How To Train Your Brain

You’d better relax and set aside some time for yourself, because this post is going to be rather long. And it will also be something different from what you’d expect from me. One could argue that this will be a tutorial for rewiring your brain, while others may think that this will be just a review for a product I like. No one would be right, of course. It will be something in between.

Without further ado, ladies and gents, let’s talk about how to keep your brain in good shape. There has been a lot of research conducted in educational psychology on learning in the classroom; here I will talk about how to keep your brain in good shape outside of traditional learning settings.  And, with your permission, let’s talk first about why you need to keep your brain in good shape.

Your Brain Is Your Main World Interface

Some of you may remember the series of posts in which I made a comparison between a human being and a computer, and I’m talking specifically about how to keep the best version of yourself. For the sake of the game, let’s pretend again you’re like a computer. In this case, your brain will be your main world interface. (It’s not the CPU, as some of you may think. The CPU is just processing information, and that is only one cognitive function among many others the brain has, like attention, flexibility and so on).

So, everything you feel, think, imagine and create, everything would go through this interface. If this interface will be broken, your sensations, thoughts and memories would be severely affected. If this interface will become faster, wider and slimmer, your sensations will be more vivid, your thoughts will be more complex and your memories will be accessible much easier.

Now, let’s take this a little further. Let’s pretend you’re much more than a computer. You’re an airport. Thousands of planes are going in and out to this airport. Some of the planes are carrying sensations, some of them are carrying information and some of them are carrying thoughts or memories. Some of the planes you send out are carrying words or gestures, and they land on other airports.

In this case, your brain is your main control tower. It dispatches sensations, thoughts and memories and creates complicated storage structures and algorithms. It keeps all the traffic going on in good conditions. And it does that by constantly monitoring the incoming flow of planes, the available departure lanes, the weather, the remote airports availability, the flight schedule and maybe a thousand of other parameters.

Imagine what happens if this control tower fails at some point. Plane crashes. Colliding sensations. Erratic words going out to other airports. Missing pieces of information from other airports, because their planes will never land. Total damage. And you don’t need a severe failure to observe a significant decrease in brain performance. It suffices to have just a lazy control tower operator and you’ll start noticing delayed responses, crowded landing lanes, rushing takes-off and so on. I’m sure you’ve been there: saying what you didn’t want to say, remembering stuff when you don’t need it anymore or experiencing sudden talking blocks.

Hopefully, you have a better idea now about how important your brain is for your overall functionality as a human being. And still, this metaphor is just a feeble image of what your brain does. It also monitors your energy levels sending stimuli of hunger (that would be the equivalent of re-fueling the planes), it does long-term planning (equivalent of upgrading the equipments and planes) or makes estimations (learning by example, for instance, after a plane collision).

OK, I get the feeling that you know why you need to keep your brain in good shape. Let’s start talking about the how.

How To Train Your Brain

First of all, let me tell you that I was in search for something similar to Lumosity for a long time. When Lucaino Passuelo posted a tweet about how cool Lumosity is, I clicked to see what it’s all about. (It’s not the first time when Luciano, who blogs brilliantly at litemind.com, is pushing my limits. Last time he did it, I ended up on the first page of Delicious, Digg and a few other social media outlets, after I wrote my first huge list post: 100 Ways To Live A Better Life).

After a few clicks (or touches, since I was more attracted by the iPhone version) I confess I was totally sold out. Lumosity is a collection of scientifically designed “brain games”, which are challenging various areas of your cognitive process: from flexibility to attention, and from speed to memory. The best way to explain Lumosity is “fitness for your brain”. If you exercise regularly you already know all the benefits: your body tends to be slimmer, you walk steadier, you’re more aware, your muscles are always ready to act, you detox faster and so on. Well, those are the exact benefits you should expect from a brain exercising routine too. You’ll think faster, you’ll increase your attention and memory, you’ll be more flexible, reacting better to environmental changes, and so on.

These brain games I’m going to talk about are hosted at Lumosity.com but there is also an iPhone version. I personally prefer the iPhone version and I think that being a digital nomad plays a huge role in this decision. Games are also structured as courses, or series of various games mixed together in sessions. The iPhone version features such a course with 35 sessions. One neat thing about the iPhone version is that you can set up alerts and you’ll be notified at the time of the next session. Total time spent on such a session is between 4 and 7 minutes. Of course, you can play the games individually and I do this all the time. But I would recommend doing the session first, it seems there is a certain progression which will tune in your brain faster if you that.

Another cool thing about Lumosity is that you can evaluate your progress, by using a proprietary metric, the so called BPI, or Brain Power Index. Citing from Lumosity website, “Brain Performance Index (BPI) is a measure of your performance in a given cognitive function. You can use BPI to track your performance, and compare your ability in one cognitive area to another. An increase in BPI indicates improvement. An increase of more than 200 points represents a substantial improvement of about 1 standard deviation.”

If you wonder how this BPI is calculated (I know I did), there’s an answer for that too: “The BPI scales are based on an analysis and ranking of over 13,000,000 real game results. We used these game results to create a distribution of scores for each activity so we know how an individual score stacks up to all others. We then evaluate your game scores and use a proprietary algorithm to derive your BPI. Each time you play, we update your BPI to accurately reflect your current brain performance.”

But that’s not all. You can track your BPI in various cognitive functions (by playing the associated games) over time with some nice looking graphs.

Now, let’s talk about the most important games in the pack (I won’t spoil the surprise for you by talking about ALL the games).

Brain Exercises

Just like physical exercise, brain training must be performed in a balanced way. Excelling only at one cognitive function of your brain wouldn’t give you any big advantage. Yes, you may have a fantastic memory, but if you lack attention or flexibility, it wouldn’t make you perform better overall. So, if at the gym you’re doing intervals, weight lifting and running, in a brain training workout you’ll do memory, attention, speed and flexibility.

Train Brain for Attention: Lost In Migration

Apparently, this was the most difficult game for me. You have to spot the center bird in a group, without getting distracted by the other birds. Once you saw its direction, do a swipe confirming it (left, right, up or down). If you got it right, you get points (and a bonus if you do it really fast). If you got it wrong, your iPhone will vibrate and you won’t get points. Each session lasts about 45 seconds. The goal is to keep your attention steady, without being distracted.

The game features several backgrounds (balloons, desert, city) and I suspect there’s a different difficulty level in each of them. It can get really frustrated in the beginning, if you’re getting 2-3 vibrates in a row, but it surely becomes better as you practice. I still find it very difficult to pass over a certain physical limit: there are a few milliseconds between the visual identification and the finger gesture. This gap is very hard to minimize. In other words, the brain-finger muscle cooperation must be enhanced too.

Train Brain for Memory: Memory Matrix

By far, my favorite game. You get a matrix of cells (growing from 3×3 up to 8×8), in which you are presented with a random model of colored cells. The model stays around a second, then it disappears. Your job is to re-create the model by touching the corresponding cells. If you got it right, the matrix advances to the next level and you get points. If it doesn’t, you get a nasty iPhone vibration and have to start over from the previous level (for instance, if you screw it at the 7 cells level, you gotta start again by doing the 6 cells level).

There are 15 turns, starting from 3 cells models, which means the maximum you can go is up to 17 cells models. In my experience, around 9-12 cells there’s a threshold. If you get over these levels, you’ll find it surprisingly easier to solve a matrix with 14 or 15 cells. This game was the first one in which I got a BPI higher than 500 (a part from the Chalkboard Challenge where I got the maximum after the first game, but more on that in a minute).

Train Brain for Speed: Circles

I picked up Circles for this short presentation, but there are a few other variations of this in the package, feel free to get the app and look it up for yourself. In this game, you’re presented with a circle in a certain shape, you have to memorize it and then the first one disappear and another one comes to the screen. Your job is to see if the previous circle matches the current one, by pressing the corresponding buttons. If you got it right, you get points, if not, yes, you’re right, the iPhone will vibrate and you won’t get points.

I find this type of game very challenging, because it forces you to stay alert AND keep your short term memory in good shape. Also, you gotta have a pretty good reaction speed.

Train Brain for Flexibility: Color Match

That was a real challenge for me and I’ll explain you why a little later. It’s a nice little game in which you get a two areas zone: in the upper area you get a word designating a color: red, blue, yellow or black, and in the lower area you get another word designating a color, which, attention, must MATCH the upper word color. So, if the upper word is “red” the lower word must by in a red color, regardless of its meaning, which could be “yellow”. That’s tricky.

I’m not an English native speaker, so I had a little overhead in this game because I had to perform 2 more translations: one for the upper color and one for the lower color. In the beginning I was a catastrophe at this game. But after a few days I got better. Which means nothing, but nothing, but nothing that these games are really working.

Train Brain for Problem Solving: Chalkboard Challenge

Now, last but not least, the game in which I surprisingly got the highest possible score from the first time. In this one, you get a two area zone, only this time on an horizontal split. The left and right areas are holding numbers, or various operations with numbers and you gotta pick the highest result. For instance, if on the right area you got number 9, and in the left area you got (6 + 3) * 2, the right area is the correct one: 18 > 9. The operations can get really complex.

At some point, the areas are starting to shake, making the identification of symbols pretty difficult (not to mention the actual computations). As I told you, I got the highest score at this from the first time, meaning 1700. I had a few blunders along the line but overall I am at the same level – 1698 – 1700 – during the last month. It took me a while to understand why I got the highest score so fast but I think I finally got it: as on online entrepreneur[ I exercised this estimation function on a daily basis. Especially in the online business, where everything is so volatile, making accurate estimations is a key process. So I was already there, so to speak.

My Brain Training Personal Experience

Now, I have more than one month since I practice this. And I must say that it was quite an interesting experience. First of all, I took all the 35 sessions from the iPhone introductory course. I didn’t take them one per day, as they recommend, but rather 2-3 in a row. Meanwhile, I did a lot of other exercises separately and closely watched my BPI. I was able to go from 1100 BPI to 1500 BPI in around 30 days. According to Lumosity terms, I had at least 2 standard deviations (one increase in 200 BPI being considered 1 standard deviation).

Physical Sensations

I am a true believer in neuro-plasticity, which is the ability of brain to re-organize itself, or even to re-create new cells as they are required. Not long ago, the large majority of brain scientists believed that we are basically limited by birth conditions to the number of neurons we have, hence our brain performance was something “frozen” or at least highly predictable and limited. I don’t believe this. I think we can reshape our brain the same way we are “sculpting” our bodies at the gym.

During the first part of my 30 days experience with Lumosity I experienced some mild headaches. I couldn’t even describe them as headaches, but more like an inside pressure or some increased awareness of some of my brain areas. Something very close to the sore body you get after a good workout.

I also felt more alert and ready to start or to finish things. It wasn’t about motivation per se, but more about my presence in the moment.

I also had more intense hunger feelings and I clearly felt the need to eat differently. I know there is a link between proteins and our nervous system, but I don’t know exactly what it is. I can only tell you that I felt the need to eat more proteins as usual (beans, for instance).

I continued to drink around 3-4 liters of green tea per day (I gave up coffee a year ago) and I also observed some subtle correspondence between the level of liquids and my overall state. Clearly better when I stick to my regular tea routine.

Some Visible Improvements

In the last 30 days I was invited to 3 public events where I talked about entrepreneurship and lifestyle design. I never was afraid to talk in public, but these last 3 times I felt really great. In two cases I didn’t had any written presentation and I spoke freely to an audience of about 30-50 persons. I surprised myself being coherent and catching the flow even without a pre-established structure or plan. At one event I was on the board of advisers, in front of a 120 persons audience for 9 hours straight and I never had any drifting away moment. I consider this to be a direct consequence of exercising my brain.

In the last 30 days I also launched the website of my New Zealand company along with my first public product. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my first app in the App Store was a little cute memory game. The game was developed in about 10 days and it features both iPhone and Android versions.

Another area in which I clearly saw a visible improvement was my learning ability. I was able to finally freeze my long time postponed company products roadmap for the next 9 months, including some old, dusted projects, and to bring to alpha version a few new apps. Being busy, so to speak. What’s interesting is that I noticed an increased ability to juggle with different programming environments and languages, switching easily from Objective C (yes, I finally become a friend of Xcode) and Lua (using a somehow exotic SDK for cross-platform game development).

But the most visible improvement was in awareness.

In less than a week since I started this brain exercising routine, I observed an increased capacity to focus and to remain focused for larger chunks of time. I don’t think many of the so-called social media enthusiasts will like what I’m going to say now, but this 30 days trial made me reconsider my social media approach. I’ve been extremely quiet on Twitter and only at the minimal level in Facebook. I do think social media is making us prone to attention disorder and it highly affects our ability to stay focused. Toldya you ain’t gonna like this.

Another visible improvement was on the analytical side, especially on the relationships side. We all have our own idiosyncrasies and we tend to react the same way to the same social stimuli. Some persons are making us angry and other are making us happy. We’re reacting to them on autopilot. I noticed that I have an increased attention to my reaction to relationships, giving them much more attention and weight that I did previously. For instance, I avoided a few fights just by being able to see more clearly what the point of the discussion was, and I also was able to start a few fresh contacts with persons I wasn’t usually very attracted to (there were business contacts, mainly).

Tips For A Better Brain Fitness

Now, if you’re going to start your own brain exercising routine (which I believe you’ll do, judging from the fact that you’ve been curious enough to get to this point of the article ), here are a few tips and tricks from my personal experience.

- don’t do attention games after 20:00 in the evening (or with less than 2 hours before going to sleep). It will create an unneeded state of awareness. I couldn’t sleep for hours until i realized that I just challenged my brain attention function and it will stay alert for the next few hours.

- do some brain games before meetings: memory games when you’re doing some public speaking, especially if you’re talking freely, without a written presentation. Do some flexibility games before a negotiation, it will make easier for you to see the opportunities in the discussion. If you’re planning something, do some problem solving exercises and strengthen your forecasting abilities.

- to improve your memory matrix results: try to create stories associated to the the images. I saw that if I give names to some of the shapes, I can solve the matrix faster.

- in attention games is more important to give accurate results than to be faster. The goal is to train your ability to stick with the correct situation than to do it faster. You can become faster in speed games.

- don’t let a gap bigger than 100 BPI between your various cognitive areas, otherwise it will be pretty difficult to advance. Even if you score the highest score on Estimations, for instance, it will be pretty difficult to increase your overall BPI.

The Brain Training Price

Initially, this last paragraph was meant to give you a short overview of the prices for this product. But as the article unfold, I realized that there is really a price you pay if you DON’T enhance your brain. Of course, Lumosity isn’t the only method to train your brain, it’s not the greatest miracle in human evolution, nor even the best thing since the sliced bread (I think the Internet could easily win this one). But it’s a solid service and it does a very interesting thing from a business perspective: it finds a good opportunity and exploits it. The price is affordable, the service is solid, the results are unquestionable (again, at least for me) so it does what every business should do: sell something valuable at an affordable price.

Now, let’s talk about the real prices. The iPhone app is free, and so are the first 20 training sessions. After that, you subscribe using InApp Purchase (meaning you’re buying a subscription from within the iPhone, using the credit card you use for buying stuff on iTunes and App Store). The most affordable yearly plan is 7.99 USD. Please keep in mind that you can play the games for as long as you want without paying, the subscription will only give access to your BPI and tracking statistics. Also, on the iPhone some of the games are sold separately for prices from 0.99 and 1.99. The individual apps offers statistics only for the BPI associated with the game (i.e. only memory BPI if you’re buying the Memory Matrix game).

On the website, the monthly subscription costs 14.99 USD, but there are a few yearly packages which can drop this as low as 4.99 USD for a two years subscription. Keep in mind that when you sign up to Lumosity.com you can use all the features in the website for a limited time. There’s no associated fee for creating an account. You pay this subscription only if you want to access your BPI all the time, access personalized courses and see how you compare with other Lumosity users. Speaking of which, there is also a ”friend this user“ option, so you can get in touch really easily with other guys. If you want to befriend me on Lumosity, my nickname there is edragonu. As for paying the subscription, just keep an eye on your mailbox, because I saw that Lumosity is pushing some special offers and discounts pretty every now and then, so you can get even better than 4.99 USD/month.

So, go ahead: sign up at Lumosity.com (even if you plan to use only the iPhone version, you gotta have an account at Lumosity, your BPI score and evolution are stored remotely on the server).

Start playing, befriend me and let me know how you feel about that.

Happy brain fitness

Training Your Focus

How is your focus? Do you find it easy to concentrate for longer chunks of time or are you easily distracted? Do you enjoy doing the same thing at the same focus level over and over again, or are you easily bored?

I used to think that focus is a function of pleasure: I can concentrate on this because I like it. I do some stuff better than other because I like it. While loving what you do can keep your concentration high, at least in the beginning, maintaining a constant, high focus is not a function of pleasure at all. It’s a function of will.

Focus can be trained. It can be enhanced, it can be shaped the way you want. It can serve you well, if you treat it well. In today’s post I’ll share some of my observations regarding focus and how one can work this tool the same way you work your muscles in your daily workout.

Detach From Pleasure

To like something is a great “do” igniter. It really puts you on the road. Starting something you don’t like is usually slower and less energizing. But after the initial thrill, even if you do like what you’re doing, keeping yourself in the flow requires a lot of effort. Your focus will start to weaken.

The best way to ensure a constant flow of focus is to detach from pleasure. To treat every single task emotionally equal. Might sounds “robotish” and totally not fun, but in fact it’s just a way to trick your focus into a better approaching method.

If you’re constantly doing only things you like, your focus will develop a sort of addiction. It will unconsciously start looking for nice stuff, and will ignore difficult, or boring things. It will not discard it and put it aside for later, the boring stuff will simply disappear from the radar. You’ll end up as a hedonistic prisoner of “only nice stuff, please”.

Detaching from pleasure doesn’t mean you will refrain from enjoying what you’re doing. Detaching from pleasure means you’ll start doing things regardless of their niceness level. You’ll just do them. Detaching from pleasure means you’re also detaching from boredom. If you can observe yourself doing stuff, pleasure and boredom are just choices. You’re doing that thing anyway, so you can chose how you feel about it.

Assess Results

Whenever you keep your focus on something for longer chunks, take your time to assess results every once in a while. Take your time to see how were you at the beginning of the task and how are you now. Especially in difficult tasks, assessing results is a great focus enhancer.

It does this by progress showing. If you’re caught in solving a longer problem, you might forget where you started. You start circling and stumbling. You get caught in a pattern of “I’m getting nowhere with this” and your focus will start weaken. The hedonistic part of you will ask for something nice to hang on, and you’ll step away form the problem and go grab a cookie, for instance.

If after the cookie your focus will be higher, it would be great, but your focus is usually thinner. You didn’t assess any results, you just tried to escape a difficult task. Your focus will want again to the cookie.

Assessing results is easy, is a matter of saying: “I started this journey 15 minutes ago, and I’m doing ok, regardless of the fact I’ve done only one single step. I’m ok. I’m on it.”. Your focus will be forced to stay there until you solve the problem. You assessed your position, you acknowledged the fact that you’re making progress.

This works regardless of the focus time span. You can assess results of a 15 minutes cooking session, or of a 5 years goal. Maintaining your focus is equally important in both.

One More Second

I took this habit from my fitness session. Whenever I do pushups or abs, I establish some goal, let’s say 50 abs. When I’m close to 49, I stretch myself out and go over 50, usually 51, or 52. I do the this all the time. The goal is clear but I always try to stay in there for one more second.

I also did this in business. Whenever I was close to finish a project, I did something extra, a feature or an addition of some kind. It was not in the specs from the beginning but I felt the need to put it there.

Staying “one more second” in a project, in a workout, or in a relationship is a fantastic focus enhancer. I always know that I can do more abs after that second and I always know that my project will be a success, after that last feature. I am in there, I know it, I stay focused.

“One more second” is also good for assessing wrong paths. Even if you feel it’s wrong, take one more second to assess that and let your focus decide. If it’s a bad relationship, stay one more second in it and make sure it’s really bad for you. Next time, your focus will warn you from the beginning, and you won’t have to go through tough times again.

Balance Your Senses

Your focus is channeling the reality by using your senses. Each person have a specific distribution of these senses in their focus. Some are visual, some are functioning well by really touching stuff, some are reacting better to voices. Your senses are the gates and your focus is the gate opener.

Focus likes diversity. If you’re a visual guy, try using some sounds in the next working session. Put some music on, tap the table from time to time. If you’re doing something related to sounds (you’re a musician for instance, or working on a movie soundtrack) try to balance this by using some new lights around you. Change your seat, light a candle. It will instantly make you focus better.

Your focus will always appreciate a new balance in your senses. It’s not about boredom, we talked about that already. What you’re doing is sending a complementary signal that will make your focus trying to recompose the big picture. And that will keep it on the current task.

Your Focus Is Your Reality

Ok, I cheated a bit. I started with all those tips about focus enhancement and kept the focus definition aside. And I did this for a reason.

I strongly believe that your focus is in fact your reality. You cannot experience something outside your focus. Everything you do is driven by focus, it’s like a handle to keep and master your environment. It’s the only way you actively experience your life: whenever you’re not focused, you’re drifting away, whenever you’re focused you’re sailing.

Let’s make a short experiment now. Take a look at the wall in front of you. Yes, like right now. Take a look, I said, don’t cheat. After several seconds come back here and read on.

Where was your focus while you looked at the wall? Outside this blog post, of course, what a silly question. But where was the blog post during this period? You’ll answer that it was there, right in front of you, waiting for your to get back. It was in your mind. But I will say this blog post was completely outside your reality.

You might have think it was there, but it was on a virtual space and time. Your real space and time was filled with the wall. You were focused on the wall, and the wall took precedence of everything else in your life, including your thoughts. You might have think you were thinking at the post, but instead you were focused on the wall.

Everything in your life works like this. You might think you’re doing something, but your real focus is somewhere else. You think you’re happy, but instead of real happiness, your focus is in useless, shallow thoughts. You give to your thinking mind the benefit of reality, instead to give this to your focus. You might spend your entire life thinking you’re doing just fine, but your focus will be on a wall. You’ll be in fact experiencing a wall, not a happy life.

This is why training your focus is far more than a productivity technique. At a certain level, focus mastering is a magical endeavor, is an esoteric, almost secret art.

The one who masters his focus will master his own world.

Are you with me here? Or are your drifting away?

Perfect versus Better

We tend to define perfection as the absence of flaws, which is inherently wrong, since flaws are part of the reality. Too often, our perception of perfection as a flawless situation or individual proved to be not only difficult to learn, but plain wrong and deceivable. Striving for perfection causes more harm than good, leading into a land of frustration, weariness and misery.

Defining something by the absence of something else is a mindset of incompletion, a hedonistic and fearful approach. It’s hedonistic because we try to isolate only the “good” things from the whole, and it’s fearful because we do that by fear of the other, “bad” side. Choosing only one side of the coin is useless and ineffective. You can’t have a full coin if you chose only one side of it.

On the other hand, being just better assumes you know your flaws and accept them. You’re just getting better, not perfect. You’re embracing your whole structure. Not seldom, what you considered to be “flaws” are just violent pointers for a path you refuse to see or to take. What you may call “flaw” is in fact just an open window for another reality, usually much better than the current one.

Dry Future versus Rich Present

When you move your focus from your current reality and projecting it into a future, flawless reality in which you are perfect, you are depriving yourself from the only precious tool you have: your present time. When you step out of the living second and project yourself into a dry future you’re not actually living to the full. Whenever you strive for perfection you step out from the current time space continuum and try to insert into another, illusory one.

Whenever you strive for getting better, you’re in the present moment. You have to continuously assess your progress, you have to keep your focus on what you’re doing. If you had goals, you have to constantly check if you reached them. And if you did, you have to evaluate your options and set up the next goals. When you chose to become better, you never get out of your current time space continuum. Your present is real. And is rich.

Destination Oriented versus Traveling Oriented

When you strive for perfection you’re destination oriented: your goal is to attain a certain state, a flawless situation in which you are perfect. When you strive for being better you’re traveling oriented: your goal is not so much the destination, which changes continuously, but the travel itself.

I find much more joy by traveling than by arriving to a certain destination. As long as the current destination is also the departure point for my next trip, I can understand and I enjoy it. But if my final destination is reached, that means it’s the end of the travel. My trip has to stop. Which I simply don’t want to happen. I enjoy the trip much too much.

Focus On Bad vs Focus On Good

Striving for perfection is such a wearing attitude, it really drains you out. In fact, striving for perfection is quite a negativistic approach, if you look carefully. Since we define perfection as the absence of flaws, when we strive for perfection we focus on eliminating our flaws. Hence, we focus on flaws, instead of things we can improve.

Striving to be better is a fulfilling attitude, it fuel your body and mind. Striving for the better is focusing on the positive side. By accepting your flaws as part of your inherent nature, focusing on becoming better forces you to focus on your positive qualities and start enhancing what you already have an can grow.

The Dumbo Paradigm

I guess you all know by now the famous Dumbo cartoon. For those living on planet Mars in the last  50 years, Dumbo is the touching story of a baby elephant which had a big problem: huge ears. So huge that it actually had integration problems in his environment, a circus. His mother had to defend him from picky boys saying bad things about it, the other workers in the circus were also bothered by the little cub which only use seemed to be a very dangerous leap into a bucket filled with water, and nothing more. That little elephant with those incredibly big ears was no good even in a circus. Dumbo was tainted by his flaw: those huge and almost obscene ears.

But after the little elephant touches the bottom of his sorrow, with a little help from his friends, stumble upon a great discovery. His ears are so big that it can actually… fly! Right, those ears are so big that it can become a flying mammal just by flipping them. His biggest flaw has become the trampoline for his biggest success. The cartoon ends with a happy image of Dumbo flying all over the country above its personal tour train.

There is much to be learned from this story, and I do intend to write another blog post about it, but for now I’ll just say that Dumbo became better not because he tried to eliminate his flaw, but because he accepted it and made the best out of it. Dumbo focused on becoming better not perfect. If Dumbo would have been a perfect elephant, I really doubt that Disney would have made a cartoon about it.

Perfection is boring. Getting better is where all the fun is.

Learning To Ignore

One of the most important things I learned in the last few years was the fact that my focus is actually creating what I call my reality. I know, it’s a pretty straightforward way to start a blog post about how to learn to ignore, but I do this on purpose.

Focus is the actual builder of your reality. Is the fluid that makes it move, change and look alive. Without your focus, things aren’t there. They might be (and this is something you can be aware of) but they aren’t there for you, for your reality. Focus creates everything around you and this is a subtle yet incredibly important shift form your standard reality approaches.

I’m sure most of you think that reality is something “outside” you. Reality is already there and it will continue to be after you. It’s independent from you.

Relax, I’m not going to dig into something philosophical right now. I plan to this anyway in a future post about focus. What I’m going to do right now is to show you how this standard approach of the “outside” reality can – and will be – used as an excuse.

I Can’t Avoid It

If you think reality is already there and you can’t do a thing to influence it, next step is to think that everything in your life is the result of a pre-programmed set of events.  There is already a plan and you can’t do anything but to follow that plan. Of course, you will start to act like you have no power. You will put every responsibility of your life on the so called “destiny” or “faith”.

This is the easiest way to delude yourself and embrace a miserable journey for the rest of your life. Many people already think like this. This mindset is so present that you start to think it must be “real”. But you know, just because a 1000 people are saying that I can’t climb a mountain, this doesn’t necessarily stops me for climbing that mountain.

What I’m saying is that you can change your reality. Not only you can change what you are experiencing right now, but you can also create whatever you want. And even if you think you never did that, you already did it before. I’m sure you have memories of something really nice that happened in your life as a direct result of your actions.

Maybe it was the courage to approach your actual wife when you were a student? Maybe it was the decision to switch your career? Maybe it was a kind gesture towards a total stranger that filled your heart with gratitude and joy? Those were situation in which you modified your reality in order to obey your wishes… You made it happen. And everybody has these memories.

Now start thinking what was happening during that specific action. What happened to you during that sudden release of energy which created a shift in your reality? Where was your focus? You were thinking at something else when you proposed your wife? I really doubt that. You were thinking to finish that boring report when you quit your job? Hell, no, otherwise you would still be in that dark office doing a dull job.

Instead, you focused totally on what you wanted. You left apart everything that you didn’t wanted to happen to you, and focused only on what you wanted to happen. You wanted your future wife to say yes and you wanted that job to disappear from your life. Your focus was so clear, that  your reality didn’t had any other choices than to follow it. You were so focused that anything else in the universe disappearead. You were there. Totally there. (more…)