I’m a big believer in the power of the subconscious mind. And I trust mine.

I trust it to remind me where I want to go, and to use my gut feeling to pull me back on track. That’s why I’m not a big believer in goal-setting. If I know where I want to go, and I genuinely have a desire to get there, then I can leave my conscious mind to be guided by its silent but powerful counterpart.

Have you ever woken up from a dream and felt so strongly about what you were dreaming that it took control of your mood? Maybe you dreamt your girlfriend cheated on you, and you woke up despising her even though the feeling was based on nothing but thoughts. You’re more wary of her and, for the next little while, you don’t trust her as much — all because your brain had concocted a story in your head while you were asleep.

That’s your subconscious mind taking control of your emotions. But imagine if we empowered our subconscious to guide us in love, motivation, and happiness? Those positive, driving feelings would be just as prominent. It’d be as though our favourite soundtrack is playing in the back of our minds every day.

We just need to feed our couscous brain information about who we are as individuals, and our subconscious takes care of the rest. It’s the engine and the gears behind our conscious steering wheel. All we have to do is fuel it and be guided by its direction.

I got some inspiration this morning from one of my favourite entrepreneurs and people to follow, Tim Ferriss. For those of you who don’t know, Tim is a productivity powerhouse. His successes are many but his main story is how he changed his life from working 80 hours a week and being completely burned out to traveling the world, blogging whenever he wants, investing in whatever start-ups take his fancy, and becoming a New York Times best selling author.

To review his full accolades, I highly recommend checking out Tim’s blog, and reading his best-selling book. You can also pre-order his latest book.

Tim’s framework for life is what he calls “Lifestyle Design”, which is basically getting the absolute most out of what you’ve got, whenever you can, and jettisoning the rest. If the French Foreign Legion decided to do a course in minimalism, that’s how Tim lives his life.

This morning I woke up to see Tim’s latest blog article in my RSS reader. His posts have been few and far between lately, so it’s always good when they come through.

The post was a video called ‘Tim Ferriss: A Day In The Life’. It’s rare to see such an exposé on Ferriss, especially since he likes to do his own thing and stay under the radar to a certain extent.

I’ve also heard some criticism of Ferriss that, despite writing a book called ‘The Four Hour Work Week’, he’s still one of the hardest working people in his space, often clocking up more hours per week than his blogger/entrepreneur counterparts.

So I couldn’t wait to check out what this enigmatic guy does on a typical day.

Rather than go through the clip and describe what I found inspirational (you can watch it here), I wanted to write about something else he did in the way the article was published.

I live in Australia, and if you look at the article, you’ll see that the video is hosted on Hulu. We’re not allowed to watch Hulu in Australia, and neither are you if you live anywhere outside the USA (aka Centre of Everything). Which sucks bollocks.

So as soon as I saw the Hulu logo I thought there was no point, until I noticed a snippet Tim had written underneath the video, which directed international viewers to try Hotspot Shield.

Hostpot Shield, as I found out, is a really simple, free tool that temporarily shrouds your IP address so the content provider can no longer determine that you’re outside the US, allowing you to work around the IP blocker and view the content as the good Lord intended.

This is cool for one main reason.

Ferriss is saying to his followers, “look, I know it’s a bummer that this thing’s only viewable to people in the US, but I’m here for you, so here’s a neat work-around”.

He takes this approach all the time with his followers. At times when it would be far easier for him to just pump content out in whatever format suits and let it get picked up and shared among his loyal followers, he puts in the extra 2mins required to make something truly great and add the most value.

2 hours to write a good article; 2 minutes to make it awesome.

2 minutes to prove that he hasn’t sold out.

2 minutes to stick it to The Man for the benefit of his audience.

Henri Matisse was an amazing artist.

He could create emotional pieces of art with nothing more than a pencil and a bit of paper. Some of his well-renowned work is no bigger than a post-it note, and contains no more than ten or twelve strokes.

To make great art, sometimes all we need to do is grab a pencil and a scrap of paper — and draw.

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image: Henri Matisse, Study of a Model, 1934

When I was younger I had a friend who used to chew gum whenever he got thirsty. He would always carry a packet of gum around with him in case he need a drink and we weren’t near a tap, thinking that by activating the saliva in his mouth he was re-hydrating his body.

I never wanted to correct him because it was something he truly believed, and he seemed to feel better once he was chewing the gum, so I felt there was no need to bring him down.

We all have little stories like this.

We recite them to ourselves as a way of smoothing out life’s little inconsistencies. They help us live the way we want; reinforce that we’re in control and we know what we’re doing (even if, in actual fact, we don’t). 

But when the situation gets serious, these tales can be dangerous. Believing you’ll survive in the desert for three days on nothing but chewing gum is going to get you into some serious trouble.

I’m a big believer in making my own mistakes. That’s when I learn the most and it creates the most obvious reason for me not to make the same mistake again.

When somebody else tells us not to make one of their mistakes, it’s much harder. How can you be convinced not to touch the kettle when you’ve never experienced heat?

This one’s slightly morbid, but one of my other posts got me thinking.

What happens when the majority of facebook/social media users start to leave this mortal coil?

What recourse will their family and friends have to access their passwords or extract their data? Will we eventually write into our wills what we want done to our online social graph once we’re gone? 

Or will there be applications to convert peoples’ profiles into a tribute to the person’s life, like an “online gravestone”?

An entire lifetime of interactions, events, photos, conversations… the comments people made at the birth of your first child, the images uploaded from your wedding day, the well-wishes people posted on your 50th birthday. 

What would you want done with yours?

What does professionalism do for us other than slow things down and get in the way of genuine interactions?

We hold things back from others, dress differently, and downright lie in the name of “maintaining professionalism”, and yet there is no advantage of doing so.

Would you trust your accountant any less if he wore shorts and thongs and declared a love for 80s hair metal? Probably not.

In fact, knowing these quirks would bring you closer to him, realising that he is human and has human qualities like passion, care, and a willingness to do good.

The new way of doing business will see a decline in traditional professionalism and an increase in the genuine traits we already value in social relationships.

It’s the end of January, 2012. How’s this year going for you so far?

Are your goals still at the forefront of your mind, and how are you tracking against them?

If, like me, you’ve forgotten the majority of what you’re setting out to achieve, don’t worry. It’s only February, it’s not too late.

We don’t have to leave our objectives behind — go back, scoop them up, and bring them to the present.

Take stock, remind yourself where you’re headed, and move on with the year.

I wonder how all of the babies of today will feel when they get older and realise their whole childhood has been documented on social media.

Most people my age are wary of showing their baby photos to others… imagine all your parents’ friends telling you, having already seen your photo album, that “you were so cute in your little bumble bee suit!”.

Are we doing children a disservice by publishing their photos to all our friends without their consent, or will online identity be so widely accepted by the next generation of kids that they simply take is as part of the heavily documented world we live in?

Or, will the current trend of locking down our online social identities continue, and could this cause big problems for parents as their children get older?

It’s easy to think if social media’s immediate effect (“I’m having a great time at this party, let’s document this moment!”), but harder to think long term (“when Facebook becomes a public company, or goes bust, who will own this photo of my daughter wearing a rabbit suit?”).

It’ll be interesting to see the effect our relaxed social sharing attitude has on future generations. My prediction is a huge shift towards online privacy and an increased demand for transparency from organisations like Facebook and Google.

I really like this TED talk from Daniel Kahneman who researches how we perceive happiness. He reveals that we’ve been researching this topic the wrong way by failing to distinguish between our “experiencing self” and the “remembering self”.

Our experiencing self really only focuses on the “now” moments, which according to Kahneman, only last about 3 seconds. So the question “how happy are you?” requires people to tap into their experiencing self and judge their happiness in that particular moment.

Whereas asking the question “how happy are you when you think about your life” calls on the remembering self to reflect on past experiences and rate the emotion.

This year Kahneman, a Nobel laureate, released a book on the topic called Thinking, Fast and Slow, which appeared on quite a few Best Books of 2011 lists.

In his talk Kahneman tells a story of someone who had listened to 20mins of beautiful music, at the end of which was a terrible screeching sound. The person recalled that the screeching sound ruined the whole experience, when in fact all it had ruined was the memory of that experience. The happiness that the person felt while listening (experiencing) the beautiful music still remained the same.

Another way of talking about the remembering self is to ask “how good is the story of this experience going to be when I tell it later on?”. In the same way that we simplify past and future events, I think we can influence our brains to focus on the positive experiences we have already had, and the good things that will come from events in the future.

In doing so, we’ll be able to improve the happiness of our remembering self and feel better about our past decisions, giving us better perception on our future decisions and making for a more satisfied life overall.

Have a watch of Kahneman’s fascinating presentation here.