Who’s Afraid Of The White Canvas?

“You don’t know how paralyzing it is, that stare from a blank canvas that says to the painter you can’t do anything. The canvas has an idiotic stare, and mesmerizes some painters so that they turn into idiots themselves.” This was what Van Gogh wrote in his letter 464, 3r:7.

He continued in 464, 3v:8 with: “Many painters are afraid of the blank canvas, but the blank canvas is afraid of the truly passionate painter who dares — and who has once broken the spell of ‘you can’t’.”

Van Gogh probably was very right. He knew perfectly how to emphasize authentic entrepeneuralship sleeping inside each of us. A lot of people however are frightened to create something new, something radically better from a complete bank “greenfield” situation.  And this is a pity because for certain things we really need radical improvements. Perhaps only those who are not afraid to radically recreate towards a radical better humanity-centric situation need to be encouraged in just doing that.

Good luck with selecting and painting your “canvas”.

From High-Frequency-Words To High-Vibration-Words

Our languages are sometimes being analyzed by experts. This may lead to insights like e.g. High Frequency Words. These are words that occur with a high frequency and thus are used most often. But as far as my knowledge goes, there has not yet been analysis on what I propose to call ‘High Vibration Words’. These are words with a high ‘vibrational’ value which means the higher the vibration, the more positive energy they ‘might’ bear. On the positive energy side we could find words like friendship, love, faith, happy, good, abundance, unity, peace, gratitude, optimism etc. On the negative side we could find words like bad, anger, frustration, scarcity, war, fight, deficit etc. These are words with low vibrational value.

Now the funny thing about our language is that it has creational effects beyond what many probably belief. The Universal Law of Attraction is applicable here, i.e. the more one talks or communicates words with low vibrational value, the higher the chance is that these attract ‘language’ that is comparable. Bad language can attract other bad language. But the opposite is also true: good language can attract other good language. So from this point of view it would be interesting to see if we could find constructs to better use our language towards more positive vibrational value. This could then for example be examined by a (scientific?) approach of clustering high vibrational words and see if these can be put to some kind of ‘Law of Attraction’ usage.

Oh, and for those of you who read this and might not get ‘the picture’ yet: try giving yourself a quit, nice place to relax and listen to the song ‘Good Vibrations’ of the Beach Boys. While listening to it, try to meditate for a while about what’s there in the lyrics. Good luck discovering your own High Vibrational Language!

Decision Making: Ready For Evolution?

Fear was never meant to be used as part of decision making processes. And yet we use fear in our daily lives to make decisions as if it were the most normal practice every. We are used to decide under self-inflected pressures, informed by all kinds of fear. For example fearing to fail, fearing to be not succesful, fearing not to have personal benefits, fearing our ego is not being fed, fearing we miss out on something, fearing we are not on time, fearing we are not within budget, fearing for inconsistency, fearing for incompetency etc.

But fear was only meant to protect us from physical dangers (for example when a Lion comes running toward you to eat you), not to protect from mental dangers!  So strictly speaking, fear should not have to be a necessary or mandatory element in decision making processing.

But what’s the alternative? What about using decision making based on positive values only, removed from any fear? For example decide based upon the perceived benefit of service to others and/or service to the planet. Simple. Maybe even an eye-opener to some. Good luck in discovering your own decision making evolution.

How To Overcome Fear For Simplification: Make It Simple, Not Easy

“It is not the fear for complexity, but the fear for simplification that sustains a perpetual, omnipresent fire-fighting culture.” I don’t think this quote was ever recorded before by anyone else so I’ll just claim it here now until proven wrong.

I believe the drivers to let us act simplistic are very much in line with the enumeration of the ‘simplistic’ column in the picture in the left. Some of us are plain ignorant which makes us seek for the most simple solution that fits into our head, not into that of the customer or stakeholder we work for. Some of us would want to make things simpler, but get distracted because of fire-fighting and have to extinguish that first. Because that is more important. So they lose their attention and make it thus easy upon themselves, and difficult upon their customer. Then we have people who are just lazy and know very well things can be made simpler, but why hurry? They don’t really see the need for themselves and make it easy upon themselves this way. And then there are those that are deceived, by some form of authority they believe they have to follow blindfolded. So they make it easy upon themselves and upon their authority. But not on their customers.

So what should we then do to make it really simple? Well, first of all, it’s not easy. But it’s a real challenge, which can create win-win for all, provided we’re open enough to try it. We should become aware. We should gain knowledge. We should build up a spirit of wanting to serve and help others. We should foster honesty and sincerity instead of authority. And by combining all of these drivers, we make it simple for them, and will get many rewards. Good luck in finding your own path from simplistic thinking and acting to simplicity thinking and acting.

Ultimate Goal: Living Inside The Goal Oriented Box?

We all want to feel connected. We all want to feel relevant. And we all are willing to do a lot for that. Some (most?) of us are even willing to enforce greed (leading to Red Ocean Strategies) if it helps us achieve our relevancy goal. Even if it leads to others suffering. Not our problem anyway. Hey, it’s a bloody survival war out there, isn’t it? So we live our lives inside our own tiny illusionary goal oriented boxes. Rat racing from goal to goal, from illusion to illusion, in the end finding out that it all really wasn’t worth the rat race anyhow.

So whats the alternative? Why not try to live your live according to Sid Ceasar’s viewpoint: “in between goals is a thing called life that has to be lived and enjoyed.” Stop the rat race. Stop the goal oriented illusion chasing. Start focusing your whole life on enjoying each here and now moment. All the rest is illusion. Past is illusion, it doesn’t exist anymore. Future is illusion, you never know if it will exist. Only here and now is real. Enjoy it. Stop chasing future goals. Start chasing things that improve here and now. Embrace anything that improves both service to self and service to others. Good luck awakening and discovering your own new goal oriented strategy.

What’s Bordering Us?

We people are funny 😉 species. We inherited a beautiful borderless world, and during eons and eons of time, we specialized in segmenting this holistic beauty which actually had no real boundaries, into artificial, illusionary chunks. And these chunks we gave words like continent, country,  state, province, rural are, city and so forth. This made it easy for us to introduce duality thinking and move away from integrally thinking. It even has led to wars, trying in the end to change the artificial border from one geographic set to another. What a waste of time this was! There should have been a better way. Why did we invent these artificial boundaries anyway? Was it because of greed? Or Status? Or Fear? Or Power? Or a combination of these? And did it really help our World forward? You answer that question yourself and decide for yourself if you have the intent to change that or not. It’s all up to you. You can conquer this illusion. Only need to have intent. Let the language of your heart speak instead the language of dualism and separation. Good luck finding your intent in un-bordering!

From Ego To Lego To Let-go

Our Ego’s like to stay in control. That’s why they are so fond of creating / designing technological stuff that is Lego-alike. Because Lego has a well defined interface from building block to building block, it makes it easy to develop scalable concepts. So far so good.

But in practice we often tend to organize not only our technological stuff like this, but also the organizational and social (human-centric) stuff around it. And that’s where things often go wrong. Because not all ‘work’ can be organized like Lego chunks of work. And not alle Humans can be organized as Lego robots. So in this more ‘creative’ area, maybe we should choose to stay more far away from Lego strategies and replace with alternative Let-go strategies. We should certainly be careful not to start Legoizing everything. And leave ample room for work-related and Social flexibility.

Good luck finding your way out from Ego to Lego to Let-go.