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Attacking Adversity

Bookish Weapon Number Forty-Four

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Sometimes a book is a lot of work. Mastin Kipp’s, “Claim Your Power” was a lot of work. Exercises to do. Lots of list-making and thinking. Then “Best Self” was like that too. So much to do that I was worn out after reading it. This book, “Loving What Is,” by Byron Katie doesn’t have a lot of exercises, but it does exercise your mind. It was written in 2002 when I was in my 50s. I wonder if life could have been different if I had read it then?

Your mind gets a workout. It doesn’t seem that complicated at first, but then once you start using “The Work” it requires a lot of thinking.

What’s “The Work?”

“The Work” is a series of four questions you ask yourself anytime you don’t like what someone is doing or not doing or some idea that upsets you. Any thought or situation.

Here are the questions or inquiry:

Is it true?
Can you absolutely know that it is true?
How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
Who would you be without the thought?

And

Turn the thought around. Then find at least three specific genuine examples of how each turnaround is true for you in this situation.

How Easy Is It?

Not so easy. Certainly is simple, right. So try it out. See! Katie gives you lots of help in the book so you can become decent at doing “The Work.” It makes my brain hurt, but maybe that is just me.

She presents whole sections about each of the questions even the first and second. These seem so obvious but they are not.

There are dialogues with several people in the book where Byron Katie asks them these questions and then guides them through it all. It can get complicated.

There is a chapter about doing the work on the body and addictions. There is a chapter about doing the work on money and work. One about doing the work with children. The book covers all the bases. At the end of the book, there is a section of questions and answers.

Is this book a weapon. You bet! It is a bookish weapon.

Bookish Weapon Number Thirty-Six

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Does everything seem to be happening faster? In their book “The Future is Faster Than You Think,” Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler make the cat that you don’t even realize how fast it is going. They say that it is not just in one particular area where we will see dramatic changes but rather the convergence of technologies will have the most impact.

Moores Law

You have most likely heard of Moores Law – that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit double about every two years. Think about how that has changed your life over time.

We can now carry cell phones around in our pocket that began as giant car battery size devices. Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Rose’s Law

Have you heard of Rose’s Law? This is the new one. It is that the number of qubits in a quantum computer doubles every year. The authors say it has been named “Moores Law on steroids because qubits in superposition have way more power than binary bits in transistors.”

Yes, quantum computing is going to change things a lot. These authors don’t even know what innovations will emerge once quantum computing matures. That is very exciting!

New materials, new chemicals, and new drugs. The future is going to be amazing and happening so fast.

Examples

Tree planting drones “that fire “seedpod” bullets into the ground, allowing a single, drone to plant as many as one hundred thousand trees a day.” Isn’t that something?

Virtual and augmented reality will kick in like never before as VR matures.

Flying cars! Uber already is planning to provide trips from atop of buildings in LA to tops of buildings in San Diego.

Very fast underground “trains.” How does 700 miles per hour sound? The authors use the example of someone leaving their home in Cleveland Ohio at 9:00 AM and arriving at their 10:00 AM appointment on Wall Street right on time.

Or how about the “spaceship” that gets people fro New York to Shanghai China in 35 minutes?

Increase in life span. The authors say, “We’re heading toward a world of long-lived, AI-enhanced, globally interconnected humans – a world far different from the one which we find ourselves.”

Supporting the previous example are the plans of a company called Neuralink. “Neuralink has a plan for a two-gigabyte-per-second wireless connection from the brain to the cloud and wants to begin human trilby the end of 2021.” So how do they get that link into the brain? They inject it!

There is much more in the book. You can read about how the retail, advertising, and entertainment business will be transformed. So get it and read it!

Bookish Weapon Number Thirty-Six

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Gary John Bishop is an interesting character and the author of the book, “Stop Doing That Sh*t.” It is a self-help book. You wouldn’t pick it up unless you thought you needed to help your self in some way, especially if you thought you needed to stop doing something.

It is a book that approaches self-sabotage in a different light than what I have read in the past. It is not for everybody. There is, of course, lots of bad language and he doesn’t apologize for that. After all, he also wrote the book, “Unfu*k Yourself.”

The Dedication

I liked his dedication. How many of you just skip over a dedication in a book. It isn’t what you are after or so you think. However, I thought it was well said in this case so I will share.

“I dedicated this book to the helpless and hopeless, the frustrated and defeated: today is a day when it can all begin anew. I don’t care about your past, and you shouldn’t either.”

Good, right? So if you are helpless and hopeless this book might be one you should read. But you say you have lots of hope! Hope that your car doesn’t break down again because you can’t afford to get it fixed, Hope that you can pay the rent. Hope you don’t get sick. You get the gist of this, lots of hope. Right!

Your Center

Bishop calls it your core and asks what is at the core of every human. His answer is “bullshit.” That’s pretty original and a lot different than other answers you would get from self-help gurus.

I really liked what he says about self-talk. “Your self-talk is the locker room of your life.” And he goes on to elaborate:

“People are little more than a living conversation, both internal and spoken. A dialogue in a body. A skin-and-bone bag that talks, and it talks about everything, and the limit of that talk is the limit of that life. Period.” The bold is mine. He says it is not the horrible life you have but the conversation you are having about it that has you by the throat.

Self Sabotage

This is a large part of the book so I will be taking bits and pieces from it. Please read the book if you want to get more out of it.

I liked a quote he reproduces from the writings of Marcus Aurelius’s writings, “The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts.”

There are three saboteurs. “The three saboteurs are the fundamental conclusions you have come to about yourself, other people in your life, and life itself.”

The Question

Bishop asked himself the question, “Why is my life the way it is?” It is a decent question. Have you asked it yourself? Maybe your life is perfect. If so Bishop would ask why you were reading his book. Anyway, he came up with some reasons.

He says that if you want to accomplish some things you have to get used to see other things. He puts it this way, “Whatever you are out to accomplish in this life, you’ll have to get more than a little okay with the experience of struggle or hell, even overwhelm.”

Also, he claims that those who survive are those that are the best predictors. “Every Monday morning is the same because you are already predicting how it will go before it even starts.” He says you have an opinion about how everything is going to go. Your subconscious is responsible.

I like what he says here. “Circumstances may change, but what stays the same is how you see them, as well as how you deal with them and ultimately how you participate in life.” He goes on, “Your entire life to this point has been a series of actions subconsciously driven to trap you in the same bubble of life.”

He says your “subconscious is working you like a sock puppet.” I thought that was pretty funny. He says people are more concerned with fixing themselves than improving themselves.

The Three Saboteurs

You have a way your subconscious views yourself, other people and life. Bishop takes you through the steps find our what those are for you. These are your established truths. I liked that part of the book.

He says, “You? You’re victimizing yourself into a truly forgettable life. Like most people, you’d rather explain your life than intervene in it.” “Your actions are always in alignment with your conclusions.” Of course, he is talking about your conclusions regarding yourself, other people and life. He goes on, “Day after day, week after week, year after year, you see yourself in the same way, you see others in a very distinct way and you see life in the same way you always see it. Talk about predictable.”

He says you form these conclusions in your first two decades of life. Twenty is fifty-four years ago for me. I can’t remember what conclusions I had come to at that time. I think for me the most negative conclusions about these three things came much later in life.

Once you dig down and discover what these are for you, he tells you that you can’t change it. And here is where we disagree. He says the solution is to focus only on the future and do what your future tells you to do. What? Maybe that’s good for younger people but not when you are creeping up on the average life expectancy.

However, the book has some great insights about life so I highly recommend it.

Bookish Weapon Number Thirty

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Dan Carlin has the best podcast on history in the history of the world! Now he has a book. The title of the book is, “The End Is Always Near.” It is not the most uplifting subject you might be able to imagine, but it does hold your attention and is certainly timely with the new Coronavirus from China making the news. Is it a bookish weapon. Sure! It prepares you.

Anything Carlin would write of course would be about history and his point, I believe is that over the course of time the “end” has come again and again to civilizations. Hence it is always near. However, if you think his title is too morbid, he says he had an alternative title which was, “And They All Lived Happily Ever After.”

Scary Chapters

If all I did here was to list the titles of Carlin’s chapters it would be enough to get you to crawl back under the covers. So let’s do that!

Chapter 1 – Do Tough Times Make for Tougher People? (not scary, maybe positive-sounding)
Chapter 2 – Suffer The Children – (we are warming up here)
Chapter 3 – The End Of The World As They Knew It (now we are talking)
Chapter 4 – Judgement at Nineveh (this is not the biblical Jona story)
Chapter 5 – The Barbarian Life Style (interesting – certainly not scary)
Chapter 6 – A Pandemic Prologue (Very timely. I am going back to bed)
Chapter 7 – The Quick And The Dead (crawling back under the covers)
Chapter 8 – The Road To Hell (Can’t get any scarier than this)

Just by scanning the table of contents you get the idea. Pretty thought-provoking material.

Tough Times

Carlin discusses the great depression, the Second World War (which came right after the depression), the Blitz in London where the Germans dropped bombs for eighteen months. Then he talks about nuclear weapons. He speculates if people from the “Greatest Generation” were by percentage tougher than those of today. My guess is that it would be a higher percentage than what Carlin says.

“Perhaps we’re living in a time when toughness in the old sense doesn’t matter as much as it used to. If that is the case, then what advantages might a “softer” society have over a tougher one?” asks Carlin. I don’t think there are any advantages and I doubt Carlin does either.

He discusses how the Spartans, who were known for their toughness became “luxury-loving and corruptible.” If it can happen to the Spartans it can happen to any society.

The Children

It was really tough for children in the past. Even for those of the Great Generation who grew up thinking corporal punishment was ok. Take a look at some of the ways their parents punished them: “whips of all kinds, cat-0-nine-tails, shovels, canes, and Iron and wooden rods.” I knew a girl who’s father would beat her with a horsewhip and a boy who’s father beat him with a razor strap (he was a barber). Of course, my Junior High School Principal had one of those paddles with holes in it that would raise blisters and I had a math teacher that threw me up against the wall. My parents did call the school about that, but only because he tore my shirt.

In prior generations, children were sold, says Carlin. They witnessed torture and violence of all kinds. Mothers didn’t nurse their kids. They had wet nurses do it.

The Ending of Civilizations

The Bronze Age ended quickly and Carlin says historians argue about what happened and how it happened. It could have been a number of things or one thing. Read the book

Nineveh was an ancient city mentioned in the Bible. It was destroyed in spectacular fashion all at once. Carlin says the locals living in the area didn’t even know how it happened.

Carlin discusses the Roman Empire and what happened to them. It was interesting how the Roman legions became more and more germanic.

Plagues

Carlin speculates about how the reformation of the Catholic Church may have been at least partially due to plague deaths, because the plague killed most of the officials in the church so they had to replace them with very young inexperienced men who had no one left to teach them. This then led to all sorts of nastiness.

Carlin says, “We can’t know how many in all died. While estimates put the figure at 75 million, countless out-of-the-way farms and towns and even cities may not have been included in the final toll.”

Atomic Bomb

Then Carlin begins to discuss the bomb. I was born six days after the very first atomic bomb was detonated and one month after I was born the United States dropped one on Japan. It has only been 74 years since then and that is not very long if you consider the scope of history. Carlin wonders how long we can keep a nuclear war from happening.

He recounts the Cuban Missile Crisis and discusses what was said in meetings with Kennedy and his staff. It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I recall riding home on the school bus wondering if we were all going to get nuked.

As usual Carlin makes history more interesting by considering the human side of it. Get this book and read it. Then you won’t be so surprised at what might be coming just around the bend.

Bookish Weapon Number Eighteen

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We are all going to die or as John Ortberg puts it, “Old Man Wrinkle is coming for everybody.” Ortberg has a unique way of reminding us of that fact and adding a twist or two in his book, “When The Game Is Over It All Goes Back In The Box.” That is one of the best titles for a book I have seen and contains a bookish weapon we can all use daily.

The title is a reminder that while we play this game, winning and losing at times, when it is all over all the pieces and the board go back in the box. It could be that the “box” is a coffin.”

Reality

“The reality of this world is that I was born into Someone Else’s kingdom. My life came to me as a gift I did not choose; it is suspended from a slender thread that I did not weave and cannot on my own sustain.”

Here is a meditation Ortberg quotes:

I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.

Then he says Jesus added one more to this: “I am a ceaseless being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”

He also adds this much needed quote from Bernie Siegle:

“I’ve done the research and I hate to tell you, but everybody dies – lovers, joggers, vegetarians and non-smokers. I’m telling you this so that some of you who jog at 5:00 AM and eat vegetables will occasionally sleep late and have an ice cream cone.”

Meaning

A vacuum cleaner is built to clean. A knife to cut. Ortberg says, “We are built for meaning the way Porsches are built for speed.” He goes on to discuss how all of us have what Martin Seligman calls “signature strengths.” And of course goes on to encourage us to use our signature strengths in the service of something larger than ourselves.

You are most likely familiar with the book “Mans Search for Meaning” where Victor Frankl points out that we can put up with anything if we have a big enough why. We can find meaning in even the worst circumstances.