Okay, technically, I'm on day 17 but I haven't had time to listen to day's 16 and 17 yet and I've had this post openned but not written for two days so let's, in the words of Larry the Cable Guy, 'getter done'.
The reason it's taking me two days to get around to this post is because I didn't feel I had anything to write about. I sometimes forget, and have to remind myself, this blog, unlike http://www.thecuphalffull.com/ isn't meant to show pure uplifting messenging. It's to show how difficult this road can be, but to show it is achievable.
I want you dear readers to see both my ups and down and even the boring parts.
As for the 100 Day Challenge, it's all well and good but it's hasn't been a source of growth for me since the last post (which was great).
Recently I've really started to get into meditation. Just a quick five to ten minutes a day of relaxing, clearing my mind and openning up my self to more devine insight.
On Thursday on my commute back home I was trying to meditate but my mind was filled with all the news off of the games forum I frequent when I'm bored at my work (which is a considerable amount these days). In meditation you're suppose to merely acknowledge each thought and let it pass, which is what I was doing but it was thought after thought of utterly useless video game information, most of which I honestly don't even care about. Then devine insight happened. I'm obsessed with this site.
Ironically, that was a happy thought. Currently, as you know if you're following this blog, I'm reading Anthony Robbin's Awaken the Giant Within. In it Tony talks about using pain and pleasure to form life altering habits for the better until they become habitual or better yet, like an obsession. I had read that before and understood the principal but never had any success in trying to create an onsessive behaviour. And now, here I was discovering I had, unwittingly, done exactly that.
Reflecting on it, I could see how it had happened. When I started in my current position we were extremely busy in the summer but slow in the winter. So during the winter months I'd occasionally have some free time and fill it with a wide range of internet sites. I looked at comic book news (I worked in the industry in the 90's and still like to follow it even though I'm not a collector), video game news, movie news, political news, general news, date sites (don't tell), I even worked on my book until people complained about it. Over the course of the next nine years (Lord, has it been that long?) our business has become slower and slower to the point now where even during the summer months I need to fill considerable down time and the winter months are virtually all downtime needing to be filled.
So applying the pain/pleasure formula (we move away from pain and towards pleasure): boredom was the pain and the games forum provided the best escape from boredom for a couple main reasons, unlike news, there was always fresh posts on the forums and debates to get into and secondly at that time the Nintendo Wii was launching at it's success (which I predicted) came with tremendous uproar from the established gaming community. It didn't meet their predetermined idea of what a games console should be and many outright hated it as they resented the fact that it was vastly outsell the consoles that they felt did it 'right.' Such drama is always fun to watch - and occasionally stir up with more predictions of success.
Over time, it became a habit and over more time it became an obsessive behaviour where even if I'm at home and bore I feel a complusion to see what's happening on the forum.
The great thing about all this is that I now have a working example of how to create an obsessive behaviour. Now all I need to do is recreate that with something that's more beneficial to me over the long term, like my website.
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