The swirling guitars and synthesized chaos of the song along with the inspiring words created an atmosphere that was probably as close to an “insightful” or “psychedelic” experience as anything else I had experienced up until that age. It felt meaningful and liberating.

And even today these words carry a lot of meaning to me. The mantra “think for yourself and question authority” speaks to a simple truth, which is: society isn’t always right, and you have to trust your own heart and mind at the end of the day, no matter what anyone else thinks.

Many people try meditating once or twice, but never develop a steady routine. A big part of this is beginners often get discouraged by common problems that they experience when first starting out.

There are 3 specific problems that I see people struggle with all of the time in meditation. This article is going to describe each one of these, then offer advice and guidelines on how to help you overcome these issues.

Our values play an important role in guiding our actions and choices. They are the things in life that we strive for on a daily basis and keep us going. They are what we live for. And the fulfillment of these values is ultimately what brings us our happiness and success.

However, what we value in life can greatly depend on the individual person. We don’t all live for all the same things, so knowing what you value most in your life is important in building a lifestyle that works for you.

One of the first, most essential steps to improving your life is discovering the things in life that are your most important values. Only when you identify what you desire in your life can you really take action to begin making it a reality.

Here is a quick 5 minute exercise to help you discover your most important values.

In the early 1970s, British social psychologist Henri Tajfel explored a phenomenon he called the minimal group paradigm. The basic idea behind this concept was to investigate the minimal conditions required for discrimination to occur within groups.

Amazingly, studies on this approach have shown that people tend to favor a group bias even when they are categorized on relatively meaningless distinctions, for example: eye color, what kind of paintings they like, or even the flip of a coin.

This tells us that we can potentially separate ourselves from a certain group of people on any random and arbitrary characteristic. Therefore, everyone is susceptible to be a perpetrator and/or victims of social prejudice and ostracism.

We imagine it to be the worst thing possible in our lives: What happens if that person at the bar rejects me? What happens if my band does terrible during our first show? What happens if people say my new blog sucks?

We’re so afraid of what people may think about us that we end up never doing what we really want to do, because we’re scared that we are going to suck at it and embarrass ourselves in front of everyone.

If we want to reverse this pattern, we need to learn that not only is failure a necessary first step to success, it can also be kind of fun. That’s right, let me repeat that: failure isn’t so bad, it can actually be kind of fun.