World of Warcraft (WoW) came out in Europe in February 2005. I started playing it a month earlier during the final beta test phase, and I kept playing it for about four years straight - except when I was doing my student exchange in Malaysia in 2006. However, even at that time I was eagerly looking forward to the first big expansion (The Burning Crusade) to come out, and I was following WoW news sites and watching WoW videos created by other gamers.

All in all, I was rather hardcore about the whole thing: I was the founder and leader of one of the best guilds - a group of players organized to work together - on the server in which I played. Eventually we merged with another guild so we could achieve more together, and we did. We became the first ones on the whole server to beat most of the toughest opponents in the game. I also wanted to give up my position as a leader because it got simply too tiring to run the whole thing and to deal with egomaniacs, who for some reason seem to be particularly attracted to multiplayer online games...

Picture by Shards Of Blue

What finally stopped me playing WoW for good is actually rather embarrassing. In the end of 2008 I was becoming more and more fed up with the game. I had graduated a year and a half earlier and was working full-time. What I didn't want was to come home after work and play a game that started to feel like work, too. I felt obliged to play it. Then I finally realized after a period of denial that I was not getting any enjoyment out of it anymore, but instead it was making me anxious and frustrated.

Click to read more ...

Note: My aim is to publish new articles at least once a week, which I've been able to do pretty well for the past 3-4 months, but last week was simply way too busy as I had to focus on work, school assignments, exams, and a few other commitments. I should be back on track now.

I think the topic of liming beliefs falls into "personal development basics," so to speak, but it is something that's useful to think about every now and then. It's also a topic I have never written about before, so hopefully it will be of interest to you :)

Now, what exactly is a limiting belief? Let's start with some examples:

• I love photography but I'm never going to be good enough to make it for living.
• It's always someone rich and famous who gets the kind of girl/guy I want.
• I was bullied as a kid which made me an introvert, and because of that I can never become successful in relationships.
• I am not smart enough to do well in business.
• I would love to write a book, but I don't have the talent/patience/creativity.
• My kids don't respect me because I don't have a well-paying job.
• Women/men don't like me because I'm fat.
• I'm overweight because of my genes, so I can never become fit.

As I've written before, our interpretation of the world and what happens around us is largely based on our beliefs. These beliefs can be roughly divided into two groups; positive and negative, or enabling and limiting. It's the negative, limiting beliefs that prevent us from achieving what we want in life, whereas the positive, enabling beliefs support us when we're reaching for our goals. 

Click to read more ...

One of the biggest life lessons I had in 2009 was that my personality is in a state of constant change. The change may be small, subtle, and quiet or take big, life-changing leaps, but it's there and it's continuous. The fact that personality changes over time is not a big surprise in itself; I think everyone can take a look back a few years and immediately see how they were different back then compared to who they are now. However, I've hold the assumption that it takes major life experiences - such as break-ups, marriages, parents getting divorced, moving to live on your own for the first time etc. - for a personality to change, but considering everything that has happened in my own thought and behavior patterns during 2009, I have had to abandon that belief.

According to Dictionary.com, the definition of psychological personality is

a) the sum total of the physical, mental, emotional, and social characteristics of an individual.

b) the organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of the individual.

In psychology, the act of learning implies behavior change. Meaning, that when something is learned, the behavior of the learner changes as a result. If personality then is an organized pattern of behavioral characteristics of an individual, learning changes also the personality of the learner. This does not require major life experiences. With open and curious mind it's easily possible to learn something new every single day, and the cumulative outcome of that learning is a changed personality.

It's very important to realize, that no one is born more confident, social, outgoing, competitive, creative etc. than anyone else. Your early life experiences are paramount in the forming of your personality, which affects how you behave and think in different situations. Although your personality greatly determines how you think and act, the way you think and act also affects your personality. It's a two-way connection.

Click to read more ...

I don't think I've ever read as much as I did in 2009. On top of hundreds of blog posts I've finished somewhere around 40 books. This year has also shaped me a lot as a person. A year ago I was way more shy, overweight guy spending days at work and nights playing World of Warcraft. Now I've started to take much more control over my social life and ambitions, lost 10kg's, and gotten very excited about how the human body and mind works.

This is my list of ten best, most influential books of 2009. Some of them have been published already earlier, so 2009 stands for the year I read them.

The Vegetarian Myth
by Lierre Keith

"The 4.8 pounds of grain fed to cattle to produce one pound of beef for human beings represents a colossal waste of resources in a world still teeming with people who suffer from profound hunger and malnutrition," writes Jim Motavalli. Yes, it is a waste, but not for the reasons he thinks. As we have seen in abundance, growing that grain will require the felling of forests, the plowing of prairies, the draining of wetlands, and the destruction of topsoil. In most places on earth, it will never be sustainable, and where it just possibly might be, it will require rotation with animals on pasture. And it's ridiculous to the point of insanity to take that world-destroying grain and feed it to a ruminant who could have happily subsisted on those now extinct forests, grasslands, and wetlands of our planet, while building topsoil and species diversity.

This book is arguably the most important one I read in 2009. No other book has carried such a profound message about how and why agriculture has driven species extinct and destroyed ecosystems. Most importantly, this book has taught me about the meaning of topsoil, and because agriculture is destroying topsoil instead of building it, agriculture in itself is not - and cannot be - sustainable.

Click to read more ...

It's a beautiful ideal that each of us is born with unique talents. I've heard it said by my mother, by my old teachers, and by a number of public speakers. They all believe that you, me, and everyone else has something special to bring to the table. Something that will make us superior to the others. And guess what, I'm starting to believe that it's true. The only problem is, that those talents are not so easy to figure out.

When talking about talents, most people think of the obvious ones such as being a great pianist, or a painter, or a code wizard. These talents are easy to notice, because they result in external evidence that is a direct proof of the talent of the creator. We can see the painting in a gallery and say "this artist has talent", and it makes sense. However, considering a talent to be merely a channel for creating tangible objects will limit your way of looking at talents. I think there's more than just artistic talent that needs to be taken into account.

Click to read more ...