Regurgitated learning

There are countless examples of phrases that are engrained into our rule-making world.

We sheepingly follow them like commandments even though they weren't on the tablets Moses brought down from Mount Sinai.

When it comes to rules. There is one constant. There are no rules. Or as Lexus pointed out in a recent commercial, "rules weren't made for the exceptional, they were written by them".

I sit in a lot of business meetings where highly intelligent people regurgitate the same rules they read in a book or learned in a classroom.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel.
If you conceive it and believe it, you can achieve it.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing.
It's not about the product you sell. It's about the experience you offer.

On their own, all of those sentences make sense. But so what. What is the real learning behind each of them.

Can I learn from them?
Can I expand on them?
Can I break them?

Rules are accepted until someone breaks them and makes our lives better. We then all realize the rule wasn't true.

Cars couldn't be built in 73 minutes, until Ford figured it out.
Men couldn't fly until the Wright Brothers showed us otherwise.
Cars can't fly until someone figures out that George Jetson wasn't just a cartoon.

Automated learning can be done by robots and computers. We've been taught to read something, learn about it and then regurgitate it as knowledge. We don't need knowledge. That's why we have Google.

We have to be greater than Google.

We have to ask the hard questions. We have to get deeper in our understanding. We have to come up with new innovations. Google doesn't come up with innovations. The people behind Google do.

Here's my point.

The next time you are faced with an automatic response, ask yourself one question, "Do I know this statement to be true OR am I regurgitating something I was told.

A hate letter

I wake up every morning and look at you. Not knowing what role you play in my life, I wonder why you're still here?

I think you're lying to me.

Or do you tell me things I don't want to hear?
Words roll around my head, "Isn't that the definition of a friend?"

Without emotion, you just say it the way you see it. Actually it's so matter of fact that it pisses me off.

I've asked you to sugar coat your message.
You never do.

I've ignored you. And you were waiting for me when I was ready to come back.
I've yelled and swore at you. You always listened calmly and non judgemental.

I hate you.  You've been in my life for 20 years. I think I hated you the first day I saw you.

Why did I stick around so long?
Was it hate masked as love?
Or was it necessity?
Who knows?

All I know is I've had enough. You stopped talking to me. You stopped listening.

It's been two chilly weeks. I cannot stand this coldness anymore. Today is the day I'm kicking you to the curb. You are garbage to me.

I'm getting a younger, sexier model.

Can't wait to bring her home and show the kids.

I hope the new set of bathroom scales won't be a bitch like you were.

No fault insurance

We are living in the age of no-fault society.

The insurance companies taught us that there are times when no one is actually at fault for an accident. But we know that's not true. It's always someone else's fault. It couldn't be us. Could it?

Everything happens to us.. It has to be someone else's fault. As we look at where to point our blame, we are forgetting to take responsibility for our own actions.

Our society is walking backwards. Evolution and technology haven't given us eyes in the back of heads yet. We have to fall down eventually. And when we do, it's gonna hurt the entire race.

Lack of responsibility is a lack of competence. We are not born with this competence. We are taught it by our parents and teachers.

Depending on our experiences, each of us have a different level of emotional competence to accept responsibility.

Hot coffee burns.
Do we have to be told to be careful?
We do if we don't have the emotional competence to accept the results of our actions.

It's easier to blame another person, an event, or a thing for the resulting damage to ourselves.

In every great story, there is are three prominent characters: The villain, the hero and the victim.

We never play the role of villain in our own stories. We accept the role of hero or victim.

The victim says "Oh my, look what the villain has done to me."
The hero says, "I will right this wrong and save the day."
The villain says with conviction, "I didn't do anything wrong."

No one is right. No one is wrong.

The villain in your story believes you are the villain. The villain actually believes you are the one who wronged him.

So who's right?

It doesn't matter. You can be right or you can be happy. That's the only choice.

We have to accept the shit that happens to us and try to understand what we could've done differently.

We're the only ones to blame.

It's time we all take responsibility like a Boss. Otherwise, our species is going to wake up one day in a dimly lit cave wondering why the gods hate us so much.

That's the path we're on.
Don't blame me.
It's not my fault.