Forever Grateful

Depending on where we stand in our lives, some of us may burdened with pivotal decisions with great consequences.  In a video I was watching, the legendary coach John Wooden was given the final shot (he was still a player) in one of his games.  He missed, and his team ended up losing the game.  However, John Wooden had the calm and inner peace that comes with a knowledge that he has done his best.  He had no regrets.   As a coach, even though he was a competitive person, he only demanded that his players practiced and performed to their highest potential.  He only wanted them to concentrate over things that they have control over.  Results may or may not go their way; what they brought to the table was more important than the results they achieved. To John Wooden, if a person decided to make each day a masterpiece of his/her life, success is likely to follow or ensue.  That is why he put such a premium on trying as opposed to results.  T...

 On some of his videos, Simon Sinek describes states of conflicts: he is grateful for having listeners while simultaneously wondering why there still exist podia for speakers like him.  I am not sure even if the world becomes a perfect place, the need for speakers like him will disappear.  To explain that in a little more detail, let us turn to spherical cows. A spherical cow is a picturesque expression that captures simplification of concepts.  Imagine teaching speed as a rate of motion for a novice student.  Using actual cow may complicate the problem, since there are multiple forces to consider.  A spherical cow, or a dot that represents a cow, on the other hand, is much more helpful. One of my favorite Ted Talks is the one about starting with the shy.  The three concentric circles of why, how, and what represent distilled and codified model to show the importance of why.  For me, it is a 'spherical cow' that gently moves me along the path of l...

When life becomes challenging, especially financially, it is easy to blame fate or circumstance or people.  Watching the video  (40) The 7 C's to Success with Brian Tracy - YouTube  changes that wrong perception.   Mr. Tracy uses personal example to lead off the talk about the seven Cs.   When he was in his thirties, he was asked to give a presentation on how to become millionaire.  He accepted the challenge and  committed  to do the presentation without personal experience of being a millionaire.   He had the courage to transform his commitment into a set of actionable items.  The most important one was devoting two months to study available materials on the subject of being a millionaire.  He discovered that there were more than ten thousand of interviews in addition to other literature on millionaires.  Through  commitment  and courage , he developed capability to give presentation about millionaires...

 I was watching videos by Bob Proctor and Zig Ziglar.  Both videos emphasized the need for repetition from different perspectives.  Repetitions, according to them, is vital for understanding contents of educational and motivational videos. To back up his assertion, Bob Proctor uses simple but effective visuals to contrast a running speech or video with the attentional pattern of the listener.  He used white line to represent a running speech and a red line embedded in the white to represent the attentional pattern.  The red one usually has gaps as the listener tries to understand the running speech.  The effort forces the listener to drift out and think a little.  Meanwhile, the speaker does not pause; he is going.  The speaker often says something that the listener did not catch.   In a way, this reminds me of that video showing basketball players passing the ball.  In that video, the viewer is instructed to count the number of pas...

 During the last sixteen minutes of my flight from San Antonio to Dallas Lovefield Airport, I was listening to Cal Newport's podcast.  It was about deep work, a topic which garnered him well-earned fame.  His book on the topic has been translated into forty languages and the English version has sold more than a million copies. He divided his podcast into three sub-topics: what deep work means; why we should embrace it; and how to do it best.   Deep work is defined any work done for a period of time without switching to another cognitive task.  The focus on one cognitive task at a time is pivotal.  Shifting tasks works against us. Let us think through an experiment below, which I adopted from a training video I viewed on You Tube to help me with my work for my work.  Look at the next two lines and follow the guide in the paragraph after the two line.                         ...