Psycho-Cybernetics Part 9 of 30: Disney and Desire
May 19, 2009 by dr. lam · 5 Comments
When Walt Disney was seeking investors for his famed theme park, Disneyland, he was confronted with jeers and laughter about his fantastical, non-sensical idea. This pushed Disney to prove all his detractors wrong and to fulfill his life-long dream of opening and succeeding with his vision. The rest as they say is history.
Last week, we talked about how we should reprogram our unconscious servo-mechanism with an Automatic Success Mechanism. How do we do that? The answer is with deep desire. Desire motivates our thoughts. When we feel that we deeply want something bad enough, we overcome insurmountable odds. We overcome negative thinking, and we replace our Automatic Failure Mechanism with our Automatic Success Mechanism. We don’t take no for an answer.
Specifically then, how do we reprogram these negative thoughts? We focus on the end result. Of course, we have to have a desired end goal of what we want so that we can keep our eyes on the prize. Too often we are still plagued with the notions of what we don’t want. Instead, we should focus on what we do want…where our desires lead us. Starting with a deep desire for what we want to attain will create a powerful reprogramming of our unconscious mind. Remember that it is not force of will that Maltz talks about, i.e., it is not our conscious mind forcing us begrudgingly and exhaustingly forward. It is our conscious mind that sets our much more powerful unconscious mind into motion to lead us forward to success. Visualizing what we want every day can generate us to move forward in ways that we could not otherwise imagine.
Also remember that we talked about how our Creative Mechanism was the dividing element between us and the animals, i.e., how we enlist our imagination. Our imagination oftentimes is an unconscious attribute that is set in motion by our conscious mind. As a creative person myself, I open myself to inspiration and thoughts about everything. I move with a conscious desire toward my goals and my unconscious mind oftentimes gives me the answer that I was looking for.
As an example of this, in December 2006, I was interested in getting my name more broadly disseminated out to the world so I began to upload numerous videos that I felt passionately about on YouTube (currently I have 573 videos on the site with over 1.9 million views), at the time a nascent site that certainly was not used for promoting a plastic surgical practice. My mother and sister were both laughing at me at how I was wasting my time doing something so stupid. I was completely passionate that such a move might benefit my practice but just followed my heart and soul. Today YouTube accounts for the principle method by which I have a practice now that garners between 50 to 80% of my patients who have flown in from over 500 cities, 47 states, and from 18 countries for my services. Follow your heart and intuition against all odds.
Outliers Part 2 of 3: 10,000 Hours & The Beatles in Hamburg
December 10, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
When the Beatles hit the U.S. shores in 1964, they were hailed as the vanguard of the British Invasion. However, did the Beatles simply succeed out of sheer talent? In Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he traces the Beatles’ growth, maturity, and success to a critical time that they spent in Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles began playing already since 1957 but it was not until 1960 when they were brought over to Hamburg to play 8 hours a day, 7 days a week in a strip joint that they were able to get the right experience they needed to be successful. Lennon recalls when they were in Liverpool, they played one-hour gigs once a week or so meaning they played the same songs over and over again, their hits. When forced to play continuously all the time, they were compelled to improvise, learn new material quickly, play all types of music, etc., just to keep their foreign audience engaged. Their raw talent was placed into a boiling crucible where, after 5 trips to Hamburg, they transformed into the Beatles that arrived in the U.S. in 1964. Gladwell speculates that it takes 10,000 hours to arrive at a definable success in many fields. Bill Gates, the subject of yesterday’s blog, arrived at his 10,000 hours through luck of circumstance that put him well ahead of everyone else by a sizable time differential.
I look at how YouTube and the entire Internet medium have become my voice, so to speak, to reach the masses across many shores. We have on this website regularly people from Asia, Europe, South America and from every part of the North American continent. Similarly, I now attract patients every single day from across the United States and the world, all by virtue of a singular message beamed out over the net. Back in December 2006, I had this crazy idea to start loading videos onto a nascent site, YouTube, because I had a message to deliver but had no platform for doing so. I remember that my sister and mother were laughing uproariously about my activity, thinking what a colossal waste of time. Now the attention that I have garnered through my Internet exposure accounts for 60 to 70% of my business.
I don’t know if I have logged my 10,000 hours in, but I am on track to do so and exceed that number. I work tirelessly every day between my busy patient practice, at night, and on weekends thinking about and working on the Internet. I learned Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and work somewhat religiously on my site, as I am doing right now on a Saturday. In a way, this is not work for me; it is my love and passion. I love communicating my vision. I love thinking of new strategies to communicate that vision, and I love my ever expanding audience, which is now 1.5 million viewers on YouTube, almost every country in the world has seen this site (178 out of 195 countries according to my webmaster) with over 1,200 unique visitors to this site every day. I now come up with creative ideas that my webmaster implements for me at a furious pace because the execution of these creative thoughts come to me almost naturally by this point. I had a PR individual ask me last week, “Don’t you worry that someone will steal your ideas if you put them out there?” I frankly said, “No, they can’t keep up with me so I don’t even worry about it. By the time they copy what I have done, I have already thought of something else and far better.”
Although fruitless hard work backed up without talent and passion is not going to move you forward, hard work to the point of almost insanity is a requisite for success according to Gladwell’s thesis. Obviously, I subscribe to that philosophy. Cheers to hard work driven by inestimable passion!
Completing (for now) my Web 2.0 Platform
November 21, 2008 by dr. lam · Leave a Comment
Today, I introduce a new level of web 2.0 integration by incorporating social medial channels on every page of my website. Watch the short video I shot in my vlog section on this idea.
As many of you know, I relentlessly post videos on YouTube. However, you have to go to YouTube to find these videos or scour my site for the newest video that I have shot. Two things will rectify this encumbrance. First, the updates section will tell you when a new anything (video, text, section, etc.) has been posted with a direct link to it. Second, I will now have a link on every page to my YouTube videos. (Btw, another option is to subscribe to my videos on YouTube if you don’t mind an email sent to you that I have a new video shot and uploaded).
In addition, I have made a lot of changes to make this website a truly aggressive Web 2.0 platform, meaning fully integrating social media into this site with the incorporation of Facebook (a new group that I just created on Facebook dedicated to LFP’s shenanigans) that facilitates more easily my posting photos and other stuff that my staff and I are doing, e.g., thoughts that lie outside of my blog entries, vlogs, and forum postings. (Btw, you must register for Facebook to see the page). Twitter updates from my staff and me. (We’ll see how successful this is, but my staff is already getting crazy and loving to submit “tweets” [that is what short updates are called].) A direct link is also now displayed on every page to my podcasts (far right icon) that I publish in iTunes for your iPhone and iPod. Hopefully, these changes will encourage a broader sense of community, participation, and integration into what LFP has to offer our global tribe of followers.
Btw, as you probably would surmise, I really haven’t “completed” anything. This is just the beginning of the journey over the next 6 months and beyond.