Life, The Universe, and Everything Coincidental

I don’t believe in omens in the religious sense of the word. I do believe that we notice coincidences or perceive special circumstances when our unconscious is focused intently on a goal or objective. For example, when your major definite goal is to make a lot of money as an entrepreneur, you might notice that the people at the table next to you at the restaurant are talking about a business service that might meld well with your new company — and when you talk to them, you think to yourself, hey, what a coincidence… In fact, you had simply programmed your subconscious mind to be hypersensitive to anything related to money, starting a business, and your particular product niche.

Which brings me to why I’m doing the 21 Day No Complaint Challenge. I can’t really explain why, just the how. My unconscious mind conspired to make me do it.

In the week before I wrote this journal entry, I read a book called In Search of Inspiration by Anthony Willoughby, who owns an adventure trekking company called I Will Not Complain (the premise is in the title); I then proceeded to notice a a post on Tim Ferris’ Four Hour Workweek Blog about his experience with the 21 Day No Complaint Challenge; then a few days later, without prompting or mention of what I was reading, a fellow survival school instructor mentioned how he thought his courses would be much better for everyone involved if no one ever complained and how complaining was contagious and lowered energy levels. The kicker was when the field director here overheard me talking about maybe doing the challenge, and said he happened to have received the No Complaint Challenge purple bracelet as a gift and had never used it. He gave it to me that day.

So my thoughts are, although I can’t figure out how exactly this relates to my major definite purpose, my unconscious mind seems to think it will benefit me. I’m not one to argue with the universe.

The 21 Day No Complaint Challenge

So the deal with the little purple bracelet is that you switch wrists whenever you complain — the goal being to keep the bracelet on one wrist for 21 days straight. (see Tim’s site for a more comprehensive explanation and history of the challenge)

Essentially I’ve been following Tim Ferris’ modified rules; you can complain, but you have to follow it with some constructive or positive spin (which I agree with since constructive criticism and not taking crap from anyone are both important to me).

For example (from Tim’s site):

“John can be such an asshole. Totally uncalled for.”

That’s a complaint. Switch wrists, start over.

Whereas the following variation would be acceptable:

“John was a bit of muppet in there, wasn’t he? I suppose I’ll just send the e-mails directly to Mary in engineering for the next two weeks to get buy-in, then he’ll have to agree.”

Knowing the results of this challenge might be revealing and possibly amusing, I’m going to keep a bit of a diary and post the results. This should be fun.

To be continued in the next post…