There will be times whenever you will feel absolutely sure about everything, only to then feel completely uncertain. Always be at your studies therefore and continue to outgrow yourself each year whilst inside this process. This applies to both physical training equal to your mental, as increasing your physical endurance abilities will increase your mental endurance skills.
Each discipline compliments and influences the other. You will therefore transform your mind by transcending these limits of your present physical and mental self thereby becoming extremely disciplined and unusually focused, able to navigate your way through and endure the hardest of times by always being able to find solutions to whatever problem you find yourself confronted by in the moment.
Your goal is to become a completely independent thinker, someone capable of guiding themselves through any obstacle using the power of deliberate reasoning, making your own rational choices and decisions to alter the direction of your future. Your life, and therefore your life’s work, is going to be influenced by a number of factors, from individual self experience and from a collective of environmental engagements, forming a series of extensive observations, taking a great number of notes from everything you ever see, read, hear or learn and experience both internally and externally through studying other people, their actions and behaviours, understanding what makes people flawed, learning how to improve our own flaws. Not that we may be able to improve others but we should always be striving to improve ourselves. As there are things which people don’t know about them to be true. Your goal then is to always act a fool in order to make other people suspect you are.
Any time someone who tries to trip you up, who trips up themselves and makes a severe error in judgement, take notes (and photographs). All of this mastery over other people’s psychology will bring you tremendous power. Being deliberately quiet to consciously study another’s unconscious is one of greatest skills you can acquire in human manipulation tactics and how to project fear into an enemy’s mind.
The quieter you are, the more unsuspect you are, the more you can absorb their actions. What that means is you are going to have to spend much time studying unrelated materials, resources, books, the greats, and all the classics: in psychological manipulation. Not being constrained to any particular style, genre, but simply interested in all work that has ever stood the test of time. That includes seeing through the eyes and minds of others. Being able to say things that not only other people would be too afraid to say, but be afraid to even see. “The best way to change a man is to show him who he is,” said Samuel Beckett. The best way then to terrify a man, is to reveal what goes on inside his mind when no one else is around.
How else do you expect to master the art of mind and self defense manipulation tactics unless you take the time to study the dark art and become a key player in the game also? This is an even better way to spend your time, when your mind is in that flurried state, a whirl of ideas on all the possible ways in which to go. This can help you to reflect seeing more than you otherwise could, if you continued just working on the same problem.
“It is much safer to be feared than loved.” NICOLLO MACHIAVELLI, THE PRINCE.
When trying to understand the inner processes of how another person’s mind thinks and operates, it is necessary to take some real time out to study why some people act and behave in the world the way they do. For instance:
Passive aggression is nothing more than insecurity. Feeling envious towards another person simply means to feel inferior from this other person, either through wanting what that other has, or through the experience of discontent seeing how much happier they are compared to you. Or, perhaps even worse is the person’s disowned personal ambitions, seeing other people’s life success and happiness reflects back what’s missing in their own life, and having now reached mid-life and made no progress with any of their own dreams or desires, now they experience a mid-life crisis.
Ideas are like seeds. They grow to become more elaborated over time, after they reside beneath the threshold of awareness in consciousness. And this is actually a critical part in the process that prepares and sets the next stage for allowing your creativity to flourish: when you walk away and stop thinking about it, that is generally when the next part of it will come to you. You have to go “out there” as it were and be a boring person and live a normal life in order to find interesting things for “in here”.
That does not mean sitting there and doing nothing but it does mean not sitting and doing the same things each day. Yes, it’s the space between the notes that make the music. So if all you do is sit there in the same place and only do the same things each day, such as the monotonous routine of your job but don’t actually use your mind constructively for any other purposeful activity in order to achieve complexity in your mind, then you are probably continuously engaged in gossiping or entertainment which will not only never make you an interesting person, but you’ll also make you achieve the most boring existence.
You might find gossiping is helping with your condition, but only momentarily. As you must return, back to the cubicle, answer the phone, place the order, then realize that even though it’s mid-life now, you still haven’t achieved this high quality existence. Nothing has changed. Life has not improved. It’s mid-life. Now. And while happiness increases for many of us at mid-life, it unfortunately hasn’t for you. So what about when that ends? What about when the ears who only hear you due to being paid no longer care because there is no need to listen to you?
Now you must also worry about that too. More anxiety to go along with the existential dread.
And although this feels as if it just came out of nowhere, it’s not exactly nowhere. The power to do this has been 10-years in the making. In preparation of trying to disturb another person’s mind what you shall find is this will inspire all kinds of new thoughts, new ideas, new ways of seeing through other people’s hidden motivations, secret desires, even underlying problems, unleashing a fascinating powerful perception of experiencing life through another person’s eyes in a very uncomfortable manner being able to now project the feelings they wish to keep hidden.
And this is how the discovery of invention happens: ideas will sit beneath the threshold of awareness where all of our incoming information we collect by coming into contact with everything we ever experience and encounter in the outside world goes behind a locked door and gets stored into our unconscious memory. We don’t ever have conscious access to that door. At least not right away. But it always continues to work for us, even as we sleep.
These ideas then, after they have gone deep into the recesses of our mind for long enough, one day, and that could be anywhere between 5-10 years being heavily engaged with this process of thinking as your work, suddenly that door flies open allowing you to access much deeper, hidden dimensions of knowledge that even allow you to witness what life feels like looking through the eyes of another who has unconsciously exposed their deep seated repressions.
Understand: this is not a straightforward and simple thing to achieve. Many wires have to cross first in the imagination. And the imagination grows in complexity only through years of training and exposure to a field. That is only when these points of new possibility arise. Then you’ve got to run the experiments in order to try and figure out if the information coming through is making sense.
So you start by playing with these ideas. You’re not quite sure where all this is going, or what you may even be able to do with it, but you still enjoy the fact that things feel and seem like they are moving somewhere. Whether they are there yet or not doesn’t matter.
Take deep notes at every stage of your life. That means every place of work, every person you meet and observe the ways they act and behave, especially negatively. Many will try to hinder your progress. They want to see you fail. They can’t stand that you always know what to do with yourself and how you are far more motivated and can even do much more than they can.
And this feeling is felt when one watches another make progress. It is vital that you not only know how to ignore these negative, toxic types, but that you completely annihilate them on your way to the top. If they didn’t mind mocking you during the stage of your deepest struggles, it’s important you show no mercy by brutally attacking their psyche now you have the ability to do so.
These are the same types who have no idea, mission, or purpose to their life, and therefore don’t know who they really are, or what to do with themselves when alone. Without the incessant chit chat of a Whatsapp group chat to feel they have a friend, who isn’t their real friends, they are all completely alone.
So come up with an idea, something new, something weird, something strange, or something different. And you just put it out there for fun and who cares if it’s good or not? It was never a problem before you became an expert in using grammar and the English language. Give it some time. It will only get better.
Wait to see what other information gets back to you from it. This is known as the feedback loop: the more you engage and experiment with your own creative cycle, the more information will arrive back to you later regarding better ways of its continued expansion. Over time, these ideas will grow so deep, they will evolve into such complexity that they may no longer resemble the original seed idea which was planted, such as this right now, however all is necessary on the way leading to discovering what the final version will be. This after all is the creative process: working in order to find what work we should be working on.
Try your best to not let yourself be too concerned or pay too much attention when others attack you. The best way forward is to distract yourself by improving your self. The best way to get back at other people is by becoming far better than them in every facet of life. What you will find is that these same people who might laugh at you, make fun of, or joke about you, are the same people who after a decade are still sitting around laughing about the same jokes, doing the same things with almost nothing changed at all in their lives. And so, the reason they need to laugh so much is to hide the fact that inside they are deeply miserable and empty. And therefore need addictions, such as masturbating to mobile phone pornography daily or alcohol to numb the fact there is nothing exciting in life anymore.
Let us not ask anyone anymore why the addiction, but rather, what pain has driven you into addiction? And confront that pain, rather than mask it. Distraction becomes the default escape mechanism to avoid being alone with thoughts which causes one to experience the dreaded sensation of boredom and anxiety as they seek the distraction in order to try and escape that feeling of not knowing how to be alone, without the distraction.
Why not meditate about important things? Why not read difficult books? Why not see more interesting things in life? Look and see how much you devote already to screen time on your phone each week. What you should find is you have enough time to become an expert in your own life, at anything, but yet, you don’t. You instead invest in watching others achieving their own life mastery.
And once these “better” ideas come back, unlocked through that back door, and come into full view to the front side of your imagination, any uncertainty you may have had previously, dissipates. And you emerge from this being able to see far more with and much greater clarity. Within a flash, or “Blink”, as Malcolm Gladwell expressed it, you will even start to see behind the curtain of other people’s minds.
What seems like all of a sudden or just out of nowhere arrives this image that comes full circle seeing fragments composed sporadically over a long period of time, somehow fit into a full picture. Everything in the process. You’ve made it through. The only thing you need to do now is continue. And all the disparate ideas will eventually collide together at once in your mind. And within the blink of an eye, everything will link. All that unstructured chaos will become ordered and patterned.
You have finally learned how to see.
Now, where there were once only pieces, there are patterns. Where everything needs to go is then felt. And while this type of intuitive experience takes years to cultivate, having a problem always on your mind, or even people who become a problem to your mind, take all of these experiences with you, but it won’t really start to add up to anything until you hit that 10-year mark. That hurdle is the real starting point. As the finish line in creativity, is always another start point.
Now, with these emerging pictures, the apprenticeship phase draws to a close. However, all that means is that it’s actually time to begin doing the difficult work necessary that 10-years of training requires to be ready for beginning, taking all that accumulated experience of your process, and turning people into a product, and you into an independent thinker.