Category: personal AnGoL

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Fighting Poverty

from here:
Hope is oxygen to someone who is suffocating on despair.

I think that most people in developing nations such as my country this applies. I talk to a lot of people and what hits me is that extreme or even mild but prolonged poverty causes a great change in all but the best people.  Before we can even try to help someone we must first try to convince that person that he can be helped, that he can be “saved”.
There are a lot of foundations who like to help in our country but a key ingredient a lot of these foundations seem to be missing is that people who suffer from poverty are broken in a way. They are not normal or ordinary and a more mindful and involved program is needed. I’ve seen a few organizations that seem to know this. Hope they all do.

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rePost: Addiction and Living

I don’t know, he was saying this about how he survived a drug addiction, but I think that this is great advice for life in general.
The article was a great read, please read it if you haven’t yet. Its about a drug addict who was able to overcome his addiction.
read the article here:

I lustily chanted some of those slogans and lived by others. There is nothing romantic about being a crackhead and a drunk — low-bottom addiction is its own burlesque that needs no snarky annotation. Unless a person is willing to be terminally, frantically earnest, all hope is lost.

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rePost: Practice And Genius

TakeAways:
We are given brains and the larger the brain or the better formed the brain was the less energy it consumed in solving a problem and the better it was in processing information.
from here a scientific american article on intelligence and the brain:

Perfection from Practice
Whatever the neurological roots of genius, being brilliant only increases the probability of success; it does not ensure accomplishment in any endeavor. Even for academic achievement, IQ is not as important as self-discipline and a willingness to work hard.

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rePost: Gratitude

The takeaway is that if you are not going to be mindful of what you are doing 24/7 why don’t you make helping people a default reaction. Remember maybe helping one people directly may mean really helping 2-3 people.
from here:

Consider the following experiment conducted by Monica Bartlett and myself. We brought people into the lab and set up 2 situations: One in which they confronted a problem which would require them to complete an onerous task and one where they didn’t face any problem. In the first case, a confederate, at some cost to herself in terms of time and effort, helped the participant solve the problem, which led to measurable feelings of gratitude. In the second, the confederate was just another person in the session.
After leaving the lab, all participants just happened to encounter someone asking for help on a different onerous task. This person was either the known confederate (labeled benefactor in the figure) or someone who was a complete stranger.
Looking at the first two bars, you can see that grateful participants helped the known confederate much more than neutral participants.
Ok, I know what you’re thinking. This doesn’t prove anything! They may just be following a reciprocity norm. Fair enough. But look at the second set of bars. If it were really reciprocity, then no increased helping should occur when a stranger requests help, as participants don’t owe this stranger anything. Yet, those who were feeling grateful still helped more. Simply put, gratitude functioned to push people to acquiesce to requests for help — even onerous ones from unknown others.

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Importantly, another study showed that if we reminded the participants before they left that they were helped by the confederate, they didn’t help the stranger any more than control participants. By binding the emotional state so saliently to one person, it couldn’t be misattributed as a cue to help another, thereby indicating that the increased helping isn’t just adherence to a “pay-it-forward” norm. Yet participants still were paying-it-forward.

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Excited To Be Going To WordCamp Philippines 2008

Well I’ve heard of this awhile back but this has me really excited! Hope to meet interesting people there and to pick up some new knowledge!
I’d like to go to the wordcamp because I love meeting interesting people, interacting with them and generally growing with like minded people is fun for me.
Official Site: WordCamp Philippines 2008 here:
Organizers:Mindanao Bloggers here:
Sponsors of WordCamp Philippines 2008:

UPDATE (2008 08 13 1901H): Updated the list of WordCamp Philippines 2008 sponsors!

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Live Life!

Thanks to pk here:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea–“cruising”, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.
Little has been said or written about the ways a man may blast himself free. Why? I don’t know, unless the answer lies in our diseased values. A man seldom hesitates to describe his work; he gladly divulges the privacies of alleged sexual conquests. But ask him how much he has in the bank and he recoils into a shocked and stubborn silence.
“I’ve always wanted to sail to the South Seas, but I can’t afford it.” What these men can’t afford is not to go. They are enmeshed in the cancerous discipline of “security”. And in the worship of security we fling our lives beneath the wheels of routine—and before we know it our lives are gone.
What does a man need—really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in—and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That’s all—in the material sense. And we know it. But we are brainwashed by our economic system until we end up beneath a pyramid of time payments, mortgages, preposterous gadgetry, playthings that divert our attention from the sheer idiocy of the charade.
The years thunder by. The dreams of youth grow dim where they lie caked in dust on the shelves of patience. Before we know it, the tomb is sealed.
Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

It pains me when I see friends whose youthful dreams fade into the oblivion of getting caught up in reality!

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Oppressed Mentality

thanks to brad delong from his excerpt here:

Though via a paradox: the greater their power, the more they felt oppressed. When the people who felt like losers united around their shared psychological sense of grievance, their enemies felt somehow more overwhelming, not less; even if the Franklins weren’t always really so powerful at all, Franklin “power” often being merely a self-perpetuating effect of an Orthogonian sense of victimization. Martyrs who were not really martyrs, oppressors who were not really oppressors: a class politics for the white middle class. The keynote of the new, Nixonian politics…though we are getting ahead of ourselves. For first we must send Richard Nixon to law school, where he was a monk….

I see this with a lot of my countrymen and women. its like so many people feel that they are so special as to believe that everyone is trying to oppress them. Damn. We are all special that’s why Nobody is special.
What I’d be honest enough to admit is what I continuously see. People are so caught up (except those people whom I know to have so much as to be ble to give so much of themselves, I wouldn’t name names so the few people who read this end up thinking I am referring to them) in the little drama of their own lives that most of the time your boss doesn’t hate you. The jeepney driver who gave you the wrong change didn’t actually try to cheat you. The lady who slightly nudged you while getting off the MRT(like the BART) didn’t really intend to shove you. Get Over Your Cult Of ME!

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Why "Wise" Self Made Introspective People Give

from here an article on discussing Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan”:
There are various things you can do. The first is to realize that if you succeed, it’s probably not exclusively due to your brilliant mind. More than anything else it is luck. You still need a brilliant mind of course to help guide you at every step, just don’t pretend that it alone will get you where you want to be.
most self made people realize that there was someone just as smart and just as driven as them that wasn’t as successful as they are. They see people far more intelligent and far more “better” in less enticing situations.  They realize that given how much they know about how precarious their success actually was, a little missed connection here and a little bad timing there and the whole thing collapse like a corrupt politician’s bridge. Because of this Randomness the “Wise” Self Made Introspective person cannot but be the philanthropists who helps less fortunate people at least achieve a decent kind of life.
I hope, I pray, I will become, Someday, Someday!

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Reminder To Start Helping

from here:
The economic growth in a country like South Korea, which has made much more educational progress than the United States, clearly demonstrates this. “If you look across countries,” says Lawrence Katz, a labor economist at Harvard, “education is the strongest predictor for how quickly the pie grows.”

Hope I can find the time to contribute in the community with increasing literacy and helping people find a track towards getting educated in my country. I don’t know. I promised myself I’d get more involve a around January next year. Posting this as a reminder.

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Norwegian Wood

just finished Murakami’s Norwegian Wood.
I’ve always been something of an outsider, never really fitting in.
And maybe if I wasn’t lucky enough to live in this wildly connected world, where you can find someone not quite but enough like yourself that the world is a little more liveable, I don’t know what my life might have become.
Maybe I’d just live in an island or up in the mountains I don’t know!