Retrain Your Mind To Not Be Stupid

So I wrote a pretty good piece just a little while ago and when I went to go format it the stupid thing erased everything I wrote. Awesome, oh well. Alright, I'll try again.

So for those of you that care, sorry about not posting last week. But I have an excuse, its the end of the semester and I have tons of assignment due that I just can't find the motivation to be interested in. So its been a hassle to get my brain to do anything lately. Good news is that there's only two weeks left till the end, very excited. But despite my brain's lack of motivation to work, there has been something that I think I should've written in the first place.

A lot of people want to think about these things on a more constant basis, but just don't know how. Or some people think that they do think about deep things but they don't realize that they've tried to schedule it in, like church. And that's not where you get the good deep thoughts, when you try to schedule in deep thinking, it doesn't happen. It's like forcing yourself to be creative, you end up producing a pile of crap. So how do you get to the point where you're randomly having philosophical revelations throughout the day? Well I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I can tell you what I've gathered so far from my own experiences.

So for the better part of my life so far, which was about 13 or 14 years, I was what most people would label as a loser or an outcast. Someone who lived on the outside of most situations and social settings. I was very quiet and spent a lot of time with my own thoughts, mostly because I had no one to share them with. But all of that was my own doing, I was who I was because I was afraid to insert myself into the situations and social settings that I wanted to be in. But I'm ok with who I was because it made me who I am. And that is someone who is on their way to understanding life and all things included. Now I don't assume that my way of becoming a successful thinker is the right way and only way, but if you can take one base truth from my experience, take this.

SHUT UP!!!!

Be quiet sometimes, slow down. You want to have deep thoughts? Stop thinking so much. You need to find a way to quiet your mind. This means droppin out of everyday life for a little bit. Find a place to sit down and then just don't think, put aside your emotions and your opinions about everything. If you can't find a place that's quiet or silence just kills you, then get some headphones and put on some music and just tune out. Close your eyes if it helps and you won't fall asleep, or maybe read a book. Whatever it takes to just slow your heart rate, not feel obligated to do anything, and just slow down the thought processes. Then start thinking objectively about everything, but start with yourself. That's the hardest thing to do if you've never truly done it before. And what does it mean to think objectively? The best definition of the word objective I've found is: Uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices. So to think objectively put aside your emotions and personal prejudices whatever they may be, and do this especially with yourself. And once you get that out of the way, everything becomes much simpler to get through. Basically, you need to retrain your mind to think slower about the things that matter. Everyone is so used to either doing things on auto-pilot or just speeding through the day that they just do the same thing with the things that matter.

Introduce some reductionism into your thought process, boil everything down to its most basic form. I'm talking about finding your foundation. When you start thinking about yourself objectively one of the questions that you should think about is, "How do I make decisions?" Think about how you think. It's important to find the foundation on which you make your decisions. Because most of us have unconsciously chosen what our foundation is, and more often than not those are the most wrong and most dangerous. Because then we end up making and defending decisions that we don't have a reason for making. So its like I talked about in my last post, find out, what is most important? Slow down, shut up, sit down and figure it out.

I'll try to get another post up tomorrow but no promises.