Personal Development for Smart People^TM

Personal branding is basically the way you market yourself to the world. Your personal brand is what other people think of you. In some ways it’s outside your control, but you obviously have some influence over it.
Personal branding is unavoidable. As others interact with you, they’ll automatically form mental associations that connect you with certain labels, often within the […]

Supposedly Buddha recommended avoiding extremism, suggesting we should instead pursue the middle path. But where exactly are the edges of the middle path? Does the middle path mean the average path, close to what everyone else is doing? No, I don’t think the middle path is something you can measure with an external yardstick. This is […]

A bad career choice can serve up some major emotional consequences.  First comes discontent and dissatisfaction.  Next comes frustration and overwhelm.  Then comes depression and learned helplessness.  And finally you get numbness and apathy.  This pattern normally plays out over a period of years, although the rate of progression is different for everyone.
It’s sad to see people stuck […]

There many strategies you can use to select and plan a career path, but perhaps the two most basic patterns are bottom-up and top-down.
Bottom-up career planning
Bottom-up career planning means figuring out how you can best take advantage of the career building blocks you already possess.  It’s a low-level, objective method of planning.
Perhaps the simplest form of […]

The reason I haven’t posted the New York City trip review yet is that I’ve been sick the past several days.  Erin and I co-wrote the review last week (about 6000 words), but I still need to add the photos.  I’ll have it online by the end of the week.
This was a strange illness.  I had a mild cold near the […]

A forum member recently shared the Carl Sagan quote, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”  Sagan is credited with popularizing that slight rephrasing of an older quote by Marcello Truzzi:  “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”
These quotes assume an objective universe, which is a rather biased way of looking at reality — and not particularly accurate.  In […]

Our shared physical reality is the most common state of reality we experience, but it certainly isn’t the only one.  Our nighttime dreams are another state, as are astral experiences, near-death experiences, and out-of-body experiences.
I regard these different levels of reality as being at different frequencies or energy levels.  It’s like tuning into different TV channels.  Physical reality […]

Our feelings are a natural response to our thoughts and intentions.  We don’t really choose our feelings directly.  Our feelings are a feedback mechanism.  They indicate whether we’re moving into alignment with our true desires (positive feelings) or out of alignment (negative feelings).
Simply put… we feel good when we’re moving towards what we want, and we feel bad […]

This is perhaps the simplest way I can explain the perspective of subjective reality at present — and why I’m such a strong advocate of it.
First… some definitions:
Objective Reality (OR) is the perspective that you’re the character in the dream world, and the dream world is solid, real, and objective.  An OR person wouldn’t normally think of […]

David Schirmer is one of the experts featured in The Secret.  Within the past hour, I watched a rather disturbing YouTube video clip about him after a forum member posted a link to it.  Some of David’s seminar customers accused him of taking money he was supposed to be investing on their behalf (to the […]