"The game ceases to be worth the candle. You start straining at doing something when it just isn't worth it." — Alan Watts

For twenty minutes every morning, I walked to a job that was burying me deeper into debt, reciting the same words: “All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this situation only good can come. I am safe.”

Then I got fired.

Go to school. Go to university. Get a job. Get married. Get a mortgage. Have kids. You have arrived.

Arrived where?

There is no sliver of space to consider another game. Day after day, you persist. Until repetition reveals futility.

Cost of living goes up. Salary stays the same. Promotions don’t come. Then one night, a few days before the mortgage is due, an unexpected property tax bill arrives. There’s no way to come up with that money in two days. So it goes on the credit card. The one that’s almost maxed out.

I played this game for ten years. Starbucks, then IT support, then cybersecurity in the UK government, then Cybersecurity in insurance. Each move felt like a step up. In reality I was trading a better job title for ninety-minute commutes, frozen public sector salaries, and doubling of train costs. I climbed the ladder and kept sinking.

By the time I reached the insurance job, finally walking distance from my house, I had hit a ceiling I couldn’t see. I was desperate. The debt didn’t happen all at once. A few hundred here, a few thousand there. Service charges. Water leaks. Property expenses nobody tells you about. Every month, our household spent more than I earned. The hole got deeper just by existing.

Is this all there is? It can’t be.

I had asked myself that question many times, but always in passing, just before closing my eyes. I wouldn’t allow myself to sit with it. One night I did.

I looked around. Everyone was playing the same game. They’d learned to justify the suffering. When I suggested the game might be tilted, some would nod and agree, some got defensive. So I looked elsewhere. I started looking for people who had made it out. Not optimized their way to the top of a broken ladder but actually changed games. I needed proof it was possible.

Tony Robbins helped me survive. I started listening to his CDs. I joined one of his programs. I walked on coals at Unleash the Power Within in May 2013 and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time. Alive.

I had affirmations taped to my mirror. Handwritten on yellow sticky notes. “God’s wealth flows to me in avalanches of abundance. All my needs, desires, and goals are met instantaneously.” I read them every morning before that twenty-minute walk to the office.

The seminars, the books, the affirmations—they kept me going, all the while the math wasn’t working out in my favour. They couldn’t change the math. But maybe they were shaping the person who could eventually walk away from it.

It was paradoxical. I kept finding advice for people already winning. Wake up at 5am. Journal. Cold showers. How Jeff Bezos structures his day and chooses the stairs instead of the elevator at Amazon HQ. These rituals are for people with agency, doing work they love, with people who value them. I was ten floors underground, looking up. Taking the stairs wouldn’t have fixed anything. I needed someone to send the elevator down.

On a Friday morning, three years into the Cybersecurity role with the insurance company, I got to work around 8:30. I went to the cafeteria for coffee and a croissant. Before I could finish, the IT director’s PA appeared. “You need to come to HR. Now.”

“Can I finish my breakfast?”

“No.”

I carried my half-eaten croissant in a paper bag and followed her. In the HR office, the IT Director and HR Manager were waiting. They read from a letter. My role was being eliminated. Twenty-five people, same day. They call it redundancy. You are not needed anymore.

My manager had taken the day off. I connected the dots later that day.

I packed my desk. Nobody would look at me. Nobody spoke. As if I had something terminal and contagious. I walked out, started walking home, and found myself smiling at the sky. I had a wife and a five-year-old at home. We’d just booked tickets to Greece, our first visit in four years.

I thought it was a joke. All these affirmations, and this is what I get?

We went to Greece anyway. Couldn’t get refunds for the tickets.

I started calling recruiters. For the first time, I didn’t have to explain why I wanted to leave my job. I was made redundant. They expressed sympathy. The conversation was easier.

I did what I knew how to do. I applied for permanent roles. Same ladder, different companies. After the second, third interview, waiting to hear back from multiple employers, a recruiter asked: “I have a contract role. Would you be interested?”

I said yes. I had nothing to lose. I was waiting anyway.

She sent my CV. The first week in Greece, I got a call. I was at my grandmother’s house in Athens. I’d told my mother I needed a quiet room with good wifi as I had an important telephone interview.

Fifteen minutes with the hiring manager. His name was Paul. Forty-something, recently joined from a decade in private equity. I didn’t know any of that yet. What I sensed was that he wasn’t looking for textbook answers.

I had nothing left to protect. No job to go back to, no reputation to maintain. So I stopped performing. When he asked about risk frameworks, I told him what actually works and what’s theater. When he asked about stakeholder management, I told him most security teams lose because they can’t translate jargon into business language. I said things I’d never said in an interview before—things I believed but had learned to keep quiet.

He wasn’t interviewing me. He was looking for an ally.

I called the recruiter back afterward, as you do. She’d already spoken to him.

“I don’t know what you told him. He said cancel everybody else. Make him an offer.”

Paul was the one who sent the elevator down.

I had twelve years in IT, six in cybersecurity. But no certifications. No employer had ever paid for training. On paper, I wasn’t qualified for the contract role I’d just accepted.

I felt like a fraud. In permanent roles, I’d learned to keep my head down. I wouldn’t speak up in meetings. I couldn’t articulate my thoughts the way senior people seemed to. I stayed quiet, hoping not to be noticed for the wrong reasons.

What I did have was willingness. No credentials, no connections, no safety net. But whenever I was asked to figure something out, I jumped. That instinct was all I brought with me.

In my last permanent role with the Insurance company, I’d been there three years. I worked on one or two projects at maximum. Two or three goals per year. That’s how slow it moves when you’re a cost, not a solution.

On my first contract, I worked on eight projects in the first eighteen months. It was exhilarating. I stayed up late learning, but now I was getting paid for it, gaining experience on the job instead of waiting for permission.

People started asking my opinion. I was a consultant now, a resource with experience across environments. I found myself helping others who reminded me of my old self: permanent employees, three years in, never having seen how anything else worked.

For the first two years, I carried a new fear: that all this would disappear. That I’d wake up back where I started.

But five years in, I realized the door had closed behind me. After all those contracts, all those environments, I was perceived differently now. They couldn’t put me back in the same box I’d been in for ten years. I wouldn’t fit. Ten years later, I run my own company.

That’s when the self-help advice started working. Wake up at 5am. Journal. Take the stairs. Now that I had agency, these rituals actually helped. You can’t think about growth when you’re fighting for survival.

I’ve been writing this essay trying to explain what happened. Only now do I see what that incantation was. I wasn’t affirming my reality. I was calling out to a place I couldn’t see yet. “All is well” wasn’t a lie. It was a destination I didn’t have directions to.

Then I got fired. And the directions appeared.

In Ricky Gervais’s Netflix show After Life, he asks a 100-year-old woman about her life.

“You must’ve seen a lot, though? A hundred years.”

Her reply: “I was born in Tambury. I’ll die in Tambury. Very soon, I hope. I’ve seen fuck all! I may as well have been a tree.”

That image has stayed with me. A century of life in one place. Not because she couldn’t leave. Because leaving never occurred to her as a real option.

We talk about freedom of movement as though the only barriers are borders. Visa requirements. Passport colours. The geopolitics of where you happened to be born.

But most people who could leave don’t. They have the passport. They have the money. They have no war, no famine, no secret police. And still they stay. Rooted. As if an invisible fence runs through the mind.

I think about this because I left. Greece to the US, then the UK, and now Canada. Twenty years ago. And I’ve watched the people I grew up with stay put. Not because they can’t leave, but because leaving never occurred to them as a real option. The idea lives in the same mental category as “become an astronaut” or “win the lottery.” Technically possible. Practically absurd.

The first prison is fear of the unknown. We are all, to some degree, afraid of what we haven’t seen. A new country means new rules, new hierarchies, new ways of failing. You don’t know where to buy bread. You might not be able to speak the language, or speak it well. You don’t know if people are laughing with you or at you. You don’t know what you don’t know.

The familiar is a kind of anaesthetic. It numbs the part of us that would otherwise feel how small our world has become.

What changed for me was a trip I took at age 10.

I travelled from Athens to Montreal for a month during the early 90s. A boy named Nick lived down the street from my uncle’s house. He taught me to play baseball, and stayed patient with a kid who had never held a bat. His mother made us pizza and we ate it on his porch. We cycled around the neighbourhood with a bike I had to lean on the pavement just to reach the pedals.

Back in Greece, I didn’t know our neighbors next door.

The kids in Montreal played a game I’d never seen. There was no board. You made your own map, your own story. The game was Dungeons & Dragons.

My uncle gifted me the starter kit with the red dice set before I left. I tried to play it back in Greece with my brothers and friends, but nobody wanted to. No board, no pieces. They thought it was boring. I ended up playing alone, just to keep the memory alive.

Something restructured in my mind. I suddenly had another mental map of a place I had visited, that was oceans apart.

The world became smaller. Less frightening.

I learned that the map is not the territory. You can read about a place, hear stories, form opinions. But until you stand there, it remains abstract. And abstract things are easy to fear or dismiss.

The second prison is the cost of leaving. This one is real and heavy, and no amount of inspiration porn can make it lighter.

When I left Greece, I left my parents to age without me. I left my childhood friends behind. I left a version of myself that only existed in that context, the jokes that don’t translate, the references that fall flat, the person I was in a language I now speak only on the phone. You don’t just move to a new country. You become someone else. And the old self dies a little.

I haven’t been back in several years, and even then just a few days, passing through.

When I do go back, nothing is the size I remember. In my mind, my mother’s kitchen is expansive, the table where we ate, the kitchen window overlooking the street. In reality, it’s a small apartment. The hallway I ran through as a child takes four steps. The balcony fits two chairs. This isn’t criticism. It’s what distance does. The mind expands what it misses. Then you return, and the world shrinks back to its actual dimensions. You realize you’ve been homesick for a place that never quite existed.

My parents visit me now. It’s easier that way, I tell myself. And it’s true. It is easier. But easier isn’t the same as right.

There’s a depressing bit of math that floats around. Once you do the numbers, you realize you might only see your parents another ten or fifteen times before they die. It’s usually framed as an observation. It doesn’t feel like one.

I’ve already lost family members I never said goodbye to. Distance doesn’t prepare you for any of it.

I am the one who has to make the effort. My parents made the trip to Vancouver once. No one else has. I understand it, in a way. I’m the one who left. From their view, I created the distance. So I should be the one to close it.

I carry the weight of that distance. It doesn’t get lighter.

Growing up, I had two opposing influences on geography and choosing where to live.

Many of my relatives had immigrated to Canada and the US. They would visit us every summer in Greece, telling us how wonderful those places were. Wide roads. Big houses. Opportunities everywhere.

My family in Greece would dismiss all of it. “Anywhere you go around the world, it is all one and the same. I don’t see the point of moving anywhere else. Greece is the best place in the world.”

I was caught between these two stories until I visited Montreal at 10 and saw it for myself. The quality of life, the access to things that were unimaginable back home. When I returned to Greece and told my family what I had seen, they dismissed it. Just like they dismissed the relatives who had moved.

I was the only one from the family in Greece who ever visited. Everyone else had made up their minds without checking.

To my family in Greece, leaving was strange. Even reckless. Why would you go? What’s wrong with here?

For a long time, I didn’t know how to answer. I didn’t have the words for why their certainty felt incomplete. They weren’t wrong about Greece. They were working with the information they had. But they were evaluating a game they hadn’t played.

It’s like trying to explain 3D chess to someone who has only played on a flat board. They can’t fathom why you’d add another dimension. It looks unnecessarily complicated, maybe absurd. They judge your moves as mistakes because they’re evaluating them on a plane that doesn’t account for where you’re actually playing.

But you can’t see the next level until you’ve made the journey. The road unfolds only as you walk it.

I understand the appeal of staying. Leaving cost me something too.

My mother, years after reconciling with the fact that I had left Greece and was never coming back, shifted her perspective and advice. She started saying, “Don’t look back.” It reminded me of a line from the Italian film Cinema Paradiso, when the old projectionist tells the young Salvatore as he leaves his hometown: “Leave and never look back. Forget us.” It’s advice about growth. About letting go. My mother had become Alfredo.

Here is what no one tells you about leaving.

I knew that by going I might not see some people ever again. Then COVID happened. People died. I didn’t have the chance to consider that the last time I saw them would actually be the last. There was no goodbye that felt like a goodbye. I have to live with that and keep moving forward.

And yet, my family in Greece, the ones who live close to each other, they fight. They quarrel. They avoid each other for months. Proximity has not given them what I thought I was giving up.

I had seen the other side. And it looked like the street I grew up on. Familiar. Imperfect. Home.

The third prison is the one I didn’t understand until I’d already escaped it.

In school they made us read “Ithaki” by Kavafis. They made us memorize lines about hoping the voyage is long, about what Ithaka gives you and what it can’t. I was fifteen, and although I had visited Montreal at 10, I didn’t get it. The words were just words.

Nikos Kazantzakis, too. We studied him like a national monument, the great writer who left and kept leaving, who wrote from France, from Antibes, from anywhere but home. I memorized passages for exams. I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just stay.

Now I do.

In a 1955 interview on French Radio, Kazantzakis said something I’ve carried with me since I first understood it:

“The farther we are from our country, the more we think of it and the more we love it. When I am in Greece I see the small things, the intrigues, the foolishness, the inadequacies of the leaders, the misery of the people. But from a distance we do not see the fields so clearly and have more freedom to shape an image of the homeland worthy of total love. That’s why I work better and love Greece better when I’m abroad.”

I understood that in my body before I understood it in my mind.

There was something about the collective unconscious of the place I couldn’t sync with. The way things worked. The way they didn’t. The shortcuts everyone took because the straight path was for fools. I felt like I was swimming against a current that everyone else had accepted as the water itself. Staying meant shrinking into a shape that didn’t fit.

I love Greece. And I couldn’t breathe there.

This is another kind of prison. Not borders on a map. Not fear of the unknown. But the weight of a culture pressing against your lungs. Some people feel that weight and call it home. I felt it and called it a ceiling.

From Vancouver, I can see Greece clearly for the first time. The light. The sea. The way my father tells a story. The things worth loving, separated from the things that were killing me slowly.

Kazantzakis was right. Distance doesn’t diminish love. It purifies it.

The 100-year-old woman in Tambury had one map her whole life. She never tested it against the territory. My family in Greece told me everywhere was the same. They had never checked.

I don’t say this to judge them. I have my own boards I’ve never seen from above. My own dimensions I’m blind to.

But the ones I did explore taught me this: the world is not one and the same. And it is also not as foreign as we fear.

Trees can’t choose where they’re planted. But we’re not trees. We tell ourselves we are because it’s easier than admitting we have a choice. And that choosing is terrifying, and costly, and might be the only way to become who we’re supposed to be.

I am freer than my grandfather could have imagined. I am also more alone. Both are true. I carry the cost. And I would do it again.

The red dice are still in storage in Athens. Last year, I bought my son his own set. I told him the story.

You are not a tree.

A 21-year-old launches an AI app that helps people cheat technical interviews.

Two months later, he is doing half a million dollars a month.

VCs throw money at him.

Twitter calls him a genius.

Welcome to 2025, where cheating is not just tolerated. It is celebrated.

For decades, we have been conditioned to believe success equals millions or billions. If you are not sprinting toward unicorn status, you are invisible. This obsession with outsized wealth has created a culture where shortcuts are not just common, they are expected.

Why build something honest and durable when you can promise people a backdoor to success?

Why play fair when the market rewards the opposite?

Once you accept that logic, the rise of cheating as innovation makes perfect sense.

We are living in an era of cheating as a service. Apps that whisper answers during interviews. Platforms that script your sales calls in real time. AI that helps you game your way into jobs, clients, or contracts.

And it does not stop with individuals. Even in compliance, one of the few spaces designed to enforce accountability, we are seeing AI tools built to help companies look secure instead of be secure. Frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001 were not created to be gamed. They were designed to raise the floor of trust. Automation has its place, but when the incentive shifts from building resilience to gaming appearances, trust is hollowed out.

Aaron Swartz tried to free academic papers, public knowledge that should have been accessible in the first place. For that, he was vilified and crushed by the system. Meanwhile, founders who openly sell tools to cheat their way into FAANG interviews are paraded as innovators.

And here is the uncomfortable part. Today’s most celebrated technology, large language models like ChatGPT, were trained on vast amounts of public, copyrighted, and proprietary data, much of it without consent. What Aaron did was treated as theft. What LLM builders did is dressed up as progress.

One man fought to liberate knowledge for everyone and was punished. Another generation of companies quietly absorbed the world’s knowledge and got hailed as pioneers. That inversion says everything about the values we have chosen to elevate. And those values are enforced not by reason, but by capital.

This era runs on a simple operating system: do not ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.

Build the tool, raise the round, apologize later.

It does not matter if the foundation is weak, as long as the growth chart goes up and to the right.

Investors have always chased returns. That is not new. What feels different today is how openly we celebrate shortcuts that undermine trust. The money will always follow the hype. The responsibility rests with us, the builders, leaders, and communities deciding what to normalize. If we claim to build for trust and resilience, then we cannot confuse cheating for progress.

Compliance, security, and governance were supposed to make our systems stronger. Instead, they risk becoming mirrors, tools to create the appearance of strength. It is a fragile illusion, and when it cracks, trust collapses with it.

Aaron Swartz died for sharing knowledge.

Today, we celebrate machines that ingested the whole internet without consent and call it progress.

Not every shortcut is innovation. Not every growth story is progress.

If we care about security, trust, and real resilience, then we have to be clear: what we reward matters.

Originally Posted on: HEY

I started computer programming back in 1993 when I was still in Greece. The first language I learned was BASIC. It was fun to see things I typed come to life. As I grew older and started my Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science, I started learning C++, Visual Basic, Java and Object Oriented Databases.

I built e-commerce websites by hand around 2003, long before there was Shopify and e-commerce platforms were a thing. But in 2005 I moved into 1st/2nd Line Support and break / fix support for PCs. I didn't code anything for a number of years.

A few years later in 2008, I was now living in the UK and started messing around with WordPress. I learned through trial and error how to setup, manage, host and protect WordPress. I created several sites for myself and others.

In 2012, as I was getting more involved in Cybersecurity, I got interested in iOS apps as a side project. I had transitioned to Mac OS at that point, had an iPhone and I had access to xCode. I built some games with help from another developer and a designer and had fun coding again. This however, lasted for a couple years and as It happens, life got in the way and I slowly abandoned iOS apps. However, during that time I learned Git and became comfortable with Github and publishing apps on the App Store.

Fast forward, 10 years later, it was December 2022 and I was going through my annual subscriptions. I had moved to managed hosting services, Squarespace for my business, a personal Ghost blog and some other side projects. Due to personal circumstances, I couldn't afford to renew any of them.

My sites went offline that week. It was a sad moment, but I was also disappointed in myself that I had become so dependent on SaaS. despite all of my knowledge and experience.

For the next week, I spent my free time dusting off my Git, HTML, CSS, Javascript knowledge to create at least some landing page for my business and personal site. I didn't want to have to manage WordPress, Ghost or Jekyll sites again.

I ended up building static sites that I could publish on Github Pages or Cloudflare Pages for FREE.

These sites were fast and looked great and I didn't have to pay anything to keep them online.

Last year, I wanted to create more things and had spent quite some time trying to figure out LLMs for coding. I went through quite a few. My conclusion was that at some point the LLM broke the code and you ended up trying to fix the errors than actually building anything operational or the thing you originally had in mind.

LLMs like Claude and ChatGPT would not take the full codebase due to context limits and Cursor needed some figuring out to be used effectively. So I parked doing anything more with development last year.

This year, I signed up for a course that Nat Eliason created, called Build Your Own Apps. This course takes you through the basics of using Cursor.com to create your own apps and gradually build more complex webapps. Nat's approach helped me use Cursor in a way that helped understand the generated code, get back into using Github and troubleshoot more effectively.

These apps can run as static sites and there is no cost for most use cases. Some of the apps that I want to create will require more resources but still will be a fraction of the cost of subscriptions.

So, onto the webapps.

I created a pomodoro timer, with lofi music and task labelling that is visible on the browser tab. (Focus)

I created a blog for my company website. This works great. I only need to create markdown files with the correct frontmatter and a script runs and builds the html pages. As my website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, any change in the Github code, such as adding a new markdown file, triggers a site re-build in seconds. It is super SEO friendly as well. (Techimpossible Blog).

I also updated my company website to make it more uniform (Techimpossible Security Inc.).

I finally updated my personal page, which links to all my other work (Skaronis.com).

I added some fun random particles too.

All these sites are super fast and SEO friendly.

I almost forgot. I did create 2 basic games that promote by Substack blog Cybersecurity Notes and a GRC Analyst Course I'm building.

You can check them out.

A Day in the Life of a Cybersecurity Consultant - Inspired by Space Invaders

GRC Refinement - Inspired by the Apple TV Show - Severance (GRC Analyst Course Discount Code included)

Year 2025 is going to be the year of AI agents. We will see many workflows and processes being overtaken by AI. Many SaaS services will also be eaten up by AI. This week OpenAI did a demo of the chatGPT Operator and it is like looking a person performing all the steps and it is only January 2025!

These web apps, sites and games I've completed only in the past 2-3 weeks, will be replacing some subscription based software for me at least. As I continue down this path, I am confident that I will create my own tools for things that I am performing manually right now.

There are so many ad-hoc processes in Cybersecurity that could be automated and I am looking forward to delving into those too and creating Mac OS and iOS apps again.

Let's build!

Originally Posted on: HEY

Today I wandered into a Japanese store in my neighbourhood called ITSUMO which translates to "all the time".

The simplicity of Japanese products, the craftsmanship and level of detail is present in every single item.

The store owner greeted me with, thank you visiting our store and went back behind the counter as I roamed around the store and marvelled at every single item. Everything from cookware to incense and tools used for flower arrangements that I have never seen in my life, where beautifully placed around the store.

Owning a few simple, well build, high quality items brings an unexpected feeling of calm. Aesthetically pleasing items that you want to use every day.

Pencel Japanese pens that feel like you're writing on clouds and bath towels named "marshmallow" made out of 100% premium cotton, that actually feel like you are touching cotton candy.

I've come to understand over the years why Steve Jobs visited Japan multiple times a year.

The feeling of experiencing another perspective to life that does not rely on bigger, better, latest and greatest but rather on minimal creations grounded in mastery and love of the art that stand the test of time.

It's completely the opposite of western civilization where most items don't make it past the first year and end up in garbage yards and subsequently burned or end up at the bottom of the ocean.

I've made conscious decisions over the years to simplify my daily life and invest in quality products that last.

It is not always feasible, but this approach is my antidote to consumerism and leading a less stressful life.

.

Joscha discusses the stages of lucidity that to me are similar to Maslow's pyramid but with the twist of contemplating additional stages on your way to self-actualization.

Levels of lucidity:
Stage 1: Reactive survival (infant)
Stage 2: Personal self (young child)
Stage 3: Social self (adolescence, domesticated adult)
Stage 4: Rational agency (self-direction)
Stage 5: Self authoring (full adult, wisdom)
Stage 6: Enlightenment
Stage 7: Transcendence

I would add to the stages of Lucidity the levels/circle of knowledge.

Level 1: The stuff you know
Level 2: The stuff you know that exist but haven't learned how to do
Level 3: The stuff you don't know that you don't know

This whole area falls in the "stuff you don't know that you don't know" for most people including myself to an extend, as I've gone down these rabbit holes in the past.

This would translate into a better understanding of ourselves if this knowledge was accessible to everyone which is not the case.

What is certain and currently happening, is that this knowledge is pre-programmed into the logic of systems that we use every day and more increasingly powered by AI that have a level of agency that we don't even realize is possible.

This level of understanding is not afforded by most people but is exceedingly being trained into LLMs.

If we take a 10,000 feet view, this is the first time in human history where we are dumping human knowledge and collective thinking, through training models and scraping of data from places like the Internet Archive and social medial  into what is essentially going to be an advanced AGI or Super AGI.

That can be a tremendous leap in our evolution but equally a terrifying extrapolation of unintentional social engineering through LLMs hallucinations.

In cybersecurity we spend a lot of our time with compliance and tweaking controls while criminals are learning about psychology and how to manipulate people through social engineering before they look at  exploiting firewalls or take advantage of misconfiguration.

Shodan is full of the latter.

We are willingly creating black boxes that can analyze us better that we can understand ourselves, leading into an easier manipulation and reality distortion if left unchecked.

I've always believed Psychology should be required learning for most fields but especially Cybersecurity.

At this point in time, I think it is even more critical.

At the very least, this would result in some sort of ethics review to determine the level of intelligence of AI and safeguards and boundaries implemented.

This is necessary because Psychologists don't necessarily understand LLMs or their capabilities and technical people don't understand psychology.

Is there another role that could bridge this gap?

#LLMs #AI #psychology #cybersecurity

Originally posted on X: here

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

– Steve Jobs

The trappings of technology

We are mimetic creatures. We copy others. Then we join camps. Some people are hardcore Apple fans and have anything that start with an i(Device), myself included and others can't stand Apple and will use Google or Microsoft or literally anything else but Apple.

This is a good thing, because we have diversity.

The issues arise when we keep following along. long after the technology has stopped serving our needs. We have invested too much time and money to move away from products, services and subscriptions.

This is the moment technology becomes a tyrannical master. I reached this realization when I got sick last December with COVID. I was unable to work for almost a month. Something interesting happened. All my subscriptions to services stopped getting paid.

Most companies cancelled my subscription and blocked my access, others including 37 Signals were more courteous and extended my access.

My apps stopped working, anything from meditation to icloud backups and email systems and so on. After a few weeks of recovery, I was well enough again to focus on this area.

I found that I had subscriptions to applications ranging from Notion, Evernote, Readwise, Grammarly, Airtable, Miro and many many more that I rarely used and that I had signed up over time by following others that promoted these tools.

The only tools I really used daily was Basecamp and my Hey email. This is because I got the most done with no distractions and enjoyed using them.

Growing up in the 80s, I was used to buying software once. It was nice. You paid for something and got something you owned. Back then there was box with CDs or DVDs and manuals.

The move to the cloud has introduced this subscription model we are experiencing today and provides flexibility and location independence but in most cases it enslaves us.

So I made a list of all my subscriptions and spend 3 weeks, cancelling them. I would get the odd charge on my credit card as I had forgotten some of the subscriptions completely.

This is an ongoing process as I now realize and need to force myself to think twice before signing up for the next thing that doesn't meet my criteria.

Don't be afraid to break things

The next step I took, was to try approaching my needs through a different mindset and specific criteria.

My new criteria for software are stability, credibility, support, ROI, necessity and joy.

Setting criteria is one thing, migrating data between applications and undoing years of work is another challenge. It requires willpower, bravery, as you are inadvertently going to break some things along the way, but It is absolutely worth it.

Our time is limited and this is the only reminder I need when I hesitate.

So after 5 years of being a Microsoft partner, I moved away from Microsoft 365 for my business and moved to Google Workspaces. This is because of ease of use and integration with other systems. I am still using Basecamp for my work projects and my personal life. Basecamp has also replaced all my note taking apps and journaling apps.

I have journal, a knowledge management system and in combination with Google sheets, It fulfills all my needs. 

I finally use HEY for my personal email and blog and this brings me joy.

If you are trapped by dogma, make some changes today! You'll thank me later.

Welcome to Neural Impulse. This is my weekly newsletter starting with ideas I've had or stumbled upon during the week that result in connected thought.

Writing

Happy New Year!!!

This year I am working on a new writing project. This is a way for me to organize my thoughts and resources on cybersecurity and also help others that are just getting started or have been in this industry and looking to make a change.

This is the result of idea synthesizing and inspiration from other creative projects I've experienced and made sense to re-create for my industry.

It's called Cybersecurity Consultant Notes. I've set up the site initially on Ghost but now moved to substack. I will be starting with free and subscriber only content and will be looking to add premium content for a monthly or yearly subscription.

Version 1

Version 2

I will be documenting business and technical resources I use to run my cybersecurity business and how to create, price, write proposal and deliver cybersecurity programs. This will not be just description of things but actual SOPs and document templates.

This is really exciting and challenging for me, as I also have to work on overcoming the curse of knowledge.



Thoughts and Insights This Week

In October 2020 I signed up for a coaching program with one of Brendon Burchard's High Performance coaches.

I followed 2 coaching programs that lasted one year and it was the best decision I've ever made in personal development. I am looking forward to continuing again this year.

In the meantime, I have revisited the new platform that Brendon set up a year ago called Growth Day.

There are many similarities to the coaching programs I did, expect from the one to one coaching sessions.

One great feature is the daily coaching recording that Brendon does called Fire Session.

Today's fire session was on self talk.

Here are some notes I took.

Most of our life is determined by how we complete the following sentences. Consciously and unconsciously.

1. I am

2. What if

3. I must

4. I want to feel

5. What matters most right now

6. I care about this because

7. My intention for this person or interaction

8. I will become

The words we are add after the "I am" are very powerful. They create our conscious reality.

All the sentences above can go either way depending on the feelings we choose. So we have to become conscious of our emotions and conscious and subconscious beliefs, if we are to match our words with our true intentions.

In the words of Neville Goddard, in his books "The Feeling is the Secret",

“Assume the feeling of your wish fulfilled and continue feeling that it is fulfilled until that which you feel objectifies itself. If a physical fact can produce a psychological state, a psychological state can produce a physical fact. If the effect (a) can be produced by the cause (b), then inversely, the effect (b) can be produced by the cause (a). Therefore I say unto you, "What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye have received them, and ye shall have them" (Mark 11:24, E. R. V.).”

What do you think? You can reply to this email with your thoughts.

If you want to check out Growth Day and get a 2 week free trial, follow this link.

Graph of the week - Zooming In vs Zooming Out

Every week I stumble upon a photo or a design that makes me think.

This week I discovered a design by Junhan Chin.
 



We live our lives zoomed in. Zoom out regularly to reclaim your perspective.

This is the insight and perspective that daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly review provide.

Tweets Worth Reading

Cheat codes I know at 36 I wish I knew at 20



The Power of visualization

Coolest Thing I learned

Over the holidays I started playing with OpenAI's GPT-3, like most people. This is a near sentient machine learning technology that can write unique text, write code and output complex answers in a way that is not humanly possible.

This is not the same as Googling something and finding static text or content that another human has previously created. It is an algorithm that can access millions of sites, read, consume, digest and re-create in a unique way content within seconds, in real-time.

One example is that I tried was asking GPT-3 to write a statement of work for an ISO 27001 sustainment program with deliverables and a pricing section. It did this in 25 seconds and it included the correct terminology.



Now this is not something that will replace me but it is a tool I can leverage to minimize effort on tasks that a machine can do and then use my energy on quality assurance and higher planning tasks.

Recommended Reading

The Secret is the Feeling by Neville Goddard

This is narrated by Master Key Society and it is only 39 minutes but packed with wisdom. It was published in 1944 but these ideas have now been validated by neuroscience and work exactly as described.

I got the collection of books for Kindle by Noah Press.

The Neville Goddard Deluxe Collection: All 14 Books By A New Thought Pioneer

Have a wonderful and productive week!

The movie "Limitless" starring Bradley Cooper came out in 2011 and it is every information worker's dream.

Taking a pill that can make you smarter, even for a few hours.

The premise is exciting.

There are drugs of course that can get you pretty close but they come with side effects.

People like Dave Asprey who used the drug Modafinil in previous years and has attributed part of his success to it.

However, anything that alters the biochemistry of the body tends to have side effects.

I will list below some non-intrusive ways I've found over the years with various degrees of effectiveness and some nootropics I've tried.

Non-Invasive Methods

Binaural Beats
David Monroe discovered binaural beats by accident and went on to create a technology that was used by the US Government and is till being used today by meditation practitioners and neuroscientists to help entrain the brain into certain frequencies.

Dr. Joe Dispenza
One of my mentors, Dr. Joe Dispenza has conducted studies over the past 10 years and can conclusively demonstrate the effect of certain frequencies, words, music and binaural beats, in causing an effect on the nervous system.

The largest study of meditators affecting their physiology and demonstrating through blood and stool collection before and after, that SARS-CoV-2 couldn't penetrate the cell membrane.

Evidence is the loudest voice, worthing watching.


BrainTap
A device I discovered in the past 3 months since I started visiting the Neurolounge in Vancouver. This is a headset that use red and blue lights in both the ears and eyes. The device is paired with an app that has syncs the headset with the meditation track. The majority of meditations are recorded by Dr. Patrick Porter and combines a multitude of disciplines. If you follow the meditation you will feel like having taken an hour's or two nap after a 20 minute session.

Nootropics

Neurohacker Collective - Qualia
I used the Qualia supplements for 3 months. There was a noticeable difference in my focus span. I did however had to switch to the caffeine free versions as I felt agitated in the evenings and had increased anxiety.

Nootopia
This is something I'm looking to test next. They've had very good reviews and are more personalized compared to other supplements.

Cognitive performance is an interesting area, but it is important to stress that without proper sleep, hydration and nutrition, none of the above will have the desired effects.


A picture is worth a thousand words.

Every time I heard or read this quote I was always looking at photos, trying to see what was in the shot.

It was only after I started taking photos myself and publishing them online that I realized that there was more to this quote.

It is true that the shot captures a point in time that could take you a thousand words to describe. There is something missing though.

It is the planning of the journey and the effort required for the photographer to position themselves in front of that frame, the exact moment to get that shot.

This is not visible to the viewer, but it is a feeling embedded in the shot, that the photograher can recall by looking at their photo.

I tried this assumption with photos I've taken over the years and it is true at least for me.

Here are some examples.

This shot was taken in July 2006 on the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago with my OLYMPUS C70Z while I was rushing to get a career fair for IT jobs. It was hot, humid and I was sweating a lot and my feet were hurting because of my leather shoes.

I took this photo in Brighton, UK after visiting a supplier for a day seminar. I ended up in the Brighton Pier and was walking around the beach. I remember feeling uneasy because of the long day and the 2-hour drive to get back home to Milton Keynes.

Overcoming Excuses

Some of the best looking photos, are taken during the Golden Hour. This is a term used by photographers to signify the period when the natural sunlight is amazing. This is an hour before sunset and an hour after sunrise.

Also, the best shots are outside the beaten path.

To get this shot of science world in Vancouver, you have to walk alongside the Cambie bridge and get to the halfway point during the morning golden hour.

Being up at 5:00am on a Sunday to get there at 6:00 am is not something many people would do. I was one of them.

Another excuse that stopped me from going out and taking photos in the past, was that I didn't have the right camera.

I was able to overcome this notion, when I was forced to use an iPhone 5c as my only phone and camera at a time that I couldn't afford anything else.

So I started making the best of it.

Milton Keynes, UK - iPhone 5c

Looking at these photos, after 7 years, I still remember where I was physically and emotionally and feels like another lifetime.

As Jim Carrey started out his commencement speech at the Maharishi University in 2014, I too want to plant a seed.

I'm here to plant a seed today, a seed that will inspire you to move forward in life, with enthusiastic hearts and a clear sense of wholeness.

If you have only known Jim Carrey through the characters he portrayed in his 40 movies so far, you might be happily surprised that Jim is a charismatic person on and off screen. The more I've looked into his work, the more I discovered that he has a depth to everything he does that exemplifies the fact that his success in life is not an accident.

Once you watch his commencement speech, you should go back and re-watch his movies from a different perspective.

As Jim Rohn used to say, invest in yourself and your personal development. Read a book, listen to a speech, just do something that will nurture your brain.

So today through the power of technology you can listen to someone like Jim Carrey from anywhere in the world and get advice that has the potential to change your life if implemented.

I have broken down his speech into sections, each representing an area of focus that will improve your life.

1. Mindset

Life doesn't happen to you, it happens for you.

This mindset can create a life of happiness or misery, pain or pleasure.

Although everything in our life is a result of our thinking patterns and choices, we rarely assert that to ourselves and get into the blame game. We will do anything to meet our needs and get away from pain and gain pleasure.

A significant and conscious distinction is essential. We can start by designing our life.

We want to be proactive as we get up in the morning looking forward to being embraced by life. The alternative would be to reaffirm in our minds the hopelessness of our life thinking that our past equals the future.

The realization that life is in agreement with your pure intentions can have an impact on your life and everyone in it.

2. Affirmations

I have no limits. I cannot be contained because I am the container. You can't contain the container.My soul is not contained within the limits of my body. My body is contained within the limitlessness of my soul.I am ready and able to do beautiful things in this world.I am just making a conscious choice to perceive challenges as beneficial. so that I can deal with them in the most productive way.

We use affirmations every second of every minute of our waking hours, whether we realize it or not. These are usually for most people internal monologs that gravitate towards the negative spectrum.

If you have said to yourself, phrases like "You're always late",

"You are not good enough for this,"

"I can't do anything right,"

"You are a loser," then you are using affirmations already.

The result though will not be what you desire, as you can see that there is a conflict of interest in your mind. You want to ace an exam, get that job, exercise every day, but what you are telling yourself at the same time is that there is something wrong with you.

What if you said to yourself every day looking in the mirror, "I have no limits", how would that feel?

If you knew there was no physical or mental story that could stop you from taking action how would you go on about your day?

Affirmations are similar to having a coach pumping you up for a big game. Now think that this coach is in your head talking to you every morning as you get up.

He is telling you that you are tired, and you are a disappointment because you haven't achieved your goals. Would you keep them as a coach? Would you carry on trying?

Notice how you talk to yourself. Instead, start saying to yourself in the mirror, "I love you, and I accept you as you are".

This very simple exercise as Louise Hay says in her book, "You Can Heal Your Life", will reveal to you instantly whether you believe yourself or there is something you reject about you.

3. Focus

Fear is going to be a player in your life, but you get to decide how much.

Everyone holds certain beliefs in their mind about themselves and life itself. Beliefs are like tables; they need legs to stand on.

Depending on where you focus your mind, you will attract events in your life that will support this belief.

As Jim describes it, decisions you focus on at this moment based on either love or fear, will shape your the life, instead of worrying about the pathway to the future.

You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about the pathway to the future, but all that will ever be is what's happening here and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.

It is so tempting to focus on the things that you don't want.

You play the same video in your mind, but the truth of the matter is that giving up or lowering your standards will guarantee your outcome.

I love the fact that Jim is encouraging everyone to believe in themselves and do what they love, as he has already been there and done that.

You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

4. Purpose

The effect you have on others is the most valuable currency there is.

Finding your purpose in life is one of the two most important dates. In Mark Twain's words, "The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

Sooner or later comes a day in our life that we face this question, is this all there is?

We get to a point where we have achieved and acquired everything all that we have envisioned it would make us fulfilled, but it is a deceit.

Because everything you gain in life will rot and fall apart, and all that will be left of you is what was in your heart.

One way to of answering this question is start thinking about others. Instead of asking what do I want, maybe shift the focus to "How will I serve the world?"

What do they need that my talent can provide?

In Jim's words, "The purpose of my life has been to free people from concern, I did something that made people present their best selves to me wherever I go."

What is your purpose?

5. Self-Actualisation

I am at the top of the mountain and the only one I hadn't freed was myself.

Somewhere along the way of trying to figure out life and what it all means, we try to fit, adjust, suppress who we are to feel accepted.

Below I've added the painting by Jim Carrey and his marvelous description of his work.

The need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.

To find the real peace you have to let the armor go.

Don't let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form.

Risk being seen in all of your glory.

It's about picking up the light and daring to be seen. Everyone is attracted to the light.

The party host who thinks ignorance is bliss and is always offering to drink from the bottles that empty you.

Misery despises the light, can't stand when you're doing well. Wishes you nothing but the worst.

The queen of diamonds under him needs a king to build her house of cards.

The hollow one down the bottom there will cling to your leg and say, please don't leave me behind, for I have abandonedmyself.

Even those who are closest to you and most in love with you, the most you love most in the world, will find clarity confronting at times.

6. Creative Meditation

Our eyes are not viewers, they're also projectors that are running a second story over the picture that we see in front of us all the time. Fear is writing the script and the working title is "I'll never be enough".

One of the ways that you can use to change the stories that you project is through meditation. It is as old as history and has many health benefits. It is a way of taming the mind.

If you can't meditate with your eyes closed trying or not to observe your thoughts you can try meditating through some form or art.

I recently came across something called Zentangle which is a way of drawing patterns using a pen and focusing on each stroke. There are no mistakes, you can't erase anything, you just keep moving forward. Like you do in life.

You can read more about the Zentangle Method and its benefits here. In the past couple of years, there's been an explosion of art books for coloring meditation. You can find them on Amazon.

Jim uses painting, but you can use some other form of expression that helps you be present, not thinking about the past or worrying about the future.

Painting is one of the ways I free myself.

A way to stop the world through total mental, spiritual and physical involvement.

7. The Ego

How tricky is that ego that it will tempt us with the promise of something that we already possess. Relax and dream up a good life. Ask the universe of what you want and working towards it without worrying of how it comes to pass.Your job is not to figure out how It's gonna happen for you but to open the door in your head and when the door opens in real life, just walk through it.

As Eckhart Tolle describes the Ego, it is a protective shell that tries to differentiate us from other people. Awareness is the first step to a free life. It is crucial to realize those moments that you don't have thoughts, but your thoughts have you.

As that shift happens in you, you won't be feeling the world, you will be felt by it, you'll be embraced by it.

Now I'm always at the beginning. I have a reset button and I ride that button constantly.

Once that button is functioning in your life, there's no story that the mind can create that will be as compelling.

Imagination is always manufacturing scenarios both good and bad and the ego tries to keep you trapped in the multiplex of the mind.

I've often said that I wish people could realise all their dreams in wealth and fame so that they could see that it's not where you're going to find your sense of completion.

8. Faith

I don't believe in hope, hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire and faith leaps over it.

There is one common denominator in every religion, and that is Faith. Nothing comes close.

You can't achieve anything in this life with sheer willpower, hope or optimism.

You need to have faith in a higher power that has created everything in wisdom. We are so much more than just our body and the limiting beliefs we have about it.

(Heb. 11:1). Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

9. Contribution

One of the 7 human needs that are important for being fulfilled as a person is the need for Contribution.

Jim Carrey has created two separate foundations, both unique yet powerful. The impact that can have on humanity is phenomenal.

He is also not afraid to speak up when it comes to our children's health and the big pharma interests.

BETTER U FOUNDATION

The Better U foundation is focused on educating farmers on how to increase their rice crops by 100-150% by using less seeds, less water and no pesticides or GMO.

It is remarkable that this foundation is not selling anything. They are spreading knowledge by teaching farmers the SRI method (System of Rice Intensification).

GATE

GATE stands for Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment, and it is focused on helping the industry with evolving the transformation entertainment genre. Two of the founding members were Jim Carrey and Eckhart Tolle, and their mission is to project a more positive and life enhancing reality through the use of entertainment and media.

Books

Jim created an amazing children's book with a great moral story called How Roland Rolls. What a great example for others to follow on producing material that will teach, educate and inspire kids.

10. Choice

You always have two choices. Fear or love.

So many of us choose our path our of fear disguised as practicality.What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dared ask the universe for it.I'm saying, I'm the proof that you can ask the universe for it, please.

When I heard Jim Carrey saying that we choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality, It was a wake-up call for me that added another lens through which I view my life.

Choose love and don't ever let fear turn you against your playful heart.

The age old questions of why we are here and what is our purpose or mission on this earth has troubled mankind for thousand of years. If we look throughout history we can find reference points when people with the knowledge and understanding of the world at the time had tried to attach meaning and make sense of our existence.

Whether it was Seneca talking about The Shortness of Life or Richard Feynman on the Meaning of It All, covering different both ends of the spectrum or even Jimmy Carter on his 1979 speech called The Crisis of Confidence warning the public that the road to consumerism does not satisfy our longing for meaning.

To contemplate even such questions requires time for introspection and studying of other great minds that have stepped on this earth before us and even during our time.

One such great mind was the Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis. He was born on the island of Crete in Greece in 1883 and died at the age of 74 in 1957 in Freiburg, West Germany. In the years during his journey on earth he was a restless soul driven by his thirst to understand our purpose in life and our relationship to God.

Among the many famous writings that he left behind( Zorba The Greek, The Last Temptation and many others as well as translations), the one that was of great significance to him was "The Saviors of God" which was a distillation of his beliefs about our journey on earth.

Through his travels around the world and the translation of spiritual and psychology books in others languages, Nikos Kazantzakis inherited invaluable lenses through which to interpret and make sense of the world. His encounter with Saint Francis, Fredricht Nitsche and other great minds have been instrumental in the writing of The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises.

The premise of the book bears Kazantzakis unique viewpoint and it is a guide for the soul on how to ascend to a higher state of being. He describes 5 ascending circles that we need to become aware and move towards. It is a daily fight alongside God, so that we can save God and ultimately save ourselves.

The book is densely written with vivid descriptions from which I have distilled what stood out for me and was of great significance.

The five ascending circles are Ego, Mankind, Earth, Universe and God. It is characteristic throughout the book that God is not depicted as being almighty but as an army General who fights alongside us with victory being uncertain. Kazantzakis explains his relationship to God by providing a view to his prayer.

“My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the trivial reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you.My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I found, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

The book has 5 parts, the preparation, the march, the vision, the action and the silence.

The 5 ascending circles mentioned earlier are part of the march and the action steps. We need to raise our awareness before we can fathom such concepts and constructs and be ready to take action.

There is a theme of struggle throughout the book  between the body and the soul. In more than one ways Nikos Kazantzakis paints this graphic picture of the mind trying to contain and constrain man within the confines of the skull while the soul speaks through the heart and screams to be let free.

The mind has a way of deceiving us into believing that the superficial world that we see with our eyes is all there is and will ever be, while the heart cries to be heard, hoping to grab our attention and express the limitlessness of the soul.

We are all born into very different times and the inherent unlearning while focusing on useless rumination is overlooked when we anguish about the direction of our lives. We need to filter the noise.

Kazantzakis writes:

“A command rings out within me: “Dig! What do you see?””Men and birds, water and stones.””Dig deeper! What do you see?””Ideas and dreams, fantasies and lightening flashes!””Dig deeper! What do you see?””I see nothing! A mute Night, as thick as death. It must be death.””Dig deeper!””Ah! I cannot penetrate the dark partition! I hear voices and weeping. I hear the flutter of wings on the other shore.””Don’t weep! Don’t weep! They are not on the other shore. The voices, the weeping, and the wings are your own heart.”

The Preparation

As Nikos Kazantzakis explains in the prologue,

“We come from a dark abyss and end in a dark abyss. The in between luminous interval we call life. As soon as we are born the return begins and what we do or don’t do in that in between space defines our being.We are fighting to balance the powers of darkness and light and create, compose and turn matter into life.

This again reminds us of Seneca on The Shortness of Life, where he talks about life and how most people truly leave for a very short period.

Most of our lives, we just exist, waiting to return. Kazantzakis believes that it is our duty to harmonise these two enormous holy forces and with this vision to adjust our thinking and actions accordingly.

First Duty:  Discipline, Clarity & Austerity

Our first duty is to become aware of the power of the mind. The mind can create the world around us, through our five senses and attach meaning in order to protect us. In doing so, it also confines us within the limited capacity of the skull.

Through discipline, clarity and austerity we can determine the omnipotence of the mind in all material things and its incapacity in all things beyond this material world.

Second Duty: Boundaries & Meaning

The second duty contemplates the boundaries set by the mind and the unwillingness to look beyond them. Whatever the boundaries, echoes of the heart's open calling can be heard as voices, weeping.

Kazantzakis contemplates the idea of a sixth sense, which he calls heart and invites us to defy the limitations of man and start looking through the eyes and not with the eyes in the words of Adlus Huxley.

“Before they crush me, I want to open my eyes for a moment and to see them. I set my life no other purpose.

Between the boundaries of unseen powers that throw us into existence and back to oblivion.

There is only ephemeral joy to be found in this materialist world of ours eventually leaving a void of purpose and lack of of confidence.

“I want to find a single justification that I may live and bear this dreadful daily spectacle of disease, of ugliness, of injustice, of death.

At the very least, love for other people should allow us to think outside our circumstances and see the power of unity, harmony and love in people.

“Let us unite, let us hold each other tightly, let us merge our hearts, let us create - so long as the warmth of this earth endures, so long as no earthquakes, cataclysms, icebergs or comets come to destroy us - let us create for Earth a brain and a heart, let us give a human meaning to the superhuman struggle.

Third Duty: The Greatest Temptation of All: Hope

The greatest temptation as Nikos Kazantzakis writes is that of hope.

It was Jim Carey who said:

““hope is a beggar. Hope walks through the fire but faith leaps over it”.

In Kazantzakis own words,

“It is faith in yourself and a higher power as well as bravery.

It takes faith and bravery to overcome the confines of the minds and the circumstances of the season of life we appeared on this earth.

These were also his famous words:

“I know now: I do not hope for anything. I do not fear anything, I have freed myself from both the mind and the heart, I have mounted much higher, I am free. This is what I want. I want nothing more. I have been seeking freedom.

The March

Not long after we attune ourselves to these frequencies of duties that we have as people on this earth, we start to hear a calling. This is a calling coming from within and at first it is incoherent but when the time is right, it takes human form and calls you by name.

“I hear the savage cry, and I shudder. The agony that ascends within me composes itself, for the first time, into an integral human voice; it turns full face toward me and calls me clearly, with my own name, with the name of my father and my race.This is the moment of greatest crisis. This is the signal for the March to begin. If you do not hear this Cry tearing at your entrails, do not set out.Continue, with patience and submission, your sacred military service in the first, second, and third rank of preparation.And listen: In sleep, in an act of love or of creation, in a proud and disinterested act of yours, or in a profound despairing silence, you may suddenly hear the Cry and set forth.Until that moment my heart streams on, it rises and falls with the Universe. But when I hear the Cry, my emotions and the Universe are divided into two camps.

By way of life, there is an ascend and a descent. Yin and Yang. Ascending into life, light and existence and descending into death, darkness and non-existence. We come from nowhere to now here and back to nowhere.

“Which of the two eternal roads shall I choose? Suddenly I know that my whole life hangs on this decision - the life of the entire Universe.Of the two, I choose the ascending path. Why? For no intelligible reason, without any certainty; I know how ineffectual the mind and all the small certainties of man can be in this moment of crisis.

As mentioned in the Tao Te Ching, one of the verses states:

“The highest virtue does nothing. Yet, nothing needs to be done. The lowest virtue does everything. Yet, much remains to be done.

When you know what your calling is, there is ascending of your spirit without struggle. Everything becomes natural, flowing as if it was effortless, yet all is taken care of.

The spiritual path signifies the ascending path that defies the mind and its assertiveness to comply and stay within the imaginary lines.

First Step: The Ego

The concept of the ego contemplates the existence of a deep seated invisible self within us, that has ways of bending the mind to its will with the ultimate goal of severing the ties of man with its source.

Nikos Kazanantzakis writes:

“I AM NOT good, I am not innocent, I am not serene. My happiness and unhappiness are both unbearable; I am full of inarticulate voices and darknesses; I wallow, all blood and tears, in this warm trough of my flesh.I am afraid to talk. I adorn myself with false wings; I shout, I sing and I weep to drown out the inexorable cry of my heart.I am not the light, I am the night; but a flame stabs through my entrails and consumes me. I am the night devoured by light.Imperiled, moaning and staggering in darkness, I strive to shake myself free from sleep and to stand erect for a while, for as long as I can bear.A small but undaunted breath within me struggles desperately to vanquish happiness, weariness, death.

Denying our origin and adjusting to the ways of the Ego to please the wishes of the shadow self in the words of Carl Jung.

The balance between body, mind and spirit is what Kazantzakis prescribes. This is all we have and we have everything we need.

“I put my body through its paces like a war horse; I keep it lean, sturdy, prepared. I harden it and I pity it. I have no other steed.I keep my brain wide awake, lucid, unmerciful. I unleash it to battle relentlessly so that, all light, it may devour the darkness of the flesh. I have no other workshop where I may transform darkness into light.I keep my heart flaming, courageous, restless. I feel in my heart all commotions and all contradictions, the joys and sorrows of life. But I struggle to subdue them to a rhythm superior to that of the mind, harsher than that of my heart - to the ascending rhythm of the Universe.

Our struggle as human beings is to realize the workings of the Ego and identify our connection to our source. The source communicates with us and we can receive these messages if we become quiet.

“The Cry within me is a call to arms. It shouts: “I, the Cry, am the Lord your God! I am not an asylum. I am not hope and a home. I am not the Father nor the Son nor the Holy Ghost. I am your General!“You are not my slave, nor a plaything in my hands. You are not my friend, you are not my child. You are my comrade-in-arms!

It is this source that entrusts in us the fate of this world and expects us to fight alongside. This is a very different perception of God from what mainstream religion advocates and as a consequence has been criticised by Church throughout the years as being a blasphemy.

However, after reading this books I could not imagine this any different. The God that we are taught about when growing up is very controversial. We learn about an almighty God who forgives and we learn to pray for forgiveness, help, hope and for taking our troubles away. Yet at the same time there are parables that teach us not to wait for God to save us, nothings happens if just sit and wait.

This is a quite different God as he writes:

““Hold courageously the passes which I entrusted to you; do not betray them. You are in duty bound, and you may act heroically by remaining at your own battle station.“Love danger. What is most difficult? That is what I want! Which road should you take? The most craggy ascent! It is the one I also take: follow me!“Learn to obey. Only he who obeys a rhythm superior to his own is free.“Learn to command. Only he who can give commands may represent me here on earth.“Love responsibility. Say: It is my duty, and mine alone, to save the earth. If it is not saved, then I alone am to blame.’“Love each man according to his contribution in the struggle. Do not seek friends; seek comrades-in-arms.“Be always restless, unsatisfied, unconforming. Whenever a habit becomes convenient, smash it! The greatest sin of all is satisfaction.“Where are we going? Shall we ever win? What is the purpose of all this fighting? Be silent! Soldiers never question!”I stoop and listen to this war cry within me. I begin to discern the face of my Leader, to distinguish his voice, to accept harsh commands with joy and terror.Yes, yes, I am NOT nothing! A vaporous phosphorescence on a damp meadow, a miserable worm that crawls and loves, that shouts and talks about wings for an hour or two until his mouth is blocked with earth. The dark powers give no other answer.But within me a deathless Cry, superior to me, continues to shout. For whether I want to or not, I am also, without doubt, a part of the visible and the invisible Universe. We are one. The powers which labor within me, the powers which goad me on to live, the powers which goad me on to die are, without doubt, its own powers also.I am not a suspended, rootless thing in the world. I am earth of its earth and breath of its breath.I am not alone in my fear, nor alone in my hope, nor alone in my shouting. A tremendous host, an onrush of the Universe fears, hopes, and shouts with me.

Again, the false sense of being rootless and part of nothing, only belonging to the constructs of the shadow self is one of the greatest accomplishments of the Ego.

Second Step: The Race

The author talks about the concept of race. The concept or reincarnation is a device for depicting the continuous nature of man's purpose in the history of mankind. There is another cry which comes from all who came before us. They embody our passions and thoughts:

“You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.

The question then becomes how are we going to live?

Are we going to shy away from responsibility and blame our shadow self?

We are doomed to make choices as Carl Jung best put it, so why not make these choices count?

“Where are you going? How shall you confront life and death, virtue and fear? All the race takes refuge in your breast; it asks questions there and lies waiting in agony.You have a great responsibility. You do not govern now only your own small, insignificant existence. You are a throw of the dice on which, for a moment, the entire fate of your race is gambled.Everything you do reverberates throughout a thousand destinies. As you walk, you cut open and create that river bed into which the stream of your descendants shall enter and flow.When you shake with fear, your terror branches out into innumerable generations, and you degrade innumerable souls before and behind you. When you rise to a valorous deed, all of your race rises with you and turns valorous.“I am not done! I am not done!” Let this vision inflame you at every moment.You are not a miserable and momentary body; behind your fleeting mask of clay, a thousand-year-old face lies in ambush. Your passions and your thoughts are older than your heart or brain.Your invisible body is your dread ancestors and your unborn descendants. Your visible body is the living men, women, and children of your own race.

The concept of cause and effect that we associate with business, marketing and other quantifiable applications, is equally applicable in the spiritual realm as thoughts manifest themselves into things.

There is a knowing and a presence with us at all times. We get to shape our life with our thoughts. Throughs either based on love or fear.

As it was so beautifully put in The Course In Miracles:

““If you knew who walked besides you at all times, on the path that you have chosen, you could not experience fear or doubt ever again”.

Third Step: Mankind

The third step talks about the concept of mankind. The illusion of separateness amongst people of different race and colour that the Ego creates is exactly that. We need to free ourselves from these fabrications.

We overestimate our subjective attention when we focus on the external characteristics of people and begin to believe that our bodies are real in the sense that they never change.

But this is a lie. We deceive ourselves. We have been in many bodies since birth and each one is characteristically different. The author writes:

“Battle to give meaning to the confused struggles of man.Train your heart to govern as spacious an arena as it can. Encompass through one century, then through two centuries, through three, through ten, through as many centuries as you can bear, the onward march of mankind. Train your eye to gaze on people moving in great stretches of time.Immerse yourself in this vision with patience, with love and high disinterestedness, until slowly the world begins to breathe within you, the embattled begin to be enlightened, to unite in your heart and to acknowledge themselves as brothers.The heart unites whatever the mind separates, pushes on beyond the arena of necessity and transmutes the struggle into love.

Additionally, we are fixated on the ideas of seeking happiness and becoming enlightened.

What if we are looking at these backwards?

“Gather together in your heart all terrors, recompose all details. Salvation is a circle; close it!What is meant by happiness? To live every unhappiness. What is meant by light? To gaze with undimmed eyes on all darknesses.

It is a matter of perspective.

Remembering the words of Dr. Wayne Dyer:

““It is the space between the bars that holds the lion in the cage”.

Fourth Step: The Earth

The interconnectedness of body, mind and nature supersedes the artificial layers man has built. It is Mother Nature that can sustain us or make us extinct depending on how we approach this relationship. We vibrate to the frequency of this earth as we step on it. We are connected to nature and all livings things. We can listen to nature's music.

“IT IS NOT you who call. It is not your voice calling from within your ephemeral breast. It is not only the white, yellow, and black generations of man calling in your heart. The entire Earth, with her trees and her waters, with her animals, with her men and her gods, calls from within your breast.Earth rises up in your brains and sees her entire body for the first time.

Henry David Thoreau noted of this connection of man and earth during his two years and two months of living in the woods near Walden lake:

““A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

As human beings, we have power over all livings things on this planet, but this power should and must be put to constructive use not destructive.

The Vision

There is a an ultimate vision detailed in the book:

“Behind the stream of my mind and body, behind the stream of my race and all mankind, behind the stream of plants and animals, I watch with trembling the Invisible, treading on all visible things and ascending.

The Action

As one would expect theory is followed by action, otherwise it would remain just mere thoughts. There is only so much we can understand by though alone and action comes to validate and unfold the path ahead like the headlights of a car.

“THE ULTIMATE most holy form of theory is action.Not to look on passively while the spark leaps from generation to generation, but to leap and to burn with it!Action is the widest gate of deliverance. It alone can answer the questionings of the heart. Amid the labyrinthine complexities of the mind it finds the shortest route. No, it does not “find” - it creates its way, hewing to right and left through resistances of logic and matter.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOD AND MAN

Nikos Kazantzakis describes our relationship with God in what is humanly possible with the use of the twenty six letters of the alphabet.

“Our profound human duty is not to interpret or to cast light on the rhythm of God’s arch, but to adjust, as much as we can, the rhythm of our small and fleeting life to his.Only thus may we mortals succeed in achieving something immortal, because then we collaborate with One who is Deathless.Only thus may we conquer mortal sin, the concentration on details, the narrowness of our brains; only thus may we transubstantiate into freedom the slavery of earthen matter given us to mould.

This striving to encapsulate the invisible into a tangible form that we can fathom is necessary for us to evolve and ascend.

“We struggle to make this Spirit visible, to give it a face, to encase it in words, in allegories and thoughts and incantations, that it may not escape us.But it cannot be contained in the twentysix letters of an alphabet which we string out in rows; we know that all these words, these allegories, these thoughts, and these incantations are, once more, but a new mask with which to conceal the Abyss.Yet only in this manner, by confining immensity, may we labor within the newly incised circle of humanity.What do we mean by “labor”? To fill up this circle with desires, with anxieties, and with deeds; to spread out and reach frontiers until, no longer able to contain us, they crack and collapse. By thus working with appearances, we widen and increase the essence.For this reason our return to appearances, after our contact with essence, possesses an incalculable worth.We have seen the highest circle of spiraling powers. We have named this circle God. We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence.

The God that Kazantzakis envisions is not almighty but fighting alongside us:

“It is not God who will save us - it is we who will save God, by battling, by creating, and by transmuting matter into spirit.

This is further reflected in the way that the writer prays:

“My prayer is not the whimpering of a beggar nor a confession of love. Nor is it the trivial reckoning of a small tradesman: Give me and I shall give you.My prayer is the report of a soldier to his general: This is what I did today, this is how I fought to save the entire battle in my own sector, these are the obstacles I found, this is how I plan to fight tomorrow.

Out journey on this earth is a service to God:

“Life is a crusade in the service of God. Whether we wished to or not, we set out as crusaders to free - not the Holy Sepulchre - but that God buried in matter and in our souls.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MAN AND MAN

The 2nd relationship to be understood is that between human beings:

“We, as human beings, are all miserable persons, heartless, small, insignificant. But within us a superior essence drives us ruthlessly upward.Humanity is such a lump of mud, each one of us is such a lump of mud. What is our duty? To struggle so that a small flower may blossom from the dunghill of our flesh and mind.Out of things and flesh, out of hunger, out of fear, out of virtue and sin, struggle continually to create God.

THE RELATIONSHIP MAN AND NATURE

Last but not least is the relationship between man and nature.

“ALL THIS WORLD, all this rich, endless flow of appearances is not a deception, a multicolored phantasmagoria of our mirroring mind. Nor is it absolute reality which lives and evolves freely, independent of our mind’s power.

THE SILENCE

Finally, silence is where you will find God. Silence cannot be divided and inherently has a divine nature.

In his closing paragraphs Nikos Kazantzakis remains unconventional and uncompromising in his choice of words:

“Every person, ascending above and beyond his own head, escapes from his small brain, so crammed with perplexities.Within profound Silence, erect, fearless, in pain and in play, ascending ceaselessly from peak to peak, knowing that the height has no ending, sing this proud and magical incantation as you hang over the Abyss:I BELIEVE IN ONE GOD, DEFENDER OF THE BORDERS, OF DOUBLE DESCENT, MILITANT, SUFFERING, OF MIGHTY BUT NOT OF OMNIPOTENT POWERS, A WARRIOR AT THE FARTHEST FRONTIERS, COMMANDER-IN-CHIEF OF ALL THE LUMINOUS POWERS, THE VISIBLE AND THE INVISIBLE.I BELIEVE IN THE INNUMERABLE, THE EPHEMERAL MASKS WHICH GOD HAS ASSUMED THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES, AND BEHIND HIS CEASELESS FLUX I DISCERN AN INDESTRUCTIBLE UNITY.I BELIEVE IN HIS SLEEPLESS AND VIOLENT STRUGGLE WHICH TAMES AND FRUCTIFIES THE EARTH AS THE LIFE-GIVING FOUNTAIN OF PLANTS, ANIMALS, AND MEN.I BELIEVE IN MAN’S HEART, THAT EARTHEN THRESHING-FLOOR WHERE NIGHT AND DAY THE DEFENDER OF THE BORDERS FIGHTS WITH DEATH.O LORD, YOU SHOUT: “HELP ME! HELP ME!” YOU SHOUT, O LORD, AND I HEAR.WITHIN ME ALL FOREFATHERS AND ALL DESCENDANTS, ALL RACES AND ALL EARTH HEAR YOUR CRY WITH JOY AND TERROR.BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO HEAR AND RUSH TO FREE YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: “ONLY YOU AND I EXIST.”BLESSED BE ALL THOSE WHO FREE YOU AND BECOME UNITED WITH YOU, LORD, AND WHO SAY: “YOU AND I ARE ONE.”AND THRICE BLESSED BE THOSE WHO BEAR ON THEIR SHOULDERS AND DO NOT BUCKLE UNDER THIS GREAT, SUBLIME, AND TERRIFYING SECRET:THAT EVEN THIS ONE DOES NOT EXIST!

The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises is fascinating in the ways it approaches this multi-dimensional subject of meaning and life and is worth reading and drawing your own interpretations of it. Complement it with The Course In Miracles that also explains the meaning of  our journey and the ways to come closer to nature and essential living as described in Walden.

One of the most influential, innovative and disruptive people of our time has undoubtedly been Steve Jobs.

As commented by Walter Isaacson in Time Magazine,

“Steve Jobs revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. You might add a seventh: retailing, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. Along the way, he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who will carry forward his visions.”

His commencement speech at the Stanford University in 2005 unravels some of his thinking and the meaning he attached to life events. His speech is one of the most shared speeches online and for good reason. If you have read his biography, you surely know that his unconventional thinking and strong personality have allowed him to make choices and decisions outside of what everyone else called common sense.

Thinking differently and taking action has been two key elements of Steve Job's decision making and thinking. He knew exactly what he wanted and was determined to get it.

After listening to his speech again after his death, I can see clearly his unwithering belief in his choices and the model of the world he had in his mind. Making a dent in the universe and leaving his mark upon it has been some of his driving forces.

It is fascinating to listen what drives a person and how they have accomplished everything in their life.

Τhis is a fascinating speech and you can derive valuable lessons on public speaking as well. There is a theme of birth/death/rebirth as rightly pointed out by Andrew Dulgan in his post Ethos, Pathos, Logos: 3 Pillars of Public Speaking.

However, I have broken down his last words in what I believe it to be eight life lessons that emerge from his stories that we can all relate to and incorporate into our life.

8 LIFE LESSONS I LEARNED FROM STEVE JOBS

1. Connectedness

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. - Steve Jobs

In his opening story, Steve talked about connecting the dots. We have been conditioned by society to believe that most events in our life are unrelated, and there is no connection whatsoever. Only when those events are aligned to what we have envisioned, then we call it luck.

We have been told not to believe in coincidences and be realistic. The truth though is that everything that happens in our life, we have created with our thinking.

Nothing happens without thought.

We are so much connected to this world that is unfathomable. As Carl Jung spoke first about the Synchronicity and the Collective Unconscious, there is a connection of non-casual events that we call coincidence.

One reason that it is hard to believe that such connectedness exists is because we have lost touch with nature in the most literal sense.

With our shoes and cars and modern constructed houses, we rarely touch the earth these days. Grounding has been one of the ways that our bodies connected with the energies of the earth and shielded us from any disease. The influx of negative ions entering the body through the K1 acupressure point at the soles of our feet mobilizes our blood and stops blood cells from sticking to each other.

On a more internal level, we have neurons all over our body with the highest concentration in the gut. It is, therefore, no coincidence that we have a gut feeling about things.

When reflecting on your life so far, think about what you learned that can be used as a guide for your future. If you look into those memories that might be painful as well, you can draw incredible lessons for your present moment.

When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us.  Alexander Graham BellMuch of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Steve Jobs

2. Perseverance

Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. - Steve Jobs

There are numerous times in your weeks, months or years that life will throw a curveball and get you off track. You should nurture the strength of your spirit so that you can persevere in situations you can't predict or control.

As Brendon Bruchard has said, visualize yourself not only achieving what you desire but also the moments that you feel weak. It is in those moments of being in denial or lost or not feeling like doing what you know to be true.

You need to get yourself in a state where you have overcome or stayed the course in your mind. So when it appears in real life, you know what to do or at least you know that not showing up is not an option.

I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.... Unless you have a lotof passion about this, you're not going to survive. You're going to give it up. So you've got to have an idea, or a problem or a wrong that you want to right that you're passionate about; otherwise, you're not going to have the perseverance to stick it through.― Steve Jobs

3. Life Purpose

You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.  - Steve Jobs

Our modern schooling system is more consumed with educating and cramming more information into our kids heads from an even younger age each year and leaving less space for self-expression. This system inevitably leads to a postponing of the inevitable question of why you are here.

After you finish school and you get into the workforce, somewhere along that path you are faced with questions. Questions that you have only answered to others on a superficial level, thus creating an identity for you that is ok and acceptable to society.

A great speech I watched the other day was from Adam Leipzig's TED Talk on Finding your Life Purpose. This speech also inspired me to create a short motivational video on Life Purpose, which you can view here.

Adam Leipzig helps everyone define their Life Purpose as a statement that excites you and inspires others. You don't have to become Dalai Lama, but you have to take the time and write down your thoughts.

There are five questions you can to ask yourself now and come up with your Life Purpose in the next five minutes.

1. Who You Are?

2. What You Do?

3. Who You Do It For?

4. What Those People Want And Need?

5. How They Changed As A Result?

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. ― Eleanor Roosevelt

4. Meaning

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. - Steve Jobs

Every morning we are all equally granted the amount of 86000 seconds in our personal bank account. Everyone gets the same. The question is how to spend your seconds?

Do you wake up excited, looking forward to your day or are you dreading every second of it?

This reminds me of the movie Groundhog Day. You have nowhere else to go, so you might as well do something.

If you don't change your thoughts and subsequently your actions, your day and your life is not going to change.

It is essential to start creating your ideal environment in your head, even before you get up from your bed. Start visualizing while lying down, your life in what would be ideal for you. Feel how you feel, what you smell, notice the colors and the people you are with. Visualization is amazing as part of priming yourself for the day.

A great exercise is to set a timer for every 50 minutes throughout the day and check on yourself. What are your thoughts, what are you telling yourself? Notice the words, the tone and repetitiveness of what you affirm to yourself. Then replace the words and tone with something positive that will put you on a totally different mindset and path.

5. Freedom

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." - Steve Jobs

You've got to free yourself from fear. As Alan Watts used to say, worrying about death is completely absurd, because once you are dead you will have nothing to worry about.

We all have a part of the brain called Amygdala that is responsible for keeping us safe. We have managed to program our subconscious brain to respond the same way to what you wouldn't call actual threats, such as giving a speech or being late for work.

These events are almost never a single incident that will cause us to cease to exist, but it is more a chain of events that feel like a 1000 cuts. The actuality of such chain of events leading up to our death is highly unlikely and that is where we need to consciously step in and start asking Why going 5 times deep. This will instantly clear out any fears and set us free from dogma, pride and expectations from our environment.

Try it, it is awesome. It is very likely that the barriers and worries originate from you, but it is a truth you have to accept and carry on. Accepting yourself and being able to learn from your mistakes will set you free.

“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”  ― Gloria Steinem

6. Change

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away." - Steve Jobs

Be at peace with life. Change is omnipotent in nature. The change of the seasons, the birth of new life and the end of another. Nothing stays still or stagnant although it may feel like that at times. Just remember what you did or where you were 10 years ago or even a year ago. Everything keeps changing all the time.

The issue lies in our perception of change. Our society is moving at a frenzy pace, promoting a culture of living in the future. No time for reflection of the past is allocated and living in the present is not trendy. Yet all you have available is the present moment.

I believe that one of the reasons we are so afraid of death is not so much that things will change but more that we won't have done or said or been everything we wanted while we were alive.

It is the fear of regret.

So, embrace change every moment of your day and ask yourself, If I died today, would I be at peace?

If the answer is no, go do the things you want now. You have the permission you need.

Just do it.

7. Social Conformity

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs

You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with as Jim Rohn used to say. You are your environment. The minute you take the time to listen to your inner voice and realize that your decisions and actions may be a sum of the opinions of the people around you and not a true reflection of your inner world, your life will change.

These days there is a new condition called Social Anxiety. It is used to describe the anxiety caused by social interaction and fear of being judged by others. This is a common problem for most people these days and something I've seen with my clients. The fear of being judged by your family, friends, co-workers is enough is to stop any thought, dream or concept dead in its tracks.

You have the power to change your life and design it exactly as you want. Don't be a clone. You were born unique and amazing in your own right and you have the right to be here.

Who are you?

What do you really love to do? If you google it, you will certainly find others that are already doing what you think is unattainable.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.” ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

8. Innocence

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." - Steve Jobs

Everybody loves the innocence of children and their unwithering strength and determination. However, when we grow up and as we are growing up, we hear phrases from adults like, Be realistic, Grow Up, stop acting like a child. It doesn't take long before we have blocked our imagination and stopped trying.

It is exactly what they do to elephants when they are babies. They tie them to a big heavy chain and no matter how hard and long the elephants try, they can't free themselves. As they grow up, they have lost the hope and will to try and all they use on them is a tiny rope.

As someone has said, adults ask children what they want to be when they grow up, so they can get ideas. It is difficult to be original and creative in a society that wants you to be realistic and compliant, but it is not impossible.

"All things truly wicked start from innocence." - Ernest Hemingway

Steve Jobs Commencement Speech

Welcome to Neural Impulse. This is my weekly newsletter starting with ideas resulting in connected thought.

Writing

I just finished an intense 6-week writing course called Write of Passage. I learned a lot about writing online and made new friends. If you want to start writing online check it out.

Thoughts and Insights This Week

This week I've been thinking about the concept of personal sovereignty. This is defined in Wikipedia, as, "the concept of property in one's own person, expressed as the moral or natural right of a person to have bodily integrity and be the exclusive controller of one's own body and life."

The definition is clear. In pandemic times, however, the "I" is obscured with "we". There is an effort to associate self-ownership with far-right movements, conspiracy theories and disregard for collective public health. In the article "Personal sovereignty in pandemics" on OpenDemocrary, the author argues that any advice supporting natural immune response is contrary to the collective good and irresponsible.

For believers, the sovereign body is the body in a “pure” state, not reliant on chemicals to heal, and trusted to fire up its own immune response when confronted with a virus – even a novel one like Covid-19”. In the EU context, one striking example is offered by the founder and CEO of the organic food producer Rapunzel, one of the largest on the European natural foods market, who has publicly described viruses as a ‘part of the earth’s biological life’, contributing to the development of the latter, as too of the human anatomy and psyche.In his words, healthy food is far more important than masks and social distancing measures. Such prescriptions for re-claiming sovereignty over individual health have gone hand in hand with the stoking of anti-vaccination sentiments, in Germany as too in other national contexts. The focus on individual agency and responsibility comes, indeed, with the denial of public health as a collective good (and responsibility).

The disinformation playbook used in the 1950s by the tobacco industry using the tactics of  "fear, uncertainty and doubt", has been put in use by the media during the past 2 years resulting in a divide.

I wrote about my reasons for becoming Vegan back in 2012 and my personal testimony on the power of the human body and the immune system. You can check out my post  "Why are you Vegan?". 

What do you think?

Graph of the week - Expectation vs Reality

Every week I stumble upon a photo or a design that makes me think. This week I was looking at a design by Jack Butcherover at Visualize Value who creates amazing minimalist designs based on quotes or ideas.

We have an irrational expectation of any endeavour to be a straight line. It's not. It is more like a maze.

Tweets Worth Reading

@jordanbpeterson: “If you encounter a system that’s very unfair, you can complain about the unfairness...Or you can say, “It may be unfair, but I’m going to play the cards I’ve been dealt as well as I can.” That’s something over which you have a tremendous amount of control.” - @BretWeinstein https://t.co/CCF5KIR58c (View Tweet)

@ShaneAParrish: What goes in your mind today is what you think tomorrow. (View Tweet)

Coolest Thing I learned

Recommended Reading

• On the 10 year anniversary of Steve Jobs's death, I read a post by Jason Fried on "Idea Protectionism" worth reading.

• Holding your own true opinion is not easy.

"Doing the work required to hold an opinion means you can argue against yourself better than others can." — The Work Required to Hold an Opinion

I’m waiting in line to order lunch at one of the five restaurants inside the UK Parliament, before I have to sprint across the estate to get to my next meeting. My colleague is looking at the daily specials. Jerked chicken with rice. “That’s what I’m having”, he utters, looking my way salivating. “Are you having the same?”, he asks.

This is the point where I am forced to make use of labels. I don’t like labels. They put people in boxes. Even worse, they become part of your identity. In an effort not to sound weird, I look at my colleague and reply, “No, I’m Vegan”. Usually, I get different types of responses, ranging from ignorance to ridicule. In this instance, my colleague proceeds with, “are you sick?” and this is where I have a trigger ready short answer for this comeback.

The Short Answer

The easiest way to answer the question is to say, I do it for health reasons and because I want to save the planet. In this way I manage to get labeled a Vegan and a tree hugger.

I realized over the years that for most people’s idea of health is one-dimensional. Some think about the body, some think about the mind and few about the whole. This answer covers everyone.

The true answer is that I want to be the best version of myself, in a holistic sense and inspire others to do the same for themselves. Veganism is one of the frameworks to get there. In the dictionary there are two definitions for Veganism.

veganism

noun

1. The practice of eating neither meat nor other animal products, such as fish, milk and milk products, eggs, and honey.

2. A way of life which strictly avoids use of any kind of animal products and services that are based on exploitation of animals.

That’s not how it started for me 10 years ago when I became Vegan but I guess I made a decision to embrace non-violence through my food choices and gradually find alternatives to animal by-products where possible.

In addition to the above, something I heard recently that resonates with me on being Vegan is from actress Teressa Palmer. She said, “I just decided I don’t want to add to any more suffering in the world, including suffering of any sentient beings.”

Veganism is not just another fad diet. It is a shift in consciousness. As Henry David Thoreau said years ago, "I have no doubt that it is part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual development, to leave off the eating of animals."

Product of my Environment

While I do have a short answer, the story of why I became Vegan is more involved.I spent the first 25 years of my life following all the culturally accepted systems. The school system, the medical system, the religious belief system that was accepted in the region I grew up in. I grew up with antibiotics, had every vaccine mandated by my country and took Panadol like candy when I felt I was getting sick. I used to regurgitate all the expressions, like “I caught a cold” or “I caught a bug” or “I’m coming down with something.” At the same time I was left feeling like an addict, dependent on modern medicine for my survival and that answers were somewhere outside of me.

I was trapped, as in my mind there were no alternatives, but every now and then I would see something or read something that gave me permission to re-visit and question inherited beliefs, like this quote from Rolling Thunder.

"People have given their health to their doctor. Their money to their banker. Their soul to the preacher. Their children to the school system. And in doing so.. Have lost their power to control their lives."

There was truth in these lines for me, as I felt like most people do, that we know nothing. Who are you to talk about anything? You’re not a doctor, you’re not a teacher, you’re not a priest, you’re not an expert.

My sense of being useless growing up was being affirmed by my environment but that was ok as everyone around me felt the same and I had company in my miserable comfort zone.

Reliving The Past

Fast forward a few years later. I’m 29 years old, still following the system like a good citizen. I’m working in London and it is during the swine flu epidemic. The fear mongering from the media, combined with long commute times and stress at work, results in me falling very ill. My fever was spiking and every breath felt like a punch in my chest. I was afraid to breathe. My wife was pregnant and I was scared not to get her sick as well.

I took a taxi to the accident and emergency unit at our local hospital. As I waited there for four hours to be seen by someone, I was feeling horrible and overcome with fear for my life. When I finally got to see the doctor and got an examination, I was shocked to hear that I had no infection and that I just needed rest. I was so confused. I was sure that I had a virus or something that was wreaking havoc in my body. Being sick was part of life and a yearly phenomenon in my mind.

The Turning Point

One night our son was crying so loud and I couldn’t hear a thing. My wife, frustrated and exhausted, punched me on the shoulder and I rolled over and fell off the bed.

The sleepless nights, combined with a daily four hour commute to London and bad diet led to me being ever more useless than I already felt. I wasn’t able to be there for my wife and son and didn’t have the energy for anything else.

That was the defining moment for me, as I was upset enough with myself to do something about it. I started thinking that there is more to the story that we are not being told and I wasn’t going to wait for permission any longer.

Back then there were mostly books and not many documentaries on healthy eating. These days documentaries like “Game Changers” have been enough for people to switch or at least try a Vegan diet.

I started researching online about ways to increase my energy naturally. I had already felt the side effects of too many Red Bulls and four hour caffeine boosters. After a few days of searching online, I stumbled upon a guy named Tony Robbins. I found a program he had created called “Living Health”. It was six CDs. I listened. I took notes. I listened to the program 2-3 times and everything clicked and made sense. He talked about dairy and meat and detoxifying your body.

I started thinking about how many things we do for our car to keep it running but we don’t realize that our body is a far more advanced machine that needs maintenance and downtime too.

Listening to Tony, I was in some sense, re-affirming the thoughts and beliefs I had deep inside but could not discuss or contemplate with my family or circle of influence.

On 6th July 2012, I put the first raw broccoli in my mouth. I started eating raw foods only. I went cold turkey on coffee and diet sodas. Within seven days I had so much energy from eating raw foods, that my eye gaze widened and I felt unstoppable, without drinking Red Bull or coffee.

I stopped having brain fog, which resulted in me being more present when spending quality time with my wife and son. I lost 20kg of weight and I started regaining my childlike optimism for life.

The next 12 months that followed, myself, my wife and our one year old, had all been eating raw, organic food and drank green juices.

Something else profound happened in that first year. My chronic high blood pressure disappeared. Also, my overall stress and anxiety diminished significantly.

The most amazing change was that I stopped being sick. No runny nose in the winter, no fever, no coughing. Nothing. I started learning about energy lines in the body called meridians and how to balance the energy through Qi Qong exercises.

We threw out all the Panadol and sick medicine and for the last 10 years we haven’t been sick not even once.

Being Vegan has allowed me to think clearer and allow my body to repair itself and be a great vehicle for me to experience life. Try it for a week, you will be happily surprised.

Happy New Year!

Last night I couldn’t sleep and somehow I ended up on substack reading a post by Michael Dean, an amazing writer and editor I’ve worked with and value his input and analysis.

The post was called “Substack or Bust”. 

Michael managed in 10 minutes to answer all the same arguments I had in my head for a long time.

I went to sleep and the next morning, I started thinking what is the shortest path to transferring my content over to Substack without worrying about anything else.

Another contributing factor was that, over the Christmas period, I realized I hadn’t posted anything on my Ghost blog for months.

After reading a blog post by Jason Fried, the creator of Basecamp, explaining how he never set up a personal blog, as it felt too formal, I realized I had similar barriers. I wasn’t posting because I was waiting to write something worthy of my blog. Of course, you can’t do that If you never write in the first place.

I decided to move my posts over to Hey World that is a free blogging service provided as part the hey.com email that I use.

This helped me start writing and publishing again as it is just like writing an email.

There were still some things that bothered me.

There is no custom domain option at the moment so the URL is long and funny to remember world.hey.com/pskaronis and there is no commenting option. If someone wants to comment, they have to reply back to your post via email or comment on twitter.

I did set up a basic HTML/CSS page on Github Pages that acts as profile page and subscribe form for my Hey World blog and it works fine.

You can check it out here.

There is no search option, or tags or categories, so after a while you have to go next, next, next page to find something.

Finally, you don’t have the cross-promotion that is happening on substack.

My biggest pain is that I am tired of writing in a vacuum.

So, I will start cross-posting on substack as an experiment and review after a few months.

I will keep writing on Hey World as it helps me focus and re-post on Substack. Hey World will also serve as my personal archive and as minimal mirror version of this blog, if you prefer to read posts there.

Subscribe to my Hey World Blog

Sometimes, It can get overwhelming trying to read something on substack, especially if you have a lot of subscriptions.

There is a small SEO caveat though with that approach, as substack links will take priority as they don’t allow configuring canonical links from other blogs.

So, back to Substack.

Substack allows you to have your own domain for a one-off $50 fee which is nothing compared to paying for Ghost $108/year minimum as Michael mentioned in his post.

The next thing is the design. If you suffer from ADHD like me at times, having too many options makes progress difficult. Luckily, with Substack you get only 3 themes and these are around structure mostly.

Over the next few days, I will be transferring my content over to substack and start sending out a weekly newsletter.

I keep track of everything I learn during the week in my Obsidian Second Brain and share the best of what I’ve learned or connections I made that you might find useful.

See you soon!