If you’ve ever suppressed the urge to unleash a string of obscenities, maybe think again. Some research suggests that it might be a better idea to simply let the filth fly.Scientifically speaking, a penchant for profanity doesn’t seem to be such a bad thing. Studies have shown that swearing relieves stress, dulls the sensation of pain, fosters camaraderie among peers and is linked with traits like verbal fluency, openness and honesty.

The Science Behind Swearing 

And the effects of cursing are physical as well as mental. A 2018 study in Psychology of Sport and Exercise found that letting out a few choice words during a workout can actually make you stronger. In the study, participants who cursed aloud while gripping a hand vise were able to squeeze harder and longer.Experts in this field of study suggest that humans partly developed taboo language as an emotional release valve.

What Happens When You Curse

“There’s a point where it’s just more efficient to say, ‘F*&^ you,’ than it is to hit somebody.We’ve evolved this very efficient way to vent our emotions and convey them to others.”

In 2009, researchers set out to study whether swearing alters someone’s experience of pain. Scientists found that swearing actually increases an individual’s pain tolerance. The team tasked 67 undergraduate volunteers with plunging their hands in ice-cold water for as long as they could handle it while repeating a swear word of their choice. Then, they did the experiment again — but this time, the students said a neutral, non-taboo word. The research team found that volunteers were able to keep their hands submerged in the frigid water for longer while repeating the swear word.See below...

Pain Relief Pt1

In addition, because swearing was accompanied by an increase in heart rate, the scientists think that cursing may trigger an individual’s “fight-or-flight” response. They suggest that swearing triggers negative emotions that serve as an alarm bell, alerting someone to danger and sparking an innate defense mechanism.

Beyond swearing's impacts on the body and mind, research has shown that cursing can influence our social dynamics, too. A 2012 study found that swearing can enhance the effectiveness and persuasiveness of an argument. In addition, cursing can also convey an emotional reaction to something without us resorting to physical violence.And while many might consider swearing less than savory, a recent study revealed that people who curse often actually lie less and have a higher degree of integrity.See below...

Damn Honest

After the scientists surveyed how often participants use profanity, they conducted a series of tests to determine how truthful an individual was. The research team found a positive link between profanity and honesty. Cursing was associated with less deception on an interpersonal level, and higher levels of integrity overall.

For many, the use of obscene language isn’t just a sign of boorish behavior — a common assumption is that people swear because they lack the vocabulary, education or even intelligence to express themselves in other ways. In other words, when language fails, we curse.“It’s a form of linguistic snobbery,” says Jay, referring to the presumed link between swearing and intelligence. “It’s a cultural stereotype. But the more I became sophisticated in language studies, the more I realized that every language scholar knows that’s not true.”

Fluent In Foulness

“People who are good at producing language are good at producing swear words. ﻿It’s not because they don’t have language — it’s because they have a whole toolbox full of words.”

See how psychological research shows people who swear like a sailor are more honest and intelligent.

People who swear like a sailor are more honest and more intelligent, studies show.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mindfulness

Mindfulness

mentalhealth

Mental Health

communication

Communication

Worried About Swearing Too Much? Science Says You Shouldn't Be..

Have a Will to Succeed, have a Vision, have a clear understanding of what drives you, what sparks you, what do you imagine when you look at the stars, what do you imagine when you see someone on the road, what do you imagine when you look at your Surroundings. Combine all these ideas and you may land upon a Dream of yours, a burning Desire.Then incoprate the fact that you are ready to Achieve it and also understand why you are worthy of it. And you would find a Will to Succeed.

A Will To Succeed 

Once you have a WILL to SUCCEED decide on what steps or what qualities you need to get to reach there, make a action plan, and execute onto it daily."Discipline makes the undoable doable"

Extreme Discipline 

Incorporating the above qualities makes you a Unique person but a person without Focus cannot achieve the Greatness found within a Man.So, black out everything else which doesn't contribute towards your dream, once this step is achieved successfully, a man has come a infinite steps near to his goal.

Laser Like Focus

Those who see the Invisible do the Impossible

How many times have you solved a problem by running away from it? Probably: Zero; but what if you see a problem directly in the eye without any fear? You might solve it in lesser time.But, in the long run you would become a Great problem solver, but not only that, you would become a man who converts Challenges into Opportunities. That is what the world Requires.

Being A Good Problem Solver

See your life as a House, you lay the bricks to make it, however a lot of people see Destiny and Fate as the factors related to this brick laying process, but this is not true, the Real Factors include: Hard Work, Determination, Grit, Focus, etc; Yes, the soil might be different for each one, but the bricks remain in your hands. Use them wisely.

Belief System

They say Life is a Long Road with a lot of Passengers , I say make your Own Path and travel with the Voyagers

productivity

Productivity

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

How to Achieve Success: 5 Ideas to Have for Attaining Success ⚡

A new picture is emerging of the way that the brain manages the body's resources and how this can be swayed by our motivation, and by our broader beliefs about our capabilities and the task ahead.These new insights offer enticing strategies that we can all use to boost our performance and improve our experience of exercise.

Fatigue Is A Mind Thing

Caffeine, for instance, has long been considered a muscular stimulant that can enhance performance in many sports - yet that is largely a product of our expectations about what it can do.According to multiple studies, people can benefit from so-called open-label placebos, even though they know they are taking an inert substance.

Placebos: We Think We Are Getting Better, And We Do

There is no substitute for auto-suggestion, or self-belief.Understanding the power of mind-over-muscle might lead us to reconsider some of our core underlying beliefs about our fitness. For manifold reasons, we might assume that we simply aren’t cut out for exercise. We may have had poor experiences in gym classes at school, for example, and our feelings of inadequacy could then be exacerbated as we compare ourselves with the stronger and faster gym bunnies around us.

The Expectation Effect

Scientific research <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6874306/">shows</a> that negative beliefs about our capacity for exercise can <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32062021/">reduce</a> our endurance and increase our discomfort. This will naturally make it much harder to summon the will to work out in the future.We can also look out for ‘catastrophic thinking’ while we go about the exercise, and try to interpret feelings of exertion more objectively. If you have a dim view of your fitness, you might currently interpret the natural aches and pains and feelings of fatigue as a sign of your own ineptitude.

The Negative Thought Spiral

The idea of ‘mind over muscle’ is more than motivational rhetoric – exercise science shows how the brain manages fatigue

health

Health

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Physical fatigue is in the brain as much as in the body | Psyche Ideas

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Each day we are confronted with hundreds, probably thousands of decisions. Most of which are insignificant or unimportant or both. Do we really need a whole aisle for toothpaste?</li><li class="ql-align-justify">In response to all of these decisions, most of us adopt a strategy of satisficing, a term coined by Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon to describe something that is perhaps not the best but good enough. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">For things that don’t matter, this is a good approach. You don’t know which pizza place is the best but you know which ones are good enough.</li></ul>

Decisions Decisions

Satisficing is one of the foundations of productive human behaviour; it prevails when we don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter, or more accurately when we don’t waste time trying to find improvements that are not going to make a significant difference in our happiness or satisfaction.Example: For most of us, we clean our houses until they are clean enough, reaching a kind of equilibrium between effort and benefit. It is this cost-benefits analysis that is at the heart of satisficing.

Satisficing: Not Perfect But Good Enough

In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 unique products; today that number has ballooned to 40,000 of them, yet the average person gets 80%– 85% of their needs in only 150 different supermarket items. That means that we need to ignore 39,850 items in the store.This comes with a cost.Neuroscientists have discovered that unproductivity and loss of drive can result from decision overload. Although most of us have no trouble ranking the importance of decisions if asked to do so, our brains don’t automatically do this.

Decision Overload

Our world has exploded. Information is abundant. We have a limited number of decisions. After all, there are only so many we can make in a day without compromising quality. Once we’ve hit that limit it doesn’t matter how important they are.The decision-making network in our brain doesn’t prioritize.We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired. Neurons are living cells with a metabolism; they need oxygen and glucose to survive and when they’ve been working hard, we experience fatigue.

A Limited Mind, An Unlimited World

The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second. That bandwidth, or window, is the speed limit for the traffic of information we can pay conscious attention to at any one time. While a great deal occurs below the threshold of our awareness, and this has an impact on how we feel and what our life is going to be like, in order for something to become encoded as part of your experience, you need to have paid conscious attention to it.

The Speed Of Our Mind

In order to understand one person speaking to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Under most circumstances, you will not be able to understand three people talking at the same time.With such attentional restrictions, it’s clear why many of us feel overwhelmed by managing some of the most basic aspects of life.

The Limited Bandwidth Of Our Brain

Attention is the most essential mental resource for any organism. It determines which aspects of the environment we deal with, and most of the time, various automatic, subconscious processes make the correct choice about what gets passed through to our conscious awareness. For this to happen, millions of neurons are constantly monitoring the environment to select the most important things for us to focus on. These neurons are collectively the attentional filter. They work largely in the background, outside of our conscious awareness.

Our Most Important Mental Resource

Most of the perceptual remains of our daily lives don’t register.When you’ve been driving on the freeway for several hours at a stretch, you don’t remember much of the scenery that has whizzed by: Your attentional system “protects” you from registering it because it isn’t deemed important. This unconscious filter follows certain principles about what it will let through to your conscious awareness.

Missing The Beautiful Sunset

The attentional filter is one of evolution’s greatest achievements. In nonhumans, it ensures that they don’t get distracted by irrelevancies. <ul><li>Squirrels are interested in nuts and predators, and not much else. </li><li>Dogs, whose olfactory sense is one million times more sensitive than ours, use smell to gather information about the world more than they use sound, and their attentional filter has evolved to make that so. </li></ul>If you’ve ever tried to call your dog while he is smelling something interesting, you know that it is very difficult to grab his attention with sound— smell trumps sound.

Dogs And Squirrels

Successful people— or people who can afford it— employ layers of people whose job is to narrow the attentional filter. That is, corporate heads, political leaders, spoiled movie stars, and others whose time and attention are especially valuable have a staff of people around them who are effectively extensions of their own brains, replicating and refining the functions of the prefrontal cortex’s attentional filter.These highly successful persons have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, allowing them to devote all of their attention to whatever is immediately before them.

Buying Freedom From Distractions

The brain’s change detector is at work all the time, whether you know it or not. If a close friend or relative calls on the phone, you might detect that her voice sounds different and ask if she’s congested or sick with the flu. When your brain detects the change, this information is sent to your consciousness, but your brain doesn’t explicitly send a message when there is no change. If your friend calls and her voice sounds normal, you don’t immediately think, “Oh, her voice is the same as always.” Again, this is the attentional filter doing its job, detecting change, not constancy.

The Attention Filter Reports Anomalies, Not Routine Signals

If you’re driving, a billboard for your favourite music group might catch your eye (really, we should say catch your mind) while other billboards go ignored. If you’re in a crowded room, at a party, for instance, certain words to which you attach high importance might suddenly catch your attention, even if spoken from across the room. If someone says “fire” or “sex” or your own name, you’ll find that you’re suddenly following a conversation far away from where you’re standing, with no awareness of what those people were talking about before your attention was captured.

Catching The Mind

The human brain has evolved to hide from us those things we are not paying attention to. In other words, we often have a cognitive blind spot: We don’t know what we’re missing because our brain can completely ignore things that are not its priority at the moment— even if they are right in front of our eyes. Cognitive psychologists have called this blind spot various names, including inattentional blindness.

The Mind Makes Us Intentionally Blind

iPhones and iPads, email, and Twitter are the new revolutions.Each was decried as an addiction, an unnecessary distraction, a sign of weak character, feeding an inability to engage with real people and the real-time exchange of ideas.Our brains have collectively gone over the danger mark as information gets fed into it in truckloads.

When The Internet Happened

The industrial revolution brought along a rapid rise in discovery and advancement. Scientific information increased at a staggering clip.Today, someone with a PhD in biology can’t even know all that is known about the nervous system of the squid! Google Scholar reports 30,000 research articles on that topic, with the number increasing exponentially. The amount of scientific information we’ve discovered in the last twenty years is more than all the discoveries up to that point, from the beginning of language.

Information Overload

Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master. This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth.

Learning How To Think

Attention is created by networks of neurons in the prefrontal cortex (just behind your forehead) that are sensitive only to dopamine. When dopamine is released, it unlocks them, like a key in your front door, and they start firing tiny electrical impulses that stimulate other neurons in their network. But what causes that initial release of dopamine? Typically, one of two different triggers:<ul><li>Something that is salient to your survival, with evolutionary origins.</li><li>You effectively will yourself to focus only on that which is relevant to a search or scan of the environment.</li></ul>

How The Attention Process Works

<ul><li>As knowledge becomes more available— and decentralized through the Internet— the notions of accuracy and authoritativeness have become clouded. </li><li>Conflicting viewpoints are more readily available than ever, and in many cases, they are disseminated by people who have no regard for facts or truth. </li><li>Many of us find we don’t know whom to believe, what is true, what has been modified, and what has been vetted.</li></ul>

Why Curation Is Important

Highly successful people have many of the daily distractions of life handled for them, which allows them to better focus their attention.

philosophy

Philosophy

problemsolving

Problem Solving

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

The History of Cognitive Overload

Masanobu Fukuoka (2 February 1913 – 16 August 2008) was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, herbicide and pesticide free cultivation methods from which he created a particular method of agriculture, commonly referred to as "natural farming" or "do-nothing farming". Fukuoka was the author of several books, scientific papers and other publications. He was an outspoken advocate of the value of observing nature's principles.

Masanobu Fukuoka

"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."

Zen Farming

Food and medicine are not two different things: they are the front and back of one body. Chemically grown vegetables may be eaten for food, but they cannot be used as medicine.

Natural farming, popularly known as “do nothing” farming, is an environmentally sustainable way of growing food, founded not in technique, but in the philosophical principal of living and growing food in accordance with nature's principal.

'Do Nothing' Farming

The four principles of natural farming are: <ol><li>human cultivation of soil, plowing or tilling are unnecessary, as is the use of powered machines.</li><li>prepared fertilizers are unnecessary, as is the process of preparing compost.</li><li>weeding, either by cultivation or by herbicides, is unnecessary; instead, only minimal weed suppression with minimal disturbance should be used.</li><li>applications of pesticides or herbicides are unnecessary.</li></ol>

Principles Of Natural Farming

"At first people ate simply because they were alive and because food was tasty. Modern people have come to think that if they do not prepare food with elaborate seasonings, the meal will be tasteless. If you do not try to make food delicious, you will find that nature has made it so."

"People think they understand things because they become familiar with them. This is only superficial knowledge. It is the knowledge of the astronomer who knows the names of the stars, the botanist who knows the classification of the leaves and flowers, the artist who knows the aesthetics of green and red. This is not to know nature itself- the earth and sky, green and red. Astronomer, botanist, and artist have done no more than grasp impressions and interpret them, each within the vault of his own mind."

Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.” Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature’s own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Whether you’re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here—you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.

books

Books

Call it “Zen and the Art of Farming” or a “Little Green Book,” Masanobu Fukuoka’s manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledge presents a radical challenge to the global systems we rely on for our food. At the same time, it is a spiritual memoir of a man whose innovative system of cultivating the earth reflects a deep faith in the wholeness and balance of the natural world. As Wendell Berry writes in his preface, the book “is valuable to us because it is at once practical and philosophical. It is an inspiring, necessary book about agriculture because it is not just about agriculture.” Trained as a scientist, Fukuoka rejected both modern agribusiness and centuries of agricultural practice, deciding instead that the best forms of cultivation mirror nature’s own laws. Over the next three decades he perfected his so-called “do-nothing” technique: commonsense, sustainable practices that all but eliminate the use of pesticides, fertilizer, tillage, and perhaps most significantly, wasteful effort. Whether you’re a guerrilla gardener or a kitchen gardener, dedicated to slow food or simply looking to live a healthier life, you will find something here—you may even be moved to start a revolution of your own.

The One-Straw Revolution

Animated corpses appear in stories all over the world throughout recorded history. But zombies have a distinct lineage— one that traces back to Equatorial and Central Africa.

Zombie’s African Origins 

The first clue is in the word “zombie” itself. Its exact etymological origins are unknown, but there are several candidates. The Mitsogho people of Gabon, for example, use the word “ndzumbi” for corpse. The Kikongo word “nzambi” refers variously to the supreme being, an ancestor with superhuman abilities, or another deity. And, in certain languages spoken in Angola and the Congo, “zumbi” refers to an object inhabited by a spirit, or someone returned from the dead.

Zombie’s Types And Varieties

Between 1517 and 1804, France and Spain enslaved hundreds of thousands of African people, taking them to the Caribbean island that now contains Haiti and the Dominican Republic. There, the religious beliefs of enslaved African people mixed with the Catholic traditions of colonial authorities and a religion known as “vodou” developed.

How Vodou Developed

According to some vodou beliefs, a person’s soul can be captured and stored, becoming a body-less “zombi.” Alternatively, if a body isn’t properly attended to soon after death, a sorcerer called a “bokor” can capture a corpse and turn it into a soulless zombi that will perform their bidding. Historically, these zombis were said to be put to work as laborers who needed neither food nor rest and would enrich their captor’s fortune.

Zombis: The No-Fuss Laborers

In other words, zombification seemed to represent the horrors of enslavement that many Haitian people experienced. It was the worst possible fate: a form of enslavement that not even death could free you from. The zombi was deprived of an afterlife and trapped in eternal subjugation. Because of this, in Haitian culture, zombis are commonly seen as victims deserving of sympathy and care.

Zombis: The Eternal Slaves

The zombie underwent a transformation after the US occupation of Haiti began in 1915— this time, through the lens of Western pop culture. During the occupation, US citizens propagated many racist beliefs about Black Haitian people. Among false accounts of devil worship and human sacrifice, zombie stories captured the American imagination.

The First Transformation: Occupation

And in 1932, zombies debuted on the big screen in a film called “White Zombie.” Set in Haiti, the film’s protagonist must rescue his fiancée from an evil vodou master who runs a sugar mill using zombi labor. Notably, the film's main object of sympathy isn't the enslaved workforce, but the victimized white woman.

The Second Transformation: Film

Over the following decades, zombies appeared in many American films, usually with loose references to Haitian culture, though some veered off to involve aliens and Nazis. Then came the wildly influential 1968 film “Night of the Living Dead,” in which a group of strangers tries to survive an onslaught of slow-moving, flesh-eating monsters. The film’s director remarked that he never envisioned his living dead as zombies. Instead, it was the audience who recognized them as such.

The Zombification Of The Zombis

But from then on, zombies became linked to an insatiable craving for flesh— with a particular taste for brains added in 1985′s “The Return of the Living Dead.” In these and many subsequent films, no sorcerer controls the zombies; they’re the monsters. And in many iterations, later fueled by 2002′s “28 Days Later,” zombification became a contagious phenomenon.

A Monster And A Disease

For decades now, artists around the world have used zombies to shine a light on the social ills and anxieties of their moment— from consumer culture to the global lack of disaster preparedness. But, in effect, American pop culture also initially erased the zombies origins—cannibalizing its original significance and transforming the victim into the monster.

World-Famous And Defamed

On voodoo and zombies, or on the effects of perspective distortion and/or false representation: how Vodou went from diasporic religion to sensationalized pop-culture caricature and how zombis went from victims to monsters.

Zombies have a distinct lineage— one that traces back to Equatorial and Central Africa. For three centuries, African people were enslaved and brought to the Caribbean Islands. There, a religion known as vodou developed, along with the belief that a person's soul can be captured and stored, becoming a body-less zombie. Christopher M. Moreman uncovers the true origins of the undead. [Directed by Kaspar Jancis, narrated by Addison Anderson, music by Salil Bhayani, cAMP Studio].

religionandspirituality

Religion & Spirituality

history

History

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

The Dark History Of Zombies

Though many people make the pursuit of happiness their life’s goal, recent research suggests that doing so may backfire and, ironically, lead to less happiness.Because life is filled with various challenges, people may be better off pursuing purpose than chasing passion, building the resilience and character needed to thrive.Uncovering our unique vocations may not only help us flourish as individuals but also as humanity.

Key Takeaways

We’ve all heard this before: To change the world, we need to use our passion as our North Star, and let our happiness be the measuring stick of our success. The truth is that happiness is not the goal of our human existence.Making happiness the goal of our lives is tantamount to embarking on a fool’s errand that is sure to leave us disappointed. In fact, recent research suggests that making happiness our life’s goal may ironically lead to less happiness and backfire in harmful ways.

Passion Or Purpose

Character is forged in the face of adversity. When that harsh reality sets in, it can leave happiness-seekers feeling hoodwinked, empty, and rudderless. The very adversity we often wish to circumnavigate has the potential to produce within us the grit, resilience, and character we need to flourish as human beings in an era in which machines are rapidly replacing humans throughout the global economy.People who pursued meaning in life not only lived longer but also experienced improved physical and mental health, greater economic prosperity, and resilience when dealing with change in life.

Finding Meaning

Happiness is not the goal, but rather a byproduct of living on what I call the “purpose path.”This requires “vocational courage” — gaining clarity about the work you were made to do and committing to it no matter what. This is more than simply attending to one’s passions — this is discovering and acting on one’s reason for being. Vocation is not a goal to be achieved; it is a gift to be received

The Purpose Path

This is the essence of vocational courage. It is recognizing when there is a gap between what you’re doing and what you believe you’re made to do. For some, it may mean <a href="https://hbr.org/2015/07/setting-the-record-straight-on-switching-jobs">switching companies</a> to work for a more purpose-driven brand. For some, it may mean going back to school to prepare for a different line of work altogether. It is having the bravery to pivot in a different direction when your soul knows it’s time — when your soul demands that you live an “<a href="https://onbeing.org/blog/living-an-undivided-life/">undivided life</a>.”

An Undivided Life

Each of us has a vocation — a unique, worthwhile life’s work we are called to undertake at this moment in human history. So instead of orienting our lives around our passions and the <a href="https://hbr.org/podcast/2017/09/find-your-happy-place-at-work">pursuit of happiness</a>, let’s commit ourselves to listening to the voice of our vocation so we can understand who we should become and how we can contribute to human flourishing. It just might change the world for good.

Find Your Calling

Though many people make the pursuit of happiness their life’s goal, recent research suggests that doing so may backfire and, ironically, lead to less happiness. Because life is filled with various challenges, people may be better off pursuing purpose than chasing passion, building the resilience and character needed to thrive. Uncovering our unique vocations may not only help us flourish as individuals but also as humanity.

career

Career

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Why Purpose—Not Passion—Should Guide Young Professionals

We are constantly researching and discovering new creative people in our line of work. The ones who rise to the surface usually have something in common.The designers, artists, illustrators, photographers and animators who get noticed either:A. Are extremely talented or skilledB. Have a “thing”C. Have a “thing” and are extremely good at itIt’s the exceptions that get attention. To find a story newsworthy, a journalist needs an angle. For your work to stand out, you need an angle, too. That leaves you with one of the three above options: Option B.

What We Do What Others Cannot

Now the tricky part is, you can’t necessarily fake or force this 'thing'. The people who become known for their niche usually don’t start out with the desire to become known. They are simply pursuing a weird, unusual, singular interest – and going all-in on that.The point is that you open yourself up to your genuine, specific and even weird fixations.

That Quirky Thing We Have

This passion may be fleeting, and that’s fine. It’s those passing interests that lead people to some of their best side projects. And those side projects inevitably lead to other opportunities. The point is that you open yourself up to your genuine, specific and even weird fixations. Don’t judge them. Don’t overthink them. Just follow them and see where they lead you.
If something specific fascinates you – even if it’s as seemingly mundane as the way light hits dust in a photograph, or how chewed gum might look like an animated character – let yourself follow that interest as far as your heart desires.

Get Going At Your Niche

On finding your niche

According to the Mayo Clinic, laughing has short- and long-term effects on our health. As we bring in more oxygen, it stimulates our heart, lungs, and muscles. Laughing increases the endorphins that are released by our brain, and it cools down our stress response. Over a longer period of time, laughter can improve our immune system, relieve pain, and increase personal satisfaction.

Laughter Can Be Good Medicine

While it’s easy to laugh at something funny, the ability to laugh at yourself can help you address the challenges that could be holding you back in your career and life, says Dr. Brian Kaplan, author of Almost Happy: Pushing Your Buttons with Reverse Psychology.“To laugh at one’s self is an excellent thing,” he says. “Humor can be a very powerful way of helping people, proving that helping doesn’t have to be a solemn experience.”

Helping Doesn’t Have To Be Solemn

Kaplan studied the work of Frank Farrelly, an innovative therapist who founded Provocative Therapy in the 1960s. Provocative Therapy uses humor and reverse psychology to provoke people to change. With the person’s explicit permission, you repeat what you hear their “sub-selves” saying and you do it with humor, warmth, and affection.

Provocative Therapy

Provocative Therapy is a system of psychotherapy in which the therapist plays the devil’s advocate, siding with the negative half of the client’s ambivalence toward his life’s goals, his relationships, work and the structures within which he lives. The provocative therapist also plays the Satanic role by facetiously agreeing with the doom and gloom feelings and expectations of the client, and “tempting” him to continue his “sinning,” his self-defeating attitudes and behavioral patterns.

Whose Side Are You On?

“We all have sub-selves, or sub-personalities, such as our inner child,” says Kaplan. “That’s a nice use of a sub-self. But we also have sub-selves that dominate us. They’re loud, grab the microphone, and dominate the whole personality.”For example, you may relate to a sub-self of the workaholic. You could justify that you need to work 15 hours a day because you’re paying for your children’s education, a new house, or a vacation home.

Our Sub-Selves

Laugh at yourself by reaffirming the workaholic’s devotion to work. For example, you can tell yourself, “You should definitely spend all your time focusing on making more money and acquiring more businesses or investing in the market. Your children will be judged by their clothes and vacations. They don’t need you; they need your money.”

Self-Subversion How-to

“When you can laugh at that side—especially when it’s a bit over the top—then you can laugh at that part of you that’s sabotaging yourself,” says Kaplan. “That moment of laughter provides a window of opportunity to recognize what’s holding you back and prescribe your own solution. And laughter and the warmth of it is like a medicine that allows you to deal with something that’s often quite painful.”

Laughter And The Warmth Of It

In his book, Kaplan identifies more than 100 sub-selves that could be holding you back. For example, you may be a procrastinator. In this case, you can talk to yourself by saying, “Never underestimate the power of tomorrow!” “Always make magnanimous resolutions on your finest night, New Year’s Eve.” And “Meditate on the many horrible consequences of most impulsive decisions and actions.”

Sub-Self: The Procrastinator

Another sub-self is the grim executive, which Kaplan calls “the stone-faced men and women of big business. Anyone feeling the burden of being held responsible for profit and loss.” In this case, you can call out the sub-self by saying, “It’s a badge of honor to look ten years older than you are. Don’t forget your annual visit to the cardiologist.”Other sub-selves include being a people pleaser, robot, doormat, critic, and ego maniac.

Sub-Self: The Grim Executive

“Mark Twain once said, ‘Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand,'” says Kaplan. “Once you’re laughing at the sub self, you’re acutely aware of it. Normally, you don’t think of the trait as a sub-self. When it takes you over, you think ‘I’m angry’ or ‘I’m under stress,’ because the sub-self has taken your whole personality there. When you can identify it as a part of you and not your entire being, you can quiet it down.”

A Part, Not The Whole

If you find it hard to laugh at yourself, I would be happy to do it for you.

If you would not be laughed at, be the first to laugh at yourself.

We probably all know what it’s like when others push our buttons and drive us crazy. What if we pushed our own buttons and drove ourselves happy? 

The ability to laugh at yourself can help you address the challenges that could be holding you back in your career and life, says Dr. Brian Kaplan.


habits

Habits

How (And Why) We Should Learn To Laugh At Ourselves

The Seven Virtues are:1. Master Your Mind (The garden)2. Follow Your Purpose (The Light House)3. Practice Kaizen (Sumo wrestler)4. The Power of Discipline (Cable Wire)5. Respect Your Time (Stop watch)6. Selflessly Serve Others (Fragnant Roses)7. Embrace the Present (Path of Diamonds)

Short Summary

“Your "I CAN" is more important than your IQ.”

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