“Your Worst Enemy”

For years, I’ve been struggling with an enemy. An enemy that I’ve been fighting the greatest battle in my life from the day that I had the conscious mind up to the present, an enemy that I figured every single one of us have. This enemy is what I call…

“The Devil”.

Do you any have an idea of what I’m talking about? Well the devil is the still small voice in the back of your head that's always whispering the words, “You can't.” The worst part is, you know the devil. You may think you hate it, but you actually love it. You let it control you like a robot and you do just about everything it says. Every time there's something you desire for yourself, you consult the devil first, to see if it will say, “You can or can't have that.”

To support this, I have read some works from Steven Press Field who first wrote in his book a few years ago. He said that there is a “resistance”, within every human being that tells you that it will never work, Steven’s theory of resistance is extremely useful because it shed the light on the difficult problem that creates doubts, and fears. It will always force you to think the other way around hindering you from pursuing a greater and a more productive life.

Unfortunately, what you don't realize is that it doesn't know anything about you. It's dumb and an idiot. It's nothing but a bird, repeating back to you anything negative. Anything that makes you hopeless, hurt, and defeated. Sucking up all the potential that you have in order to live the life that you’ve wanted for yourself.
If a person once told you “You'll never accomplish anything,” it was listening; it hoards words like that and repeats them back to you until you’re exhausted. It doesn't know what its saying. It doesn't care.

Listening to this small voice is the ultimate source of why people fail. Now, you might think, how about the successful people do they have it? Well of course they do. Although as a matter of fact I don’t believe there are terms such as “successful” and “unsuccessful” people. What I believe however is that there are two types of people. First, are the people who recognize their potential and “TAKE ACTION” about it, and the people who recognize their potential and then do “NOTHING” about it.

This is the truth of what separates the few who “take action” and succeed, from the masses that stumble, fall and ultimately surrender.

There’s a physiological explanation in the brain to this resistance-your amygdala. The amygdala is located near the brain stem. It’s responsible for anger, revenge, sex, survival and fear. When the amygdala is activated, when it feels threatened, when there’s a sense that people might actually laugh at you, it takes over. It’s the one that leads you to distractions.

And so the resistance kicks in. How does it actually play “the devil”?

The devil finds excuses, it makes tasks either overly complex or oversimplifies that you fail. It uses phrases like, “see, I told you it would never work.” It is also responsible for giving you an even better idea just before you finish this one, that leads you to accomplish nothing… in fact, it will do anything it can to prevent you from “Taking Action”.

This resistance sabotaged my life for so long. It trapped in the 4 corners of a box, that I sometimes lose control of myself. And in the end, I found myself regretful and disappointed, repeatedly saying to myself the line “IF ONLY”. If only I say this, if only I made this decision, If only I do this and that then my life would be much better.

The resistance is powerful, so powerful that all the shortcuts, time savers and focusing tools are powerless. As we are all aware, the web is filled with different techniques, methods and list that offer to help you in your battle to “defeat the devil”. But unfortunately because the content are practical, polite, and calm. .None of them are working for you because you may NOT be serious about actually defeating the resistance.

Its fun to procrastinate and comforting to complain...

Now you know its name. Now you know how it sneaks in under the radar and sounds quite sensible as it undermines your work and compromises your vision.
The challenge then, is that YOU must DEFEAT the enemy. You need to seek and find a purpose SO IMPORTANT that it is worth overcoming your fears. SO IMPORTANT that yes, you are willing to go through all the hoops, have a bloody war if necessary until you defeat it. And WIN.

First Breath....(Blog Prospectus)

To start off, I was really struck with the powerful yet inspiring words pointed out by Kenneth Burke in our book “They say/I say”. He strongly believes that we are social well beings deeply connected to each other. To be a better writer, we should be able to “put ourselves in the shoes of other people” listen, respect and engage in conversations for it will help us to step out of our comfort zones, possibly change our minds and become a better person. And this criterion is what I found in the community that I was planning to join.

Lifehack.org is the community that I’m passionate to be a part of. Well basically now they rebranded it with what is called Stepcase Lifehack, a new stepcase’s flagship brand, religiously providing thousands and thousands of readers on a daily basis with the best personal development, productivity, life organization blogs and article content available both online and offline the web.

I did some research on this community and found out that Lifehack.org had grown far beyond compared to when they started. It is now a Technorati Top 100 with less than 70,000 subscribers. To name some of the blogs included in the top rank I’ve been reading lately were; Ririanproj,The Lazy Way to Success, Slacker Manager, StevePavlina.com, Dumb Little Man, GTD Wannabe,43 Folders, Your Life. Organized and so much more. After honoring my vision of personal productivity at Lifehack.org, I looked to the next piece of the of the bigger picture. I strongly believe the content in Lifehack.org is a great and useful tool to show people tips, practical techniques, as well as different psychological methods and meditations for self improvement focusing on personal productivity, motivation, and self education. The community’s goal is to help people get the most of what life has to offer!

To emphasize on the main essence of this subject, it may be worth going back to a very simple question: "why be productive?"

In support of this, based on The Little Book of Productivity written by Scott Young points out that by becoming aware of the “specific reasons”, you will be naturally motivated to be and stay productive instead of falling into lazy habits and procrastinations. A lot of people have benefited from the experiences of many on this community that have provided the site with their “hacks”. It’s fun, easy to manage and makes life a little easier to handle. Personally, sometimes I get caught in the “receiving comfort zone”, waiting for the next hack to be posted to change my life.

But thinking about the word “life hack” makes me realize that I shouldn’t be consistently stuck-up in this “receiving comfort zone”, which is why I am looking forward about this privilege to give back in this community. My goal as a psychology major passionate in helping people, is to write blogs in a free writing way hoping to share my own personal experiences, true stories of other people that can relate to the situation that everyone of us are somehow facing in reality. I hope to give and develop techniques regarding managing their emotions, to achieve inner balance and physical vitality, enjoy love and intimacy with their family and friends in a greater way, and to experience inner peace of mind and personal growth.

Again, a hack is not an uplifting solution that carefully solves people’s problems. A hack is something fast to get the job done in less time. Desiring to seek for reliability and efficiency is not the true essence of a hack and therefore this is one of the foreseeable issues that I might point out regarding this community. I have actually read a certain blog that’s called the “Anti Hacks” which on the other hand argued that sometimes our problems require more than life hacks, our lives don’t necessarily need optimization but they need to be fundamentally reconfigured. Anti-hacks attempt to find solutions to problems by approaching them at a higher level of thinking.

“A hack is like a journey into uncertainty”.

It’s learning to do something in a way unintended with certain limitations. It’s engaging reality that makes it far from the ideal. Developing a hack is not the most efficient way, but we may eventually see that it is a better way.