Takashi Izo’s blog Goes on Retreat

Regular readers may have noticed my post topics have been jumping around a bit lately. This is partly because I have more than one blog, but also too many other writing projects. It also doesn’t help having a full time job and an ongoing search for a new full time job.

I’m taking a break from blogging, but not a break from article writing. An article a day is my current writing priority. When I return to blogging, I will be posting much more frequently. Once a week isn’t often enough to get a decent number of visitors. I’ll have over 50 articles ready to go and be posting every 3 days or less when I return. That will allow articles to be more closely related and that’s especially important with some of the more difficult topics.

If you’d like to know more, you can read the full details here.

Article text copyright 2011 David Arthur Smith. All Rights Reserved.

The Benefits of Aiming Too High

If you aim too high and don’t quite make it, you may still reach your goal. If you aim at exactly what you want to achieve and don’t quite make it, you fail. Of course, we should always aim too high. But, most of us don’t. Why?

When we set a tough target and miss, we feel like we’ve experienced a failure. This is the case even when we know we were aiming beyond our goal and achieved what we wanted. We perceive two goals, one higher than the other, and it’s the low goal we achieve. What failures we must be.

Why Psychotherapy Works

For someone who has studied nothing about psychology, there’s no mystery about how it works. They have no interest in the question. As far as they know, if someone has emotional problems they go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, receive therapy or medication and get better. A sunny idealized view, but one that is occasionally true.

The reality is that sometimes therapy and medication have no effect or even make the patient’s problems worse. But, this article isn’t about how psychology fails. The question is, why does it often succeed?

Counting Lives

Hermann Hesse wrote books about people who lived more than one life in a single lifetime. The last one was published in 1943. Since then, few writers have made transitioning to a new life part of their novels. The requirement that the protagonist of a novel needs to resolve some deep personal conflict is usually handled with a new job similar to their old one, patching a failing relationship or finding a new lover.

Nonfiction books on careers do a little better job dealing with this. Most of what they write requires that your first career pays well enough that you have savings that can be used to get a degree that launches a new career. That is a transition between lives, but it’s rich people’s lives. It’s not what the average working person experiences.

Staying On Top When You Slip Into Old Habits

Quitting a bad habit can be tough if you don’t have a good game plan. Because it’s a habit, you will have situations and times in the day when you feel it’s time to indulge.

How to Break Out of a Negative Rut

If life seems to be stuck in a negative rut for you, maybe it’s time to consider what kind of world you’re living in. Is it moving you closer to realizing your goals or further away? Is it helping in some ways but distracting you in others? Sometimes friends will hold you back unintentionally. Everybody doesn’t want the same things. You can reverse direction.

Start by Finding the Negativities

If you don’t know what’s wrong, you can’t fix it. Make a list of the ways you spend your time. Include how much time you spend on each activity. Rate each as either positive, negative or neutral. You aren’t going to cut out a neutral activity, like eating, for example. You will want to do your best to get rid of the negatives. Four hours of TV every night is a negative, in case you didn’t know. An hour of TV every day is a break. Four is a waste of time. You’re zoning out when you could be accomplishing something.

You Get What You Ask For

Do you feel like you’re doing all the right things and getting all the wrong results? If you’re the only one who knows what you’re going for, there’s a good reason you aren’t seeing good results.

Your Job

If you have a job as a graphic artist, for example, and help out with technical documentation on your own time, don’t expect to be offered a technical writer position. Promotions are offered in line with your current job. You need to be explicit about what you want. Let the managers who work with technical writers know that you want to switch roles. Get their advice and take assignments from them. Study what they tell you to study to get ready for any required tests and to prepare for the change.

Don’t Be A Victim

You As Victim

You make yourself a victim when you see yourself as acted upon by other people. When you believe your life is out of your control, you become passive and things happen to you. You feel sorry for yourself because you can’t do anything about the events that decide your fate. You find yourself looking for pity from others because of the bad situation you have no control over.

Social Anxiety Can Be Overcome

Social anxiety is a fear of social situations where you may be evaluated by others. You don’t know what other people are thinking or how they may react to you. That element of mystery should make socializing interesting. If you have social anxiety, you experience fear instead of excitement.

Your Goals Need a Path

I’m going against my usual article style and talking about my own goals in this one. I think some concrete examples are called for.

Ten years ago, I received an old 386 PC as compensation for some bookkeeping I had done for a small business. At the time, I was using an Atari 2200 computer, so this was an interesting change. The Atari had a GUI but the 386 did not. It came with all of it’s original manuals. I read them all and tried everything. It amazed me how much more I could do with this black and white text-only machine. I saw a lot of potential there and had an idea.