Update on Erin Pavlina, and why I disagree with what she does so much

I thought I should do another post about Erin Pavlina, because the earlier post I wrote about her was a little stream-of-consciousness, but despite that it’s the third result in google for a search for “Erin Pavlina”, so I feel I should justify my comments a little. (It also annoys me that my blog is higher in a google search for her name than for mine, but whatever).

On the earlier post I received two incredibly contrasting comments. The first was this one from Sue:

Hi, I am totally mortified to admit that it is clearly me, not Erin, who is the crazy person. Because Erin has $500 of my money and I am still wincing from the pain of being ripped-off by paying for one of her psychic readings. I wish I had done more research before I went through with it – the problem is that people paying psychics are vulnerable and really want to believe in this bs. Usually I am a rational person but I got totally duped by the false promises on her website. So I would be grateful if you would please publish this comment as a big warning to anyone thinking of buying a reading from this lady – DON’T DO IT!! It feels like rape.

And another from Ellie:

I have to say I have had two readings with Erin and both have been accurate and helpful (including making contact with deceased relatives Erin didn’t even know existed) – a far cry from what Sue refers to here.

So how could two people feel so differently about the same process? And why does that process cost up to $800 for just an hour of Erin’s time?

To demonstrate this, I will now do a psychic reading of you. Yes, you, the reader. It will be a long and detailed reading. I’ll show you how amazing a psychic I am, even though I’m not in the same room, and for some of you, not even in the same country. Here it goes. By the way, I”m assuming that you, like the majority of my readers, are in university or college, or have recently graduated – if not then email me about a private reading. It’s only $200, and I accept payment by PayPal and all major credit cards. So, without futher ado, here is my psychic reading of you.

You are a person prone to bouts of self-examination. This is in sharp contrast to a striking ability you have developed to appear very socially engaged, even the life and soul of the parrt; but in a way that only convinces others. You are all too aware of it being a facade.

This means that you will often be at a gathering and find yourself playing a part. While on the one hand you’ll be talkative and funny, you’ll be detaching yourself to the point where you will find yourself watching everything going on around you and feeling utterly unable to engage. You’ll play conversations back to yourself in your head and wonder what that person really meant when he said such-and-such – conversations that other people wouldn’t give a second thought to.

How have you learned to deal with this conflict? Through exercising control. You like to show a calm, self-assured fluid kind of stability (but because this is self-consciously created, it will create bouts of frustrated silliness and a delight in extremes, or at least a delight in being seen to be extreme). You most easily recognize this control in how you are with people around you. You have learned to protect yourself by keeping people at bay. Because in the past you have learned to be disappointed by people (and because there were issues with you adjusting to your sexuality), you instinctively keep people at arms’ length, until you decide they are allowed over that magic line into your group of close friends. However, once across that line, the problem is that an emotional dependency kicks in which leaves you feeling very hurt or rejected if it appears that they have betrayed that status.

Because you are prone to self-examination, you will be aware of these traits. However, you are unusually able to examine even that self-examination, which means that you have become concerned about what the real you is. You have become all too aware of facades, of sides of yourself which you present to the world, and you wonder if you have lost touch with the real and spontaneous you.

You are very creative, and have tried different avenues to utilize that ability. It may not be that you specifically, say, paint; it may be that your creativity shows itself in more subtle ways, but you will certainly find yourself having vivid and well-formed ideas which others will find hard to grasp. You set high standards for yourself, though, and in many ways are a bit of a perfectionist. The problem is, though, that it means you often don’t get stuff done, because you are frustrated by the idea of mediocrity and are wearied by the idea of starting something afresh. However, once your brain is engaged you’ll find yourself sailing. Very much this will likely lead to you having considered writing a novel or some such, but a fear that you won’t be able to achieve quite what you want stops you from getting on with it. But you have a real vision for things, which others fall short of. Particularly in your academic/college situation, you are currently fighting against restraints upon your desire to express yourself freely.

Your relationship with your parents (there is a suggestion that one is no longer around, or at least emotionally absent) is under some strain. You wish to remain fond of them but recent issues are causing frustration – from your side far more than theirs. In fact they seem unaware of your thoughts on the matter. Partly this is because there are ways in which you have been made to feel isolated from certain groups in the past – something of an outsider. Now what is happening is that you are taking that outsider role and defending it to the point of consciously avoiding being part of a group. This will serve you well in your creative and career pursuits. You have an enormous cynicism towards those who prefer to be part of a group or who exhibit any cliquey behaviour, and you always feel a pang of disappointment when you see your ‘close’ friends seeming to follow that route. Deep down it feels like rejection.

However, for all that introspection, you have developed a sensational, dry sense of humour that makes connections quickly and wittily and will leave you making jokes that go right over the heads of others. You delight in it so much that you’ll often rehearse jokes or amusing voices to yourself in order to ’spontaneously’ impress others with them. But this is a healthy desire to impress, and although you hate catching yourself at it, it’s nothing to be so worried about.

There’s also an odd feeling that you should have been born in a different century. You might be able to make more sense of that than I can.

There are some strong monetary shifts taking place at the moment. Both the recent past and what’s in store over the next few months represent quite a change.

You have links at the moment with people abroad, which are quite interesting, and will look to yield worthwhile results. You’re naturally a little disorganized. A look around your living space would show a box of photos, unorganized into albums, out-of-date medicines, broken items not thrown out, and notes to yourself which are significantly out of date. Something related to this is that you lack motivation. Because you’re resourceful and talented enough to be pretty successful when you put your mind to things, this encourages you to procrastinate and put them off. Equally, you’ve given up dreams a little easily when your mind flitted elsewhere. There are in your home signs of an excursion into playing a musical instrument, which you have since abandoned, or are finding yourself less interested in. (This may alternatively relate to poetry and creative writing you’ve briefly tried your hand at and left behind you.) You have a real capacity for deciding that such-and-such a thing (or so-and-so a person) will be the be all and end all of everything and be with you for ever. But you’d rather try and fail, and swing from one extreme to the other, than settle for the little that you see others content with.

Conclusion: It’s very interesting doing your reading, as you do present something of a  conundrum, which won’t surprise you. You are certainly bright, but unusually open to life’s possibilities – something not normally found among achieving people. I’d say you’d do well to be less self-absorbed, as it tends to distance you a little, and to relinquish some of the control you exercise when you present that stylized version of yourself to others. You could let people in a little more, but I am aware that there is a darkness you feel you should hide (much of this is in the personal/relationship/sexual area, and is related to a neediness which you don’t like).

You really have an appealing personality – genuinely. Many thanks for doing this, and for offering something far more substantial than most.

So how was that? Accurate? A load of nonsense? If you’re a normal, fairly intelligent young person, you will undoubtedly have found, like I did, that at least some of this applies to you. Yes, sometimes I can be a little self-absorbed. Yes, I tried to play the guitar and then got bored of it, and gave up. Yes, I’d like to think that I’d rather try and fail than settle for less. And like most people, I have “links” abroad.

But do you see the problem with this? Most of it is so general and generic, that if you really wanted to believe it, you could. If you really wanted to believe that I was psychic and performing an excellent reading of you, you could take the phrase “links abroad” to mean any number of things. Maybe you have relatives abroad, or colleagues from work, or  you recently went on holiday, or you’re just about to go on holiday, or that your girlfriend is half-swedish. It could literally apply to almost everyone, if they wanted it to.

Similarly, who hasn’t at one point in their life tried to play an instrument or some other creative exercise? Who isn’t a little disorganized sometimes? Who hasn’t felt a little odd or disconnected in a social situation before?

By now, you’ve probably worked out that I’m not a psychic. This reading was in fact copied from Derren Brown’s book Tricks of the Mind (which I’d highly recommend, by the way), and is an example of the Forer Experiment.

Forer administered a personality test to his students. Rather than scoring the tests and giving individual assessments, he gave all the students the exact same analysis copied from a newspaper astrology column. The students were then asked to evaluate the description on a scale of zero through five, with five being the most accurate. The average evaluation was 4.26. The experiment has been repeated hundreds of times since 1948, and the average remains about 4.2. The Forer effect shows that people tend to accept generalised descriptions of their personalities without realising that the same evaluation could apply to nearly anyone else, because people want the results to be true.

And do you see how someone could make this reading even more precise in person, with a number of probing questions? By saying things like “I’m getting an indication that you can be a creative person”, and guaging the person’s reaction, you can make it much more accurate. If they agree with you, you can go more along this line and say something like “yes, you like to express yourself creatively, through music or writing or something similar” which has every chance of being correct. If they don’t think they’re particularly creative you might say “well, not obviously, but you have a creative side of you that manifests itself in other ways. For example, you often come up with a solution to a problem that others don’t see”, or you could even say “well, you have a creative side that you’re not fulling embracing, which you need to do”. The possibilities are almost endless.

And to use these skills, as Erin does, to dupe people into thinking that they can contact their deceased relatives (for only $797.00 an hour!) is dishonest, exploitative, and disgusting. To offer someone false comfort about a terrible event in their lives, and charge them up the ass for doing so, is horrible.

Admittedly, it may not be that Erin Pavlina does this intentionally. Let’s look at the alternatives for what might be happening here:

1. Erin uses cold-reading techniques to give the outward appearance of being a psychic medium, and all the content on her website and her blog is carefully constructed to uphold this appearance, as people will come to her already believing she is psychic, making her job much easier as a result, as they will mould what she says into something that fits their reality.
2. Erin believes what she says, and thinks she is psychic, as do others. She is quite intuitive and can, for example, tell if things are bothering someone, and can be a comfort to them. She’s not psychic at all, but sometimes she gets lucky with the things she says.
3. Erin can literally contact the dead, psychically read people, and everything she says is absolutely true.

Which do you think is more likely?

The best paragraph (and a half) I’ve read today

From Alex Mann’s interview with Philalawyer:

I’m referring to solving actual, human problems using available communication tools, regardless if it’s called “social media” or not. The tools will never replace humans, but they can help.

Look at the reaction to the Iranian election online. A lightweight Internet application, Twitter, has created a sense of healthy transparency in a geographic arena that has been traditionally stubborn by design in the past. The conversation has always existed, but now it’s being funneled and aggregated online. The tools haven’t created the conversation; they just created an outlet. That’s more democracy than Iran has ever felt.

The whole article is great. Read it here.

The summer job market

I’m struggling to find much work this summer. I’ve applied for perhaps thirty positions, heard back from about twenty, and been given work at two. Unfortunately they were just temp work, one or two days at a time – nothing permanent and no guaranteed paycheque.

It’s frustrating, that’s for sure (although at least I’m not the only one – thanks to Charlie for the link). But I’m trying to be productive with the down time, mainly through lots of reading and more exercise.

Also, this post from Seth Godin caught my eye. He recommends that, if you can’t find a graduate job, you should take a year off and try to teach yourself a wide array of skills to make yourself much more employable in a year’s time.

It’s not a bad idea, but I don’t think it could all be accomplished in the three months of summer that I have left.But that’s not to say I shouldn’t try and do at least something.

If you had 3 months, with (almost) no other time commitments and few living expenses, but no resources to travel, what would you do? How would you spend your days? What skills would you try to learn? What books would you read? Who would you try to talk to?

On the right track

This time last year, I had just finished my first year Law exams, and was back home for the summer, just about to change onto the BA Economics course instead of Law. It was a pretty big decision – it set me back a year and took me off what could have been a very stable, easy, well-paid career path.

Of course I wasn’t sure if I was making the right decision. Sure, I liked this subject when I’d studied it before, but this was advanced stuff. It would be more difficult. I didn’t know what I wanted to do afterwards. Unlike law, there was no set career path, no list of boxes I had to tick off before slotting into the ‘right’ job after I graduated. But I did it anyway.

Today, I knew I was right. I walked out of my first serious economics exam knowing that I had made the right choice. Because I enjoyed it. I actually ENJOYED taking the exam.

I still don’t have the answer to any of the questions I keep asking myself. There’s still no clear goal, no obvious, defined path for me to take that leads to that elusive place on the horizon called “success”. But if I’m enjoying the journey then I’m pretty sure things will turn out OK in the end.

(Also, I thought I’d plug this blog, because it gave me some fantastic revision advice. Go to Study Hacks, browse through the archives and then buy his book. Best £8 I ever spent, apart from my DVD boxset of the Godfather films, and that pizza I got the other day)

Erin Pavlina is a crazy person

I like to think that, generally speaking, I can be fairly objective and rational and think things through to their logical conclusion. I’d like to think that I choose any course of action or belief based on the evidence in front of me and a careful analysis of the facts.

Which is why this shit scares me. From Erin Pavlina’s blog post, What Happens When You Die (as if ANY person in the world has the authority to speak about this subject):

First we need to understand how we got here.  Your consciousness, your soul, your energy made a decision to incarnate into a human body so that you could have experiences that you can’t get in the ether.  You agreed and decided to take physical form to work on karmic issues, personal growth, or to help the planet evolve.  You chose your parents, planned some major life events, worked things out with some other souls who would also be around when you were, and got busy gettin’ born.  Then the veil was drawn over your memory so you could act out your life without knowing why you were there.

I’ve never heard anything so outlandish in my life. It’s suggesting that toast is made by a piece of bread choosing that it wants to be heated on both sides for a minute before being coated in delicious butter and a blob of marmalade. It’s fucking nuts.

Why do people convince themselves of these things? How does anyone come to such a ridiculous belief? What has happened in these people’s lives that they choose to believe this, with absolutely no evidence?

And why the hell is there a week-long waiting list to pay $500 for a phone reading with this person?

Some things really worry me. This is one of them.

The MPs expenses scandal, and transparency

For a few days I’ve been wanting to write about the MPs expenses scandal. I was planning to write a speech that I thought Gordon Brown should give about how the scandal has been terrible for british politics, severely undermining the trust that we have in our MPs, and how Parliament needed to move towards radical transparency to foster trust and better inform the electorate. But David Cameron is a step ahead of me. It’s not often I say this, but I agree with a lot of what he said in this interview.

And Cameron has actually put his money where his mouth is (he may or may not have claimed expenses for this money). If you go here and click on the link about halfway down it opens a Google Docs spreadsheet outlining expenses claimed by his shadow cabinet – when, by whom, why, and how much.

That’s fantastic.  I still don’t get how Owen Patterson was able to claim for £108.16 worth of newspapers, but now I know that he did, and if it bothers me I can do something about it.

It shouldn’t have taken a huge scandal like this for such a system to be implemented, but the more initiatives the government has like this, the better. The more transparent Parliament is, the better. And the more informed the electorate are about what’s actually happening inside Westminster, the better.

New college students: make the most of ‘diet’ real life

Charlie Hoehn has just written a fantastic post with some great advice for those about to graduate from college:

You don’t have to walk down the path that everyone else takes. If you haven’t realized it by now, there is no such thing as job security. You’re fooling yourself if you think a steady paycheck will ensure a safe future. The only real form of security is working on yourself. Read as much as you can. Put experiences under your belt that can open doors in the future. Meet smarter people than you and do some free work for them. These are the kinds of things that can help mitigate your risk against a bad job market. And in the long run, you’ll be in a far better position than everyone else.

That seems great advice as far as I can tell, but I’m not entirely qualified to say, as I’m still at university (and will be for a couple more years yet). And I didn’t want to just quote and link his post, as there’s not much value in that.

Instead I wanted to write about something that I am qualified to write about. While Charlie’s advice is great for those just leaving college, what about the incoming freshmen and first years? That’s what I want to write about today.

College is a fantastic place. I’ve been here almost two years now, and I’ve loved every second. But it’s not all as Asher Roth would have you believe. Sometimes you will have to work your ass off, grinding away for maybe even a couple of months at a time, especially if you leave all your work until the all-too brief period just before exams, like I’ve done in the past.

Nothing in life comes without a tradeoff. But the tradeoff in college is that if you can get the work out of the way, you have an unbelievable amount of free time, and an outrageous lack of responsibility. You’re young, your parents love you and your student loan is yours to do with whatever you please.

I can’t remember where, but someone I once heard someone describe college as ‘diet’ real life – you have all the freedom to essentially do whatever you want to, but you rarely have to personally deal with all of the consequences if you screw up.

So make the most of it. Try everything and anything you can. If there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, just give it a shot. That library has a lot of books that you don’t have to read for your course -read one of them anyway, and see if you like it. Go to all your classes, sure, but go to someone else’s as well – you might learn something interesting.

Google give all of their employees 20% of the week to work on their own projects, and it doesn’t have to be directly related to their core business. That has produced phenomenal results like Gmail and Adsense. Not all of the projects come to anything, but a couple are huge.

As a student, the amount of time you have to work on your side projects is probably closer to 40% or even 50%. Imagine what you could do with it.

I’m not just talking about businesses, or societies or sports teams. Use some of that time to get some experiences – everyone loves to have a few cool stories to tell at the bar. What I’m saying is, in the downtime between handing in your last essay and starting on the next one, don’t sit down and see if you can top your best score on Halo 3. Go and experience as many different things as possible, and just see where it takes you.

Your free time in college is an incredible gift. Don’t waste it.

You’re a pub, so serve some ****ing pub food

One TV show I love is Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Gordon Ramsay is obviously a great chef, but more than that, he’s a great businessman. He seems keenly aware of what is required for a business to survive, and this show follows him around as he tries to turn around failing restaurants.

I was watching it last night, and Gordon went to a pub called The Fenwick Arms, in Lancashire, North England. Let me tell you a couple of things about rural Lancashire. It’s not a fast-moving place. It’s not on the cutting edge of anything, and it’s not where all the trend-setters go to seek out the next big thing. It’s certainly not a place where people want to be made to feel like they’re dining in a restaurant in Soho.

Sadly, this fact had escaped the owner of The Fenwick Arms, as he tried to impress everyone with his fancy sauces, his overly elaborate menu, and the outrageous place settings that made the place look like the Queen was visiting.

Gordon Ramsay took one look at the place and said, “You need to get back to basics. This is too much. You’re trying to do far too much all at once, and you’re missing what the locals want. They want good, simple British pub food, not this fancy crap.  Focus on doing the basic stuff, and doing it well.”

Amen. Any enterprise needs to focus on its core business, its raison d’etre, and focus on doing it really well. Don’t try to be all things to all people. I met one entrepreneur at university a couple of weeks ago, and he said he was thinking of making a new online application for setting agendas for meetings and conference calls. Someone pointed out to him that you could basically do that with Google Docs or PB Wiki. And he replied, “Yeah, you could, but they’re not designed for that specifically. I want to take just this one little thing and do it really, really well, better than anyone else will.”

That’s probably a good way to get people to pay attention.

What I’m reading

I’ve binged on books over the last couple of weeks – here’s some of what I’ve been reading:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. Like I said a week or two ago, I’m a little behind the times with this book, but it was full of fantastic graphs, explanations and theories as to how the internet has changed so many business models for the better, and the important of niches.

The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. Again, I’m hugely behind the times, but I finally got around to reading this, and I thought it was great. I can’t instantly put into practice much of what Tim talks about (in order to escape 9-5 I would first have to find myself a 9-5 job from which to escape) but I really admire what he’s done, and I think it’s inspiring. Your life doesn’t have to be work all week, party on friday and saturday night, rinse and repeat for 40 years: you control it, you can shape it and you can do what you want. There’s some fantastic productivity advice in here as well.

The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth with Innovation by Lafley and Charan. This book is a fascinating look at how Proctor and Gamble focus on customer-centric innovation and how every decision is driven by trying to improve the day-to-day life of the customer. I knew P&G were a big company, but I was blown away by the sheer number of brands they own. 21 brands with sales of over $1bn per annum. A lot of P&G’s success comes from hugely extensive market research, immersing themselves in the customer’s world and seeing things as they do, defining what the issue is and then coming up with a way to ‘delight’ the customer.

Being familiar with the ideas

Anyone who’s seen my list of google reader subscriptions or my delicious account can tell that I spend a large portion of my time online. And while my parents may think that that’s a huge waste, I do spend at least some of my time trying to learn new things, new ideas and new concepts. A lot of what I know and what I consider my marketable knowledge, I learned online (either directly from wikipedia or blogs, or indirectly from being told what books to read etc).

One of these books that I’m currently reading is The Long Tail (I know, I’m late to the party), which I was reading on Ryan’s recommendation:

There is not much that needs to be said about this book other than it defines current net economics. There’s the head of the tail which is the stuff you find in Borders, and the tail, which is the infinite inventory on Amazon. You need to be familiar with this theory.

That’s a fair point, but it made me think – what ideas or theories should people be familiar with?

I could think of another two:

• Permission marketing – go here for a primer.
• Black swan theory – here’s the wikipedia article.

What others are there? What ideas should young, smart and ambitious people know to help them succeed?