Brainersize

The other day when I was talking with Ecologista she told me something that really struck me. Way back before writing was invented, and all of the histories were orally passed down from father to son (and mother to daughter), people had much better memories. They had to to in order to preserve their histories. Since we don't have to memorize all those things today, our memories don't work as well. That would explain why I'm so terrible with names. When I was a kid I memorized several scriptures (because I had too) but lately I just haven't memorized anything.

There has been a lot of talk about how fat Americans are getting. Technology is making our lives so much easier that we don't naturally work out our bodies, and all the leftover energy is just working out our bellies. We need to go out of our way to exercise the body. It would seem that thanks to technology our brains are also getting fat and lazy, and we need to go out of the way to exercise the brain, or brainersize. I have a feeling that just as exercise has two fundamental parts: cardio and resistance training, brainersize has two analogous parts: reading and memorizing.

Fortunately I have been doing a lot of reading lately. So far I've read the following books this year (some were audio books):

• The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey
• Financial Peace Revisited by Dave Ramsey
• The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley
• The Five Secrets a Millionaire Taught Me for Women by Richard Paul Evans
• Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson
• The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
• Tribes by Seth Godin

I'm also in the middle of reading:

• 48 Days to the Work You Love by Dan Miller
• Thou Shall Prosper by Rabbi Daniel Lapin
  

And I have a list of a few scriptures that I'm going to start memorizing.

Fear

I've been reading the book, "Tribes" by Seth Godin, and I starting thinking about what how he describes "the factory." If you've seen "The Incredibles," then you've seen the perfect example of what Seth is talking about. Early in the movie, you see Bob Parr working at his desk when the boss calls him in. Bob goes into the bosses office where the boss starts rambling about cogs in a clock. All that the boss cares about is maintaining the status quo, and maintaining the bureaucracy. While in the office Bob see's someone getting robbed. He wants to go help, but is held back. Why? At first you may think that it's the boss that's stopping him. The real reason is fear. Bob is afraid of lossing his job (even though he hates it.) He's afraid of being seen. He's afraid, but the only thing that leads to is anger and more trouble.

I've been reading other books that talk about how fear holds us back. As I've been doing this, I've been motivated. That motivation has been drowning fear. Fear of change. Fear of taking a risk. It's all beening pushed out by motivation. It's an amazing thing, this motivation. It makes me feel better, and gain more self worth. Hopefully it's also leading to a lot of growth.

Fear paralyzes
Hope enables

The power of one

The other day I was browsing some online comics and I found a really great one:

After reading this I just had to google "Died in a blogging accident" There were about 300,000 results. It turns out that the day this comic was published that phrase became the 6th most searched for term on google.

The thing is that we all hear, "you can make a difference in the world," but how much do you really believe it? This is someone that has made a big difference and the author didn't even have to spend millions of dollars running for president. So I started wondering how such a big change was done with one post. A couple of reasons are:

• Consistancy (this comic is consistantly posted)
• Simple
• Entertaining
• And most interestingly enough, most people didn't think that it wasn't that big a thing.

I don't know if the author posted this thinking "How can I mess with google today? Maybe he did, maybe he didn't. Still I'm sure that most people googling the phrase didn't think about how it would mess with google.

On a side note, I just heard this teaser on the radio news: "The police have reported a decrease of reports involving cheese."