DrContrarian

There are many obstacles to achieving success. Failure is the default position, I think. (Several 100 million sperm, one baby. Etcetera.) So what are the obstacles? Let me not count the ways… there still many blogs to come, but I’ll just focus on one: CYNICISM. Cynicism is such an easy, ‘adult’ excuse. It masquerades as word-weary experience, so it is very handy to pull out. And because success is more exceptional than it should be, the cynics are often right. But to be successful, you need an almost child-like naiveté: To remain positive in the face adversity, to persist against the odds – all these things require a suspension of ‘reality’ that’s seems very self-evident to the cynic. There are always more reasons to give up than there are to keep going so to be cynical is more realistic and possibly even more rational. Cynicism also provides the rationale after you quit – making it the easy option; justifiable under the circumstances. And because the circumstances are always s...

I remember when I first noticed the existence of patterns. Everywhere I looked, I discovered patterns. I did not immediately realise it, but I had discovered the concept of chaos theory. Initially, for a number of years, I never bothered to understand its principles, assuming that it was all about chaos – and I had a preconceived notion that the answer cannot lie in chaos, because that would mean randomness rules. That would have meant luck was the Master of the Universe, and I did not want to face that. Fortunately, I could not have been any more wrong. Habits are patterns. Personalities are habituated behavioural patterns. Culture is patterns of behaviour and norms. Mathematics is all about formulae that describe specific patterns or rules. So is Biology. Every imaginable phenomenon that you can see or experience has an underlying rule or formula that determines the phenomenon or behaviour. All psychological ailments are simply defective patterning, and all counselling is an attemp...