What is the difference between someone that is neurotic, normal, and criminal?

A neurotic is not your boss, and if you are the boss it is not the people who work for you. Maybe.

One definition of neurotic is when a person cannot decide when to participate or when to withdraw, and the person is frozen for some reason. A neurotic cannot see their own needs and cannot fill them. Are we neurotic some of the time ourselves? Do we need help from time to time to sort out what is going on around us?

On the other end of the spectrum is a criminal. A criminal cannot see the needs of others and harms others, and cannot distinguish between themselves and the rest of world.

In the middle is us. Whoever “us” is. In life we need to learn to adapt to change as the world around us changes. And as our world changes faster now than ever before, we are challenged to look at our own beliefs and determine if they fit the world now or not. And if we decide we can’t change our beliefs, we become neurotic and/or criminal.

A big story lately has been the bombings of several hotels in Jordan by suicide bombers with radical beliefs. These people cannot cope with the fact that the world is changing. They do not want the world to change; they want the world to be what they want it to be, and that is not going to happen for anyone.

So the suicide bombers cannot fill their own needs and become criminals blowing up innocent people. And this makes them feel like they are doing something that will change the world.

They cannot adapt to the world as it grows.

They cannot accept change, and so their choice is to try to force change to stop.

We all hold outdated beliefs that are no longer true, but the extent to which we act on these beliefs makes a big difference.

One of my favorite stories is that in 1899 Charles Duell, the head of the U. S. Patent Office, declared that everything that could be invented had been invented and we could save the taxpayers a lot of money by closing the Patent Office down.

The change in our world is becoming more rapid every day. Dealing with the changes takes adaptation like never before in the history of man.

Change is something that we don’t do well with. But when change does occur in our world, most of us learn to assimilate it into our consciousness.

Women in America didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. Do any of us think about women not voting anymore, or are more and more politicians reaching out for the women’s vote today?

In some countries even today women do not have the right to vote (see Kuwait as an example). In America can we believe that there are places where people don’t have the right to vote?

But we have the push-pull to everything we do in life, and we have constant conflict.

For example the golden rule of do unto others as you would like to have others do unto you, versus the law of survival of the fittest, or reduced to “dog eat dog”.

Which one do we hold in our mind? Or is it both of them? And then when it comes time to make a decision what do we do? Be kind and help them out like we would want to, or do we crush them in the spirit of the law of survival?

Which message is in the office with you today?

How can we adapt to different signals in life?

We have to examine our beliefs, which can be very painful. We have lived with some of these beliefs for centuries and now we have to give them up? How is that possible?

It is a requirement for success, and Success Philosophy can help you achieve more.

What about your time? Is it valuable to you? Do you use it wisely? Probably not. We aren’t doing things that could make us successful all of the time, we might even be goofing off, but there should be some time that you say to yourself “This is the time I am going to do something for myself.” Try this budget exercise: read every day for at least 15 minutes to start the time budgeting process.

PS: Check out the recent Weekly Challenges as an introduction or to find a new success technique.

“Success is a journey, not a destination.”

I have heard some people say that they cannot do sales. And I say, “Fine, that means your life is a mess.” If you can’t sell yourself to a prospective employer what kind of job do you have? If you can’t sell yourself to your children, what is going on in the household? If you can’t sell yourself to somebody then you need some help. Sales is not hard- if you can help others get what they want, you are selling. Figuring out what others want and helping them to achieve these goals is selling. Being able to speak and ask questions is selling. Selling is something that you can do if you can ask questions. How is your questioning ability? You can work on questions to help you sell more.

PS: See the recent Sales Tips of the Week from Step Jones

Who said: “The unexamined life is not worth living”

1. Socrates
2. Aristotle
3. Plato
4. Zeno
5. Your mom

Answer the question correctly and get a free MP3 download of Step Jones’s CD Help Yourself Be Better  from his upcoming new audio product Jump Start

The answer to last week’s trivia question is #7, “All of the Above”.