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Tag Archives: Personal Growth
AshleyMadison — Why we’re too lazy to cheat right
Everything’s easy. Everything’s instant. Is it any wonder that we want everything to be effortless and risk-free — even our acts of disloyalty.
Ironically, patrons of AshleyMadison made their infidelity all the more vulnerable to discovery, believing they could benefit from technology without exposing themselves to the inevitability that anything online eventually finds its way into the public arena.
Technology should free us to enjoy our lives more richly. Instead, it teaches us to be increasingly undisciplined, leeches meaning and purpose from our existence, and deadens us to the simple pleasures that make us truly happy.
Hear my guest interview on the Christal Frost Show discussing why we look for happiness in all the wrong places:
http://wtcmradio.com/the-christal-frost-show-podcasts/yonasongoldson82115/
Channeling Anger and Solving our Common Problems
My thanks to Dan Mason of KKOH in Reno for inviting me to be a guest on his show. We talked about the anger driving voters, resolving conflict, and transforming negatives into positives.
Email of the Week — Making “Friends”
Presently, I am trying to make friends outside of Facebook while applying the principles of Facebook.
So every day I walk down on the street and tell the passers-by what I have eaten, how I feel, what I did yesterday and what I will do tomorrow.
Then I give them pictures of my family, of my dog, and of me gardening and spending time in my pool. I also listen to their conversations and I tell them I love them.
And it works. I already have 3 persons following me:
2 police officers and a psychiatrist.
What is happiness, and how do we get it?
Order on Amazon today.
Proverbial Beauty, a new book on how to achieve happiness and success, offers a practical guide to changing our outlooks and our fortunes. Here’s an excerpt:
In a single, ringing phrase, Thomas Jefferson captured the essence of the American dream when he declared that all men have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And yet, despite Mr. Jefferson’s noble sentiments and laudable achievements, the enduring lyricism of his words spawned an epidemic of confusion and despondency that continues to spread like pestilence through western society.
How precisely does one pursue happiness? We may pursue wealth, pursue fame, pursue gratification of one form or another. But the fiction of pursuing happiness has become a collective obsession that consumes our lives, either by goading us into chasing impossible dreams or by tarnishing the quality of our existence with unwarranted regrets.
Before we set off in pursuit of anything, we ought to know what it is and how to get it. Like many other words and expressions, we toss about the word “happiness” without really knowing what we mean. The definition seems obvious, but the inconvenient truth is that we really have no idea what we’re talking about.
So what is happiness, and how does one get it?
Read the whole excerpt here:
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0815/Goldson_pursuit_of_happiness.php3
Acquire the Gift of Giving
When she was 8 years old, Lara Aknin convinced her little brother to trade his dimes for her nickels. It was an easy sell… after all, nickels are bigger and must therefore be worth more.
Now a psychologist at Canada’s Simon Fraser University, Dr. Aknin has discovered a mistake more profound than youthful embezzlement: in truth, her motivation itself was built on a misunderstanding of human nature.
In an interview with NPR’s Shankar Vendatam, Dr. Aknin describes the experiment in which her team asked toddlers to feed candies to hand-puppets which, they were told, would really enjoy the treats. Considering that these children were still too young to have absorbed any cultural awareness of giving as a value, the results produced two surprises. Explains Dr. Aknin:
“Children smiled significantly more when they were giving treats away than when they received the treats themselves. But what we thought was particularly exciting was that children actually smiled significantly more when they gave away one of their own treats than an identical treat provided by the experimenter.”
In other words, the greatest feelings of joy may come from giving up that which we treasure the most.
But does the impulse remain as we grow into adulthood?
The Orchestra of Mankind
Find tranquility in the midst of conflict. Develop attitudes that deepen relationships. Gain clarity through times of darkness and confusion. Decrease cynicism and find joy in the daily miracles that fill our lives.
Respect the boundaries of the world…
Proverbial Beauty now available on Amazon.com
How to Survive the Age of Advertising
After the Stone Age came the Iron Age, then the Industrial Age, and now the Age of Advertising. Regardless of what the experts say, we are not living in the age of a consumer economy, but of an advertising economy.
With companies trading for billions without producing proportional revenue — or any at all — we can only imagine how far things can go and how far the markets will climb before this latest bubble bursts, exposed for the pyramid scheme that it is. Indeed, the inability to distinguish between reality and illusion is precisely the goal of modern advertising.
Nevertheless, there is some small hope that escape from its influence might still be possible, no matter how far its tendrils have reached. That evidence comes in the person of Julian Keonig, perhaps the greatest legend in advertising history, who passed away last year at age 93.
Readers of a certain age will remember the classic Timex slogan, “It takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” and the self-validating tagline for the Volkswagen Beetle — think small — voted the most successful ad of the last century. Both were the creations of Julian Keonig; but neither was what he considered his most inspired brainstorm.
And neither provides us with an insight into his most important legacy.
Success in Failure
A righteous man falls seven times.
~Proverbs
But failure only leads to success if we learn the lessons it tries to teach us. Otherwise we prove the wisdom not of Solomon or Churchill but of Einstein and Hegel:
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
What experience and history teach is this — that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it.
Yonason Goldson 