Who controls your mind and the thoughts that occupy it?

Are you able to decide what thoughts to think and which ones to reject?

What about other people’s thoughts, the thoughts of the people you meet, and the ideas and information you get from the T.V. Internet and the social media? Do they occupy your attention?

They sure do.

Most people are not aware of all the thoughts that pass through their mind, since most thinking is done in an automatic manner.

The mind sometimes acts like a small child, who accepts, and takes for granted, whatever it sees or hears, without judgment and without considering the consequences. If you let your mind behave in this manner, you lose your freedom.

We are constantly flooded with thoughts, ideas and information coming through the five senses, other people, the newspapers TV and the social media. These thoughts, ideas and information penetrate the mind and affect our actions and state of mind, whether we are aware of this process or not.

This flow of thoughts affects our behavior and reactions. It influences the way we think, our preferences, likes and dislikes. Usually, we accept these thoughts automatically, letting them shape our life. This actually means that we lose our mental freedom.

The Source of Your Thoughts

• Do you think and believe that all your thoughts originate from you?
• Have you ever stopped to consider whether your thoughts, desires, likes and dislikes are really yours?
• Did it occur to you that maybe they came from the outside, from other people, and you have unconsciously accepted them as your own?

After reading the above words, do you still believe that you control your mind, or powers outside yourself control it.

If you do not filter the thoughts that enter your mind you stop to be a free person, and allow every thought to control your life.

You may object, and say that the thoughts that pass through your mind are yours, but are they?

Have you deliberately and attentively created every thought that entered your mind?

As said earlier We are subjected to a lot of information every day, coming through family, colleagues, teachers. radio, TV, newspapers, and of course, the social media.

Every person is differently affected by external thoughts. Certain thoughts and ideas we ignore, and others spur us to immediate action. Thoughts about things we love have more power on us than other thoughts. However, if we are frequently exposed to thoughts and ideas that we don’t care about, we eventually, we allow them to affect us.

Everyone has desires, ambitions and dreams that he or she may foster from childhood. However, it is possible that some of them are the thoughts of parents, teachers and friends, which have lodged into their mind.

Are these thoughts necessary? Do we need all this excessive baggage?

How to Control the Thoughts the Enter Your Mind

You do not have to accept each and every thought that enters your mind. To be able to do so, you need a certain degree of the ability to control your mind and thoughts. You can gain this ability when you teach your mind to focus on one thing at a time.

In order to reduce the power of outside influences and thoughts on your life, you need to be aware of the thoughts and desires that enter your mind, and ask yourself, whether you really like them and want them, and whether you are willing to accept them into your life.

Follow these steps:

1. Find a place where you can be alone for a few minutes and pay attention to your thoughts.

Do not think about anything in particular, just be aware of the thoughts that pass through your mind, and ask yourself whether these are your own thoughts or someone else’s thoughts.

You will surprised to discover that most of them are unimportant thoughts, which are a reaction to your environment, the people around you, or to events in your life.

2. Also, decide whether the thoughts are useful for you, and if they are for your own good to follow. This will lead to more control over your thinking process.

This is the first step on the way to free your mind of outside influences and learn to control. This is the first step to being able to choose your own thoughts.

It might not be so easy do at first, because your mind will probably revolt against this control. However, if you want to be the master of your mind and life, you should not let other people’s thoughts rule your life.

What is self-control? What does it mean and how can we define it? if we wish to define it in short words it, we would define it as self-discipline, the ability to account for yourself, and hold in check undesirable habits and actions.

This quality of character is not some kind of negative and limiting behavior, as some people might think. When self-control is present and used wisely and with common sense, it becomes one of the most important tools for self improvement and for achieving goals.

Here is a more detailed self control definition:

• Self-control is the ability to control impulses, reactions and negative emotions, and is another name for self-discipline.
• It is the skill that enables you to say “no” and “enough” to yourself.
• It is the ability to abstain from harmful extremes of behavior and actions.
• It is the ability to avoid eating unhealthy food or too much food.
• It means being able to stop doing anything that might be harmful for you and for others.

It is you, your consciousness and real essence, which controls your subconscious and habitual behavior and automatic responses.

Self control is vital for overcoming obsessions, fears, addictions, and any kind of impulsive behavior. It puts you in control of your life, your behavior, and your reactions. It improves your relationships, develops patience and tolerance, and is an important tool for attaining success and happiness.

What Are the Benefits of Self Control?

• It keeps in check self-destructive, addictive, obsessive and compulsive behavior.
• It gives you mastery over your life, and brings balance into your life.
• Self-control helps to keep over-emotional responses in check and moderation.
• Self-control eliminates the feeling helplessness and being too dependent on others.
• It helps to manifest mental and emotional detachment, which contributes to peace of mind.
• It enables to control moods and reject negative feelings and thoughts.
• Self-control strengthens your self-esteem, confidence, inner strength, self-mastery and willpower.
• It enables you to take charge of your life.
• This ability makes it possible to abstain from undesirable behavior in various situations.
• It makes you a responsible and trustworthy human being.
• It helps you resist temptations to do indulge in things that can harm your health or waste your time.

What Are the Obstacles to Self-Control

Why it is difficult to gain and maintain self control?

Here are a few reasons:

• Lack of knowledge and understanding what self-control really is.
• Strong and uncontrolled emotional responses.
• Reacting to outside stimuli, without thinking first.
• Lack of discipline and willpower.
• Lack of the desire to change and improve.
• Considering this ability as a limiting and unpleasant activity.
• The wrong belief that its possession might eliminates fun and joy.
• Lack of faith in oneself and in one’s abilities.

To possess this ability, you need to eliminate these obstacles.

How to Have Self Control

The more self control you have, the better your life will be, and the more mastery you will have over it.

Here are a few tips for increasing this ability.

1. Identify the areas where you lack this ability

The first step would be to identify in what areas of your life you need to gain more self-control.

Where do you find yourself lacking in self-control?

Possible areas could be:

• Overeating, and eating junk food
• Addiction to shopping
• Drinking too much alcohol
• Spending too many hours working and leaving no time for anything else
• Addiction to gambling
• Watching too much TV
• Smoking
• Obsessive behavior
• Being quick to get angry

2. Become aware of your uncontrolled emotions

Try identifying and becoming aware of the emotions that you do not control, such as anger, dissatisfaction, unhappiness, resentment or fear.

3. Thoughts and beliefs

Identify the thoughts and beliefs that push you to behave in an uncontrolled manner. What thoughts and what beliefs trigger automatic impulses and reactions?

Identifying these thoughts and beliefs, trying to understand them and find out whether they are reasonable and desirable, will reduce impulsiveness and rash reactions.

4. Thinking about the consequences of your behavior

After identifying all the above issues, devote a few minutes every day for thinking about the consequences of this behavior and how your life would be different without them.

5. Affirmations

Several times a day, especially when you need to display self control, repeat for a minute or two one of the following affirmations:

1. I am fully in control of myself.
2. I have the power to choose my emotions and thoughts.
3. Self-control brings me inner strength and leads me to success.
4. I am in control of my reactions.
5. I am in charge of my behavior.
6. I am gaining control of my emotions.
7. I am the maser of my life.
8. Day by day, my ability to control my feelings and thoughts is increasing.
9. Self-control is fun and pleasure.

6. Visualization

Visualize yourself acting with self-control and self-restraint. Take one of the instances where you usually act with lack of control, and visualize that you are acting calmly, with self-mastery and restraint.

7. Willpower and self-discipline

Your self control will improve considerably, if you work on developing and increasing your willpower and self-discipline through appropriate exercises. This is actually the most important step for developing this essential skill.

Why are people prone to making bad decisions? Many would argue that poor choices are a part of life, and while understanding cognitive behaviour is an extensive process, the only way you can prevent the destructive effects of these choices in your life is to avoid making them.

It is easy enough when you are self-aware, but what about those times when you are not? Our brains are hardwired to make choices based on shortcuts, resulting in more economical and quicker judgments. So, how can you train your mind to avoid these shortcuts and make better choices all the time?

Seeking and relying on good information and guidance

When you are faced with difficult choices, you often seek the guidance of experts or people you trust. There are times when you get valid information from these sources, but there are also instances when you need to challenge the advice given to ensure that you are provided with accurate information.

Emotional and mental clarity is also possible through psychic guidance. A good psychic will help you come up with a personal roadmap and empower you to make decisions by weighing the benefits and consequences of each choice.

Avoiding common pitfalls

Two of the most common issues that lead a person to decide poorly are assumptions regarding possible best-case scenarios and guessing what might not go well. If these two pitfalls plague your decision-making process all the time, you need to rethink your method to avoid making similar mistakes.

Examine your history

Experts say that people rarely learn from previous errors because of the emotional difficulty to own up to these mistakes. Despite the challenge, you will need to shed light on these concerns if you want to understand why you made a mistake in the first place. Only by facing the problem head-on will you be able to figure out a solution.

Internalize

Your emotions and the external environment have a significant impact on your decision-making process. Introspection will help you become more in touch with your feelings and aware of your surroundings. This way, you can maintain a more objective frame of mind when faced with challenging choices.

Make time for self-care

Stress is also another factor that causes a person to make poor decisions. If you take care of yourself and keep yourself healthy, you will always be in a better frame of mind to make better decisions.

Take time to meditate and think

The everyday distractions that surround you can undermine your decision-making and cause you to make bad choices.

Extensive multitasking also takes away from the vital process of thinking thoroughly, before you act because you are always in a hurry.

You need to spend at least thirty minutes each day alone with your thoughts and away from all sorts of distractions. Tuning out the noise will guide you in making better decisions.

Analyze well

Not getting the desired outcome does not necessarily mean you made a bad decision. There are times when a good choice may also lead to failure. The key is to analyze the outcome and learn from it so that you can apply what you learned in the future.

Fear is a state no one wants to embrace, yet for many of us it’s the background music to our lives. But by making friends with fear and understanding why it exists, we can become less vulnerable to harm — and less afraid. Read on to learn a better approach to fear.

***

In The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, author Gavin de Becker argues that we all have an intuitive sense of when we are in danger. Drawing upon his experience as a high-stakes security specialist, he explains how we can protect ourselves by paying better attention to our gut feelings and not letting denial lead us to harm. Our intuition, honed by evolution and by a lifetime of experience, deserves more respect.

By telling us to value our intuition, de Becker isn’t telling anyone to live in fear permanently, always alert for possible risks. Quite the opposite. De Becker writes that we misunderstand the value of fear when we think that being constantly hypervigilant will keep us safe. Being afraid all the time doesn’t protect us from danger. Instead, he explains, by trusting that our gut feelings are accurate and learning key signals that portend risk, we can actually feel calmer and safer:

Far too many people are walking around in a constant state of vigilance, their intuition misinformed about what really poses danger. It needn’t be so. When you honor accurate intuitive signals and evaluate them without denial (believing that either the favorable or unfavorable outcome is possible), you need not be wary, for you will come to trust that you’ll be notified if there is something worthy of your attention. Fear will gain credibility because it won’t be applied wastefully.

When we walk around terrified all the time, we can’t pick out the signal from the noise. If you’re constantly scared, you can’t correctly notice when there is something genuine to fear. True fear is a momentary signal, not an ongoing state. De Becker writes that “if one feels fear of all people all the time, there is no signal reserved for the times when it’s really needed.”

What we fear the most is rarely what ends up happening. Fixating on particular dangers blinds us to others. We focus on checking the road for snakes and end up getting knocked over by a car. De Becker writes that it matters that we’re receptive to fear, not that we’re watching out for what scares us the most (though of course, different things pose different risks to different people, and we should evaluate accordingly.) After all, “we are far more open to signals when we don’t focus on the expectation of specific signals.”

Fear vs. anxiety

Fear is not the same as anxiety. Although people experiencing anxiety are often afraid of both the anxiety and what they presume to be its cause, these two states have different triggers. De Becker explains one of the key factors that differentiates the two:

Anxiety, unlike real fear, is always caused by uncertainty. It is caused, ultimately, by predictions in which you have little confidence. When you predict that you will be fired from your job and you are certain the prediction is correct, you don’t have anxiety about being fired. You might have anxiety about the things you can’t predict with certainty, such as the ramifications of losing the job. Predictions in which you have high confidence free you to respond, adjust, feel sadness, accept, prepare, or to do whatever is needed. Accordingly, anxiety is reduced by improving your prediction, thus increasing your certainty.

Understand that when we’re anxious, it’s because we’re uncertain. The solution to this, then, isn’t worrying more — it’s doing all we can to either find clarity or working to accept that uncertainty is part of life.

Using fear

What can we learn from de Becker’s call to rethink fear? We learn that we’ll be in a better position if we can face possible threats with a calm mind, alert to our internal signals but not anticipating every possible bad thing that could happen. While being told to stop panicking never helped anyone, we benefit by understanding that being overwhelmed by fear will hurt us more. Our imaginary fears harm us more than reality ever does.

If this approach sounds familiar, it’s because it echoes ideas from Stoic philosophy. Much like de Becker, the Stoics urged us to be realistic about the fact that bad things can and will happen to us throughout our lives. No one can escape that. Once we’ve faced that reality, some of the shock goes away and we can think about how to prepare. After all, catastrophe and tragedy are part of the journey, not an unexpected detour. Being aware and accepting of the inevitable terrible things that will happen is actually a critical tool in mitigating both their severity and impact.

We don’t need to live in fear to stay safe. A better approach is to be aware of the risks we face, accept that some are unknown or unpredictable, and do all we can to be prepared for any serious or imminent dangers. Then we can focus our energy on maintaining a calm mind and trusting that our intuition will protect us.

“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.”

— Seneca

The Stoics also taught us that we should view terrible events as survivable. It would do us well to give ourselves more credit — we’ve all survived occurrences that once seemed like the worst-case scenario, and we can survive many more.

“I’ve spent my life trying to undo habits — especially habits of thinking. They narrow your interaction with the world. They’re the phrases that come easily to your mind, like: ‘I know what I think,’ or ‘I know what I like,’ or ‘I know what’s going to happen today.’ If you just replace ‘know’ with ‘don’t know,’ then you start to move into the unknown. And that’s where the interesting stuff happens.” — Humans of New York

***

No skill is more valuable and harder to come by than the ability to critically think through problems. And schools don’t teach you a method of thinking, you have to do the work yourself. Those who do it well get an advantage and those that do it poorly pay a tax.

Poor initial decisions are one of the reasons we’re so busy. With poor thinking, a large chunk of your time is spent correcting mistakes. Good thinking, on the other hand, produces better initial decisions and frees up time and energy.

I’ve read Solitude and Leadership, an essay by William Deresiewicz before. In fact, I even pointed out some of its leadership lessons. However, after Peter Kaufman prompted a re-visit to the very same essay, I realized that I missed a key part.

How do you learn to think?

Let’s start with how you don’t learn to think. A study by a team of researchers at Stanford came out a couple of months ago. The investigators wanted to figure out how today’s college students were able to multitask so much more effectively than adults. How do they manage to do it, the researchers asked? The answer, they discovered — and this is by no means what they expected — is that they don’t. The enhanced cognitive abilities the investigators expected to find, the mental faculties that enable people to multitask effectively, were simply not there. In other words, people do not multitask effectively. And here’s the really surprising finding: the more people multitask, the worse they are, not just at other mental abilities, but at multitasking itself.

One thing that made the study different from others is that the researchers didn’t test people’s cognitive functions while they were multitasking. They separated the subject group into high multitaskers and low multitaskers and used a different set of tests to measure the kinds of cognitive abilities involved in multitasking. They found that in every case the high multitaskers scored worse. They were worse at distinguishing between relevant and irrelevant information and ignoring the latter. In other words, they were more distractible. They were worse at what you might call “mental filing”: keeping information in the right conceptual boxes and being able to retrieve it quickly. In other words, their minds were more disorganized. And they were even worse at the very thing that defines multitasking itself: switching between tasks.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn’t turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.

The best way to improve your ability to think is to spend time thinking.

“It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise”

— William Deresiewicz

Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to escape from that and encourage creativity?

***

“Technological progress requires above all tolerance toward the unfamiliar and the eccentric.”

— Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches

Writing in The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, economic historian Joel Mokyr asks why, when we look at the past, some societies have been considerably more creative than others at particular times. Some have experienced sudden bursts of progress, while others have stagnated for long periods of time. By examining the history of technology and identifying the commonalities between the most creative societies and time periods, Mokyr offers useful lessons we can apply as both individuals and organizations.

What does it take for a society to be technologically creative?

When trying to explain something as broad and complex as technological creativity, it’s important not to fall prey to the lure of a single explanation. There are many possible reasons for anything that happens, and it’s unwise to believe explanations that are too tidy. Mokyr disregards some of the common simplistic explanations for technological creativity, such as that war prompts creativity or people with shorter life spans are less likely to expend time on invention.

Mokyr explores some of the possible factors that contribute to a society’s technological creativity. In particular, he seeks to explain why Europe experienced such a burst of technological creativity from around 1500 to the Industrial Revolution, when prior to that it had lagged far behind the rest of the world. Mokyr explains that “invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity. Individuals, however, do not live in a vacuum. What makes them implement, improve and adapt new technologies, or just devise small improvements in the way they carry out their daily work depends on the institutions and the attitudes around them.” While environment isn’t everything, certain conditions are necessary for technological creativity.

He identifies the three following key factors in an environment that impact the occurrence of invention and innovation.

The social infrastructure

First of all, the society needs a supply of “ingenious and resourceful innovators who are willing and able to challenge their physical environment for their own improvement.” Fostering these attributes requires factors like good nutrition, religious beliefs that are not overly conservative, and access to education. It is in part about the absence of negative factors — necessitous people have less capacity for creativity. Mokyr writes: “The supply of talent is surely not completely exogenous; it responds to incentives and attitudes. The question that must be confronted is why in some societies talent is unleashed upon technical problems that eventually change the entire productive economy, whereas in others this kind of talent is either repressed or directed elsewhere.”

One partial explanation for Europe’s creativity from 1500 to the Industrial Revolution is that it was often feasible for people to relocate to a different country if the conditions in their current one were suboptimal. A creative individual finding themselves under a conservative government seeking to maintain the technological status quo was able to move elsewhere.

The ability to move around was also part of the success of the Abbasid Caliphate, an empire that stretched from India to the Iberian Peninsula from about 750 to 1250. Economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein write in The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70–1492 that “it was relatively easy to move or migrate” within the Abbasid empire, especially with its “common language (Arabic) and a uniform set of institutions and laws over an immense area, greatly [favoring] trade and commerce.”

It also matters whether creative people are channeled into technological fields or into other fields, like the military. In Britain during and prior to the Industrial Revolution, Mokyr considers invention to have been the main possible path for creative individuals, as other areas like politics leaned towards conformism.

The social incentives

Second, there need to be incentives in place to encourage innovation. This is of extra importance for macroinventions — completely new inventions, not improvements on existing technology — which can require a great leap of faith. The person who comes up with a faster horse knows it has a market; the one who comes up with a car does not. Such incentives are most often financial, but not always. Awards, positions of power, and recognition also count. Mokyr explains that diverse incentives encourage the patience needed for creativity: “Sustained innovation requires a set of individuals willing to absorb large risks, sometimes to wait many years for the payoff (if any.)”

Patent systems have long served as an incentive, allowing inventors to feel confident they will profit from their work. Patents first appeared in northern Italy in the early fifteenth century; Venice implemented a formal system in 1474. According to Mokyr, the monopoly rights mining contractors received over the discovery of hitherto unknown mineral resources provided inspiration for the patent system.

However, Mokyr points out that patents were not always as effective as inventors hoped. Indeed, they may have provided the incentive without any actual protection. Many inventors ended up spending unproductive time and money on patent litigation, which in some cases outweighed their profits, discouraged them from future endeavors, or left them too drained to invent more. Eli Whitney, inventor of the cotton gin, claimed his legal costs outweighed his profits. Mokyr proposes that though patent laws may be imperfect, they are, on balance, good for society as they incentivize invention while not altogether preventing good ideas from circulating and being improved upon by others.

The ability to make money from inventions is also related to geographic factors. In a country with good communication and transport systems, with markets in different areas linked, it is possible for something new to sell further afield. A bigger prospective market means stronger financial incentives. The extensive, accessible, and well-maintained trade routes during the Abbasid empire allowed for innovations to diffuse throughout the region. And during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, railroads helped bring developments to the entire country, ensuring inventors didn’t just need to rely on their local market.

The social attitude

Third, a technologically creative society must be diverse and tolerant. People must be open to new ideas and outré individuals. They must not only be willing to consider fresh ideas from within their own society but also happy to take inspiration from (or to outright steal) those coming from elsewhere. If a society views knowledge coming from other countries as suspect or even dangerous, unable to see its possible value, it is at a disadvantage. If it eagerly absorbs external influences and adapts them for its own purposes, it is at an advantage. Europeans were willing to pick up on ideas from each other. and elsewhere in the world. As Mokyr puts it, “Inventions such as the spinning wheel, the windmill, and the weight-driven clock recognized no boundaries”

In the Abbasid empire, there was an explosion of innovation that drew on the knowledge gained from other regions. Botticini and Eckstein write:

“The Abbasid period was marked by spectacular developments in science, technology, and the liberal arts. . . . The Muslim world adopted papermaking from China, improving Chinese technology with the invention of paper mills many centuries before paper was known in the West. Muslim engineers made innovate industrial uses of hydropower, tidal power, wind power, steam power, and fossil fuels. . . . Muslim engineers invented crankshafts and water turbines, employed gears in mills and water-raising machines, and pioneered the use of dams as a source of waterpower. Such advances made it possible to mechanize many industrial tasks that had previously been performed by manual labor.”

Within societies, certain people and groups seek to maintain the status quo because it is in their interests to do so. Mokyr writes that “Some of these forces protect vested interests that might incur losses if innovations were introduced, others are simply don’t-rock-the-boat kind of forces.” In order for creative technology to triumph, it must be able to overcome those forces. While there is always going to be conflict, the most creative societies are those where it is still possible for the new thing to take over. If those who seek to maintain the status quo have too much power, a society will end up stagnating in terms of technology. Ways of doing things can prevail not because they are the best, but because there is enough interest in keeping them that way.

In some historical cases in Europe, it was easier for new technologies to spread in the countryside, where the lack of guilds compensated for the lower density of people. City guilds had a huge incentive to maintain the status quo. The inventor of the ribbon loom in Danzig in 1579 was allegedly drowned by the city council, while “in the fifteenth century, the scribes guild of Paris succeeded in delaying the introduction of printing in Paris by 20 years.”

Indeed, tolerance could be said to matter more for technological creativity than education. As Mokyr repeatedly highlights, many inventors and innovators throughout history were not educated to a high level — or even at all. Up until relatively recently, most technology preceded the science explaining how it actually worked. People tinkered, looking to solve problems and experiment.

Unlike modern times, Mokyr explains, for most of history technology did not emerge from “specialized research laboratories paid for by research and development budgets and following strategies mapped out by corporate planners well-informed by marketing analysts. Technological change occurred mostly through new ideas and suggestions occurring if not randomly, then in a highly unpredictable fashion.”

When something worked, it worked, even if no one knew why or the popular explanation later proved incorrect. Steam engines are one such example. The notion that all technologies function under the same set of physical laws was not standard until Galileo. People need space to be a bit weird.

Those who were scientists and academics during some of Europe’s most creative periods worked in a different manner than what we expect today, often working on the practical problems they faced themselves. Mokyr gives Galileo as an example, as he “built his own telescopes and supplemented his salary as a professor at the University of Padua by making and repairing instruments.” The distinction between one who thinks and one who makes was not yet clear at the time of the Renaissance. Wherever and whenever making has been a respectable activity for thinkers, creativity flourishes.

Seeing as technological creativity requires a particular set of circumstances, it is not the norm. Throughout history, Mokyr writes, “Technological progress was neither continuous nor persistent. Genuinely creative societies were rare, and their bursts of creativity usually short-lived.”

Not only did people need to be open to new ideas, they also needed to be willing to actually start using new technologies. This often required a big leap of faith. If you’re a farmer just scraping by, trying a new way of ploughing your fields could mean starving to death if it doesn’t work out. Innovations can take a long time to defuse, with riskier ones taking the longest.

How can we foster the right environment?

So what can we learn from The Lever of Riches that we can apply as individuals and in organizations?

The first lesson is that creativity does not occur in a vacuum. It requires certain necessary conditions to occur. If we want to come up with new ideas as individuals, we should consider ourselves as part of a system. In particular, we need to consider what might impede us and what can encourage us. We need to eradicate anything that will get in the way of our thinking, such as limiting beliefs or lack of sleep.

We need to be clear on what motivates us to be creative, ensuring what we endeavor to do will be worthwhile enough to drive us through the associated effort. When we find ourselves creatively blocked, it’s often because we’re not in touch with what inspires us to create in the first place.

Within an organization, such factors are equally important. If you want your employees to be creative, it’s important to consider the system they’re part of. Is there anything blocking their thinking? Is a good incentive structure in place (bearing in mind incentives are not solely financial)?

Another lesson is that tolerance for divergence is essential for encouraging creativity. This may seem like part of the first lesson, but it’s crucial enough to consider in isolation.

As individuals, when we seek to come up with new ideas, we need to ask ourselves the following questions: Am I exposing myself to new material and inspirations or staying within a filter bubble? Am I open to unusual ways of thinking? Am I spending too much time around people who discourage deviation from the status quo? Am I being tolerant of myself, allowing myself to make mistakes and have bad ideas in service of eventually having good ones? Am I spending time with unorthodox people who encourage me to think differently?

Within organizations, it’s worth asking the following questions: Are new ideas welcomed or shot down? Is it in the interests of many to protect the status quo? Are ideas respected regardless of their source? Are people encouraged to question norms?

A final lesson is that the forces of inertia are always acting to discourage creativity. Invention is not the natural state of things — it is an exception. Technological stagnation is the norm. In most places, at most times, people have not come up with new technology. It takes a lot for individuals to be willing to wrestle something new from nothing or to question if something in existence can be made better. But when those acts do occur, they can have an immeasurable impact on our world.

Entitlement

It seems like people from all generations use this word to describe the actions of others (although lately, people use the term to describe Millenials and Gen-Z).

Maybe they’re talking about the kid who thinks they deserve a medal even though they didn’t win their soccer game.

They could be talking about the employee who’s pissed off that they didn’t get the promotion even though they do the bare minimum and make more work for their colleagues every day.

People like and you and I are usually pretty quick to point out how entitled we think others are.

But have you ever thought about your own sense of entitlement?

Everyone has some amount of entitlement. However, like with most parts of your personality, it can be unhealthy when it adversely affects your daily functioning as well as your personal and professional relationships.

* * *

What is entitlement?

“The feeling that you have the right to do or have what you want without having to work for it or deserve it, just because of who you are.” — Cambridge Dictionary

When I look back on how I acted when I was younger, I now see that I was pretty entitled.

Have you thought that the things you wanted would just fall into your lap?

Have you thought that hard work is for suckers?

Have you thought that other people are the primary reasons for not reaching your goals?

I used to think that way.

I figured out I was wrong.

* * *

Here are some of the big life lessons I’ve learned from being entitled.

1. You need help to be entitled.

When someone becomes entitled, it’s usually after a series of repeated behaviors or beliefs have been reinforced over a long time.

When something doesn’t go your way, what do you think is the cause?

An entitled person can often have others around them that are quick to offer an excuse that reinforces the idea that they genuinely deserved whatever they wanted.

They’ll say that the reason someone didn’t get what they were after is due to the action, or inaction, something or someone else.

When I looked back on it, people often said things like this to try to avoid me from having my feelings hurt. I appreciated it at the time, but sometimes we need to go through some pain to come out better on the other end.

Entitlement doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

It can be painful for the entitled person to admit that they could be the cause of their problems, but then at least they’ll be a step closer to fixing them!

* * *

2. Most people aren’t going to give you something just for being you.

There are billions of people in the world. Although you may be lucky enough to have a few friends and family who care for you, there aren’t many people waking up thinking, “What I can do to make your day better?”

The truth is that people are often rewarded based on what they do versus who they are.

There were many times where I entered a situation thinking about what I could get from it. I would ask myself, “How is this going to benefit me?”

I didn’t think about what I could bring to the situation. I didn’t think about what I could do for other people.

Thinking about what you can do for other people will get you thousands of steps closer to where you want to be.

* * *

3. People get what they have by working hard for it.

If someone has achieved something great in their life, it’s usually because they worked for it (or someone else worked hard for it and gave it to them — they’re might be entitled).

There aren’t many shortcuts in life that pay off in the long run.

Sure, you may get what you want today, but chances are that it won’t last.

Take a look at the people who are doing the things you want to be doing, and you can see that they have developed habits and skills over the years that allowed them to do the things they do today.

The entitled person may not see things this way.

For a while, I didn’t see things this way. It seemed like there was some magical force behind the factors that determined whether people succeed or they don’t.

Later, I found that there is a force that determines success, and it’s not very magical.

That power is our routines and habits.

If you want something, you’ve got to make a plan and hustle!

* * *

4. You’re not as important as you think you are.

When someone does something at work or a social outing, it can be easy to think that whatever happened might have been done to get back at you or affect you in some way.

The good news is that most people are more concerned more about themselves than what you’re doing.

For a person who’s very entitled, this can be a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, if someone is conspiring against them, it means that they’re important enough to have enemies.

On the other hand, if nobody is thinking about them, it shows how unimportant they are.

For me, practicing humility and putting others first taught me that many things happen in the world every day regardless of what we do as individuals.

I’ve learned that we can get plenty of gratification from our work and healthy relationships with others. Then, we’ll become more concerned about our own plans and not what other people are doing or thinking.

* * *

5. The world won’t make special rules just for you.

We can see examples of people expecting special treatment every day thanks to the combination of phones and YouTube.

I’ll admit that I’ve lost a few hours of my life watching “public freakout” videos.

The problem of people wanting to special rules just for them is even more visible during the Covid-19 pandemic. There are a lot of people out there who want everyone else to follow the rules but don’t want anyone to make sure they’re doing the same.

An entitled person might be lucky enough to find someone who will indulge in their behavior and let the rules slide a bit.

The free-ride can come to a crashing halt when that person runs up against an authority that won’t budge.

There were times when I wanted things to be done a certain way for me, but ultimately things didn’t work out the I wanted. I now see that it was good for me in the long run. Luckily, there weren’t any huge consequences.

The longer an entitled person goes without facing accountability, the harder the crash will be when they come up against someone who isn’t willing to accommodate them.

* * *

So what’s the cure for entitlement?

Gratitude

If you think you might be somewhat entitled (or want to avoid having that label put on you at al-l), it can be great to make a priority of practicing gratitude.

Be thankful for what you have. Express thanks when people do something for you. Thank someone for what they did for you years ago but you never acknowledged.

Living a positive life and focusing on personal growth and self-improvement can empower you to live your best life and help others along the way.

* * *

“Gratitude begins where my sense of entitlement ends.”

— Steven Furtick

‘To err is human; to forgive, divine.’ A quotation probably more famous than the man who first said it.

You may not have heard of English poet Alexander Pope, but you have probably heard his words.

Screwing up (to err, in other words) is human indeed. We are all flawed human beings. In relationships, mistakes –the biggies and the not-so-biggies –happen. They often lead to disagreement, strife, sorrow, or a sense of betrayal. Forgiveness is human too, despite what Mr. Pope had to say. Though you may think of God as the final dispenser of forgiveness, you and I have the power to forgive as well. Doing so can help us avoid bitterness and resentment and often will salvage a relationship.

Defining forgiveness through the back door:

• To forgive does NOT mean that you condone wrongdoing.
• Reaching a place of true forgiveness is NOT about you deciding that what someone did is okay if it was not.
• Forgiving does NOT mean you have to forget (is that even possible?).
• What forgiveness IS: eliminating the negativity that results from hurt by letting go of emotional baggage.

Why should we forgive?

Though it can feel very comforting or powerfully releasing to be forgiven, make no mistake: we do not forgive for the other person; we forgive for ourselves!

• Forgiveness is for our own growth and happiness. When we hold on to hurt, pain, resentment, and anger it harms us far more than it harms the offender.
• Forgiveness frees us to live in the present. Reliving the wrong that was done to us keeps us living in the past and missing today’s beauty.
• Forgiveness allows us to move on without anger or contempt or seeking revenge. As Confucius said about revenge, “Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” This applies as much to the spirit of anger behind the desire for revenge as much as to revenge itself. Even if you do not actively seek revenge, holding on to your anger brings you down.
• Forgiveness lets us regain our personal power. Our anger, regret, hatred, or resentment towards someone means that we are giving up our power to that person. Envision a chain around your neck, held by the one who wronged you. Until you can forgive, you won’t break that chain and the person will still have an unhealthy hold on you.
• Forgiveness brings you back to good physical and mental health. The systems of the body respond to negative emotions, affecting the immune system in ways that would blow your mind. Releasing those emotions is a good idea.
• Forgiveness clears the cobwebs so that you can see the good again. When you forgive you will be able to see all the positive qualities in the person who hurt you — qualities that you loved once — and allows you to accept him or her fully, warts and all, and have a chance at a long-lasting, healthy relationship.

When should we forgive?

When the pain of holding on to the wrongdoing in the past continues to follow you into the future, you have a choice. Be bitter or let it go.

How to forgive?

If you are in a current relationship that you want to heal and continue, a serious and loving discussion is in order.

1. Take your time to process your anger and hurt.
2. Wait until you are reasonably sure that your partner will not repeat the hurtful or treacherous act (i.e. he or she regrets the wrongdoing, sincerely desires to make restitution, and confidently vows not to repeat the mistake).
3. Tell him or her how you feel (use “I” statements). “I feel hurt/ betrayed/ afraid/ anxious/ grief-stricken etc.”
4. Ask questions that you need answered. This is a moment for full disclosure –your partner’s. You have a right to know whatever it is you want to know.
5. Set new boundaries.
6. Explain that you are choosing to forgive.

If the hurt took place in a past relationship and you can’t seem to get out from under the anger, resentment, or heartache that it caused, then your process will be an internal one.

1. You can talk to a close friend or life coach to speak your forgiveness, or write it out in a journal.
2. Be sure you understand your feelings and express them.
3. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. As difficult as this may be, trying to understand why he or she harmed you and your relationship is very important. (Understanding does not mean condoning, but is a step to forgiving.)
4. Forgive yourself for your contribution to what happened.
5. Leave it in the past.
6. Find the beauty in your present life.

Forgiveness is not reserved for our romantic partners. We can all find renewed richness in our relationships if we can learn to forgive. Many people find their bonds to estranged parents or siblings are renewed and strengthened. Discord with a neighbor or co-worker can be healed.

Alexander Pope had the right idea after all. The healing and peace that can come from forgiveness may indeed seem heaven-sent. Appeal to your own higher –or divine — nature and see if you can forgive, and move on.

Most of my career has been spent working with or around sales people. Sales is a weird gig because you are taught to be competitive and outshine your colleagues in order to be paid incentives that are standard in the industry.

This obsession with competitiveness and incentives destroys any chance we have of using humility to advance our lives and achieve our goals. Selfishness, competition and destroying others so that you can win does not let you do anything you want in life.

I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit thinking about what the one trait is in life that I’d like to study, understand and one day master. I’ve watched documentaries, read books and consumed a stupid number of blog posts trying to work it out.

The word humility came up plenty of times, but that wasn’t enough. I compiled a list of everyone I know or have met who basically does whatever the hell they want in life and then put their lives through the filter of humility. Essentially, when all was said and done, what I was looking to understand was whether each of them was humble or not.

As well as testing each of their lives against the filter of humility, I also considered other traits such as confidence, intelligence, kindness, net-worth, self-esteem — the list was long and every time I’d find at least one person that didn’t tick the box.

The only answer that was true for every person who did whatever they wanted in their lives was that they were humble.

Ever since this experiment, I’ve hired people in my career based on their humility.

When I’ve looked at working with new people, I’ve also used the same filter of humility.

And when it comes to building one new skill for this year, I’ve put all my energy into understanding one question: How can I be more humble?

The opposite of being humble is to let your ego control your life and that has many downsides.

Here are the advantages of humility:

You are able to work in a team

Your ego tells you that you are the best.

Humility tells you that no success worth achieving can be done in isolation. Working with other people creates far bigger results and it’s heaps more fun. The problem is ego kills teamwork.

When your goal is to win at all costs to benefit yourself, you end up crushing everybody else you encounter to get there.

When you’re humble, you understand that not everything is about you. You go from selfish to selfless.

You will learn to question everything

There are very few things in life that are absolute.

Humility teaches you to remain open-minded and understand two crucial facts: You don’t know everything, you will be wrong an awful lot, and the acceptance of this reality will help you not to block the insights you need to grow as a person.

Questioning the world you live in removes the idea of your self being the center of the universe and everything revolving around it.

The universe doesn’t revolve around you. You are a tiny dot, here for a short time, to do something remarkable, and then die having taught a few people something useful along the way that will cause them to remember you at the end of their own existence.

You will grow

You can’t grow when you believe that you have already arrived and are better than everybody else.

If you are already at the top and know everything, how do you find ways to grow? You don’t. You believe you already have all the skills, know all the answers and have learned everything you need to learn. Being humble is the rejection of this reality.

Humility teaches you what you need to work on and that leads to growth

You will be able to be a chameleon

The reason humble people can do whatever they want in life is that they can change and adapt to different situations.

One minute they can be a leader, and the next minute, they can do the hard work of someone in a support role or wash the dishes without getting upset or pissed off.

Chameleons change roles in life and are flexible, nimble and willing to do whatever it takes. Flexibility leads us to discover people and opportunities that would have otherwise been hidden from us, which end up giving us the life where we can do whatever we want.

If you are too proud of where you are in life, then you’ll stay stuck exactly where you are.

People will assume you are too proud to try something else or do the hard work and so it will become your own demise, eventually, if you continue to ignore it.

You are aware of your own faults

We all have various flaws in our lives and when you’re humble, you don’t hide these flaws from yourself or from anybody else.

Accepting your flaws gives you a chance to work on them and help others learn from them as well. Knowing what you are not good at is just as important as knowing what areas of your life you excel at.

When you discover a flaw, you have two options:

1. Acknowledge the flaw and work to fix it
2. Embrace the flaw and decide it’s something you are going to live with

Thinking you have no flaws, though, is where it all turns to a messy lemon tart that has been hit by two-hundred medium sized vehicles in a row.

You do have flaws and that’s okay.

You will think twice about how you describe your own success

When people describe their success as being all about them and what they have achieved, they are not being humble.

Whatever you achieve, someone, somewhere, will have helped you get there either directly or indirectly.

Humble people describe their success as being an outcome of many people’s inputs as opposed to solely their own.

Once you truly start to explore humility, you will no longer describe your success in the same way. Finally, you’ll acknowledge other people and that is a beautiful thing that will connect you to more future successes.

Getting the balance right

Here’s what being humble is not:

• Lacking confidence
• Being weak
• Being selfish

Humbleness is a quiet confidence that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Humility is letting your actions and your results do the talking rather than your ego. You are still confident when you are humble; you just don’t pretend that it’s all about you — because it’s not.

Confidence is believing in yourself and not thinking you are the best. When you believe in yourself and you are humble about what you can do, you find a balance that attracts people to what you’re doing and makes them want to help you.

Humility links all the good stuff together

It turns out that the people who are humble and do whatever they want in life are also respected, kind, can lead people, are selfless and are not so stressed out.

Humility is a trait that becomes the foundation of other similar traits that when combined, make us someone people want to know and have in their lives.

If you can find your own path to humility, you can discover what it takes to be a true human being that possesses the sort of qualities that allow one to do whatever they want in life and be fulfilled at the end of it all.

Final thought

I’m not there yet, but every day I’m working on possessing more and more humility. So far, it has been a game-changer in every phase of my life — and I’m only just getting started.

When you make your life about more than you, it gives your life a different and fresh meaning. Humility is a journey that takes you on a path to discover what it means to be human and how you can leave the world better than you found it.

The path to humility is the path to understanding why you are here in the first place and on a deeper level, the biggest question of them all: What is the meaning of life?

Start with humility.

For years, I taught gifted teenagers — long enough to know how it sounds when someone brings up their IQ. The most intellectually-lazy people I’ve met obsess over their intelligence.

It ruins all of their relationships.

I’ve also spent years teaching developmental students, the ones everyone else has given up on — the ones who were told they need more “remedial” classes before they’re allowed to take the real ones.

Twelve years in education has taught me one big lesson: The difference between intelligence and ignorance isn’t about IQ or cognitive ability. It usually comes down to your mindset.

Here’s what truly intelligent people do — regardless of where they come from, or what they look like:

1. They don’t talk about how smart they are.

Because they don’t have to. If you’re always doing and saying smart things, people notice. Smart people aren’t interested in how they’re perceived. They’re busy growing their minds.

2. They learn best by imitation.

Everyone benefits from a little guidance, but intelligent people prefer to watch what the pros do first. They reverse engineer success by studying what works and then trying that.

3. They try to figure things out themselves.

Nobody can teach themselves absolutely everything. But an intelligent person’s first move isn’t to ask for help or step-by-step instructions. They want to experiment and problem-solve. They develop all kinds of mental muscles by doing this, and they can usually swim on their own.

They’re okay sinking for a few seconds.

Intelligent people want to struggle a little first. An intelligent person might look stubborn, but they’re really just self-sufficient. You don’t get there by giving up too soon and letting someone do things for you — or walk you through every step of every process.

4. They’re always hunting knowledge.

Intelligent people focus on what they want to know, not what they already know — or what might impress someone.

5. They don’t brag about what they know.

Intelligent people apply their knowledge. They don’t keep it locked up in a trophy case for display.

6. They connect the dots.

Intelligent people look for connections between dissimilar things. They read across fields and disciplines. They can import an idea from one context to another and unpack it.

7. They’re okay with cognitive dissonance.

The world contradicts itself all the time. Intelligent people can hold two conflicting ideas in their head at the same time, and find ways to admire each one on its own strengths and merits.

8. They ask lots of questions.

Intelligent people know they’ll never figure out how everything works, but they want to try anyway.

This one might contradict the self-sufficiency trait. But smart people get curious. Sometimes they like to fire off a barrage of questions before they jump in and get their hands dirty.

9. They abstract from their experiences.

An intelligent person finds patterns in ordinary stuff and scales them up. They’re always observing tiny parts of life that everyone else overlooks, and figuring out how to explain them. The explanations become theories, and they can lead to huge breakthroughs.

10. They seek out puzzles and paradoxes.

Something that defies explanation is like a Christmas present for an intelligent person. They love wrapping their minds around things that can’t or shouldn’t make sense, because they know something causes it to happen — they just don’t know what that is yet.

11. They don’t get hung up on crumbs.

Intelligent people are fine letting someone act like a jerk, as long as they do it over there — and don’t get in the way.

12. They move slow, until they hit warp speed.

Think about the last time you saw an intelligent person in action. They sat quietly for several minutes while everyone else did their squabbling and grandstanding. Or they went dark for a few days while everyone else was rushing around. If you don’t know an intelligent person that well, you might think they’re dumb or lazy at first. Then they say or do something so utterly brilliant it changes everything. That thing they do — that’s called thinking about a problem before doing anything.

13. They have no problem with failure.

Any failed experiment is just information. Maybe it doesn’t pay the bills or rake in the grants, but it’s always one step closer to the eureka minute they’re looking for. They’re immune to failure because it’s baked in.

14. They don’t try to sound smart.

You know you’re talking to an intelligent person when you feel smarter after the conversation, because they explained something complex in such a simple way that almost anyone could get it.

14-b. They make everyone around them feel smart.

See above. I just wanted to stress this point. You’ll often find intelligent people praising other people’s intelligence.

15. They don’t always use big words.

Intelligent people use the right word. Sometimes that’s a big word, and sometimes it’s a simple one.

The master habit: They practice empathy.

If there’s one habit that oversees all the others, it’s empathy. Intelligent people try to think from lots of different viewpoints. They try to understand how their actions affect everyone — not just themselves, or the handful of people they care about or agree with.

We don’t normally think of empathy as a mental process, but it is. Feelings happen in our brains, and they’re connected to thoughts.

We tend to assume science and logic go against empathy, that they’re cold. They don’t, and they’re not. Intelligence is all about caring what happens in the world around you, and how you fit into it.

There’s no such thing as objectivity, only taking everyone’s views and feelings into account before you do something.

(Or say something.)

They also like listening to arguments and debates more than jumping into the middle of them. They make space for voices other than their own. They know that you get smart by listening, learning, and observing.

We live in a world where more and more people want to look smart without actually practicing the habits.

Don’t let them trick you.

The smartest people in the room are usually the ones who don’t make a big deal about it. They don’t care that much about who thinks they’re smart, or what their IQ is. Intelligence isn’t something you can buy. It’s not something you can be. It’s a way of doing things.