Drawk Kwast

Archive for the ‘Your Brain: The User’s Manual’ Category

Antilibrary

by Drawk Kwast – April 11th, 2010

I am the proud owner of an antilibrary. I don’t own any books that I have read. That’s not to say that I haven’t read any books. Quite to the contrary, I have read a mountain of them, but as soon as I get to the end of the last page, I either mail them to friends or simply throw them out. I believe that only unread books have value.

Look at the book shelves of most any person and you will see all the books they have read. People buy a book, read it, and put it on the shelf like an ornament. People keep their books because it makes them feel intelligent to look at everything they have read. It’s as if they believe that for every 10 books they finish and put on the shelf, they gain one I.Q. point.

This approach never made any sense to me. Once I read a book, I’m done with it. What am I going to do, read the same book twice? Logically, I know that I get much more value out of reading two different books than out of reading one book twice. If I happen to read something that really hits me, I take notes by putting it into an electronic knowledge depository on my computer. Once it’s there, keeping track of these gems of insight becomes much easier than looking for highlighted pages inside of a physical book. Now you may think that the process of taking notes requires a lot of time, but you would be wrong. The average book I read has no more than three things that make it into my electronic knowledge depository. The most influential book I read last year resulted in less than one page of notes.

If you read one book on a subject you know nothing about, such as the mating habits of the endangered African penguins, every page of that one book will contain new information for you. Take notes, and you’ll end up rewriting most of the book. An interesting thing happens, however, if you read 20 books on that subject. By the time you read number 20, you have actually encountered the same information over and over again. At this point, repetition has burned the relevant information into your memory, but the other reason you remember the information so well is that different authors have presented the information in different ways, from different perspectives.

If you learn Kung Fu from one master, you have learned some of what that one master knows about Kung Fu. If in that process you take notes at nauseam, you will retain a greater percentage of what that one teacher showed you. However, if you learn Kung Fu from three masters, Muay Thai from three different masters, and Ju Jitsu from three more different masters, the result will be a true understand of martial arts, with no notes needed.

In Bruce Lee’s Tao of Jeet Kune Do, he tells you to throw his book out as soon as you finish reading it. His intent is to open your awareness. He wants you to find things that are relevant and true for you through the process of seeing his ideas. He warns that memorizing what he says at the expense of gathering other information and inserting your own reflections will only cripple your true learning.

The first time I read the word antilibrary, I was reading about a man named Umberto Eco. He has over 30,000 books in his antilibrary. This is a man who understands that if you focus on what you have read, you will believe yourself to be knowledgeable, and be wrong. If you focus on what you have not read, you will believe yourself to be ignorant, and be wrong. Given the two options, I would like to believe myself to be ignorant.

Umberto Eco is a philosopher who has written many books of his own. Do you ever wonder how philosophers come up with so much to write about? They do lots of reading. That was the number one secret I learned as I became a writer myself. Consider this: if you read one book on a new subject and then wrote a book on that subject, your book would be very similar to the one you just read. If, however, you read 100 books on a new subject, without taking any notes, and then wrote a book of your own, you would be pleasantly surprised by the results. Not only would it be free of plagiarism, but it would also reflect your personality. This is what Bruce Lee’s advice was in the Tao of Jeet Kune Do. Take what works for you and make it yours. Focus more on what you don’t know rather than what you can’t remember.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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Science of Luck

by Drawk Kwast – November 5th, 2009

The biggest reason you don’t have the life you want is because you are focused on what you aren’t getting. You see only your lack of luck. Successful people live life as they desire because they focus on what they are getting. These people see all their options, and when they receive the benefits from wisely acting on the options, everyone else calls them lucky. It was Machiavelli who told us that success is 50% luck, and the rest is how we respond to that luck through cunning and bravura. Personally I believe that life is only 10% what happens to me and 90% how I respond to it, but this goes way beyond seeing the glass half empty or half full. This is the difference between seeing the glass or dying of thirst.

Most people hold the belief that some are just born lucky and others are not. They believe somehow that “fate” decides the lucky. The most interesting thing to me about the concept of luck is that the world’s biggest experts on the subject seem to be the ones who do not have it. The day I came to this realization was the day I realized the concept of luck was flawed. Think of it like this. What if the biggest experts on financial investing were all bankrupt and the people with the most money had no idea how they did it? It would tell you that something else is going on that no one is seeing. This is how it is with luck. Ask a lucky person why they are so lucky and the most popular answers will be either that they don’t know or that it’s because they expect good things to happen to them. The flaw in the logic of the second statement is simple. If you had been unusually lucky your entire life, would you not also start to expect it?

Ask a person who considers themselves unlucky about luck and expect everything from an emotional rant to a lengthy pseudo-scientific explanation based on something completely irrelevant like the day they were born on. They will include that the “fact” (as they see it) that because their luck has been so bad for so long, it means that their luck has to be about to change for the better. Ask them about a person who is lucky and they will tell you that because they have been so lucky for so long, they should be careful because their luck is about to run out. None of this is necessarily true. I have known people who spend their entire lives falling on their face and I have known people who always land on their feet, no matter what happens. The key to what I am about to show you is in the last part of that sentence, “…no matter what happens.” This has nothing to do with luck. It’s pure science.

There was a very interesting study done on luck by Richard Wiseman, a psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire. He gave a newspaper to both a group of “lucky” and a group of “unlucky” people. Both groups were asked to look through the newspaper and tell him how many photographs it contained. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: “Stop counting. There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” This message took up half of the page and was written in type that was more than 2 inches high. It was staring everyone straight in the face, but the unlucky people tended to miss it and the lucky people tended to spot it followed by adjusting their actions based on what they found.

It’s not about luck. It’s about keeping your eyes open.

I am the type of person who is considered lucky. I learned how to be lucky. I interact with as many people as possible to create as many opportunities as I can for myself. I separate from the negative and pursue the positive in very creative ways. I know when to hold on to value that others don’t see and when to let go for something better that I usually find hiding right in front of my face. It’s not that I have better luck than other people; it’s that I can see things that others can’t.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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Blind Spots: What You Can Learn From a Turkey

by Drawk Kwast – September 26th, 2009

Being able to see your blind spots is one of life’s most important lessons and it can be easily learned from a turkey. Every day at farms across the world, turkeys are born. They learn that humans feed them. They are thankful for the nice humans who feed and take care of them. As the days turn into months, the turkeys see that they get feed every day and begin to accept this as one of the core realities of their existence. After the passing of 364 days, they sleep that night being 100% sure that they will get fed the next day. On day 365, rather than getting fed, the farmer kills the turkey. There is a big problem with living your life assuming that your past will equal your future. The thing to learn is that you are not aware of what you do not know, like the turkey. These blind spots can sneak up on you and kill you before you even know what happened.

I know quite a few men who behave like turkeys in their romantic relationships. These guys assume that the women they are with will stay with them for no other reason than that they are with them right now. They think that if their woman was unhappy she would have already left, and since she is still with them she must be happy. It then comes as a huge surprise to them when their woman leaves for another guy. This other guy knows how to give her things in the relationship that the turkey never even knew she needed to be happy.

Then there are the turkeys who have worked at the same company for 20 years. Every day they sit in their cubical, and every two weeks they get a paycheck. They assume that this will continue with the same certainty as the sun rising every morning. Then, to their total shock, one dark morning they arrive at the office to find out that the company is out of business. Because this possibility never crossed their mind, they are not prepared for it.

It is a very foolish man who thinks he knows the rules of the game just because he has not lost, yet. The woman you are with is not going to tell you in advance that she is looking for another man. It comes as a total surprise to every man when this happens. The owner of your company is not going to tell you that the company will be bankrupt next month. It comes as a total surprise to every man when this happens. The farmer is not going to tell the turkey that he plans on killing it tomorrow. It comes as a complete surprise to every turkey when this happens.

Unfortunately life doesn’t come with “CAUTION: Slippery when wet!” warning labels. Your blind spots are your responsibility, and like I said, most people don’t even know they have these blind spots until it’s too late. The most successful men I know all keep an open mind and go into every situation knowing that they can not possibly know everything. It takes a big man to get past his own ego and admit that tomorrow may take a turn that he hasn’t yet considered, even though he has been prepared for everything up until that point. Just admitting that you have blind spots will cause you to look for them and begin to see what you didn’t even know was there.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

Learning to catch… a Girl

by Drawk Kwast – September 15th, 2009

Everyone knows that the easiest way for a person to learn how to do something is to “learn by doing.” A good example of this is when you learned how to catch a ball. When you think back to when you learned how to catch, do you remember your parents teaching you about trajectories, aerodynamic drag coefficients, and gravitational equations? Probably not. Whoever taught you to catch most likely told you to keep your eyes on the ball, you hands up and ready, and then tossed a ball toward you. As they kept on throwing the ball toward you, some mechanism in your brain took over and you learned how to catch.

This may come as a surprise to you, but your brain is not designed to compute mountains of data with math equations. Evolution has setup our brains to figure things out through a system of experience based techniques called heuristics. These are the actual engines behind the “learn by doing” process in humans. Heuristics are not math equations. They are down and dirty, simple little tricks and shortcuts your brain uses to figure the environment out.

When it comes to catching a ball, the “gaze heuristic” is used. When we look at the brain activity of someone catching a ball, their brain is not solving a system of differential equations regarding the forces acting on the ball and then using that data to predict where the ball will be and thus where their hand will need to be to catch it. Without the help of scientific equipment, someone could never figure that out real time while the ball is in the air. The human brain just can’t do this. So here is how your brain does it. The brain uses your eyes to fixate on the ball while it is in the air. Your body then moves to keep the angle of this gaze the same as the ball gets closer. The result is an alignment between your body and the path of the ball.

Great to know, but what does this have to do with getting laid?

Every guy knows that you can’t learn to catch a ball by researching it. You learn by playing catch. For some strange reason though, guys seem to think that they can learn how to catch women by researching it. It will not work. Humans learn by doing. Sure, just like learning to catch, there is some good advice out there like don’t blink as you are about to catch. Balls in the face are never good (in any context) but realize that if your plan to get good with women resembles a father teaching his son advanced physics before throwing the football at him, you are doing something wrong.

So why do guys do this if it doesn’t work?

Let’s look at a second example. A person learning to run can practice running by themselves. A person who does this will improve their ability and when they chose to run a race against someone, their practice will pay off. The important thing to understand about this example of learning is that you can practice without the risk of failure because you are practicing by yourself. Most sports are like this. There are things you can practice to hone your skills outside of the game, without the pressure of losing. Once you feel like you have improved, you can then get in the game and only risk losing once you feel that you are ready.

Getting good with women is nothing like this. There is no way to practice without actually practicing inside of the game. You are either playing or not. Sure, read the rule book before you play the game but realize that you can only practice inside of the game. Guys hate this. The reality is that to get good at this game you have to play it as a novice and fail quite a bit before you learn anything. Every guy wants to avoid this learning pain and as a result, most over-research, thinking they can get around it. This actually creates a negative feedback loop. If you start off with a belief that you need to understand all the math equations before you can be successful, what happens?

The first problem is that with the help of the internet, you never feel like you have read enough because there is so much information available, so you just keep on reading. This is a wealth of information creating a poverty of action.

As you attempt to read everything, the next problem you run into is that you start to find contradictory information. For every guru that says one thing you can find another guru that says the opposite. The only way you can filter this information is to actually try it in real life and keep what works for you and throw out what doesn’t.

Then another problem because you believe success with women is in understanding the equations. You read, read, read, and read some more. Then you finally pick a girl to walk up to and test what you have read about. When it doesn’t work, you tell yourself that you obviously have not read enough and you go right back to burrying yourself in research.

This negative feedback loop just gets worse and worse because more research means less time out in public interacting with real girls. It never occurs to these guys that they just need time interacting with women to become comfortable with them. It’s not that the “material” they have been reading isn’t working, it’s that they have been hiding in a cave reading, and girls can instantly feel how uncomfortable they are.

This is the fallacy of the pickup line. Every guy wants that magic opener. They research to find that magical incantation that will instantly win the girl over. They overhear a guy who is good with women, repeat the words he used and then wonder why it doesn’t work for them. It’s not what you say but how comfortable and playful you are as you say it. Guys who are good with women are comfortable with women and they didn’t get that way from reading books. They will tell you that it’s not that complicated and just as easy as learning how to catch. You practice and you get better at. If you are reading this, I am very doubtful that it’s the first bit of research you have ever done on attracting women. You know enough to get out and start talking with girls. You need to spend less time with your computer and more time talking with girls (where you will learn best by doing). Just keep at it until you hit a sticking point. When that happens, research to find a way past it, and once you have the answer, stop reading and get back out in the real world. Rinse and repeat. That’s the way to learn. For every hour you spend reading about interacting with girls, you should spend no less than 4 hours actually interacting with them. Keep at least a 4:1 ratio.

So how long did you spend reading this article?

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

Self Sabotage: The Emotional Rollercoaster

by Drawk Kwast – September 14th, 2008

Gary is his own worst enemy. I sit in amazement day after day as I watch him wage wars on himself. Sure, sometimes he is yelling at his girlfriend, or the person at work who he feels doesn’t show him enough respect, but for the most part he isn’t fighting them so much as he is simply just compelled to continuously create drama in his own life. Why does he do this?

I live in Las Vegas, also known as “Sin City.” The tourists that come here have a saying that “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” I’ve lived here for a little over a year now and have come up with my own saying, “What happens in Vegas makes for interesting newsletters for you all to read.” Las Vegas is one of those places where one minute I can be 500 feet above the strip having drinks with movie stars and five minutes later I can be less than a mile away, in the ghetto, smiling at homeless people. We have no shortage of diversity in interesting people. The one commonality all of these people have, including Gary, is that they all seem to crave drama in their lives.

A few days prior to me writing this, Gary and his girlfriend Melinda had a fight. I know because I was there as it happened. I live next door to Gary. It’s the exact script as you hear it on daytime TV talk shows. Melinda is on medication for being bipolar. She skips out on taking her meds, goes crazy, and next thing you know they are fighting. She physically attacks him. He pushes her away a little too hard and she falls. One of her girlfriends calls the police, and next thing you know, Gary is in handcuffs. The punch line to this joke is when she later says, “but I love him.” This reoccurs every few months or so. Now, you would think that Gary would wise up, get a restraining order, and find a “normal” girl, but no, he doesn’t. Not more than 24 hours after the police have left, he tells me that his apartment is just so quiet without her. He misses her. He is nuts! He would rather have a clinically crazy girl nagging and occasionally attacking him than a quiet apartment.

I’m sure you know people who behave like this. Maybe they habitually use drugs to get as high as the moon and then suffer though the hangover after. Maybe they are in a bad relationship like Gary and Melinda. Maybe even you have something repetitive that you do that takes you through emotional highs and lows for no logical reason. It’s time for you to finally understand what’s built into every human that compels us to behave in this way.

Everything I teach is rooted in the science of evolution. If you want to understand why people behave the way they do, evolutionary psychology will give you the answer. Your brain and how it functions is the product of evolution. Evolution is a slow process. The “software” that is running in your head is about 40,000 years out of date. So you are living in today’s world, but your head is wired for the world of 40,000 years ago. This mismatch is the number one cause of all the bad decisions that people make today.

40,000 years ago, life was harsh. If you were alive back then all you thought about was hunting/gathering food, trying to not become dinner for some other animal, and if you were lucky, reproduce before dying at a very young age. Life was very, very stressful. It was programmed into you that survival and huge emotional swings went hand in hand. The reason we developed this over 40,000 years ago was because it was an advantage to us. Your ancestors craved situations like this because it was to their benefit. There were two options back then:

OPTION ONE: Cower in the back of a cave too scared to leave to gather food and hunt. They sit there until they get so weak that they either just die or the first fierce animal that finds them has no problem making dinner out of them. – This group dies out quickly.

OPTION TWO: Be a prehistoric adrenaline junkie. They leave the safety of their cave and risk death as they hunt and fight off animals that are hunting them. As they participate in these feats of bravery/stupidity they find women willing to mate with them (some of whom already have mates who may try to kill them for stealing their women). – Bottom line is that this is a game they will eventually and inevitably lose, but before they do, they will survive long enough to have children. These children are your ancestors. We are all decedents of prehistoric adrenaline junkies because they were the ones who survived. Our brains are wired for desiring huge emotional swings because 40,000 years ago it increased our chances of survival and replication.

As life changed for us over the years and got easier, we came up with new ways to satisfy that evolutionary need for highly charged emotional swings. We replaced hunting tribes with sports teams. We replaced quests for conquest with movies. We replaced inter-tribal rivalry with day time TV soap operas. Our brains are wired for drama and that is why we create it.

So where does this leave us? Are we doomed to create useless drama in our lives to satisfy some outdated evolutionary need? Thankfully, no. We can use the logical part of our brains to actually use this to our advantage.

So how do we do this? The first step is to understand why this exists in you, and now you know the answer. The second step is to choose the emotional rollercoaster you are going to ride wisely.

Stop watching TV habitually. Stop drinking and doing drugs habitually. And if Gary happens to read this, stop getting into relationships with women who are clinically insane.

Like our ancestors, get your fix of emotional highs and lows from things that make your life better via participation.

One hour of strenuous exercise a day will do the trick. GO TO THE GYM! Trust me, when those endorphins start to kick in (once you make habit of working out every day) you will feel great after you workout. As a side note, you’ll hurt like hell when you push it and that will provide the emotional low. If this isn’t enough for you, start kickboxing. Beating the hell out of people and having the crap kicked out of you (in the safest way possible) a few days a week will definitely do the trick. You will actually get in good shape doing this, a benefit to you, rather than Gary who gets his kicks when his crazy chick calls the cops, which is never a good thing.

Another option is to start a business. Starting a business in some cases is almost as good as a serious gambling addition. It amazes me when people come to Las Vegas, look around at all the money the casinos pull in to build ridiculous tourist attractions, and still think they are going to win. Did all these people fail math class in Jr. High School? You want to gamble? Start a business. I speak from personal experience when I tell you that it’s an emotional rollercoaster ride, but at least the odds tip in your favor more and more the longer you play.

If you are interested in finding out what disasters happened next for Gary because he was too dumb to leave Melinda, you can read Self Sabotage Part II: The Rollercoaster Crashes.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com

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Function of Doubt

by Drawk Kwast – June 30th, 2008

Why do we have doubt? If there was not some evolutionary advantage to having it 40,000 years ago, we would not have doubt today. Why can’t we just walk around all of the time with our mojo flowing? Doubt is a protection mechanism. The fact that it cripples you from doing certain things is what keeps you alive. You could be 100% totally congruent in your belief that you can fly but if you step off of the side of a 20 story building, you will not have that belief very long. The problem is not that your doubt system exists. The problem is that the software in your head that runs it, and everything else in you, is about 40,000 years out of date. That is approximately how long it takes evolution to catch up so to speak.

Think of it like this. Let’s say that you want to quit your advertising job and start your own advertising company. For some reason you have this unexplainable fear in your head that keeps you from doing it. It’s almost like you feel as if your possible failure could result in death. It’s completely irrational when you think about it, isn’t it? Come on now, really, what is the worst that could happen? You may run out of money and have to find another job working for someone? OK, so you are back to square one. Big deal. Think about this for a moment, logically. What if right now, you lost everything? What if all of your money, positions, and job were completely gone in an instant? Would you die? Nope. In fact, going through something like that could be one of the best experiences of your life because you would realize how unimportant all that stuff really is. So where does this doubt and intense emotional fear come from? It comes from 40,000 years ago.

Your unconscious brain is not running software from today. It doesn’t know what an advertising company is. It gets forced to replace the world of today with references from 40,000 years ago as it attempts to make sense of things and give you direction. Here is how your unconscious brain gets told the above story.

Let’s say that you want to leave your small hunting tribe and start your own tribe. Once you leave, the leader of your old tribe will never let you back in. If you fail at starting your own tribe, you will actually die. Unless you are 100% sure you can successfully start your own tribe, the risk of most certain death is not worth it. Your unconscious then puts this intense fear in you because it thinks that the fear will stop you. It is trying to keep you alive.

Your unconscious is always trying to help you. The problem is that it has a hard time figuring out what is actually taking place in today’s environment. You must learn to use your logical brain to overcome the outdated programming of your unconscious. Evolution has actually built a mechanism to help you with this also. When you use your logical brain to overcome your unconscious and are successful, you get rewarded with happy chemicals in your brain. This is your evolutionary incentive to logically get past your fears.

Jump out of an airplane. Right before you do, your unconscious will tell you, “jump and die.” Your unconscious doesn’t understand the concept of a parachute because we didn’t have them 40,000 years ago. When you make it safely to the ground, your unconscious will be very confused, your logical brain will have won, and you will have all kinds of happy natural chemicals in your blood stream as a reward. This serves as an incentive to figure out what else your unconscious may be wrong about.

As you start playing with this concept, you will find out that you are capable of all kinds of things that you never even knew you had inside of you. For the person who never pushes past fear, they know not what they are capable of. For the person who pushes past fear, they find out that there exists inside of them a complete set of instructions for completing tasks they never thought they could do. This is a very difficult concept for people who have not experienced it firsthand to understand. This instruction set is held by your unconscious mind and it is your unconscious mind that hides these instructions from you. Believe it or not, it does both for your own good. Let’s go back to the example above of you starting your own advertising company and how your unconscious sees that as starting your own hunting tribe. I will show this example as if your conscious and unconscious were having a conversation with each other.

Conscious: I want to leave my job and start my own advertising company.

Unconscious: If we leave our tribe, they will never let us back in and we will die when we are most likely unsuccessful. Yup, we are going to either starve to death or get killed by a tiger when we have no one to help protect us. Very bad idea!

Conscious: I am doing it anyway.

Unconscious: Can’t you feel this fear? This is me telling you that we are going to die. OK fine. Here is even more fear. How about now? Do you still feel like this is a good idea? Don’t kill us.

Conscious: Here I go. I am doing it.

Unconscious: OK, that is the last straw. I warned you. Here feel this, this is crippling fear. Turn back now while we still can.

Conscious: I just handed in my resignation.

Unconscious: We are going to die.

Conscious: I feel good for having the balls to do that.

Unconscious: Well since there is no turning back now, I better show you everything we know about how to start a tribe.

Conscious: What!?! We know things about how to get a business going?

Unconscious: Sure. All those years of watching others run tribes. I was paying attention to everything. I remember all of it.

Conscious: What?!? You have been writing an instruction manual this entire time and you didn’t tell me about it?

Unconscious: Yes.

Conscious: Why the hell didn’t you tell me that we knew how to do this?

Unconscious: If you knew about all of the instructions I hide from you, there would be no limit to the stupid stuff you would try, and you would kill us in no time.

Conscious: OK, but I have just one more question.

Unconscious: What’s that?

Conscious: Why would you take the time to create all of these instruction sets if you never want to share them with me?

Unconscious: Because if I didn’t, you would actually kill us when you did stupid stuff like this.

There you have it. The biggest secret your unconscious has been hiding from you. Your unconscious will use fear to protect you right up until the point that you are actually doing something. If you can get past the fear through action, your unconscious will then help you in ways you never expected. At the point that you fully understand this, your life will completely change. I know, you are very upset at your unconscious. I was too when I found this out.

Article Source: www.drawkkwast.com