Mojo – noun mo·jo \ˈmō-(ˌ)jō\ :
a power that may seem magical and that allows someone to be very effective, successful, etc, or a quality that attracts people to you and makes you successful and full of energy.
What is Mojo?
The traditional definition of mojo involved the creation of a physical bag that you would keep full with distilled spirits and prayers in order to gain some benefit in your life. You would wear this bag, hidden on your person, and keep it filled and fresh with charms and trinkets. The kind of mojo you wanted to create would determine what sorts of materials you filled your mojo with. The more personal the materials used to fill your mojo, the more powerful the magic. Each mojo bag was different for each person and for each expectation. These mojo bags offered the wearer powers and strengths and would aid them in their lives.
I like the imagery of that mojo bag being carried around with someone, full of trinkets and charms that would lift the wearer to some higher performance in a certain aspect of your life. That’s the imagery I channeled when I decided to create Modern Mojo. I wanted to take that idea of collecting a set of mental “trinkets and charms” that one could carry with them in order to improve their life, and that is my intent with this website. To give you the modern mental magic that will help you be the best version of yourself and to help you build your mojo to a level where you are unstoppable in every area of your life.
The fact is, everyone wants a little mojo. Everyone wants that magic that just helps them navigate their lives and sets them up to be successful. Everyone wants that quality that draws people in and lights them up. Everyone wants to feel the comforting weight of a magic charm around their shoulders that they know will take them through any troubles that arise. You can’t physically measure mojo, but you can sure as hell feel it when someone has it. A certain swagger and confidence that everything is going to work in your favor, that obstacles in life are going to tumble down one by one and leave you with a clear path to your goal. Mojo makes that feeling possible and mojo is something you can create and feed. You just need the right magic, the right belief and the right effort.
What is Modern Mojo?
Modern Mojo is a resurrection of the mental magic of applied philosophical, spiritual and scientific living. It is about folding in the modern ideas of psychology, physiology and science in with the ancient goals of philosophy and spirituality and creating the right personal recipe for change and growth. It is about bringing the concepts of philosophy, psychology, physiology, spirituality and science out of the books and into our lives so that we can use the ideas to become the best version of ourselves that we can be.
What does philosophy have to do with personal development?
Philosophy started out as two parts personal development and one part intellectual curiosity. It did more than discuss, it applied. It went out into the wild and experimented, challenged, rebelled, debated and evolved. The best of the philosophers lived their ideals. They didn’t just talk about them. It was as scientific as it could be at the time and science and philosophy were always aligned to try to approach a complete truth about the world.
Just like Socrates, I believe we can know ourselves, change ourselves and make ourselves happier through rational and reasoned thought. I believe that the more you consider and experience and dissect and analyze the world, and everything in it, the easier it is to see a path open up for you that will help you to make lasting change in whatever direction you want to go. That means science, spirituality and philosophy. Nothing is outside the scope of reasoned speculation and understanding and everything can have an impact on how we live our lives and who we become. We have to be open, inquisitive, skeptical but always seeking.
Philosophers ask the big questions and struggle with the big answers, because they want to understand the world, their place in it and what it means to live an informed and meaningful life. They want answers and use whatever technology or science is at their disposal to inquire deeply and by inquiring get closer to the answers we all want to know.
I think we can bring that type of philosophical inquiry back. I think we can resurrect the ghost of that ancient philosopher’s mojo and we can all conjure some modern mental magic that can change the trajectory, force and impact of our lives. Not only that we can do this, but we must. It is critical to the meaningful, conscious growth of the world that we keep updating and experimenting and questioning, not only the science of everything, but the philosophy of it as well. We must keep science and philosophy married and move them both forward together to improve our understanding, not only of the world, but of our little place in it.
But it is not enough that we bring philosophy back, we have to bring that shit back with style. We have to update it for a modern world and with modern science. We have to investigate it deeper, armed with the knowledge of those that came before us and those coming after. We have to scrutinize it in a way that we can apply it to our lives.
We are at a wonderful time in history where we have a wealth of scientific information that can help us to dissect and reevaluate the ideas of philosophy and spirituality, both our own philosophies and the philosophies we see around us. And when we bring philosophy back, alongside the newer science of change, we bring back the magic of our lives- the mojo. The intellectual swagger. The confidence of wisdom. The curiosity of life. The fascination with living. The impetus of change and the strength of character that comes with well reasoned beliefs. We bring back the Modern Mojo of life.
So you have a choice to make. You can remain a cobbled together, uninvestigated amalgamation of all your beliefs; blindly stumbling through your life without any insight the deeper reasonings of living or you can dig deeper into the whys and hows and whats of everything going on out there and inside your own mind, and by doing so, develop a mental fortitude, discipline, wisdom and magic that will help you realize the personal way that you should approach your life to get the most out of it.
