Period.
I mean, really.. All the experiences gained, all the knowledge gathered, all the love received and given away, all the challenges solved and all new people met every day, can make quite a good bargain for all the effort invested, don’t they? 
Unfortunately many of us take all of this as something most trivial and are therefore unable to embrace all the joys life fills us with day by day, while at the same time they are daydreaming of some unrealistic perfect situations with no real intention ever to happen. And even if they do, of what use would that be? The same person would most likely have other goals and different dreams, at that time, and would again not even be aware of the fortune they were blessed with.. But don’t get me wrong – I still think imagination and big goals are of great importance for our personal and professional growth, but should only be used as a kind of “mental tools” and not as the main principle of how we engage with life.
Habits are an extremely powerful tool, when used right, but one of the greatest curses, when out of our control. They could be described as a kind of a way, how our subconsciousness helps us with the pursuit of our goals.
How does this process work?
Through our thinking and repetitive activities, we reprogram our subconscious mind to adopt that kind of behavior and execute it at the littlest effort invested possible. If we take Psycho-Cybernetics as a reference, it says that about three week to a month are required for this new attribute to domesticate itself in your mind.
How good habits make the difference?
As we people have realised that time can’t be managed and that we should optimize our energy investments to our activities, it soon becomes clear, how profitable can be the delegation of our chores and repetitive tasks as habits to our subconscious mind, where they will be regularly executed with little or no conscious effort needed. This could be described as some kind of a mind hack to our preferred behaviour (always heading along the path of the least resistance), where all the conscious effort is excluded from the process. For an example if we would like to get up at 6am every day and take some kind of physical practice, our mind will very likely come up with various arguments for not getting up and oversleep our planned activity. This behaviour may seem beneficial in short run by getting enough sleep, but can’t compare to long term benefits of improved physical condition by regular daily exercise. Even furthermore, the more I study success stories and success principles, the more evident it is how habits shape the character and are many times the crucial difference between a man of standards and the one of great success.
And how the bad ones are lowering the life’s quality…
Smoking, drinking to much coffee, being late, campaign learning, spending all of our income every month, overeating, lack of physical exercise, watching TV long into the night, spending half a day unproductively on facebook, becoming a news junkie, work-a-holism, can’t spend a weekend without being drunk, chronically getting up late in the morning… You don’t have to guess twice, how productive can you be with such practices…
How to raise the good ones?
The most effective technique that has yet come into my way are probably 30-day trials. That is about enough time for your subconsciousness to get programmed to a desired way and still small enough time span that everyone should be able to keep his focus along. Just choose a habit you want and repeat it strictly every day for 30 days. At first it can be very hard, but over time it gets much easier… You just need to have enough will and determination to keep up and defeat the emerging barriers. More about this subject can be read here.
And why I am writing all of this?
Because one could never exaggerate the importance of the role habits play in someones life. They determine someones quality of life, the wealth someone is going to accumulate, quality of his relationships, development of various person’s faculties, etc. They take part in almost any area of life imaginable. In most cases, you would say, that it’s his character, he can’t do anything about that… But even our characters are made somehow. We have some kind of predispositions inborn, but attitude towards life, our philosophies, they are mostly in-learned. So if you have any serious interest in development of your potentials, you should certainly give them some more attention and gain their better understanding.
If you are interested in further studies of this subject, you should take a look at the following books:
Stephen R. Covey: Seven habits of highly effective people
Maxwell Maltz: Psycho-Cybernetics
Quite some hours last week, were dedicated to watching American civil war movies; Gettysburg, Glory and Gone with the wind. And seeing all those people fighting in such ridiculous way, with so many guaranteed casualties, can be quite mind bothering. How can you convince such masses to march over a long battlefield with such discipline, meanwhile sieged by canons, than under enemy’s gunfire and lastly, facing the enemies with bayonets. You need some kind of a minor miracle to motivate people for such a thing, or needn’t you?
Along the history, we people raged war for numerous reasons. The primary is the survival one, then there are different economic reasons and others depending on the historical era, the battle took place. As for the first two, I believe they’re constant, while the others I believe, are the products of the development of our consciousness. While in prehistoric, the battle was triggered if someones survival had been endangered, in antique there were mostly ambitions of conquest, looting and gathering wealth, in the middle ages some kind of primitive “higher causes” emerged, like crusades for example (at least that is what the masses believed, of course it was also backed up with ambitions for extending Church’s power, of conquest, and gathering wealth), and then this higher causes grow to a degree, where in American civil war practically all believed (soldiers of the Union) they were fighting for “human rights” of every fellow American and the abolishment of slavery (not to forget the economical loss, the rebellious Confederation would suffer with this act..). Purely ideological cause believed by many, defending the idea considered today as something most natural, that motivated the soldiers to risk their lives for, and march in practically assured massacres. Then the first world war also appeared pretty ideological on the outside (brainwashing about inequality of nations and taking aggressive stance against them), while there were most likely purely economical reasons (distribution of colonies), and than the second one, I believe was ideological on huge majority of aspects, even though there are theories that German economy had been developed to a degree that was too suppressed from the winners of the first world war, and had to be “extended”. It was followed by the clash of two ideologies; communism and capitalism (cold war) and their ambitions for economical prevailment over the globe, resulted in dominance of capitalism, continuing to occupy the rest of the planet, under pseudonyms like terrorism etc.
So where is the difference? As we can see, the causes were developed paralleled with the development of the awareness of our “needs”. If we take Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a reference (Picture 2), physiological reasons were enough at first to start a war. But when they were met, people laid back, become lazy, and some other motivator was needed if “rulers” of some system wanted to expand their geopolitical reach and fill up “system’s treasury”. So safety reasons came in place.. Still quite materialistic in many ways, but if a man feels endangered or in lack of resources, prosperity, employment, you needn’t convince him too long to have him engage in a fight. And when this aspect is met, you continue climbing up the hierarchy with the development of causes for convincing the masses for your deed. So today, when most of us in somewhere in the self-actualization part, with more or less all the lower needs taken care of, it seems pretty illogical when you look back, what were our forefathers fighting about. Because the abundance we live in, makes all of it look natural to us, and we feel we’re entitled to it in the first place. But if someone endangered or “removed” one of the “founding bricks” to our current state in this hierarchy, I believe most of us would be ready to defend it in an instant (at least I hope so 
). But what about the aggressive counterpart?
Picture 2: Maslow's Hirearchy of Needs
There are two ways to exploit this hypothesis. The first one is to go higher in this hierarchy and make up some “higher cause” based on those needs, the people will like and feel entitled to, but “someone” is preventing it from them, to have it at the moment.. And the other way.. Go down the hierarchy, as far as you can, find some “entitlement” you like, take it away from them, and then blame someone else for it. (Bush “excelled” at this.. Taking security and scared the shit out of Americans and many others with Al Kaida, and than they granted him the war on terror, with permissions for attacking almost anyone he wished). But for God’s sake, don’t do anything of the above. Because..
Human mind is capable of providing us with abundance in all areas of life. So rather than kill and conquer, create and serve to each other. And why not love your fellow human for a change? Would do you no harm.. Because like you, every one only strives for happiness and fulfilled life. And don’t search for this on the outside, in land, power or wealth.. Because even with all of this, you will only find it, when you create peace and balance in yourself. Therefore, there is no need for aggressiveness, unless someone limits any of your fundamental needs. But try not to let yourself to be deceived..
Tags: battle, development, happiness, needs, war
An interesting quote, I came across while watching the movie “A good year”. Even though I don’t totally agree with such statement, if we take beauty as an alignment of someone’s physique with society’s standards, that are instilled in us during our socialization and participation in society as such, the above statement couldn’t be far from the truth. Why so?
I believe there are some among us, that have faithfully allowed their colleagues, media, etc. to take charge over developing their own goals and life’s purpose. For them, the idea of having such a “standards complied” girl to be seen around with, alone presents the big enough source of satisfaction for all their needs. But all others, we need something more.. something with much more distant expiration date, something that will at once dismiss all our doubts and regrets, that could turn up while investing huge amounts of our love and energy into the selected person. And what is that “something”?
I believe it could be the respect of her/his personality and of course, some kind of a physical turn-on. The latter is already taken care of by our creator, we only need to find the way to manifest those charms at our best, but the former needs some more of our effort and attention. Nobody is born with an impressive character, only with its predispositions. Then it is up to us, how we’re going to develop it. And here comes the catch… our character consists of our habits, that are the result of continuous actions in its favor, and actions are the consequences of our thinking and philosophies. And as we are always heading along the path of the least resistance, we end up with two choices for altering the habits, which usually demand heavy effort end energy investments. Either we end up in conflicting situation that forces us to do so, or take our own initiative, which is quite illogically very rare (otherwise there wouldn’t have risen such business around quick diets, shortcuts to financial independence, etc.). And this is where that “standard beauty” become more of a curse, than a blessing. Because we tend to be much more sympathetic with the people that are most aligned with that social beauty standards. We are more likely to help them, and avoiding conflicts between us and them, by solving them in their favor. So people of such “curse” are much more likely to experience less life’s difficulties and therefore, the development of their character and good habits are very likely to stagnate, with slow or no positive development at all. Of course exceptions can be found, as they might have different problems (for an example, in a modeling world, it can be a very tough path to a successful career, with many testings of personal values, ethics, etc.), but I still believe that could only apply to a little minority, as for majority, the hypothesis described above could have a very solid grounds.
But what about beauty as such? The one above is mostly regarding to the society ideals, we are brainwashed by through different media channels and different traditions. But as for the other sorts, I’m strongly convinced It’s a very relative thing. As in economics, where there is some kind of demand, there can be some kind of value. So as nature made us, we’re all buyers at this, and we are the ones that put the “price tag” and express desirability over some personality or physical trait. And a question inevitably appears; What do we really value?
Not what the society expect from us, but what do we as individuals sincerely want? What character traits we respect most and what physical attributes turn us on most effectively? And as we all have different sets and combinations of these “preferences”, nature blessed us with the variety, that made it very possible for the “perfect” matches of our demands to be found. And to conclude, our “match” is as beautiful, as we make it. It all depends on how well we’re able to express this perfection, cherish it and welcome it in our life’s fairy tale. So there is no universal beauty, it all depends on how well we’re able to resonate with the chosen “perfection”, we decide to build our life around.
And lastly, to comment the title of this “article”… Most of the beauties (there are some exceptions of course) by so called “society standards” really are for the shallow “heroes” without any bright future in the eyes of a great character building and enjoying life in all its beauties on as many areas as possible. But for all others, we want something more… We want those angels, we could establish the greatest relationships with, and transform them to our best friends, as well the intimate ones, as the ones on the other areas of our cooperation. We search for the soul mates in creation, the most divine shape of the interlaced blissfulness for every individual, that will ever come in existence, called true love… And can such materialistic attitude towards beauty (as pointed out in the title) ever be the core foundation for this sensational, almost spiritual leveled feelings? I don’t believe so…
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