Sometimes we feel alien in our own society. That’s what drew me into watching foreign films. Filipino culture sometimes tends to be less retrospective too permissive and yet too suffocating that seeing a different perspective, a new perspective can breath fresh air to a thousand conversations done thousands of times with different people on the same inane things.
How Successful People Stay Calm – Forbes
They Limit Their Caffeine Intake
Drinking caffeine triggers the release of adrenaline. Adrenaline is the source of the “fight-or-flight” response, a survival mechanism that forces you to stand up and fight or run for the hills when faced with a threat. The fight-or-flight mechanism sidesteps rational thinking in favor of a faster response. This is great when a bear is chasing you, but not so great when you’re responding to a curt email. When caffeine puts your brain and body into this hyperaroused state of stress, your emotions overrun your behavior. The stress that caffeine creates is far from intermittent, as its long half-life ensures that it takes its sweet time working its way out of your body.
They Sleep
I’ve beaten this one to death over the years and can’t say enough about the importance of sleep to increasing your emotional intelligence and managing your stress levels. When you sleep, your brain literally recharges, shuffling through the day’s memories and storing or discarding them (which causes dreams), so that you wake up alert and clear-headed. Your self-control, attention, and memory are all reduced when you don’t get enough—or the right kind—of sleep. Sleep deprivation raises stress hormone levels on its own, even without a stressor present. Stressful projects often make you feel as if you have no time to sleep, but taking the time to get a decent night’s sleep is often the one thing keeping you from getting things under control.
via How Successful People Stay Calm – Forbes.
Amazon's 100 Books Everyone Must Read – Business Insider
Check out the final list of books in alphabetical order below.
“1984” by George Orwell
“A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking
“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave Eggers
“A Long Way Gone” by Ishmael Beah
“A Series of Unfortunate Events #1: The Bad Beginning: The Short-Lived Edition” by Lemony Snicket
“A Wrinkle in Time” by Madeleine L’Engle
“Alice Munro: Selected Stories” by Alice Munro
“Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll
“All the President’s Men” by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
“Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir” by Frank McCourt
“Are You There, God? It’s me, Margaret” by Judy Blume
“Bel Canto” by Ann Patchett
“Beloved” by Toni Morrison
“Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen” by Christopher McDougall
“Breath, Eyes, Memory” by Edwidge Danticat
“Catch-22” by Joseph Heller
“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” by Roald Dahl
“Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White
“Cutting For Stone” by Abraham Verghese
“Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead” by Brene Brown
“Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Book 1” by Jeff Kinney
“Dune” by Frank Herbert
“Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream” by Hunter S. Thompson
“Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn
“Goodnight Moon” by Margaret Wise Brown
“Great Expectations” by Charles Dickens
“Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” by Jared M. Diamond
“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” by J.K. Rowling
“In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
“Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
“Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth” by Chris Ware
“Kitchen Confidential” by Anthony Bourdain
“Life After Life” by Kate Atkinson
“Little House on the Prairie” by Laura Ingalls Wilder
“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
“Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
“Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl
“Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris
“Middlesex” by Jeffrey Eugenides
“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
“Moneyball” by Michael Lewis
“Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham
“On the Road” by Jack Kerouac
“Out of Africa” by Isak Dinesen
“Persepolis” by Marjane Satrapi
“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen
“Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson
“Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut
“Team of Rivals” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
“The Age of Innocence” by Edith Wharton
“The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” by Michael Chabon
“The Autobiography of Malcolm X” by Malcolm X and Alex Haley
“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” by Junot Diaz
“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
“The Color of Water” by James McBride
“The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen
“The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America” by Erik Larson
“The Diary of Anne Frank” by Anne Frank
“The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green
“The Giver” by Lois Lowry
“The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials” by Philip Pullman
“The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald
“The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood
“The House At Pooh Corner” by A. A. Milne
“The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins
“The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot
“The Liars’ Club: A Memoir” by Mary Karr
“The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1)” by Rick Riordan
“The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“The Long Goodbye” by Raymond Chandler
“The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” by Lawrence Wright
“The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales” by Oliver Sacks
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” by Michael Pollan
“The Phantom Tollbooth” by Norton Juster
“The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel” by Barbara Kingsolver
“The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” by Robert A. Caro
“The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe
“The Road” by Cormac McCarthy
“The Secret History” by Donna Tartt
“The Shining” by Stephen King
“The Stranger” by Albert Camus
“The Sun Also Rises” by Ernest Hemingway
“The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien
“The Very Hungry Caterpillar” by Eric Carle
“The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame
“The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel” by Haruki Murakami
“The World According to Garp” by John Irving
“The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion
“Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe
“To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
“Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption” by Laura Hillenbrand
“Valley of the Dolls” by Jacqueline Susann
“Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein
“Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak
Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.
via Amazon’s 100 Books Everyone Must Read – Business Insider.
Rant 2013 12 26 1519H
Konti na lang mag re resign na ako.
Takte.
Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay | WIL WHEATON dot NET
When I was younger, I would have completely ignored the first one, and obsessively focused on the second one to the point of feeling shitty about myself. Part of having Imposter Syndrome is believing that people who praise you are dupes, while the people who criticize you can actually see through everything. But the thing is, the guy who isn’t thrilled has every right to feel that way, and I don’t take it personally. Not everyone digs what I do and what I bring to a project, and that’s totally cool. At the same time, it’s also pretty awesome that a lot of people do dig what I bring to a project, and that is also cool.
Consider this, about having perspective on criticism: If you enjoyed making a thing, and you’re proud of the thing you made, that’s enough. Not everyone is going to like it, and that’s okay. And sometimes, a person who likes your work and a person who don’t will show up within milliseconds of each other to let you know how they feel. One does not need to cancel out the other, positively or negatively; if you’re proud of the work, and you enjoyed the work, that is what’s important.Don’t let the fear of not pleasing someone stop you from being creative.
The goal isn’t to make something everyone will love; the goal is to get excited, and make a thing where something wasn’t before
via Not everyone is going to like the thing you made, and that’s okay | WIL WHEATON dot NET.
RIP Nelson Mandela
Saddened but not surprised. RIP.
The Next Philippine President
I think I am a busy person but interacting with people such as my bosses leaves me to believe that I am not nearly as busy as I can be.
To combat all the down time that interacting in this world entails; Things like waiting for the 15-45 minutes that will take to cook your food or other stuff like waiting for a meeting or lunch date; I’ve devised thought experiment like games that try to think about either medium/hard solution, medium/long horizon , and or medium/hard cooperative problems.
One of these mental games I’ve played the past year is to envision the next Philippine President. To be more accurate who are the candidates that can better lead our country than our present presidential wannabees like Binay, Mar, Bong Bong and the like.
To answer this question entails answering some bounding questions. Some of which I will state next.
- Winnability.
- Personal/Organizational Network.
- Integrity.
This is a short list and I actually have a much longer list in mind.
I am writing this down for posterity’s sake.
To state that I’ve been thinking about this for more than a year.
And it has been a very fun thought experiment.
The problem with all the Haiyan outrage.
The problem with all the outrage is that the outraged people have never had to move hundreds of tons of goods hundreds of miles without the benefit of the pan philippine highway. This makes the outrage of slowness more of a gut reaction rather than an examination of the physical constraints that the men and women of the government/military have to deal with. As highlighted by Winnie Monsod. Did you really think you could have done better? If you did well you probably have a healthy self worth. What our nation needs to heal is a truth commission like post mortem for us to understand what we could have done better and what we did wrong. As an aside, Notice the lack of outrage from veterans of calamities far smaller than Haiyan. Mr Peque Gallaga/Mr Anderson do not forget the physical constraints. Mr President do not forget that sometimes people just need to know somebody is in charge.
Making a Difference In Our Own Ways
A few years ago I would have been first in line in these drives to pack relief goods for disaster victims.
I have to take the practical route. Each overtime hour I log in work is around 400 pesos of donatable cash.
I’ve already donated 4000(practically 10 hours of my life earmarked for and iPod Touch) in various charities mostly the world food program since I’ve been donating to them consistently since I started working in 2008.
I just have to take the practical view. To earn by doing overtime and donating is where my efforts are best spent.
A note to self when I get the urge to go do something physical to help our countrymen.
Nirvana's 'In Utero' and Counting Crows' 'August and Everything After' 20 years later – Grantland
The second camp is a lot less glamorous — it’s just realistically sad. “Anna Begins” by Counting Crows is an example of a realistically sad song. It describes a scenario that occurs in nearly everyone’s life at least once (if you’re lucky) between the ages of 16 and 23: A person falls in love with a friend, the friend is interested in possibly reciprocating, they consummate their feelings, it doesn’t work, and the relationship is ruined. The song is so direct and plainspoken that it hardly seems like art;11 it just sounds like dialogue that’s been transcribed from a million arguments between emotionally exhausted parties:
It does not bother me to say this isn’t love
Because if you don’t want to talk about it then it isn’t love
And I guess I’m going to have to live with that
But I’m sure there’s something in a shade of gray
Or something in between
And I can always change my name if that’s what you mean
via Nirvana’s ‘In Utero’ and Counting Crows’ ‘August and Everything After’ 20 years later – Grantland.