Martin Lecter

When it comes to taking notes and improving your comprehension of the material that you read or listen to, one of the most efficient ways to do it is by creating a mind map with all the facts about the subject you are learning. A mind map is a graphical representation that illustrates how different facts relate to each other.

You brain is designed to remember things by association – that’s why mind maps works so well in helping you better understand and absorb the information that you are learning. Your brain is also designed to organize your knowledge in a hierarchical order and not linearly – as you would typically do when taking notes. That’s why mind maps are far more superior learning tool than ordinary note taking.

Why Mind Mapping

Mind mapping allows you to organize a range of different concepts in a two dimensional diagram based upon the way these different concepts relate to each other. And since the information is presented to you in a visual manner, your brain will find it a lot easier to comprehend and remember the information. You will also have a far greater sense of clarity when you can visually examine how different ideas relate to each other.

There are basically three main types of learners which prefer to take in information through one of the following channels – either visually, audibly or physically through their sense of touch.

• Visual Learners are the people who learn best when presented with diagrams and pictures. They like to ‘see’ the information.
• Auditory Learners prefer to listen to the information, close their eyes and focus the auditory input. Lectures and audio books are usually the preferred way to learn for auditory learners.
• Physical or Spacial Learners are the people who prefer to have a hands on experience of the concepts they are trying to learn. This may involve writing key words on paper cards and arranging them in a pattern or organizing the information in a hierarchical list.

While most people have one predominant learning style, we do tend to use all of our senses when taking in new information. What mind mapping does is it provides a single solution that suites all three of these learning styles. When you have a mind map in front of you, then you can read the keywords to yourself out loud or explain the concepts audibly to someone else. You can also visually examine the diagram and the images that represent the ideas on your mind map. And you also have the possibility to arrange the ideas physically on a flat surface. Through mind mapping your can make the most out of all three learning styles, all at the same time.

Additional Benefits

Through mind mapping you can explore your creativity, better remember how your ideas relate to each other; you can make better and more structured presentations to other people and you gain a better degree of clarity; and you can learn more things more rapidly.

I will briefly explore these four topics one by one so that you can gain a better understanding of each one of these benefits.

• Creativity. Mind mapping improves your creativity because it gives you the freedom to easily rearrange different ideas in a way that makes the most sense to you. You can easily combine key ideas from different sources into a single structure. You could for example read two books on the same subject, create two mind maps for both books, and then combine the two mind maps in order to form a new mind map using a combination of ideas from both of the books.
• Memory. When you create a mind map from the material you study, your ability to remember the material increases dramatically. It is a well known fact that note taking helps you to better remember the material that you learn – mind mapping adds a whole new dimension to the concept of note taking. This is because your brain is designed to recall primarily visual images and your memory works by associating images with situations, objects and people. Even when you read, you are creating images within your own mind based upon the ideas that you absorb from all the text that you are reading. A mind map mimics the way your brain works and that’s exactly what makes a mind map so effective.
• Presentation. Using a mind map you can easily communicate an idea to somebody else. It is far easier to communicate an idea to someone else when you have a visual representation of your idea that you can use as basis for your presentation. Not only does a mind map make your presentation easier to understand, it also makes it easier for visual and spacial learners to absorb the information that you are speaking about. A mind map is a thousand times better than a series of power point presentations.
• Clarity. Mind maps give you a degree of clarity over large amounts of information because you can see all the information right in front of you at the same time. Exploring ideas without a mind map is like navigating in a city without a navigation map – as opposed to having a detailed map of the streets that you can visit. In my article called What Is Knowledge I briefly touched on this idea of knowledge maps. When you have a mind map of your knowledge, you can easily revisit different areas of this map and refine your knowledge within these specific areas.

Next we will move into the process of actually creating your mind map. Should you use computer or paper? How do you color the diagram? How do you know what you should put on the diagram?

How To Create A Mind Map

Whenever you are studying a subject by doing research on-line or reading about a subject in a book, you will find it handy to create a mind map as you go along in your learning so that you can later go back to your mind map and review it at a later point in time.

Using Computer Software

You can create your mind maps both on paper and using you computer. The paper method is convenient for taking quick notes when you don’t have access to a computer and for creating quick mind maps of the books you read – the simple mind map you can keep within the book itself. However if you want more convenience then creating your mind maps on your computer is a better way to go.

The main benefit of using computer software is that you can easily rearrange your mind map at a later point in time, and add new nodes to it without worrying about running out of space.

There are several software packages specifically designed for mind mapping – both commercial and free. Tody Buzan, who established the mind mapping concept, has his own set of tools on his website. You can always visit Tony Buzan’s website and get a copy of his original iMindMap software. Although I have never used his package, it does seem to be a fairly complete software tool for creating all kinds of creative mind maps.

The package that I use for making my own mind maps is called XMind. The diagram above representing the outline for this articles has been created in XMind. This tool is very easy to use and it supports all the basic functionality that you need to create good looking mind maps. You can get their free package and start using it right away. The only difference between the free and the commercial one seems to be that the commercial one supports multiple sessions and fancy export formats.

Using Colors and Images

When you are creating your mind map, a good way to make your mind map more memorable is to use colors and images that relate to the ideas that you place within the diagram. This will make it easier for your mind to make distinctions between different groups of ideas that are related to each other. Colors can also be used to tag various ideas that are related to each other yet may not have a direct connection on the mind map.

Although XMind’s support for images is limited, it does support putting small graphical icons within the nodes. It also supports coloring the nodes and it has a feature for grouping several nodes together into a group.  I personally do not find this limitation very serious though. Personally I benefit most from the spacial layout.

Using Key Words

When you are creating nodes within your mind map, a good practice is to use a single keyword per node. Avoid using phrases or pairs of words. It’s always better to subdivide a pair of words or a phrase into several nodes with a single word per node. For example if you think of the term “Red Car”, you might want to create a node for “Car” and then add “Red” as a child node to it. This way you can brainstorm all kinds of cars and connect them to the node “Car” without restricting your imagination to red cars alone.

The purpose of keywords is to represent a single specific concept or property. Keywords should nicely describe the idea or part of an idea that you are trying to express. They would usually be nouns or adjectives. Although you could also use questions such as “Where?”, “Why?” or “Who?”. Normally you would have a noun which then extends into the properties associated with that noun, along with other nouns that this particular noun is related to.

Using Associations

Your mind works by association and so does mind mapping. Start off by writing down the key idea that you want to mind map in the middle of the page and then walk through your internal map of associations. For instance, I personally associate the concept of “Mind Mapping” with “Efficiency”, “Creativity” and “Big Picture” within my own mind. Your associations may be different. Put down all these associated concepts on your mind map diagram and connect them to the main concept. Then take each one of these child concepts and put down everything else that you associate with each one of them. For example, you could associate “Efficiency” with “Results” and “Production”, “Creativity” with “Music” and “Writing” – and so on until you exhaust your memory.

This brainstorming phase will help you put down a basic outline of your main idea. Once you have your basic associations down on paper then you can create a new mind map that arranges these concepts in a more efficient manner. Group several items that relate to each other under a single topic and rearrange the map in a way that suits you the most. Reordering your mind map is easy to do if you are creating it on the computer. The purpose of this step is to create more clarity within your mind about the concept that you are mind mapping. When you rearrange the mind map in this way it also makes it easier to remember because you will find it much easier to remember things that are arranged in a way that makes the most sense to you.

Applications For Mind Mapping

The applications for mind mapping are many. Whenever you need to clarify your knowledge in a specific area, a good way to start is by creating a mind map of everything that you currently know about that subject. As you then do more research and learn more about the subject in question, you can extend your mind map with new knowledge that fits into the big picture. This allows you to have a convenient overview of the information and to insert all the new knowledge that you learn about that particular subject into the place where it naturally belongs on the mind map.

Here is a quick list of the possible applications for mind mapping.

Communication

A mind map makes it a lot easier to communicate a complicated concept to a large group of people when you can present an outline to the group. It’s not always easy to structure text in a way that makes it easy for a person to grasp your general idea. Because of the nature of text, your writing will always follow a linear pattern and if your reader is to understand what you are trying to express then the reader will have to either read the whole text or at least glance over it in order to create a mental picture that represents your ideas within her mind.

Glancing over a mind map is a lot more efficient than having to scan a large block of text.

Mind mapping is a great tool for structuring all kinds of presentations – from articles to speeches. When the reader or listener knows what to expect from your presentation and can see how different parts of the presentation relate to each other, it makes it easier for her to understand what you are trying to say.

Reading And Research

Whenever you read a book that you really want to understand quicker – make a mind map of the key ideas presented in the book. How do all the ideas relate to each other? Within XMind you can create relationship arrows between two nodes that are located on different sub-branches of your mind map. This makes it easier to comprehend how some of the more obscure areas of your knowledge relate to each other.

Leave your mind map for future reference. When you later go back to the same book and want to find a specific idea within that book, a mind map of that book will help you remember exactly where in that book the idea may be located. It will also help you remember the general idea of that book. If you have created a mind map on a sheet of paper then you can fold it and put it inside the book itself.

You will benefit from mind mapping even more if you are doing research on a specific subject that involves reading a large amount of literature. What you could do then is place the specific purpose of your research in the middle of the mind map and then populate your mind map as you move along and read different books on the subject. When you have finished reading all the books or articles, you can rearrange the ideas in a way that suits you best and add your own content to the outline before writing your research paper.

Taking Notes

Taking notes during lectures and while listening to audio programs is another excellent use for mind maps. Not only does it make your note taking quicker and making it easier for you to keep up, it also far more superior to ordinary note taking because mind maps preserve the associations between ideas, while notes don’t. When you are drawing pictures and using different colors for your mind map, it also makes it a lot easier to remember the details of the lecture.

Planning

You can also use mind mapping for planning your tasks. You could use it to plan your future, or to plan a trip or simply to maintain a monthly todo list for a project you are doing by using a mind map. For instance, if you are planning a trip then you could create a mind map with hotels, basic expenses, interesting destinations and the things that you have to take with you on the trip. This will make it easier for you to plan your trip in more detail. A simple linear todo list may work well enough, but it doesn’t give you the flexibility to group tasks in a hierarchical order. And neither does a todo list allow you to arrange your items on a two dimensional surface. Mind mapping does that for you.

Development

When I think about mind mapping, it reminds me of the tools that are used within the software development industry for organizing software code in an object oriented manner. Since I come from a programming background, I have a very intuitive understanding of arranging things in this manner. Software developers have already been using various graphical tools for ages that are very similar to the mind mapping tools mentioned in this article. Although you can just as easily use XMind to create a clean outline of the software project that you are developing.

Mind mapping is an object oriented way to structure your ideas. And this object oriented way of organizing facts and ideas can be just as readily applied to a whole range of different areas of development. For instance, when you are developing a website, you will benefit greatly from mind mapping your development process and the things that you need to do. You can use mind mapping to create outlines of your ideas for a book that you intend to write, or an article or a speech. The applications are endless. It’s simply an effective way to organize a large volume of facts in an efficient and easily comprehensible manner.

Summary

Mind mapping is an excellent concept that you can use to improve your learning ability. It’s an effective way to take notes, review previous ideas and develop more complex systems of ideas. It helps you clarify your thinking.

You can create your mind maps either using colored pencils and paper, or on your computer using sofware such as XMind or iMindMap. Using software is better because it allows you to easily modify your mind map and to combine several mind maps together.

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If you are interested in mind mapping, you might also be interested in the concept of photoreading – which is a technique that can be used to improve your reading using mind mapping as a helping tool. I’m currently in the process of exploring photo reading at the moment so I’ll post a more detailed review of photo reading when I have a better understanding of the concept.

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Toastmasters is a worldwide public speaking organization that provides you with a friendly environment to develop your communication skills. You also have the opportunity to test your knowledge and ideas on a live audience, develop self-confidence, get constructive feedback on improving your speaking skills, and also an opportunity to meet other growth oriented people.

Personal Story

When I was in school I used to feel rather nervous and self-conscious when making presentations in front of the class. I would constantly think about how the words were coming across and what I should and should not say. Unfortunately, this fear of presentations is something that many people have because schools usually don’t teach us the skills required to make a good presentations in front of other people. There is simply no system in place that teaches you the skills you need in order to make good presentations and there is no supportive environment in school directed specifically at improving your speaking skills. We are somehow expected to have these skills already or develop them through trial and error – which is not a very good way to learn. Toastmasters provides you with a system as well us a supportive environment to practice your skills.

When I watch people speak I can see how nervous some people are when they stand in front of an audience. I know from my own experience how difficult it can be to speak in front of a group without feeling nervous. It’s a completely irrational fear, yet it haunts so many people – even the ones who have good jobs and are seemingly successful within their professions. And even people who own their own businesses. That’s normal though – if you are not used to doing something very often or have had negative experience associated with a certain task, then obviously you will feel a degree of uncertainty when you attempt to do it. Though once you take the first step and start doing it then the fear disappears. At Toastmasters everybody understands that these fears exist and so you have absolutely nothing to worry about. Everybody eventually gets over these fears – as long as they keep going and developing their public speaking skills.

Course Layout

The standard Toastmasters program includes two main tracks – the competent communicator track and the leadership track. You can do both courses in parallel. The competent communicator track aims to improve your communication skills which relate directly to speaking. This includes speech organization, persuasion, body language, improving your material and engaging the audience. The leadership track aims to develop your leadership skills, and you do that by taking on other activities within the club such as evaluating other peoples speeches, giving them feedback on how they can get better and organizing a speech contest.

When you have completed the basic competent communicator training, you have the opportunity to go even further and do the advanced communicator series of manuals which include more in-depth courses on areas of public speaking such as story telling, public relations, professional speaking, technical presentations, persuasive speaking and humorous presentations. From there you can move on towards developing your skills even further by joining the National Speaking Association and by eventually going into paid speaking. I haven’t gotten that far yet myself, but I know that Toastmasters will give me a solid foundation to build upon. It’s entirely up to you how far you are willing to develop yourself.

Personal Development

Toastmasters and public speaking in general is a great personal development experience. You are not only developing your speaking speaking skills – you are also developing yourself as a person. As you become a better communicator on stage – it becomes easier to communicate with people in person. As you become more confident within yourself, it becomes easier to apply this confidence in other areas of life. As you become better at relating to the audience, it becomes easier to relate to people in general. As you become good at presenting your knowledge on stage, it becomes easier to present your knowledge through other media channels. Some speakers say that as the result of their public speaking experience and their development as leaders within the organization they have also improved their relationships with their spouses. Even in a private setting, good communication skills are always beneficial.

There are three main elements involved in your development as a communicator – internal communication, external communication and your knowledge of the subject you are speaking about. Through Toastmasters you have the chance to practice all three of these. The quality of your internal communication skills determines the emotions that you convey when you speak, your external communication skills determine how you say your message and your knowledge on the subject determines what you say. Through public speaking you can improve your internal dialogue so that you feel less nervous when you speak. You can also work on improving your tone of voice and body language in order to make your message more clear. And as you prepare a speech, you will also become more aware of the gaps in your knowledge so that you can improve your comprehension of the subjects in general.

Live Audience

The greatest benefit that Toastmasters provides for me personally is the opportunity to test my ideas on a live audience. When I write on-line, it’s very difficult for me to know how my articles are being interpreted by somebody on the other side of the world. And even if I do get some feedback on my articles, it’s usually not the kind of feedback that I can use to improve what I write. What’s excellent about the feedback that you get at toastmasters is that it’s geared specifically towards improvement of your communication skills. So for example, the other day I got excellent feedback on making bullet points more clear to the listeners as I transition from one bullet point to the next within my presentation. This is something that I can also apply to my articles by adding subheadings to my posts.

At Toastmasters you also have the chance to meet other people who are interested in improving their communication skills and share ideas with them – which is an excellent way to learn and grow. Even if you are just attending the meetings as an observer, you can still learn something new from the feedback given by the evaluators and from the contents of the speeches themselves. When you come to your first meeting you can just be an observer and watch. You don’t have to do a speech the first time you visit a club. You don’t even have to do the introduction yourself – you can let a more experienced member introduce you to the rest of the club.

Joining Your Local Club

The most important prerequisite before joining the club in your area is for you to have a clear picture of what you want to accomplish through Toastmasters. This is important because it will give you the motivation to keep going. How do you think becoming an excellent communicator can benefit you personally? What opportunities do you think such skills will open up for you in your professional life? It’s always important to start out with a goal before you set out to do something – whether it’s reading a non-fictional book or joining a course in public speaking. You will simply learn better when you have a clear objective with your learning.

So how do you join Toastmasters? The best way to go about doing it is to find a local Toastmasters Club in your area through the main Toastmasters International website and then just show up for one of their meetings as a guest. This way you get to see how the club works and you also get the chance to chat and get to know the members of the club. You can then join the club right away and get more information on how to pay your membership fee from the club organizer. When you have officially joined the organization, you will get your course materials and then it’s time for you to prepare your very first ice breaker speech. The first step is to get started!

Today I’m going to descend deeper into a more detailed understanding of how our minds create meaning out of seemingly meaningless objects within the real world. What is meaning and how do we assign meaning to things within our awareness?

Symbols Of The Mind

How is it exactly that we give meaning to things? What is meaning and how can we better understand the way in which our brain assigns meaning to objects?

The best way to understand meaning is by looking at how our brain tends to organize information. Your understanding of your reality is a hierarchical system of symbols which your brain arranges in groups. These groups can be called classes of symbols. Your internal representation of reality is like a software program that resembles the real world based on your experiences of reality.

When you interact with object within the real world, your brain forms symbols and assigns meaning to them based upon the persistent properties of these objects. For example, you learn that all objects that resemble a teapot usually have a neck and are round. They also have a handle and a flat bottom. They are hollow and they can be used to heat up water on the stove. These properties together form a class within your mind called a ‘teapot’. From this point onward every time you see an object that has the same properties as the class ‘teapot’, you will assign the meaning of a teapot to that object.

Within your mind you also maintain relationships between these classes. For instance, you have a class called ‘cup’ which you know can interact with a class called ‘teapot’ in such a way that a teapot can pour water into a cup. Since you know these properties of the both classes, every time you identify two objects within your perception that fit the descriptions of a teapot and a cup, you also assume that these objects also possess the relationship described above. The relationship is a class in itself that defines a property between the class of a ‘teapot’ and a ‘cup’.

These classes form descriptive templates of meaning that you assign to the objects that you become aware of within the objective reality. These are the ‘knowledge patterns’ that I have talked about in my article on knowledge. Your mind is performing pattern matching all the time while you are interacting with the world. The better and more accurate your internal property descriptions of the classes of objects their relationship descriptions, the more accurate you will be able to predict how these objects will behave within the objective reality.

Simulated World

Within philosophy there is a concept called subjective reality which assumes that everything that we experience is entirely happening within our own minds. This concept is very empowering because it gives you a sense of control over your life situation. You gain confidence and the belief that you can change anything within your reality if only you decide to do it. But how does this concept of subjective reality relate to our understanding of meaning?

Subjective reality is a mind game. It’s a way for you to group symbols within your mind and simulate interactions between these symbols without actually having access to them in the real world, allowing us to build ever more complex simulated realities within our minds. This means that we can create anything we want inside our minds from symbols that we already are aware of. Symbols that we have already formed from our experience of the real world.

When you are driving a car, you form symbols for the steering wheel, the road, the car itself and everything within your field of view. The moment your mind perceives an object, such as a tree, it’s able to assign a symbol to that object which is then processed by your brain. This symbol contains a class ‘tree’ and an instance of that particular tree that you are perceiving. The class of the symbol tell you generic properties that a tree should have – such as a trunk, branches and leaves. A tree can have leaves or it can be naked – this is yet another property of the tree class. If your perception fits these properties of the ‘tree’ class then the perceived object can be considered to be a tree.

You can then play with these symbols within your mind. For instance, you can create systems of symbols where symbols behave in completely novel ways. You can combine the symbol for a tree with the symbol of a human and create a mutated symbol of a walking tree. This is entirely possible within the context of your mind. There are no limits or restrictions to how you can combine these symbols, so within this simulated software program of your mind anything becomes possible.

Lucid dreaming is an advanced version of this symbol game where you build a complete simulated environment out of the symbols that you already know and then play within that environment doing the things that you normally would be able to do within the real world. You are basically creating your own simulation of the real world within your mind where anything is possible. Your expectations determine how the symbols within this simulated world behave.

What’s interesting is that this subjective reality is indeed entirely based upon your experiences of the world. You can not imagine something that is not somehow grounded within your experience. You can mutate the symbols by combining several symbols together in order to form new symbols – however these new symbols will still be mere derivatives of the original symbols that are grounded within your experience of reality.

This means that subjective reality is a construct of the consciousness. It’s formed based upon how your consciousness organizes the knowledge that it possesses about the world. Subjective reality is the software that runs on your brain hardware and it’s an empowering way to look at your reality because it gives you the ability to play with your symbols in any way that you choose to. Objective reality perspective restricts you in that it only considers possible that which has already been experienced within the real world – discarding the possibility of mutating the symbols. Subjective perspective gives you more options and unlocks your creativity.

Conclusion

This articles assumes the viewpoint that our brain is the hardware and your consciousness is the software that is running on the hardware of the brain. The software of the consciousness is independent of the hardware – it has it’s own rules of operation that are not tied to the details of the neural network of the brain. You program your consciousness with the rules that it needs to know based on your interactions with reality. These rules then create categories of symbols with specific properties within your mind that assign meaning to real world objects.

You are able to bypass all the rules that exist in the objective universe by creating a simulated world within your mind using your imagination. This world is the subjective reality that is created entirely within your mind. You are free to create any rules that you wish within this reality and experience all kinds of supernatural phenomena. This reality is however grounded in your experiences of the objective universe, so the symbols that exist within this imaginary world will be permutations of the symbols that have been created within your mind as a result to your experiences.

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The questions that remain are: How can we explain the ability of psychic mediums to connect and communicate with dead people? Are these psychic individuals simply extremely sensitive and capable of simulating symbols within their internal subjective world that represent the people whom they are trying to communicate with? Could it be that our brains are able to subtly exchange symbols between each other without us having to say a word? Could it then be so that a medium is simply connecting to the brain of the person who has known the person who passed away, and then simply simulating the symbol representing that person within their own mind while interacting with that symbol?

This is going to be a brief introduction to how we learn and how you can get better at what you are dong, regardless of what it is that you are doing.

There are two main components that constitute to knowledge – experiences and theory. These are the building blocks of intelligence. If you have the experience but not the knowledge – then you will have a hard time identifying proper actions to take in order to gain the results you want. You may be naturally good at something, but you will not be able to teach it to others – let alone improve yourself. If you have knowledge but not experience – then you will be uncertain of your knowledge because you will not be able to back it all up with experience. When you combine the two though – that’s when you gain real intelligence.

Experience

We are all experiencial beings and we learn primarily from our experience. Your experience is your ‘truth’ that you live because you will usually feel quite certain and confident of the things that you have personally experienced. Even the learning process is an experience in itself.

Experience builds your perception and your beliefs. If you didn’t have any of your senses then you would likely not have any sense of reality at all. You simply wouldn’t have any material to work on when it comes to extracting knowledge and no sound raw materials to exercise your creativity upon. Everything we ever create in the real world is a composition of all the experiences that we have been exposed to during our lifetime. Creativity is the ability to piece together previous experiences in order to create something that has never been created before.

Experience is basically a sequence of impressions that that are etched upon your mind. Your mind is like a photofilm that absorbs all the experiences that come in contact with your nervous system through all of your senses. Much like the light particles permanently change the chemical composition of a photofilm, all sensory impressions permanently change the composition of your mind. And as you gain more experience, you will see more patterns that connect different parts of your experience together. You will thus have a much richer understanding of your reality.

As you live your life, you are narually exposing yourself to experience – regardless of what it is that you spend your time doing. This experience is full of patterns that can help you get better at doing the things that you do. Even when you are relaxing on your couch, you are having an experience – although it might take place within your mind. You might have a meditative experience of great value to you – but you are still experiencing something. Sitting and doing nothing is not a very rich experience though, with very few useful patterns to extract valuable knowledge from. However if you go to a party and practice your seduction skills then you suddenly have a far richer experience with many more patterns that you can use and apply in the future.

Theory

Your experiences are the raw building blocks of your reality. The way you interpret reality is determined by the patterns which have previously learned from previous experience. These patterns give you a high level and more abstract understanding of your reality. For instance, a great deal of philosophical knowledge is aimed at identifying these high level patterns so that you can see your life experience from a bird’s eye view – allowing you to better chart your course through life.

Theoretical knowledge teaches you the relationships between your actions and their effects within your experience. Often we might have a certain effect in our lives, but be completely clueless as to what it was that we did that has led to that event. You might in fact be repeating the same mistakes over and over again simply because you don’t see the pattern. And you will likely never see the pattern clearly enough to make any signifficant changes, unless you have had this same pattern repeat itself several times in your life.

Theory enforces your faith in yourself and your actions. Faith is your ability to have complete trust in the soundness of the patters you know. Your faith is gained from theoretical knowledge backed up by experience. When you are acting with faith, it means that you are acting in accordance with patterns you already know. You don’t even have to have experienced these patterns before – that’s whats cool about faith. If you know a pattern and you believe it to be true, then you will apply it and likely get a similar result as someone else who have applied the same pattern before.

Predicting The Future

Theoretical knowledge of the patterns that exist within your accumulated experience, allows you to more accurately predict future effects of your current actions. There is virtually no limit to the amount of patterns that you can identify within your experience. You can not see them all at once though because some of the bigger patterns consist of many smaller patterns that you have to learn first. Everybody needs to start somewhere.

When you learn a pattern, you will naturally see it more often in your reality and thus be able to more accurately predict future events. What you will be doing is basically extrapolating one or more patterns into the future in order to ‘see’ the events ahead based on the actions that you are willing to take. You may not always be right, but as the number of patterns in your knowledge base grows – your level of accuracy will increase.

In order for your predictions to be accurate, you need to have access to more patterns that you can apply in order to contstruct your plans. And the only way to gain such patterns is through knowledge and experience. You gain knowledge through other people and experience by doing the things you want to get better at. There is no other way. This is why we can’t cheat the concept of time. If you are doing one thing and you have someone else who have been doing the same thing and learning in similar way to the way in which you learn, but during a longer period of time than yourself, then the other person will invariably be much more skilled at the task than you are. So in order to get better at a faster pace, one must dedicate maximum amount of time to gaining knowledge and experience.

Failure vs Success

There is no failure in my reality – there is merely experience – and all experience is neutral. I don’t always get the result that I have intended and I do my own share of mistakes. However, for me, every experience has something valuable in it – a pattern to learn. The pattern might not be apparent right now, but as similar experiences repeat themselves over a longer period of time, the patterns behind them become more clearly identifiable. What success really means is getting what we want – and we do this by learning patterns and applying them.

Failure is basically when your anticipated course of events turns out to be false. You have made an error in judgement because your patterns are not accurate enough. You have made a mind map of possible events based on the patterns you already know and somewhere along the way an unexpected variable crept into this system. A variable that you don’t know how to handle – because you don’t know which pattern to apply. This simply means that you need to learn more patterns and gain more experience to back up these patterns with.

There is no single ‘right way’ to go about doing things. The right way is your way. As long as you are gaining experience and learning new patterns, you will be slowly but steadily moving closer and closer to getting the results you want. And at a certain point, when you have learned all the necessary patterns, getting the desired results will be a natural consequence of your actions. There is nothing overly magical about it. It’s how we learn and get better at what we are doing. But you need to have a desire to learn and a desire to get better in order for this concept to work.

I want to talk about the truth. What is truth, how do we know that something is true and how do we improve our understanding of the truth.

What Is Truth?

Most of our lives we spend making decisions and acting on information that we assume to be true. We listen to our parents, learn from our peers, read books and listen to our teachers. We then make assumptions about reality behaving in a certain way which we assume to be the truth. People live in fear of the bad and evil world out there, in fear of expressing their true personality, in fear of being themselves. All because some well meaning person misled them to believe something that has been false or innefficient all along.

The more we learn and the more we experience – the more accurate understanding we get of the cause and effect relationships that exist between our actions and their effects. For instance, today I learned the truth that it’s possible to connect with interesting people right on the subway. I didn’t do it before, but now I know that it’s possible and I know how. You do it by having a controversial conversation with a friend and creating strong emotions within the other person until they voluntarily join the conversation. I discovered this truth quite accidently – but now I’m aware of it and so I can duplicate the effect in the future.

I used to believe that the truth was simply a perspective of looking at the world. And in a sense it is – it’s a perspective on how we connect different causes to their effects. There can thus be many possible explanations of how effects relate to their causes – all being correct. However, one person advocating a certain perspective might disagree with another who is actually looking at the same cause and effect relationships, but from a different angle.

There are people who lock themselves up in a single perspective, unwilling to look at the world from different angles. It’s a disease called closed-mindedness. It permeates large portions of our society. Then there is a select few who are willing to seek out the truth and to live by it. To look under the surface and to consider different points of view. The open minded people who are open to new experiences – to new challenges. Those who are not afraid to be themselves and who accept the human nature as being complex and inconsistent. The people who are constantly learning and refining their own version of the truth.

Why Pursue Truth?

“There is something very important about the truth – it sets you free. Free to correct old errors in judgement.” ~ Jim Rohn

As we do more and learn more, we are able to shed some of the false opinions that we have previously thought to be the truth. There is absolutely no need to stick to an opinion just because we happen to be emotionally attached to that particular point of view. If your experience tells you that something that you have previously thought to be the truth is not true – then get rid of that opinion and replace it with whatever you consider to be the truth. If your experience tells you that you should be pursuing a certain path in life while everybody else is telling you that you are wrong – then trust your experience instead of listening to a person who has never achieved the effect that you are trying to achieve.

The world and all the events that occur in it is like a diamond. We can look at it from different directions and perceive the diamond from different angles. The diamond is still a diamond regardless of how we look at it – however our perceptions of what we see might be different. The colors being reflected from it will be different depending on how you tilt the diamond in relation to the light. But the diamond is still there. In much the same way, the way we choose to look at the world and explain different effects is merely one of many perspectives that we can take. We view the world through the preconceptions and assumptions that we believe to be true about the causes and their effects. And even though some of these preconceptions might not be true – we still struggle to shape and form the world in such a way that it conforms with our beliefs.

All people have slightly different experiences and different concepts of what has caused the effects that they are currently experiencing – that’s why it’s so exciting to consider different perspectives and learn about the way that different people rationalize events in lives. For instance, some people believe that getting a well paid job at a big company is the truth about building financial security – others believe that starting your own business is a far better way to secure your future. What you choose to accept as truth entirely depends upon the effects that you are looking to experience.

Every time I read a new book or a blog by an author who is passionate about their work, I get to experience a new angle on reality. I get to look at the world through the eyes of that particular author and this let’s me better understand reality. The fascinating thing is that since we always act in accordance with what we believe to be the truth – by learning about other people’s beliefs, we are able to better understand how they are able to do what they do and why they are so successful at what they are doing.

What we believe to be the actions that will lead to our desired results will determine what we do, and what we do determines the results that we get. Beliefs are not always true – they can be false as well – but we will still act upon a belief regardless of whether it is true or false. The difference is that acting upon a true belief will lead to success and acting upon a false belief is likely to lead to failure. Though we might still achieve a positive result – just of a different nature.

Why We Can Never Perceive The Absolute Truth

Because of the nature of our minds, we will never be able to accurately perceive the reality around us and the relationships that exist within it – so there is no such thing as an absolute truth – only our perceptions. Perceptions are the way we connect different events together to form our world view. The way we identify these patterns is through reflection upon our past experience. By looking at some of the effects that we have achieved, we can trace them back to their causes and avoid repeating the same mistakes again. Sometimes we need other people’s help in order to see the patterns – but it’s these patterns of cause and effect that determine how we choose to act.

A salesperson needs to learn the patterns that lead to sales. When I was first starting out in sales, I hardly knew anything at all about having a productive conversation with another person that would lead to a sale. What would I say when the customer states his reason for not going ahead? I didn’t know. I would start arguing with the customer and both of us would get frustrated. Later I learned a very effective conversational technique that involves agreeing with everything the customer says, acknowledging their point of view and then leading them out of their false perceptions and towards a more profitable solution for everyone involved.

This is a typical pattern that we can consider to be the truth when it comes to disarming an argument. We believe that if we agree with, acknowledge and ignore the objection then we have a better chance of getting to a close than we would have if we had argued with the customer. There are probably other ways of handling objections, but they all have the same goal – to effectively neutralize an objection in a conversation. There is no ‘right’ or ‘true’ way to do it – all approaches are valid as long as they fulfil the goal of neutralizing the objection. And this is the main property of truth – it’s not stable or definite. It simply represents the best possible way that we know of when it comes to doing what we do.

So What Is Truth?

Truth is thus the means to an end. It is what we believe that we should do in order to produce a certain result. A truth, or a true belief is usually of the form “If we do this.. then we get that.” And we always tend to act in accordance to these beliefs. We act in a certain way because we believe that our actions will produce a certain result – and when we don’t get the result we wanted then we can go back and try to extract a different truth form the way things have turned out. Learning simply means that you are forming new connections within your mind between specific effects and their causes.

Through constantly seeking out the truth about how certain effects relate to their causes we are able to discover better and more effective ways to do what we do. We can shed light upon these relationships by reading educational material from people who have spent their lives studying certain effects and their causes. What causes good health? What causes us to become successful? What causes us to be happy and content with our lives? What causes us to live happy and fulfilling life?

When you find a way that you believe will bring you the results you seek – test it. And if it really was the true way to achieve the goal then it will work – if you follow the steps and get a different result then something is missing from your perceived picture of the truth. Perhaps the teacher has missed a crutial step of the way? If that’s the case, then you go back to the drawing board and figure out what was missing from your last attempt. Modify something in your approach and try again. Every experience is a valuable resource from which we can extract new truths about the effects we achieve in our lives and their causes. This is why taking any action at all towards a goal is always better instead of wasting time merely thinking through various actions within our minds.