Category: Self Improvement

If You Think Your Writing In Not Original, You Need To Know About Helsinki Bus Station Theory

Neera

“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.

Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.

To understand the theory, imagine this:

You are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.

But for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

“Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer,” Minkkinen declares.

You pick a direction — maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes — and set off.

Three stops later, you’ve got a nascent body of work. You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn.

Your work looks very much like Penn’s.

Annoyed to have been following someone else’s path, you hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform.

A few years later, something similar happens. This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What’s the answer?

It’s simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference.

Once you see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly, your work will get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling:

  1. It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
  2. It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.

Helsinki’s theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

“Stay on the f*#king bus.”

I Am Not Busy Anymore, I Am Fully Optimized

Neera

The word we chose determines how we feel.

Recently I learned how much power ‘words’ have on us.

The words not only have meaning but also emotions attached to them.

Lately, I have been using the word ‘busy,’ a lot.

‘Busy’ is a word with negative connotations. It’s a word I associate with drowning in work. I literally feel suffocated.

So, when I say ‘I am busy,’ I feel anxious, overwhelmed, and heading towards burnout.

So I replaced it with ‘fully optimized.’ The next time someone asked me how my day was going, I said, ‘Couldn’t be better. I am fully optimized.’

It instantly felt better. It generated a different emotional reaction. I felt in control and on top of things.

Think about the words in your life that might restrict you. Find a replacement word for them and watch the magic happen.

I Am Testing Silva Meditation Method To Work Less And Produce More

Neera

On a Monday morning, just three weeks ago, the universe responded to my pleas for a way out from all the stress and overwhelm associated with online writing.

I was watching Tim Urban’s TED Talk when a sponsored video interrupted it. Normally, I would quickly click ‘Skip Ad’ and get back to the video, but this time I kept listening because the story was very interesting.

I watched the video for 23 minutes and bought the course the speaker was selling. Then I watched two more videos, by the same speaker, and bought another course and membership to the community.

For three weeks, I have been learning and testing the concepts and meditation exercises taught by the course. My stress is gone, my productivity has quadrupled and my future looks brighter than ever.

Before I go any further with the benefits, I am observing I want to share with you Jose Silva’s story I heard in the sponsored video three weeks ago.

In the early 40s, a guy by the name of José Silva, developed an interest in psychology to see if it could help him increase his children’s IQ. He had ten children and like any parent he wanted them to do well.

José Silva was an electrician in the US Army. Once, while going through a routine army mental health checkup, he noticed a psychologist was assigned to ask all army recruits a series of questions. It was just a routine thing, but he grew fascinated and started reading more and more books on psychology.

As an electrician, he knew if a wire has more resistance less electricity flows through it but if you reduce its resistance, more electricity can flow through it.

Jose wondered if the same principle would apply to the brain.

What if we could reduce the resistance in the brain, can our brains operate more efficiently?

It was the early 60s, and scientists had come up with the theory that there were four levels of brain frequency — beta, the waking state; alpha the more relaxed or slightly sleepy state, theta when dreams and vivid imagery occur and delta the slowest brain wave frequency when healing and regeneration occur.

Jose wondered whether moving into the alpha or theta level was the way of reducing resistance.

He started experimenting with his daughter.

He developed a script to take his daughter to a relaxed state. His script was something like guided meditation except back in the 60s, the word guided meditation didn’t exist.

So, Jose Silva would put his kids into a guided meditation and then read her important elements from their school textbooks. He found she could remember better when she was in this alpha or slightly relaxed level of mind with her eyes closed and when he would ask her questions and she could recall better.

It is a well-known fact today that you can remember and retrieve information faster in the alpha level of mind.

Then something curious happened.

His daughter would answer him while he was still formulating a question in his mind. She somehow knew the question he was going to ask her even before he could verbally speak it.

He was a devout Christian. He couldn’t figure out how his daughter could so-called read his mind. So he wrote to Joseph Banks Rhine, of Duke University. JB Rhine was the famous doctor who pioneered research in extrasensory perception and formed parapsychology as a branch of psychology.

He told JB Ryan he had figured out a way to train children to be intuitive. JB Ryan dismissed it. He said, your daughter was probably intuitive, to begin with.

Jose Silva disagreed. So he then trained all the kids to be intuitive.

Then he trained all the neighbor’s kids. The neighbor got fascinated. Their kid’s grades were going up. What’s this man doing with them? So they asked Jose if he can teach them as well. So Jose started teaching little classes in Laredo, Texas.

Jose found it wasn’t just intuition that went up with his technique, but people’s pain disappeared and their happiness levels went up. One person had migraines for a long time and after learning from Jose Silva his migraine disappeared. He wrote about it in the local newspaper and his next class was completely swamped.

The Silva Method was born.

A path to reducing mental resistance? He called it a centering exercise.

It spread across America through the 70s and 80s. Soon it was being used by the Chicago White Sox, and famous celebrities of the time, like opera singer Margarita Piazza. The New York Times and The Washington Post featured articles on the Silva Method. Jose Silva wrote a book, The Silva Mind Control Method which sold well over a million copies.

And the Silva method, as it spread globally, ended up graduating some 10 million students over three to four decades.

But the story doesn’t end there.

A Weird Coincidence

There was a point in Jose’s research when he almost gave it up.

Jose Silva was finding his work very fulfilling, but it wasn’t making him any money. To feed his large family, he knew he had to give it up and go back to just running his electrical business. One night, as he tells in his biography, he grew so frustrated, he flung his psychology book across the room and went to sleep, promising himself that he would never dabble in this again because he needed to earn a living.

That night, he had a weird dream. He saw a figure of Mother Mary who gave him a four-digit number.

He wondered, what is this four-digit number? And the first thought was it must be the license plate number of a car, and he needed to meet the person who owns that car.

So Jose Silva decided to keep his mind open for any car with a four-digit number. As he was going to his radio repair business, a friend came to him and said, “Jose, I’m about to swing across the border to Mexico to pick up some goods. You want to come with me?” Jose said, “Sure.” It was not a busy day and Jose saw no harm in accompanying his friend across the border.

So they got into the car and drove across the border to Mexico. And as they were driving across the border to Mexico, Jose told his friend about the four-digit number and the dream. They went to a shop to buy goods in Mexico. And as Jose was picking up his goods, his friend called him over and his friend said, “Jose, look, they’re selling a lottery ticket here. Isn’t this the number that came into your dream?” And it was.

Jose bought the lottery ticket, and he ended up winning $10,000. That money allowed him to keep doing his research.

Jose wrote, look at the weirdness that happened. It wasn’t just a dream. His mind didn’t just give him a number, it showed him an image to reinforce that it was coming from a higher power. It then caused synchronicity to happen when a friend came to invite him to Mexico because the winning lottery number wasn’t on the US side. It was on the Mexican side.

Another coincidence happened when his friend saw the lottery number while he thought it was a car license plate number. All of these strung together were like a ripple of reality to give him the cash infusion needed to take the Silva method forward. It was then he realized he was on to something.

I have been going through a 28-day program and recording my progress in a journal after each day.

I have gone through many self-development programs, but never I have seen so much growth in so little time.

I am meditating three times a day, five to fifteen minutes for each instance. It is not the normal relaxation kind of meditation I was familiar with. Instead, it is an active meditation designed to help turn problems into projects.

My Priorities Have Changed

Neera

I am back. After a 49-day trip around India and sleeping in strange beds, I was thankful to sleep in my bed for the last two nights.

Besides meeting family, visiting new places, and attending a wedding and special birthday celebrations, this trip had another significant purpose – to have mental rest.

What we do as writers is quite cerebral.

We need to give ourselves mental breaks in the same way that we need to sleep regularly.

Vacations regenerate our minds.

They help us get out of the rut

Before going on this trip, I was a prisoner of self-created routines.

They were driving me nuts.

I was taking on more and more projects and setting myself deadlines that I knew I couldn’t meet.

The trouble was that I couldn’t get out of the hole I dug for myself.

Everything felt important and urgent.

I was compromising my health and wellness to chase goals that had no ultimate significance.

Eight weeks away from routines, I could see nothing is more important than my health and happiness.

I have come back with a clean slate.

My priorities have changed.

Previously they were:
1. Writing
2. Family
3. Fun
4. Health

Now they are:
1. Health
2. Family
3. Fun
4. Writing

In the next few days, I will re-evaluate everything.

I will consolidate some projects and abandon others.

I will half my writing time and double the time I spend on outdoor activities.

When you give yourself time to just relax, wonderful things can happen.

Some call it serendipity.

Letting go is making space for those magic moments to happen.

How To Get Out Of Herd Mentality

Neera

Researchers observed an interesting phenomenon on the 86th floor of the World Trade Centre during 9/11.

When the plane struck the twin towers, one group of colleagues on the 86th floor didn’t panic. Nor did they run for their lives. Instead, they gathered in a conference room to discuss their options.

All of them were terrified. And yet all of them regrouped to see what their friends would do.

The same thing was observed when authorities interviewed several airplane crash survivors.

The first thing people do in times of trouble is not panic.

They look at what their neighbors are doing.

If their neighbors are panicking, they’ll panic too. And if their neighbors are calm, they’ll be calm too.

It’s a typical “monkey see monkey do” response.

Doesn’t matter how intellectually savvy we think we are; deep down we have animal instincts.

And animals live in herds.

Like it or not, we are influenced by our peers and adopt certain behaviors on an emotional rather than rational basis.

We copy our neighbors even in mundane tasks.

Professor Jens Krausse of Leeds University conducted an interesting experiment. He and his colleagues gathered a bunch of people in a big hall and instructed them all to walk randomly inside the hall.

But they gave explicit instructions to 5% of the participants to walk a very particular path.

And guess what happened?

The 95% who were asked to walk randomly just followed the 5% who were instructed to follow the particular path and everyone walked on the same path.

Herds are often irrational.

In the 16th century, tulips were imported from the Ottoman Empire to Holland. Just a few years after arriving in Holland, tulips became the most sought-after commodity in the Netherlands.

At the time, tulip bulbs were worth more than gold and were sold for ten times what a commoner made in a year.

Farmers pulled out the potatoes and other crops from their fields and planted tulips, and what followed was appropriately named “tulip mania.”

There was no rationale for replacing food with flowers, especially when the bulbs were expensive.

Needless to say, the bubble burst. So many tulips were produced that their price fell. Several farmers went bankrupt.

Because we copy things until they reach their breaking point.

More recently, when the pandemic hit the world, the rate of unemployment broke all records in every country. And yet, we saw the stock markets rise.

Why would the stock market rise when the economy is performing so poorly?

This thoughtless copying causes the problem. It’s what causes the mismatch between productivity and the economy.

Technically, the economy should grow as productivity improves.

We always take things too far. The herd mentality leads to irrational actions.

How to escape an irrational herd mentality?

Introduce circuit breakers.

A circuit breaker is an automatic switch protecting the electrical circuit from damage. They switch off automatically when excess current passes through the circuit.

How can you do that?

By doing two things.

Change your environment.

It is the easiest way to escape the herd. We humans are not equipped to go against the herd. Whenever we engage in social behavior, our brains release oxytocin which makes us feel blissful. Agreeing with others releases oxytocin and makes us feel warm and safe.

And so, the most effective way to break the circuit and negate this oxytocin bliss is to change the environment.

That’s what Warren Buffett did when he realized he was getting influenced by other stockbrokers. He moved from New York to Omaha, Nebraska. By insulating himself from the crowd, he made better decisions.

What can you do to change your environment?

Develop your cynical muscle.

Question every assumption. And every solution.

You have to dig deeper, which usually takes a lot more effort.

This is often uncomfortable and tiring.

But it’s the only way to know when the herd is wrong.

How To Control The Fights Between Your Rational and Irrational Brain

Neera

Have you ever got frustrated by the battle between your rational and emotional brain?

Your rational brain knows going for a walk in the morning is good for you, and it sets up the alarm.

But when the alarm rings at 5:00 AM the following day, the emotional brain takes over and rebukes, “Are you crazy? It is too early. Why not catch up with your sleep now and go for a walk in the evening?”

Then in the evening, it presents several other obstacles so that you can’t go for a walk.

It happens to me every time I try to implement a new routine, or from a new habit, or try to do something I should do and don’t want to do.

A Jekyll and Hyde battle begins within me, between my rational and emotional brain.

The rational brain knows what is necessary, but the emotional brain doesn’t want to do the hard work.

The Heath Brothers use the metaphor of ‘the rider and the elephant’ to explain the battle.

The rational brain is the rider.

The emotional brain is the elephant.

The rider can control where the elephant goes… to a certain extent.

But, at any moment, the mighty elephant can take over and do whatever it wants.

If we just instruct the rider on what to do, then we have an understanding, but not motivation.

If we only appeal to the elephant, then we have passion but no direction.

If we want to make a behaviour change, we must get both the rider and the elephant walking along the same path. The way to do this is to direct the rider.

The rider is the rational, logical part of our brain.

It knows that going for walks in the morning is good for me. It has a vision and knows the best way to get there. But it is weak. It only has so much strength to manipulate the bulky, mighty elephant below.

To give the rider the best shot at doing the right thing, we must make our desired change crystal clear.

“Lose weight” isn’t very clear, but “wake up at 4:55, put on running shoes, and get jogging out the door at 5:00” is crystal clear instructions.

“Be more productive” is not clear, but “sit down at the desk, open up the word document, set the timer for 15 minutes, and start writing” is crystal clear.

If it is straightforward, the rider can take control.

But, as soon as we lose clarity, your puny little rational rider stands no chance.

The elephant is the emotional, primitive part of our brain.

It likes to do things that feel good and avoid things that don’t. As soon as things feel complicated, the elephant is looking for an easy way out.

The emotional elephant can easily overpower the rational rider, so we need to keep the beast happy.

One way to do this is to shrink the change.

If the elephant thinks a massive change is headed its way, it’s just going to sit there and become an immovable obstacle.

I have been trying to build two habits — start walking in the mornings and do intermittent fasting. But my elephant is resisting. So I have come up with a plan to trick it by making the change small.

Rather than waking up at 5:00 AM, I have started waking up just fifteen minutes earlier than before and going for a stroll around the block.

Rather than doing 16 hours of fasting (as per intermittent fasting), I have started with 13 hours.

Once my elephant is comfortable, I can slowly start taking longer walks and increase my fasting time.

I can gradually ramp up the habit reset and make more significant changes.

Question For You

What rational and irrational brain battles are going on inside you?

What behavior do you want to change?

What habits do you want to form? Can you give your rider some clear instructions and make the goal small for your elephant?