Thursday, April 17, 2008

The Weight of Your Brain?

When the Russian author Turgenejev died in 1883 his brain was weighed and found to be exceptionally heavy - heavier than any other brain by that time. When the French author Anatole France died in 1924 his brain was weighed as well. It was found to be the lightest of all brains by then.

The brain of both of these two authors was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records and both of the records have been beaten since then.

Among the normal tinnitus there is a rhyme going on in my head: "If you always do what you´ve always done, you´ll always get what you´ve always gotten."

You need not be exceptionally intelligent to understand the logic of that rhyme. But understanding does not mean that you would change the situation accordingly. Changing one´s own habits must be one of the most challenging things in life. You might have set a goal, but anyhow you go on your normal daily life in the way you have always done.

In a seminar I met a couple who had built a solid, highly profitable business. The process from the decision to the end result had taken them five years. "In fact we did it in three years, but we needed two years to get ready for the activity." they explained.

Maybe it was the other way round - two years of doing and three years of active work - but it does not matter. The basic idea is still the same - you might have decided to reach something important and anyhow the concrete activities tend to somehow remain on the side-track. It is as if there were a threshold in front of the conscious changes in life. Why does this happen?

No doubt the goal itself needs to be clear. All goals have consequences. We may need time and energy to check them out. It is not enough for the goal to be morally and ethically correct. It must be ecologically correct as well, which means that it must not mess your own or anybody else´s life.

There must also be a clear connection between the goal and the activities leading to it. They are the daily activities that beat the path and make the goal become true. And it is exactly here that we have the continuous competition between the old habits and new activities. Normally the old routines win and the goal is in danger of becoming unreachable.

Some time ago I read the biography of Evita Peron (Barnes, J.: Evita, La biografía, ISBN: 84-473-1214-3). I know that there are different opinions about her, but nobody can deny that having made a decision, she did not need any threshold-time to start the action proper.

She quickly became the only person who, by then, had paid any attention to improving the living conditions of the poor people in Argentina. A clear indication of the impact of her work would be the number of hospitals before her and when she died. Sorry, I do not remember those figures just now. Just wait until I have read the book again...

Another interesting fact in Evita Peron´s life was that she never reached her primary goal. She wanted to be recognized and appreciated by the high society in her country. She never was. From the goal setting point of view this is due to the basic fact that we cannot set goals for other people. I cannot stop smoking for you and you cannot go jogging for me.

To gain somebody´s appreciation or love is not under your control. They also say that life would be easier if we could decide who we fall in love with. Well, as far as we know, Evita Peron made a very conscious decision to fall in love with Juan Peron and immediately informed him about her intention to marry him. She was an exceptional person in that respect as well. Burning goals really push obstacles by side.

Among all the goals you have set yourself, there are some that have the status qualification 1 A, which means that they get absolute preference among all possible choices you make daily. Do you recognize the specific features that make these goals so compelling for your brain? We continuously make choices of what to do next. Some things get preference, others drop out. How does your brain know what to prefer? How do you mark the steps leading to your goal 1 A so that the new routines get in and the old ones are pushed onto the side-track - and not vice versa?

Our preferences become our ambitions and passions. We want to do something in order to reach something else. Doing is under our control. At the beginning of the 15th century Cosimo de Medici wanted to have 200 books in his library. We do not know why he wanted to have them, but we know that he took the list to a bookshop in Florence and the bookshopper employed 45 scribes to copy them for him.

Ivan Sergejevitsh Turgenejev and Anatoli France wanted to write books. When you read them you will get an approximate idea why they wanted to do that. One of them had an exceptionally heavy brain while the brain of the other was exceptionally light. Obviously the size of the brain is not decisive. Decisive is how you use your brain in your normal life.

What will you do next? How does that help you reach your goal marked with the status qualification A1?

Friday, April 11, 2008

The Last Finn Eats Fish and Tomatoes

I have been writing short articles about time lately. So far their number is 24. I´m aiming at 40 and the goal looks totally possible. At least I want to believe so.

In this time-article process I have learned that the Mayas had a calendar that repeated itself every 260 years. All good and bad that happened 260 years ago would repeat itself now. If a calamity is to come it is waste of time (!) to try to stop it.

I also learned that the City of Assisi in Italy published their strategy on November 9th in 1210 and any Finnish city could copy that today in their effort to increase their prosperity.

However, from today´s perspective we can see one obvious mistake in the Assisi strategy. The City Fathers did not include caring for people in their concept of ´work´. They defined ´work´ as something that brings economic benefit to the town.

Just imagine what our present day would look like if caring for people had been included among the prosperity-bringing acitivities. The Assisi City Fathers left caring for the Church to do - and there it has remained. Just think what it would mean to appreciate caring for people as much as we appreciate producing paper making machines, for instance.

I also learned that the last Finn will die in the year 3702. It is a widowed old lady living in the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnia. She has eaten a lot of fish and tomatoes and sung in a choir.

All Finnish-speaking Finns have died long ago, because we are gloomy, we avoid meeting people, we only sing when drunk, we try to avoid speaking Swedish, and we are pessimistic.

I personally like eating tomatoes and fish, but when writing those articles I often get caught by the dark and pessimistic idea that they will never be published, I´ll be bankrupt, and die before having learned Swedish well enough to speak it publicly.

Time is a social construction. I do not stop admiring us human beings - we are able to construct anything we need as a collective. As long as the Nature, heavenly bodies and gods controlled our time system, we were unable to organise our activities to produce anything systematic and precisely defined. But as soon as we changed the concept of time so that it became a neutral, evenly distributed, predictable and countable concept with a price tag on it, we were able to organise our activities to produce steam engines, locomotives, diesel cars, space travel, mobile phones, global banking, and 24-hour on-line currency speculation.

Having changed the concept of time, we can earnestly claim that time is money. Time has a price tag on it. You know the worth of your working hour as well as that of your neighbour´s. You also know that it is exactly the price of the individual hour that moves big factories from one continent to another. The price tag has a magnetic effect. It either pulls or pushes organisational activities world-wide. We also know that big enough magnets tend to be out of any human control.

But if you had a lot of money, what would you do with your time? I mean really much money.
I suppose that you lead normal life and that supposition leads to another - having enormous amounts of money you would be in a totally new and unfamiliar situation. In new, unfamilar situations people seldom know what to do. To be able to do anything we need role models. Luckily we know one really rich person - Bill Gates. What does he do?

Imagine Bill Gates walking in the street and seeing or dropping a piece of paper money on the ground. Of which value would the bill have to be so that it would be worth his time to stop and pick it up? We can count his average earning rate in dollars per second and we assume that it would take him four seconds to pick it up. In 1986 a five dollar bill would have been too small for him to bother with. Ten years ago, by 1998, a 10 000 dollar bill wasn´t worth trouble.

So the Bill Gates Wealth Index by Richard Florida reveals that being really rich you would not be picking up paper money from the streets.

What would you do instead? Eat tomatoes and sing in a choir? That is what the Swedish-speaking Ostrobothnians here in Finland do. And that is why they feel happy and outlive us others...

Friday, April 4, 2008

Your Personal Level of Happiness?

Have you ever been flooded over by life? Now I do not mean that you should have gone through any drastic and dramatic life changes. Neither do I mean feeling over-loaded. I mean normal days that somehow get filled up with comings and goings the combination of which rather resembles a cubistic painting than a Flemish still-life.

Today everything in this town has been framed by beautiful spring weather. Now we have light. Even after nine o´clock in the evening you can still see that light was present. Snow is melting rapidly. Going for a walk on the frozen lakes would be very risky. Skiing tracks in the forests won´t be back until next year.

Maybe the most memorable event today was a visit at my cousin´s. He has a big family. Their three and four-year-old sons were going out. If you have lived in the north, you know what it means to dress the children properly in winter. Often it takes time and effort. Sometimes you need to tell yourself that you are an adult person and you can decide to have good nerves.

"Imagine, every morning we need to find fourteen more or less similar pairs of socks." the boy´s mother laughed. She found two wellington boots - a blue one and a red one. "Are these all right?" she asked suggesting that they were a pair. The little one said simply "No." Finally one complete pair was found. All this happened without any signs of impatience and rush on either side.

"I´ll give you two euros, if you play with them here." mother said to the neighbour´s girl. The deal was done. We could talk business at the kitchen table.

Having come back the boys simply took off their clothes and went on with their games totally naked. "Our children start wearing clothes when they are five." their mother explained.

I wish I had been that kind of calm and non-rushing mother. I was not. I remember having been impatient and I certainly have rushed my children - and myself. I still keep on doing that. However, when children were small I tried to apologise in the evenings for all the obvious mistakes I had done during the day. Once having done that my daughter said: "Well, it´s all right. Anyway, it´s better to have a yelling mother than no mother at all." - All is relative and some things have a lasting effect.

Later in the evening the battery of my mobile phone went flat just when I was talking with my friends in Hungary. I had to wait for it to operate again. When a book catches your eye, you need to take it. Meanings of Life (ISBN: 0-89862-531-9) was sending special messages from the bookself. This is what I found in it:

"People believe that happiness depends on their immediate circumstances, and they often believe that changing the circumstances - as by getting out of an unhappy marriage - will bring about a major change in their level of happiness. But these beliefs appear to be wrong, or at least greatly exaggerated. Happiness remains fairly constant over the long run."

The author of Meanings of Life is Roy F. Baumeister. He cites research. A two-sentence summary of the adaption-level theory of happiness states that good and bad events have only a temporary effect on subjective feelings, which soon return to the baseline and people have different baselines. After any event, good or bad, happy people go back to being happy, while unhappy people go back to being unhappy.

Sometimes I feel worried about feeling worried. Once we were talking about things like that with teacher students. I said that to my mind the basic idea of the Christian religion is to liberate human beings from all worries and feeling worried is perhaps the biggest of all sins. "All sins are of the same size." somebody said. "One sin is not bigger or smaller than any other."

Well, we have t-shirts and blue jeans of various sizes, but would God really use scales and measures to determine the value of our shortcomings? Even that remains untold to us. You have to decide that yourself.