 3 minutes in. Incidentally, watch this from part one if you want an example of a man who is a lot more inspiring and has a lot more to teach us than any motivational speaker ever could. Not to mention, he was a man who really was a genius himself, and really did lead a ridiculous life

Thanks for the link. With all due respect for the man (none else than Richard Feynman), he does tense up a lot when he talks about those "experts". So like in his story about his boy and his girl, some people want to hear the "scientific motivational speakers" and others like me, would tend towards something that speaks more towards your own inner experience.

I dont discredit what he says at all, but I feel that science todays continues to ignore our inner worlds, which have been explored for thousands of years by previous and current civilizations. In these aspects of course when he says "social science" it's not going to happen tomorrow that we will be able to put a formula on the interaction between men and women, say. So it's fairly safe for him to assume that all self-appointed experts in those fields will never match his criterias for being a true expert.

When I hear his talk, or see movies like "The Secret" I think of it as a kind of popularization of ideas that are way outside of a lot of people's lifestyle. So in a sense even if movies like "The Secret" have a lot of pseudo-science BS based on their views quantum physics (eg. "law of attraction" "law of vibrations"), I think there is still a positive outcome for these talks. I think those self-appointed motivational speakers and experts in their fields should come clean with their exact backgrounds, so that we can decide if we want to listen to them, based on our criterias (yours and mine would differ then); ... but at the same time there is a place for them, and they have truths to say too.

That skit about "The Secret" is funny. There's been lots of talk about that movie and subsequent books. A huge commercial enterprise.. funny in a way that they DO seem to eat their own dog food. I.e. they reap an abundance of $$$ for their motivational movie and books. But what if you watch "The Secret" as a kind of popularization of old wisdom, perennial truths. Some ideas that are way out of the concerns of many people entranced in today's lifestyle. Perhaps it is wrong to use pseudo science to explain made-up laws such as the "law of attraction" or the "law of vibrations". If you look at it at 1st degree, you'll want to laugh it off like in this puppet video (yukkuri's link). But you can look at it from a deeper level.. Does your reality need to be constricted to a currently accepted world-view of what is scientifically true and what is not?

Sometimes when I hear these guy talk I wonder if they really believe what they say at 1st degree. Do they really believe there is a universal "law of attraction" ? Does a Yoga teacher really believe that the students are connected to the spririt of guru-ji (the guy who wrote down the yoga sutras thousands of years ago) at the beginning of the class when they chant some verses? Perhaps the teacher does believe it, or perhaps he knows that it means that by practicing yoga the students are in a way connected to the ideas and concepts, and so in a way are making alive today the mind of the long deceased guru-ji. It's not all black and white... So do these guys in "The Secret" really believe there is a "Law of attraction" that science could somehow describe in gorgeous details? Again I find it funny that it doesn't matter so much... because perhaps there IS in fact such a phenomenon, but so complex and involving so many variables that you could popularize it as "law of attraction", and it's gonna work for some people. Or maybe it's all BS... but my point is, I strongly believe you should listen to your own truths and not accept things that the scientific worlds deems "true". Both the pseudo-science self-appointed experts and Richard Feynmann are wrong, in my opinion.

(yeah it's Sunday ;-))

Haha, I got quite a reply out of you. I'm not a scientist myself at all. My interest is only in epistemology, theories of truth and the like.

Replying to what you said is a bit hard, but I'll try to do my best to make a couple of points.

First, I think it's a bit of a misunderstanding to say that science is ignoring our inner worlds. Science is methodologically limited. We have what has become a relatively standard philosophy of science which gives us a set of rules which we follow in science. Because of these rules there are certain things which we can apply science to and certain things we cannot.

To use a concrete example, there is a great going on in the non-scientific world about science and religion and to what degree they conflict with one another. Science methodologically can have nothing to do with religion as long as religion is talking about non-material things. If you can't directly observe it or measure it, it has nothing to do with science. Science does not however, say that there is no such thing as something non-material, or that it is stupid to believe in non-material things. That is, science has no metaphysical position on non-material things.

So it is the same with things having to do with our inner world. As long as it is not a thing that can be measured, or is not something that is observable, then science can have nothing to do with it. Like religion, inner worlds are methodologically outside the realm of science, but science actually takes no metaphysical stance on them. So I think that to say that it ignores them is misleading. It's like saying that people who study political science are ignoring geology! Political science doesn't have any stance on geology, and why would it? It's simply a field that deals with a different thing. The way science is talked about shows that often people think of it as a universal study of everything, but really it's limited to a small amount of things in the same way political science is.

I also think it's a mistake to think of science as a collection of facts which the scientific world deems as true--it's not (partly because science is a methodology, not a series of facts, but that's not so important here). In fact, I think the most interesting thing about science is that it really has little to do with what any given person thinks is true or not. For example, if you take Newton's law of gravity and you measure the gravitational force of the planets you can discover the orbit of the planets. And any individual person can do these calculations, and baring that nobody makes mistakes they all get the answer. And then, when they look at Mercury, they'll all notice that the answers don't come out quite right, so they bracket the data. This is true no matter who does it. When new theories are proposed, all we can do is do the experiments with the new theory, and see how well the agree with data regardless of what anyone thinks. Because of global warming debates and things like that, we imagine science a bit different than it actually works without the filter of the media and politics. Really, it's quite objective--that doesn't make it true, but it's a very interesting aspect of it.

I wasn't meaning to belittle non-scientific views of the world. By necessity, most of my thoughts on the world are non-scientific because, as I tried to explain above, science can only apply to very few things we experience. Incidentally, I don't think Richard Feynman was trying to belittle them either (earlier in this full video he gives love as an example of something that is very beautiful and important and has nothing to do with science or mathematics. In other works elsewhere he discusses these things a bit more). My problem was more than Nightingale was using scientific language, acting as if what he was talking about was science or objective fact, when in fact it wasn't anything of the sort. It's misleading is all. We should be honest about our limitations.

Incidentally, I do follow a lot of the ideals he outlines. Thinking for yourself and non-conformity are ideals I share with him. I also share maxims like not wasting your time watching TV and making definite goals.

[ファブリス]

Tzadeck, thanks for your comments. Didn't mean to belittle science either, just I wish sometimes the world wasn't so dualistic. Maybe I am using my idea of science as a scapegoat for other things.