Expert Professional Advice

A guide for urban, suburban, rural, and wilderness environments… actually a decent book. My favorite part is the short recommended books list… very interesting. It appears that the author is aware that wellness and effective survival is a continual life process, not a one-time drill or practice but also an understanding of training the mind and productively embracing life, no matter how it surprises us.

A new theory of how we think? It’s not able to live up to that claim.

Self-proclaimed self-help business gurus and experts say, “See yourself achieving success…” but successful fantasies don’t change the conditions of minimum wages, low pay and unemployment.

Self-help sellers have a name for you, it’s called future revenue stream.

If affirmations are so powerful, how come these self-help gurus/marketers don’t attract wealth beyond their book deals, seminars and speaking engagements? Oh right, we have to affirm their worth/wealth creation. If it weren’t for the self-help sales, where would the money come from?

When crisis looms it becomes evident that affirmations don’t have linkages to productivity. But maybe you’ve got an interesting story to tell from your own experience… feel free to post.

The positively affirmed wealth-focused mindset cannot mail you a check from the clouds. At some point you will have to get to the marketplace, satisfy the needs of people in some way and have them transfer a symbolic vote of cash to you. That’s the recognized way:

To reach wisdom may require action, it’s often easier to say no because no requires nothing else, subscribing to chance has no substitute. What have you taken a chance on today?

I spent some time in the park with Tai Chi students and masters. The power comes from their legs, or their center of gravity rather than their hands. The hands are simply a delivery mechanism or tool to pass the energy. It is a subtle, yet counter-intuitive technique of transferring energy rather than using resistance. What they practice is a form of Tai Chi where they have to push or pull each other off balance. There is no striking but they are able to demonstrate proficiency at deflecting an opponent’s force to cause a loss of balance to the opponent or absorbing your energy and immediately sending your own force back to you causing you to lose balance, wind up in a lock, or confronting the floor. One of the guys said learning Tai Chi helped improve his boxing and Thai kick boxing abilities and that the principles of Tai Chi helped him compete more effectively, rather than expending energy looking for ways to overpower a competitor. UFC competitors rely on a sprawl technique to avoid being taken to the mat, but the leaning stance leaves them vulnerable to falling face down, although I have not seen this happen in a match because the other competitor is meeting the resistance with resistance rather than using that moment as an advantage to using the other opponent’s motion against himself. For example, a master in this form of Tai Chi will step toward the force when his head/neck is being pulled forward/down throwing his opponent off balance, to the floor, etc. The traditional UFC approach is to attempt to pull your neck/head back to avoid an upcoming knee to the head. The match and the rematch when Rich Franklin fought Anderson Silva, Franklin lost momentum and succumbed to knees to the head from Silva. The lack of a technique to deflect or absorb and send back the downward pressure of the clinch with Mr. Silva resulted in Mr. Franklin losing the matches. When a competitor fails to maintain his balance he cannot effectively defend himself so a study of Tai Chi would be of value to UFC competitors, the only way to prove how valuable it would be is to give it a try.

Please look carefully and guess what these paintings might be worth to the art community…

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Now consider that the art world is filled with thousands of crummy paintings from established artists, so consider again that these paintings are from an infamous figure in history.
Thirteen paintings will be auctioned at Ludlow racecourse in Shropshire on April 23. The others are of flowers and landscapes.

What do you estimate the final bids will be? Please post your guess or analysis.

We’ve all heard names that make us laugh… now there’s a book on it.

• Extracted from Potty, Fartwell And Knob by Russell Ash, published by Headline at £6.99. ° Russell Ash 2008. To order a copy (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.