Fred Yankowski

"There is a kind of wanting that is contracting and grasping and is about coming to take something from life. And there is a kind of wanting that is expansive and is about coming forward to meet life. Shifting from the former to the latter is what makes it possible to stay comfortably in the wanting. When we let the wanting be, we can experience ourselves as more alive, regardless of outcome." "If, however, we remain open to the possibility that no solution will arise and at the same time continue to bring our heart and attention and action to working toward a solution, our work takes on an entirely different flavor. We work toward our dreams, we embrace the vision and our needs in full, and we remain open in the face of what is happening. In doing so, whether or not we have external success (and so far as I know, none of us knows how to move the world from here to where we want it to be), our work itself becomes a modeling of what the world could be." - Fred Yankowski

"Reading is the best way to relax and even six minutes can be enough to reduce the stress levels by more than two thirds, according to new research." - Fred Yankowski

Visualize what you want and how you'll feel good when you have it. - Fred Yankowski

Examples of various interchange designs. - Fred Yankowski

Gyratory system , http://oddlyspecific.com/2009... , http://maps.google.com/maps... pstp ref geo eng - Thomas Page

"Clearly, little is necessary to make us feel rejected and devalued as a person. We simply cannot underestimate the power of feeling cared for, valued, and connected to other people." "To test this idea, a few of my colleagues randomly assigned people to take a dose of acetaminophen or a placebo each day for 3 weeks and provide daily reports on what happened to them and what they felt. By day 15, those taking acetaminophen reported feeling less painful reactions to being rejected on a daily basis than those taking placebo. The ability of acetaminophen to ease hurt feelings, enhance self-esteem, and reduce anxiety, sadness, and hostility grew stronger each day until the end of the study." - Fred Yankowski

"Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. " "It may be possible to tactically use disfluency to improve our own everyday lives, as well. Schwarz has found that the ease or difficulty of thinking something can sometimes neutralize the actual content of the thoughts themselves. " - Fred Yankowski

"The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer's block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn't stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door. The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That's because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk. The lizard is a physical part of your brain, the pre-historic lump near the brain stem that is responsible for fear and rage and reproductive drive. Why did the chicken cross the road? Because her lizard brain told her to." - Fred Yankowski

Short summaries and links to some of the author's favorite social psychology studies. - Fred Yankowski

"The trouble comes when I consciously stop trying to distract myself and the unconscious process carries on looking out for the thing I was trying to suppress. Anything it sees that looks vaguely like the target triggers the thought again and round I go in another loop of thinking the same thought I was desperately trying to forget about. The irony of thought suppression, then, is that actively trying to manage our own minds can sometimes do more harm than good. Although it makes perfect intuitive sense to try and suppress unwanted thoughts, unfortunately the very process we use to do this contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more we try and push intrusive thoughts down, the more they pop back up, stronger than ever." - Fred Yankowski

Simple beef roast recipe - Fred Yankowski

"Even though your truest identity is the consciousness behind your ego and not the ego itself, that doesn’t invalidate the reasons for building a strong and capable ego as your primary means of interacting with the physical world. A underdeveloped ego won’t do your consciousness much good anyway; a weak ego will only limit the range of experiences that are possible for you, thereby stunting your conscious growth. So don’t be so quick to buy into the notion that ego-less enlightenment is an intelligent spiritual ideal. Consider that building a stronger ego may be the more intelligent, heart-centered choice for you." - Fred Yankowski