Why human beings need to involve themselves in games of strategy and adventure online, effectively playing games within a game I don’t understand.

What better game to play than the one you’re already playing - the game of life? Why sit in front of a computer and play Quake, SIM City or some other video game with limited choices, experiences and outcomes that you need to pay for with time, and mental effort that will lead you absolutely nowhere.  Playing such a game over the course of a couple hundred hours will give you a final screen that turns into a mediocre fireworks explosion or says simply, “Congratulations, you’ve conquered the game.  Don’t miss our next game, Quake II which will arrive in stores just before Christmas 20xx.”

Why do some people spend hundreds or even thousands of hours pitting themselves against fictional characters in a game with a meaningless outcome? The big picture is that there’s no real goal or good purpose to these games. They’re mind-candy designed to stimulate some basic human interest. In SIM City its creating functioning cities. In Quake its about exploring unknown places, conquering enemies and extreme violence that we couldn’t otherwise partake of in reality.

In 1995 I think it was, I became interested in adventure video games like Doom II and Duke Nukem. They were novel at the time. It was an amazing concept to be able to play people from across the USA in ‘death match’ tournaments.  It was glorious fun and I spent a couple hundred hours playing, sometimes all night until I had to drag myself away to attend graduate classes the next morning.

When I think of the couple hundred hours I wasted I can’t believe I took part in it.  Why did I play them?  What did I get as a result?

Maybe some relaxation in a schedule filled with school, work and relationships.

But hundreds of hours?  What if I’d meditated instead?  What if I’d written a book?  Learned something online that mattered?  What if I spent those couple hundred hours learning some programming languages that could have been applied toward the year 2000 scare? I knew guys making $150/ hour updating old code from 1998-2000.  What if I had tutored someone and saved up some money to buy a mountain bike and get a different type of fitness (I was running a lot at the time)?

What if I would have spent the time talking to friends?  Volunteering somewhere?  Starting a business?

There are thousands of choices in this, the most awesome game.  There are infinite choices available with infinite possible results. This is the real game. Real life - as real as it gets, and yet some people don’t want to play THIS game. They are afraid of this game. How sad is that?

This is the only REAL game worth playing. This is the only one that matters even a little bit. In the big, big picture this entire game of life might mean the outcome for our future for the next 30,000 millenia. Or it might mean nothing. Better to act like it means a lot, than the other way around since there is always this chance that this life is what all future experience will be based on. That’s a sobering thought.

Isn’t life on it’s own thrilling enough? The outcomes, the rewards are infinitely more compelling than reaching a screen that says, “Congratulations! You killed 78,667 fictional chunks of code designed to attack you weakly within a GUI 2-D interface.”

TV is the all-time greatest waste of time affecting more people in more cultures than computer games probably ever will. In a way, computer video games are even less purposeful than TV. That’s saying a hell of a lot. Computer games have less intrinsic value than TV.

I challenge you today to stop playing any kind of computer game or watching TV. These two meaningless time wasters are better replaced by… well, anything.

Instead do something like…

• Learn a new sport or create one.
• Take part in a sport or exercise you already love.
• Start a stretching program.
• Use the computer to research something you want to learn about.
• Learn meditation, the ultimate relaxation and stress reliever. Download my free meditation course e-book.
• Question your religion… there must be something bugging you about it - see what others are saying about it.
• Teach your child how to do something s/he is interested in - not that you’re interested in.
• Read one of my favorite books Children, the Challenge; Think on These Things; or No Religion, by Buddhadhassa Bhikku; Hannibal, Thomas Harris.
• Start writing a book!
• Get a RSS Reader from Google and subscribe to some interesting blogs with it. It’s an amazing time saver. What’s a RSS reader?
• Start researching how to position yourself for the Ultimate Job.
• Every time you want to play a video game or watch TV get out a sheet of paper and write 10 things you could be doing instead.

Choose one or two and do them!

Best of Life!

Vern

This applies to a man or a woman, though a woman would probably have much more success with it. What have you got to lose? Just your marriage if you don’t try it!

Cut off all the hair from your head.

In 1996 as I began to meditate I realized something about the way women looked at me. They lusted after me to put it bluntly. I’m not Brad Pitt and I’m not a political powerhouse or wealthy mogul. But I realized something back then. I’m pretty damn attractive. Too attractive to have these women drooling over me because I was newly married and didn’t need the aggravation. Come on guys, you know what I’m talking about. (I hope this came across as humor!)

So, I was recently married and I was getting the usual eye-traffic coming my way at the university where I was finishing up graduate school. Being a student of psychology I enjoyed doing little social experiments to see if I could learn something about life. After a visit to see my brother in New York I decided I’d cut my hair down to about one eighth of an inch and see if people looked at me differently. My brother, who has been effectively bald since the age of twenty-one told me that not having hair is different than having hair. People don’t treat him the way they treat me because I have hair. He seemed to be jealous of me having hair when he didn’t - especially since I was older by four years.

My head was shaved in the Air Force years before - but that was done at the base where every man’s head was shaved. I wanted to see - does hair make a difference in how people treat me? Specifically, I wanted to see - do women treat me in a different way than when I had hair. Friends and strangers - were there differences that I could perceive?

I bought some clippers and put on the #1 level plastic piece. A “1″ is a close cut. It’s 1/4 to 1/8″ of an inch. It took all of five minutes to clip it all off. Wow. I went from a preppy and adorable full head of dirty blond hair down to stubble in minutes. It was comical to look at myself in the mirror. Already I knew the answer - people would definitely treat me differently. I couldn’t even come to grips with the new look for a few days.

Over the next few weeks I noticed a very real change in the way my friends treated me.

The most common question asked was, WHY did you do that? Apparently the shock of reality was almost too much for my female friends who thought me attractive before. They said things like, “It looked so much better before.” “Why do you want to look like a skinhead?” Apparently my head was so white because my hair was blond that I looked like a skinhead to some. I didn’t act like a skinhead any more than I did with hair - but, this was the reaction I got from some people. Apparently the stubble-head incites fear in some. I guess I did look skinheadish - but inside I couldn’t have been further from that.

I noticed a huge difference in the behavior of strangers toward me. Prior to shaving my head I got a fair number of looks my way during the day. I think everyone at the university gets their fair share of looks since out of 35,000 students there must be 100 that think any person looks good enough to make eye contact with.

Well, after I shaved my head I didn’t get the usual looks and eye contact that I got before. I still got some - and it wasn’t from people staring because I looked like a skinhead. I don’t think anyway. I began to get looks from a different type of person that I didn’t get looks from before. Bad girls. Girls with tattoos and smoking outside the classrooms, even teenagers would look at me quite a bit more and smile. It was bizarre. When I had hair I can’t remember ever having a bad girl look my way or go out of her way to make eye contact with me. When I had no hair - apparently they thought I was a bad boy and that appealed to them.

With friends they seemed to distance themselves from me a little bit. It seemed like they acted more seriously toward me and didn’t joke around or flirt as much if they were girl friends.

Anyway - a very interesting experiment that you should try as a man. As a woman I think you would experience really profound differences in the way men and other women treated you. Some would look at you as if you had turned lesbian. Some would think you a skinhead. Some would think you have a medical problem. Some would think you had a mental problem.

I’m considering making social experiments a part of this web site. I have a few more to share with you from growing up in the USA - but, since now I’m in Thailand - I wonder about the generalizability of experiments I do here. Would you still find them interesting? Not sure.

Here in Thailand I’ve shaved my head - sometimes with a razor (see pic) - just so I don’t have to think about hair being mashed down by my motorbike helmet. It’s cooler and nobody gives me strange looks here. The Thai women also have a similar reaction as in America. Less looks after I clip or shave my head. It’s really strange to realize the effect first-hand.

So - if you’re cheating or plan on cheating or could see yourself cheating - shave your head as soon as possible. Use a razor and go totally hairless if you’re just too sexy for your own good.  See how sexy you are then.

Huh?  Still too sexy?  Shave your legs and arms too.

STILL?  Shave your eyebrows smooth and pluck your eyelashes.

STILL??????? Ok, Ok, see a professional I can’t help.

Best of Life!

Vern

For most of us the ultimate job would be to collect a huge salary for doing something fun. My penultimate idea of the ideal job would be surfing. No, not competing, that’s hard work. I just mean just soul surfing at say, Launiopoko Beach Park in Maui every time the urge hit. A woman would stop by my two-story beachfront hut and hand me a million dollars each month. That would be the ultimate job and no, it doesn’t exist.

But an acceptable, close to perfect job does exist for me and for you though you may need to accept a lower income for a while (or forever). See the “How little do you need?” series if you’re having trouble coming to grips with that concept.

Straight out of college or high school and looking for work most of look for a job working for someone else’s company. It’s safe. Sometimes it’s too safe, the money is good enough and complacency kicks in. A person in this situation might stay in that same job until they retire in 40 years. Others will get bored and try another job probably again working for someone else.

We go after everything we want - the best of everything in so many areas, but not our jobs where we spend eight to ten hours a day doing something we probably don’t want to be doing if we had a choice. We DO have a choice, but we continue on mindlessly accepting it.

WHY is that?

In one word, fear. Fear of the difficult path. Fear of not making enough money. Fear of trying to get the job you’d love and being rejected over and over or facing ‘insurmountable’ difficulty trying.

Everyone knows what their ultimate job is. We’ve all spent time thinking about it. But most of us haven’t taken even one step toward it. Usually our self-talk is that there are so few people doing it in the world or we’d need to take a profound pay cut. Maybe your idea of the ultimate job is skydiving out of planes and filming a team doing aerial stunts. Not many people in the world are making that happen for themselves. But I know one thing, YOU could be one of them.

The world is a big place I’ve been finding out the last 10 years. Even if you exhaust your efforts to find the perfect job in the USA you could go abroad and try there. I think the USA provides opportunities for anyone that is motivated to get their ultimate job. If none exist, you can make the opportunity yourself. A driven person can do anything. Look at this guy who strapped jet engines to his back and flew around in circles at almost 200 mph. Since being in Thailand I’ve met other full time bloggers and two guys that had fishing guide businesses in Alaska. Their ‘job’ was to take tourists fishing in some of the most pristine natural streams and lakes in the world. How strange is that to meet two different guys doing that across the planet in Thailand? There must be more of those opportunities than I ever would have thought.

Over time my idea of the ultimate job changed a lot. Currently my idea of the ultimate job is what I’m doing. You’re reading it. Blogging is my ultimate job and I’m making it work. I’ve written in a journal since grad school and I never stopped writing fiction, e-books and long articles for web sites I’ve had. I decided about a year ago to focus on blogging full time and that would be it. This is my ultimate job but I’ve sacrificed a lot to make it work… for instance, I’m not living in Hawaii where the cost of living is outrageous, I’m living in Thailand where my electric bill was $3 this month and water bill was $4.50. Rent was $100. Food was about $100 this month. Gas? I have a motorbike so, at $5 a gallon gas was just about $40. Will I ever make enough money blogging to move from Thailand back to Hawaii? I don’t know. Does it matter? No, not really. If I can just continue to write articles and survive - that’s what I’m doing. I’m happy as a turtle in mud.

Some Ultimate Jobs:

Blogging about anything you love.
Fishing guide, anywhere.
Hiking guide, Maui, Oahu, Kauai, Fiji, Samoa, Tahiti, Western USA, Alaska, Canada, Swiss Alps, Thailand.
Test driver for new sport super-cars.
Dressing room attendant for Charlie’s Angels movie set.
Travel photographer.
Travel writer.
Actor, Actress. Seriously - this must be the best job in the entire world. Nobody on the planet gets paid more for doing less.
Movie extra that acts only as the recipient of massages.
Professional sports player (any sport).
Astronaut.
Artist of any sort.
Comic strip writer.
Joke writer.

If income was the only area you had to sacrifice to be doing what you really want to be doing, could you make it work?

Best of Life!

Vern

My good friend from Sweden is doing Hawaii Appraisal of residential real estate on Oahu, Maui, Kauai and the Big Island. He is living his dream. He came to the USA with little and has carved out a niche for himself in a very competitive market. If you need an appraisal in Hawaii - contact him!

Flow is something that’s talked about by aspiring zenists, Feng Shui practicioners, archers, golfers, chess players and those addicted to computer games. In the flow state time passes without being noticed. Activity is effortless. You may not remember all the details of the state. There’s nothing interfering with your brain and the activity. Quite the opposite, you’re perfectly meshed with the activity. You ARE the activity.

Creative flow is when you’re developing something or creating something and it’s a time of very high productivity. You’re in an optimal state where you are accomplishing much more than you usually do per minute, and there’s no boredom or sense of “work” being done. It may be fun, or there may be no sense of fun at all - you’re just so focused that you ARE whatever you’re doing.

This state of optimum creative flow happens often for me as I’m writing, and I’m glad it does. Over the past year I’ve written over a million words at my blogs and web sites, not to mention comments and questions at other blogs and through email. I’ve learned about the creative flow state just by needing to enter it on a daily basis. I’ll do my best to pull everything together that I’ve learned and share it with you here.

Last year I decided to blog full time. Before that I’d always just been happy to have the flow state visit me when it came. I thought I was just a lucky recipient of it. I didn’t think that I could initiate or control it. I played soccer for many years and on occasion I’d have flow occur during a game. It was as if I was two levels beyond everyone else. My passes were crisp and my timing impossibly perfect. This state usually visited me once per game for a few seconds, a minute… or, if I was extremely fortunate it would last most of the game.

I thought the creative flow state was just like that - when it came, it came. Now I know differently. Now I know how to OWN the creative flow state. It’s available when I want it to be. Or, more appropriately, when I need it to be. Gaining entry into the state when you need it is an almost god-like power. Imagine being able to choose when you enter the state and for how long.

Owning the creative flow state is not as hard as you might think. Like anything, there are antecedents that, once in place help foster the development and then prolong this awesome experience.

How to OWN the creative flow state?

1. Go to your Cave. You, like everyone else that needs to create have a preferred place to work where you can control the environmental conditions like air, noise, chair, table height, space around you, and the rest of it. Only you know what you need in your cave to make you happy and productive. If you’ll be there for hours you will want to arrange sustenance to keep the energy flowing. For me, pretzel rods, the Bull, cashews or pistachios (no red dye) canned coffee and a big water bottle does it. My cave has a toilet, air conditioning, fan, stereo and a place on the floor with a thin mattress and pillows in case I need to get cozy with my notebook on the floor for a change of position and perspective.

Ensure you have your creative instruments in supply and close at hand, exactly where they should be. If I’ve got a project that doesn’t require the notebook (rare) I need those thin lined markers (blue, black and red) and a ream of blank white paper so I can draw sketches, write symbols, text or whatever else - color coded in a way that only I could figure out.

Ambiance. Depending on what you’re doing you’ll want to choose the right music. Eighty percent of the time I’m in the cave creating I like to have something on. Other times I want absolute silence as I’m working on a very detailed idea which demands silence.

Ensure everything is exactly as you like it. The purpose of this is reducing the extraneous fook that can pull you out of the state and into mediocrity. All it takes is one stray thought to germinate in your mind about not having the ruler where you thought it was and all hell could break loose as you systematically fly through every drawer, closet, pocket and puppet to find it. Nothing destroys creative flow faster than thoughts about why something isn’t the way it should be.

Use the restroom before you begin. Take a mental inventory. Anything else that isn’t quite right? Fix it before you sit down. Usually this is when I crank up some Prodigy, English Beat, Beastie Boys, Pixies or Chili Peppers to rev me up. I need to be in a special state of mind to get the creative juices flowing. Nothing less than euphoria works best for me. Upbeat songs rattling the walls works best, but I can be considerate and use headphones when it’s in the interest of social harmony.

2. Inform others that for x hours you won’t be available. That means people in other rooms of the cave. That means turning your phone ringer off. SMS beeps off. Flash phone messages off. Browser messages off. Instant messengers off. Email notifications off. Close your blinds if you’re in an office. Kick the dog out.

3. Label a motive for starting this creative project. It might be very clear, like - if you don’t finish this 50 page paper by the morning you’ll fail Psychoanalytic Theory 6020 and need to repeat the class. Notice how you spontaneously enter the flow when you absolutely MUST get something done and you’re completely out of time and excuses?

A strong motivation is the number one factor for inviting a creative flow session. In college that student mentioned above was me. I left projects to the last minute and then completed them with amazing efficiency and quality. I did my best work that way, so why change the equation? Now it’s a little different as every night is a mental deadline for some blog article to be written. I enter the creative flow state daily for hours, banging out articles out like popcorn thrown in a cub scout fire.

If your motivation isn’t so clear, make it crystal clear so you know exactly why you need to create a masterpiece over the next few hours. I keep defining the why until I feel very confident about the need for the project. I like to picture little things that will come later as I blog toward greatness: Dinner with Lance Armstrong or maybe a playful wrestling match with my favorite Charlie’s Angel.

4. Brainstorming. I brainstorm first - scribbling fragments of ideas all over some blank A4 sheets, I’m chicken-scratching what appears to be gibberish to the rest of mankind, and honestly I can barely read it myself - but, it’s part of the process. If I slow down to write it nicely then I lose the speed at which things pour out of my head. Sometimes i use the computer to write as I can type faster than I can write with a pen - but sometimes the strict format of text on a screen is too limiting and I need to see it on paper, diagonally, curving around the edges, in different sizes, shapes and colors.

5. Planning. Plan the chapters of your project or the general outline of what you want to create by choosing from the bits and pieces you just brainstormed. It is a masterpiece and you’ll know after looking through what you’ve written if it’s comparable to Ludwig Van’s glorious 9th or not. You may need to brainstorm some more. Brainstorming might take 10-30 minutes. Planning might take another 10 minutes. Usually I’m so excited by the time I have half an outline together that I need to either force myself to slow down and finish the complete plan - or, run with it immediately and finish the plan as I go. Sometimes I’m so tweaked about getting started and seeing it come to life that I don’t finish the planning. But, that’s just me.

Usually I don’t catch myself realizing that I’m in the creative flow state for hours after it begins. At some point inevitably I’ll need to use the restroom or drink a coffee and I’ll notice that a chunk of time passed. When I wrote my first book I wrote over 10,000 words at one sitting. Time just flies when you’re focused!

For me, the first session is basically a huge right-hemisphere memory dump from my brain in “Vern-logic” digital format. I spill everything at once almost like a brainstorm but I’m fleshing out details in the general ideas, usually corresponding to paragraphs that will form in the project later. I type like a fiend until my wrists, fingers, elbows and neck hurt.

The first spill is never a completed masterpiece. The left hemisphere needs to make Vern-logic mesh logically with a critical mass of readers that will be reading it. Word substitution, spell checks, graphics and page formatting takes place next.

I’m never in a creative flow during any editing process. It’s something that doesn’t come natural to me. Dumping it all is easy, it’s just like breathing. Editing it is seriously difficult work that I wish I could call on a flow process to help with. Anyone have a remedy? Outsourcing, yeah, I know… I know…

Owning and extending the optimal creative flow state is an amazing skill to put in your bag of productivity tricks. It’s simple really, requiring nothing more than an optimal environment, confidence in your skills, and a really strong and lucid purpose and motivation for tackling the project.

When you own the flow, you’ve got it all and a bag of chips.

Best of Life!

Vern

Flow while exercising:

Flow, pseudo-flow, and mind-tweaking during exercise >