Slotrology
Slotrology is a series of articles on how to use your mind so it works for you rather than against you. The first article in the series, and the introduction to the subject is: Slotrology 101.
Entries Tagged as 'slotrology'
Unremitting Resolution Can Accomplish What Seemed Impossible
Relentless resolve can accomplish what seems impossible. In India people called fakirs (which doesn’t mean they fake anything) do something amazing that takes years to master, and they do it as a spiritual discipline. What they choose to do varies.
For example, some hold a particular pose, like a certain religiously appropriate position, and they just keep holding it. This takes intense resolve, because of course, it becomes uncomfortable after only twenty minutes. So they go as long as they can, and then they rest. And then they go as long as they can again, and they keep this up, doing it longer and longer until they are permanently frozen in that posture!
They eventually can’t move, even if they wanted to. Their disciples have to force feed them and carry them to the river like a statue to wash them off.
This shows the amazing power of unremitting resolution. Personally, I think this particular application of will power is stupid. There are so many worthwhile things to accomplish in this world, and these guys have developed their powers of resolve to an unbelievable degree and all they have accomplished is to turn themselves into a statue! I’m sure you can use the power of focused resolve for something better.
Robert B. McCall, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues have kept track of 6,700 people for 13 years. Specifically, they were tracking people who were underachievers in school — people who, according to aptitude tests, had a lot of potential to get good grades, but who, in reality, had low grade-point averages. After 13 years, only about 15% of them had achieved a career success equal to their abilities.
What did they lack? Two things, according to McCall: “persistence in the face of challenge,” and they were too self-critical. The lack of persistence can be changed. It is simply a missing thought-habit.
You are persistent in the face of challenge if you are in the habit of being persistent in the face of challenge, and you are in the habit of persisting if you are in the habit of thinking in ways that make you persistent.
Get in the habit of telling yourself at key moments, “stay on track.” Other good things to tell yourself are “focus creates power” and “do what needs doing.”
Persistence is an extremely important habit. You can’t really develop competence at anything unless you persist through the rough parts, whether it’s playing the piano or doing your job. Any task you undertake, if it’s worth your trouble, will have some challenge in it. Some parts of it will be tough. No new abilities can be created without having to persist in the face of challenges, even if the main challenge is suffering through the boring repetition of playing scales on the piano.
For some goals, it will take everything you’ve got to accomplish it. As a matter of fact, it will take more than you’ve got — you’ll have to become more than you are now in order to accomplish it. You’ll need to learn more than you now know. You’ll need to gain skills you don’t have yet.
Practice staying on purpose no matter what distracts you. You will be taken off track again and again until you learn to stick with your purpose. With practice, you can get to the level of Einstein’s concentration. And when you can focus like that, you will be a laser beam, cutting through obstacles and barriers with hardly a pause, flying strait to your objective with power and speed.
SUMMARY OF SLOTROLOGY
All the stuff about the virus of the mind, and all the stuff about slotrology can be summed up as forming mental habits. The difference between someone who is feels bad and doesn’t get much done and someone who feels good and gets a lot done is simply their mental habits.
The way you think is a habit just like any other habit. When you learn to drive a car, you really have to pay attention to it. But the more you do it, the more you can do without your conscious attention. Behaviors become habits. Whole series of even complex behaviors happen on automatic pilot. When you drive, your body is on automatic pilot. You pay attention to cars around you, adjust your speed, move the steering wheel so you stay in the center of the lane, adjust your foot to keep your speed just right, and you’re doing all this on automatic pilot – by habit – while you carry on a lively conversation with your passenger.
The same is true of thought. The first few times you think a new thought, you may do it deliberately, but after you’ve thought a certain way about something over and over several times, it starts to become automatic. Thoughts influence the way you perceive the world. And thoughts alter how you feel. And for the most part, the thoughts you normally think are habit. They aren’t deliberate. They’re not what you would choose if you were choosing your thoughts deliberately.
Change your mental habits and you dramatically change your life.
How? Take a situation where you’re having trouble or where you’d like to feel or do something differently. Now figure out what you want to say to yourself in that situation. What would be helpful to think in that situation? Avoid any statements you don’t believe. Try to boil it down into a few short sentences, or even down to one.
Now practice saying that to yourself. In your head, or ideally out loud and with lots of feeling. Say it again and again. Practice thinking that thought. Make it smooth. Make it familiar with repetition. Make it come easy. Make the thought come easily to mind by repeating it.
Practice several times a day for awhile so the slotra feels grooved in. Keep practicing until that pathway through your brain seems well-worn. Write the slotra down and carry the paper with you to remind yourself to practice thinking it. Then when the right situation comes up, try to remember to say it to yourself.
It might not work out the first time. But after awhile, you’ll start to form a new mental habit. Keep practicing, and it will become automatic and you won’t have to try to remember.
To speed up the process, close your eyes and say your slotra with feeling over and over, and as you do, think about all the different situations in which you would like to think that thought. Think of the situations, one after the other, where you want that slotra to come to mind, all the while, repeating it to yourself. This is a way to future-practice, and helps the thought come to mind at the right time. It is also running back and forth on the pathway of your mind, helping to make the slotra easy to think.
To help form mental habits that can serve you for a lifetime:
Create good slotras and practice thinking them
until they come to mind automatically.
Repetition, Focus, and the Power to Achieve
Remember I coined the world “slotra” as a sort of cross between a mantra and a slogan. The first definition for “slogan” in Webster’s New Collegiate is “A war cry or rallying cry esp. of a Scottish clan.” When you need to bolster your courage, when you need to get off your rump and go to work, when you need to overcome your own inertia or nervousness, repeat the following slogan to yourself over and over, making the intensity and urgency of your tone rise each time you say it until it becomes like a war cry — Focus creates power! Focus creates power! Focus creates power! You’ll be up and moving!
In a sense, this is the principle that makes slotras work. By repeating the slotra over and over, you allow your mind to focus, like the sun through a magnifying glass. The sun could shine all day without changing a piece of paper lying on the ground. But use a magnifying glass to focus a lot of light on one little spot, and you’ll start to see something happen.
It’s like reading a book. You read and get a lot of good ideas, and then get up and go on about your day, and the ideas never had a sharp enough focus onto a single point to make a difference. But take one of those ideas and repeat it and think about it and tell your friends about it, and you’ll start to see something happen. Repetition creates focus. Focus creates power.
In experiments on Yoga practitioners, researchers found that their intense focus during meditation created a specific power: the power to maintain an alpha brain rhythm even during annoying stimulation. During meditation, the yogis’ brain waves slowed down and became rhythmical. It is known as an alpha state, and the state cannot be achieved by force. You can’t make yourself, by any effort, create that state, because the state of forcing or “making yourself” puts your brain in a beta state, a normal waking state characterized by a faster and more chaotic electrical pulse.
Once the yogis got into that alpha state, the researchers tried to see what they could do that might pop them out of alpha and into beta. They tried strong light, a loud banging noise, touching them with something hot, ringing a tuning fork, and sticking their hands into ice-cold water for forty-five minutes.
Something they didn’t try was smacking them on the back of the head with a baseball bat. I think it would’ve worked, but I wasn’t there at the time and they didn’t ask me for my ideas. But anyway, the things they tried didn’t work at all. The yogis stayed in alpha, and their alpha rhythm didn’t respond at all to the annoying stimuli. By contrast, normal people sitting there who had relaxed enough to be in alpha would immediately come out of it from any of those stimuli.
What were the yogis doing? They were simply repeating some stimulus over and over. Either saying a word over and over to themselves (a mantra), or holding a picture in their mind’s eye, and when they drifted away into other thoughts, they brought their mind back to that picture or word.
Focus is what created the power.
The ability to stay with what you’re doing without getting your attention scattered by non-relevant stimuli is a vital component to your general effectiveness in life. Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “If the rock-climber were to worry about his job or his love life as he is hanging by his fingertips over the void, he would soon fall. The musician would hit a wrong note, the chess player would lose the game.”
If you can set a goal and stay with it through all the normal distractions of our modern world day after day until you reach your goal, you are in possession of a power to be reckoned with!
Focus creates power. Even my repetition of this principle here is creating a certain amount of focus.
But repetition is boring, isn’t it? Let’s look at that for a moment. Boredom means what? It’s an unpleasant state characterized by a wandering mind. Your mind wanders, which is the opposite of focus.
When you’re repeating your slotras, and your mind wanders, you can handle it in one of two ways. I don’t know which way is best. Either you can wait until you notice your mind has wandered, and then gently bring it back to repeating the slotra again. That’s the peaceful way. If you have too much stress in your life, that’s the one I recommend.
If you want more motivation and energy in your life, I recommend the other way: say your slotra fast enough and intensely enough that your mind doesn’t wander very much.
The repetition of the slotra focuses your mental powers on one idea and forms a well-worn path through your brain.
In Ben Franklin’s autobiography, he wrote about how he changed himself. He made a list of thirteen virtues he wanted to acquire. He said:
My Intention being to acquire the Habitude of all these Virtues, I judg’d it would be well not to distract my Attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time, and when I should be Master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on till I should have gone thro’ the thirteen…I determined to give a Week’s strict Attention to each of the Virtues successively.
His method of concentrating his attention on one at a time worked wonderfully, and through the practice of these virtues became one of the most useful men in America during his lifetime.
The most effective formula for success is: Pick one goal and think about it and work toward it all the time. Make it your Magnificent Obsession. There may be many things you want. As Earl Nightingale suggests, write them all down, but then choose one. Forget about the others for now. Choose one and make it your top priority, your most urgent daily obsession. Do this, and keep it up long enough, and success is practically guaranteed.
OBSESSIONAL FOCUS
Albert Einstein and a colleague were once working on a scientific paper, and when they were done, they needed a paper clip. They looked around and found one, but it was bent out of shape. So they started looking around for a tool they could use to bend it back into a usable shape, when they came across a whole box of paper clips.
Einstein immediately took out a good paper clip and bent it into a tool that he then used to bend the original paper clip back into a usable shape.
His partner said, “What are you doing bending that paper clip into shape when we have a whole box of perfectly good ones!?”
Einstein’s reply was, “Once I’m set on a goal, it becomes difficult to deflect me.”
He said later in his life that this little incident characterized him more than any other. It’s a silly incident, and it was a foolish waste of time to bend the paper clip back, but the habit of staying on a chosen course is extremely powerful, and fully worth it even if the habit occasionally wastes time.
This world can easily be looked on as a trap designed to take you off course, whatever course you’re on. The world is full of enticing temptations, annoying circumstances and catastrophes, full of people who want your attention, your energies, and your money to go somewhere other than down your track. Staying on track is a tremendous test of will.
The chief obstacle is something inside your body, something built into your genetic makeup — a curiosity that makes the human species the most successful on Earth; a greed for what you don’t have, a desire to see, do, and hear new things. Combine that built-in desire to gain pleasant experiences with the free-enterprise system, and stir. What do you get? A dizzying land of temptations and distractions.
The world is literally screaming for your attention. Advertisers, salespeople, your friends, your enemies, and your own mother want your attention. They want you to take your attention off your goals for a moment and put your attention on their goals.
Distraction is the chief obstacle to achievement of any kind. It doesn’t seem like an obstacle, and that makes it all the more difficult to overcome.
In the Millionaire Mind page-a-day calendar, the authors — who have studied millionaires scientifically — tell about a school-bus driver who was able to send his children to medical school, private colleges, and graduate school, and then he retired with a net worth of three million dollars. What?! Wait a minute! Obviously you don’t make much money as a school-bus driver. But he was consistently frugal. That was important. He stayed focused on his goal.
One advantage of being a school-bus driver is lots of free time, and what he did consistently, staying on track year after year, was read about investments. He saved money by being frugal and then used what he learned in his reading to invest his money wisely. That’s how he did it. Not with a supreme exertion but with staying on purpose no matter what the temptations or distractions.
AN EXAMPLE OF FOCUS
Gail Borden thought condensed meat was the wave of the future. It was 1844 and people often died from eating tainted meat. Before refrigeration, people needed other alternatives. Borden experimented and found a way to boil 120 pounds of meat down to ten pounds, making it not only easier to carry, but less likely to spoil.
When the California Gold Rush began, he saw a ready market for his product, and he and his brother Tom built a meat-condensing plant and started cranking out the product.
But of course, the Gold Rush didn’t last very long. After it was over, his main source of customers dwindled down to nothing and his business went bankrupt.
“Don’t infer I’ve given up,” he told a friend. He knew the process of condensation was valuable, and he was determined to convince other people of it. After several more years of experimentation, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “Every piece of property I own is mortgaged. I labor fifteen hours a day.”
He was paying the price of accomplishment. Often it doesn’t come easy, especially when you want to make a difference. He wasn’t just trying to make a living. He could have just gotten a job. He had a vision, if you will: A big, shining vision a hundred feet tall of the Value of Condensation. He knew it was useful, and he was determined to bring his vision to fruition. He was obsessed. He said, “I mean to put a potato into a pill box, a pumpkin into a tablespoon, the biggest sort of watermelon into a saucer.”
Gail knew a lot about condensation, but apparently he was condensing the wrong thing. He was persistent, but he wasn’t a blind fool. He didn’t keep trying to give people what they didn’t want. What would they want? What could he condense that would serve humanity?
Pondering this question one day, he suddenly remembered an incident on a ship he had read about somewhere. Cows were on board to provide fresh milk (again, this was before refrigeration) for the babies on the voyage. But the cows took sick and four babies died from the tainted milk.
Maybe condensed milk would be useful. Gail started experimenting and found a way to condense milk without making it taste burnt, and opened a factory.
Dairy farmers saw this as a threat and started a campaign against this “unnatural” form of milk.
Keep this in mind: When you are doing something that needs to be done, even if it is all good, and even if your intentions are pure, there may be someone who finds your new thing a threat to an already-existing status quo. They may put up obstacles. What can you do to deal with it? Stay the course. You are not responsible for making everyone happy. You are responsible for accomplishing your goals.
Gail prevented himself from being distracted and continued toward his goal, and almost went belly up again. But then the Civil War broke out and the Union army thought Borden’s condensed milk was the perfect thing for a field ration. His business was saved. After the war, public perception had changed, and his business prospered. Condensed milk was indeed useful, and his company has been providing Borden’s condensed milk for more than 120 years now.
On his grave, the epitaph reads, “I tried and failed, I tried again and again, and succeeded.” He faced plenty of temptations to go off track, and plenty of distractions.
But you can accomplish tremendous things when you keep your eyes on the goal.
Read next: Unremitting Resolution Can Accomplish What Seemed Impossible
Repetition Sucks
We live in a world so rich with possibilities that you could eat a different dish every meal and you’d never eat them all; you could watch a different movie every day and you’d never see them all; you could read a different book every day and you’d never read them all; and you could think a different thought every second and you’d never think them all.
In a world like this, it seems awfully foolish to repeat anything — to read the same book twice, or think the same thought over and over again. It seems foolish, but it is very much not foolish. Repetition generates power in many different ways and in many different contexts. Let me go over a few to give you an idea.
Obviously the first place to start is with slotras. Repetition is what makes slotras work. Repetition goes over and over the same pathway in your brain, making that pathway stronger and easier to go down again, and that strength and easiness is exactly what makes the slotra worth anything. It allows that thought to be very easy to think, and if it’s the right thought for the right context, it can do a lot of good. The good was created with repetition.
The most lasting way to memorize something is a seemingly clumsy, time-consuming, and old-fashioned way: Go over it again and again. If it’s a poem, for example, that would mean reading it aloud again and again.
Go over it enough times, and you will have it memorized. And it will be memorized so well that forty years from now you’ll be able to recite it by heart. This is the power of rote learning. Repetition generated the power to put something in the mind and have it stick. Repetitition gave you the power to take something as wispy and ephemeral as a thought and make it solid in the mind.
If you were one of the many children who recited The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag every morning at school, you have with you right now a good example of how solid repetition can make something in an organic organ as soft and alive as the human brain. You can stand up right now, put your hand over your heart and say the whole thing start to finish without batting an eye, and chances are good you haven’t said it or even heard it for a long time — ten, twenty, maybe even fifty years. But there it is, complete.
It would seem really old fashioned to walk by a fifth grade classroom and hear them all chanting aloud the rules of grammar, because that was done in the olden days before mimeographed copies could be handed out. But those rules and facts that were repeated over and over out loud were indelibly printed on the mind of those students.
Unless you’re a writer, you probably know very few rules of grammar by heart. I am a writer and I hardly remember any of them.
We’ve gotten away from that sort of learning in our schools, and for some good reasons. But it has its uses for some things, and perhaps we’ve gotten too far away from it.
One of the arguments against rote learning is that it stifles creativity. But that isn’t true. Perhaps nothing but rote learning would stifle creativity, but memorizing some things by repeating them over and over doesn’t keep the mind from being creative.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of Creativity and Flow, and a researcher in the field for over forty years, wrote,
It is a mistake to assume that creativity and rote learning are incompatible. Some of the most original scientists, for instance, have been known to have memorized music, poetry, or historical information extensively.
There’s something very calming about well-memorized words. It is a place to come home to, a stable place in a sometimes unstable world of experience. “A person who can remember stories,” wrote Mihaly,
poems, lyrics of songs, baseball statistics, chemical formulas, mathematical operations, historical dates, biblical passages, and wise quotations has many advantages over one who has not cultivated such a skill. The consciousness of such a person is independent of the order that may or may not be provided by the environment. She can always amuse herself, and find meaning in the contents of her mind. While others need external stimulation — television, reading, conversation, or drugs — to keep their minds from drifting into chaos, the person whose memory is stocked with patterns of information is autonomous and self-contained.
Benjamin Franklin wrote in his essay The Way to Wealth, “To encourage the Practice of remembering and repeating those wise Sentences, I have sometimes quoted myself with great Gravity.”
Of course, he said that tongue-in-cheek, but he did create a lot of aphorisms and they have been repeated often, and became like proverbs and rules people lived by, and some still do to this day. Many of his aphorisms are well-known. He made many of them rhyme or made them especially pithy and memorable.
Here are a few of Franklin’s gems: Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise; God helps them that help themselves; Diligence is the mother of good luck; Constant dropping wears away stones; Little strokes fell great oaks, and so on and on. He was fond of making sayings and repeating them often in his writings. He repeated himself so much that others got the ideas stuck in their brains, and they have become a part of our culture.
His rhymes made the aphorisms a little less boring to repeat, but let’s face it, repeating anything is boring. But if you will create motivating slotras, or slotras that create a feeling of strength and determination in you, and then practice thinking those thoughts — repeat them to yourself many times every day — you will find a new source of power in accomplishing the goals you want.
Repetition may suck, but it can also suck your goals right into your hands.
Read next: Repetition, Focus, and the Power to Achieve