We normally don’t put up ads but this Dove one got to us.

Drop a comment if you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by the beauty industry.

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Movies contain a lot of wisdom, sometimes even when there’s a car chase and an explosion going on. So we thought we’d compile some of our favorite movie quotes to give you a laugh and maybe something to think about

“Every man dies, but not every man really lives.” — Mel Gibson from Braveheart

“You can lose lots of money chasing women, but you will never lose women by chasing money.” — Edward Herman in I Think I Love My Wife

“Nature is about balance. All the world comes in pairs: yin and yang, right and wrong, men and women. What’s pleasure without pain?” — Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life

“For just one night let’s not be co-workers. Let’s be co-people.” — Will Ferrell in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more.” — Ryan Gosling in The Notebook

“It’s not about the paycheck, it’s about respect, it’s about looking in the mirror and knowing that you’ve done something valuable with your day.” — Kevin Kline in Dave

“Whatever you fear most has no power over you. It is the fear that has the power.” — George Clooney in The Men Who Stare At Goats

“We can’t retract the decisions we’ve made. We can only affect the decisions we’re going to make from here.” — Jamie Foxx in Law Abiding Citizen

“We’re going to live like we’re telling the best story in the whole world. Are you ready?” — Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom

“Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people have got to have their faith rewarded.” — Christian Bale in The Dark Knight

Got a few of your own favorites? Drop a comment and share them.

Americans pride themselves on being hard working. We all love our rags to riches story and we find comfort knowing that the rich people have worked hard for their money.

But here’s the kicker. Germans on the other side of the pond are more productive, happier, take more holidays, and have a greater quality of life. So where did things go wrong?

Check out this article and you’ll be baffled. I’m thinking of packing my bags and moving to Germany right now.

“Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?”: America’s misguided culture of overwork

Germany’s workers have higher productivity, shorter hours and greater quality of life. How did we get it so wrong?

By Alex Jung for Salon.com

Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.

According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life,” European social democracy – particularly Germany’s – offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.

Salon spoke to Geoghegan over the phone about Germany’s luxurious worker benefits, our own dysfunctional attitudes towards work, and how we can make our lives more like theirs.

People in the U.S. often pride themselves for working more than our European counterparts. Why do we work so much in the first place?

There aren’t any historical or cultural reasons for it. Americans famously had more leisure time than the Japanese back in the 1960s. I would say if you did a survey of most people who are in their late 50s or 60s, they will tell you that they take fewer vacations than their parents did. Now why did that change? It wasn’t because of the Pilgrims. People work hard in America, but there was a period where leisure time was increasing. I quoted Linda Bell and Richard Freeman in an article they wrote about what happened during the ‘90s. There was nobody to stop you from working longer. There was no government check, there was no union check as there is on excessive work as there is in Germany or elsewhere in Europe. These institutional checks are gone. So people feel like lab rats: “If I work an extra 10 minutes over the person in the cubicle next to me, then I’m less likely to get laid off.” It’s a very rational response.

Aren’t we at least more productive by virtue of the amount of time we’re putting in?

No. Look at their productivity rates. They’re like ours. I think we understate our hours and they overstate them, because they take so much time off and sneak off early from work. If the productivity rates being reported are officially the same, and if they’re understating and we’re overstating, they’re probably working more efficiently than we are, and maybe the fact that they’re taking time off has something to do with that.

Why is it useful to compare ourselves to the Germans?

Germany has the highest degree of worker control on the planet since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I saw German labor minister Günther Horzetzky in April of 2009, he said “Our biggest export now is co-determination.” He meant that other European countries were coming up with versions of it.

How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?

The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans.

But the Germans have a lower GDP than we do. Doesn’t that mean that our quality of life is better?

One day we’ll get beyond that and see that the European standard of living is rising. You can pull out these GDP per capita statistics and say that people in Mississippi are vastly wealthier than people in Frankfurt and Hamburg. That can’t be true. Just spend two months in Hamburg and spend two months in Tupelo, Mississippi. There’s something wrong if the statistics are telling you that the people in Tupelo are three times wealthier than the people in Germany. Despite the numbers, social democracy really does work and delivers the goods and it’s the only model that an advanced country can do to be competitive in this world. I mean that not just in terms of exports, but in terms of being green at the same time. That we can raise the standard of living without boiling the planet shows how our measure of GDP is so crude.

Click here to continue reading »

This is just plain funny. It’s a rapper in quarantine, rapping his story.

Pretty good song, might we add.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First off, THANK YOU to everyone who submitted a tagline for the FinerMinds Tagline Search. We loved reading every single one of them so thank you so much for giving your suggestions.

Alright, after much deliberation we’ve finally whittled down 437 comments and over 500 different taglines. It was tough but fun work.

And now the time has come for you to pick the number 1 tagline. Drumroll please…

We’ll be announcing the winner of the Tagline contest next week so keep your eyes on the blog. If you’re one of the people short listed, keep your eyes on your inbox. We’ll be getting in contact with you.

And the Winner Gets 2 Tickets To AwesomenessFest (Worth $4000)!

The winner of the tagline contest will get 2 tickets to our December personal growth beach event happening on Costa Rica. It’s called AwesomenessFest.

This December 2 — 5 2010, on a beach in Costa Rica, I’ll be hosting Awesomeness Fest. We’re bringing together music + personal growth + fun and adventure. 300 people will be exposed to the hottest personal growth ideas of 2010. We’ll also bring in amazing musicians, bands, and some of the most incredible speakers in the field of personal growth. The event’s got a huge focus on bonding and team activities. The idea is that people who attend will form and create a whole new network of friends and contacts who can help them in their upward spiral of growth. The event is by invitation only and the ticket package we’re giving is worth $4000 (for you and a friend). That doesn’t include hotel or airfare but it’s pretty cheap if you’re coming in from North America.

Thanks again to everyone who participated. You all rock!

A couple weeks ago I posted a slightly controversial issue up on the FinerMinds Facebook page about the “Ground Zero mosque” debate. If you haven’t heard about it, there has been a proposal to build an Islamic center where the World Trade Towers used to be. It’s not even a mosque. It’s more like a YMCA or a Jewish Community Center. And it’s 2 blocks away from Ground Zero.

I think it’s important that we as an interconnected humanity be aware and conscious of what’s going on in the world. That’s why I’m bringing this up and that’s why I want your opinions on it.

Check it out:

For the full thread of comments, head here »

We got 81 comments with some really strong opinions. But I don’t want to the discussion to end. I want your thoughts on this. If we don’t question, we don’t grow.

By the way. When Sharif El-Gamal, one of the organizers of this project was asked what would the building be used for he replied, “The community center will provide a place where individuals, regardless of their culture or background, will find a place of learning, arts and culture, and, most importantly, a community center guided by the universal values of all religions in their truest form – peace, compassion, generosity, and respect for all.“

Turns out, celebrities know a lot more than just fashion advice and red carpet wisdom.

Here are 12 different celebrities who tout the power of meditation and what they used it for.

Article by Jason Wachob for the Huffington Post.

12 Things Celebs Can Teach You About Meditation

One of the many great things about meditation is that there’s no one-size-fits-all formula. There are many different meditation techniques, many different benefits, and many different reasons why people meditate. Here are 13 celebrities who meditate, and 13 things we can learn about meditation from them.

1. Angelina Jolie

You can meditate anywhere and find it everywhere. “I find meditation in sitting on the floor with the kids coloring for an hour, or going on the trampoline,” said Jolie.

2. David Lynch

Meditation can help you can do amazingly creative things. (Have you ever seen Mulholland Drive?) How is David Lynch so creative? Lynch attributes his creativity to meditation, as he’s been practicing Transcendental Meditation for over 35 years.

3. Hugh Jackman

Meditation can help you deal with anxiety. Hugh said that meditation “changed his life” and helped him deal with being obsessive compulsive.

4. Adrien Brody

Meditation can help you prepare for a starring film role — or just prepare, in general. In preparing for his upcoming role in Predator 2, Brody said he stayed in a hut in the jungle and “studied meditation techniques.”

5. Eva Mendes

Meditation can help you deal with everyday stress. Mendes said it helps her “deal with life’s ups and downs, coming from more of a centered place.”

6. Howard Stern

Meditation may help you quit smoking. Stern said he quit smoking almost instantaneously after he began his Transcendental Meditation practice 36 years ago.

7. Gisele Bundchen

Can meditation give you a supermodel-like figure after giving birth? Well, Gisele was a supermodel before giving birth — but was able to lose her baby weight miraculously fast because of “eating healthily, meditating and doing exercises such as kung fu and yoga.“
(Paraphrased from Vogue Magazine)

8. Adam Yauch

This Beastie Boy says daily meditation helps him in his struggle with cancer. Adam “pictures smashing apart all of the cancer cells in the world.” Namaste to that.

9. Russell Brand

Meditation can help you find your soul-mate. Russell Brand told fellow meditator, Howard Stern, that meditation helped him when he first met pop star, and now fiance, Katy Perry.

10. Russell Simmons

Meditation can do all that, and then some… The hip-hop mogul on the benefits of meditation: “It has given me energy, strength, health, wisdom, and access to my own inner stillness, inner silence, inner bliss. It is my connection to myself; it is my connection to the universe.”

11. Tiger Woods

Things can go bad once you stop meditating. Yes, Tiger has said that he’d gotten away from his meditation practice and we all know what happened there.

12. Gwyneth Paltrow

You can start meditating today. You know what Gwyneth Paltrow’s 2010 resolution was? To learn how to meditate. So if Gwyneth just started, so can you. Here are some great meditation techniques from Deepak Chopra to get you started.

Article from the Huffington Post. By Jason Wachob.

Recently a FinerMinds reader asked me a question about discovering their life purpose. How does one find the right career? And WHY are so many people miserable in their current careers? This got me thinking. And I realized that the very core of how we’re trained to pick a career in this modern world is ludicrous and faulty.

So here’s my reasoning on why so many people get stuck wasting their lives doing something meaningless and boring. I then offer 3 ways to help you find the right cover by taking yourself through a simple thought process.

Did You Want To Be A Lawyer? I Didn’t Think So…

Most of us, when thinking about what we want to do in life, choose careers that we think will be marketable. For example, no kid grows up thinking they want to be a lawyer or accountant. But then why is it that America has 1,116,967 lawyers?

It’s because at some point in our society people began to view being a lawyer as a method of survival, of attaining the glamorous lifestyle they see on TV. (we can thank those 90s TV shows like Ally McBeal and LA Law for that!). These people picked Law as a career because they saw it as a way to pay of their student debts and meet their needs for happiness and fulfillment. Unfortunetly this is bullshit. America has 5% of the world’s population and 70% of the world’s lawyers. The oversupply causes most lawyers to earn measly salaries, struggle for clients and detest what they do. I was in the legal industry for 2 years selling technology to law firms. I know this from the hundreds of lawyers I befriended. (In a recent poll,  52% of practicing lawyers describe themselves as dissatisfied.).

So why then do so many college kids chose law as a career?

It’s because our society has conditioned us to choose careers in the the most impractical, dumbest way possible.

If you choose a career based on what makes you money and not what will drive your passion — you’re setting yourself up for misery.

How do we break this pattern? Well first you have to understand the difference between a MEANS goals and an END goal.

Stay with me for a few minutes..this is going to get interesting

So my point is that so many people go into law misguided. Yet the same thing happened to me. I became a software engineer because in the 1990s everyone thought that this was the cool thing to do. Every  parent wanted their kid to become the next Bill Gates. So in school, guidance counsellors, family members, teachers all said, “You’re smart. Go into computer engineering. You’ll become rich and happy.”

So that’s what I did. I studied for 4 years at the University of Michigan College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and hated every programming class I took. I got a summer internship at Microsoft. My parents were proud. Yet after 11 weeks at Microsoft I literally had myself fired. I just could not bring myself to sit in front of a computer for 8 hours a day and write code.

I feel I wasted 4 years of my life studying computer engineering because I had assumed it was the right thing to do.

You see, I had confused a MEANS GOAL with an END GOAL.

Step 1: Know The Difference Between  Means Goals and End Goals

Let me give you an example. I was once teaching a class on goal setting.  I had a woman come up to me and ask, “How can I learn to type faster?” I was intrigued so I asked her why she’d want to improve her typing skills. She replied, “Well, I need to type faster because I’m a data entry clerk and if I can type faster, I can  finish my data entry work way quicker.” So I asked, “Why do you want to finish your data entry work quicker? And she said, “Well, I get paid by how much data I can enter.” So naturally, I asked, “Why do you want to get paid more?” And she replied, “If I get paid more I can move my mother from Detroit to live with me in NY.”

I asked, “Why do you want your mother in NY?” And the lady replied, “Well, there’s this house I want to buy in the Bronx and I want to live in that house with my mother and make that house beautiful.” I asked again, “Why do you want to buy this house and beautify it?”

And she replied that her and her mother come from a long line of rich African American history and culture and they were the only ones left in their family. She wanted to build this house and fill it with all their heirlooms, artefacts, and priceless pieces so that her children can one day grow up in that home an understand their cultural heritage. She couldn’t do this in Detroit because the neighborhood where her mother and all these priceless antiques were located was way too dangerous.

This house would then become a museum, a beautiful glorious home filled with their family heritage.

So you see, the house filled with heirlooms was her END GOAL.

Learning to type faster was her MEANS goal.

But she was focused on the wrong thing. She had her mind focused on the pointless task of speeding up her typing skills when she should have been focused on the attaining the house.

In short, she had defined the wrong problem. Now think about what would happen if she had focused on the house.

First, she has more emotion and passion towards the home. This creates more drive and positive emotion towards that goal. If she suddenly lost her job or found that she lacked the skills to type faster it would not bother her. Because neither of those things were important anyway. It was all about the house.

Second, by giving her subconscious mind the end goal of the home, she allows her mind to work with her to channel ideas, inspirations and guidance to move her towards attaining that home. This the big secret with inspiration. It comes when you give your mind a problem to solve. Whether it’s writing a book or trying to find a way to finance a home.

So here’s the problem with our society.

We pick careers. Which are means goals.

Instead we need to be picking an ideal life. Which is the END GOAL.

Here’s how to apply this.

Step 2: Decide On Your Dream Life

So how do you then find a career if so many people get misguided? Well, the trick is to not pick a career. Instead you want to decide on the kind of life you want to lead. If I could do it all again, at the age of 22 I would map out the kind of life I would want by my 30th birthday. I would ask myself these questions. What kind of home do I want to live in? Where do I want to live? Do I like beaches, mountains, or rivers? What language do I want to speak? Do I want to work in an office, from home, or over the net? What type of people do I want to be around?

Here are some questions to get you going:

Where would you live?
What would your house look like?
What time would you wake up?
What would you do in the morning?
What would you do in the first half of your day?
Who would you have lunch and dinner with?
What would your friends be like?
What are your clients like?
What are your relationships like? What do you like about each other?
What would you do for family time?
What is the relationship with your kids like? What do you appreciate about each other?
What would you talk about over dinner?
What would you do at night?
Who would you do it with?
What would your thoughts be as you go to sleep?

Step 3: Decide On What You Want To Do

Now based on these questions, decide what you want to do. Okay, so I lied. It’s not that easy. It might be easy to think of what you want but it’s a little trickier finding out how to get there. But here’s how the mind works. When you start asking the right questions, your mind starts opening up to inspirational sources and the necessary steps you need to take will start coming to you.

A lot of people misunderstand inspiration and genius. They think it comes from random flashes of insight that hit you. That’s not the case. Those random flashes of insight only hit you when you’ve actually given your subconscious mind a problem to solve. And in this case the problem is the kind of life you want to create and how to get there.

When you operate this way  you’ll start finding shortcuts. Quicker, more efficient ways to get to your dream life. And I can guarantee you that struggling as an underpaid lawyer or junior accountant or tax collector or low level programmer for years and years while waiting for the next salary hike will probably not be the path to your end vision.

Now Follow Your Inspiration And Take Action

In my case, I quit programming and instead pursued my passions. Reading, writing, travel, building websites. Studying personal growth and meditation. At first I struggled.  I spent a few years broke. I lived in New York below the poverty line working for a non-profit. I watched as many of my friends who were MBAs, or lawyers or programmers got good jobs and started ‘proud careers’.

But following my passion did get me somewhere. I now run a company that sells $10 million dollars a year worth of personal growth products. I get to write — my blog has 450,000 subscribers. I get to travel — speaking at seminars around the world. I build websites. I spend hours every day reading. I made my first million in my early thirties. And I did it without using anything I learned from computer engineering school but by simple following my passion — WITH A CLEAR END VISION IN MIND OF THE LIFE I WANTED TO CREATE. Which is the life I now lead.

So when I started asking myself those questions above, I began to receive the insights that led me to build my business, which is now MindValley. But I didn’t sit down and decide I was going to build a business. Instead I decided what kind of life I wanted to lead and the inspiration came that helped me create that life. The right ideas for getting clients. The right models for marketing my talents. The right people in my life.  And I took action. I listened to my gut instincts and ideas and pursued the opportunities that came my way.

This is how you build a life. Ignore the “career” part.

So if you’re wondering what to do with your life, maybe you’re a fresh grad or you’re leaving a 20-year career, think about your end goals and not your means goals. Follow those steps above, and follow it up with action.

Do share comments below. You know I love hearing from you all.

There’s warnings on movies, music, and just about everything else out there. EXCEPT when it comes to print media like the news or magazines. So Tom Scott created these incredible labels you can stick over newspapers and magazines to give people a heads up about what they’ll be reading.

It’s time average consumers (i.e. you and me) get a heads up on what we think is the “truth” and the “news”.

If you want to print out your own labels, he’s made some just for you. Just head here and scroll to the bottom to make your own warning labels. All you need to buy is one of those Avery label sheets.

After all, you can’t believe everything you read.

For the full post from Tom Scott and links to make your own labels, head here » He’s also got the same labels but translated into several languages.

By the way, all images courtesy of Tom Scott.

In our last few newsletters we sent out videos that challenged the normal view of reality. These videos took on the viewpoint that reality is but a creation of our brains. I.e. What’s around us is just a series of quantum particles existing in various states of probability. Our brain then coalesces these into what we see as reality.

I first came across this in The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot. He suggests that reality is just a hologram created by our brains and in the future, people will find ways to emulate reality. One of the methods he mentions is holophonic sounds. When I first listened to holophonic sounds, it wowed me.

They trick your brain into perceiving a reality that does not exist. It’s spooky but really cool. Check it out below and make sure you CLOSE YOUR EYES.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was actually Argentinean physiologist, Huco Zuccarelli, who developed this audio technique, which allows you to create holograms in your mind. A while back, a reporter for the Times of London wrote, “I stole a look at the reassuring numbers on my watch to make sure where I was. People approached from behind me where I knew there was only a wall… By the end of seven minutes I was getting the impression of figures, the embodiment of the voices on the tape. It is a multidimensional ‘picture’ created by sound.”

Our recommended product if your really want to explore the nature of alternate realities and use this to improve your life is Quantum Jumping by my friend Burt Goldman, the famous 83-year old American Monk. Quantum jumping rocks and it’s based on the idea that we can tap into alternate realities to help us improve our current reality. It’s wild, but very cool. Check it out here »