“Be pleasant until ten o’clock in the morning and the rest of the day will take care of itself.”
— Elbert Hubbard

If you were to rate your mornings, how good would they be? Would your mornings be the great, motivating and inspiring part of the day, or the part which clutters your mind and makes you feel confused and powerless?

“Handwriting is civilization’s casual encephalogram.”
— Lance Morrow

Graphology, the study of handwriting as an indicator of the writer’s disposition or character, examines loops, dotted “i’s” and crossed “t’s,” letter spacing, slant, height, ending strokes, etc.

Graphologists believe that such handwriting details are physical manifestations of  unconscious mental functions and that they can reveal as much about a person as astrology, palm reading,  psychometry,  rumpology, or the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator.

Business failed? Love of your live left you? Cat died? Got fired? Lost your house? Totaled your expensive car? Found out your favorite TV show got canceled? Friends betrayed you?

“You can spend minutes, days, hours, or months over analyzing a situation, trying to justify what happened. Or you can leave the pieces on the floor and move the f— on.”

– Tupac Amaru Shakur (June 16, 1971- Sept. 12, 1996)

What would you do if any of that happened to you?

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?

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.