Jonathan Burrows

A question

Did I get you started reading this article?  I’m sure if we did a vote on it, most people would say ‘Yes, I want happiness in my life and yes being happy would make my life perfect’ (or something like that).

What do you think? Is happiness the be all and end all?

A response

Now, I’m not going to go all silly on you and say ‘No’, well I am actually but not an absolute ‘No, happiness is not the be all and end all’.  Happiness is after all subjective and therefore we each have our own perception about what being happy is.  I’ve mentioned happiness in a previous post where I mention Acceptance+Future Thinking=Happiness. While that phrase is perhaps a simplistic summation of what happiness is, it does make a profound point.  Maybe it should have been written in a more personal way:

You acceptance of your circumstances and life

Plus

Your ability to keep looking to make your future better

Equals

Contentment and happiness

But why ‘No’

Why did I suggest that being happy is not the ultimate, the perfect place to be in life?  Well, we can’t all be happy all the time can we?  I don’t think so.  In fact I would go so far to say that sometimes we need a little unhappiness in our lives to help us appreciate the happy places we come to.

Personally

Ok, I’m gonna get personal now so please don’t laugh or ridicule me!

I was married once and had been for 17+ years, I have three children from that marriage but we went through some dark times shall we say.  Also, I had business problems and felt let down by others just when I needed them the most.  Needless to say I was pretty low and stayed that way for quite a while.  But all the time I kept telling myself that Acceptance+Future Thinking=Happiness.  However for a couple of years I didn’t really accept my situation, I tried to though.  And I suppose it was the ‘trying’ to accept that meant I was finally properly able to accept my situation.  I got a job which was hard and very stressful but it helped me out of a time of depression and feeling sorry for myself.  Now I have a job back in IT which I love. I adore love my three children and they love me.  I have a roof over my head and just enough money in the bank to pay my bills and maybe the occasional treat or two.

So?

So what is it about the above section that explains my happiness?  Is it because I have a good job now?  Is it because I love my kids and they love me?  Or is it because I accepted my experiences as ‘life’ and I now have the same attitude of acceptance.  Ok, life is good yes, but I think that happiness comes from within not from without.

Does this mean I have to suffer to be happy?

No! Just take a reality check on your life, accept your life for what it is ‘right now’ but strive to make things better.

Huh?  Come on, think about it!

….I’m waiting….

Thought about it?  Here it is again:

“The more I know, the less I seem to know”

“Jonathan”, I hear you say, “what on earth on you on about?”

Well, as you know many of my blog posts are about self improvement, personalities, life, the universe and everything (sorry, couldn’t resist a little Hitchhikers Guide) and so the phrase above relates to this.  More specifically it relates to a topic of I’ve discussed before ‘Future Thinking‘.

How does ‘The more I know, the less I seem to know’ help with ‘Future Thinking’?  Give me five minutes to explain.

I think it is fair to say that if you are an open minded individual, one who has a good attitude in life, one who is not obnoxious and full of self importance; then you will be a more rounded and happy person.  You will be someone who takes life as it comes and doesn’t get too upset when things don’t always go to plan.  Likewise, to be a ‘Future Thinker’ you need to be aware of surroundings, you need to be doing and thinking about things now so that your future is better (later).  With me so far?  Read that paragraph again if not.  Go on, do it!

“The more I know, the less I seem to know”

Brief history (early I.T. years)

I’m going to give you a brief  history of part of my life to help explain the sentence above. I coined this phrase many years ago just a few years after I had changed career from one that was predominantly retail to one in I.T. (computers and stuff).

Around 1993/1994 my uncle presented me with my first computer! You could not believe my joy when I saw the box sitting there on the table waiting for me to take it out and plug it in!  So, opening the box I was a little dismayed to see a lot of incomprehensible separate pieces of what I assumed at the time were ‘My computer’ (you like that joke? ‘My Computer’? Yeah? Ah, never mind).  Anyway, I turned to my uncle with a questioning look on my face.  The answer was that this was my computer but that I had to put it together first!

Well, after several hours of blood, sweat and tears (well, sweat and tears anyway) I managed with my uncles help to get a working Windows 3 PC up and running!  I was over the moon!  It was a glorious moment!

Side note

I have always felt that sometimes we learn best when we have to fix something.  And believe me, we had a lot to fix in that first computer!

Brief history (early I.T. years) continued

Anyway, I started to get good at computers and operating systems and software etc.  I did a course or two and after a while felt that I was probably one of the best around, and certainly one of the best in amongst the people I knew. A little bit of obnoxiousness had started to creep in.

Brief history (eye opening)

So I thought I was good enough now to get a job in computing and I did! But very soon I began to realise that there was more and more to learn to I.T. and computing than the stuff I knew about the ‘personal computer’.  I was now working in a large company and I was now supporting many customers with their business, mission critical computers, networks, databases and so on!  I was overawed by what I had to learn but felt I could do it.

Brief history (eye opening part two)

From that first job in I.T. I took another job and once again I had to go up another gear and it was about now that I coined the phrase “The more I know, the less I seem to know”.

I now realised with embarrassed humility that I knew relatively little about my chosen profession and that’s how the expression came about.

Putting the expression to good use

Really, the more I know, the less I really do seem to know!  I have spent the last fifteen years learning various aspects of I.T. and computing and some might say I’m pretty good at it, but even now I still hold true to that phrase, that expression.  But what use is it?  Surely it could make you give up with an exclamation of ‘what is the point in carrying on?’.

No. If you have a positive attitude in life, then great, but this can lead to an obnoxious, I’m perfect, I can’t be beaten approach.  While I applaud those who have confidence and ability in life, I would like to warn everyone reading this that sometimes ‘pride comes before a fall‘.

To be a future thinker means that you can be confident in yourself, you can believe in your qualities and skills but that you are also aware that there is so much in life that we do not know. That there is so much in life to learn, so much in the universe, so much about us, about our personalities that we are unaware of.

To be a future thinker means that while you strive to be the best, to do well, to be the best person you can be (etc), you also have a sensible attitude of “the more I know, the less I seem to know”.

Keeping this in my mind over the last fifteen years or so has enabled me to think on many occasion ‘hmmm, I wonder if there is more about this that I don’t know?’ and thereby making me safer from my own stupid actions, embarrassing decisions and contributing to a better future.

I am nowhere near perfect and there are many many people out there who seem to be doing this so naturally that it drives me mad.  But I am trying. Everytime I mess something up, I have to remind myself that:

“The more I know, the less I seem to know”

Child Of Our Time

Child Of Our Time and TV programs like it will often show us interesting ways to analyse our psyche. Coming up with tests and questionnaires which will then show us that we are ‘Extravert’ or ‘Agreeable’ or that women get more stressed than men or some other categorisation of our personality.

This is fine to get our brain cogs thinking but for me is nowhere near enough!  In fact because these sort of programs generalise too much and also leave one important fact out, they could be more destructive than helpful.

Generalisation is not the answer

For me, labelling someone ‘Extravert‘, or ‘Agreeable‘ or ‘Neurotic‘ simply doesn’t cut it.  After, years and years of study, we end up with labelling a child as ‘Conscientious‘? or ‘Open‘?  I’d like to think we that we all have some elements of all the above.

Scientific explanations are clearly (to me) not enough

There was a part of a program that documented identical twins.  These identical twins obviously have the same genes and therefore you would think have the same basic characters and persona’s.  The program then focussed on why the two became different or that the differences in their personalities became noticeable as they grew older.

One thing especially made me wonder if the project had totally missed the mark.  It tried to then explain that much of the differences were likely to do with one twin have a slightly more effeminate chin than the other.  Apparently, our brains will make super fast decisions and conclusions in the space of a couple of hundred microseconds and it is theses conclusions that our brain makes which affects how we deal with people.

It (apparently) is this, that meant the twins were treated differently in their growing up, which in turn has created their different characters and personalities.  The program also mentioned things like one child (of triplets) waking up during the night, the child was then brought in to sleep with the mother which has led to this child’s neuroticiscm.

Something massive has been missed

The inherent problem with this sort of analysis is that it does not include something so massive, so huge that it makes a mockery of our attempts to group man and woman into describable types.

I personally do not agree (completely) that our personalities are created from our environment.  Programs like this will tell us that we are what we are because of the way we have lived and been treated especially during our early years growing up.

For me though, there is enough evidence to suggest that there is something else that has been missed which would explain why we (the individual not the human race as a whole) are like we are.

The human spirit or soul

The human spirit is not easy to scientifically box up and put on a rack and then label it under ‘S’.  I believe that is our spirit or soul that makes us who we are way more than our upbringing or our environment.

I think the human spirit is far more complex than simply saying he or she is an ‘agreeable’ personality type or that someone has become what they have become due to their environment.

I would go so far as to say that it is the human soul that makes identical twins different more than a minute difference in their chin structure!

Personality types

Now it might seem strange that I now talk about personality types.  Remember though that this springs from our human soul more so than our environment.

It is nice to be able to look inside and know ourselves, so in this respect finding out that you are more ‘extravert’ than ‘neurotic’ might be a good thing. We need to broaden our labels though and start to discuss how our soul or spirit has made us what we are rather than scientifically putting each of us in a box.

If you are interested in analysing your character, then personality tests like the BBC Personality test are a good place to start.  But they are just that – a start!  you should go further otherwise you might incorrectly call yourself an extravert for the rest of your life when really you are a mixture of extravert and neurotic (for instance).

Broadly speaking we all have the same abilities inside of us which we use to react in certain ways to certain situations.  It is the way we react that makes us ‘agreeable’ or ‘conscientious’.

Carl Jung was one of the first psychologists to define these abilities or functions I think he called them.

These functions are called Sensation, Thinking, Feeling and Intuition and he believed that it is the way we use these that defines us as a certain ‘type’ or personality.  Further, he explained that our personality type depends on whether our emphasis on how we do things is outside us (extraversion) or inside (introversion).

Check out Myers-Briggs Type Indicator for more information on how it works.

But don’t forget that our soul, our human spirit is what makes us who we are!

Changes in personality over the years

This was a confusing one for me.  I have seen first hand that people change over the years, especially over the growing up years, which seems to enforce the idea that our environment and upbringing make us who we are!

So, does our soul really exist and is all this talk I’ve made about our human spirit a load of rubbish?

No, I don’t think so!

Our soul allows us to develop and learn about ourselves, to change the way we react to things over time – or at least over our early years.  As we grow up and mature, the way our personalities develop and the fact that we can make one decision one day and another decision another proves to me that we are far more complex beings than some might have us think.

Finally

Don’t get me wrong, I do think we have certain inherent traits or ways of dealing with and looking at things and it is these traits that make scientists categorise us.

Why have I written all this today? I want to maintain my individuality thanks!

Secretly, I want to find out more about my character though – which is why I’m reading Carl Jung and Myers-Briggs and of course watching programs like ‘Child Or Our Time’.

Comment and “Suggest to friends!”

Thanks!

Jonathan

Nick Vujicic

Nick is a young man born without arms or legs and yet his story shows how even with this disability you can have a positive outlook in life, you can ‘future think’ by considering others, by, and I quote:  ‘not comparing suffering’, unquote.

In previous short articles, I’ve discussed the need to release control of our lives so that we can receive the benefit – that of happiness and peace.

Nick shows that in this short video (see link below).  Watch and weep.

Bye for now

Jonathan

Short video of Nick Vujicic

I’ll start this short article by quoting someone far more knowledgeable than I.  I’m reading a book by Susan Jeffers called Embracing Uncertainty (link).

“You’ve entered the cinema and are very excited about seeing this great movie that has been touted by the media for months and months.  You are happy that none of your friends nor the media have revealed the ending.  In fact, at dinner last night, you stopped someone from blurting it out as you put your hands over your ears and started singing loudly.  It got a laugh and your friend got the point…he didn’t reveal the ending.  You wanted to experience the story yourself.  You didn’t want the movie spoiled.  Think about that. It would spoil the move if you knew the ending.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could think of the story of our lives in that way?”

If you think about it, that quote above is Future Thinking at it’s best.  What it means is that you relinquish control and by relinquishing control, you can start to enjoy your life, to enjoy the thrill of all the exciting things that happen, rather than getting stressed that ones situation isn’t quite how you would like it to be.  You know the feeling? Where you think too much and get stressed too much about things such as trying to earn a few hundred pounds (dollars if you are in the US!) per month.  You work harder, you borrow more and too much of your waking thoughts are spent wondering and working towards getting that extra money so you can afford that better model car or a slightly nicer home to live in.

I’m perhaps twisting Susan Jeffers’ quote a little but to release control of our lives is a little like not knowing the ending of a film.  She’s right when she says that if you knew the ending to a film (or even the beginning and middle too!), then the film wouldn’t carry as much excitement.  Many films of course rely on the uncertainty of what’s going to happen more than others, but what about our lives?  Why don’t we just let things happen a little? Why don’t we forget about trying to see round the next bend and spend more time on how we are going to grow and learn from ‘what’s round the next bend’ instead?

Here’s another example: Perhaps you are single and wouldn’t mind meeting someone who you can be with.  Maybe you are see someone you like the look of at a dinner, a coffee shop, at the leisure centre and so on.  Don’t stress about how you can meet that person and get to know them! They might be with someone for starters! You should relax a little, by all means go and chat or strike up a conversation, but it shouldn’t be about how you can turn that person from a stranger to a close friend.

I personally have been told on many occasions “If it’s going to happen, it will happen”.  This is partly true but there also needs to be some intervention on our parts too.  That cute looking girl or hot looking bloke isn’t going to become a friend if you sit around doing nothing!  What Future Thinking says is that you should be chilled and relaxed about what comes your way, don’t try to ‘make things happen’, don’t try to work out what the end of the film is going to be like.  In the case of relationships, if you went from seeing someone you like the look of to falling in love and getting a home together in the space of a cup of coffee, then life wouldn’t hold any excitement would it?

Trying to control (too much) our lives and the ‘end result’, leads to frustration.  Frustration leads to stress.  Stress, leads to depression.  Depression leads nowhere useful.

Still, as I write this, I can’t help noticing the very cute lady sipping coffee a couple of tables away from me :-)

That’s all for now, chill a little, relinquish control and you will have peace and happiness.

Jonathan

I’m one of those people who ‘knows’ that I should listen to the ‘inner voice’ or as we often call it, our intuition.  But (you knew there was a ‘but’ didn’t you?), my thoughts and the decisions I make are often clouded by the emotional side of me.

I recently had a fabulous instance of listening to my intuition, to listening to that inner voice nagging at the edge of my consciousness.  I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say that one part of me was keen (the heart/emotional side of me) and the other was a little voice deep down saying ‘hmmm, I’m not so sure, you should think about it’. I decided to go with my intuition and it just happened to the right choice!

This brings me to an interesting point.  The two sides of us speak to us in totally different ways.  The one side speaks to us in images, images of excitement and possibilities perhaps, or images of sadness, negativity and deflation.  The other side speaks to us in thoughts and words and pragmatic comments and I think these thoughts and words are our subconscious brain speaking to us from its wealth of experiences. Experiences of a lifetime.

The emotional/heart side of us is very colourful and understandably takes a large percentage of our current thought processes.  The other side is quietly thinking away, analysing and noting things away in it’s memory.

Both sides to our cognitive behaviour are relevant to how we live our lives,  They are what makes us ‘me’.  They are what makes me ‘Jonathan Burrows’, they are what makes you ‘you’.  Simple!

The importance of the small inner voice, our intuition, comes when we need to problem solve, to make the right decisions in our lives.  This is especially important when it comes to our careers, relationship choices and major life decisions.

There needs to be a balance between the excitable side of us, the part of us that says “Yes, that job sounds fantastic!”, or “Wow she’s cute, I’d like her to be my girlfriend” and so on.  Without this emotional and excitable side of us, we would not be complete human beings and it has a valid place in how we work.  However! Decisions (in my opinion) should not be based on this side of our being (or at least, not this side alone).

To make correct decisions we need to use the Future Thinking side of us to enable us to get the best outcomes.  Best outcomes? Those that make us happy, that put smiles on our faces long term not just short term emotional happiness.

Future thinking and listening to our intuition can reap rewards that make us think more highly of ourselves and in our capabilities.  Try and think now o a time when you listened to your inner voice and how you felt about the decision you made when you realised that it was the right decision!  You might want to imagine times when you have listened solely to your heart and then regretted the decisions later.

Finally, I’d like to hear your comments.  I’m not an expert but someone who has thoughts like these and is trying to work out who I am and what I am capable of.  Please respond with your ideas and thoughts to if you have them :-)

Kind regards

Jonathan