Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization

Here is a revolution in an unexpected way:

Marcin Jakubowski: Open-sourced blueprints for civilization | Video on TED.com

Six Money Lessons

Great advise we can all use:

6 Money Lessons for My College-Aged Daughter | zen habits

I always dreaded budgeting and paying bills and thinking about savings and retirement, and figured I could always deal with it later.

Problem with that is you end up screwing yourself if you put things off until later. Living for the moment is great, until the finances catch up with you and the moment starts to suck because you owe a ton of debt.

I’ve found that living mindfully means not just partying in the moment, but taking care of things now, when they’re small, rather than when they’re huge.

Cancer: the ugly truths, the better treatments

If the "c" word (that is, cancer) has touched your life (directly or indirectly) then you need to read this book.

Cancer-Step Outside the Box

The author seems a bit repetitive at times, but perhaps that is a needed technique as people tend to jump in to read parts they want/need to learn about.

The truths about the cancer industry are very real based on my own experience with Tracey. It is obvious that the cancer machine does not want to allow more effective treatments to come to surface. How could then they make billions of dollars per year? It is this reality that has caused me to stop contributing to charities associated with cancer treatments and cures. Sadly, they are a farce. Whether the people that head and work for such organizations as the American Cancer Society or Susan G. Komen Foundation know it or not is debatable. What is not so unclear is that there are more humane treatment methods and they have been shutdown, repeatedly, by government agencies that are too vested in the status quo to be a conduit for progress.

Not only is this book an exposé of these organizations, it also provides great treatment protocols and excellent preventive methods.

If you take only one thing out of this post then take this: we owe it to ourselves not to be part of the current cancer machinery that slashes, poisons and burns patients with a pathetic 3% success rate; compare that with a 90% success rate of the protocols listed in this book which use more natural and effective methods.

Do you want to learn more? Please visit: Cancer Truth | Alternative Cancer Treatments

One tiny change -- that's all it takes

Get Started: From Overweight to Healthy | zen habits

If it were just a body-image thing, I’d say learn to love your body — and I believe that. Forget the cover models on magazines, the perfect people on TV and in movies. They’re just being used to sell us stuff, but the result is that we get bad body images for not having rock-hard abs. Forget about that. What worries me, though, about friends and family who are overweight is their health — having a big belly puts you at risk of heart disease, diabetes and other similar problems.

Scary stuff.

But how do you start getting healthier and fitter? How do you change a whole slew of habits, from eating too much to eating fried and sweet and fatty foods to drinking sodas and sweet coffee drinks to being sedentary?

You make one change. A tiny little one.

It really can be that is. One small change. My first change was to increase water drinking. Then I moved more. Then … 65 pounds later, I was in the best shape I had been in decades!

So make one small change; and please do it today!

Breathe!

Breathe. | zen habits

Breathe.

Breathing can transform your life.

If you feel stressed out and overwhelmed, breathe. It will calm you and release the tensions.

If you are worried about something coming up, or caught up in something that already happened, breathe. It will bring you back to the present.

If you are discouraged and have forgotten your purpose in life, breathe. It will remind you about how precious life is, and that each breath in this life is a gift you need to appreciate. Make the most of this gift.

If you have too many tasks to do, or are scattered during your workday, breathe. It will help bring you into focus, to concentrate on the most important task you need to be focusing on right now.

If you are spending time with someone you love, breathe. It will allow you to be present with that person, rather than thinking about work or other things you need to do.

If you are exercising, breathe. It will help you enjoy the exercise, and therefore stick with it for longer.

If you are moving too fast, breathe. It will remind you to slow down, and enjoy life more.

So breathe. And enjoy each moment of this life. They’re too fleeting and few to waste.

Be still

Be Still. | zen habits

From the Tao Te Ching:

It is not wise to dash about.
Shortening the breath causes much stress.
Use too much energy, and
You will soon be exhausted.
That is not the Natural Way.
Whatever works against this Way
Will not last long.

The Illusion of Control

A good friend of mine sent me this, and I wanted to share it with all of you.

breathe. | zen habits

May you live like the fish … at least some of the time.

The Illusion of Control

‘The Master allows things to happen.
She shapes events as they come.
She steps out of the way
and lets the Tao speak for itself.’
~Laozi

Post written by Leo Babauta.

When you think you control something, you’re wrong.

It’s amazing how often we think we’re in control of something when really we aren’t.

Control is an illusion, as I’ve said many times before.

We constantly make plans that never actually turn out the way we envisioned. ‘If you want to make God laugh, make a plan,’ an old saying goes.

We have been trained to set goals, and then work on the actions that lead to those goals … and yet how often do those goals fail? How often are we trying to control a future that we cannot predict?

Did you know five years ago that the world would turn out as it has — that Obama would be president, that the stock markets would have crashed, that we’d be deep into a recession, that earthquakes and tsunamis would hit, that you’d be doing exactly what you’re doing today?

Of course not. We don’t know the future, much less control it. We like to think we do, but that never turns out to be true.

And yet we continue to believe in the illusion of control. We face a chaotic and complex world, and seek to control it however we can.

Our attempts to control the world can be seen through:

• Trying to control how our children turn out, as if we can shape them like blocks of clay, as if humans aren’t more complex than we can possibly understand.
• Tracking every little thing, from spending to exercise to what we eat to what tasks we do to how many visitors are on our site to how many steps we’ve taken today and how many miles we’ve run. As if our selective tracking can possibly include the many, complex factors that influence outcomes.
• Trying to control employees — again, complex human beings with many motivations and whims and habits that we don’t understand.
• Obsessively planning projects, trips, days, parties, as if the outcomes of events are things we can control with our powers of manipulation of the world.

If we can let go of this illusion, what are we left with? How can we live among this chaos?

Consider the fish. A fish swims in a chaotic sea that it cannot possibly control — much as we all do. The fish, unlike us, is under no illusion that it controls the sea, or other fish in the sea. The fish doesn’t even try to control where it ends up — it just swims, either going with the flow or dealing with the flow as it comes. It eats, and hides, and mates, but does not try to control a thing.

We are no better than that fish, yet our thinking creates the need for an illusion.

Let go of that thinking. Learn to be the fish.

When we are in the midst of chaos, let go of the need to control it. Be awash in it, experience it in that moment, try not to control the outcome but deal with the flow as it comes.

How do we live our lives like this? It’s a completely different way of living, once we let go of the illusion:

• We stop setting goals, and instead do what excites us.
• We stop planning, and just do.
• We stop looking at the future, and live in the moment.
• We stop trying to control others, and focus instead on being kind to them.
• We learn that trusting our values is more important to taking action than desiring and striving for certain outcomes.
• We take each step lightly, with balance, in the moment, guided by those values and what we’re passionate about … rather than trying to plan the next 1,000 steps and where we’ll end up.
• We learn to accept the world as it is, rather than being annoyed with it, stressed by it, mad at it, despaired by it, or trying to change it into what we want it to be.
• We are never disappointed with how things turn out, because we never expected anything — we just accept what comes.

This might seem like a passive way of living to some, and it’s against our aggressive, productive, goal-oriented cultural nature. If you can’t accept this way of living, that’s OK — many people live their lives with the illusion of control, and not realizing what it is that makes them unhappy or frustrated isn’t the worst thing ever.

But if you can learn to live this way … it’s the most freeing thing in the world.