More than ever, I am concerned about wasting my energy on unproductive activities. When I say “unproductive activities”, I mean bad habits…regardless of their intent. By Spirited Leaders’ definition, bad habits are thoughts and actions that do not bring progress toward goals. Bad habits are caused by many things: laziness, ignorance, lack of intelligence, lack of self-control, planning errors, etc.
Sometimes the intent is ‘good’ [admirable] yet the resulting thoughts and actions fail to generate progress toward goals. When these sorts of ‘admirable’ thoughts and actions are repeated and fail to bring the desired results, we must make a choice:
- Do we continue our admirable efforts, believing they will sooner or later bring the result we desire? [i.e., Do we persist as in ‘Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win’?]
- Do we seek then perform better thoughts and better actions? [i.e., Do we conclude current thoughts and actions are bad habits and replace them with New Things?]
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About Energy – a Thought Post from Mar 9, 2012
Over the years, I have written about energy:
Today, my thoughts are about the major role energy serves in our lives.
A century ago, another of my heroes, Albert Einstein, showed the world E=mc2...that is, energy and mass are directly linked and proportional. [and Einstein said more] Perhaps this is true? Perhaps, in the future, another great mind will prove there are nuances not captured in that fascinatingly-straightforward Einstein equation?
Regardless, for life, energy is necessary. For human life, energy is necessary.
Here's how Brad Sugars expressed this a few years ago, when I attended his session in Las Vegas:
- People can live about 3 weeks without food
- People can live about 3 days without water
- People can live about 3 minutes without oxygen
- People can live, perhaps, 3 seconds without electricity
Brad's point: without electricity the neurons in our brains would not fire...and life would cease.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. That's the Law of Conservation of Energy we were taught in physics and engineering classes.
So, we know our bodies consume energy and we process it without destroying it.
In fact, we use energy to fuel everything we think, feel, and do...our muscles, our internal processes, etc.
Our brains consume energy as our neurons fire.
Scientists have measured the voltage and the current over neuronal synapses. While it would be rather intrusive work, scientists could insert a bunch of probes and do a pretty good job of figuring out just how much energy is required to fuel the parts of our brains that do our thinking work. Yes, it would be an intrusive and tedious exercise...and dangerous. So, let's not spend more time on that extreme approach.
Let's accept the fact our brains use quite a bit of energy to fuel our thoughts.
On a micro scale, all those billions of bits and pieces of our brains do work when we think.
There is a limited amount of energy available to the parts of our brains that do our thinking.
As we try to do with oil and coal and other non-renewable sources of energy, we ought to consume the energy in our brains as prudently as possible.