photo by: ory2

“Be happy while you’re living, for you’re a long time dead.” – Scottish Proverb

Have you ever heard anyone saying “How the time flies?” I have, lots of times. You’ve heard it too, I’m sure. Maybe you’re feeling that way right now. But, are you enjoying every moment of the journey?… it’s great if you do! However, if you don’t, or if you feel that you could use a nudge into that direction, this is for you. I promise you’ll feel better after reading this!

Time… it flies, the days go by and turn to years and years become a whole life. My life, your life.

“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, Fellowship of the Ring, second chapter

Photo by: mint tea

Self-improvement is about helping people have a fuller appreciation of all the wonderful things in their lives, even when many things are bad. It’s really getting people to focus on the good things in life.

The good things in life are other people. And getting to really know other people is the process by which you’re getting to know yourself.

In the pronaos of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the “gnothi seauton” (latin “nosce te ipsum”) inscription stands as a reminder of this. It refers to the ideal of understanding human behavior, morals and thought, because ultimately to understand oneself is to understand other humans as well. But you can’t understand yourself if you don’t understand the others.

Very few people know themselves and we know other people even less well, because we spend a little slice of our lives with anybody but our parents. And even so, your parents don’t really know you. They spend very little time with you after you’ve been a child and you spend little time with them.

And even your best friends, who you may argue that you know, how many hours a week do you spend with them?

“Yes, a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware of the dark side.” – Yoda

If you’ve been reading Project Armannd for a while, then you may have noticed that in the last period of time I got a bit lazy. I think they call it lazy blogging.

I got lazy, I lost my motivation, I forgot my goals, I forgot the imense pleasure of blogging, I even contemplated quitting… I lost almost everything that made blogging a fun activity.

How did I manage to drag myself down? Well, it’s really simple: I threw away the key.

Donald Robert Perry Marquis (1878-1937) was a celebrated New York newspaper columnist and humorist in the early decades of the last century. Today he is remembered mostly for his stories of Archy and Mehitabel, a lowercase cockroach and a toujours gai alley cat, but in his lifetime Marquis was known equally well for the Old Soak — a hip-flask philosopher who struggled to endure the dry days of Prohibition. Altogether, he wrote five plays, dozens of books, and hundreds of poems and short stories.

Columnist, playwright, humorist, short story writer and screenwriter, Marquis also wrote several volumes of serious poetry and three full-length novels — a remarkable range of talents. While many of his stories are forgettable today, there are others — most notably the observations of a cockroach and an alley cat — that remain fresh and funny and unique in American literature. It’s a curious fact that none of Marquis’ books ever appeared on the best-seller lists, yet so many of the better-selling writers of his time are now virtually unknown. “Archy and Mehitabel,” meanwhile, has never gone out of print since it first appeared, 75 years ago.

One important trademark of most self-improvement blogs is the abuse use of lists. You know: ten ways to do this, nine ways to do that, six steps to success, et cetera.

While some of these lists provide interesting informations, there is one thing that no-one seems to want you to know: lists stop being useful the instant you’re finished reading them (i.e., when you leave the page).

All learning is brain-based and through the process of learning we are literally trying to change the brain. When learning, we create new connections between brain cells.

The brain is radiant, it thinks centrally and explodes out in all directions. It thinks by imagination and association. Lists are linear, rigid, similar and boring, and the brain gets unhappy very quickly because of that. Only a few minutes of such lecture can be tolerated before the brain seeks other stimuli.