Category: Self Improvement

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rePost::Red Squirrel's Nuts – 50% Time

The problem is really to work an extra 20 hours per week on self improvements means you have enough energy to to expend in self improvement. This is why I am limiting myself to jobs within 30 minutes from my house optimistically and within 1.5 hours with traffic. If the commute is too long I’m too tired to study/self improve. Life is too short to waste on a commute.

At the time I was finishing Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers, a book that digs deep into the stories and counter-cultural explanations of successful people. Having someone so close to my context tweeting about a topic related to the book I was reading helped me see something I hadn’t noticed before. I’ve spent years trying to make sense of how a person evolves from a novice programmer to an accomplished software developer. And up until now I haven’t paid enough attention to the raw number of hours spent deliberately working to improve oneself. Uncle Bob calls us to work a sustainable pace in our day jobs (40 hours), so we have time (20 hours) to improve ourselves in the off-hours. Most people don’t do that, though. It’s not considered normal. People who spend time doing more of what appears to be their job in the off-hours are seen as obsessed or workaholics. Maybe we are, there is some grey area there, and I know I’ve taken it too far before. One of the ingredients to being an outlier, though, is an opportunity to work hard. Sure, many outliers have had some good breaks, like being born in the right decade (American entrepreneurs in the 1830’s) or even the right month (Canadian junior hockey players in January), but that luck only provided them with an opportunity to work hard at something that they wanted to do.
via Red Squirrel’s Nuts – 50% Time.

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Musings 2010 01 20

I fear the low hanging fruits have been or would be picked within this year, what I mean is the places to go to/ food to eat / events to experiences that are within easy reach has been. This means that I’d have to earn more to enjoy newer experiences. Thought about this when I saw a post about Sundance, minor want would be to go to those film fest even once.Here’s to dreaming and trying to fulfill those dreams.
this was the post that prompted that thought, from  my favorite film blog /Film:
http://www.slashfilm.com/2010/01/20/film-has-arrived-at-sundance-film-festival-2010/

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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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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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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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Nice Post on Happiness and Wealth Creation and Success

Once you’ve found your happiness, all that other stuff is just scenery.
from a post by Michael Parkatti title: Happiness, Not Wealth Creation, is the Sole Measure of Success here:

I don’t know I feel that this might be true but with things like this the only way to really know is to experience these things.

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rePost: My Business Magazines Lied to Me

Excellent Article,
We succumb to the startup itch because of the promise of getting rich but most of the time we fail to understand that (I got this from a Paul Graham essay) people who succeeded from their startups were paid on account of their productivity and output. I distinctly remember my aha moment when I read in the footnotes that “what you do in a startup is compress a lifetime’s worth of work into a few years. .”
I think that the problem is you seldom know who would be extremely successful in a startup environment. You can see who would be successful but not who might be (explanation: If you knew Steve Jobs or Bill Gates before their success you would probably say they had a high chance of succeeding whilst the majority of people are like millionaire’s next door types you wouldn’t know they are successful if they didn’t tell you!).
And I believe their (magazines/bloggers/tech-evangelist) skewed views are somewhat sound because some people need to get started at doing before they get their groove and find that they were meant to do great/amazing things.
all in all read the whole thing!
from here:
Telling Us What We Want To Hear
Have you ever had a close friend whose engagement isn’t working out, and now they wonder if they should be concerned about getting married? Sometimes there are signs it isn’t going to last, but they don’t want you to tell them that. They are scared to leave the relationship, scared of failing, scared of being alone, and so they don’t want to you help them go down that path. They want you to tell them it will all be ok. They want to hear that he/she will probably change.
Likewise, people don’t want to read that hard work and discipline are the path to success. They don’t want to have to analyze numbers, because it isn’t as fun as going with the gut feeling. They don’t want to be told that the latest trend is just a fad, even though it almost certainly is. Business magazines that don’t cater to what people want will go out of business. The result then, is that business magazines (and books and blogs) tell us what we want to hear. Then we go off and implement that bad advice, and when it doesn’t work, we make up some other excuse. Or, if we come to realize the advice was wrong, but it is still popular, we keep it to ourselves, because speaking out about it is a quick way to get chastised and be labeled (negative, luddite, sour grapes, etc). People want to believe what they want to believe, and if you try to show them a truth that conflicts with that, you will most likely fail.

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Interactional Expertise

More evidence of how crucial a choice our friends/seat mates/acquittance’s are to the decisions we can make. If this is true and my gut points me to the truth of this, we may be fast entering an age of great decision making. Why because usenet/googlegroups/yahoogroups or other conversational/ web 2.0 social interactivity interconnection technology is allowing us to be in the loop with the world’s foremost experts in the hard and social sciences. We (the early adopters) may be the first wave of people blessed with an Interactional Expertise spanning a large part of human knowledge.
the interview is from here:
How do you distinguish the people who can and can’t contribute to a specialized field?
 The key to the whole thing is whether people have had access to the tacit knowledge of an esoteric area—tacit knowledge is know-how that you can’t express in words. The standard example is knowing how to ride a bike. My view as a sociologist is that expertise is located in more or less specialized social groups. If you want to know what counts as secure knowledge in a field like gravitational wave detection, you have to become part of the social group. Being immersed in the discourse of the specialists is the only way to keep up with what is at the cutting edge.
Is this where interactional expertise comes into play?
 Interactional expertise is one of the things that broadens the scope of who can contribute. It’s a little bit wider than the old “people in the white coats” of the 1950s, but what it’s not is everybody. (Within science, lots of people have interactional expertise, because science wouldn’t run without it.)
You did experiments to test your theory of expertise. What did you find?
The original version we did was with color-blind people. What we were attempting to demonstrate is something we call the strong interactional hypothesis: If you have deeply immersed yourself in the talk of an esoteric group—but not immersed yourself in any way in the practices of that group—you will be indistinguishable from somebody who has immersed themself [sic] in both the talk and the practice, in a test which just involves talk.
If that’s the case, then you’re going to speak as fluently as someone who has been engaged in the practices. And if you can speak as fluently, then you’re indistinguishable from an expert. It’s what I like to call “walking the talk”. You still can’t do the stuff, but you can make judgments, inferences and so on, which are on a par.
We picked color-blind people because they’ve spent their whole lives immersed in a community talking about color. So we thought color-blind people should be indistinguishable from color-perceivers when asked questions by a color-perceiver who knew what was going on. And we demonstrated that that was in fact the case. Now we’re planning to do another imitation test on the congenitally blind to see if they can perform as well as the color-blind.

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Living Long and Living Well

It seems that living long correlates well with living a worthwhile life.
This is very comforting,.
from ted here:
What can people do right now to help extend their lives? There is no pill, as of yet. Diet, exercise and purpose are the three sure ways.

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Working Environment!

If you don’t have a great working environment quit, quit now!
from NYT:
In addition to being brilliant, Dr. Gray was an iconoclast. Speaker after speaker fondly told stories that reflected his disdain for bureaucracy and his independence. Shankar Sastry, dean of the college of engineering at UC Berkeley, noted that when organizers were planning the Saturday tribute, they felt the attire should be business casual; Dr. Gray, however, rarely wore anything but jeans and was once thrown out of the I.B.M. Scientific Center in Los Angeles for failing to meet the company’s dress code.
While working at I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. Research Laboratory in New York, Mr. Gray asked his boss if he could relocate to an I.B.M. laboratory in San Jose. When he was told that he couldn’t, he said, “All right, then, I quit.”
He then got in his Volkswagen, drove across the country and was rehired by an I.B.M. laboratory in California.
“We had a research group in San Francisco because Jim lived in San Francisco, and if he’d wanted to move to Monaco, we’d have a research center in Monaco,” said Rick Rashid, senior vice president for research at Microsoft.