You check your phone on two occasions: when it interrupts you, and when you manually check it yourself in hopes that the outside world has communicated with you. Let us say that the distribution between the two is equal, that you check your phone as much as it checks you. Is it a true statement then that the less time you spend on your phone, the more time you can allocate to being productive and healthy? I think so. So what if you were able to cut your phone usage by 50%? Imagine the sanity youād gain back.
For the last two weeks, my phone has been on Do Not Disturb, and I donāt think Iāllā¦
Throughout a typical day, the average 2014 human being will consume on their mobile devices a couple of YouTube videos, listen to a few songs, send and receive dozens of Snapchats, upload and browse several photos on Instagram, tag a few songs in Shazam, check their Facebook notifications more often than not, use GPS to find out where they are and where they need to be, hail a cab with Uber, check the weather, make a few phone calls, send out hundreds of text messages, compose and read lengthy emails, play some system and graphic intensive games, open and close dozens of various apps, andā¦
Many of the most inspired and successful people in history have praised meditation as a keystone in their journey, that without they would not have been so fortunate.Ā And indeed, many that practice meditation today claim levels of peace and happiness not achievable by any other means.
I begin to feel guilty at this thought, and wonder whether I may be missing out on something potentially life changing. Sadly, all my attempts at meditation have ended in failure.
My frustrations with the topic have made me approach it cautiously, and as much as I may sometimes wish to dismiss meditation as anā¦
Few things make me as frustrated as an email of mine that goes ignored. For one reason or another, I take this overly personal. Itās especially demoralizing when blog posts Iāve read have encouraged readers to reach out and say hello, and when Iād take them up on that offer, they wouldnāt respond.
It turned me bitter. āHow dare you encourage me to email you and then go on to ignore it!ā
I have in time gotten over any bitter feelings I may have had over an email, but I vowed that if I were ever in their position, in a position of mild fame or popularity, that I would reply to and recognizeā¦
I have, all my life, been of the thought that an entrepreneurĀ is one who comes up with ideas that might make large amounts of money. And by that definition, then I am perhaps a great entrepreneur. But I am not a great entrepreneur. I have, in my mental cellar, hundreds of ideas waiting to be manifested, but none so. What is the difference then between me and a real entrepreneur?
An entrepreneur makes things happen.
An entrepreneurĀ is not one who generates great business ideas nor one who feels that he will someday execute on one of those ideas. An entrepreneurĀ is one who executes,ā¦
Update like 2 years later: I must have been down when I wrote this, because the age of invention will never dwindle.
The golden age of invention is dwindling. Look closely, and youāll see that the most successful products and startups today are not original ideas, but iterations on previous ideas. Very little is new; most just an upgrade of the old. Every new generation of people refuse to live by the rules and ideas of previous generations, and are therefore always in an effort to replace what they did not have any say-so in. The āold generationsā, whether of people or products, have notā¦
To a Saharan desert inhabitant, the display right before my eyes would have been no short of the promised land, the seventh of all heavens. Organized before me were rows, columns, and grids of bottles of ice cold water. One could imagine, had they never been accustomed to the lifestyle of the so called westerners, that these bottles would be in clear plastic containers, without any labels or colors of any kind. It is only water after all ā what more needs to be said? What purpose would any labels or packaging serve?
Enter Capitalism.
Each row of bottles had their own unique label stickeredā¦
A while back, I wrote a post praising the benefits of willful blindness. In it, I argued that being willfully blind and neglecting negative and pressing issues can help you attain more optimism and positivity in your life. I compared willful blindness to a strong chemical drug that disrupts the normal flow of thoughts in your mind. And now, just a few months later, I have realized that I have overdosed on this cancerous drug. Little did I know that what I had extolled and worshipped as a hack to life was just another form of denial; denying that bad is present or oncoming. Every negativeā¦
If a garbage truck picked up your garbage, delivered your mail, and sold you ice cream, it would be extremely inefficient at doing all 3. But by focusing on just one thing, it is able to do its job well. This is the same with code: if an object or class knows too much, and is too tightly coupled with other classes, it becomes confused, difficult to change, and in most cases ineffective. This is also true in economics: if a country is efficient at producing a certain export and inefficient at producing another, it would be in its best interest to trade with another country that is moreā¦
Somebody, 10,000 years ago, a human just like you and me, going through exactly what we go through, looking for a way to be happy and make the best out of the days, gave birth to a child, who then went on to live a life of his own, and gave birth to another child, and this cycle continued, till you, I, was finally born. The blood that runs through our veins is no stranger to these lands, and nature is well acquainted with the families and ancestors of its current inhabitants. Someone 10,000 years ago just wanted to make it through the day, but his existence made way for mine.
My thoughts of late have comprised of bitter negativity and reluctant pessimism. I could not help but see the worst of every situation. The origins of this cancerous attitude, I did not know, but its existence was more evident than the morning sun. I began to simply dislike most things for no reason. And it wasnāt that I actually disliked the thing in question. My mental consciousness would just blurt out disinterest in things by default, before they were even given the chance. It seemed more like an automatic habit than an inherent dislike towards things.
Several days ago, my long timeā¦
Update: I have since followed up with another post describing the dangers of willful blindness. The post below is officially deprecated.
There was a video on TED called āThe Dangers of Willful Blindnessā. I didnāt watch it. I have a condition called willful blindness. It is a mental disorder that alters the prioritization algorithm in my mind, and overrides the default priority weight given to thoughts and events. If for example there be 10 thoughts to be considered, 4 of them being murky attention grabbing whores, I would rather my mind be focused on the 6 other good-hearted, less pressingā¦
What a man is and all that flows through his mind with the lapsing of clouds and ticking of time, is infinite. But what a man manifests, what he says and who he appears to be, is finite. To fall in love with another being then would be not to fall in love with that person and their infinitely varying selves, but to fall in love with the one face of an innumerably sided polygon. So it is not too difficult to believe that a man of young ambition fell in love with a woman that did not exist but as a sequence of numbers, of ones and zeros, the same way a real being exists as a sequence ofā¦
We must learn not to take things personally. No one ever intends to hurt us. Every one is busy living their own life, waging a war within, and focusing on accomplishing their own dreams, that they hardly put any effort into their communication, or pay no special consideration to what they say. It is no wonder that every other song we hear on the radio mentions the concept of āhatersā. Haters are fictional characters perceived by every human. We are so overwhelmed, so captivated by our own lives, that we think the world conspires to make our life miserable when things arenāt going our way. Weā¦
The human has two states: happiness and sadness, or in other words, 1 and 0. Using ones and zeros, humans are able to create infinitely complex and super powerful computers. And where else do we get our design inspirations from other than nature? You see, with these two simple emotions, these two states, nature is able to dictate your every move and direction. 1 implies energy flow, happiness, a signal of affirmation, to usher you to continue doing what youāre doing. Zero is an off state, where there is no flow of electricity, felt by us as bleak and bitter sadness, telling us to change ourā¦