Alex Karasyov

fight club by gevorkyan

Total Read Time: 4 Minutes
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Who were you?
When you were a kid in school, which role did you take up? Were you the big bully? Were you the little weirdo who had some “weird” hobby or clothing style that nobody liked? What was it about you that defined your position in the model of society that was the school classroom and the school yard? May be you were that one kid with free mind that everybody loved, or may be everybody hated. But is that who you truly were? Does it play a big role in who you truly are?

Those years in school, we are put in the situation where we don’t have a choice not to be there. Isn’t that counter productive? Isn’t not making choices a self fulfilling prophecy. The greatest minds, people that everyone respects, are people who have made a great distinction in their mind. The great distinction is nothing complicated, it is quite simple. Everything that you do is a choice. This is a very simple and powerful concept.

Who are you?
We all think back to who we were. Who we were in school, at out first job, on the first date with that girl that we had feelings for, what our parents told us we will become (or not). We all remember, we all know what it looks like. And by all I really mean all of us. Even the biggest bully and the greatest nerd. The bum on the street remembers who he was just as much the millionaire. We all think the same ways. Everyone of us. So why are we so different?

Can you choose what you think? Pause. Are you thinking about it? Stop. No really, stop!

Look where you are.

As you read this, remember one thing – your are not your mind. Just like your hands and legs your mind is just a part of your body. Your mind is there, and your mind reacts to millions of chemical reactions that are going on all the time. And guess what. You can control it. You can control which part of your mind is active and which is passive. You can choose what you see in this world and what you can’t. This is your choice, nobody else can choose this for you.

So what is this article about? This part is called “Who are you?”. Do you think this article can tell you who you are? It can’t. Do you think someone can tell you who you are? Nobody can! No one! Except one person, and that person is you. Everything goes back to choice that you make. The choice that you make right now.

Who will you be?
As I am writing this I am sitting in the hotel room in Varadero, Cuba. My nose hurts. Why? I got punched in the club last night. This made me think about fear. Why are we constantly afraid of something or someone? The pain in my nose is telling me not to do what I did last night. It is an alert in my mind screaming “Danger!” Last night my choices were challenged. I have chosen along time ago to restrain myself from any form of unnecessary physical violence. I have chosen last night to have as much fun as I could. I have chosen to give everything good that I have to all people around me. Last night these things were taken away from me with a simple punch.

And isn’t this funny? These things happen to everyone. It may not be in the form of physical violence, and it may not be directly effecting you. But these things happen. They can make you antisocial, they can make you introverted, they can make make you feel down. And you know what? That is fine. It is nothing more then the reaction of your body. In the end, nothing has changed. The essence of who you are remains the same. Not good, not bad, and simply beautiful.

When these things happen to you, when you are hurt, your body creates an enormous amount of energy. That energy can be completely under your control. You just have to direct it. This may be the very root of creativity. You hear those stories about artists, musicians living in a lot of pain (at least a part of their life). More common are stories of business men and spiritual teachers who talk about difficulties that they had in their life. All this energy generated and directed on something they want. And you know what? You are no different. We all have hands and legs. We all have a mind. No one in this world has mental power to do something that others can’t.

So? Who will you be? Which choices are you making as you read this? Which choices are you going to make after? How much of your energy are you going to direct inward, and how much outward? Think about the beauty of every moment of you life and do make the choice.

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PS – “Don’t Let Anyone Ever Make You Afraid” – quoting one of my favorite singers David Coverdale.

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Total read time: 1 Minute.
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This entire blog post was inspired by a conversation I had with my friend Mike about a ringtone I had put on my iPhone. My friend told me “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”. He implied that there was no point in getting a new ringtone. What does this mean? Stability? Just because the old boring ringtone works great I should not change it to a more exciting one? Of course this is a very trivial case. However, this case has started a thinking process in my mind about the origin of comments like this.

Think about everything that has changed throughout our history. Were horses and carriages broken? Were telegrams a big a problem? Were film cameras broken? I think the answer to these questions is no. None of these things needed any fixing. But they were replaced, much like my old ringtone. We have cars & airplanes. We have cell phones and Skype. We have digital cameras that never require any film whatsoever. We have tons of technology that we use today that was not developed to fix anything in particular. make seemingly simple tasks even simpler.

What does all of this mean? If we assume that a lot of people have this strategy: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it”, then we have a lot of people are comfortable with what exists, no matter how inconvenient it might be. There is nothing wrong with being comfortable with what is available, in fact most of people really lack this comfort about the most important things in their life. What really is a problem is not seeking improvement. Not seeking new solutions for the old problems. If we had this approach we would never have any of the amazing technology that we have today. We would never have made any progress in any social or natural sciences. I think that a trivial case, like enhancing your ringtone on your phone can give you an inspiration to change something much more important. It’s about creating new, better, experiences, rather then fixing the old ones.

“Anything that is done can be done better”

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