I am thinking of transitioning this blog from a formal essay format to a more casual show and tell format. This way you get more content faster. When I have time I’ll still do a formal essay so you get that as a bonus on top of the show and telling I’ll be doing more frequently.

Hey check this time-lapse out of a room of plants moving around during the day to chase the sunlight! I think it’s fascinating to see a normally immobile thing like a plant move. I’m reminded there is beauty right under our noses in our daily lives: the plants are doing a dance around us and thanks to video cameras we can see this beauty!

Why am I afraid of disappointment/pain/negative? I can overcome it! Nothing to be afraid of!

Emotional self reflection: If I experience fear, I respond with anger. If someone else experiences fear, I respond with anger. What other before/after emotions do I have? What do you have? Do you want to keep them that way or do you want to change? I want to harness the energy from the anger I get from fear to have energy to overcome the fear productively.

I have a tendency to ‘let others win’ because I’m overly confident and arrogant in my own abilities. I give others a huge handicap as a result of my confidence. However, this often backfires because I just give up even trying to win because it would take so much work to do so given how much handicap I’d given already, and because I already know I’d win so it doesn’t matter. I need to learn to close–use my talents and secure the victory. THEN if I want to be generous with the rewards, I can do so. Be generous after I win, not before. Don’t be generous while in competition: be generous out of it.

I can’t keep approaching the world from a perspective of me being wounded and being owed compensation for things. It’s time to take full ownership and stand as I am and a whole person with options. Then every step forward is a positive step, instead of a ‘making up for loss’ step. View the world from a positive position rather than from a negative one.

Rebelling against tests and refusing to study and score high only hurts me and not the system or the world.  

I watched this video about Harvard students and their test scores and they all say the scores weren’t the reason they got in. But they all did have high scores. And even without you asking for the scores, you’d already assume high scores. 

This shows the importance of testing. Don’t let the ‘test scores don’t matter’ message mislead you: you still need the test scores.

There are good people in the world. When we encounter too many bad people, bad situations, bad environments, it’s easy to forget and so I want to remind us that there are good people in the world. Good people are worth helping.

We must be willing to help bad people in order to help good people because good people are connected to bad people. We are all connected. Helping a good person may help a bad person, and helping a bad person may help a good person. There isn’t a clear cut way to isolate help and purely help good people only.

Helping a bad person isn’t so bad because not only can it indirectly help a good person, but it can help that bad person become a good person. Most bad people are that way because they need help, and with your help you can help change them into the good people they wanted to be in the first place.

Be a model for good behavior. In my life I’ve often found myself surrounded by bad and that makes it hard to want to do good. It feels pointless to do good because the impact is so small and insignificant and unappreciated, but in reality it’s in those moments that it’s the most critical to do good because the world needs someone like you to lead the way and model the good behavior others should follow.

A bad person thinks they are good. Consider the perspective of the bad person to understand why they think they are good, because no-one thinks they are a bad person doing bad things. Understanding why they think they are a good person can help you understand that you have a shared humanity of wanting good things, and it’s just the values and plan that are different.

Play to your strengths. What you value, the way you do things, what you believe is good, continue to do them. You can adjust and adapt them to the situation, but don’t give them up if they are part of who you are. Embrace who you are and love yourself. You are not a bad person for helping bad people. You are a good person for behaving in good ways that you value.

Religion doing what it should. from MadeMeSmile

This story of Charles Leclerc broke my heart from formula1