Hope he wins, even from a not-very-political European’s perspective, the alternative just looks like more of the same… which wasn’t great…
So good luck Obama, the world will feel like a more spirited, alive-with-possibilities, and interesting place if he wins.
My friend Alistair and I were in an Asturian place this evening, just off Madrid’s Calle Narvaez.
Propped up on the booze-shelf behind the bar was a photo of the owner, a fat grin below his thinning ‘tache, mountain pine forest behind… Here he is, the wild man, holding an absolute honest-to-god WOLF between his outstetched arms, tail in one hand, jaw (toothy and twisted towards the camera) in the other. A sticky red smear on it’s tawny belly the only clue that it had recently been shot to death.
I asked the (bigger moustache, combed-over hair, quintessentially Spanish) barman: “That’s a wolf, right? It’s huge!”
He said: “Yes, I’ve seen it, the head’s in the bar’s window display”
Me: (Nice…) “When was that photo taken?”
Barman: “Last year”
Me: (WTF?!) “Where?!”
Barman: “In Zamora Province”
… Jo’er.… so they are still shooting wolves in Spain. Wolves! There’s something so medieval about a wolf! And something so heartening to discover that they are still wandering around the wilder corners of Spain. Or not, as the case may increasingly be…
What’s to be done about the shooting of wolves?
My sister is a designer and illustrator with a wonderful imagination!
http://www.flickr.com/apps/video/stewart.swf?v=61761
In the world of ham, you can’t beat a bit of good old acorn fed Jamon Iberico…
I’ve just finished the most extraordinary book. It’s called The Game, by Neil Strauss, a shy and slightly introverted writer who goes from being an “AFC” (Average Frustrated Chump), the typical guy who’s terrified of meeting women, to the world’s most celebrated and successful “PUA” (pick up artist).
One of his editors asks him if he knows anything about the underground world of the art of seduction, and he decides that the best way to write about it is to learn it.
He immerses himself in the wisdom and teachings of every guru, guide and organised group he can find, soaks up all their teachings like a sponge and, by a third of the way into the book, he’s walking up to any group of girls anywhere (club, mall, restaruant) and coming out with the sexiest one’s phone number, or company, every time.
What’s more he tells you exactly how to do it. Damn, why didn’t anyone teach me that when I was 18?
But that isn’t what I wish they’d taught me at school. What I wish they’d taught me at school was how to get anywhere with anything. How to achieve stuff. How to be even mildly successful at getting where I wanted.
What I mean is this. We all have moments of great success in our life, where we set our mind to something, and we do achieve it. Normally, we don’t have a clue how this actually happens, we are just really proud to have got where we hoped to.
After thinking about it a lot though, I think what really happens is this:
Having a Goal + Educating Ourselves + Taking Action = Success!
I’ve experienced this phenomenon twice in the last 10 years, but only understood it the second, most recent time round. If only they’d taught me this stuff at school.
Goal + Education + Taking Action = Success
Breaking it down, it looks like this:
Goal: If you want to get anywhere, you have to know where it is you want to go.
You have to have goals, be they financial, personal, work, relationship, or health-related.
Examples might be: I want to be a great dad, I want to pay off my mortgage by such and such a date, I want to become a pick up artist… if you don’t set the goal, you don’t know where you’re going, you don’t know why you are doing any of this ‘stuff’ we do every day.
And just doing this everyday living/working stuff without knowing why eventually gets disconcerting.
Education: Once you know what your goal is you have to immerse yourself in material that will teach you how to get there. You have to find (out about) successful people who have got where you want to be and see how they did it. (This is also known as ‘modeling’).
Essentially, you have to find your way to the very best information.
I think an awful lot about this part of the equation. It fascinates me. I’ve come to the conclusion that the best skill one can develop, is knowing how to hone in on the right sources to learn the best possible information about a given subject.
It’s not about using google, it’s about knowing HOW to use google best. It’s not about asking on a forum, it’s about knowing which forum to ask on. It’s not about reading books, but knowing which books to read.
It’s about learning who, what, when and where to best ask about what you want to know.
How do you develop this skill? I think it’s all about the immersion. If you immerse yourself in enough sources it’s easy to see how they match up to each other, to set up a comparative scale that evenutally leads you upwards to the very very best sources.
The more you study and analyse, the quicker you develop a sense of which sources are ringing the right bells.
Read only one book and you never know whether it’s the right one or not. Read five (after making sure they are the best five to read through an exhaustive reading of Amazon book reviews) and you’re going to know which 2 or 3 of those five have really got the good stuff in.
So the more you learn about a subject, and the more you investigate, the closer you get to the best information. And once you immerse yourself in the best information, there’s only one thing left to do:
Take action. So you’ve got your goal, you’ve immersed yourself in the best information and opinion you can find that relates to it… what do you do next? One of 3 things.
a) You Do Nothing. Which means no goals reached.
b) You do a bit. Goals might get sort of reached. Probably not.
c) You Do Everything. Which means surprising yourself by reaching the goal, surprisingly successfully, sooner than you imagined. When I say ‘everything’, I mean that everything you learn in the ‘Education’ phase, you put into practice, (ideally massively and repeatedly).
Conclusion: you decide what you want to do, teach yourself everything you possibly can about it, and then relentlessly do something about it, until you succeed at it.
WHY DIDN’T THEY TEACH ME THAT AT SCHOOL?
They taught me geography, history, maths and religion. They turned me into a walking talking pretty-average-score-in-a-pub-quiz, (and I really am grateful for all that knowledge) but they never told me how to get stuff done.
When I decided to come to Spain I basically followed the Goal + Education + Taking Action = Success! equation above, and it paid off. But I had no idea what I was doing.
So after my first wonderful year in Madrid, I found myself in a three year period where I slumped in a shitty teaching job that drove me mad and provided me with absolutley no fulfillment, and I had no idea at all what to do about it.
Even though I’d managed to apply this magic formula already to change a life I was unhappy with in London for a much better one in Spain, when I got lost again, I had no idea what to do. I became depressed, difficult, obsessive compulsive and a total hypercondriac. No goals. No idea what to do.
This was between years three and six in Spain. Not long ago. Then I discovered the internet and became obsessed with that. I set one goal after another: get myself out of teaching… get myself out of translating… get my wife out of her shitty 9-5 office job and her 90 minutes of commuting…. meanwhile obsessivly learning and applying.
Learning about how to write webpages, then writing them (and learning about uploading them and finding hosting for them). Learning how to make podcasts, then podcasting (which meant learning how to plan, record and edit audio). Learning about ecommerce websites, then setting up and customizing one…
But I still didn’t really understand why it was all working. I only worked that out recently when I decided that if we had set up a limited company, we better learn everything possible about running one.
And I found that these business gurus are always banging on about having goals and ‘taking massive action’ and I thought, hey, I did that! And so I came to work out this magic formula.
And now I know it, things are so much clearer.
I’ve spent the last three months enrolled in a fascinating Masters degree in running a business. It’s a Masters degree entirely of my own making.
I don’t think there’s a university or college on earth that could give me a better course right now than the one I’m constantly devising and refining for myself. I work out which sources I trust, and exactly what it is I want to learn, or who I want to learn from, next. It’s certainly a lot more fun that my philosophy degree was.
And as often as I can I put what I learn into practice, and so far the results have been remarkable. I’ve set some pretty lofty goals and I think I’m going to meet them, without killing myself or exploiting anyone in the process. (Hopefully it’s going to involve helping a LOT more people learn Spanish).
So here it is for the umpteenth and final time:
Having a Goal + Educating Ourselves + Taking Action = Reaching Those Goals
Did they teach us that at school? Maybe I just didn’t care then, or wasn’t listening.
Back to Pick Up Artists. Neil Strauss became fascinated by pick up artists. He knew he wanted to be one, to experience the success with women they enjoyed. So he nearly drowned himself in their world, in their beleifs, their knowledge, and their way of doing things.
He tirelessly tested and put into practice everything he learned from them, and he became the best Pick Up Artist in the world. Read the book, the guy is astonishing. Just your average-looking, short, shy guy, who set his mind to something, is good at learning, and took plenty of action. Do read the book. It’s fascinating.
Further Reading: That Tingling Sensation…
That’s a quote from the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), found on the bbc website.
I don’t read the news much, so I don’t know all the details… (obviously I’ve heard rumours about the imminent collapse of capitalism), but wow, that quote above sounds pretty end-of-the-world-is-nigh…
Should I start stocking up on rice and beans again? Someone clever fill me in please! What happens if we do reach “systemic meltdown”?
Time to catch up on a few important things that have been whirling around these past few weeks. I hope some of them might be useful. So, in no particular order:
1) Two weeks ago I turned comments off on the blog… and stopped blogging. I think there may be a connection, so I’ve turned them back on again. There goes that experiment! I’d love to keep hearing from you as usual 🙂
2) Turning off comments and stopping blogging meant I got far far far more done in the last two weeks, supporting the theory that the only way to get anything done is to a) remove all distraction and b) have a real mission to get on with. In this case it was to finish our latest Spanish project before baby turns up!
3) I’m loving the new ‘Genius’ feature in the latest update of iTunes. You pick a song you like, hit the ‘Genius’ button, and it makes you a playlist from all your other tunes, based on that first pick. It’s a wonderful way of rediscovering old music from your collection.
4) I’ve rediscovered “God Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” by “Buffy Sainte-Marie” as a result. What a song!
5) I’m going to be living vicariously through Tom, one of my oldest bestest mates, over the next few months, as he travels across South America. He’s started out in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala, where he is doing a Spanish course. Check out his progress and podcasts at http://www.earthoria.com/
6) Just got back from the market. Walking up the hill with 7 packed shopping bag, the question once again came up, how do those Spanish grannies manage to so effortless occupy the ENTIRE pavement/sidewalk, while moving at 0.2 km/h, thus making it impossible for anyone else to pass them EVER, or get home before the combined weight of the shopping bags turns your hands BLUE?!
7) Had to have a number seven. Anyone know what it is about the number 7 that is so important? If you ask someone to think of a number between 1 and 10, most people will say 7. Why?! (P.S. this is a good party trick – you guess 7 when you ask people to pick a number, and they think you have ESP or something…)
genius
I’m missing the writing and the comments so both will be back asap, with an explanation. For now, suffice is to say that the huge Spanish project we’ve been working on is finished, so I’m going to have more time from now on.
If you are an interested (and keen!) Spanish learner, you can check it out here:
We think it’s great 🙂
There is a reason for the recent silence here on the blog. We’ve been working away like crazy on a big project for notesinspanish.com called ‘Real Spanish Control’. This has meant putting all those time management theories I’ve been obsessing about recently through a rigourous test, and I’m happy to say, they work!
More on Real Spanish Control soon, but in the meantime, if you are a Spanish learner, you have to see the 3 videos we have lined up this week.
The first is ready, and includes instructions on how to see the other two.
Click here to watch the first video
More soon… Ben
Hmmm…. where to start. With the big news I suppose, followed by all the consequences!
Marina, my wife, is just about 8 months pregnant. This is wonderful. Wonderfully wonderful. But it certainly adds a new edge to life, a new urgency as THE BIG CHANGE approaches, fast.
What can I tell you about having a baby in Spain?
In Spain the question isn’t “Are you going to find out the sex before it’s born?”. Instead everyone asks: “Is it a boy or a girl?” Why? Because everyone finds out the sex of their baby as soon as an ultra-sound can tell them (around month four).
In our case the answer is ‘boy’. This means finding a boy’s name that sounds good in Spanish and English (for when we take him back to the ‘old country’). My current favourite is Rafa, after my number one tennis idol and all round super hero, Señor Nadal, but Marina still needs some convincing!
So what else does this mean?
It means I’ve got to get my shxt together! We run a business from home, and now we’re going to be running a child as well… in the same office, so to speak.
Hence my recent obsession with time management. (By the way, forget anything else I’ve said about that, and buy “No BS Time Management for Entrepreneurs”, immediately! Do what he says, he’s totally OTT and even more obsessive than me, but it really really works.)
Managing time better means cutting down on certain luxuries, one of which is the commnets on this blog. I’ve turned comments off for the time being for all past and future posts. There are a few reasons for this:
– As well as having a baby (or because of!) we have to concentrate 99% on our Learning Spanish site, notesinspanish.com, over the coming months. This means I just won’t have time to reply to comments left here, and I feel really guilty when I don’t reply to comments!
– We have the wonderful forums right here on this site where wonderful discussions go on, so please please go and comment and discuss things there instead! Feel free to take any topic I discuss here in the future and expand on it there. I’ll be popping in a lot to join the conversations there.
– Having comments very occasionally makes one write ‘for the comments’. It makes me think ‘I wonder if this topic will get lots of comments’, rather than, ‘I think this is the most interesting thing I can write about write now for the readers of this blog, regardless of whether people are likely to comment or not’.
(This may be a very inside-baseball bloggers point, but I think it will free up, and improve the writing here. As for the ‘is a blog a blog without comments?’ discussion, Yes it is!)
What will I be writing about?
Creativity, Spain, having a baby in Spain, anything else I deem of interest to those kind enough to keep showing up to have a look.
I often say to Marina “I wish I could write about x or y, not just Spain, I might start Notesfromben.com again”. She says, “Just put that stuff on the Notes from Spain blog”, so that’s what I plan to do.
I can’t promise how often I’ll be posting. I made a list recently which on one side said ‘Cool things’ and on the other ‘Not cool things’.
On the cool things side it said: Writing blog posts when I’m in the mood.
On the uncool side it said: Writing blog posts because I feel I have to (blogging pressure).
I’m going to take the ‘cool things’ approach. (By the way, I highly recommend you make two of these lists, one for not-work life, and one for work. You then do everything you can to remove the things on the ‘not cool’ side of the lists from your life, to concentrate on the cool things list).
So, enough rambling. Keep coming back, I’ll keep posting good creative content whenever I’m inspired, I hope it will be useful and helpful, not just ego-to-pixels blogging. New times are coming!
Notes from Spain by Ben Curtis 