Sunday, December 27, 2009

Tim Ferriss - Practical Pessimism

[Thanks to TTL]
This is interesting.
"The Secret" and "the law of attraction" are very popular at the moment. I think they have two weaknesses though: 1) even if you do attract what you want, it often turns out to not make you happy, or not for long, and 2) it may stimulate a fear of visualizing bad things happening, out of belief that the visualization will actually make it happen. Which it won't.

Two years ago I had several weeks in very severe pain, from a pinched nerve in the neck. (My chiro said I was a "heart-sink" patient, named after her emotion whenever she encountered one with this condition.) The funny thing was, I'd have thought I'd be very depressed by getting into that situation, but I was not. Sure, I was in pain much of the time, and it was not easy, but I was actually pretty cheerful. It turned out to be survivable. I used to be very fearful of pain, but this experience has lessened it a lot.

1 comment:

shakes said...

The best Secrets "moment" ;-) I've had was a test. I told myself that my hi-fi, mostly home-built sounds better and better everyday, yes I'm anal about hi-fi, music, good knives and coffee, photography to a lesser degree. And a week or so after I started I sat down and listened and noticed three things that were not as they should be and corrected them in about 15 minutes, this improved my sound quite a bit, then I was offered a a very good DAC for little money and an upgrade to the cross-over network for free, in the next month... I've been happy with sound for a while, so now I just invite friends to dinner and enjoy glorious music, which I now like to buy because it now sounds so nice, I don't want for much more... so there you go