Category Archives: Thoughts On Life

Unique and Interesting Observations or Perspectives

Wise Life Quotes 2

“If you want to choose your lifestyle, you cannot be picky about what careers you want to pursue. If you want to choose your career, you cannot be picky about what cities/lifestyles you want to live in” – Francis Chen (Quora)

A loving person lives in a loving world.
A hostile person lives in a hostile world;
everyone you meet is your mirror. – Ken Keyes Jr.

From Reddit’s What is one powerful sentence that will change the way I look at life forever?

  • People aren’t against you, they’re for themselves
  • Irish Proverbs:
    • There is misfortune only where there is wealth.
    • There is no pain greater than the pain of rejection
    • The road to hell is paved with good intentions
    • Though wisdom is good in the beginning it is better at the end
    • The best way to keep loyalty in a man’s heart is to keep money in his purse.
    • Speed and accuracy do not agree.
    • Pride feels no pain.
    • Only the rich can afford compassion.
    • Marriages are all happy; its having breakfast together that causes all the trouble
    • No use carrying an umbrella if your shoes are leaking.
  • The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel.
  • We judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.
  • In social psychology, they have a name for it! It’s called the Fundamental Attribution Error, and it states that when we explain behavior of others, we have a tendency to overestimate the role of dispositional characteristics and underestimate the role of situational influence. But when we are explaining our behavior (moreso justifying our “incorrect” behavior) we blame it on situational influence, and not our dispositional attributes (AKA our intentions,or personality).
  • Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is who you really are, while your reputation is merely what people think you are” – John Wooden
  • “If it is to be, it is up to me.”
  • The world doesn’t hate you nor love you; it just doesn’t care about you.
” Life is all about giving back. Start early.
Doing something you love is not work.
Don’t ever do anything just for the money.
Making a contribution to your family, job, or friends is what really drives satisfaction.
Grandchildren are the greatest!
Phase into retirement slowly.
Stay around young people. They will keep you young.
Maintain balance in your life through your family, religion, career, friends, and hobbies.
Networking is about giving — not taking.
Take chances with your career. Don’t be afraid to take a step backward.
Keep your sense of humor. There is fun to be found in most everything we do.
A strong religious belief can solve a lot of problems.
Long, happy marriages are related to many common interests.
A wonderful spouse is a true gift.
You are never as good or as bad as you may think you are. Stay humble.
Curiosity and maintaining an open mind seem to be underrated leadership traits.
Don’t avoid the screening tests and early warnings about your health. ” – WILLIAM J. WHITE http://hbs1963.com/wisdom/lifes-lessons/

“Doing nothing is the wrong concept. You never do nothing, because even when your body is still your mind is churning and processing information.

I have a strong dislike against “wasting time.” I don’t like myself when I spend time on nonsense. And so I fill all of my day with “constructive things.” My walk to work is filled with podcasts, the time waiting for the food to bake filled with news articles. While eating I entertain myself with shows or Ted talks or whatnot.

The best decision I made in the last weeks was to stop most of that.

Aristotle recommended to take walks – especially while discussing with another person. And now, walking to work with just my mind and the scenery and passing people as company I feel more relaxed. I feel serene. I learn to understand myself better, just the way a meditation clears my mind.

I mentally plan my evening or reflect on the day – conflicts with the boss, troubles, things I achieved, things I learned. I finally notice the food I’m eating.

The list goes on. I’m not going to stop consuming information and I’m not going to stop using podcasts on some long walks – but I live more consciously, more aware, more relaxed. It’s small changes and suddenly I’m happier and can handle stress better.

I think we all tend to drown our minds – emotions, thoughts, worries, little wins, conversations we had or want to have and much more – we drown all of it in manufactured emotions (reddit, games, tv, …) and interesting, and valuable, but ultimately unnecessary information.

When you say “doing nothing” you confuse something. You are doing things all the time, your brain never takes a break. But when you “do nothing” you finally allow your brain to breathe and process all the things it needs and wants to process. I think all these modern diseases – sleeping problems, stress, depression, distractability, even obesity,… – they have a lot to do with the fact that we don’t allow our brains anymore to breathe. We bombard them with stuff – either information or, worse, emotion – and in order to handle this stuff other important tasks – housekeeping tasks such as consolidating memories, reflecting about one’s feelings and health and happiness, planning healthy food, considering how to bring up that issue with the boss – are drowned in a sea of emotion and information. They are drowned in a wonderful wealth of “stuff to process” that ultimately prevents our brains from ensuring their own – our – mental and physical health.

We are indoctrinated with an idea that time needs to be “spent”. That’s why you wonder what people do when they don’t do all the things you do. I tell you what: they engage with others and, more importantly, with themselves. They learn who they are and what they value. Without any effort their minds plan the future and consolidate memories of the past.

That, I think, means to be truly alive. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. The modern version is maybe this:

The person that lives solely in emotions and information from the outside, the person that never pulls itself out of this messy reality and gives itself over to a mental spa, a time of healing and processing, a time of reflecting, feeling, thinking, seeing, worrying, planning, smiling, that person doesn’t live.

Take a walk. Leave the iPod and your phone at home. Find some trees or a place with a nice view. It’s even okay if you just lie down on the couch or stand in the shower or sit at your desk, with your eyes looking past the screen. Just be you, for a moment. And then watch, carefully, without judgement, all those things that happen in your mind while you “do nothing.” – ALooc

http://attemptedliving.tumblr.com/post/64965685814/reddit-wisdom

80% of life is just showing up. You don’t need qualifications, motivation, brilliant ideas, or any other crap. The person who wins is simply the person who shows up. If you show up every day, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. – Day9 Sean Plott on reddit

In the absence of all compassion, all hope disappears, leaving the strongest powerless. – reddit

Those who wasted youth actually saved it and those who saved youth actually wasted it ( Niaz Fatehpuri)

Stephen Colbert: “You must always make the path for yourself.  There is no secret society out there that will tap you on your shoulder one night and show you the way. Because the true secret is, your life will not be defined by the society that we have left you. To paraphrase Robert Boalt, society has no more idea of what what you are than you do, because ultimately, it only has your brains to think with. Every generation must define itself, and so make a world that suits itself. SO, if you must find your own path, and we left you no easy path, then decide to choose the hard path that leads to the world you want.”
Do or do not … there is no try.” — Yoda
You can only become truly accomplished at something you love. Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you. – Maya Angelou
The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it. -W.M. Lewis

To find out when more Life Education Curriculum is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.  Please share your comments to this post below.

2014 Recap: Self Doubt

This year I fell victim to the vicious cycle of self doubt.  I believed I could be successful in my endeavors, but when I started to fail I started to doubt and that reduced my chances of success because it’s hard to fight both the obstacles you face on your journey to success and your inner demons at the same time.  Because my chance of success went down, the failures added up and my doubt grew stronger, causing more failure and resulting in self doubt.

This was because this year I set grand goals, goals that were bigger than any other goals I’ve ever set in my life, so of course it would make sense that success would not be knocking on my door anytime soon.  I was in for the long haul, and I was only just beginning.  So when I didn’t succeed in my long term goal I wasn’t surprised: that was to be expected.  However I fell into the trap that most people make when they set grand goals: They don’t break it up into smaller ones.

Because I only had the one goal that was to be achieved years from now, I had no short term goals that I could achieve for gratification, satisfaction, adrenaline to keep me going.  The over-investment in the long term resulted in boredom and depression in the short term, and with depression came the doubt: “no results yet huh? Must not be working, should probably give up.”

Luckily for me I had systems in place to keep me working which meant that I continued to make progress even though I felt like quitting…and now at the end of the year I can say that I have certainly made progress because while it was difficult to see any gains or improvements or short term advances at the day or week or month level, at the year level it is clear what progress has been made.

There are many tricks to conquering self doubt. Before I dive into them I just want to take a moment to explain why you should not give into them.  An important one is that like most things in life: YOU ARE NOT ALONE. Other people feel self doubt too.  In fact, some of the most successful people out there have felt self doubt.  For example, Jerry Seinfeld, who became a billionaire from being an exceptional comedian, and Jimmy Fallon, host of the Tonight Show, a job that is an extremely high award for a comedian in the USA, both admitted that even after achieving decades of success, they still occasionally feel self doubt before performing (*From an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee).  They doubt whether they will succeed, they question their life decision to even try, they question whether they even have the potential to succeed.  But then they go do it anyway, and when they are in the middle of the doing, they realize they can do it.

What this goes to show is that whether you are just beginning and have no history of success, or whether you are at the peak of your career and have a history of success and momentum carrying you: self doubt will always be there, until you take the dive and do it.  So a solution to self doubt is to just dive in and just go do it.  Do it and keep doing it and by gaining experience improve incrementally over time so that with enough time and increments, major improvements are made and you can focus on enjoying what you’re doing or looking back and enjoying your accomplishments instead of getting trapped in the purgatory of indecision.

Next year, my goal is to stay positive and focus on having fun, being happy, and drawing on my incremental success from 2014 to give me the self confidence to face the challenges of 2015 and the conviction to pursue what I want and not change goals because I will believe I can achieve what I originally set out to do.

Misc: An alternative source of self doubt is a weak sense of identity. See Who Am I? and Getting Out of Depression if so.

* See http://comediansincarsgettingcoffee.com/jimmy-fallon-the-unsinkable-legend-part-2

Check out AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

New Perspective on New Year Resolutions

This was the first year of my life where the New Year was not a big deal to me in the sense that I was not able to set aside a considerable amount of time to reflect upon the previous year and set goals for the new year because I was and still am too focused on the goals I have set from the previous year to set new ones or reflect on my accomplishments just yet.

First, I thought about why this was: Why wasn’t I spending the time to reflect and plan? Answer: I’m too busy with my current startup to spare time for a vacation.  If it isn’t adding value to my start up, I don’t have time for it.  I haven’t taken a vacation in 2014 yet and I don’t plan on taking one until the startup reaches a better place.

Then I realized what this means is that the “new years resolution” culture is largely due to the holiday season that leads up to the new years holiday: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years give you lots of free time in a short 4-5 week period during which you can pause your life and reflect and meditate and think.

Then I realized I do this every two weeks at least: I refocus my priorities, I evaluate them against my long term goals, and I make adjustments to my plans.  I constantly do this on a small scale daily but on a full scale bi-monthly.  This allows me to not get distracted and stay focused on my goals.

Therefore I concluded that the process of reflecting on what you did since your last reflection session and setting a plan of action for yourself should be on your personal timeline rather than on a timeline that isn’t yours.  Time moves without you, the calendar will tick whether you’ve made progress on your goals or not, whether you’ve remembered them or forgotten them, so don’t base your life on it because it isn’t related to you.  You want to reflect on your goals based on a function of your personal memory timeline: If I forget things after 3 weeks then I should refresh my memory of my goals every 3 weeks or less.

I think this is the reason why people’s new years resolutions don’t last: Because too many people ascribe to the culture of reflecting based on a calendar external to their personal life calendar.  Focus on yourself: How often do you need to be reminded? How often should you re-focus and reflect on your life?  Do it on your own timeline and you’ll see more success.

The person who reads their new years resolutions every day or every week for an entire year has a much higher chance of succeeding at meeting them than someone who never reads it again after making them.

Check out AttemptedLiving’s Life Education Curriculum, a collection of core knowledge everyone should have.

To find out when those posts, and other life education writing, are released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.