A process comprising of the attribution of human traits, characteristics, emotions, or intentions to non-human entities like gods, animals, or objects. It is considered to be an innate tendency of human mind; and is employed as a storytelling tool and artistic/writing device. In mythology, anthropomorphism is the perception of the divine appearing as a deity or in a human form carrying a set of human personality traits and characteristics; In fables, fairy tales, science fiction and fantasy genres, anthropomorphism is utilised as a device to attribute human characteristics to non-human characters like animals, creatures, computers, robots, objects, motifs etc. In science, it represents attributing human emotions, behaviours and tendencies to various animals for the purpose of research. It is derived from the Greek words anthrōpos ("human") and morphē ("form").
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Blowing rainbow bubbles Watching a family movie with a bag of chips in hand A sketchbook filled with drawings of wax crayons A box of trinkets Camera containing printer…
The world outside is filled with ideas…oodles and oodles of ideas. Ideas stem from great imagination and from infinite possibilities waiting to be explored.
But how many of these ideas truly stick in our heads? How many of these really catch and grasp our attention?
In this book, Made To Stick, the authors Chip Heath and Dan Heath explore what makes up a sticky idea and what are the main villians of a sticky idea.
One of the main villians of a sticky idea is the Curse of Knowledge. To explain this, the authors take the example of ‘Tappers and Listeners’.
During a research, some people were divided into two groups. The task of one group was to tap with their fingers some songs, and the task of the listener group was to identify these songs from the rhythms of the tapping fingers.
According to the research, the listeners were able to guess only 3 songs out of 120. This happened because the tappers were experiencing the Curse of Knowledge. When they were tapping the songs, the tune of the song was playing in their heads, but the same tune wasn’t playing in the heads of the listeners. Tappers thought that the same tune was playing in the listeners’ heads but it wasn’t so. The Curse of Knowledge is when you know something then you stop knowing what it is to not know something we know. This produces ideas that are unsticky and that don’t grasp our attention.
To combat the Curse of Knowledge, the authors provide a checklist (SUCCES) of what makes up a sticky idea. They write that a sticky idea is: • Simple • Unexpected • Concrete • Credible • Emotional • Story
In this review I share 11 ideas from the book about what makes an idea stick in our heads and what to do to generate an idea that sticks, based on the SUCCES checklist. Read on.
#1 FIND THE CORE OF AN IDEA Strip an idea down to its most critical essence. Simple messages are always core and compact
#2 ENGAGE PEOPLE’S CURIOSITY & CREATE CURIOSITY GAPS Curiosity happens when we feel a gap in our knowledge. The thirst to fill a knowledge gap can be more powerful than the the thirst for slides and jungle gyms. Point out the gap in people’s knowledge. Knowledge gaps create interest and cause people to pay attention to our idea.
#3 CREATE MYSTERIES OR PUZZLES Mystery is created not from an unexpected moment, but from an unexpected journey. We know where we’re headed, we want to solve the mystery but we don’t know how to get there. Tell mysteries or puzzles that are slowly solved over the course of the communication.
#4 TELL STORIES. Stories are like flight simulators for the brain. Mental simulations help us manage emotions and trigger physical respones in our system.
#5 BE CONCRETE. ABSTRACTION IS THE LUXURY OF THE EXPERT We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions.
What makes something concrete. If we can examine it using our five senses, it is termed as concrete. Novices crave concreteness. Concreteness helps us to understand. Trying to teach an abstract principle without a concrete foundation is like starting a house by building roof in the air.
#6 SPELL OUT THE BENEFIT OF THE BENEFIT. TRIGGER SELF-INTEREST. People want to know “what’s in it for me?” Trigger their self-interest by promising reasonable benefits that people can imagine themselves enjoying.
#7 ADD CREDIBILITY Use authorities (experts and celebrities) and antiauthorities (details and statistics) to add credibility to an idea.
#8 BREAK PEOPLE’S GUESSING MACHINE, THEN FIX IT Break a pattern, create interest and surprise. Surprise happens when people’s existing schemas fail. When our guessing machines fail, surprise grabs our attention. Although, be wary of surprise without any insight.
#9 TAP INTO THE THINGS PEOPLE CARE ABOUT A credible idea makes people believe, an emotional idea makes people care. If we want people to care about our idea, we must tap into the things they care about. Fill up people’s emotional tank. Use associations, appeal to their self-interest and appeal to their identity.
#10 USE GENERATIVE METAPHORS AND PROVERBS. BE COMPACT. Proverbs are short sentences drawn from long experience. Likewise, learn to pack a lot of meaning in a little bit of compactness. Tap the existing memory terrain of the audience. Use what’s already there.
Use analogies to trigger an existing schema in people’s memory, and use it to impart new information.
#11 LEARN TO SPOT STICKY IDEAS Learn to spot stories that have potential. Usually stories fall into the themes of challenge, connection and creativity. Put on the Core Idea Glasses to filter stories based on your perspective.
Have you
read novels like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Catcher in the Rye, The Perks Of Being
a Wallflower, Great Expectations and Paper Towns? There is something common in
them apart from brillant writing. That is, a character who seeks spiritual
transformation or walks on a journey to enlightenment.
This kind
of a novel or story comes under a genre called BILDUNGSROMAN.
A
bildungsroman novel is a novel depicting a character’s formative years of
spiritual education.
A writing
genre that focuses on a character seeking answers to deep life questions and
experiencing transformation along the spiritual journey.
A
coming-of-age novel or story that elaborates a character’s path to
enlightenment.
Composed
from the German words bildung (education) and Roman (novel)!
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When I first read the book The Catcher in the Rye, I was fascinated by the straightforwardly simple expression of writing which is also rooted in the emotional depths rather than merely branching out from the surface. The range in which the thoughts and feelings are expressed in the book sounds simple enough for a layman but powerful enough to add into the favourites book list of Mr. Bill Gates himself.
Another example is the poetry of Rumi. Or, the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore. Simple yet profound and deep.
If you have also read a book like this, you too would have experienced the same feeling in which there is much detail of thought and much elaboration of emotions underpinned into the words, something where a space of awareness is holding the strings of the thoughts rather than otherwise.
So, this gorgeous writing tool namely ‘Description’ helps you do just the same for your writing and for your thoughts in general. Once you have the space cleared for the scene to appear, and once the scene has appeared, it is now the time to describe this scene. Once you’ve allowed yourself to step into the scene and put on a pair of magnifying glasses, its now time to pay attention to the details. To describe all that you can in the scene, in words.
Tiny details, big details and everything in between. All of these.
"Step into a scene and let it drip from your fingertips." – MJ Bush
In her book Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott shares her experience of looking through the index cards to have a clear picture or a scene of what she was beginning to write.
Nora Ephron is a screenwriter whose scripts for Silkwood, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle have all been nominated for Academy Awards. Ephron started her career as a journalist for the
New York Post and Esquire. She became a journalist because of her high school journalism teacher.
Ephron still remembers the first day of her journalism class. Although the students had no journalism experience, they walked into their first class with a sense of what a journalist does: A journalists gets
the facts and reports them. To get the facts, you track down the five Ws—who, what, where, when, and why.
As students sat in front of their manual typewriters, Ephron's
teacher announced the first assignment. They would write the lead of a newspaper story. The teacher reeled off the facts: "Kenneth L. Peters, the principal of Beverly Hills High School, announced today that
the entire high school faculty will travel to Sacramento next Thursday for a colloquium in new teaching methods. Among the speakers will be anthropologist Margaret Mead, college president Dr. Robert Maynard Hutchins, and California governor Edmund 'Pat' Brown."
The budding journalists sat at their typewriters and pecked away at the first lead of their careers. According to Ephron, she and most of the other students produced leads that reordered the facts and condensed them into a single sentence: "Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento . . . blah, blah, blah."
The teacher collected the leads and scanned them rapidly. Then
he laid them aside and paused for a moment.
Finally, he said, "The lead to the story is 'There will be no school
next Thursday.'"
"It was a breathtaking moment," Ephron recalls. "In that instant I
realized that journalism was not just about regurgitating the facts but about figuring out the point. It wasn't enough to know the who, what, when, and where; you had to understand what it meant.
Flowers
blossom into flowers only after a series of winds hit the saplings. Before
pearls are born, they nestle in the cocoon of the oyster for a span of time. Butterfly
rests in a gooey shelter until it transforms into a butterfly.
Everything
in nature takes its own duration of time to become perfect and the way it is
meant to be. So does a piece of writing…
Stephen
King defines this period as “Recuperation Period”. Joseph Sugarman calls it “Incubation
Period”.
This is a
duration of time when a piece of writing has been written but is not ready to
be put out into the world. During this period, we just let the piece stay in
its place until it organizes itself in our head, so we can edit and revise it to
its best possible perfection.
Whether it
is a stream of consciousness journal entry or a poem or an article, this
duration of time is important for it to become refined and polished!
Words are
no lesser than gemstones. The more you have, the greater is your treasure. As
for now, add to this treasure of yours these 11 aesthetic words with wondrous
meanings. Read on!
1.Bumbershoot:
Umbrella
2.Raconteur:
A skilled storyteller
3.Jouska:
A hypothetical conversation that you play over and over in your head
4.Cosmogyral:
Whirling or travelling around the universe
5.Zibaldone:
A heap of things, miscellany, mixture
6.Blazemoche:
The therapeutic tranquility one feels while listening to the sounds of burning
firewood
7.Drapetomania:
An irresistible desire to run away
What is destiny? What is the nature of human mind? What does it mean to respond to life?
In this book, Sadhguru takes us into the detailed mechanism of how a human system is designed. From topics like responsibility to mystical dimensions of chakras and energy channels, he delves deep into the engineering of a well-designed human individual. With cutting insights and crisp pointers, he describes to the readers how to keep and maintain our individual human systems as well as sadhanas (tools) for meditation.
In this review, I share 43 insights that I learned from reading the book. Read on, get inspired and enjoy!
1. If you can use it when you want and put it aside when you don’t, the mind can be a fantastic tool. 2. The only solution for all the ills that plague humanity is self-transformation. 3. Self-transformation is not incremental self-improvement. Self-transformation is achieved not by morals or ethics or attitudinal or behavioral changes, but by experiencing the limitless nature of who we are. Self-transformation means nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life 4. The world is not "out there". 5. Language is no more than a conspiracy devised by human beings. If someone speaks, they are only making sounds, and we are making up the meanings. 6. if you really want to know spirituality, don’t look for anything. It is not the object of your search that is important; it is the faculty of looking. 7. Do it for the fun of it! 8. An extraordinary intelligence within each of us that is capable of transforming a piece of bread or an apple into the human body in a single afternoon. Not a small feat! 9. it is possible to be ecstatic in one’s adulthood as in one's childhood. It is possible for every human being because all we can ever experience happens from within us. 10. We are all seeking to become infinite. 11. Well-being is just a deep sense of pleasantness within. If your body feels pleasant, we call this health. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this pleasure. If your mind becomes pleasant, we call this peace. If it becomes very pleasant, we call this joy. If your emotions become pleasant, we call this love. If they become very pleasant, we call this compassion. If your life energies become pleasant, we call this bliss. If they become very pleasant, we call this ecstasy. This is all that you are seeking. 12. The human mechanism is the most sophisticated physical form on the planet. You are the greatest piece of technology, but the problem is you don’t know where the keyboard is. It’s like you’re handling a supercomputer with a pickaxe and a wrench! 13. All human experience is one hundred percent self-created. 14. Human life is longing for unlimited expansion, and that is the only thing that will settle you for good. 15. Enlightenment is not an attainment or an achievement. It is a homecoming. Your senses give you the impression that you are experiencing the outside, but you have never experienced the outside. When you realize that all that you experience is within, that absolute homecoming is enlightenment. 16. When it comes to our inner nature, there is only one governing principle: borderless unity. Our physical and social worlds are governed by boundaries. Our inner world needs none. 17. If you go outward, it is an endless journey. If you turn inward, it is just one moment. In that one moment, everything changes. In that one moment, you are not in pursuit of joy anymore. Instead, your life becomes an expression of your joyfulness. 18. To mold situations the way you want them you must first know who you are. Who you are is not the sum total of accumulations you have made. 19. Creating your own destiny does not mean you have to control every situation in the world. Creating your destiny is about steadily heading toward your well-being and your ultimate nature, no matter what the content of life is around you. It simply means making yourself in such a way that, whatever the events and situations around you, you don’t get crushed by them; you ride them 20. The physical and psychological dimensions belong to the realm of polarities—pain-pleasure, love-hate, masculine-feminine, and so on. If you have one, the other is bound to follow. But when you move into the fundamental dimension of who you are, you are beyond all polarities. You now become blissful by your own nature. You are the master of your own destiny 21. This ability to respond to the entire universe is already a physical reality. It is only your thoughts and emotions that need to become conscious of the fact. 22. Reactivity is enslavement. Responsibility is freedom. Responsibility is the ability to respond. The choice is always before you: to respond consciously to the present; or to react compulsively to it. 23. The wealth of life lies only in how you have allowed its experiences to enrich you. Filth can blossom into the fragrance of a flower. Manure can transform itself into the sweetness of a mango. No adversity is an impediment if you are in a state of conscious response 24. Every subatomic particle in your body is responding in a limitless way to the great dance of energies that is the cosmos. 25. Once your joy is on self-start rather than push-start, you have upgraded your technology. 26. The physical body is the first gift of which we are aware. It is also the ultimate machine. Every other machine on the planet has come out of this. 27. The very source of creation is functioning within you. 28. There are two basic forces within you. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings—to preserve and to expand—are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. 29. The human body is capable of downloading the entire cosmos 30. If you observe the natural cycle of the body, you will find that there is something called a mandala. A mandala is a cycle of forty to forty-eight days that the human system goes through. In every cycle, there will be three days on which your body does not need food. 31. Your body is just a loan from this planet. What you call “death” is just Mother Earth reclaiming the loan that she offered to you. 32. Fear is not a natural part of their existence. Fear is a result of the incompleteness of your existence. 33. Only when you recognize your mortal nature do you want to know what more there is to life. It is then that the spiritual process opens up. 34. Death is not the end of life. Death is simply the end of the body. 35. If you tell yourself you don’t want to think a certain thought, that is precisely the first thing your mind will produce! That is the nature of the human mind. 36. You are, therefore you may think. 37. Learn to discern the real from the illusory, what is existentially true from what is psychologically true. 38. Avoiding something is not freedom from it. Such morality is based on exclusion. Spirituality, on the other hand, is born of inclusion 39. Spirituality does not mean moving away from life; it means becoming alive to the core, in the fullest possible way. With age, physical agility may diminish, but the level of joy and aliveness need not. If your level of joy and aliveness is declining, you are committing suicide in installments. 40. A well-established human mind is referred to as a kalpavriksha, or a wishing tree that grants any boon. 41. If you want to experience a mountain peak, you either elevate yourself to that level, or simply look up. 42. The most generous way to live is to set an example to the rest of the world by living life full-throttle and beyond all limitations. 43. Try this. Sit alone for five minutes and see what your life would be like if you were absolutely alone in this world. If there were nobody or nothing to compare yourself with, what would you truly long for? What would really matter to you if there were no external appreciation or critique?
In a journey, is the destination more significant or is the journey itself?
What would we do if reached our destination and discovered the outcome? We may forget the destination but never the journey. Journey, when we make it, becomes a part of us. Isn’t it so?
Well, this novel is a parable depicting the journey the author makes towards Santiago in order to find his sword. On his journey, he is accompanied by a guide named Petrus who reveals to him several insights and teaches him a set of meditative exercises. The book is one part story and one part these exercises. The book is enlightening and in this review, I list 27 insights and lessons I gained from reading this book.
#1 Free yourself from the burdens you have created in your life. #2 In order to grow, we have to keep moving forward, adapting ourselves to new situations and receiving the blessings that life generously offers to those who seek them. #3 When we are moving towards an objective, it is very important to pay attention to the road. #4 The more you look at the watch, the more slowly time passes. #5 Changing the way you do routine things allows a person to grow inside you. #6 Time doesn’t always proceed at the same pace. It is we who determine how quickly it passes. #7 A devil never makes false promises. #8 If we don’t recognize that we need everything and everybody, we become arrogant warriors, and our arrogance defeats us in the end. #9 Talk to your personal devil to know people, but never let the devil dictate the rules of the game. #10 People don’t like to ask too much from life because they are afraid that they’d be defeated. But if someone wants to fight the good fight, that person must view the world as if it were a marvellous treasure waiting to be discovered and won. #11 The language of your heart is what is going to determine the best way to find and use your sword. #12 In places where the mind cannot reach, a force is being born and becoming ready to manifest itself. #13 We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do, the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn’t work that way at all. #14 Every star – every person has their own space, their own special characteristics. There are green stars, yellow stars, blue stars and white stars, and there are comets, meteors and meterorites, nebulas and rings. #15 It is always a good idea to do something relaxing prior to making an important decision in your life. #16 The things of this life don’t last very long. #17 When we are involved in the good fight, nothing else is important, our enthusiasm moves us towards our goal. #18 Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning. #19 Every small gesture made by one person affects the life of someone else. #20 Whoever has the sword, must constantly put it to test, so it doesn’t rust in its scabbard. #21 A hammer would not make sense if there were no nails to be driven. #22 You have your own way of living your life, of dealing with problems. Teaching is only demonstrating that it is possible. Learning is making it possible for yourself. #23 Once a problem is solved, its simplicity is amazing. #24 One step from success, this is the moment when one’s strength begins to flag, and one loses confidence in oneself. #25 When we allow change to occur, we transform ourselves into fertile land and let the Creative Imagination sow its seeds in us. #26 The only way to make the right decision is to know what the wrong decision is. #27 Everything is contained in sounds – the past, present and future. The person who doesn’t know how to listen will never hear the advice that life offers to us all the time. And the only person who listens to the sounds of the moment is able to make the right decision in life.
