The Power of "I'm not Interested"

"I'm not interested". "I love your energy and you're doing a great job selling, but I'm not interested, mate." "I can tell you REALLY want me to, but not interested. Thanks though! Happy travels!" "No, zero interested". There's magic in those phrases. There's abundant, liberating, FREEDOM in those phrases. What do those phrases do? Those phrases reclaim your time. Those phrases reclaim your life. In life, all you really have is time. It's arguable that you have decisions and time, but for someone committed to taking action (less decision-making), you truly only have time. Utilizing your time with the right decisions will earn you money, put you in the best place in the world, where you want to be.

If you don't have the capacity to say those phrases, and control YOUR time, do you know how dangerous life will become??!!! Your life will become someone else's life. Some salesman who invites you to test drive his car, or some teacher who wants you to pay them to take her class...all of those things you will do and people will drain you of money, drain you of time, drain you of life.

People may get offended if you politely tell them you're not interested. Guess what? Their feeling offended is NOT your problem! If someone says to you "I'm not interested" and I feel offended because someone expressed their opinion about an offer, I'd have a seriously low-esteem or "taking things personally" or confidence problem! So honor someone being offended by you politely saying "I'm not interested, but I appreciate your offer" as some problem THEY have!!

If someone "NEEDs" you to accept their offer for the sake of their own self-esteem, emotional well-being they have a serious problem!! Acknowledge that clinginess as a problem (obviously, they've tied emotional validity to someone accepting their offer which is not true!)

So cultivating the comfort and ease of saying "I'm Not interested" reclaims the power and clarity back in life!

I could list all the times NOT saying "i'm not interested" and then continuing on my current problem/agenda created massive havoc for me, but I won't do that...the list is too long! Here's a sampler:

Was sorting contacts in address book. Friend invited me to go to bar. What happened because I FAILED to say "Not Intersted".
--Almost got beat up.
--Almost got assaulted
--Got locked out of car for 24 hours
--Got shinsplits
--Had to ice legs for next 4-5 days

What happened because I didn't say "Not interested": I drove to the bar, met the friends, started hitting on a girl, her Iraq meathead 2.5 IQ boyfriend showed up and said "get back here punk" and almost assaulted me because he thought I was stealing his girlfriend (which I was), then I got back at the valet area late so my car was locked for 24 hours. I then had to wander around Los angeles for 24 hours wearing sandals. I got shin splints and thought I seriously injured my leg.

What Would've Happened if I successfully said "Not Interested":
--Productivity on my addressbook
--Clarity on all my contacts
--Great peace of mind, freedom of thought
--Greater likelihood of connecting with good people in the future
--Less baggage with my communications
--Clarity on who my contact friends are

"I'm not interested" is a great thing to do!

News Blip: Marathon, Apple Tech, and Felines

Athletics: Roger Bannister, born almost 80 years ago, in 1929, was the first human ever to run a mile in under four-minutes. He accomplished this amazing feat in 1954 during a track meet in Oxford, UK. The winds were high at first, died down, Bannister ran, and when the announcer announced his time of "3..." the crowd went mad. His official time was 3:59.4.
That's a great achievement but what was even more fascinating that the psychological barrier was shattered. Instantly after Bannister did a sub-4, other runners believed it was possible and consequentially more and more sub-4 miles were accomplished. John Walker went on to run 129 sub-4 miles, alone, and Daniel Komen of Kenya, in 1997, doubled up Bannister's original record to run a sub-8 minute 2-mile (two sub-4 miles back to back). So all this "breaking the barrier" business in athletics -- or any arena of accomplishment -- has a big emphasis.

Certainly, three sub-4 miles back to back resulting in a sub-12 minute 3-mile race is certainly a goal for some, but an even more prominent goal is the sub-2-hour marathon barrier. People have gotten close, but no one has ever run a marathon in an amount of time that begins with "1-hour"...x minutes, x seconds. Right now, the person to do that most likely is Gebrselassie, an amazing Ethiopian runner. You can read the full article, but basically prior to Haile Gebrselassie's race in Berlin about 2 weeks ago a 2-hour 4-minute marathon was a barrier. Gebrselassie went on to break that with a 4:44 mile pace to get 2:03:59. There are skeptics and optimists of the 2-hour marathon barrier, but if anything, Gebrselassie brought the world a whole lot closer to the accomplishment of shattering such an outstanding barrier.

Bottom-line: Gebrselassie pushes the sub-2-hour marathon record.

Bizarro News: I normally don't cover the disturbing or unsavory news, but this murder trial of a former "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers" actor was just too, well, bizarre. He lured some yacht sellers out onto the boat and apparently tied them to an anchor, plunging them to a watery death. I'd like to know how they discovered his guilt, maybe they had Angela Lansbury on the case, and frankly this sounds like something out an episode of Murder She Wrote, as opposed to real-life!.
And for some comic relief from the above incident "SNL's People getting punched in the face just before eating!".

Technology: I know I covered Apple's "iBrick" rumors last week, but frankly, I just love this IT company. New news with Apple is that they've released an LCD screen designed for it's simplicity in connected with a macbook notebook and a new macbook notebook, sleeker and more polished in its appearance, making it someone visually similar to a miniature macbook pro. Personally, I liked the sturdiness of the older version macbook, which was built like a tank. But nothing can beat the humor of the iBook version 1 which has become notoriously known around the mac community as the "toilet seat notebook" because of its uncanny, um, hardware design.

Kudos for Apple's release of the new macbooks, but honestly I think the LCD was a bit overkill. Apple has released some incredible monitors and LCDs for high-end graphics, those are only mainly used for high-end graphic designers; the typical consumers will just vie for a cheaper LCD screen to connect their macbook to a desktop environment. But it's certainly excellent to know that the LCD option exists for die-hard apple fans (like myself).

Miscellaneous-Home: One of the things I like most about this guy is that he's not special, certified trainer. He's just a normal bloke who seemed to have taught himself how to train a cat! The scientific theory behind all of the conditioning is fascinating as well as nostalgic. I remember training a rat to tap a lever and visit different corners of a box for a psychology class. It's just amazing watching the cat -- over the course of a very short period, no doubt -- slowly get the gist of the "light switch gimmick". Over the course of the operant conditioning period, you can almost just envision that cat saying to itself:"Well, I don't really know what this is about, but if I bump that white thing...how do I bump it again?...oh alright, I flick this stupid thing and I get food, so works for me!"

Works for me, too. Clicker-training has a fascinating background and Skinner's operant conditioning functions as its fundamentals. It's fun for the pet; fun for you, and simply illuminating (pun unintended) to see the applications of science in your pet from turning on a light switch to other tricks!

Bottom-line: Operant conditioning applies to household pets.

Real estate: Apparently there's some discrepancies in data that show southern californian homes being some of the most expensive, and now, they apparently look as though the prices of plummeted, resulting in a greater number of house sells in recent months.

"Last month's median home price in the six-county region fell 33.2 percent to $308,500 in the six-county region, compared to $462,000 in September 2007, San Diego-based MDA DataQuick said"

. Interesting, well high or low-priced, still a great place.

Bottom-line: House prices decreases, causing house sales to increase.

Good Times:  At least the Aussies still know how to have fun  Graduating 12 years from Xavier College allegedly streaked through their school wearing the ties as g-strings, set off fire works, and caused a ruckus like no other on their "Muck up Day" as a graduation prank.  It's hysterical if you read the readers comments.  Some woman apparently got her her gnomes beheaded and bird bath tipped!  And another '68 alumni praised the pranksters! Ah, the life down under! hehe.

PBS "How A Computer Works" (Circa 1990)

As a closer note...here's the best collection of old school cheesy computer nerds possible ever created: I think keywords for this vid are "pascal" and "floppy disk" serve as a blurb.



This also serves as a testament to how outrageously lax television production rights were back in the 90s. haha! But that blonde nerd chick...total hottie.

The Woz

Woz. He's so brilliant. But he just appears so gypped in the business world. Trampled on by cutthroat business sharks. But ironically he's the smartest person with apple. The mind behind the first apple computer.



Jobs definitely always pushed the sales. Woz is just a curious. He just looks so uncomfortable these days! Like uncomfortable with his body. One interesting pattern you'll notice here is that Woz is continually talking about the past. "That's the way it worked back in the day." "Back in the old days...". That's great, but I think Steve Jobs's prescience and vision and Bill Gates's ability to always stay on top of new market trends makes for better business leadership.
Here he is reaffirming that the tech business (unfortunately) became about programming and actual "tech" work and instead, more about business, wearing the right suit, and sales.

iPhone: Mingling with Hollywood & Paving the way for solid Music Copyrights

Just to refute non-Iphone believers (haha!) like Richard Sprague who wrote:

"Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? "

There simply hasn't been a good phone on the market. If you flash back to THIS GREAT ARTICLE (when I fink the link, I'll post it), you'll recollect just how many hoops Jobs and Apple had to jump through to get the iPhone approved with a carrier. How many, no doubt, calls, meetings, and white-knuckled negotiations he had to do to get his invention into the marketplace. In many ways, iPhone is the 2nd coming o "Mac" altogether, too! Here's the insightful blurb form the article:

Apple engineers bought nearly a dozen server-sized radio-frequency simulators for millions of dollars apiece. Even Apple's experience designing screens for iPods didn't help the company design the iPhone screen, as Jobs discovered while toting a prototype in his pocket: To minimize scratching, the touchscreen needed to be made of glass, not hard plastic like on the iPod. One insider estimates that Apple spent roughly $150 million building the iPhone.

The iPhone cracked open the carrier-centric structure of the wireless industry and unlocked a host of benefits for consumers, developers, manufacturers — and potentially the carriers themselves.

Verizon and Sprint wouldn't take it, fortunately, At&T came along. But Apple even built special wireless testing towers to debug and test the cellular capacity of the iPhone. And that's just the thing, it's the first phone that offers user experience First and then cellular capacities second. All over phone manufacturers (From Black berry to Nokia to LG) simply released plastic buttons with one or two new features revolving around the wireless speeds, so the wireless companies always had the upperhand. Not so with Apple nor with the iPhone. Apple's interface (which is what counts from an "actually using the phone" point of view) by far IS the phone and the actual service stays a tertiary or secondary "supplement" to the experience. That entire relationship, with the software coming first, and the wireless carrier a far second or third, is revolutionary and a key development that makes the iPhone unique. Jobs had to do a lot of flips to get his foot in the cellular door, but he knew what he was doing and now it has completely set the trend and cutting-edge standard completely redefining our connotation of "cell phone" from some plastic gadget you flip open and speak into like a walkie-talkie with a few "add-ons" to full fledged portable operating system that by the way, has cellular capacity.

In reference to my previous post about iPhone goggling up electronic gadgets, it seems awesome monopoly spreads into other industries as well, namely Hollywood and the obvious, celluar companies:

To be sure, all the parties in the three industries involved are circling each other warily as they seek to protect their overlapping interests. But as their ambitions collide, rivals are hiring talent from disparate fields to navigate through a unsettling era.

Although the NY Times article kind of pitched the fusion of the cellular, Apple OS, and hollywood industries as something like a rivalry, the idea of coallescing Apple's technology with the movie industry sounds like the "Web 2.0" how we perceive media. In many ways, if film continues it's trend, this will make film and technology much more tangible and interactive and dynamic (like Web 2.0).

Again, this article has totaly the wrong idea. It frames apple's Fairplay copyrighting as something that "cripples" the music and phone experience, when, in reality it does the complete oppsite. Fairplay works in unison with the music business. Jobs, being a savvy and "fair" businessman has looked out for the interests of muscians, developers, and anyone who sells on the iTunes store with the Fairplay copyright (sure, the copyright also encourages use of Apple-based prouducts, but hey, that's a good thing and only secondary to the main goal of preserving the copyrights of the music, film, shows, soundbites, and apps downloaded from the store. It's astonishing how someone could deem that as "crippling" when it plugs the leak to the music (and film) industry's problem of losing sales due to pirated music and film. Apple, again, is working in unison with and in the best interests of Hollywood, the music industry, and the consumer-technology experience.

Also verifying the industry-goggling of Apple is productivity guru and esteemed blogger, podcaster, programmer (a bit of everything), Merlin Mann, who wrote:

…Apple might eat the lunches of about three different industries over the next couple years.

What I'm REALLY interested in, though, is Apple's movement on the web-based front. With Sun crunching out some amazing technologies like jMaki and WADL and RESTful technologies and the Comet architectures all create that "Ajax" Web 2.0 feel, but it's more than just a "feel", with more instantaneous user-activity, web technologies are just a means to totally unlimited communicaiton. Apple's aware of that. In choosing to emphasize Objective-C for apple dev, Jobs remarked that Java's too slow and bulky. It IS! It runs in a virtual machine, making it safe, but Objective-C has all the best assets of Java's OOP, combined with the grace and stability of C. Anyways, apple's iTunes and iTunes store is obviously the standard for cutting edge "web-based" interfaces and it's brilliant marketing in addition to it's cutting-edge programming.