Martin Lecter

What is your philosophy when living your life? Do you have a plan? Do you have a birds eye view of your life and how you want it to turn out?

Your philosophy is basically the way you think about your life. Your thoughts determine how you look at things and what you choose to be doing. Thoughts form habits and habits determine the outcomes of your life. A life philosophy is something that you definitely want to get right as early as possible. Your life philosophy is like your long term investment plan. How are you choosing to invest your time?

Taking Control

All our thoughts are subject to our conscious control and we can change out thought habits at will. Napoleon Hill talks in detail about this subject in his book Think And Grow Rich. Looking at this subject from a more technical point of view we could say that your philosophy is like an operating system which is running on your brain hardware. Your thoughts determine how you apply your unique biological brain towards the completion of certain tasks. And as you take full control of your thoughts, you are able to direct your efforts more intelligently.

Our philosophies are continuously evolving and improving as we get older and gain more wisdom about life. They become more adjusted to the environment that we live in. We are to a certain degree conditioned by the environment that we find ourselves in, but we still have complete control over the way we respond to this environment. We are the captains of our bodies and we have the complete intellectual freedom to make our physical bodies respond in a manner most appropriate for any situation at hand.

We have the opportunity to reshape our thoughts to serve us in the best possible way and by doing so we are able to control our emotional responses such as sadness, happiness, anger and fear. Once you learn how to control your thoughts, you will have limitless opportunities to exercise this control. You will have a far better chance of rooting out all stress and anxiety from your life and you will have the opportunity to think only the thoughts that make you feel happy and joyful.

What Defines An Efficient Life Philosophy?

In a similar way that an operating system on a computer needs to have specific methods for handling most basic tasks, such as input and output between different components connected to the computer, your personal philosophy must also have methods for efficiently improving your personality over time. Napoleon Hill’s work called Think And Grow Rich is a very good example of a such an efficient and self-improving life philosophy.

The core of the Think And Grow Rich philosophy contains basic methods for efficient existence:

• methods of learning (means to extend and refine your personal philosophy – chapter on specialized knowledge)
• methods to reprogram your own mind (and change your own philosophy at will – chapter on auto-suggestion)
• methods to gain personal freedom (by freeing yourself from your own self-induced cage called fear – chapter on defeating the six ghosts of fear)
• methods of debugging our lives (the self-assessment that Napoleon Hill published in his book)
• methods necessary for building a business (the chapter on the principle of the mastermind)
• methods for effective execution of plans (the chapter on decision)
• methods for developing conviction and consistent action (the chapter on persistence)
• methods of refining our built in emotional guidance system (the chapter on sixths sense).

To develop an efficient philosophy essentially means developing thought patterns that lead us towards living a joyful and fulfilling life with many friends and appropriate rewards for our contribution to the society. Your personal philosophy is the core of your being.

How Our Philosophy Effects Our Lives

The way we think about our reality determines to a large degree what we do with our lives. We are, from a very early age, indoctrinated with a philosophy of the mass population. We are taught to think and do what everybody else does. And any relatively intelligent human being understands that doing what everyone else does will ultimately lead us to a station in life where everybody else finds themselves. At this point you have to ask yourself – do you want to be like the majority of people who do not feel in complete control of their lives or do you want to live your life according to your own rules while working on your own personal goals?

A person who never amounts to very much is in that position because of the way that person thinks – because of the way in which their life philosophy works. Perhaps that person thinks that he or she will never be able to be successful and so consequently they never try to find ways to realize their innermost desires. Such a person is a prisoner of their own lives. They are putting themselves into a cage by thinking the way they think. In much the same way, a person who is oriented towards building on their personal goals will keep moving in the direction of achievement and success.

Final Thoughts

When we take control over out thoughts, we are able to become the person that we truly want to be. This is a freedom that everyone has because nobody can control the thoughts you think within your mind. You have the complete freedom to think in the way you want to think within your mind and one of the goals of this website is to help you clarify your thinking and show you how to improve you personal philosophy.

Having been in direct sales for a while and having talked to quite a lot of people, I’ve noticed that I’ve become much better at connecting with certain types of people on a more personal level. Connecting with people has never been my strong side, and one of the reasons that I have been doing sales was to improve my social skills.

What I’ve noticed is that the more experience I get in this area, the better I’m able to connect with certain people on a level where we go from a stranger to a friend in a single instance. It’s as though you focus and melt into their own awareness. You intuitively feel your way through the conversation and you know what to say, when to say it and how to say it in order to communicate your point to the other person in the best possible way. It’s as though their mind becomes one with your own and you share the same thoughts with the other person.

I went dancing Lindy Hop here in Manchester recently after an almost a year long break from dancing and I noticed that my sales experience was paying off in terms of my ability to communicate my intentions during the dance. While dancing with several people I could instantly sense what the whole dance was going to be like after exchanging only a few words with the other person. If I had an intuitive feeling that the other person was in tune with myself then the dance would go smoothly and I would be able to lead the other person into any kind of move with ease. However if her mind was out of sync with my own then the dance doesn’t go as smoothly because there simply is no mutual understanding between us.

What I found is that the best way to improve this ability to connect is to simply talk to a lot of people and listen carefully to everything that they say. After a while you will develop an intuitive sense for social interaction. When the other person is talking, focus completely on what they have to say and try to sense your way into their emotional state. When you do that then it becomes easier to keep the conversation flowing.

When you listen carefully and absorb everything that the other person has to say, you will find a lot easier to connect with people on a more personal level.

The only way that we can achieve any results outside of our own minds is by taking actions. What often happens though is that we get stuck in the planning stage and keep charting our course instead of actually taking the first step towards our goals. This is a failure to take action and without action nothing happens.

An interesting phenomenon that I have noticed is that as you start moving and take the first step towards a goal, then the next step is nicely revealed to you. This is because as you take the first actions towards your goals, you gain experience which then opens doors for you and allows you to take even further actions towards realizing your goal. An action is something that effects your physical reality in some way – it is something that produces a change outside of your mind. Drilling a water well requires an action of the drill against the ground. Body building requires the action of lifting weights regularly in order for them to get stronger. Action is anything that in some way effects your environment.

As you take more and more actions that effect your environment, you will develop a better feel for the effects your actions are capable of achieving. As the environment responds to your actions, you learn which action to take in order to achieve a certain desired results. The important thing on your part is just to get going and take any action in the direction of your goals right now no matter what information you have available. If your goal is to become a better communicator then take some action today that will make you a tiny bit better – read a book out loud, write a blog entry, make a presentation in front of a group.

Over time these little actions will add up and you will become better at doing what you do. That’s how we become successful – consistent action that leads to small, maybe almost unnoticeable results. Arnold Schwarzenegger didn’t just become a world famous body building over night – behind his success are countless hours of workout that have all led to tiny improvements in his physical appearance which have over time accumulated to create the person that he is today. Albert Lee didn’t become a great guitarist just by thinking about it – playing guitar was his hobby and he loved it so much that he often found himself playing it for hours every day for several years. We can all become professional at something that we are already naturally predisposed to be good at.

Whatever it is that we want to achieve – we must have the object of our desire present in our current reality in one form or another. It definitely is important to plan – it does improves your chances of doing things right. However, realize that there must be a balance in place between planning and action. It is the actions that produce tangible results and it is the habit of acting that improves our ability to plan in the first place. Planning is the act of grouping previous experiences into an ordered list of actions to take. So if you never take action you will never be able to create detailed plans.

Action and planning are two sides of the same coin and they go hand in hand – planning improves the effectiveness of the subsequent actions – and actions improve the clarity of subsequent planning.

Quantum leap is when your awareness rapidly jumps to a higher level and you experience what many people call an “eureka” moment. It’s easy to achieve such a leap if you know what to do. The result is that you will feel as though you understand the world just a little better.

My first ever quantum leap of awareness occurred in the end of 2008 when I read a book called I’m A Strange Loop (aff) by Douglas Hofstadter. For a very long time I have been ponder the issue of God. I began questioning the issue since about the age of 16 and I have thought long and hard about all possible ways to explain or rationalize religious teachings. It just never really made sense to me that God was somehow a creator of the universe and the ‘father’ of all human beings. What a nonsense. So I began questioning the subject and really thinking about it long and hard.

Now, back then I didn’t like to read books. In fact I haven’t read a single sensible book until the age of 21. That was primarily because I hated reading all the classical literature that I was forced to read at school, since most of the story books we read in school are completely useless to us later in life. The instant somebody tells me ‘read this book’, a question pops up in my mind: what can I do with the information found in it? So naturally, since classical literature has very little ‘use value’, I assumed that most books were quite useless to read. That is, up until I discovered philosophical and business literature.

Since I didn’t read much, I was attempting to figure out the answers to complex questions such as  ”What is God?” completely on my own. Naturally I wasn’t getting anywhere fast, so I was completely stuck and frustrated. I didn’t know how to think. I was confused and couldn’t see the big picture. I felt as though my mind was in a fog. That’s an ideal state for inducing a quantum leap.

And that is exactly what happened when I read ”I’m a strange loop“. That book is immensely philosophical and expands on the ideas of the self and consciousness at large. This book really makes you think about the really complex questions in life such as the questions related to religion, life after death and how our consciousness works. Suddenly everything that I have been previously analyzing and putting together in my mind has finally fallen in place after reading the book and I finally felt an enormous sense of clarity. It was as though several ideas within my mind have finally aligned themselves into a greater whole.

I suddenly felt more aware of what constitutes such a complex ideas as God and consequently I felt like I have solved one of my long unsolved puzzles.

The next quantum leap in my awareness came in the beginning of 2009 when I immersed myself completely into the personal development literature. There I have experienced a very similar situation where I could finally see some very concrete solutions to some of the very complex problems that have been bothering me for years. It was as though before reading these books I was operating in complete darkness and then after reading the books I had a powerful flashlight shining on all the details of my life. I could see the whole picture and I could better see the road ahead.

The main explanation for quantum leaps seems to be that we always tend to learn in distinct stages that look like plateaus. I have first heard this idea from Brian Tracy and it really made sense to me. Basically what happens is that when we start a new project, learn a new skill or read a book on a new subject, we tend to first learn a great deal very fast. We nearly have trouble keeping up with the rate at which we learn. Then, after a while the learning process evens out and over a period of time it the progress slows down and we don’t seem to be able to develop our skills further. This is when many people become frustrated and quit whatever they are trying to master. However if we keep learning then after a while we always tend to hit upon some little idea that sets off a new chain of events within our minds that push us rapidly through a quantum leap towards a new and elevated state of consciousness.

What I personally found effective in inducing these quantum leaps is complete immersion in a particular subject. Say you want to learn about personal development. Then why not set up a goal to read at least 60 books on personal development over the course of the year.  The shorter the amount of time you take to acquire this knowledge, the more likely it is that your consciousness will permanently shift to a new level of awareness though the effect of a quantum leap. Think of it as leaving the orbit of the earth: you need a great deal of thrust over a short period of time in order to break away from earth’s gravitational pull. If you fail to deliver this thrust then your rocket will fall back to earth. In much the same way, we need to overload our minds with new information in order to permanently expand our consciousness.

If you keep learning and keep improving, eventually you will hit a flash point where everything will suddenly start to make sense. This is when you will experience a quantum leap in awareness towards a higher level of understanding.

When I first became curious about making money, I decided to learn everything I could get my hands on in order to better understand how money is being made in our capitalistic society. This led me to a more in depth study of the philosophy behind the capitalistic system itself. While I’m still very far from earning the income that I would like to be earning, I quite like the concept and the philosophy behind our capitalistic system.

The basic premise for making money in our capitalistic system is that we get paid for bringing value to the marketplace.

What this means is that the more valuable we become to the people around us, the more money we have the potential to make. If you think about it, money is really just an illusion in itself – it’s simply a medium for exchanging value. We are paid in money for the value that we ‘sell’ to the marketplace. Basically, the more people who want your stuff the more valuable it becomes. Your skills are valued in much the same way. The value of your skills is determined by the number of people whom you can successfully satisfy by applying your skills.

What can do we to become more valuable? We can develop skills required to produce products and services that other people need. If you are talented at doing something that the market is craving for, then you can make a fortune by serving many people with your skills. If not, then perhaps you need to work a little more on developing your inborn talents. Your inborn talents are the greatest asset that you have because they allow you to accomplish things that other people would find difficult to accomplish.

The capitalistic system is designed towards individual freedom. You gain freedom within the capitalistic system by working on yourself and becoming as good as you can possibly become within your area of expertise.