Erik's Blog​

Most motivators classify all fear as bad. This is a mistake. Why? Because some fear is good and some fear is bad. I’ve been blogging about the difference between useful and useless fear in several posts now: The subtle and deadly lie in every inspiring quote about fear and courage. Snake! Identifying and Eliminating Useless Fear Rattlesnakes and Rubber Snakes:

Fear holding you back? Having trouble mustering the courage to do the right thing? Just bounce around online and you’ll find a crowd of inspiring quotes about overcoming fear. Here are a couple: Your largest fear carries your greatest growth. Do the thing you fear most and the death of fear is certain. While we absolutely should take these quotes

“Fake News” is all the rage. Wired contributor Henri Gendreau sums it up in a recent article. October 12, 2016, the Washington Post reports, “Facebook has repeatedly trended fake news since firing its human editors.” Fortune and Vanity Fair pick up the story. A week later, Buzzfeed reports, “Hyperpartisan Facebook Pages Are Publishing False and Misleading Information At An Alarming

Does the world seem like a dangerous place? Like everything is falling apart, like the planet is spiraling out of control? One blogger writes, “I see humans, but no humanity.” Another posts a quote that reads, “I’m just tired, I just want the world to be quiet for a bit.” Most of us feel that way. But truth is, we’ve

Why are so many bad things happening around the world? When we look out and see all the violence and conflict and protesting and hatred, it seems like civilization itself is teetering on the edge of destruction. But I say, this view of the world is contrived. It’s a structural distortion of reality. The more we buy into this structural

Tonight I’m teaching an Automatic Influence seminar where we’ll all watch this video of Andrew Parrish filming his cat watching the movie, Psycho. The movie isn’t reality. They’re all actors. The blood. The screams. It’s all fake. But the cat doesn’t know the difference between image and real life. It reacts to the pictures as if they’re real. We’re all

Happiness researchers say the average person needs to triple their positivity to reach a healthy sense of well-being. How? It starts by understanding what happiness is and how to get more of it. For about ten posts now I’ve been angling around this definition: Happiness is a pattern of positive emotion that comes from seeing good things happen at a

There’s an old saying, “People are about as happy as they make up their mind to be.” That tells me there’s a relationship between mindset and happiness. Add in this fact: happiness researchers say the average person needs to triple their positivity. The average adult’s positivity ratio is 2-to-1, while depressed people are 1-to-1 and healthy ratios start at 6-to-1.

We live in a massive, buzzing, busy world where billions of things are happening everywhere… There’s a billion drivers in a billion cars swerving and snaking through roads all over the globe. There’s a Japanese manufacturer trying to land a can of sport drink on the surface of the moon.1 There’s ten billion billion insects scurrying and fluttering over the

I’ve been describing happiness as “a pattern of positive emotion that comes from seeing good things happen at a good pace” for eight posts now. Given our better understanding of happiness, how can we live happier lives? We start off realizing that happiness is more about mindset than circumstance. Happiness comes from the way we “see good things happen.” It’s

It has something to do with what I describe as “Living on psychological Jupiter” in a blog post a year back. So let’s look at it again.

Ever noticed how one person has all sorts of bad experiences and stays happy, while another person plunges into depression? What’s the difference? This post explains. (This is the eighth post in a series on happiness that starts here. We invested seven posts to put in the building blocks of happiness, and the next series of posts builds on this