rePost::Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian

Excesses of appetite are the ways we conceal from ourselves what we hunger for. Kafka’s Hunger Artist – the man in the story of that name, who does performance-fasting for a living – is asked why he devoted his life to starving himself in public; he couldn’t help doing it, he says, “because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else”.
via Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on our fascination with excess | Books | The Guardian.

loved this article! I’m reposting my favorite line. Hope you can read the whole thing, don’t agree with a lot, but it made me introspect!

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rePost::3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock

3M call it the 15 percent rule, Google call it 20% time and now Unity has adopted what they call FAFF (Fridays Are For Fun).
“I think there are a lot of low hanging fruits in Unity where somebody with drive can just do something cool that pushes us forward. Things that are hard to put in words, but just make sense when you see it done.
So every Friday, developers can work on something cool, something they have been craving to do for a long time.”
Joachim Ante, Unity CTO, via Unity Blog.
This idea of giving employees company time to pursue their ideas is powerful. It acknowledges that everyone in the company has great ideas worthy of investment.
via 3M, and Google, and Unity! Oh my! | themadpeacock.

Heart this, hope more company follow thier lead!!!
fridays are for fun!

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Advice:: Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?

The Guitar Player Paradox
I’m intrigued by this observation that we prefer stress over hard focus. My current hypothesis proposes two explanations:
First, the club owner strategy is more predictable — you can’t go wrong working harder, even if its rewards are distilled.
Second, and perhaps more important, hard focus, at first, can be incredibly uncomfortable — so much so that we’d rather accept 12 hour days of regular work than spend 2 hours on intense concentration. The good news is that, as Haruki Murakami taught us, hard focus is a practiced skill. If you improve this ability enough, the guitar player path might eventually seem less onerous.
I plan on exploring this paradox in more detail in the near future, as I wonder if it might hold the key to jump-starting a remarkable life. In the mean time, you should ask yourself a simple question:
Who are you trying to become, the guitar player or the club owner?
via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » Are You a Guitar Player or Club Owner?.

I choose to see this differently.  To focus, invest yourself in a single thing seriously does not allow you the luxury of failing gracefully. We know that if we fail our psyche have no where to hide. When we fail with something we focused on singly we face our weakness, our inability to do something. This is scary. This is why some people never show others what they: write,compose,paint,draw, or create in general. We hate to see ourselves in positions of weakness, we hate rejection, we hate failure. We must learn to not be stopped by the voices in our heads that tell us we aren’t good enough. We can not be great if we continue to be paralyzed by our fears!

In Memoriam::20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember : Sciencewomen

20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember
Category: Alice shares…
Posted on: December 6, 2009 5:22 PM, by Alice
On December 6, 1989, an armed gunman named Marc Lepine entered an engineering classroom at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec. He demanded all 48 men in the class leave the room, lined up all 9 women against a wall, and, shouting “You are all a bunch of [expletive] feminists!”, proceeded to shoot them. He went into the hall and shot 18 more people, mostly at random. He finally shot himself.
He had killed 14 women all together, and injured 9 more women and 4 men.
The women who died could have been anyone. They could have been your friends, your mothers, your sisters, your lovers, your daughters, your neighbors, your students, your teachers, maybe even you.
They were killed because they were women.
Remember those who died in the Montreal Massacre:
Genevieve Bergeron, 21, was a 2nd year scholarship student in civil engineering.
Helene Colgan, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and planned to take her master's degree.
Nathalie Croteau, 23, was in her final year of mechanical engineering.
Barbara Daigneault, 22, was in her final year of mechanical engineering and held a teaching assistantship.
Anne-Marie Edward, 21, was a first year student in chemical engineering.
Maud Haviernick, 29, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials, and a graduate in environmental design.
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31, was a 2nd year engineering student specializing in engineering materials.
Maryse Laganiere, 25, worked in the budget department of the Polytechnique.
Maryse Leclair, 23, was a 4th year student in engineering materials.
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27, was a 4th year student in mechanical engineering.
Sonia Pelletier, 28, was to graduate the next day in mechanical engineering. She was awarded a degree posthumously.
Michele Richard, 21, was a 2nd year student in engineering materials.
Annie St-Arneault, 23, was a mechanical engineering student.
Annie Turcotte, 21, was a first year student in engineering materials.
Please honour the white ribbon as a symbol of the fight against violence against women.
via 20th anniversary of Montreal Massacre: We remember : Sciencewomen.

rePost::God and real life « Paulo Coelho’s Blog

Christian tradition
A protestant priest, having started a family, no longer had any peace for his prayers. One night, when he knelt down, he was disturbed by the children in the living room.“Have the children keep quiet!” he shouted.His startled wife obeyed. Thereafter, whenever the priest came home, they all maintained silence during prayers. But he realized that God was no longer listening.One night, during his prayers, he asked the Lord: “what is going on? I have the necessary peace, and I cannot pray!”An angel replied: “He hears words, but no longer hears the laughter. He notices the devotion, but can no longer see the joy.”The priest stood and shouted once again to his wife: “Let the children play! They are part of praying!”And his words were heard by God once again.
via God and real life « Paulo Coelho’s Blog.

It is easy to understand the apprehension towards religion of a lot of people, It is in a sense because religion boxes what is intuitively boundless. FIND the JOY, FIND the LAUGHTER!

Advice:: Alex Payne — Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity

Everyone Wants A Cheerleader
Everyone says they’re comfortable with criticism and with critics, because not being able to handle criticism is a sign of immaturity. What people really want, though, are cheerleaders. Nowhere in life is this more true than in business.
A healthy business needs passionate employees to succeed. Critics are the most passionate people you can find, but we’re conditioned to assume that critics are negative curmudgeons with nothing more than slings and arrows to contribute. So rather than seeking out critics, employers seek out cheerleaders.
Cheerleaders are, on the face of it, lovely people to have around an office. They’re just super excited to be there, even if they haven’t had the time or inclination to really think about why. They abhor any suggestion of negativity, and pave over it with empty can-dos. A cheerleader might be a good worker or he might not be. It doesn’t really matter, because the guy is just so damn nice.
via Alex Payne — Criticism, Cheerleading, and Negativity.

I use to be a vortex of negativity. I believe everyone goes through a I’m mad towards the world for no fucking reason phase.
After I got through some of my hang-ups I believe I started to criticize most things/people/stuff. People don’t really like this.
Now; I believe I am in a If I care for this/for you I will not shut up. As most things balance is needed. I accept you/this for what you/this is , But I still yearn for you to meet your potential, yet if you don’t it’s not an issue.  It is this constant battle between loving/accepting who we/they are , and wanting to change/improve who we/they are.
If we love ourselves too much we don’t change, If we hate ourselves too much we become powerless to change.
It’s this dualism that keeps us going forward one step at a time.
What does this mean to you? Some friends will push your patience. Some friends will make you hate them. Some fill question what you believe in. Some will tell you flat out you are wrong. Don’t go for the primal reaction of wanting only cheerleaders. If your friends can’t be honest with you, who can?

Funny:: Nice Pacquiao Mention

Smiled reading this!

Q: If the boxing higher-ups had any sense whatsoever they would give us Pacman/Mayweather in six months. I would stop everything to have a fight night party for this event. I have not paid for a boxing event since Holyfield/Lewis in 1999 but I would spend at least $300-$500 to see this. What is the holdup?
— Seth Johnson, Middletown, N.Y.
SG: It’s going to be disappointing. Just warning you now. Floyd Mayweather Jr. could never in a million years trade punches with Manny Pacquiao. He will be on his bicycle for 12 rounds. There is no way that, at this point in his life, Mayweather wants any part of Pacquiao, a concrete-headed, indefatigable freak of nature who can finish with either hand from every angle. If Mayweather gets in the ring, he’ll end up doing more laps than Steve Prefontaine did for the University of Oregon. Just keep your guard up when you’re spending that $64.95.
(Important note: Will I be spending that money? Of course! Happily! I made the decision during Pacman’s glorious evisceration of Miguel Cotto that he finally had reached the exalted “I Don’t Care Who You Are Fighting, I Am Watching It Live & That’s That” status, which puts him in the following company: Ali, Sugar Ray Leonard, Tyson. My own personal Mount Rushmore. Pacquiao hit Tiger/Federer status about a year ago, and nobody cared. That’s why he needs the Mayweather fight so badly. We’ve seen dominant pound-for-pound guys these past two decades, but nobody with finishing power anything like what Pacman has. He’s like a coked-up Aaron Pryor, only without the coke. Insane. If he’s fighting, I am watching.)
via Bill Simmons’ Thanksgiving mailbag – ESPN.

Sentences To Ponder: Some new happiness research

There is, I suspect, a common theme here – that people don’t predict what will make them happy at all well. Having children and investing in careers rather than in social networks doesn’t make us happy, and yet we do it in our 20s and 30s, only to be miserable later.
via Stumbling and Mumbling: Some new happiness research.

That was one loaded sentence. Thinking about my life, I am solidly in Team Social Network and Not the  TEAM Children/Career that a lot of my generation are slowly (fast?)  going into. I don’t know, maybe in our 40’s we would know.
PS 01: I’m not anti kids. Simply put I see myself as a big kidI sometimes can’t be trusted with myself, why the hell would I trust myself with the responsibility for another human being.
PS 02: I’m not strictly anti-career, It’s just that I believe that our society/backgrounds do not allow us the leeway to really find our passions. If we dive head on to our “careers” when will we ever find our passions. 2 things.
One, I’m lucky to have my mom and dad as my parents.  This for me means that I have a personal responsibility to be the best that I can be, whatever that means.
Two, I saw a friend from high school/college in the elevator yesterday, we decided to catch up a little. During our conversation he told me something. He has found his passion, He said in a way Pisay and UP wasn’t such a good fit for him, what he wanted to do was for from what he learned from these great learning institutions. This is the third time (That I remember vividly but probably more than 10 or even more) that I have heard this from a friend from Philippine Science/University of the Philippines. In a way it made me happy. Not that my friends wasted a lot of their time, rather they do not see the other side of the coin, I prefer to think of their predicaments more in the light of; I am lucky to have found my passion, it is probably because of the different things that I went through in life, of which going to PSHS/UP was a part of.
Read the original post to get to the research to justify the claims.

Introspection::It Stops Here

The students were interviewed after the study and most appeared “genuinely flabbergasted” to learn that an experimenter swap had occurred, yet they still responded differently to the prostitution scenario compared to the control group. Proulx and Heine say these results are similar to other studies where people have been made to feel threatened before making a judgement: when threatened, people are harsher judges of others. The researchers suggest that the students implicitly noticed the change of experimenter, but since this type of a swap is unusual in real life, they never became conscious of it. Because of this implicit detection of an unusual event, the students behaved as if they had been threatened.
via What if you saw something that rocked your world … and you didn’t notice? : Cognitive Daily.

Read the whole thing it’s very intructive. I’d like to just say that we should try to understand other people’s predicaments. Some are just simply lonely/sad/insecure and that’s why they are acting like class A @$$h0135. There was this movie “Pay It Forward”, where in upon receiving a major blessing from another person, you Pay It Forward. I think we can make something different. I don’t have a gift for naming things so let’s just call it “It Stops Here”.
Whenever somebody is acting harshly towards you, take a few deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
Whenever some other driver cuts you off, You don’t go ballistic. Respectfully correct the driver , take a couple of deep breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
When you get home after a long stressful day at work, before entering your house, you take a couple of breaths and tell yourself “It Stops Here”.
See when we are insecure we go into defensively offensive mode.  If you really are the strong one, then you roll with the punches and make it stop where you are. We must make it such that there is a voice inside our heads that says “I would not be abusive because another person is abusive towards me.”,” I will not let my insecurity become the reason I shout at another person.” It’s the small things like this simple act that make the world so much more livable.