Attitude – Page 3 – Endurance Free Living

About Competition

Success is not always what it seems. Photo:© R.Morgan

I have long believed that the only true competition in this world is with yourself.

We live in a society where people are much too concerned with what others are doing and thinking, or might think.

Comparison with others is meaningless and only brings distress, and yet in our society we do it all the time.

“The next door neighbours have a swimming pool so we must get one,” even though we’re afraid of water and never go swimming.

“My girlfriends all have tattoos so I must get one,” even though it’s not really my thing.

“Bill has just got a promotion. Isn’t it time that I got one?”

Never mind that Bill sold his soul in the process.

The next time you look at someone else and feel envious, ask yourself how much you really know about the person.

He may be driving the expensive car you have always wanted, but is it paid for or just bought on credit?

He may have an incredibly beautiful wife, but perhaps in private they haven’t got two words to say to each other.

The thing is, everybody is different.

We all had individual experiences growing up, we all have our own agenda.

Don’t assume someone is successful because he or she is “successful” in the eyes of society.

We do not know what has been given up along the way or what is truly going on inside that person.

That is why comparisons are meaningless, and competition with others a waste of time.

It’s like comparing an apple with an orange.

On the other hand, competition with yourself will help you to develop and make each day a new beginning.

You can compare where you are now with where you were last week, last month, last year…

“I can do fifty press ups now but last year, I could only do twenty.”

“I can play a guitar reasonably well whereas a year ago, I couldn’t play at all.”

“I couldn’t do this at work, but now I can.”

You can look at concrete elements in your life and see progress.

The most important thing in this competing with yourself, though, and the main reason for the existence of this website,
is NOT TO MAKE LIFE AN ENDURANCE TEST.

Give yourself days off.

Allow yourself to have fun.

Frustrated that you can’t master that programme. Leave it and come back to it another day.

Can’t do what you wanted to do. Start again tomorrow.

The joy is in the doing, not in boasting about it the next day.

And don’t be put off if people say, as they have to me over the years:

“I don’t understand why you aren’t further ahead in your career.”

(Replace “career” with whatever applies to you!)

This is a meaningless judgement.

They do not know who you are or what you have gone through in life.

Their definition of success is almost certainly different from yours.

Sometimes the people who think they know you the best (parents, siblings, even close friends) don’t have a clue who you really are.

So do your own thing.

Run your own energy.

Leave the bleating to the others.

And see what happens.

Love

Richard

Start Before You’re Ready

I saw this wonderful video by Marie Forleo on YouTube:

Can’t Seem To Get Started? This One Idea Could Change Your Life

Never a truer piece of advice.

And well worth spending the seven minutes to watch.

I’ve already talked about Marie TV in a previous post:

Performance Tips (No, Not That Kind…)

As I mentioned before, the channel is really targeted at entrepreneurs and business activities, but many of the pieces of advice are relevant to any sphere of activity.

Marie is quite a character, has a big following with her YouTube channel and is fun to watch.

A little personal story here.

Almost exactly a year ago, I brought out my second full album of original music, MY TITANIC.

Now bringing out the first album, THE LESS YOU DO, in 2010, had been somewhat of an uncomfortable experience. I’d gone into the studio with eight musicians and an arranger and it had all got rather complicated.

So for the second album, I wanted to go a different direction and I was thinking about trying to record some tracks on my own, but I didn’t feel ready.

I was wondering what to do when I discovered a remarkable and now unfortunately defunct site called CrowdAudio which allowed artists to run mixing competitions.

As it happened, I’d recorded a ballad with just a piano-voice arrangement a fews days previously, so I decided to put it in and see what happened.

147 mixes and much listening later, I’d discovered the engineer with whom I went on to record the whole album. 3ee happens to live in Romania.

Now I wasn’t at all sure about recording the album on my own at home. But I liked the initial mix and I thought I could maybe try to record a few more songs before getting stuck and hiring session musicians in to a studio. Although I worried that the song arrangements would be too thin and the instrumental playing too weak, I persuaded myself to give it a shot.

So I started recording the album and sending the results off to Romania.

I decided to get each song mixed and mastered before moving on to the next.

Gradually, the number of completed songs built up.

And finally, I reached a tipping point where I said to myself, “What the hell, let’s do the whole thing like this.”

And the interesting thing was that the experience of recording at home generated new songs as I went along, songs that perhaps I would not have written otherwise.

In the end, many of the songs that I had initially wanted to record didn’t get on the album because I was enjoying the process of writing songs from scratch and recording them, all within the space of a few days. Some of them really sped through the “factory.”

Did I feel ready to record the whole album by myself before starting?

Absolutely not.

Is the result perfect?

No.

Could the arrangements be better?

Probably.

But it doesn’t stop me from being proud of the album and grateful for the experience.

And as Marie points out in her video, there’s really only one crime.

Everybody has to begin somewhere. Everybody makes mistakes. Everybody has to change things around.

The only real crime is not starting at all.

Love

Richard

The Start of a Backlash?

I thought this was an interesting article on BBC News recently:

Some cafes are banning wi-fi to encourage conversation

I’m relieved to see that the fact that everybody’s noses seem to be stuck to their screens all day long at last seems to bother some people.

It’s no substitute for real human interaction as another article from BBC Newsbeat suggests:

US Psychologists Claim Social Media Increases Loneliness

Personally, I’d like to see more places that are wi-fi, laptop and mobile phone free.

It really is time that people reclaimed their lives and started returning to the real world.

The mobile phone is a tool over which many people have no control whatsoever.

If you do not master a tool, then you become its slave.

Other tools that people are often enslaved to are money and TV.

Same thing applies.

Ask yourself honestly:

Do I have control over my mobile phone/money/TV or does it have control over me?

And if your answer is that you don’t have control over these things:

TV and mobile phone:
Discover the off button and practise using it.
Start real conversations with real people in front of you.
Do not reply to the phone when you are already in a conversation with a real person.
Try looking at the world around you. It’s full of beauty.

Money:
Try being thankful for the money that you already have.
Try sitting down and working out how much money you really need.
Try evaluating the real cost of obtaining the money you earn.
Try giving some away and see how it feels.

Good luck in all your endeavours.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

Paraphernalia

Wikipedia définition: “Paraphernalia most commonly refers to a group of apparatus, equipment, or furnishing used for a particular activity.”

When I was a kid, I had a bike.

Whenever I wanted, I leapt on my bike and went for a ride.

It was that simple.

Now it seems you can’t go for a ride unless you’ve got the right shoes and togs, preferably smeared with advertising so you look like you’re on a pro team.

And don’t forget the gel-padded gloves, the water bottle, the pump, the tinted protective glasses and the indispensable crash helmet.

Bicycle clips on your ordinary trousers are passé.

You need a special low friction, ultra high-speed, no wind-resistant pair of tights.

Whatever happened to simple?

Whatever happened to inexpensive?

Let’s take another example: fitness.

All the advertising suggests that you need an expensive gym membership to stay fit or at least have a few costly machines at home.

Not so.

Even if you have no exercise ideas of your own, the internet abounds in excellent exercise suggestions that require nothing more than willpower and a functional body to perform without any equipment whatsoever (see list at end of post).

So why are we constantly cluttering up our lives with all this unnecessary equipment and expense?

Perhaps we’re trying to convince ourselves that if we don’t have the equipment we can’t do the activity.

Perhaps we’re afraid that if there is no one to look at us, then we won’t exercise.

Ultimately, though, it’s between you and you.

The rest is just distraction.

All that equipment, all that clutter – it’s a hindrance rather than a help.

Keep it simple.

Do what you can.

Go slowly – you’ll quickly become disgusted if you overdo it.

Here are a few YouTube exercise channels that I particularly like:

Bowflex Workouts
Although this company makes fitness equipment, the workouts without any equipment at all are very interesting. The link I’ve given will take you to a series of standing abdo exercises that I’ve tried out myself, but the are plenty more videos like that. It’s a little macho with the man giving the orders and the girls doing all the work, but my goodness those girls are beautiful!

Tapp Brothers
These guys are into parkour but their exercise suggestions without equipment are really interesting and useful for anybody.

Flipping 50
Targeted at people over fifty, the lady presenter may be a little less flamboyant but her suggestions are good.

K’s Perfect Fitness
The girl has the obligatory stunning looks of a standard get fit channel, but she actually has some good exercise tips without equipment as well as with. The poor sound is a minor irritation (microphone on camera so no presence).

Very important – don’t get depressed if you don’t look like the presenters in these videos!

Hope that helps.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard

They Say

A new scientific study seems to appear almost every day.

Some of them might be useful.

Many of them are not.

For example, a recent study found that the reason natural fibre garments smell less than those derived from petrol is that natural fibres, such as cotton, wool or linen, absorb sweat whereas artificial ones do not.

Now I don’t know how much funding ‘they’ got for this study, or indeed how ‘they’ got any money at all, but I could have told them that before they started.

It’s common sense.

The problem is that what used to be common sense isn’t any more.

Money must be spent in order to establish the obvious.

Take another recent study that found that if an ‘independent study’ was made (that’s right – we even need studies about studies now) using money from an interested source, then it was 40% more likely to be biased.

In other words, and to give a fictional (?) example, if a cigarette company gives a lot of money to fund a study about the causes of lung cancer, it is more likely that the conclusion will be that the major cause in smokers is prevalent air pollution rather than smoking cigarettes.

Who would have guessed?

My only comment about that study would be that the 40% of increased probability is much too low and that some interested party probably put enough money into the study to get ‘them’ to bring the figure down from 100%.

Moral of the story: human beings are infinitely corruptible, especially where money is concerned.

So the next time you hear someone “they saying,” I suggest that your very first reaction should be:

“Who are “they”?”

Oh, it’s a report from a government body….

“No, who put up the money for the research?”

It was a health organization….

“No, who really put up the money?”

Because on closer inspection, no ‘independent report’ is independent.

Someone somewhere has always got something to prove, an agenda, an ‘interest.’

It would be much more honest to admit that bias.

Who knows, it might even help to make the findings useful?

Have a great weekend.

Love

Richard

Performance Tips (No, Not That Kind…)

Hi Everybody,

Wow, 2017. Happy New Year.

Seems like the new millenium was only last week.

Anyway, I just had to share this video which I think you’ll enjoy and find useful:

Why Smart People Underperform

Did you make any New Year’s Resolutions?

I’m proud to say I didn’t even think about it this year.

But if you did, we’re in that New Year’s resolution dicey patch, when they’re already starting to fall apart.

While this may have little to do with your NYR, it contains simple practical tips on how to get your life back on track.

Sorry, if you’re looking for tips on how to keep it up for longer, then you’ve come the wrong place. We’re not really talking about that kind of performance.

On the other hand….

And don’t worry about the “smart” or the business blurb in the opening speech by Marie Forleo.

The advice from Dr. Ned Hallowell is valuable for anybody.

Here’s the link again:

Why Smart People Underperform

Enjoy.

Love

Richard

12,218

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the 8,747 visitors to this site for their 12’218 reads over the first year that this site has been operating.

Your support is very much appreciated and I hope that you will stay with us in 2017.

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In a spirit of Christmas frivolity, I will leave you with this idea.

A friend on Facebook was asking about the name of the affliction where a person answers a question, for example, ‘How are you?’ with a number.

I don’t know the name of the affliction off the top of my head.

But it got me thinking.

What if we all agreed to use a scale of 0 to 10 so that when someone asks, ‘How are you?’ we could reply with, say, ‘1’ on a bad day and ‘9’ on an excellent one?

That way, with ‘1’ they would know not to bother us further, and with ‘9,’ we would know not to bother them…

It would be so much more efficient and communicative than replying with the usual, ‘Fine,’ which really indicates nothing at all except the weight of social convention.

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and health and happiness in 2017.

Love

Richard

P.S. If you can guess where this photo was taken, I’ll send you a free copy of my 2016 album, MY TITANIC.

The Dreaded In-Between (continued)

If you read my post a couple of weeks ago about reducing those floating moments (minutes, hours, days?) between actions, then you might be interested in having a look at this video:

3 Signs That You Will Become Rich One Day.

Don’t be put off by the mention of money in the title and the business-inspired aspect of the video.

This advice applies to anybody and anything.

It’s about the importance of time and using it to our best ability.

The remarks at the end about going out and doing things rather than wasting time on social media are spot on (although, I suppose, if you’re reading this, it’s technically a form of social media. Oh well, mummy knows best.)

Hope you find the video useful.

And don’t beat yourself up if you didn’t achieve all you wanted to do today.

Just try again tomorrow.

Love

Richard

The Fragility of Life

I had the misfortune to run over a cat on Friday last whilst driving through a small village on the way to the lake.

Well, strictly speaking I suppose, the misfortune was really the cat’s, mine being only minor in comparison.

Suddenly, there it was without warning, a sandy blur racing across the road only a meter or so in front of the car.

I braked hard but to no avail.

There was a sickening sensation as the right front wheel went over something and then it was in my rear-view mirror, throwing itself in the air and leaping around as if charged with electricity.

I stopped the car off the road and went back to check out the poor beast, dreading what I would find.

Mercifully, for both of us, the cat was dead when I got to it, so it can’t have suffered for more than twenty seconds, thirty at the most.
I had had a vision of it being horribly mutilated but clinging on to life and me sitting with it while waiting for a vet to come and finish it off.

We were both spared that.

Fortune in misfortune.

I picked the cat up and put it gently on the pavement, so it wouldn’t get run over by other cars.

“I’m so sorry,” I said aloud, “I’m so sorry.”

I thought that perhaps someone in the village would know whose cat it was, so that the owner wouldn’t wonder for months what had happened or if it was going to walk through the door at some point.

Closure.

Later, I informed the police of the accident.

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I learnt to drive in 1979.

In all the time since, I’ve never run over an animal. No humans either, I should add.

I hit a rabbit in Ireland once.

We were driving along a country round and there were rabbits everywhere, like the terrestrial equivalent of Hitchcock’s “The Birds.” One of them suddenly took it into its head to leap under the car from a bank by the road, but fortunately I was driving so slowly that it was only a little dazed and soon hopped off again.

Only recently, I was thinking how grateful I was that I’d been spared.

And then this.

No warning.

Sometimes, I have inner warnings to slow down while going through a forest, for example.

Once, when I had a premonition, several deer glided like grey shadows in the winter light from the forest and across the road, invisible until the last moment.

But I was ready for them.

Not this time.

No premonition.

No warning.

A hedge at a right angle blocked any vision of the cat until it was in the road.

What could the animal have been thinking? To dash across the road with a car so close.

I shall never know.

The film goes round in my my mind.

There’s that split-second when our eyes met just before it disappeared under the car….

***********************************************************

And what lesson can be taken away from something like that?

First and foremost, such an experience underlines the fragility of life.

One minute here, full of health and energy, the next gone.

It makes you think.

It makes you define your priorities, or it should do.

It could happen to any of us.

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And, rather disturbingly, it also makes you realize how much the colour red is present in food.

I wish you a safe week, wherever you may be and wherever you may drive.

Love

Richard

The Dreaded In-between

I’m trying to cut down on my in-between times these days.

It’s quite a challenge.

But what are ‘in-between’ times?

If you’re looking for a definition of the ‘in-between’ and what to do about it,
check out this video from the ModernHealthMonk:

Feeling lazy? Use the 3 SECOND rule

Much depends, of course, on how you view time and when it’s well-spent or not.

Basically, I think my time would be better spent if I could move seamlessly from one activity to another with little or no down-time in between.

A lot of you probably feel the same way.

The problem is all those moments, minutes and sometimes hours spent vaguely thinking about what to do next.

You may even have something in your sight line that you know you should do, but you think about doing it instead of doing it.

– You check your iPhone for messages, even though you only did this ten minutes ago.
– You look at the BBC News app for the third time that day.
– In fact, you do anything to avoid getting on and doing whatever it is that you’re thinking about.
– And then you think about all the other things you have to do and this makes you feel so exhausted that you can’t raise the enthusiasm to do any of them.

And so on.

I’m a great believer that identifying the problem is 50% of the solution, and this is where Alex’s video is a help.

Giving a name to these in-between times helps you to be more conscious of the process and therefore to do something about all this time wasting and procrastination.

And he suggests that once you have made yourself aware of what you are doing (or rather not doing!), you should count to three and then do whatever it is that you’ve been thinking about or putting off.

This is not to say that you should never daydream.

Daydreaming can be very creative.

But too much in-between time ultimately gives you a sense of frustration with yourself.

You know you could be using your time better.

So try to make a habit of catching yourself when you’re having an ‘in-between’ moment.

And move on.

Have a great week.

Love

Richard