In the following post, Eric Barker points out that we can be happier by reaching down into our inner psychopaths and embracing their thought processes and behaviors. The concept is simple, turn off certain brain regions that are getting in the way of a fuller life. The procedure can be simple if you have the right machine to do it. Otherwise, it's fake it till you make it.
3 Things Psychopaths Can Teach You About Being A Happier Person
You’re a good person. Or at least you’re trying to be. Me too. But that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a thing or two from the bad guys.
And I mean the really bad guys — psychopaths. So let’s give the devil his due. And that’s why I gave Kevin a call.
Dr. Kevin Dutton is a researcher at Oxford and author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success.
You might be wondering what good we can learn from people who have no empathy. Actually, plenty.
In fact, Kevin found out what it was like to be a psychopath — firsthand. For a brief period he actually turned himself into one, literally. (More on that below.)
Okay, let’s see what good we can take away from some very bad people…
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Via Imagine: How Creativity Works:
But then, just when Dan Wieden was about to give up and go to sleep, he started thinking about a murderer named Gary Gilmore who had been executed in 1977. “He just popped into my mind,” Wieden says. “And so it’s the middle of the night, and I’m sitting at my desk, and I’m thinking about how Gilmore died. This was in Utah, and they dragged Gilmore out in front of the firing squad. Before they put the hood over his head, the chaplain asks Gilmore if he has any last words. And he pauses and he says: ‘Let’s do it.’ And I remember thinking, ‘That is so… courageous.’ Here’s this guy calling for his own death. And then, the next thing I know, I’m thinking about my shoe commercials. And so I start playing around with the words, and I realized that I didn’t like the way it was said, actually, so I made it a little different. I wrote ‘Just Do It’ on a piece of paper and as soon as I saw it, I knew. That was my slogan.”
