Forever Grateful

Imagine fabricating a widget and examine the following visual. The green represents time you actually spend manufacturing it. Red represents time spent getting the tool, moving parts, or fixing mistakes; things that your customer does not care about. The simple visual convincingly dramatizes the proportions of value-added (what the customer is willing to pay for) and non-value-added activities embedded in the manufacturing of that widget. Moreover, it helps us appreciate the perpetual battle a manufacturer would be waging to get rid of what those red bands represent. But what does this have to do with equanimity? Glad you asked. Without equanimity, if your plot of your thoughts will probably look like that picture. Your cherished thoughts (green) are scattered amongst toxic thoughts (red) brought by stressors. More green bands? Equanimity can be your ticket.

  I find some authors are generous; they gift me with a bunch of spherical cows. Let me explain. A spherical cow is a picturesque mental model, an interesting metaphor. If I want to explain velocity to a novice student and decide to do it through problem, I may ask if a cow travels three miles an hour, how far does it travel in twenty minutes. In this problem, we (my student and I) are only concerned about a cow getting from point A to Point B; we are not concerned, for example, about the complexity of how the cow’s limbs move. The cow, for the intents of this discussion, may as well be a dot or a sphere! Gifted authors provide metaphors equivalent to spherical cows; metaphors so simple to understand that the concepts they stand for are more digestible. This morning, I was listening to John C Maxwell talk about leadership shift. He cited a violinist who gets promoted to a conductor as an example. Her world has shifted for good and she has to adapt fast. No longer is she only ...

 I had a bad morning today.  So bad that I was determined to reframe my memory of it.  I did not have the specifics but I ended the series of dark episodes with that determination. Later, I ended up at Starbucks reading on my kindle and exploiting the inbuilt features of Kindle by taking copious notes on what I was reading.  I went through few sections in a couple of books.  I was working hard to make better use of my time. Interestingly, I ended up rereading about Eric Chester from Rory Vaden’s book Take the Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving True Success. In that book, Vaden captures one of Chester’s powerful demonstration.  In the demo, Chester had two assistants stretch an eighty foot length of measuring tape across the hall.  Chester invited the audience to think of the 80 foot as representing 80 years of an individual life.  Each foot, of course, represented a year and each inch (12 inch to a foot) a month of one’s life.  A day would be one t...

 In The Art of the Impossible, Steven Kotler documents his inroad towards his defining work - flow science.  Lyme decease was the unlikely trigger.  The ailment had him on verge of suicide, forcing him to entertain overdosing on barbiturates prescribed to him to manage his pain. One day, a friend asks him to go surfing.  The idea sounded insane to him for he was at a point that doctors have told him they have.done all they could.  But there she was, this friend, inviting the immobilized Kotler to surf. I keep wondering how she managed to be Positive despite the bleak circumstances.  She convinced him to go out with her and he did manage to surf on what he called the wimpiest of waves. The experience was exhilarating.  It drained all his energy and he found himself unable to get out of bed for the next two weeks.  However, he found himself bumming a ride to surf again.  He was locked in; he was Engaged.  He would find himself in this cycl...

In my previous blog I mentioned that I was diving into the exercises or “Insights to Action Challenge” as Marie refers to them.  For chapter 3, she challenges the listener to expand on why he/she picked this book and what he/she expects to gain out of it.  She reminds the reader to actually put ink to paper rather zipping through it as a mental exercise. What a lovely challenge! Incidentally, she recommends using actual pen and paper for this challenge.  I did my initial bullet points in my notebook and I do appreciate her science-backed advice. Why this book?  I will be honest - I picked on this audiobook simply because it was in my library.  I was trapped in a chain of events triggered by a very very bad mood and needed to snap out of that chain.  That is how things started but not how they continued.  The listening morphed into a totally unexpected and bright experience. I need to piggy back on a program on Marie TV that featured Elizabeth Gilbert t...

  Everything is Figureoutable is an interesting audio book to listen to.   Start with the title, for example.  The odd word “Figureoutable“ is a mother’s generous gift to a daughter, a magnificent heirloom.  The phrase “everything is Figureoutable”, like a baton, was handed out during a mother daughter talk. Marie’s mother was a Mrs. Wizard who dazzled and mystified her daughter with her projects ranging  from fixing roof to performing surgery on a Tropicana radio that accompanied her like a faithful pet..  Baffled with this insane repertoire of skills (this was way before internet and You Tube) Marie asks her mother how she knew so many things.  Her mom’s brief and charming reply was: everything is Figureoutable. The mantra served Marie well and provides an intriguing title for the book.  She has skillfully assembled gently worded guides as well as exercises that complement the listening.  The book (audiobook) advocates for having a bias for...

 Charles Duhigg, in his book The Power of Habit,  cites an experiment done on willpower at Casewestern University.  The experiment was fascinating to me for two major reasons. For one, the design is very clever.  In the experiment, a room is set up with one dish containing cookies and another horse radish.  Participants are told to skip a meal and broken into two cohorts.  One group is to dine on the cookies while the other one on the horseradish.   The experimenters got to witness the comfort of the cookie group and contrast it with the pain of the horseradish group.  Then, they introduced the next part of the experiment: they supplied an unsolvable puzzle to the two cohorts.  Neither group was told the right reason why the puzzle was given to them nor that the puzzle was unsolvable. This clever experiment demonstrated that people who were given cookies had the stamina to work on the puzzle For much longer period while the other cohort gave ...

Some of our modern guides and mentors that we know may never have had to work a day in their lives.  They have found the work that they love and each moment they spend on their calling is a labor of love, not work.  Their labor of love has benefitted mankind on a global scale. One common theme is they have identified problems in the world and have endeavored to provide consistent stream of solutions.  This desire to serve their fellow beings have fueled their passions that fuel their labor of love.  Think of John C. Maxwell and his body of work on leadership.  Think of Steve Kotler and his massive contribution to the science of flow.  Think of Seth Godin and what he articulated through his best sellers like Purple Cow or The Icarus Deception.   Many more have undertaken generous missions to provide humanity with life skills, fresh perspectives, and novel solutions to vexing problems.  As they did so, they have written massive amount of blogs, publ...

 In part two of her book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear,  Elizabeth Gilbert represents ideas as sentient beings who visit us when the time is ripe.  I am not sure sentient beings is the perfect term, but i think it captures her idea enough.   She narrates a captivating story about a book project that she once started to buttress her point with a personal example.  The book idea was about a group of people who started building road in the Amazon.  Life intervened while she was putting together the raw materials that would help her craft her novel.  After a passage of time, she tried to return to the work, but the embers would not kindle into full-fledged flames.  The magic was gone, and she had to let the idea go. Another author picked up on the same idea (but different settings) and Ms. Gilbert discovered about it.  She did not resent the author nor curse her fate.  She just let it go; an idea visited her but had to move on ...

Eating s**t sandwich is a picturesque metaphor Elizabeth Gilbert used to describe the years she spent writing but not getting published.  It captures the courage it takes to embrace a creative journey And reminds courage is not an absence of fear but moving forward with fear in tow.  Courage also means the willingness to feed on s**t sandwich in achievement of our goals.   In that interview, she tacitly invites us to dine on that delectable cuisine that many authors embraced as staple food.  To those who express that they are afraid that their ideas have been explored before she reminds them that we have more than forty thousand years of written work.  Don’t stop before trying, her advice goes; don’t lurk in the shadows.  Show up and throw your lot in the mix... It is a valuable advice.  Although we may not be the next Hemingways, we are indeed obliged to throw our piece in the mix.  Bearing in mind that there are a lot of gifted writers out there...

As I continued reading “Willpower Does Not Work” by Dr. Benjamin Hardy, I discovered a paragraph discussing about designing a worldview.  Design... I keep forgetting that my worldview is designed by myself.  Running into this paragraph was a gentle prod to remind me of my responsibilities towards myself. Design a worldview...now that requires a bit of research, a bit of reading, preferably books.   Steve Kotler, in his book “The Art of Impossible”, states that books contain the most condensed form of knowledge and hence the highest Return On Investment (ROI).  To illustrate his point, he crafted a well-thought argument that supported the following figures:            Blog: three minutes earns 3 days (worth of the author’s time)            Article: twenty minutes earns four months            Book: five hours earns fifteen years Of course, the order of magnitude is much more ...

One outcome I need out of books is a continual reshaping of usage of deceptively familiar words.  I think this is a vital antidote to premature assumptions.   Consider the following statement:Changing our environment is vital to personal growth.  It is easy to visualize setting up clutter free environments for better productivity. Indeed Dr. Hardy’s book highly recommends it.   More importantly, however, the book breaks down environment into external, internal, and interpersonal.  The focus of the book is external environment which includes: physical surroundings, people we build relationships with, information we let in, foods we consume, and music we listen to. This is much more expansive than what I would consider environment, namely physical environment.  This initial narrow view is thrown asunder by the approach of the book.  The step or new perspective is easy enough to be digested while it encourages foundational shift in my outlook. Environment...