It’s not often that my explorations have such a narrowly defined end-goal. Usually, they’re more open-ended in nature. But this time, someone’s identity was at stake; so I ventured out into the brisk December air, focused on accomplishing my goal.

The nature of the mission was simple: retrieve a lost social security card that had gone mysteriously missing. It must be kept from falling into the wrong hands. And in the process of searching, I instinctively used the intention-manifestation model of reality (also known as the Law of Attraction) to help me find it, soon realizing that sometimes finding what you really want is more effortless than finding what you don’t.

The card belonged to my brother, who lives nearby; and he had been very concerned since it had gone missing. I can’t say I blame him. After all, identity theft is a serious concern. And even though electronic identity theft gets a lot of attention these days, the majority of theft still occurs through paper means.

Clearly, retrieving this social security card was paramount. (The last thing anyone needs is someone pretending to be them.) And since I had some extra time on Sunday, I decided to wander around the place where he thought he’d lost it. What I didn’t realize until later was that I had instinctively used the intention-manifestation mindset… with unexpected results.

How to use Intention-Manifestation

I’ve already written about how I used the intention-manifestation model to get paid to travel 1,000 miles, but I’m going to restate it here in case you haven’t read that article yet.

Here’s how it works:

• I made the decision
• From that decision, I stated what I wanted to happen: “I will find the SSN card.”
• I had faith that this would be resolved. I let the universe “Make It So.”
• I let the intention go. I didn’t cling to it. (This is very important for it to work.)

The best theory was that the card had been placed, along with some other documents, atop a car and then forgotten about. Thankfully, he already had a good idea of where he might have lost it, so I began doing a wide sweep of that area. It had rained recently, but everything had since dried, leaving everything a bit cleaner than usual.

I walked for some time, shuffling through small piles of leaves along the road with my foot. On my way around the block, I came across a small piece of paper in the middle of the road. It was the right size, but was it his card?

No. It was a tiny promotion for some new pop album, and I continued my search. Along the way, I came across other fragments of paper, but they were always receipts or bits of wrapper.

A Clue that Followed Clarity

Nearly back at where I’d started, I finally saw something interesting. With a slightly different vantage point, I now saw a fragment of something white covered in leaves on the edge of the street. I ran over and brushed the leaves aside. It was my brother’s latest bank statement!

“Look gang, a clue!”

He must have had his SSN card folded up inside of it, but it wasn’t in there now. I knew I was close. I could smell victory. I began walking along the edge of the street for a moment, but for some reason stepped up and began walking down the sidewalk. And then, I was stunned by what I saw.

Lying atop green grass, in perfect plain sight, was the social security card.

My eyes widened as I crouched down and picked it up. I had actually found it. With a combination of persistence, faith, and clarity, I had manifested what I was looking for; and when I returned it to him, my brother was quite relieved to have it back. (In case you’re not familiar with social security numbers, I should explain that if I hadn’t found the card, it’s possible that someone could have taken is social security number off of the card and damaged his credit, or worse.)

Make It So!

Only later did I realize that I had used the intention-manifestation model to accomplish my mission. Nowadays it’s become a habit of mine to state what I want verbally and then release the intention with faith. Often, this produces some surprising results. The key is to remember that if you doubt it in your mind, then you’ll find doubt all around you. But by being very clear about what I wanted, releasing the intention with faith, and putting in focused effort toward my goal, I manifested the outcome I wanted with much less effort than I would have ever guessed. In fact, using intention-manifestation can be a blast if you maintain a playful attitude.

Have you ever used the intention-manifestation model? Remember that when you do, it’s key to release your desire with faith. There can be no clinging to a specific outcome. When you release it with faith, you have faith that it will manifest in the most natural way possible.

What about you? What’s your goal? Say it out loud right now, and then tell the universe, “Make it so.” Strange coincidences and synchronicities will arrive, and when they do, follow them.

They may even seem strange, but by following them, you allow your goal to manifest.

Read related articles

1. How I Solved my Travel Dilemma in 60 Seconds using the Law of Attraction
2. How to Spot Inaccurate Beliefs While Travelling: Perceptions aren’t always Truth
3. How to Spot Inaccurate Beliefs While Travelling: Magic of Choice (& Couchsurfing)

But submitting to blog carnivals is only one side of the equation. Hosting a blog carnival can be far more complex and isn’t always an easy feat. In fact, it can occasionally be somewhat of a headache, especially if you’re hosting one with lots of entries. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Why? Because I have developed a comprehensive system that breaks down the process into 7 steps.

In fact, this is exactly how I put together the Byteful Travel Blog Carnival (BTBC), and I’ve gotten tons of positive feedback about how well those are put together. And as you can probably guess, the quality of a blog carnival depends a great deal on the quality of the submissions, which is why it’s so important to…

1. Pre-Qualify submissions as they come in.

When you are assigned to host a new edition of a blog carnival, you will be sent an email notification whenever someone submits an article to your blog carnival through the BlogCarnival.com website. The first few times I hosted a blog carnival, I would read these as they came in and then forget about them. Over time though, I realized that they could save me valuable time if used correctly.

To get the most out of these notifications, I click the link to see the submitted article and then decide if it fits the blog carnival or not. (Cuz believe it or not, blog carnivals get a fair amount of spam.) I skim the article, and if it looks good, I “star” that email. I try to do this once a week for the BTBC and once every few days for blog carnivals that are hosted more frequently.

By “pre-qualifying” entries, I always have a list of entries that I already know are good. This saves me time on the day I actually assemble the blog carnival and makes everything flow much more smoothly.

2. Use the Opt-In Method for Inclusion

The list of starred emails containing known-good articles is extremely helpful to us in this next step where we make the final decision on which articles are included. I usually do this when BlogCarnival.com emails me a reminder that the carnival is coming up, which is usually right after the carnival’s submission deadline. In that reminder email is a link to the “InstaCarnival editor” which is a wonderful little feature that creates an assembled blog carnival for you. (If you can’t find this reminder email, head over to BlogCarnival.com, log in, click “My Carnivals”, and click on the number to the far right of the list (which is the number of submissions that edition received).

Now, just because the InstaCarnival is great doesn’t mean it does all the work, though. It doesn’t come with any kind of artificial intelligence; you still have to decide what’s included. And when you get to the InstaCarnival editor, you will see a list of submitted articles. The first thing you need to do is check the “exclude” checkbox on all of them, and then click “Save” on the bottom. This may take a minute or two, but it’s totally worthy it because, by doing this, you ensure no spammy articles will get through.

Then, uncheck the “exclude” box for only those articles that you starred back in your email inbox. Even though this opt-in method sound strange at first, it’s a surefire way to avoid any spam creeping into your carnival (the importance of which we’ll discuss in a bit). Once you’ve done that, click “Save”.

3. Fix Categories & Finalize the Preview Draft

Once the InstaCarnival has been saved, click the “Preview Draft” button at the top. You will now see a rough draft of your blog carnival, complete with attribution, links to the articles, and everything broken up into categories. This is a huge time saver! But we’re not done yet. The InstaCarnival isn’t perfect, and it doesn’t always get the carnival right the first time. Be sure to double-check for duplicate categories and ensure that each article is in the category you want it to be in.

If you see a duplicate category, it’s because your entries aren’t grouped by category properly. To fix that, you need to click “edit” and change the order of the entries in the blog carnival so that entries that belong in the same category are grouped together in the list. To change the order of articles in the list, type the corresponding number in the “order” box and click “Save”. For instance, if you see an article that says “order: 50″ and you want it just after the article that is “order: 10″, type in “order: 11″ and click save. It sounds strange, but it makes sense once you do it.

4. Verify Entries & Gather Twitter Names

Now that you’ve got your blog carnival organized the way you like it, take this opportunity to click through to each article and make doubly sure that you want to endorse each of these articles. That’s what you’re doing here, after all; and it’s not meant to be taken lightly. When you include someone’s article in your blog carnival, you are, in effect, saying that “this is relevant to this topic and I support more people discovering this article”; so if you have mixed feelings about including something, think long and hard before you let it into your blog carnival.

While you’re doing that, be sure to look around for any Twitter usernames referenced beside the articles so you can @reply the carnival participants once the carnival is published. In fact, it’s best to keep a list of the Twitter names in a separate text file. To find the usernames, I often view the html source code of a given article and search for the word “twitter”. (How to do this varies from browser to browser. Check the “View” menu or similar.) Ironically enough, looking at the source code can be the quickest way to see what someone’s Twitter username is!

5. Give your Blog Carnival a Human Touch

Making your blog carnival really speak to the reader is extremely important! I cannot overstate this. Too many blog carnival hosts simply take the output of the InstaCarnival page and throw it up on their site. But is that personal? Does that honestly invite your readers, who have graciously given you their attention, to checkout your blog carnival?

In my experience, a blog carnival is enjoyed much more (and therefore catches on much faster) when given a healthy dose of humanity. To do that, click on the “preview draft” button (if you aren’t on the page already). Then scroll to the bottom, and copy the HTML code in the box. Paste the code into a new post in your blogging software. If the code is broken, don’t worry! I’ve encountered this problem, too. Try clicking the checkbox above the box that says “Check for WordPress compatible HTML”. (If the code still doesn’t work after doing that, let me know and I’ll share another solution in the comments.)

Now that we have the actual code for this blog carnival edition, we can write a concise introduction the draws the reader in. I suggest you replace the standard “Welcome to XYZ edition” introduction with something more unique. For ideas, you can see past BTBCs as well as other blog carnivals I’ve hosted.

One great way to introduce a blog carnival is to take a paragraph or so to talk about a couple of your favorite entries. It gives you an opportunity to put your own spin on the carnival, and your readers will appreciate knowing which entries to check out first.

It’s also a great time to write a short outro to the carnival thanking the people who submitted their articles, letting your readers know when the next edition will be, and providing links to the submission page. The InstaCarnival page adds these links automatically, but you may want to phrase them into a sentence. I also recommend you delete the “technorati tags” that the InstaCarnival puts at the end of the carnival since I’ve found them to be largely useless.

6. Proofread your carnival. Aloud.

While this may even sound silly, I always recommend reading your blog carnival out loud to yourself before you publish it. Seriously, say all of the words. This is the best and most natural way to find typos as well as awkward phrasing. Proofreading aloud may not sound that fun, but trust me, your carnival will be much better if you do it. (I even read this article aloud as I proofread it!)

If you’re still resistant to proofing your carnival edition out loud, remember that many people will be seeing this. Try making it a game. If it helps, try reading the whole edition in a StrongBad voice. As long as you read it and understand it, it will make catching errors that much easier.

7. Spread the Word & Tweet all about it!

Now comes the fun part: spreading the word. It’s time to use that list of Twitter names that you made before. Usually I’ll phrase my tweets rather like this:

“Congrats @Somebody & @Someoneelse You’re in the latest YOURCARNIVALHERE carnival! Give yourself a High-5! http://bit.ly/YOURLINK”

Depending on the length of the usernames, I’ll fit two or three usernames per tweet. (Pro tip: put together your tweets and make sure they’re all under 140 characters before you tweet any of them out. Then send the tweets once per minute until you’ve tweeted them all.) By grouping tweets together, I not only reduce the amount of tweets I send out (which reduces the chance of people getting tweet-fatigue) I also help bloggers find out about each other. Think about it. Another interesting bit is that whenever “@Somebody” retweets my tweet, “@Someoneelse” will see the tweet twice in their @mentions section on Twitter. When done correctly (especially when the edition of the carnival has lots of entries) it can create a veritable storm of twitter reactions!

You also may have noticed the example link above is a bit.ly link, and there’s a very good reason for that. I use bit.ly for my links because, in addition to being a great url shortening service, they also let me track how people find the link and where they’re from.

Once you’ve published the carnival, head over to BlogCarnival.com one last time, click on “My Carnivals”, and click on the number to the far right of the list. Viola, you’re back at the InstaCarnival page. From here, click “edit this edition” and click the “already posted” button. Doing this is very important as it keeps the carnival manager at BlogCarnival.com up to date as well as lets BlogCarnival draw attention to the edition you just published. This is even more important when you’re a guest host for a carnival. After all, if you don’t remember to do it, the owner of the carnival will have to do it; so updating this status is a matter of courtesy.

And finally, if the carnival belongs to you, remember to schedule the next edition once you’ve marked the current edition as “already posted”. To do that, click “Schedule New Edition” on the left hand column on BlogCarnival.com.

Conclusion

And that’s it! That process has seen me through many blog carnivals so far, and I expect it will see me through for many more in the years to come.

If you are hosting a blog carnival and have any questions or need clarification any points, please let me know in the comments.

Read related articles

1. Byteful Travel Blog Carnival #3 – 2010 Oct 26
2. Gen Y Travel Blog Carnival: The Expansive 8th Ed.
3. Byteful Travel Blog Carnival #4 – 2010 Dec 14

In this article I’m going to share with you a concept that allows you to harness the natural cycles of your brain to the greatest effect in both work and when travelling.

You see, when I travel I seldom plan out exactly what I’m going to do on a certain day. Instead, I review my options before I set out and allow time and space for events to flow together organically and spontaneously. Granted, some of your travel commitments may have firm attachments to certain points in time and space, but acting merely on intuition is incredibly worth it whenever possible. In fact, I find that when I wait to plan a given day until the night before, I’m much more sensitive to how the day is going to go; and I’m more in tune with what my needs will be on the upcoming day.

Travelling is a creative act, and your ability to jump into a creative state ebbs and flows throughout the day. In my experience, there is much magic to be found when we are conscious of those changes; and when done consciously, this kind of flexibility allows moments to snap together like magnets.

So how exactly does this apply to work? I’ll ‘splain.

The Intuitive Planning Approach

Lately, I’ve realized that I’ve approached doing work this way for a while now. Instead of stating in big red letters that I’m going to write a rough draft of a given article on Monday or bust, I find that I work better when I have a general idea of what I need to accomplish by a certain day and then allow myself to be drawn to the tasks to complete that goal in its own perfect time.

For the purposes of this article I’m going to call this approach “intuitive planning”, because, while it’s still technically a form of planning, it allows your intuition to have a say in what you should be doing at a given moment. People who use David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system (as I do) may recognize that the GTD “Next Actions” list can be used exactly this way because it’s a list of shorter tasks that can easily fit into the gaps between larger projects.

We can expand on that though. And as in both work and travel, defining the next physical action you need to take to achieve your goal is immensely helpful and can often give you clarity if you feel stuck. But if you already know what you’re going to do (and when it needs to be done) and you have some freedom over the order and speed at which the steps are completed, then you can experiment with the Intuitive Planning model.

For instance, I’m currently writing this sentence at 00.57, which is well past midnight. I didn’t even plan to write an article tonight; but inspiration struck me, and I had the time flexibility to act on it. By listening to my intuition and following it, this article was allowed space to manifest. Simply put, the Intuitive Planning approach has completely changed how I view my working time as well as my travel time. (Although you could say I’m “on the job” whenever I’m travelling, but you know what I mean.)

This model works best for me on a week by week basis. For instance, if I’m working on a big article about McWay Falls, I know that I have a few dozen photos to crop, color-correct, name, export, upload to the Byteful Gallery, and resize for the article. Then I need to outline the article, write it, proofread it, categorize it, and finally set the article to be posted in the wee hours of the morning. This whole process involves over 10 major steps with plenty of tiny steps in between; but because I understand the steps that it involves, I can set small milestones to let me know if I’m on track. (For instance, I like to have the photos done by Sunday night and a rough draft of the article done on Monday). Yet if I really get on a roll, I may have the article rough draft done by the end of Sunday. It all depends on my level of inspiration and energy level. The key here is really listening to myself and my mental state.

Inspiration & Expectation

Let me be clear here. I’m not saying you should wait for inspiration to get you started on your work. A wise man once said that inspiration must find you working; and in my experience, I think that’s putting it lightly.

There’s no Inspiration Faerie that’s going to come down and give you tons of energy. Your will and your will alone must start it. However, if you change your attitude to be open to inspiration sneaking up on you, it’s far more likely to.

Have you ever noticed that it’s those times when you don’t feel pressured and boxed in, that some of your most inspired ideas come through? In my experience, inspired ideas are more likely to come through because expectations cause a constriction in the mind. By “forcing” yourself to do a specific thing at a certain time, you will naturally feel limited and probably stressed out, too.

Don’t get me wrong. This certainly isn’t always a bad thing. Indeed, without that kind of discipline, we would not complete many things that legitimately need to be done. Yet, whenever possible, creating from a place of non-expectation is much more enjoyable experience for me, and I find more original ideas come when I’m not painstakingly looking for them. What about you?

How to Create the Flow for Yourself

The real trick here (which is a skill that can be developed) is the ability to consciously decide what you’re going to focus on and think about. I learned an important lesson about this in my teen years when I would push myself to the limit for school projects, and I continued to refine my approach when I was in college.

While it may come as an incredible shock to you, I really disliked being forced to do a project I didn’t enjoy, and I experienced a lot of stress in having to push myself to complete such a project on time. If I didn’t really care about the end goal of the project, it didn’t spur me to action. At all. In fact, I would have a lot of trouble “getting into the groove” of it. Therefore, I had to create that flow for myself. (I can’t not state the importance of this enough.)

I would often experience false starts and slow progress in the beginning, so I’m not saying this is easy. Sometimes it can be very difficult. Sometimes you may feel as though you don’t even know where to start. Trust me, I’ve been there. But in those situations, I tried to take away as much complexity as I could and simply took the most logical first step. Keeping it simple is a very important tip to remember whenever you get stuck.

Discipline is what allows us to take those first few steps. But I’ve found that once I get going, less and less discipline is required because I’ve created the groove that I was looking for. And by creating it for myself, I make it easier to get back to that place of creativity whenever I want.

Choose your Focus & Make Alpha Waves

Remember, this all hinges on you being able to consciously decide what you’re going to focus on. You must choose where to place your focus. Will you focus on the part of your brain that is worried about failing or the part that simply relishes in the act of creation itself? Have you ever noticed that when you’re really in the flow of creating (whether it be writing, reading, painting, or designing) that you completely lose track of time?

This is because a different part of your brain is engaged. When you feel truly immersed in your work, your brain is actually at a different frequency than when you’re walking around during the day. The brain is in beta frequency during most of its waking hours, but when you’re really in the flow, you enter alpha brain frequency. These alpha waves allow distractions to fall away and allow a much greater depth of focus. For instance, I’m in an alpha state right now as I write this. How do I know? Because the words keep flowing out of me, effortlessly.

Things certainly weren’t always this way. To be completely honest, there was a time when I absolutely dreaded writing; but the more I practiced, the more I learned about what it felt like to be in this state. I gained a better understanding of how my own brain worked, and so can you.

In some ways, it’s like riding a bike. When you first rode a bike, you had no hope of balancing without training wheels, right? But in time, you refined your sense of balance, and soon you didn’t even need the training wheels.

Intuitive Planning: Create Abundantly!

As I said before, your ability to jump into a creative state ebbs and flows throughout the day, and “intuitive planning” is merely intelligently harnessing this quality of the human brain in the most intelligent way possible. To really put all of this in a nutshell, when you give yourself the freedom to create in the order in which your mind wants to create, your creative process can flow much more effortlessly and with much less stress. And if the time never seems right and begins to run short, you can always revert back to a more logical discipline-based approach.

Remember, you are not your brain. You are also not your thoughts. Realize that your mind is a wonderfully complex and dynamic tool; but it is still a tool, and when you use this tool with greater skill, you can create more abundantly and more meaningfully.

And fewer things are more enjoyable or more rewarding than that.

Read related articles

1. Create with Passion or DIE
2. How to Create, Host, & Grow a Blog Carnival in 7 Proven Steps
3. How I Solved my Travel Dilemma in 60 Seconds using the Law of Attraction

Have you started a blog only to feel bogged down at managing comments from people who are only interested in pushing their products? Do you feel like you need to babysit your blog just to keep spam comments off of it? Are you ready to give your blog an intelligence upgrade?

Lately, I’ve noticed that some of my fellow travel writers are throwing in the towel and outright disabling the ability to comment on their blogs, and this saddens me. Thankfully, this is still uncommon, but if the problem becomes more intense I can see more bloggers potentially giving up and shutting down comments altogether. And since that isn’t a world I want to live in, I’m going to share my solution here, a solution that works shockingly well.

You see, I love comments. They help me gauge how I’m affecting my audience, and they often provide feedback as to how I can improve. Most importantly, comments are the primary way I interact with my readers, and I know I’m not alone in this.

In the years of trail and error that I’ve had with Byteful Travel, I’ve come up with a solution which simultaneously free, not difficult to setup, and (most importantly) eliminates around 99.9% of comment spam. (That’s a rough estimate, but roughly 999 out of 1000 spams are identified and stopped before they ever have a chance to appear on Byteful Travel.) Take that, dastardly spammers!

The following powerful technique primary applies if you’re using WordPress. And since over 95% of the blogs I’ve ever come across on WordPress (including major blogs like GigaOm, TechCrunch, and StevePavlina.com), there’s a good chance that you’re using it, too. (And if you aren’t, you can safely skip this article. More travel content is up-spin.)

Why not use a 3rd-party commenting service?

While you could certainly integrate a third-party commenting service like Disqus or IntenseDebate, there are clear drawbacks to this approach. As someone who leaves a far share of comments, I can say from experience that if I have to take the trouble to actually log into another site to leave a comment, my chances of leaving a comment are greatly reduced.

Using a third-party commenting system also requires that many files from outside your site also load before someone can leave a comment, so it slows down the experience of browsing your site overall. My time is valuable and so is yours, so third party comment sites are out.

My Tried & True Method

The method I’m about to share with you is a completely free solution that anyone familiar with WordPress can setup. The reason my method works is because I use a combination of two powerful plugins: SI Captcha and Spam Karma 2. Many people only use Akismet, but if you’ve ever tried running Akismet on a popular blog, you know that isn’t enough.

Luckily, both of these plugins are super easy to install through your WordPress interface, and since I’m currently in the middle of setting up a WordPress blog for a friend, I’m going to follow these steps right along with you. And to make it easier, I’ve broken up this process into 3 main sections. (Note: The instructions below apply primary to WordPress 2.9 and up. And if you’re using something older than 2.9 at this point, you need to upgrade as soon as possible because there are security risks in using very old versions of WordPress.)

How to Install “SI Captcha”

1. Log in to your WordPress control panel.
2. Click on the “Plugins” section in the left hand column.
3. Click the “Deactivate” button under the word Akismet. (In my experience it was NOT effective at stopping spam. We’re going to install something much better.)
4. Click the “Add New” button. (It’s next to the word “Plugins”.)
5. Search for “SI Captcha”.
6. In the first few results you’ll see “SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam”. Click “Install Now”.
7. It will install the plugin. Then click “Activate Plugin”.

Congrats! You’ve just installed SI Captcha, your first line of defense from spammers. Now, as you can see, after you clicked “Activate Plugin” you were returned to the plugin page. Next comes a slightly tricky part. Since Spam Karma doesn’t show up in the WordPress plugin interface, we’re going to install it manually, but don’t worry. It’s not that bad, and it used to be the only way to install plugins into WordPress. 2011.11.29 Update: A newer, easier way to do this has been discovered, so I’ve updated the instructions below.

How to Grab & Install Spam Karma 2:

1. Head on over to Spam Karma’s download page and grab the latest version in the list. (It will look something like “spam_karma_2_3.zip”.)
2. Go back to the “Plugins” section
3. Click “Add New”
4. Click “Upload” (It’s a small link at the top.)
5. From here, choose the zip file and click “Install Now”
6. You will now see SK2 is in the list! Click “Activate”! (You may need to reload your plugins page.)

(If you’re unable to upload the zip file for some reason, unzip the archive after you download it. You’ll then get a folder called “sk2″. Upload the “sk2″ folder to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder on your server. If you continue to have difficulties, please consult someone who is experienced in WordPress to help you install the plugin.)

Configure Spam Karma 2 & SI Captcha

1. Now it’s time to get down to business. Click on “Tools” in the left menu.
2. Under “Tools”, you will see “Spam Karma 2″. Click it.
3. At this point, SK2 will run some first-time install checks. (I always get errors here, but they never seem to impact SK2 negatively. So don’t worry about the red boxes.) From here, you can get very specific on how you want SK2 to work, but the default settings are fine because we’re using SK2 in conjunction with SI Captcha. (And while here, you may also want to take time to familiarize yourself with the “Recent Spam Harvest” and “Approved Comments” tabs.)
4. Now let’s configure the Captcha plugin. Head back over to the Plugins page, find SI Captcha, and click “Settings.”
5. Just to be sure, confirm your server will support the captcha plugin and click the “Test if your PHP installation will support the CAPTCHA” link which is just under the “Update Options” button.
6. If that worked, then you’re done! Congratulations! At this point you may want to try leaving a comment to be doubly sure that everything works. (And you may need to log out before the captcha will show up.)

Conclusion

This method works because it requires the commenter to fill out a very short captcha before they comment. I realize a lot of people dislike captchas, but with bots roaming the internet in unchecked droves, this is necessary. (After all, “byteful” means binary abundance, not an abundance of spam!) Most importantly, this captcha is very easy to read, and it’s short.

I haven’t seen any decline in my commenting activity since I’ve enabled this either, so you don’t have to worry about this discouraging people to comment. And honestly, typing in 4 letters to comment is just as much trouble as typing your email address, which you would type in anyway.

Captchas are spam-killing magic because they cut down on over 95% of spam by ensuring that only live human beings are leaving comments. That’s why SI captcha is a perfect first line of defense. There is a problem, however. Sometimes live human beings are paid to write spam comments for your blog, so that’s what the second plugin is for. It’s true! I’ve noticed that human spammers stop by Byteful Travel and try to leave comments that have nothing to do with a post; but since we’ve installed Spam Karma 2 as well, all comments are also analyzed by its tried and true spam-detecting algorithms. The result is, that none of the spam gets through, and the days of feeling like I had to babysit my site to stop spam are long gone.

By using both of these plugins, I am able to keep comments activated on my site, which helps keep me stay connected to all of you. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Read related articles

1. How I used Intention-Manifestation to stop an Identity Theft (& had fun doing it)
2. How to Create, Host, & Grow a Blog Carnival in 7 Proven Steps
3. Personal Growth expressed in Geometry! Truth+Love+Power wallpaper

It was my first time in Toronto, and despite the fact that I only had two and a half days to explore it, I managed to see many of its greatest wonders, including Kensington Market, the Royal Ontario Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the stunning view from the CN Tower, and it’s stunning city hall which was covered in chalk memorializing the late Jack Layton (who had died just a week before I arrived).

So how did I manage to see so many great places in such a short span of time?

How To Utilize a City Efficiently

In the past year, I’ve been utilizing Yelp.com more and more in my exploration of new cities. And if you’re not familiar, Yelp is basically a directory of restaurants, museums, grocery stores, and other useful locations within a city. Think of it as a digital version of the yellow pages, except that Yelp has something yellow pages don’t: user reviews.

Much like reviews for products that you might find on Amazon.com, Yelp’s users review places such as restaurants, parks, and even grocery stores. Locations are also ranked for how expensive they are (by labeling them with one to four dollar signs), and their business hours are also posted. (Well, they’re usually posted. I have come across the occasional business that doesn’t have its business hours listed on Yelp, but a quick Google search usually answers my question.)

And, of course, there’s a free Yelp iOS app.

The practical upshot of this is that, while I’m on the go, I can search for delicious vegetarian restaurants, narrow my search to what’s open for business at that moment (thus filtering out places that are currently closed), get directions to the business, and start heading in the right direction — all using my iPod touch.

If you haven’t used Yelp before, this may sound only marginally better than simply doing a Google maps search, but in practice it’s a much richer (and faster) experience because reviews and business hours are all in one place. It’s so effortless in fact, that I found it quite easy to plan out an entire day just sitting outside an Apple Store and browsing nearby attractions that appealed to me.

Combined with advice I got from my Couchsurfing hosts (who had also lent me a bike that proved supremely useful), I had found the perfect circle of information. One example of this is how I was able to see the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario for free in the same afternoon. One of my Couchsurfing hosts said that they might be free on Wednesday afternoons but that I should check to make sure. After some research, I confirmed that both museums were free and their free hours didn’t even overlap, so I’d have plenty of time to explore both.

An Exquisite Day in Toronto

And so, after having a delicious vegan “savory crepe” at Hibiscus cafe (a delightful place that I suspect I’ll cover in detail in the future), I biked over to the Royal Ontario Museum and proceeded to have a blast exploring its wealth of dinosaurs, pottery, and egyptian artifacts for a few hours. By the time the museum closed at 17.30, I was getting hungry, so I decided to head over to a place that had received some glowing reviews for their vegan cookies and incredible rooibos tea.

Yelp tells the truth, and I thoroughly enjoyed what I can only describe as a “power cookie” with my tea. Even though it wasn’t exactly a full meal, it gave me the energy I needed for the next 4 hours or so. But then again, perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised considering the food was of such high quality (and not that expensive, either).

Now powered by complex carbohydrates, I spent just under an hour wandering through the Art Gallery of Ontario (which was featuring the work of General Idea, at the time), but I left before closing time so I could get photos of the sunset from the top of the CN tower, which was my next destination.

Seeing the sunset from high atop the CN Tower was a fitting end to my explorations of Toronto, and as I looked back on my day from the 114th floor, I thought about how the day had gone incredibly smoothly and how some planning ahead of time, combined with some flexibility, had resulted in one of the best experiences of exploring a city that I had ever had.

How to avoid Proximity Apathy

When I returned home last week, I realized that while Yelp had transformed the way I explore the places I visit, I hadn’t been doing this for my own city. I had practically squeezed the juice out of every opportunity that appealed to me while in Toronto, but I had to admit to myself that I wasn’t doing it at home, where it mattered most.

Why not?

To be completely frank, I’ve actually observed this phenomena for years. Basically, it goes like this: if you live in a city, you will not feel inclined to see anything even remotely “touristy” (even if you may find it otherwise interesting or compelling).

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to call this phenomenon “Proximity Apathy”, because if you have it (and I’ve observed that the majority of people do) you will feel inexplicably uninterested in seeing compelling attractions near you merely because they happen to be nearby… whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Ask yourself, do you believe that you must leave your city to feel as if you’re “stretching yourself” or exploring new territory? That’s a limiting belief, and holding that belief is a choice.

Do you assume, without even visiting them, that otherwise interesting places near you aren’t quite as interesting because they’re so near to you? That, too, is a limiting belief that you can change.

Discover New Worlds… under your nose.

Most recently, I experienced this while on a long distance bike trek. And while the myriad of benefits of using a bike to explore are probably beyond the scope of this article, I must admit that I feel as though I discover entirely new worlds right under my nose when I decide to explore using a bicycle. For instance, this year I learned that there’s a state park that has some truly incredible rock formations just a few miles from where I live. Since it’s a bit off the beaten path, I suspect its attendance is rather low, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth seeing (or make an excellent subject for a photo shoot).

We have a tendency to assume that just because we don’t see something, it isn’t there. But have you ever considered that, perhaps, something may not be showing up in your reality because you’ve never consciously gone to seek it out? Have you ever just assumed that what you seek could never be so close? If you have, there’s no reason that it will ever show up in your life. But if you remain open… well.

Let’s just say it truly is amazing what you can find right under your nose, so don’t cheat yourself. Ask yourself: Are you fully taking advantage of what your city has to offer? And if you don’t live in a city per se, what about your immediate surrounding area? Don’t miss out on opportunities just around the corner (often literally!). Use Yelp and other tools and remain open to possibilities. Keep yourself open. When you do, you may just find yourself stepping into an entirely new world that was right beside you the entire time.

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So what’s the difference between a photo that’s post-processed and one that isn’t?

Well, a few months ago when reviewing inbound links, I noticed that this particular photo was getting 10x more attention than any other photo from my Sears Tower photo shoot.

I hadn’t seen it in years and realized that, knowing what I know now, I could post-process this photo much better than the minimal processing I did when I first published it in late 2008. In fact, it was kind of embarrassing to see just how bad the original photo was, and over a thousand people had already seen it this way! The photo just wasn’t living up to its potential, and I knew I needed to change that.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of post-processing, it is the process of intelligently improving a photo after it is taken (rather than making adjustments in the camera as you take the photo) so that it becomes a more compelling and effective image. The post-processing technique I’m going to share which you today has evolved over many years of trial and error, but it can summarized into three main steps which I’ve outlined below. To follow these steps, you’ll need a photo editing app such as iPhoto or Picasa. I also address how to utilize more complex applications (such as Photoshop) in step 3, but rest assured the concepts in step 3 can be applied to simpler applications, as well.

Let’s begin!

The 3 Steps to Greatness

1. Crop with precision
   • Cropping is always the first thing I consider when post processing a photo. Sometimes a crop won’t be necessary, but often a carefully done crop can make or break an image’s composition. In fact, this is an extremely important step because how you frame an image has everything to do with how the image’s content is presented.
   • Try different ratios. Most photos are shot in 4×3 today. Try 3×2. Sometimes I even use 5×3. Most photo editing programs will allow you to set different crop ratios and make it easy to see how a given crop will change the composition even before you apply the crop. (If you aren’t sure what a ratio is, it’s the width of a shape divided by the height.)
   • Be sure to leave some negative space around your main subject. If you don’t, it will result in a photo that feels crowded.
   • Also remember to crop out unnecessarily elements if they distract from your main subject or subjects. If you don’t, you’ll end up with a cluttered image that doesn’t draw the viewer in. But if you crop intelligently, you can create a composition that gracefully leads the eye around your photo.
2. Fine-Tune the Brightness Curve
   • Also known as “adjusting the levels”, fine-tuning the brightness curve of your image is essential. In most apps, the levels will be represented as a histogram which looks like a black mountain range.
   • You may see the black mountain shape disappear before it gets to the edge of one side of the box. This means either the whites aren’t as bright or the darks aren’t as dark as they could be. In iPhoto you can click “Edit” and then “Adjust” to bring up a panel that allows you to control the levels. In Photoshop, choose the “Layer” menu > “New Adjustment Layer” > “Levels” to bring up the levels control.
   • Below this black mountain shape (which represents the brightness curve on the image) are three triangles which control the black, grey, and white levels of the image. Try moving them and seeing how the image changes. To adequately discuss levels would require an article of its own, but just keep in mind that as long as you’re using an adjustment layer in Photoshop, or adjusting the image in iPhoto, you can always change these later without hurting the image.
3. Color Correct (preferably using Selective Color)
   • If you’re using a lighter photo editing app (like iPhoto) and then finishing up in a more complex program like Photoshop, you may want to do a few slight tweaks before you bring the photo into the final app. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it worked out that I adjusted the photo’s temperature balance by 4.1% in iPhoto before bringing it into Photoshop. You can do this in Photoshop, as well; but since I was post-processing dozens of images and not all deserve Photoshop treatment, I sometimes bring images into Photoshop that have already been slightly color-corrected by iPhoto.
   • Ever since I discovered “Selective Color” controls, I spend most of my time post-processing in Photoshop because the way a Selective Color adjustment can change your photo is can be truly illuminating. The way you tweak the “Neutrals” is usually the most important since it changes the balance of all the colors in the image. If you have Photoshop, you should also experiment with controls on each specific color because that level of control is often needed to get the blues just right if the photo contains a body of water. This was certainly true for my photo. In Photoshop, you can apply a Selective Color layer by clicking on the black & white circle in the bottom center of the layers palette and choose “Selective Color” in the menu. (It’s the middle button in the picture above.)
   • If you don’t have Photoshop, just whatever color adjustment tools you can find in your app and be sure to try moving all of the sliders, even if you don’t necessarily understand what they do at first. You’ll quickly learn, and there’s no downside. I mean, most likely no one will die from you moving sliders and pushing buttons you don’t understand.
   • Lastly, try adjusting the Hue Saturation (also called color saturation). This is usually my last step in post-processing an image. Sometimes an image could use just a bit more color. I rarely go beyond a 10% increase because the realism begins to diminish if you go overboard. In most photo editing apps, you can increase the color saturation very easily. For instance, in iPhoto you can click “Edit” and then “Adjust” to bring up a panel that allows you to control color, levels, and more. In Photoshop, click the same black & white circle mentioned above, and choose “Hue/Saturation”. Also, keep in mind you don’t want to go overboard on saturation, otherwise it can look very fake or cartoony, and that isn’t desirable… unless you’re going for that look. Overall, the color-correction step is like icing on the cake. The photo above is a great example of how intelligent color correction can revitalize an image. Do you see how much more refreshing and vibrant the image is on the right compared to the left side? That’s the power of just one carefully-tuned Selective Color adjustment layer.

Now isn’t that better?

The funny thing about post-processing is that, even though you may be dramatically changing the composition or color balance of the photo, you aren’t necessarily creating an exaggeration of the truth since the camera is never completely accurate in the first place. (In fact, many cameras can be woefully inaccurate in their light metering.) On the contrary, if your goal is to create a greater sense of realism, you can certainly do that better than the camera did… as long as you have a good eye for color. On the other hand, if your goal is something else, perhaps to emphasize a certain shape or a novel way that light interacts with a strange object, you can certainly do that as well.

Let’s not forget the cluttered, dark, generally icky photo that we started with. The thumbnail here is the unedited original photo, straight from the camera’s eye.

Throughout these post-processing steps, I’ve opted to adjust the photo to create a sense of realism with just the tiniest exaggeration in color, and I must say I’m very pleased with the improvement. It almost seems as though this post-processed version were taken with a wider angle lens, but of course we know it wasn’t. It was merely cropped intelligently so that the greatness in the image could be allowed to reveal itself, not unlike how a piece of marble is chiseled down to reveal a beautiful statue beneath.

What do you think?

Isn’t it amazing what post-processing can do for an image?

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As we learned in the previous article, our perceptions affect our experience of reality in a profound way. I experienced firsthand how other’s perceptions and influence can dramatically shape my experience of a place while exploring Washington DC last year. The extent at how my perceptions can be shifted depending on who I allow to influence my experience was profound. This effect can be for ill or for good, and it is compounded if the person in question is hosting you.

CS members can be Divine

First I should explain how I met my hosts, and then I’ll show you how each affected me in a very different way and consequently my perception of DC.

I’ve been using Couchsurfing.org for years to make new friends in cities I visit, as well as find good people to host me. It’s much better than simply staying at a hotel because staying with a local allows you to see the city through a local’s eyes, and often the local will have helpful information you’d never learn if you were just staying at hotel. And, more importantly, it never ceases to amaze me how fantastic the people I meet through Couchsurfing are. Without exaggerating at all, I can honestly say I’ve met some truly divine people through Couchsurfing that were more hospitable, caring, and generous than words could ever do justice to. These are the kind of people that make the world glow. In fact, Couchsurfing is completely free to use, and it’s ability to connect communities together has been shown time and time again; so it’s not surprising to me that CS has been growing like wildfire over the past few years. In 2009, they reached 1,000,000 members, and in 2010 they doubled that number. Today, they’re nearly at 2.5 million members globally.

Sometimes travel experiences go beyond words, and my experiences with Couchsurfing very often do. You probably won’t “get” CS if you don’t have a basic belief that we are all part of the same human family, but I highly recommend you check it out if you’re interested. Even if you don’t want to host or couchsurf at a host’s place while travelling, CS also hosts events like potlucks in many cities around the US and the rest of the planet. And these events tend to attract really cool, intelligent (and often inspiring) people.

I was lucky. Both of my hosts harbored a positive attitude toward DC, which was fortunate because I was still forming my own impression of DC since it was my first time there. They were both kind people; but, as I soon learned, one proved to be much more conducive to my enjoyment of the city than the other.

The Tale of Two Hosts

The first host I had in DC conducted a rather chaotic life. I don’t normally stay with rather chaotic people; but I’d had some trouble finding a place to stay, and my intuition told me this would be an acceptable first host. However, some things were uncertain that should have been more stable. My host had a lot of roommates, none of which were particularly organized, which also lent the place some instability. (And it’s worth mentioning that this isn’t a typical experience with CS. Couples, people who live alone, and even families host travellers on Couchsurfing.org.)

Thankfully, my host was friendly and cared about my experience there, but I soon realized that my perception of DC was somewhat fragmented because the place I went back “home” to (so I could recharge after a day of exploring) was somewhat fragmented itself.

As within so without.

Because of this, I was on the lookout for a new host, and that’s precisely what I found at a Couchsurfing event about a day later. It was a potluck-party-thing, and a local CS member was hosting it at their apartment. At the gathering I met a very cool couple in their 30s, both working professionals, and new to Couchsurfing. We had a great conversation, and I got a really good intuitive feeling about them; but when they mentioned they were technically in Virginia, I put them in the “maybe” category in my head.

“They were just too far…”, I thought to myself.

The following day, I was pleasantly surprised. I did some research, and it turned out that DC’s metro system made staying at their place more convenient than the place I was currently staying at! They were much closer to a subway station, and they weren’t as far from downtown DC as I thought. So after talking with my first host, I gracefully transferred to my new host’s place.

It was then that I saw DC begin to change before my eyes.

A Stable Foundation

Because I had a stable foundation, my energy went back into high gear, and I felt positive about being in DC again. This couple had a much more regular schedule, their place was incredibly clean, and they really payed attention to how I was doing as a guest in their home. This couple’s positive attitude was delightfully contagious, and soon I was seeing DC in a more holistic way. From this new stable foundation, I set out and explored DC with vigor. After moving to my new host’s place, DC didn’t even seem spooky at night… even after I kept running into this one homeless guy, but that’s a whole different story!

So why didn’t it seem scary?

Because from a stable foundation, I was able to elevate my level of consciousness. I was able to refine my attitude about what I was experiencing.

My remaining 4 days in DC were action-packed, seeing everything from the Lincoln Memorial to the Natural History Museum to the view from the top of the Washington Monument! I saw so much (most of which was free since it was federally funded), and to this day my time in DC remains one of my all time favorite travel memories. I really had a blast, and I’m very excited to share those experiences with you in future articles on this site (though not before I finish telling you of my West Coast trip, of course). We still haven’t gotten to San Francisco and Vegas yet, and I think you’re going to find my explorations of those places quite interesting.

Question Your Lens. Break Your Shell.

Just because someone harbors fears about a particular place, doesn’t mean you should subscribe to that fear too. Just because someone perceives a city or person a certain way, does not mean it will be in alignment with your experience. Always question your beliefs. Test them out. Ask yourself why you actually believe one thing instead of another. What would life be like if you changed that belief? You don’t have to just swallow what you’re told without examining it; be it untested faith or untested fear. Realize that you shape what you experience more than you could ever realize. This is the Magic of Choice.

Remember, beliefs are like a lens that you look at the world though, and some lenses have huge dark spots that the wearer never sees. Continually probe at your limits and discover the truth for yourself. Only through doing this will you continue to make breakthroughs in what is possible. Only though doing this will you finally begin to break the shell that encloses your understanding. Don’t let dark spots on your lens limit your freedom or your joy.

Be the washer of your own lens.

- Bonus -
Here’s an article that was pointed out to me that challenges some really common limiting beliefs about travel. Recommended: 10 Round the World Travel Myths Debunked from our friends at BootsnAll.

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And although it may seem obvious which one is more desirable, making a conscious decision about which one you want to experience isn’t always an easy feat. Or rather, it isn’t always easy realizing that you do indeed have the power to choose, in every situation. But rest assured that you do.

Experience has taught me this time and again, and today I’m going to begin to share with you a new way to look at fear and risk while travelling, how to spot when an inaccurate belief rears its ugly head, and how using this new perspective played out in my own experience. Because I want to cover a lot with this topic, I’ve broken it up into two separate articles. In this first article, I advise you to buckle your seat belts, because we’re going to look fear straight in the face, face the shadows of your mind, challenge how you perceive danger and safety, and nearly kill a cat.

Beliefs are always a choice

As you travel more and more, you will encounter more and more people who amaze you, annoy you, excite you, weird you out, and inspire you. And this is all by design, and extremely instrumental for your growth as a person. Occasionally however, you will come across a thought pattern that conflicts with your personal experience in a certain area. For instance, you may encounter a person who insists that a certain drink you don’t enjoy (for instance, cow’s milk) is important for your health. Now whether or not you’ve been very healthy for years without this hypothetical food item is usually not the person’s concern. They have their belief, and they may even feel that it’s their personal duty to “save” you.

Similarly, you may meet someone who believes that riding a particular bus or train service is fraught with terrible danger; and they may proclaim that you won’t make it out alive, despite the fact that you may have ridden this bus or train dozens of times and found that other kind people were aboard, as well.

While the first is merely the example of someone who is misinformed, the second is far more insidious. It is the projection of a belief system based around fear. And often this fear isn’t perceived as a choice by one who harbors the fear. Instead, it is merely thought of as a “fact of life” or worse, clung to like a security blanket. But these beliefs are always, and ever, a choice. And the real truth comes out when they are tested and verified. The process of realizing that a fact needs to be tested and carefully picked apart and weighed before it can be believed is the process of Discernment, and it is a life saver.

Shell of Your Understanding

Often when travelling, I come across individuals who harbor vast range of limiting beliefs like this. They may be terrified to use a certain service of which I know to be safe, or spooked at even the mention of visiting a certain place that I’ve found to be quite enjoyable. And to be completely frank, when this happens it makes me sad. It makes me sad because I see a powerful being, a human being, who can create whatever they want in their life, who can set their course for any rising star… and they choose to succumb to fear. They choose to give their power away to something outside themselves, and in doing so, keep themselves in a box of their own making.

Yet if they fail to explore even the nearest boundaries of their beliefs, how will they ever break the shell that encloses their understanding?

Perceptions aren’t always Truth

As the above examples illustrate: Other People’s Perceptions are not Truth. This is very important. A person can perceive the truth, yes, but the truth always goes deeper than any one person can understand. A perception alone is not truth any more than an eye is a beam of light. Or put another way, the chances of any one person’s fears coming true are always probabilistic, meaning they aren’t set in stone. If you go to XYZ place at XYZ time, there is no guarantee of anything, because that’s the nature our shared reality. Many minds are creating their lives here, and there are uncounted numbers of variables to consider. The process of making smart choices is about understanding risk as well as understanding the bias of the person warning. However, as we shall see, you can bend these probabilities to your whims, to your side.

Anyone may perceive danger. Anyone may perceive safety. Different people may see opposites. Even in the same place. Even at the same time. You may have noticed this in your own life, and when this occurs it means that the two people have profoundly different beliefs about what they’re perceiving. You see, perception is filtered through their belief system just like light filters through shaded sunglasses. But as my most recent longterm trip reinforced, it’s much more than that. Much, much more.

Observation is Creation

You may be familiar with the famous Schrödinger’s cat experiment in which teeny-tiny reactions happening at the quantum scale affect something on our not-so-tiny everyday scale. What Schrödinger had no idea of when he invented the thought experiment was that it was also the perfect way to explain why our perceptions effect our reality in such a profound way, even to the extent of actually creating reality around what we expect to see.

I’ll explain.

In the thought experiment, famous physicist Erwin Schrödinger envisions a sealed box containing:

1. A living cat
2. A container of poison
3. A Geiger counter
4. A radioactive triggering mechanism

If the Geiger counter detects radiation from the radioactive trigger, it shatters the container of poison thereby killing the cat. However, the radioactive trigger is decaying so slowly that there is only a 50/50 chance that it will trigger the Geiger counter an hour after the experiment is begun.

Because the trigger is a radioactive process, quantum physics comes into play. Therefore, after this one hour has elapsed, both realities have been superimposed upon the box.

Say what?

When you apply quantum mechanics to an everyday scale, strange things happen. This thought experiment implies both possible outcomes of the experiment exist simultaneously… until the box is open. But before we open the box, the cat would simultaneously be dead from the poison and alive and well because the poison never would have been released. Basically, before you open the box, the outcome of the experiment is like a “wave” and not a particle. It’s not a realized reality yet. However, when you look into the box you “collapse the wave”, and you see the cat either alive or dead. By observing the experiment, an outcome is decided. By measuring what has happened, you create the outcome.

Obviously a cat can’t be both alive and dead at the same time, right?

At least, it can’t in our shared reality. But this is precisely what happens on the atomic level with quantum physics… all the time. (Just ask your local quantum physicist.) Clearly the Universe is a lot more weird than we could have ever imagined.

The Focus-Reflection Model of Reality

Schrödinger, who was a personal friend of Albert Einstein, designed this thought experiment to show how the behavior of particles behaving as waves in the quantum scale just didn’t make sense in the our everyday world. In fact, he described that if this model of reality were true on the everyday scale, if the cat were actually in both states at once, it would be a “blurred model” for representing reality. And while Schrödinger clearly has trouble accepting this as how reality works in his original article, he does admit that, “In itself, it would not embody anything unclear or contradictory…” since “There is a difference between a shaky or out-of-focus photograph and a snapshot of clouds and fog banks.”

What if Schrödinger didn’t take his idea far enough? Or, taking another angle, what if he did take it farther but no one would publish any ideas “crazier” than that?

Schrödinger’s “blurred model” of reality could better be described as the “Focus-Reflection Model” of reality. Meaning, what a person focuses on is what coalesces, manifests, and reflects back to them in their reality. I’ve seen firsthand how my own (and others) beliefs dramatically shape the reality around them. In the past, I’ve written about how this can happen in outright weird ways. In fact, if you’re not familiar with the intention-manifestation model of reality (also known as the “Law of Attraction”), I highly recommend you read “How I Solved my Travel Dilemma in 60 Seconds using the Law of Attraction” as it will give you greater clarity on what I’m describing here.

But if I had to sum it up, I’d say that, based on what we’re learning about the true nature of reality, you shape your life more than you could ever realize. Events that you think are out of your control… are reflections of you. Your specific set of beliefs, attitudes, and expectations affect what the wave collapses into.

You are the one who decides if the cat lives.

Continue on to Part 2 —>

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So today we’re going to talk about keeping art (and your health!) from falling through the cracks, how to prevent yourself from getting sick in the winter, and a lesson in being aware of your surroundings.

I’ve gotta be completely honest with you though: I’ve been holding some stuff back. I purposely waited until after the holidays to release these three chillaxed flavors of Snowy Cascade that I’m releasing today. Because what’s the point if I release all 11 wallpapers at once? It’s too much at once! And inevitably some would fall through the cracks and fail to be appreciated. These 3 new additions to the Snowy Cascade Clear wallpaper set are:

• Snowy Cascade Clear – Morning
• Snowy Cascade Clear – Dark
• Snowy Cascade Clear – Night

Based on some profoundly unscientific polls that I’ve done this month, I expect that these three flavors will be even more popular than the previous 5 flavors because people seemed to prefer the “Clear” look.

Avoid Falling through the Cracks (In Art & Health!)

As I mentioned above, I held these back because if I released too much content at once, some would fall through the cracks. Good art can fall through the cracks not unlike how a harmful virus can get through the armor of one’s own immune system. When travelling it’s extremely important to pay attention to how your immune system is doing, because you’re certainly not going to have any fun if you’re bedridden the whole time.

And this time of year, people getting sick from viruses is more common because people often indulge in lots of sugary foods during the holidays, which produces a spike in blood sugar. What they don’t know is, the resulting blood sugar low leaves you with a highly weakened immune system, which is precisely when viruses take hold. Another reason we have weakened immune systems in the winter is the fact that sunlight is much less direct in the wintertime (due to the tilt of the Earth) which means it takes much more exposure to sunlight for your skin to create enough vitamin D for the day. (Not to mention that you probably don’t want to be outside getting some sun anyway since it’s so cold!)

This combination of increased sugar and decreased Vitamin D is the main cause of the “flu season” that is so common during these winter months.

I should know since over the past few days I narrowly avoided catching a virus myself. I could even feel my body fighting it, and when I was hit with a wave of sleepiness, I listened to my body and took a nap. (And naps are unusual for me.)

I’ve only managed to successfully fight this virus off through careful nutritional planning and a high level of awareness of my own body. For instance, I’ve been making sure I get lots of a vitamin C (I ate 4 oranges yesterday), as well as Vitamin D. Being a vegan most days of the week (and a vegetarian on the other days), most of my vitamin D comes from fortified sources. (Right now my favorite way to get Vitamin D is from Almond Milk since, for a variety of reasons, cows milk actually decreases immune function.)

By carefully avoiding refined sugars, making sure my Vitamin C & D levels were high, and drinking plenty of water, I was able to fortify my immune system to deal with the current buggy environment.

A Funny Story about Mistaken Identity & Vitamin D

Speaking of Vitamin D, when I was a kid I was walking through a grocery store, wandering away from my family and daydreaming, as usual. (Are you surprised?) After a few minutes, I stumbled across a strange kind of milk. The cap was a different color than I’d seen before, and I turned to my Dad who was nearby to ask him what kind of milk it was.

“What kind of milk is this? It seems different”, I asked.

Except that the man wasn’t my Dad at all. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was him, but that reality soon shattered. This man, who was about the height of my father, turned around and in a very deep voice said, “VITAMIN D.” (Yes that warrants all capital letters. If you’d heard him, you’d put capital letters too.)

Taken aback, I gasped and looked up at him. I tried not to look surprised and just went with it. “Ah! Thanks…”

On that day, I learned a valuable lesson about being very aware of your surroundings. And this applies equally to travel and health. Think about it.

Fits the Times Perfectly

Anyway, I hope you all enjoy the 3 new wallpapers and have amazing New Year celebration. Remember to be aware of your bodies and eat sugary foods in moderation!

As a sample, I’ve put a preview of the muted Snowy Cascade Clear “Dark” version. And I think it fits this time of year perfectly, don’t you?

Which flavor do you like best?

Get the new wallpaper in Widescreen (up to 2560×1600) —>
Get the new wallpaper in Fullscreen (up to 1600×1200) —>

— — —

All content released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. These wallpapers will look great up to resolutions of 2560×1600 (about a 30 inch screen). That’s 4,096,000 pixels of goodness to make your desktop look as incredible as possible. With so much free content on Byteful Travel, why not tell a friend?

Read related articles

1. Why Being Obsessive isn’t always Bad (& New Snowy wallpapers)
2. How Color Transports You Across the Seasons (& A New Winter Wallpaper)
3. New Widescreen Wallpaper – Snowy Crystal

A perfect, and perhaps somewhat disturbing, example of this happened to me on my recent trip to the East Coast, and I wrote this article to spread awareness about a feature I thought was common-knowledge but turned out not to be. Perhaps you’ll understand what I mean, when you read this journal entry from the trip:

2010, Early September
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

Today I met a woman on the Boston subway that didn’t realize that she never needs to feel lost again. She was fumbling with this strange folding piece of paper with words on it (I think people of the 20th century called it a “foldable map”).

And I noticed she had an iPhone and asked her if she’d tried that. It turned out that she didn’t realize that iPhones (and iPod touches as well as other smart phones) have Google maps on them that can tell you EXACTLY how to use local public transportation, saving you time, money, and added confusion.

Why this is Important

Before this happened, it had honestly never occurred to me that someone might actually have an iPhone (or other advanced mobile device) and not realize that they’d never have to be lost again. And, perhaps more importantly, that they’d never have to second-guess public transportation ever again. But alas, as the story above illustrates, this turns out not to be the case. So today I’m going to outline how to best use Google Maps to leverage public transportation when you’re on the go. We’ll see how Google Maps tells you exactly which bus or train to take and how to find them. You’ll never have to ask “Is this the right bus?” ever again!

Since I’m most familiar with the Google Maps app for iOS (i.e., for iPhone and iPod) I’m going to cover that, but apps on other systems should be similar.

How to Get Public Transportation Directions On-the-Go

1. Type where you want to go in the search field
2. Select the red pin that marks where you want to go
3. Touch the blue circle to the right of the name of the red pin
   • This will cause info about the place to be presented, including phone number, address, and website if available.
4. Touch “Directions to Here”
   • This sets the end point to what you chose, and the default starting point is your current location by default.
   • If for some reason your device can’t figure out your current location, you’ll want to type in a nearby address here.
5. Touch the blue “Route” button at the bottom right of the screen
   • You will now see a green pin, a red pin, and a path between them.
6. Touch the bus icon at the top
   • The bus icon will be between a car symbol and a walking person symbol.
7. Touch the “Start” button and follow along
   • The app will tell you which bus to take and how soon it leaves.
   • Extra Tip: if you click the clock icon to the right, you can see other times that specific public transit leaves and peruse other scheduling options.

Using this on the go, can be incredibly powerful, allowing you to use a city’s public transportation without having to second-guess complex schedules, which allows to be very spontaneous. Although you should keep in mind that there may be no public transportation service provided in some areas, so you may want to experiment and see the limits of a particular city’s public transpiration before you head out.

Also, in very rare situations the city’s public transportation board has not given Google access to bus information. (This use to be the case with Madison, WI.) But thankfully, this is extremely rare, and Madison is the only city I’ve encountered that provides no information to Google Maps. And I’m sure that, in time, they’ll see the light. (Update: About 8 months after publishing this article, the City of Madison did see the light and now provides public transit info through Google Maps. Smart move, Madison!)

So now that you know how to leverage Google Maps on the go, you need never worry about getting lost or missing a bus or train again.

Very good, grasshopper.

Read related articles

1. 7 Surprises from my Googleplex visit: A Self-Guided Tour of Google HQ
2. The Importance of Public Thanks
3. How to Get Paid to Travel 1,000 miles (How to use Craigslist Rideshare)

I wrote this article because many people benefited from my previous article about this issue regarding what I learned when encoding video for Byteful Video. This article is a followup to that article. However, if you don’t create video, you can safely skip this article; and in the next article we will return to our regularly-scheduled travel programming.

First of all, while researching this article I was shocked at what I discovered to be true versus what I’d heard. It seems there’s a lot of confusion around video, and that’s not surprising considering how absurdly complex it can be. Today, I’d like to clear away the confusion and openly show how I solved this problem once and for all.

When I set out to write this article originally, I thought that the popular video encoding program Handbrake was the solution to the dreaded H.264 gamma brightness bug that has been plaguing video creators for years. And if you export video to H.264, you’ve probably heard of this problem.

Basically, when you export a video from Quicktime Pro as H.264, the resulting video is brighter than the original, and usually it looks horrible.

A False Solution

Yet I’d heard this problem was easily solved using Handbrake because it used a different encoder than Quicktime, namely the award-winning x264 encoder. Yet after conducting various tests, I was able to repeatedly demonstrate that using Handbrake does not solve the brightness bug at all. It doesn’t desaturate the colors as some methods do, but it does change the brightness curve. Here’s a simple animation that I created that alternates between a frame from my original uncompressed video and the same frame from Handbrake’s version of the video:

The main problem with this gamma shift (which is sometimes inaccurately referred to as a color shift) is that your video’s “black levels” become unrealistic, and you loose the ability to have rich shadows.

And in case you’re curious, this was done using a slight variant on the iPod encoding preset included in Handbrake. These results mean that Handbrake decides to treat gamma in the same inaccurate way that Quicktime Pro does. Therefore, it would never be able to solve my problem. And as far as I know, hardware encoders like the Elgato Turbo.264 HD Encoder (pictured here) don’t treat gamma the same way, either. For non-professional uses, devices like the Elgato Turbo are awesome for converting video quickly (usually they’re faster than using your computer to encode the video), but they lack the fine control of the encoder I’m going to show you today.

So now that Handbrake had failed, what could I do?

Then it occurred to me, what if I bypassed Handbrake altogether? What if I used the x264 encoder directly with Quicktime Pro?

I decided to give it a try.

I remembered that x264 was also available as a standalone Quicktime plugin, so I did some research. At first, all I found was a stand-alone plugin from 2006, so I grabbed it off of MacUpdate. After a quick install process, I ran a few tests and exported a few different times, trying different settings each time. And, while the gamma problem was completely gone, I could not get any resulting movie files to play on any mobile devices.

Basically, I tried every variation of advanced settings, and nothing would work. This plugin simply doesn’t have the specific settings needed to create a video that will play on an iPhone or iPod.

So I had to resume my research, and I soon realized that Japan is still producing truly awesome people.

I’ll explain.

What finally saved me was a newer plugin by a Japanese guy named Takashi Mochizuki. This plugin is still based on the award-winning x264 project, but it has over ten times as many fine controls on its settings page than the other x264 plugin. This incredible beast is called x264Encoder, and it’s available on Takashi’s site, completely free.

After reading some of the documentation and conducting various tests, I finally refined a way to create flawless H.264 video that works on a variety of devices, all without any gamma bug. But before you can delve into the powerful controls of this new plugin, you have to install it and relaunch your video editor.

x264Encoder Quick Install

1. Download the plugin on Takashi’s site.
2. Copy the x264Encoder.component to Mac HD/Library/QuickTime/
   • Make sure you’re opening the Library folder at the root level of your hard drive. Don’t put it in the library folder in your Home, because that won’t work.
   • If you have trouble with installation, please read the directions that come with the plugin.
3. Quit any video editing programs you have open because they’ll need to be relaunched to see the new Quicktime encoder you’ve just installed. (Although it’s best to reboot entirely.)
4. Open your video editing program and do one of the following:
   • In Final Cut Pro, choose:
     File menu > Export > Using Quicktime Conversion
   • In iMovie, choose:
     File menu > Export > Quicktime Tab
     Choose, Compress movie for: Expert Settings
     Click “Share”
5. Then enter the detailed settings below.

Detailed Instructions for Flawless H.264 Output

Select: “Format: Quicktime Movie”
Click “Options” button
Make sure “Video”, “Sound”, and “Prepare for Internet Streaming” are all checked.
Then, under “Prepare for Internet Streaming”, choose “Fast Start”.

Under Sound, click “Settings” button
Change the settings to this:
Format: AAC
Rate: Recommended
Render Settings: Quality: Normal
MPEG 4 AAC LC Encoder Settings: Target Bit Rate: 160kbps
Click “OK”

Under Video, click “Size” button
Just look at this to make sure that it’s the size you want. (I mention this because when testing, I noticed that this would default to “Compressor Native” which was too small.)
Click “OK”

Under Video, click “Settings” button (this is the really important part)
Change the settings to this:
Compression Type: x264 Encoder
Frame rate: Current
Key Frames: Automatic
UNCHECK Frame Reordering
Encoding: Best Quality (Multi-pass)
Data Rate: Restrict to 1500 kbps (if you want iPods to be able to play it)

Alternatively, you could just make your settings look like this:

Then click “Options” button at the bottom left of the window.

This is where it starts to look a little crazy, but it’s easier than it looks.
So hang in there! This is totally worth it.

Now, you will see this vast array of options:

But you don’t have to worry about setting all of this up because presets are included!

Click the “Load Preset” button at the bottom left, and a sheet will slide down.

Presets make it easy to make iPhone-ready video

If you’d like people on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch (as well as the PSP and Zune) to be able to play your video, choose the “iPod Tuned” preset. (According to the x264 docs, this takes a bit longer to encode than “iPod Default”, but the results look better. It’s worth it.)

Click “OK”

And while we’re here, click on the “Values” tab to look at all the settings you don’t have to worry about because Mochizuki-san provided some excellent presets! Domo arigatou, Mochizuki-san!

The Key is Setting the Gamma

To finish up, let’s activate the color spacing tag that fixes the problem that spawned this entire situation.

Click on the “Tagging” tab and check the checkbox “Add gamma 2.2 (SD/HD content)”. Adding this gamma tag simply and elegantly solves the problem without any unnatural color filtering or adjusting. That’s why this method is superior to all other methods. No “BlackWhite” restore, brightness filter, or strange alpha channel methods are needed. This is an important point. Shifting the brightness or contrast during exporting in order to fix the gamma problem is a bad idea. Not only does the export take longer, but worse, you always lose more quality than if you hadn’t adjusted. That’s why I’m so thankful that Mochizuki-san has put so much work into this plugin.

Now that you’ve set the gamma, your settings are complete!

Click “OK”
Click “OK” again
Click “OK” once more

Then click “Save”, and wait. (It may take hours depending on the speed of your machine and the length of your video. I recommend that, before you spend hours encoding your entire video, you experiment on a clip only a few seconds long to confirm that it looks the way you want it.)

The result? Beautifulness.

The resulting video will not only have the same brightness as the original, but it will also play back on mobile devices like the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. And there should be no significant brightness shift compared to a Mac and a Windows-based PC when playing back the same video file. (Although calibrating your monitor certainly helps!)

I thank Takashi very much, because at the end of the day, using this plugin lets me say two words I love to say:

Problem solved.

Read related articles

1. How to Fix Washed-Out H.264 Video
2. How to Encode Video for a Podcast
3. How to Stop Spam with Spam Karma 2 & SI Captcha (2 Free Plugins I love)

And how would you find out?

More and more over the last few years, I’ve come across stories and first-hand accounts of how powerful intentions are, and how the intentions I hold in my mind affect more than just my own actions. I kept coming across stories about something called the Intention-Manifestation model of reality that suggested that my thoughts and intentions actually ripple out into the Universe and eventually reflect back to me, often in powerful ways. It stated that these intentions reflect back to me from the Universe itself, because the Universe is reflecting back to me the reality that’s most aligned with my thoughts and beliefs. On the surface, it seemed strange and maybe even a little crazy the first time I heard about it, but as I’ve experimented with this worldview more and more, I’ve been startled at how my life has been transformed.

So today, I’d like to share with you the story of something really inexplicable and outright weird that happened to me which wonderfully illustrates the powerful ways Intention-Manifestation can occur while travelling. And perhaps along the way, you’ll gain a new sense of curiosity and wonder for this strange universe we live in.

Many Names, One Principle

This worldview goes by a few different names, and you may have come across this theory before since discussion of it among philosophers and well-known thinkers has been growing over the past few years. The phenomenon is referred to as the Law of Attraction or the Intention-Manifestation model of reality.

Recently, this has been showing up in popular media, too. You’ve probably heard of a movie called “The Secret”, and if you haven’t, you probably will. This movie is the most popular explanation of the Law of Attraction that has emerged in the last few decades. (And for the sake of saving ink, paper, time, and my sanity, I’ll abbreviate Law of Attraction as LOA for the rest of this article.)

Beyond simply being an enjoyable movie, “The Secret” contains some pretty powerful ideas, and it’s one of the more profound movies that I’ve seen in the last few years. However, to be honest, I was pretty disappointed in the movie, because it gave a disproportionately large amount of time to how to use the LOA to become wealthy and earn more money. Perhaps the book that the movie is based off of is better, but the movie put the wrong emphasis on what the LOA truly is.

Many People throw out The Baby

Now, there’s nothing wrong with becoming wealthy; but, because of the way the movie discussed money and wealth, there’s a real danger that people will make a false association that the LOA is always about wealth and becoming rich, which it is definitely not. There are various problems that arise when you become preoccupied with the wealth-creation aspect of the LOA.

Probably the biggest problem is that, for complex reasons (which would require another article to adequately explain), people new to the LOA invariably fail to manifest the money of their dreams. So guess what they do? They throw out the entire LOA model and decide that, since they couldn’t generate wealth in x-number of days, it’s completely bogus.

Forget “throwing the baby out with the bath water” — that’s like throwing out the entire bathtub.

Over a cliff.
Onto sharks.
With lasers on their heads.

It’s not pretty.

See, the LOA basically states that every thought is an intention. That means any and every thought is an intention, including any worries, hopes, and recurrent thoughts you may have throughout the day. According to the LOA, your sum total reality is a reflection of the sum total of your thoughts/intentions; and therefore, you’re directly responsible for everything in your life.

It follows then, that to change your life, you have to change your thoughts, right?

Yep!

Easy?

No.

It’s pretty darn difficult, because to change your thoughts, you have to reevaluate, and sometimes completely rebuild, your belief frameworks (or core belief systems).

I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Challenging your belief frameworks, and growing from that, is one of the hardest tasks you can ever take on. But there’s no rush, and over the longterm fewer things are more rewarding than challenging your belief frameworks and growing from the experience.

An Interesting side note

Recently it’s come to my attention that this principle may even be hinted at in the Gospel of Mark in reference to prayer. I’m not a religious person, but I found this intriguing so I’ve quoted it below so that you can come to your own conclusions:

Now in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter, remembering, said to Him, “Rabbi, look! The fig tree which You cursed has withered away.”

So Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be removed and be cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says. Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them.

Mark 11:20-24 (NKJV)

Story Preface: Expectations Restrict You

So now that you’ve had a beginner’s crash course in what the LOA is, I can share how I solved my travel dilemma in just 60 seconds.

I feel really lucky that this particularly inexplicable thing happened to me, because it clearly demonstrated to me, first hand, that the real key when using the LOA is to not hold specific expectations about the outcome of what you want to happen. I’ve found that, once I’m clear about what I want, any attachment to a particular outcome limits the LOA from working as it should.

Basically, expectations I hold about how something will manifest actually minimize the chance of anything manifesting in a profound way.

Instead, I found that if I have faith that what I need will come to me in its own perfect time, and I remain very flexible about how and when it will arrive (i.e., not placing specific expectations on outcomes), intentions manifest into realities a heck of a lot faster, and in more compelling ways.

Recently, I saw this summarized beautifully on twitter:

Attachment is the enemy of manifestation.
~ Steve Pavlina

And frankly, I never would have believed that my thoughts actually have a such a profound, and inexplicably-fluid, effect on my reality… until I began to experience it for myself. But I never could have experienced the LOA at work in my own life until I started relaxing my own beliefs about reality a bit. For instance, I started asking myself questions like, “What if this really is how reality works? What if I don’t understand the link between my mind and my reality as well as I thought?”

Once I opened myself up to the possibility, some weird things started happening to me. Some wonderful, weird things. The story below is one such example.

How I Manifested a Solution in 60 Seconds Flat

So how did I solve my travel dilemma in 60 seconds flat using the LOA? Well, the following story happened to me just last month, and it’s an excellent example of the LOA at work.

I had just set out on a long bicycle trip out of Madison. I’d carefully packed my travel inventory into my pack and attached the pack to my bike’s rack using some handy bungee cords. After biking for a few minutes, I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten something crucially important.

My front tire’s air pressure had been low for a few days, and I’d meant to stop somewhere and fill it up the day before. I’d forgotten, which resulted in a very interesting dilemma:

1. I could go back and fall way behind schedule.
2. Or I could press on but risk ruining my wheel’s rim if the tire lost any more pressure.

Just 60 Seconds later

After stopping (in my mind) and screaming “KAHN!!!” to the sky (again, in my mind), I thought to myself, “Where the heck am I going to find an air pump station around here?”

I didn’t know the far-western side of Madison that well, and the thought occurred to me that it would be really great if I ran into an opportunity to refill my front tire without spending a bunch of extra time looking for a gas station with an air pump.

Guess what happened 60 seconds later.

After arriving at the next intersection, I saw a fellow biker head towards me. For various reasons, I got the feeling that he really knew what he was doing (though not because he was wearing a spandex biking outfit, because he wasn’t, thank goodness). So as I was about to pass him, a small voice inside of me said, in a not-so-small tone, “ASK HIM ABOUT FILLING UP YOUR LOW TIRE!”

It continued, “SERIOUSLY. RIGHT NOW.”

Sigh.

I’d heard this small, still voice before, and I had the feeling that I’d regret it if I didn’t listen to its advice.

So I did.

It turned out that he actually had an air pump with him (and if you’ve done some biking, you’ll know this isn’t exactly common anymore), and he was really glad to help. He even pumped the air for me, and 30 seconds later my tire was at the correct air pressure again. I thanked him profusely. He smiled. And after saying farewell, I was on my way once again.

So what just happened there?

Let’s recap: I went from thinking about needing to fill up the air in my tire, to someone connecting an air pump to my tire in about… 60 seconds flat.

Think the Law of Attraction is crazy?

To be completely clear, I don’t expect to convince anyone anything with just one story, or even many stories for that matter. Convincing you is not my goal. My goal is to get you curious. My goal is to get you really suspicious, suspicious of your current beliefs about the way reality works. After all, if you consider yourself a true skeptic, you must be at least slightly skeptical of your own opinions and beliefs. Otherwise, how pure is your skepticism, really?

Now, challenging your belief frameworks isn’t easy. It took me time to internalize and understand this particular framework and open myself up to these kinds of possibilities. It’s easy to write off these kinds of stories if they’re perceived as isolated cases. It’s a lot harder to brush them all off as coincidences if they’re happening to you personally and things start to manifest more quickly and more often.

And that’s exactly what happens the more you open yourself up to the possibility that this is how reality actually works.

Challenging at first, but The Blanket does exist!

The concept of the LOA may sound weird, and that’s because it is. But in my experience, it works. (And I’m not alone. Many thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world also use the LOA every day. One good place to meet people who use the LOA are on discussion boards like this one.)

So the LOA may strike you as weird, but do you want to hear something that’s even weirder? If you decide that the LOA is completely impossible, that’s an intention, too. By denying the possibility of the Law of Attraction, you actually send out the intention to have the Universe reflect situations back to you that are designed to raise more doubt in you over whether the LOA is real or not. So in essence, by “deciding” that the LOA is impossible, you use the LOA against itself in your own life.

It’s like believing that, once you put a blanket over your head, you can decide it doesn’t exist because you can’t see anything!

This Wonderful Universe loves Congruency

But don’t worry. If you want to try this out yourself, you can. You just need to keep in mind that any conflicting thoughts you generate will result in conflicting realities. And conflicting realities usually cancel eachother out which results in nothing ending up manifesting. So the less conflicting your thoughts are, the better. (This is called being Congruent.)

So if you remember only 1 idea from this article, remember this:

The more time and the more you can lock onto the feeling of what it will feel like when you’re living with the results of what you want to manifest, the quicker it can manifest.

The feeling part is really important since the emotional energy behind any thought regulates how powerful the thought is. So be responsible, be congruent, and really tune into the feeling of what it will feel like once you’re living with the results of having/being/achieving what you want.

By doing that, you allow your goal to manifest much faster.

Read related articles

1. How to Spot Inaccurate Beliefs While Travelling: Perceptions aren’t always Truth
2. How to Spot Inaccurate Beliefs While Travelling: Magic of Choice (& Couchsurfing)
3. How I used Intention-Manifestation to stop an Identity Theft (& had fun doing it)