Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

Sorry to any social networkers or ad clickers who are looking for a website to do with aviation, or learning how to be an airline pilot. I’m afraid that’s just not what this site is about, but the search robots which govern the internet just don’t seem to be smart enough yet to work that one out.

What this site IS about is learning, or at least trying to control, a much tougher beast – the human mind. If that is of interest, I hope you can stick around. If not, have a good one.

Please bear with me, I’ve just brought Mind Pilot back online, and it is going tot ake me a few more weeks to do some tidying up, make this site look half decent, and get back moving again.

I promise it will be worth the wait!

So you have a problem to solve, or you are in a creative mood — how do you imagine the best possible outcome? I have always tried to work downwards, starting at the top by asking ‘ what is the best possible outcome, regardless of any known natural or human laws?’ I then ask what the best possible outcome might be considering the limitations of physics and nature, but making use of maximum human potential, and then after that I would consider the realistic best possible outcome considering the actual availability of the key resources of time, money, people and materials.

Thinking like this is a bit of a double-edged sword — of course, it can create some fantastic ideas, but it can also result in coming up with hundreds of different ideas and solutions to a problem, when only one workable answer is necessary. Having said that, I still have a number of business and personal problems I’m trying to work through the moment, and I haven’t yet formally taken them through this exercise. I think it is about time I did.

[ drawing to follow -- top of the pyramid -- one best answer, without limitations; base of the pyramid -- lots of answers, each with their own pros and cons]

It’s a bit of a late start, but I was late to bed last night, and over the last week or so I haven’t really been that bothered about specifically getting up at nine. I’d rather get up and stay awake, which I didn’t do yesterday. Still, having said that, it’s a really bright day outside, so maybe it would be nice to have got up a bit earlier and got out straight on my bike. I’m not quite feeling motivated to do that yet, but that might well change a bit later on. Today is going to be a short day work wise, as I have a concert in London later to go to, but I am not going to let that restrict me to just writing text.

I had another dream last night — hold on, do I really want to talk about this? I feel that there are certain boundaries that I am not so confident crossing, and talking about dreaming is one of them. I feel the same way about having people listening in where I am dictating content using voice recognition — even if most of the posts I publish here are taking pretty much verbatim from what I dictate, I still have the option to go back and correct or delete anything I don’t like. I know this website is all about dealing with mental challenges, and this will often be explaining how I think, and how this relates to the symptoms of the conditions this website is here to help people manage, but do I really want to feel as if I can just let anyone come in and drill through my head to see what I’m thinking? But the reality is that we all have dreams, and that most independent thinkers are extensive daydreamers, or should that be Daydream Believers, as well. Without dreams, there is nothing to aspire to, and life becomes strictly functional. Human nature just won’t accept that, so I think I will have to at least make some reference to what I’ve been dreaming about from time to time, just as much as I have already made frequent references to how I think. So the dream was actually quite a common one — I was at university — was that back at university, or had I enrolled on a new course? I was trying to catch up with the other students — that was always the case anyway when I was at university, but I think this time it was to do with trying to integrate being a student with running my business, and there was a study trip, which involved being given lectures on a train somewhere, either going to Hungary or Paris — you know how you can never quite recall all the details! I think there was a clear point though, and that was just a simple reminder of my long-held desire to build something ‘ real’ as opposed to websites, which I still sometimes just feel are a collection of pixels, text and code.

So is this ambition helpful? It is certainly something I’m trying to resolve within myself, and I still haven’t quite found the best way of doing so. I think there’s another few posts which could come off this particular thread of thought, back later.

Wednesday to Thursday 1 AM

As I bring up the ‘ half-century’ on Mind Pilot, I am opening myself up more and more to the concept of social networking on the Internet, but still wondering to what extent it will actually increase the number of useful visitors to my main website, and whether any social contacts made online will actually really amount to anything. I know that there are many other people out there who use the Internet to help them cope with a wide variety of medical challenges, but do I want to use the Internet to find more business, to find friends, or just to find people with whom I can share similar experiences? To be honest, I don’t really know, but I have recently found that a website like twitter is even more addictive than Facebook used to be when I first signed up to that. But I’m still trying to work out what it is overall point is — yes, it is a very quick way of sharing information about all kinds of different topics, but there is no focus to it, and it seems to be another way of just blurting out about anything to anyone. You know what they say about empty vessels making the most noise.

I still think I’ve got plenty of things that are worth saying, and I just have to go around finding the right place to say them. Perhaps it is a simple case of splitting my online time into three different areas — myself as an individual, which I managed through my own personal blog, my travel website and accompanying blog which is my main professional activity, and this Mind Pilot blog, where I hope I can share thoughts my about the different mood variations I’m going through.

There is also a fourth dimension that I want to move into, and that is my interest in architecture, and also in doing maps and drawings which relate to various different buildings. Some of this can be due to be added as content on my travel website, but I think there is a difference between travelling as a tourist,  having an academic interest in architecture, and then ultimately putting buildings and other structures together, an ambition I have never lost sight of. In the meantime, my colleague has just told me that this month should see a slight revenue increase over February, which is a better sign than the fall in traffic that I had seen earlier in the week, so for now, I will carry back on with constructing my presence in cyberspace. Who knows where this will take me next.

Well, I have been up to 20 minutes, and no complaints so far. Anyone reading this who is thinking that 10 o’clock sounds like a bit of a lie in should remember that home-based web entrepreneurs don’t have to drag themselves into an office at some ungodly hour. I wonder why I’ve been stressing so much and trying to get myself started at nine — wasn’t this the very kind of pressure that I was trying to avoid? As far as I’m concerned, 10 o’clock is a perfectly respectable time to start the day, and I think I will get plenty done.

Unlike yesterday, when I was running around a lot during the day, which then meant a very late meal, I know that I can breeze through today without any interruptions, and I am already feeling the momentum building.

Other posts to follow here and elsewhere, and a few current thoughts –

·                     Content updates — continuing where I left off with Dallas flights from Edinburgh, Glasgow, London, Manchester and Newcastle.

·                     On the Web, you can make just about anything public, but how much do you want to? Why I want to make more of my thoughts public.

·                     Thoughts from first week of twittering properly.

·                     Go back over diary — there’s loads of stuff in there, not just personal posts to put up here in Mind Pilot, but there’s loads of really other good stuff for my other websites.

·                     Long-term reviews — an idea I have for a simple review based website.

·                     I’ve taken out all that fruit and veg from the fridge, isn’t it time to eat some of it?

·                     Trying to maintain a balance between doing stuff that is really creative, though it won’t pay any bills, or at least it certainly won’t pay today’s bills, and doing stuff that might add a lot of value to the website, but which is incredibly tedious. Of course, the best stuff to work on is both creative and financially rewarding, but I’m not finding too much of that about at the moment. Still, having said that, I think that I will find more and more opportunities to do this as I get my head round the whole concept of social networking and bring this into the development of my websites, so they aren’t just about putting up content and hoping people will read it. There’s definitely a few ‘brass eye graphs’ to be done here!

·                     Looking at my computer screen as I’m dictating text into various different lists on this file, it seems about half of what I’m thinking is worth putting up on a website somewhere, and that I will keep the other half to myself.

·                     I’m getting very hungry, but I have sat down now, so the impetus is to go for a full hour of voice recognition, and then get up at the end of it. Maybe I’ll just do 45 minutes, does it really matter so early on in the day, when I know I’m going to have the momentum to keep going?

·                     Dragon (voice recognition programme) is annoying me a little this morning — this should be a list in bullet points, but it keeps on cutting out. Then it just won’t spell programme properly.

·                     I’ve just gone into the Dragon voice recognition dictionary, and deleted the Americanised spelling of ‘program’. What a relief! That is certainly worth a quick twitter, but only when I’m back online later.

·                     I am creating a whole load of content about flights between different city pairs — this stuff is certainly very tedious, when compared to more prose-based articles.

·                     I mustn’t forget to take the bin out.

·                     Here I go getting up and continuing to produce all this content, but last night I was listening to a Tony Robbins CD talking about how people need to adapt to constant change in order to compete and thrive. Two years ago, concentrating on content alone might have been the best way for us to grow, but is it really still the same case now?

·                     Why did Dragon just pop the last sentence out of the bullet points that I have been using for this list?It is all down to the usage of question marks? No, not in the case of this bullet point!

·                     If I put a question mark at the end of this line, will it move out of bulleted list form? No? I still have no idea how Dragon chooses to format these lists, but never mind I will move on.

My online session earlier really didn’t do much to maintain spirits — in fact, it did quite the opposite. As I was saying last week, I’m trying to avoid spending too much time on looking up how many visitors my website is getting, or how much it is earning from one day to the next — this is a common mistake that people in our industry make, and it can end up wasting so much time in causing so much demoralisation when things don’t change overnight. (18:40) — rather than just comment on this, I’ve used it as a starting point for two articles on running revenue generating websites — one about the top mistakes to avoid, and the other about the things that have kept us in business. I’m still slightly wary of doing this — Web traffic has fallen now for three consecutive weeks. I know there is still plenty of bad economic news out there, but March should normally show an increase compared to February, and we’ve already seen a massive drop-off in this year compared to last year. So who am I to write articles about how to run a successful Internet business? Well, the best businesses know how to keep going through the bad as well as the good, and even if I wouldn’t exactly say we are thriving at the moment, we are still surviving, and there are plenty of things we are trying to do to pull ourselves back up again. It might be extremely demoralising when a whole load of effort goes into improving your website, only to find that three or four weeks down the line, there is no change, but again I need to take a reality check here — these things can take months to turn round, so hold tight!

Just before five, I got a phone call to say that the bike wheel had been sorted out, but I then messed around having a couple of Skype conversations, and didn’t leave the house until 10 past, making it a bit tight to get to the bike shop. As I was driving there, I was getting more and more angry, especially as there was (unsurprisingly considering the time) so much more traffic on the road than I’m used to, and twice I just missed the traffic lights at busy junctions. Looking back on it now, this is the kind of frustration that most commuters have to put up with twice every single day, but as I am so used to working from home now, and as most travel I do outside the city is by train, the idea of having to wait more than a minute at a traffic light fills me with dread! As I am thinking back over my worries of web traffic going down, and how further reductions in revenue could really squeeze us, I’m also thinking of this utility of having to sit in traffic just so I can go and collect the wheel that I need to get my bike working again. I am also watching the time and thinking that if I miss the shop by one minute, I will have wasted this journey completely, just because I didn’t pull myself away from a Skype conversation which really can awaited until another time. Luckily, my worry is needless, as I just catch the shop as they are about to switch the lights off. When I’m in an irritable mood, I do try and find something to pull me out of it, but I’m not always successful. Relieved that I had just managed to get the wheel sorted, I was driving out of Kenilworth, and noticed a row of seven houses which all had what appeared to be recently thatched roofs — there I am thinking ‘what a nice little touch’, but somebody must have spent a lot of time coordinating that!

(18:55) I’m back at home now, and this little dictation session seems to have done a reasonable job at stabilising my mood. In many ways I’d rather be a little bit angry than lethargic and depressed — at least when I’m angry, I will have the motivation to do something about it. On the additional plus side, my brother, who is normally there to reign in my more fanciful ideas, is considerably more upbeat about how the business is going than I am right now. He reminded me of all the things we are doing to turn things around, and I know that there are numerous content ideas we have talked about which could bring in extra visitors and useful links. I think I’ve talked enough about mood management for now — or at least enough for me to put that area of my mind onto autopilot, so I can go back and sit in business class and create some content for my other website.

I’m driving towards a bike shop in Kenilworth to get my rear wheel fixed, when one my favourite dance anthems comes on the radio — Insomnia by Faithless.

The immediate reaction to hearing the opening bars of a tune like this is to hit the accelerator and go full throttle. It is easy to see how someone might overdo this even more when in a manic state, but I am rapidly held back.

This isn’t about being totally sensible — the emotion free driver will just carry on driving at the same speed regardless of what was on the radio. Rather, I am held back because my highly analytical nature tells me that driving too fast round corners is a recipe for disaster, especially on narrow country lanes. So just as I want to hit the accelerator pedal, my mind is coming back with calculations about fatalities on rural roads and I ease off.

As for the tune – well, Insomnia was certainly something I was afflicted with towards the end of last week, but today has just been drowsiness. Having said that, as I get round to uploading this (7:40pm), I’ve had my caffeine injection and I am feeling much more alert. I said in my earlier post that this post wasn’t making much sense, but I hope it does now get across the exact point it is trying to make – namely that the bipolar mind might well want to expose itself to taking more risks, but the analytical, Darwinian inspired statistical mind will always trump it with facts.

Oh well, at least next time I feel the need for speed I will be back on two wheels. Now if you want the facts for that, afaik, cycling is always more dangerous per mile than driving, but on average regular cyclists live 10 years longer than non-cyclists, because of the fitness gains. Then again, bipolar is supposed to take 10 years off your life too. I think there is some offsetting going on here Forget about CO2 offset, that’s my BP offset programme!