I insist on...

You say in your letter of 28th June that the fees are not so high as they have been before the war. I think that this does not concern foreigner artists and I insist on getting the highest fees.

With Kindest Regards,

Yours Truly,

Sergei Rachmaninoff

(Letter to agent, 1918)

Always Keep Going

Always Keep Going! It's my translation of "Never Give Up". Never Give Up includes the phrase "Give Up" so I don't want to sow that seed in your mind, you see.

If you want to achieve a target, Do It Every Day. Just do something towards the target every day. You can do something more often than that if you want, even then it still counts as Something Every Day.

Never mind how on earth you will get to where you want - it may be impossibly far away - but you are not aiming to be there tomorrow. If you can do it in one day then you don't need any help from me!

Today your job is to get to tomorrow, and to improve by one day's worth of improvement.

Do it every day, fix what is here now, and you will arrive one day.

If it takes 300 days then next year you will look and realise you arrived. If 900 days then in three years you will suddenly be there. Nobody remembers the time it took - you may recall it if it made an impression on you - because we don't live in the past. Similarly we don't live in the future. Actually not really in the present either, because where or when is that? The present is...now no it's gone! Never mind about time and what it is. Life must be a process of living. You are alive now, in the now, and that's the time to act. Do it now. If you know something useful will happen in three hours then you can save it until then. That's called planning. But for general work, the time is now. Why wait?

There are many important points about this, but the main one is Always Keep Going. If you miss a day, then the victory will be another day away. But if you never missed a day then you will have arrived in the minimum time. That means the fastest possible in the whole world.

It is so simple. But the results are amazing!

Be patient. If you can be, then one day you will be one of only a few left in the race. The others who didn't give up.

See you there I hope!

News-free Trial

I've just completed a two week news-free trial period. That means I didn't read or otherwise learn about any news stories during that time.

The only things I missed that I consider worth knowing about were an earthquake and a typhoon. The rest was not important, as far as I can see (I may have missed someting vital though!) and would mostly have been depressing anyway. After all, nobody's going to report about positive things - they aren't considered serious enough.

What is the point of the news anyway? To keep you informed of the news? Or to keep you worried about things you can't change?

The news that applies to you is the news worth knowing - if this does include any international events then fine, you should know about them.

The news that applies to you is the news that you can change. Maybe you can't stop a war but you can stop all the people you meet from having a war. It might not change the whole world but it changes the part of the world that you touch.

If some people tried this then something might improve. It only needs some, not all - that's the good thing about it. If all are willing to help then that's the way to go, but as each person touches a lot of lives, there is an area of influence that can be quite effective (depending on the interference to the signal).

So that's what I recommend. Do what you can. If you want to do more, learn how. Keep your eye on real events. Live now.

It's worth knowing about international events, but we can only read stories about them, and that is not always the same as knowing about the thing itself. News sources are not there to tell us news, they are there to take our money and keep us entertained so they can continue to take our money. Is that the sort of information you can trust?

There is a limited commitment in certain parts of the media to distributing the truth - that's the only part worth following in my opinion. But I found over the last two weeks that there's no real need to check the news 30 times per day. It feels important or useful but it's not really contributing anything to your effectiveness. If you are one of these people then I would say just check occasionally and concentrate on making news yourself. Good news, by the way!

Think about what would be an important story to you. Bank robbed in Ontario? Mars shows traces of water? Elusive gecko variety photographed? Your daughter gets another tooth? The tax people have made a mistake and you are getting some money back?

Just think about it.

If you care about what's happening to other people and the world, you have to make this information contribute to your effectiveness. It has to be information, not just a noise of facts.

Be safe, peoples!!

Future Perfect

I'm planning what to do with this website next. As you can see, there is a variety of material here now, some of it old and in need of work, all of it in need of unification and a good trim.

Everything is going according to plan; I have had a lot to work on but it is succeeding. I haven't mentioned anything about it before, because who wants to know about what might happen? Few people would be interested and even fewer would believe it. It seemed to me to be better just to get on with it and tell you later. This may explain a certain lack of information that the more discerning of you may have noticed around the place.

Today I went out for my walk but was tricked by the sun which now disappears much earlier than formerly (and only very recently), so it was a lot darker a lot sooner! I didn't get lost but I certainly had to walk further than I was expecting...

So the sun is getting further away...some may doubt that it shall return, most accept it as obvious. What would our ancestors have thought? And our descendants?

Anyway, the point about this time of year is that the light does appear to disappear, and during that time there is no particular guarantee that it will be back. It gets cold and dark and all the goodness of the earth hides itself away in dark places. But if everything goes according to plan, guided by the Cosmic Gardeners' responsible hands, the light will soon return and shine on new things peeping out of the earth.

It's the same with many things in life. My work is just one case of that.

Everything is always beginning and being made again, but from time to time we can step back and notice that - something really did happen! The year turns interminably but at each resting point we have the chance to take stock of what we have achieved - what harvest we have brought in. If you don't like the harvest, it's time to plan for the next one. What will you change?

We can't escape change, but one thing we can do is direct it. And that is exactly what I am attempting to do. I hope you will be interested to see the results!

Love from Philip

Kanji Amazingness

As you may know, I am mainly learning Japanese at the moment. I have other irons in the fire too but I'm principally concentrating on this one for now.

OK so why am I doing that? Well every language has its strong points and in the case of Japanese there are plenty of art forms that I'd like to know better, which will be helped by knowing the language. Also plus I know so many Japanese people by now that it's embarrassing that they have to speak in English just for me. Well, I like Hiroshige and I like Bashō so I will be able to appreciate them better with more Japanese skills (one because obviously he wrote in Japanese, and the other because although they are images, I'm sure there are things to read about them that don't exist in English). Who knows, after I know more about them, I might not like them any more! Perhaps I have an English idea about them now...

So I am doing Japanese and as with everything, I am taking the most difficult thing first. In this case, it is the writing system. For some reason, everybody thinks it's really difficult - and it is, if you learn it in a difficult way. But obviously it is supposed to make sense, so there must be a sensible way of learning it. In fact there is. For the Chinese characters they use (called Kanji, or "Chinese characters", which is a good choice of name), they either come simply or are more complex and contain several elements. In all cases, you can give a name to the different parts and make up a story about them that makes you remember them instantly. For example, "sushi" has "fish" on the left, and "delicious" on the right.

鮨

I wonder if you can see that. If not, here is another one. "Fish" and "delicious" are of course English, and nobody Japanese calls them that - we have just chosen one meaning to remember them by. (Each one is made up of other smaller parts too which we have to remember first, e.g. "delicious" has got "spoon" on the top and "day" on the bottom - it's **so delicious you can eat it with your spoon all day**).

That character is a good example because I have only seen it once - I have never written it down or practised it but I still remember it because sushi is delicious fish. It's not because I have a photographic memory, it's just because I have a memory, the same as everybody else in the whole world.

The normal method of learning Kanji is essentially to copy them out again and again until you remember them. In fact Japanese children take 12 years to learn all the characters they officially need for reading a newspaper these days. However in this way of learning, you only have to write it once - or even never!

Now each character has several ways of being pronounced, but if you learn all this information at one time then it is harder to remember because you are of course struggling to remember the character and the pronunciations. If the character is already familiar then you've got a "hook" to hang your pronunciations on. So that's why this method - the method used in James Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji" - concentrates purely on the one-word meaning of each character first of all. There may well be other meanings, but just one is required to get it in your brain for ever.

Anyway, I have been getting on with this and it really works. It's like magic. And this week I read my first sentence for which I knew all the characters. I can't pronounce it or understand it of course, but I think it's an important step! You can work out what things probably mean. E.g. "telephone" has two characters, electricity and talk. So that makes sense even if you don't know it is pronounced "denwa".

So this is a method which is slow at first - I can hardly say anything at all, yet I'm supposed to be "learning Japanese" - but really quite soon it should start going a lot faster. I'm astounded so far!

It's the same with learning anything properly. Everything is ruined in the beginning and you can't do any of it at all, but one day (if you do it every day) - you have mastery!

But without starting at the beginning, it is all a bit of a muddle - though it works, after a fashion, more or less.

You don't have to learn things in this long way at all, but it's so good to be in control of what you want to do. There's nothing quite like it!

OK bye for now!