Monthly Archive for January, 2007

What do you really want?

Published on 31 January, 2007 in Creativity and genius, High performance, Overcoming, Self-awareness, Social development and Travel. 0 Comments

May I a small house, and a large garden have.
And a few Friends, and many Books, both true,
Both wise, and both delightful too.

The Secret is making it to Oprah. It’s an amazing thought that in the next 24 hours, Oprah will be helping to transform this story/ documentary of one woman’s experience with focus and manifestation into an even more powerful international success. But it leaves a very challenge part of the story unsaid: What do you really want?

Although the heart must be made to conceive before the eye will be permitted to discover, I find that one of the greatest challenges that we face is to let go of our self-imposed blindness. “What would you do if anything was possible?” is a question that I have asked at many of my seminars and workshops (as well as in personal coaching and consultation sessions), and the recurring theme in responses is that very few people really know what is possible.

Great spirits certainly do encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds, yet the greatest challenge for a great mind is to make the leap to being a great spirit. For a great spirit to be unleashed, you must believe in yourself. Whether it is a (delusional?) sense of narcissim, an inflated sense of self-importance, or perhaps just the irrational spontaneous adoption of a belief in personal purpose and direction, for someone with talent to apply that talent in the disciplined and focused manner necessary to accomplish anything great or to develop any great skills perhaps demands something of a state of mental or emotional imbalance.
So where do we begin? 

That, to me, is the primary advantage that superior educational institutions afford over ‘ordinary’ ones. Great institutions, employers and places tend to attract those with talent and ability, and in doing so give the individuals the exposure to ideas and people that can expand their minds in otherwise inconceivable ways. While I believe that the truths of ‘genius’ are still somewhat waiting to be discovered by each of us, travel, education and exposure to new ideas is one of the surest ways of expanding your mind…
If you really just want the small house and large garden, are the things that you’re doing along the way really helping?

Ideas that mess with your head

Published on 27 January, 2007 in Business, Creativity and genius, High performance, Lifestyle and Science and technology. 0 Comments

The way that you think is largely a product of your experiences. Our friends and the books that we read are great starting point,and the internet a great opportunity equaliser. Now, while our upbringing and early life, formal education and significant events have a massive impact in how we see things, what if you hung around some of the most brilliant minds in the world for a few days?

There are a couple of these impactful events of intense stimulation now – Davos, Clinton Global Initiative and a miriad of seminars come to mind – but one of the most accessible could just be TED. They’ve just increased their price by 50% (from $4,000 to $6,000pa) but damn they come out with some awesome stuff!

Check out this video that shows what may be the future for our computer screens for example.

(They even had Tony Robbins along this year – though looking like he really needs some help with a suit that fits!)

The real iPhone

Published on 11 January, 2007 in Business, Creativity and genius, Lifestyle and Science and technology. 0 Comments

Though a pretender tried to steal the branding, Apple have now released or at least launched their iPhone. As a long time PDA and smartphone user, this could be really interesting. The question is: “How interesting?”

Apple seem to be trying to undertake a minor transformation in the way that we use smartphones. To me, they’ve essentially packaged together little more than the state-of-the-art equipment set in a pretty (and probably user-friendly) box. This is a good thing in principle – though it’s really not that much of a revolution.

My Motorola A1000 isn’t a great system. It’s small enough, is 3G, and has space for a TransFlash (now microSD) memory card for a gigabyte or two of memory. It uses the clunky Symbian operating system. And it’s not quite as sexy-looking as the iPhone. But it’s mostly the same. The W950 has 4Gb of ram (same as the iPhone) if you’re really after a walkman with phone functionality. The large touch-screen is probably a little better than my A1000 (or the A920 that I had before), but it’s still just a big touchscreen with the same resolution (320×480) as the Tungsten T3 that I bought four years ago or so. Sure, it has WiFi and Bluetooth… but there’s nothing revolutionary there.

Maybe the design teams at Dopod might just need to tweak a few things, and we’ll have a great challenger on style, and I’m sure at a fraction of the price.

But to give Apple their due, they’ve done something that I really admire. They’ve focused. They haven’t produced a whole swag of versions, just two (only different in memory quantity). And while they haven’t done anything too revolutionary, they’re taken everything that’s available and (from first glance) put it together in a single, simple, satisifying parcel. Great work to the fast follower!

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