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Experts and IBM insiders break down Watson’s Jeopardy! win
Yesterday, TED.com hosted a live webstream of IBM experts and insiders discussing supercomputer Watson’s victory against Jeopardy!‘s top human contestants. For anyone who missed it, we’re providing an archived video of this fascinating conversation between host Stephen Baker, author of “Final Jeopardy, Man vs Machine” and Watson’s principal investigator Dr. David Ferrucci, IBM Fellow Kerrie Holley and Columbia professor Herbert Chase.
Watch above or visit the official archive page here >>
100 Ways to Motivate Yourself: Change Your Life Forever
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In this first-ever paperback edition of his long-time best-seller, motivational speaker Steve Chandler helps you create an action plan for living your vision in business and in life. It features 100 proven methods to positively change the way you think and act - methods based on feedback from the hundreds of thousands of corporate and public seminar attendees Chandler speaks to each year.
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Real Ways to Make Money Working from Home
There are two kinds of websites – the ones that sell products and the ones that provide information.
If you can think of a good idea for a webstore and invest enough time and energy into marketing it, you might do well. But keep in mind, you will have to constantly keep at it. There will be orders to fill and plenty of accounting and inventory work to keep you busy, provided you have a good product, there’s demand, and you’ve marketed yourself well. The “If you build it they will come” slogan does not apply to websites. If no one knows you’re out there, the chances of them accidentally stumbling upon it are virtually nil. It can also be expensive if you don’t know how to create or operate your website, or how to market it. You may very likely need to enlist the help of paid professionals.
If the idea of running an online store does not appeal to you, perhaps you’d like to create a website that offers information, rather than products. It could be that you make brilliant cartoons and think that would get a following, or perhaps you’d like to start up a news blog or maybe even a site for dog owners. There’s no limit as to what topics you have to choose from, but my advice is to choose something that you love.
My experience:
I started up a news website along with my husband in 2006. We are both news junkies who love to write. I always wanted to be a journalist, but I knew where that career field was heading and I didn’t really want to be an intern or do time as the obituary writer. So we took our passion for news and for writing and our love for our hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, and we started up a news site.
I can’t say that we’ve gotten rich off of it, but it helps pay the bills. It’s daily traffic rivals and surpasses that of established news media outlets in our market, and we’ve brought on board some award-winning journalists in recent years. It’s also gotten us other opportunities over the years, such as press passes to concerts and sporting events, chances to test out new products or listen to unreleased CDs, and so on.
We’ve stuck with it for so long because it is something that we enjoy. I can’t stress this enough – if you start a website about something that you are not passionate about, chances are you will burn out pretty quickly. It takes a lot of work to build up a successful website, and you have to be willing to put in the time yourself until it is big enough that you need to bring in some extra help.
We’ve saved a lot of costs because I know how to build websites and have a background in graphic design and a bit of SEO know-how. If you don’t have these skills, or a friend who might be willing to lend some of their talent, it will end up costing you more.
This tactic to making money online will most definitely not make you rich, but can help you earn enough to pay for the little things you’d be buying anyways, or give you some extra spending money to treat yourself every once in awhile.
There are plenty of opportunities to take surveys for money. This has never appealed to me, so I can’t honestly direct you to a legit one. They’re out there, but do your research first. Otherwise you might just find yourself added to another spam distribution list.
If you’re good at searching for information online and have an interest in a wide variety of topics, becoming a ChaCha.com guide might be up your alley. People ask questions, you find them the answers, and then you get paid. The more time you spend working, the more you will make.
If you use the internet, you probably use a search engine regularly. Well what if all those searches you conducted could earn you money? With SwagBucks.com, you can earn money for your searches. It pays you to do what you’d already be doing on Google, Yahoo, Bing or whatever your favorite search engine is. You again won’t get rich by doing this, but you can build up enough points to score gift cards to Amazon.com and other places.
My experience:
I did a few surveys for AOL way back in the day that they paid me for, but these kind of things haven’t interested me all that much because they don’t pay out all that well and I’m more interested in making a living online than earning some extra spending money. But I know people who have done these and are pleased with it.
They are out there, but they’re hard to find and pretty darn competitive. These jobs can range from a medical transcriptionist to a search engine optimization specialist. Or, perhaps, you could find a position as a social media consultant.
My experience:
I’ve seen these from time to time posted on Craigslist, but I’ve never actually gotten one yet. My advice to finding them is to scour the job postings on not only your local city, but some big cities like New York as well. Often times there will be work from home jobs posted on only the NYC Craigslist because that’s where the company is based out of, that’s their local Craigslist, and they don’t want to go to the bother of posting it on all of the cities. You’d apply for these jobs the same way you’d do any other job, and your interview will likely be over the phone, unless you happen to be near where the company is based.
Do you have a degree in nutrition? I know Livestrong.com is hiring writers for their site through Demand Media Studios. DMS also hiring writers and editors for every other topic under the sun to be published on eHow.com and their numerous other web properties. You can make about $15 or more per article, and a few dollars for each article that you edit. You can work as much or as little as you want. Once you “claim” an assignment, of which there are tens of thousands, you have 7 days to complete it.
Yahoo bought up Associated Content and have amassed their own army of writers to create articles on numerous topics. They also utilize their writers to do local feature stories for Yahoo Local cities. They work similarly to Demand Media Studios, in that you can “claim” assignments. I signed up to see how it worked, and it seems as though most of the payment for them is “performance based”. In other words, you get paid based on the number of hits your article gets.
Scour the blogger job postings on ProBlogger.net. There are lots of people hiring everyday for people to write blogs for them on numerous topics.
My experience:
I signed up with Demand Media Studios and was accepted, but I haven’t done much since. The number of assignments available and is somewhat overwhelming, but I could easily earn the equivalent of a 9 to 5 salary by writing articles every day. I’ve written for many, many blogs and websites over the years about everything from lawncare to nursing school and mobile phones. There are topics, such as new technology, that I consider myself to be well-versed in and there are others that I am not that familiar with, so I do a lot of research to write well about them.
Most people have at least one talent. Figure out what yours is, and come up with a plan to capitalize on it. This is what finding a work from home job is all about. If you love to knit, why not sell your goods on Etsy? Are you an awesome coder? There’s more work out there than you’ll know what to do with. Are you an expert gardener? Start a blog and share your tips, or maybe even make some expert how-to videos for eHow.com.
You don’t have to quit your job and start working from home overnight. It will likely take you some time to progress to a full work from home job, so start out small and work your way up. If what you do is something that you love you’ll be more successful. You need to be dedicated and motivated, and not easily distracted by the freedoms that working from home offers. Successfully earning a living by working at home CAN be done, but it will most certainly take a lot of hard work.
A place downtown where the freaks all come around
It’s a curious insight into perception of social status that both relies on some social stereotypes and turns others completely on their head.
The article is based on the work of sociologist Lauren Rivera who got a job as a “coat-check girl” in a high class club to observe the selection process in action before revealing her true intentions and interviewing the doormen to work out how they made status judgements of hopeful clubbers.
Through conversations and observations, she found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter. Celebrities and other recognized elites slipped through the door. And people related to or befriended by this “in crowd” often made the cut, too.
Wealth is considered to be one of the strongest indicators of status, yet bouncers frowned upon bribes even though bribes are obvious displays of money. “New Faces,” as the bouncers called unrecognized club-goers, were selected on the basis of gender, dress, race, and nationality. Sometimes the final call boiled down to details as minor as the type of watch that adorned a man’s wrist.
As we’ve discussed before, Rivera is not the first sociologist to immerse herself in the swing of urban night life for her work.
Sociologist Simon Winlow actually got a job as a bouncer to get, er, hands on experience of the role of violence in the night time economy.
Link to Kellog Insight on status judgements in night clubs.
Link to previous Mind Hacks post on work of Simon Winlow.
This Is What I Know So Far: 8 Principles For Positive Thinking
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Fellows Friday with Xavier Alpasa
Interactive Fellows Friday Feature!
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via Facebook. This week, Xavier asks:
What is the business of faith in business?
Click here to respond!
Tell us about where you’re living and what you’re working on now.
As a Jesuit priest, I was assigned to a mission island called Isla Culion. The island is here in Palawan, an island province of the Philippines. Because of the financial crisis, the school here, which taught poor children from grade school through college, tragically had to close its grade school.
To generate sustainable income for the rest of the school, the school board (chaired by Father Joel Tabora, SJ) decided to invest in the country’s first and only ecotourism social enterprise. Through the generosity of Ms. Malena Fernandez, Hotel Maya was born. Hotel Maya already attracts some tourists. Our dream is that Hotel Maya not only provides enough money to support the school, but that it also becomes the national center for ecotourism and ecological conservation.
What is unique about Hotel Maya?
Hotel Maya is also a laboratory for the school’s new entrepreneurial ecotourism course, which is an extension from Ateneo de Naga University. The enrollment of the school has grown. Before, the school would have around only 10 to 11 students enrolled in the college. But because of the new tourism course, which is more appropriate for the area, it has attracted around 80 students. The project has attracted tourists as well. The number before would be around 3,000 a year. It has already doubled to around 6,000.
We are very happy that National Geographic has included us in the 20 Best Trips of 2011, which has generated interest from the international community. Isla Culion is considered to be the Philippines’ last frontier. The forest is still virgin, the sea is still protected. The ecotourism thrust of the project promotes responsible travel. We want to be able to promote a different kind of tourism whereby people can go for volunteerism. At the same time, they mix with indigenous people, eat with them, build a house for them, build a water system.
The other thrust of the project is for meaningful journeys. We want to be known not just for our fine white sand beaches, not just for the coral reefs, but also for the entire package of the experience, because aside from experiencing the community, visitors also get to know the history of the island.
Tell us about Culion’s unique history.
The tourism initiative is actually a very appropriate measure for the island, because the island used to be the world’s largest leper colony. There were around 6,000 lepers walking around the island.
For more than a century the island was feared, dreaded, marginalized and really practically isolated. So the ecotourism thrust becomes a very potent medicine for that matter, which then reconnects the island to the world.
So it’s a profound experience to see tourists going to the island and touching base and really encountering, discussing, dialoguing, conversing … the tourism is a profound experience for the people.
This summer we hope to start our historical reenactment. We want to reenact the first day when the lepers arrived, when the Jesuit priests and the St. Paul de Chartes nuns literally carried them. We want to be able to reenact when children were actually separated from their parents. The parents would be able to visit their children divided by a glass wall. We want to be able to capture the tragedy of a mother crying to see her child, a mother who cannot even embrace her own child because they’re divided by a glass wall.
We want to be able to capture this history because we want to capture the healing that happened. We want to also be known as a healing island.
You were selected as a finalist in the Unreasonable Institute’s Fellows program.
Yes, in the Unreasonable Institute’s Finalist Marketplace, there are 45 finalists, and the Hotel Maya project was one selected. Now we are being tested for entrepreneurial skills. The first 25 finalists to raise US$8,000 get to be Unreasonable Institute Fellows. People can vote for us on the Isla CULION Missions webpage on the Unreasonable Institute’s website. I hope people will support Isla CULION Missions with their votes in this online voting competition.
The top 25 finalists get to stay in the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, Colorado for six weeks to meet mentors, funders, philanthropists, and venture capitalists. The first week, the maximum people could donate was $10. This week it’s $500, and the cap goes up each week. The minute we reach $8,000, we get in. So we hope to be able to get more votes from different parts of the world.
Right now we’re ranked 18th of the 45 finalists. Since we’re located on a remote island with only eight hours of power each day, and very intermittent Internet connection, we have difficulty reaching out to the world. It’s an extra challenge in promoting the island.
The race actually ends March 10, but because it is a race, whoever reaches the $8,000 even before March 10 could dislodge us.
You have a lot of experience with successful social entrepreneurship. Tell us about Rags2Riches, the organization you helped form.
As seminarians, most of us were all assigned to Payatas, which is the garbage dumpsite capital of the Philippines. When I was there, I would notice mothers weaving foot rugs from scraps they had collected from the dump.
At that time, they were just selling them for 9 pesos a piece. The middleman would come in and buy them at 9 pesos, and bring them to the department stores in the malls and sell them for 25 pesos. I thought there was injustice there because the middleman were not doing anything except carrying the rugs to the department store, and they would get the chunk of the profit.
So I told the women, “If you get organized, as one body, you will have more bargaining power and this middleman will have less power over you.” They agreed, so we organized and started our own stall at a market.
With some marketing help from friends, rich buyers started approaching the stall. And the rich people were suddenly connecting with these poor women. It was just a delight to see the richest of the country and the poorest of our country talking and connecting.
That was just the beginning of Rags2Riches success, though.
Yes, it started with the foot rugs, and then Rags2Riches grew even more.
We convinced the most famous Filipino designer, Rajo Laurel, to meet with us for dinner. He held a foot rug in his hand, and he said, “You know, this is not a foot rug.” He rolled it up, put some buttons on it, and said, “This is a wine holder.” So the foot rug that used to be nine pesos was then converted to a wine holder, and was sold for 500 pesos.
Then he grabbed another rug, and said, “This is not a foot rug. This is a clutch bag.” And it was then converted to a 900 pesos bag. Later, Rajo went to the Payatas and taught the women how to adapt the foot rugs.
The women always tell me, “You know, it’s really more than the money, it’s more than the profit, that we earn. It’s connecting to the people.” It’s the acknowledgement of their presence, the acknowledgement of their dignity.
So when we have fashion shows in hotels in posh areas, when we get the top models, we always end with the mothers from our area also walking the runway.
Our dream is that someday we hope to be able to build a Rags2Riches village. We hope to be able to provide the women a very good environment, where they are all neighbors, and they make their bags in that neighborhood.
Rags2Riches has four P’s that we are very conscious of: the typical triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit, are the first three. But we add one more, which is Positive Influence. We hope that Rags2Riches becomes a showcase for other young people to get into social entrepreneurship. And we’ve actually had a number of followers who have also ventured into social entrepreneurship. We’re very happy that Rags to Riches is becoming an inspiration for young people to get into social entrepreneurship. They are realizing that there is a career in it, and that they serve people and also have meaningful careers.
There are many aspiring social entrepreneurs out there who are trying to take their passion and ideas to the next level. What is one piece of advice you would give to them based on your own experiences and successes? Learn more about how to become a great social entrepreneur from all of the TED Fellows on the Case Foundation blog.
The very first advice I would give them is to stick to the noble intentions. When you stick to noble intentions, you attract other noble intentions. And it becomes a convergence of good will, of people wanting to help. When you stick to that faithfully, 100 percent, 24/7, people see through you with great transparency, without you having to talk about the details of your mission. It will show, it will bear good fruits. And the good fruits are then harvested to become seeds again of future generations.
Second, because it’s social entrepreneurship, one shouldn’t forget that the business acumen will have to be there. You need to really put in the best of business skills, so it’s important to actually network. It’s important to attract some of the best marketing professionals you have, the best think tanks for finance, so as to decide on your margins, your pricing, and the other financial strategies. The business acumen will have to be there.
Third, regardless of one’s religion, I also believe that there is a need to have a spirituality. There needs to be a belief in the beyond, the Divine, the Transcendence — however you may call it. Because, like any business, there will be difficulties. And it’s important to stick to the mission and see the picture beyond the obstacles one will encounter. All entrepreneurs will always encounter problems. And the only buoy, the only bridge that will bring you beyond all these obstacles is to see the Transcendent beyond all those obstacles.
Next, social entrepreneurship is about the poor. It’s about helping. So keep the focus on the poor. We do all of this because we want to alleviate poverty. Social entrepreneurship isn’t just a fad that we want to be a part of, because we want to be known as social entrepreneurs. We need to keep the poor as a focus. They are really the super stars for this. They are the reason why social entrepreneurship was born. We must always keep them in mind.
You yourself were born into a poor family. Tell us about your background.
Yes, I grew up in a poor family. My parents did not finish basic education.
So they were really struggling with poverty when they got married. But they dreamt of a good education for my sister and myself. They didn’t want the two of us to experience the same poverty that they experienced.
Initially my sister and I went to a public school. When I was in the public school, I would share my textbook with my seatmate, because there would be around 50 students and there would be only 25 books. So Monday, Wednesday, and Friday would be my turn with the book, Tuesdays and Thursdays was my classmate’s. That’s how it went for my entire elementary school.
My parents ended up taking on a lot of debt to put my sister and me into private Catholic education, all the way through college.
My father’s job was to haul cases of beer on his shoulder. When I was in my second year in college, he injured his knee and he had to retire. So I became a working scholar. I got a scholarship and I also served as a waiter for a fast food restaurant here.
When I graduated, I applied for the same company that my father was working for, San Miguel Corporation, the beer company. Luckily I was admitted.
I imagine you had a very different position than your father did.
I was a corporate planning officer under the office of the president at San Miguel Corporation, the top company in the Philippines. In his work for the company, my father had sat at the back of a truck. Now I sat at an executive desk. I was very happy to have fulfilled the dream of my parents.
Growing up, the four of us lived in a very small room, just a six square-meter space. And my father would always dream of having a house. So when I began to earn a higher salary and was offered a housing loan, the first thing I did was buy a house for my parents.
I remember my father entering the house very emotionally, actually crying, because it was his first house ever in his entire life.
What led to your decision to enter the religious life?
At the height of all that success, the Pope came to the Philippines for World Youth Day in 1995. I was chosen to be the emcee of that day. There were 4 million people gathered. I remember that night when we instructed the people to light their candles … there was a sea of light. And it gave me goose bumps, it was a religious experience. I was just a few steps away from the Pope.
And all of a sudden I was asking myself, “Oh my God, where did this all come from? Where are all these blessings coming from? I want to be able to embrace the Giver and not just the gifts. I want to be able to give back.”
So that same night I decided I would do everything to give back. To offer everything that I had: my talent, my life, my education, my experience. And looking back, I realize it is really true that nothing happens by chance.
God allowed me to come from a poor family so that I would intimately know how it is to be poor. And God also allowed me to graduate from poverty by working hard, by studying, by entrepreneurship. My business background is what I use for social entrepreneurship, my poor family background is my inspiration to help the poor.
And I dream of the beyond. I dream of impossible things, because impossible things have happened! Miracles do happen. My slogan will always be: “I don’t believe in miracles. I rely on them.”
Miracles can happen when we believe. Rags2Riches is just one proof. And I hope that the same miracle will happen for Culion, for Hotel Maya. It’s starting to happen now.
How has the TED Fellowship affected your life?
Magically. I couldn’t believe the power of that label, that seal of approval. It’s like when you’re a TED Fellow, people immediately support you. People immediately give you much credit. The integrity multiplies a million times.
I met a lot of good friends during the TED Global Fellowship. We keep in touch and exchange emails, and some even continue to help me in my work.
Productivity with Tablets: Paradox or Reality?
No one can deny it. In 2010 we saw that the idea of a tablet computer take hold with the iPad. Consumers love the idea of using a tablet to watch video, browse the web, read e-books, and of course just use Facebook. But, even with all of those consumption actions there is a hint of making yourself more productive with an always-on, always available device.
The iPad is a phenom really, and it has been chosen by consumers as the tablet to get right now. Mostly because they don’t really have a compelling choice of anything else. Because of this adoption of the iPad, this article will concentrate on the idea of being productive with the iPad rather than another tablet, but really it could be applied to any tablet-based form-factored device.
The question: is the iPad just a consumption device or can we actually use this thing to make ourselves more productive?
One of the best things about the tablet form factor is that it provides the user with a bunch of screen real estate that their smartphones can’t and the portability that their laptops lack. This allows for viewing information and media to become something enjoyable and easy as opposed to something annoying on a small form-factored device.
The extra screen space gives the user an expansive view into their data. With the extra screen size, developers can take advantage of newer ways to interact with the apps they create. For instance in the stock Mail app for the iPad, users have the ability so view their inbox or selected folder on the left while they read their email on the right. This essentially doubles your perspective giving you an easier interface to use.
The idea of a larger screen only works if the productivity apps you use take advantage of it. Some of the best iPad productivity apps that exploit screen real estate are the stock Mail, Calendar, Contact apps, as well as apps like Toodledo, Omnifocus, Goodreader, Dropbox, Pages, Keynote, Numbers, and Evernote.
I remember watching the live blog on Engadget when the iPad was initially released and seeing Mr. Jobs’ hands tip-tapping away on the landscape on-screen keyboard. I also remember thinking to myself, “there is no way I could ever be productive that way!” Well, I have to say I was partially right.
Input on the iPad, to put it bluntly, is a drag. For short replies and quick edits to documents it works fine, but if you need to pound out an essay for school, proposal for work, or even just a nice email to your mother, the onscreen keyboard just doesn’t do it.
There are two arguments to this:
1. The iPad isn’t made more input. It’s a consumption device.
I can’t stand this remark. If the iPad was a “consumption” device as so many tech pundits suggest, then why would Apple release a keyboard stand to go with their device? Which brings us to the second argument…
2. You can always get the iPad keyboard or a Bluetooth keyboard.
This argument makes more sense, but in practice destroys the portability of the iPad. That is if you have to carry the keyboard around with you. I opted for this solution but found after months of experimenting, the bluetooth keyboard just sits at home.
So, the input dilemma is very real on the iPad and any other tablet sized device. What I have found that is after getting acclimated to the iPad, that input isn’t as irritating as it used to be. I wouldn’t go out and right the next great American novel on the thing, but for simple task, calendar, email, and notes entry, the iPad works OK.
This is something to definitely take into consideration when purchasing an iPad or any tablet device for that matter. Just how long does that battery last? I believe that the iPad has set the gold bar for battery life on a device this size that performs this well. I couldn’t now imagine using another tablet that gets less battery life than it, as I use my iPad for reviewing projects and email constantly throughout the day.
So, how does the iPad stack up as a productivity tool?
With its awesome battery life, screen real estate giving you a large window into your data while being portable, and being better than OK at inputting data, the iPad shows us that it isn’t only for consuming content, it can be used to organize and make available your data to you at any time.
Although the iPad is great for reviewing and organizing your data, it still lacks in the area of actually creating things. As more and more tablet devices start shipping this year, it will be interesting to see what manufacturers come up with to correct this problem with content creation on the tablet form factor. But, for standard review of documents, quick edits, list organization, email, and information review, the tablet form factor is extremely promising and may just end up making your more productive over time.
Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilized technology to get more and better things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Dates and GTD – Everything You Need to Know
One of the aspects of GTD that I have had the hardest time with is the idea of dates; be it start dates, due dates, milestones, whatever. In GTD, Mr. Allen doesn’t speak of date information related to actions very much other than the brief discussion of giving yourself a hard landscape by ways of your calendar. So, to that end, let’s take a look at the wide-world of dates and GTD, and how they can be used within your system.
Quoting Merlin Mann regarding start dates:
“Start dates are ace. Start dates are a way of punting stuff into the future.”
I couldn’t agree more. Start dates allow you to plan your actions and projects effectively while keeping things that aren’t that important or time sensitive out of your hair for the time being. This allows you to concentrate on the stuff that really matters at the moment without being bogged down by tasks and projects that are in your system but aren’t due for weeks or even months down the road.
Because of the awesomeness of start dates I can no longer go back to a system that doesn’t support start dates as a field for a task or project. The two apps that come to mind that do this well are Toodledo and OmniFocus, but I’m sure there are at least a dozen more. If you have a ton of actions on your lists you should definitely consider using start dates to get them out of the way so you can concentrate on current actions and projects.
Ever have self-talk like this regarding projects?
“Let’s see. I have a report due by the end of the month and have at least 10 actions that go with it. I’m waiting to hear back from John, get the notes from the meeting, summarize the notes, make an outline, etc. So, by next week I should have have the notes summarized and the outline completed. I’ll give that due date of 2/27/11.”
The above is a good example of “fake due dates”; these are arbitrary dates that you set up for actions within a project that are due before the actual due date project. In my experience these types of due dates don’t work. What they tend to do is allow procrastinators procrastinate more, because when they see due dates they push everything back to the last minute.
Here is a much better approach; instead of giving all your project actions fake due dates, make sure that your actions are “highly doable”, meaning that they are something that can be done within 10 to 25 minutes. This will help a project move a long much faster. What you may find is that you get more done than you would have giving all these actions fake due dates.
Real due dates are the actual due date of an action or project. These type of dates are usually put on us by project manager types or are set by yourself as the date that projects or actions are to be completed.
When I receive a due date for a school project or assignment at work I always add it to the action or the project and try very hard to avoid the fake due date syndrome I spoke of above. Sometimes in my project notes I will give myself milestones saying that if by such-and-such date I have a certain number of actions done then I am on track, otherwise I need to clear my back log of tasks to consider myself to be on time. This works well as it doesn’t clog my system with fake due dates, yet still allows me to check my progress on actions and projects related to dates.
I will admit though, if I do have a long standing project that has a hard due date, I put in on my calendar as an all day event. Be it “right or wrong” per GTD, I don’t really care. What this has done for me is put things into perspective during my weekly review of actions and projects allowing me to see when large projects or certain actions are due at a glance of the calendar. Other than these hard due dates, the calendar is hands off for anything other than what was mentioned above.
Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilized technology to get more and better things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.
Funky shit
In the 2007 book Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic psychologist Russell Hurlburt argued that modern research methods make accurate accounts of inner experience possible whereas Schwitzgebel, a philosopher, disagreed saying that language simply cannot match our rich subjective experience and is prone to error.
However, a decade earlier The Jungle Brothers had strongly supported the idea that language is simply not up to the job of capturing our conscious experience.
I got so much funky shit inside my brain
I couldn’t explain, couldn’t explain
You wouldn’t understand, I couldn’t explainExplanation of the funk essential trapped in my brain
Couldn’t do it, make me wonder how a world maintain
Got emcees frontin’ total masquerade
Screamin’ toast had to touch them up with my blade
Although their general theory now has a number of proponents, as far as I know, they are unique in proposing that “Screamin’ toast had to touch them up with my blade”.
Link to video of The Jungle Brothers’ ‘Brain’.
Guitar Hero: Aerosmith Wii standalone SOFTWARE ONLYWhy You & Your Business Need to be Involved in Social Media
Back in the 1980s and even the 1990s, if your business wasn’t listed in the phonebook, you had to rely on word of mouth to be discovered by potential new customers. Then along came the internet and slowly businesses started putting up websites. It was great because you could put a lot more information on a website than you could in a small add in the Yellow Pages. With the internet well established now, most businesses do have some kind of web presence. If you don’t, you’re losing out on a lot of potential business. It’s like the phonebook of yesteryear – you need to be on it.
Now, in the past few years, social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter have grown into something more than just a place to connect with old friends or classmates. It’s now a way to give your business a public face to interact with the world and your customers. If you’re not on Facebook, you’re missing out on potential customers. The same goes for Twitter.
As a consumer, I’ve found both Facebook and Twitter to be excellent ways to interact with companies. Instead of calling customer service and then being put on hold forever, only to be connected with someone who can barely speak English, I can post a message on their Facebook wall or send them a message. If I really want quick action, I’ll @ reply them on Twitter. Companies are a lot more responsive, especially if you have a complaint, if it’s out there for the whole word to see.
But it’s not just lodging complaints that Facebook and Twitter are good for. Since Facebook and Twitter are sites that people visit every day, you can use your account to constantly put out information about your company and to interact. This will keep your company fresh in their mind, more often than if you just had a website because they’d only visit it when they need to. Social media is like commercials on television for a business; you can get your info on the streams of hundreds, thousands, and even millions of people easily and for free.
Don’t own a business? It’s still a good idea to be involved. Whether you’re an entreprenuer, a freelancer, or a working stiff, you’ll find benefits to utilizing social media. As a business and website owner, I can’t even begin to tell you how many contacts I have made through social media. It’s gotten me interviews with people, press passes to concerts, PR contacts, media contacts, new writers, and so much more. If I did not have a social media presence and if my business did not have a social media presence, I can’t imagine where we would be today. As a freelance writer, I’ve also utilized social media to promote myself and gain contacts, and it also gives people who read some of my work to interact with me personally.
If you’re in the market for a new job, you know how important connections are. Networking, networking, networking is key. While it probably helps more to know someone in “real life”, you can still make connections online that could help you now or in the future.
If you are one of the social networking holdouts, it’s time to reconsider. If security is your concern, rest assured that if someone really wanted to find where you live, they could do so easily without having to look you up on Facebook. You’re missing out on opportunities by not giving you or your business a public face on these social networking sites. Just try to refrain from posting photos of drunken revelry or other questionable images that could land you in some hot water.
That being said, make sure to join Lifehack.org on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter. There are some exciting things coming soon!
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Are You Addicted to Stress? The Experts Weigh In
Ever since the 1980s, there has been an increasing amount of media coverage on stress-related topics. For decades, scientists, researchers, and doctors have been investigating how the human body responds to stress, and whether it is possible for some people to become addicted to stress.
While there are no hard figures to reveal how many Americans may be suffering from stress addiction, experts do agree that people suffering from this problem face varying degrees of danger to their health.
Are you addicted to stress? And if so, does that mean you will be facing serious health problems down the road? Or, will you be one of the few people who benefits from stress addiction?
The Type A Paradox
A bevy of medical experts have noted that there are a variety of human responses to stress, and not all of them have to be negative. In fact, high-strung Type-A personalities may actually benefit from stressful lifestyles based on their genetics and lifestyle preferences.
”Anyone familiar with the corporate world has had experiences with driven executives who seem to thrive on stressful circumstances that most others could not tolerate,” says Dr. Waino W. Suojanen, a professor of management at Georgia State University. ”There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that some executives deliberately seek out the management life because they get a high out of controlling people. Indeed, the making of decisions seems to become addicting.”
So why would someone benefit from stress addiction? Dr. Robert Ader of the University of Rochester, has studied stress addiction for many years, and he explains that stress can actually have some beneficial effects on the body. ”Through our animal work we have hypothesized that it might be possible that some people might need stress because it elicits the release of catecholamines, such as adrenaline, in the blood stream, and this is not necessarily bad because it might increase resistance to some types of disease.”
Dr. Paul J. Rosch adds that because of these unexpected health benefits of stress, prescribing the right medical treatments can be very challenging. “The Type A individual has perhaps become addicted to his own adrenaline and unconsciously seeks ways to get those little surges,” he explains.
“The Type A individual is apt to be irritable and depressed. Thus, recuperating from a heart attack by spending three weeks on a deserted beach might be a perfect prescription for one individual, but lethal for some Type A’s, who would be ‘off the wall’ in a matter of hours.”
Stress and Genetics
Stress, when combined with certain genetic factors, can increase a person’s risk for developing depression or even chronic fatigue disorder. According to Dr. David Mrazek, “People with a genetic variant of the serotonin transporter gene [are] more likely to become depressed [if] they have experienced stressful situations.”
While he notes that the types of stress caused by childhood abuse or major medical are more likely to affect those with the genetic variant, even “the hassles of everyday life [were] associated with an increased risk of depression if a person had this genetic variant.”
Stress While Pregnant
Even if you are one of the rare people who thrive under stressful circumstances, all bets are off if you are a woman who becomes pregnant. Stress is arguably the most dangerous thing a pregnant woman can be exposed to. Stress during pregnancy has been linked to all kinds of ill effects for the developing baby.
For example, stress can cause miscarriages, lower IQ scores for babies, and can affect the development of the child’s immune system. In fact, one Harvard study revealed that children who had mothers with highly stressful pregnancies were more likely to suffer from auto-immune disease, including asthma and allergies.
Stress Addiction Warning Signs
According to Debbie Mandel, author of “Addicted to Stress: A Woman’s 7 Step Program to Reclaim Joy and Spontaneity in Life”, there are many warning signs that can indicate that a person has become addicted to stress. Mandel says that if you answer “yes” to any of the questions below, you may be at risk for developing stress addiction:
“1. Do you tune out during conversations thinking about other things?
2. Do you feel rushed wherever you are because you feel that you ought to be completing the next task somewhere else?
3. Do you feel uncomfortable, worried, and nervous in your mind or body when you don’t have something you must absolutely do right now?”
Mandel says that clients she treats for stress addiction get hooked on the surge of adrenaline they get when rushing around, frantically trying to check off items on their to-do lists. Many stress addicts, she adds, are also using their stress to keep from dealing with feelings of inadequacy. “In the case of stress addiction, all this busyness stems from the addict’s constant need to prove the self, suppressing feelings of unattractiveness, unworthiness and inadequacy seeping out through the seams of body and soul. It is a case of compulsion versus passion,” she explains.
Conclusion
There are good kinds of stress, and bad kinds of stress. Falling in love definitely counts as “good stress”, and getting fired is unquestionably “bad stress”. No two causes of stress are created equal, and it also seems that no two people will have the exact same response a given stressful event.
Even if you thrive on stress, your addiction may be putting your health at risk. As with everything in life, moderation is best. So, if you absolutely love the adrenaline rush of multi-tasking on 12 urgent projects, you need to make sure you find a little time each day to relax. Examine your motivations for reveling in stress, and make sure you balance your long-term health with your lifestyle choices.
Tucker is a writer and social media professional living in New England. When she's not staring into a tiny electric box, she engages in pointless acts of stupidity at BadBoozeReview.com and posts daily at MargeryJones.com
Brain area for empty news stories discovered
Scientists are heralding a breakthrough in brain scan technology after a team at Oxford University produced full colour images of a human brain that shows nothing of any significance.
‘This is an amazing discovery’, said leading neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield, ‘the pictures tell us nothing about how the brain works, provide us with no insights into the nature of human consciousness, and all with such lovely colours.’…
The development, which has been widely reported around the world, is also significant because it allows journalists to publish big fancy pictures of the brain that look really impressive while having little or no explanatory value.
‘These scans are fantastic,’ said Lawrence McGinty, Science Editor for ITV News, ‘not only are they bright and colourful but the graphics department have even converted them into 3D and can make them spin around the screen while I stand in front waving my hands about. None of this helps to explain anything, but it does it so much better the old black and white pictures. They were rubbish.’
Link to ‘New brain scan reveals nothing at all’ (via @michaelmeadon).
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What Stops us from Exploring, Developing and Maximising our Potential?
cc by M0les“You miss one hundred percent of the shots you never take.” (Wayne Gretzky) I’m not particularly gifted (sigh) but I am pretty driven. I choose to be proactive, focused and disciplined (mostly) because I’m fascinated by what we human beings can achieve when we commit to exploring our potential and when we don’t allow our thinking or emotions to get in the way of our possibilities. In some ways, I guess my drive and determination come (in part) from my lack of inherent ability.
Who knew that being not-very-talented would have an upside?
Growing up, I wasn’t a great athlete, student, musician or a great anything for that matter. I was good at a few things (okay, eating), average at a few more and pretty crap at a whole bunch of things. For all the money my parents spent on years of guitar lessons, I should be frickin’ Carlos Santana, Jimi Hendrix and Slash all rolled into one. If only there had been some musical ability in the mix, I could have been anything.
Based on what I still remember (and can still play), I think my parents invested somewhere in the vicinity of four thousand dollars per chord. Having said that, if you ever need somebody to belt out a horrible acoustic rendition of House of the Rising Sun at your next party, I’m your guy.
What do you mean – “no thanks”?
That hurts.
And if, per chance, something is in need of repair at your house, whatever you do, don’t ask me to fix it. Sure, I may look handy but don’t be fooled; as a repairman, I’m about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike. Combine my total lack of technical and mechanical aptitude with my enormous-for-no-good-reason ego, my enthusiasm, my unwarranted optimism (about my potential to fix things) and my ineptitude with tools – and I’m sure to create more havoc than harmony at your place.
The strange thing is, part of me always thinks I’m going to be able to fix whatever it is I’m taking apart – despite my abysmal track record. It’s the one area that I don’t seem to learn in. Maybe it’s my over-developed optimism-gene kicking in. Fortunately, I’ve always had girlfriends with great mechanical aptitude. And large forearms.
Stop it.
Enough about me.
Your Best Life
When it comes to the matter of creating and sustaining our best life (whatever that means to each of us personally), the question we should ask ourselves is not, “how much potential do I have?” but rather, “how much of that potential am I currently using?”
Earlier this year, I published a fantastic letter I received from Mel - one of our readers and part of our community. If you haven’t read it, I suggest you take a peek. Her achievement of creating and maintaining such a significant change in her world is inspirational. She lost 56 kgs (123 lbs) and has kept it off for a year and a half. But more important than the weight-loss (in my opinion), is the fact that she has also created and maintained amazing change on many levels beyond the physical.
Go Mel.
After years of stopping and starting. Of wasting time. Of not reaching her goal. Of living in a body which embarrassed her. Of feeling self-conscious. Of hiding in her house. Of crying. Of avoiding people. Of pretending to be happy. Of shortness of breath. Of poor health. Of chaffing. And of walking to the letterbox in the dark… Mel changed. Massively. She transformed her body, her thinking, her habits, her behaviours and her life.
Her entire reality.
Now, we could spend hours debating and discussing why it took her so long (to change once and for all) but the pertinent question for this chat is:
Did she always have the potential to create amazing change?
Of course, the answer is yes. She didn’t wake up one day and miraculously possess more potential. No, she woke up one day and started using what had always been there. And to keep using it no matter what. What she didn’t always have was the mindset, the awareness, the discipline or the momentum – but she always had the potential for incredible transformation.
For a range of reasons, there was a time when she was not (genuinely) ready. Not prepared to pay the price. Not willing to get that uncomfortable. Not willing to face her fears. The potential was there but it wasn’t being exploited – kind of like the guy who buys the amazing car and then leaves it in the garage because he’s too scared somebody might scratch it. Or resent his success. Or steal it when he’s not looking.
And when Mel created the right internal environment - when she got to that point – she opened the door to something that was always there: her own personal world of amazing. Her potential.
You and Me?
The amount of inherent potential you and I have is finite but how much of that potential we use is completely optional. Isn’t that great news? Of course, there’s no way of knowing, measuring or quantifying exactly how much potential we each have – or how much of that potential we will typically use in a lifetime (various figures like three percent get thrown around) - but it’s my belief, observation and experience that most of us don’t use most of what we have.
So the next obvious question is…
What Stops us from Exploring, Developing and Maximising our Potential?
A bunch of things but mostly, it’s a fear thing.
Fear of failure. Of embarrassment. Of being judged. Of the unknown. Of being ridiculed. Of the commitment required. Of the potential pain, discomfort and risk. The day we decide that we’re prepared to deal with those inevitable realities of the human experience, and the day we stop trying to keep everybody except ourselves happy, is the day the transformation begins.
Personally, I’ve spent years making mistakes. Taking risks. Being criticised. Embarrassed. Judged. Labelled. Liked. Disliked. I’m okay with all of it because where there’s discomfort, there’s growth. There’s learning. And in the middle of it all, I found me. Despite many protests, I went to university (for the first time) at thirty-six. After being told that I wouldn’t get a book published, I wrote my first book at thirty-seven. I did my first (regular) TV gig at forty-two. I didn’t know what a blog was at forty-one. I’ve had two failed businesses. In order to build my speaking skills, I did hundreds of presentations for little or no money. For years. Some of them were horrible. I was horrible. My ‘apprenticeship’ into the world of professional speaking was a ten-year journey. I could go on, but I don’t want to bore you. Needless to say, my failures lessons far outweigh my triumphs.
In some ways, the ‘safest’ thing for me to do would be to not share my thoughts, ideas, opinions and beliefs in such a public way. Some people don’t like it. Doing what I do – sharing my philosophies with a large audience – means that I will be criticised, disliked and uncomfortable on a regular basis. That’s okay, I’ll simply choose to live, laugh, love and learn. Because I can.
One of my favourite mentors at university (Dr. Paul Callery) once told me:
“If you don’t want to offend anyone, then say nothing, do nothing and be nothing.”
Smart man.
I’ll finish today’s post with a message I often share with my charges:
I don’t care how young, old, fat, fit, tall, small, genetically gifted, intelligent, qualified, skilled, experienced or inherently talented you are (or aren’t), all I care about (in terms of you creating lasting change in your world), is what you do with what you’ve been given. You can’t change your genetics but you can change how you use them. You can’t change your chronological age but you can change what you do (choices, behaviours, habits) at your age. And in the process, you can lower your biological age. You can’t change other people but you can change how you behave and react around them. You can’t alter your level of natural ability (potential), but you can determine how much of that ability you tap into, exploit and develop. You can’t change your past but you can change the way you let it influence and impact on your present and your future. That is, you don’t need to be limited by, defined by or determined by your history (as many people are). Your history doesn’t necessarily tell you anything about your potential and is often a poor indicator of what’s possible for your future. If you’re like many, then your achievements – or perhaps lack of achievements – are more a reflection of your fear (to take a chance and get uncomfortable) than they are a reflection of your potential.
And finally, don’t allow your self-limiting, over-thinking, fear-influenced mind to stand between you and happiness. You are good enough, talented enough, courageous enough and definitely worth it.
Enjoy your journey.
And your potential.
Friday, February 25, 2011
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How to use experts — and when not to: Noreena Hertz on TED.com
We make important decisions every day — and we often rely on experts to help us decide. But, says economist Noreena Hertz, relying too much on experts can be limiting and even dangerous. She calls for us to start democratizing expertise — to listen not only to “surgeons and CEOs, but also to shop staff.” (Recorded at TEDSalon, November 2010, in London, UK. Duration: 18:19)
Watch Noreena Hertz’ talk on TED.com where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 800+ TEDTalks.
A note on human behaviour
Enjoying the Natural History Museum yesterday, I came across this exhibit somewhere in the geology section:
The exhibit is a serious of columns, which you pass from right to left. The penultimate column is to illustrate the idea of ice, and you’re invited by a palm shape to put your palm to the column (which is indeed cold). The interesting thing is the final column, which is meant to illustrate gravity somehow (it was broken yesterday, so I don’t know how it is supposed to do this). Notice how the metal around the IVY of gravity is worn away. None of the other columns had this. Obviously hundreds of visitors a day are drawn to this exhibit, press their palms to the ICE column and then go on to touch, in exactly the same way, the GRAVITY column even though this isn’t part of the way they are supposed to interact with the exhibit.
Psychologists know that what people have done before is the best predictor of what they will do in the future. Whole industries are devoted to helping us establish, or break, habits. This exhibit on geological forces illustrates how easily some behavioural precedents can be set. We love touching things, and although we aren’t meant to, permission to do it once is all that is required to set off an immediate repetition of the behaviour.
Create Time to Change Your Life
When I decided to change my life a little over 5 years ago, I had a very common problem: I didn’t have the time.
I wanted to exercise and find time for my family and eat healthier (instead of the fast-food junk I’d been eating) and read more and write and be more productive and increase my income.
Unfortunately there are only 24 hours in a day, and we sleep for about 8 of them. Subtract the hours we spend eating (3), showering and dressing and fixing up (1), cleaning and running errands (1), driving (2), working (8) … and you’re left with an hour or two at most. Often less.
Eventually I figured out how to do all the things I wanted to do. I’ve achieved all of that and more, and in fact I have more leisure time now than ever. But first I had to figure out the fundamental problem: how could I find the time to change my life?
I know many of you face the same problem — you’ve told me as much. So I thought I’d share some of what I did in the beginning, in hopes that it’ll help.
You must make a commitment. You have to decide that you really want to make a change, and that it’s more important than almost anything else.
For me, only my family was more important — and in fact I was making these change for my family as well as for myself. So these changes I was making were really my top priority in life.
It has to be that urgent for you. Think of this not as “improving your life” but saving it. The changes I made saved my life — I am so much healthier, my marriage is better, my relationships with my kids have improved, I am happier rather than depressed.
If you don’t feel you’re saving your life then you won’t make the tough changes needed.
Once I made the mental commitment, I took small steps to give myself a little wiggle room to breathe and move:
Cut out TV. I watched less TV than ever before (eventually I watched none, though now I watch a few shows a week over the Internet). For many people this one change will free up a couple hours or more.Read less junk. I used to read a lot of things on the Internet that were just entertainment. Same with magazines. I cut that stuff out early so I could focus on what was more important.Go out less. I used to go to a lot of movies and to dinner and drinking. I cut that out (mostly) for awhile, to make time.Wake earlier. Not everyone is going to do this but it was a good step for me. I found that I had more time exercising and working in the morning before anyone woke up — the world was quiet and at peace and without interruptions. (Read more.)In general, find the things that eat up your time that are less important than the changes you want to make. That’s almost everything except the things you need to live — work and eating and stuff like that. Cut back on them where you can.
I had a lot of commitments in my life — I coached soccer, was on the PTA board, served on a lot of committees at work, had social commitments as well, worked on a number of projects.
Slowly I cut them out. They seemed important but in truth none of them were as important as the life I wanted to create, the changes I wanted to make. Lots of things are important — but which are the absolute most important? Make a decision.
If you are having trouble making a decision, try an experiment. Cut out a commitment just for a little while. See whether you suffer from cutting it out, or whether you like the extra time.
If you’re worried about offending people, don’t. Send an email or make a phone call and explain that you’d love to keep doing the commitment but you just don’t have the time and don’t want to half-ass it. The person might try to talk you into staying but be firm — respect yourself and your time and the changes you’re trying to make.
Here’s a secret: the people and organizations you’ve been helping or working with will live. They will go on doing what they were doing without you, and (omg!) they will survive without you. Your departure will not cause the world to collapse. Let go of the guilt.
Eventually I made many other changes, including:
Making bills and savings and debt payments automatic. I set everything up online so that I wouldn’t have to run errands or spend time making payments. This put my debt reduction on automatic, and I got out of debt. (Read more.)Streamlining errands. I tried to cut as many errands out of my life as possible. Often that meant changing my life in some way but I adjusted and things became simpler. I cleaned as I went so I didn’t have a lot of cleaning to do on weekends. I did the few errands I had all at once to save running around.Work less. I would set limits to how much I could work, forcing myself to pick the important tasks and to get those tasks done on time. I learned which tasks needed to be done and which could be dropped. I became much more effective and worked less.Say no. When people asked me to do stuff that was important to them but not to me, I learned to politely decline. Instead I focused on what was important to me.Slowly I learned to simplify. I simplified my daily routines, my work, my social life, my possessions, my chores, my wardrobe. It took time but it has been more than worth the effort: life is so much better now that I’ve created the time to do what I want to do.
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der Tweet
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Read more about focus and getting great things done
in Leo’s book, focus.
Existential internet states
The state of being ‘installed’ at a computer or laptop for an extended period of time without purpose, characterized by a blurry, formless anxiety undercut with something hard like desperation.
During this time the individual will have several windows open, generally several browser ‘tabs,’ a Microsoft Word document in some state of incompletion, the individual’s own Facebook page as well as that of another randomly-selected individual who may or may not be on the ‘friends’ list, 2-5 Gchat conversations that are no longer immediately active, possibly iTunes and a ‘client’ for Twitter. The individual will switch between the open applications/tabs in a fashion that appears organized but is functionally aimless, will return to reading some kind of ‘blog post’ in one browser tab and become distracted at the third paragraph for the third time before switching to the Gmail inbox and refreshing it again.
More new emotional experiences triggered by the interweb at the link below.
Link to ‘Five Emotions Invented by the Internet’.
45-Second De-Stress Tips
If you’re anything like me, you wake up in the morning, hit the ground running, work through lunch, and only stop thinking about your job when your head hits the pillow. So, needless to say, I occasionally have days where I’m stressed out of my mind.
According to Dr. Paul J. Rosch, the president of the American Institute of Stress, ”Americans increasingly seem to be living life in the fast lane. A better understanding of the harm that stress can cause, as well as the possibility of some benefits, would help an increasing number of people.”
You may think that your day is too jam-packed with meetings and events to find the time for relaxation…and you’d be wrong. Believe it or not, you can take measures to reduce your stress levels that will only take 45 seconds of your time. Here are ten tips that can help you de-stress in record time.
1. Read a Poem
Take 45 seconds to savor a single haiku, or read over your favorite sonnet. Beautiful language can really twist your mind in a way that helps to push away the cares of the day.
And even if poetry isn’t really your thing, you might find enjoyment in reading something with a humorous bent. Think Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, or Dr. Seuss.
2. Blow Off Some Steam
Get up and get moving, just for the amount of time it takes to hum a couple rounds of “Happy Birthday”. If you can burn off some of that nervous energy, you’ll feel energized, refreshed, and far more mentally capable of handling the stresses of your day.
If you can get some sun in during those precious few seconds, so much the better. Never underestimate the power of fresh air and sunshine to improve your mood.
3. Follow Your Nose
I’ve written about the benefits of aromatherapy in a previous post here, and I’m still impressed by the speed with which a single sniff of perfume can change my mood. If you don’t have essential oils on hand, peel an orange at your desk and crush the rind in your hand to release the scent of the orange. Orange is a great scent to help you feel energized and rejuvenated.
4. Elevate Your Brain
Meditate, pray, commune with nature…whatever works for you. Take a few moments to center yourself, open your mind, and get spiritual…if that sort of thing is helpful for you.
5. Pump Your Jam
There’s a reason that sporting arenas play songs when introducing the starting lineup for a sports team. The right song can change your outlook on life in under 45 seconds. The trick is to find a song snippet that works for you.
Maybe it’s the “Tro lo lo” guy, something off a Jock Jams compilation album, or the over-the-top intro to “The Final Countdown”. Alternatively, maybe a snippet of something classical would be better for calming you. It comes down to personal preference, and exactly what about your day has got you so stressed out.
6. Don’t Forget to Breathe
Breathe in through your nose, and out through your mouth. Slowly. Repeat. Make sure the breaths are steady and full.
It’s just that simple.
7. Chuckle
Hit the randomizer button on your favorite web comic, engage in cube warfare with a co-worker, or check out a website that offers a “Joke of the Day” service. Laughter really is the best medicine, and if you can laugh away the stress, your outlook for the rest of the day will be a lot more rosy.
8. Organize
Sometimes the best way to tackle stress is to clean house and get organized. Set up a new email filter, organize your paperwork, clean the clutter off your desk, or something along those lines. When you have all your ducks in a row, so to speak, your workload will seem a lot more manageable.
9. Snuggle Up
Get cuddly with a pet, a blanket, a favorite sweater….anything soft that you stroke with your fingertips. Just like Lenny in “Of Mice and Men”, most people find that they reach their “happy place” when touching something soft like fur or textiles. Scratching a dog or cat behind the ears can help to quickly lower your blood pressure…if there aren’t any pets allowed in your office, try carrying a lucky rabbit’s foot.
10. Chow Down
Eating or drinking helps to relax us. That’s why we give pacifiers to babies. Just try to make sure you’re making smart food choices (ie, choose a crunchy apple over a bag of potato chips).
Conclusion
There just aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done. Stress management is an incredibly important tool, and the more techniques you can master to lower your blood pressure, the better. With just 45 seconds, you can de-stress and re-focus your mind to maximize your productivity.
Tucker is a writer and social media professional living in New England. When she's not staring into a tiny electric box, she engages in pointless acts of stupidity at BadBoozeReview.com and posts daily at MargeryJones.com
“Uncertainty touches the best of what is human in us”: Q&A with Lesley Hazleton
In her luminous TEDxRainier talk, Lesley Hazleton, a writer and “accidental theologist,” described herself as “a tourist” in the Koran, and shared her discovery of the musicality, ambiguity, and depth of a text known by name to billions, but read intimately by far fewer. We met Lesley by phone and asked her to share more of her impressions on the Koran, as well as her insight on faith, poetry, fundamentalism, and their relationship to Islam.
You describe yourself in your TEDx talk as an agnostic. Some people see agnosticism as wishy-washy indecision. What does it mean to you?
Ah, but that wishy-washy hang-dog I-don’t-know-ness is not agnosticism at all. That’s just evasiveness. Real agnosticism is a solid intellectual position. It’s a recognition of human limitation. A position of great integrity (okay, you can accuse me of hubris right here!) And a fine safeguard against the inhumanity of certainty. Unless you are under the illusion that the bearded old man up on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is anything other than a visual metaphor, no matter how divine his musculature, you really have no idea exactly what God might be. When the issue is God, or the Divine, or whatever term you want to use, we’re talking about something that is by definition beyond human comprehension. It is the ultimate unknowable, and that’s its grandeur. That’s the whole point! [laughs] So to argue about the existence or the nonexistence of God is absurd — very humanly absurd, but absurd all the same — since it can be neither proved nor disproved. There are times, I think, when most of us get what I call a glimmer, maybe an intimation of something larger. But to go from intimation to certainty — that’s really presumptuous. As an agnostic, I acknowledge the limitations of my knowledge. I’m not saying “I don’t know” so much as “that is unknowable,” at least by me. It’s a position of inquiry rather than belief.
Does that make you a non-believer?
On my blog, The Accidental Theologist, which I describe as “an agnostic eye on religion, politics, and existence,” one commenter wrote: “I can’t believe you don’t believe in anything!” (Actually, she used capital letters and lots of exclamation marks, but please don’t reproduce that…) And I was a bit shocked by that comment until I realized that it’s true, I don’t believe in things. I may believe that this thing or that is so. But this is just another way of saying “I think that,” or “I feel that,” or “Perhaps,” or “Maybe.” It’s an attitude toward exploring the world, always aware of how easy it is to project what one already thinks into what one sees. This is where the former psychologist in me comes into play, I guess — though in fact I’m not sure there’s any such thing as a “former” psychologist. Just as lapsed Catholics remain deeply involved with Catholicism — the novelist Graham Greene is a wonderful example — so too being a psychologist informs how you see the world, no matter if it’s no longer your profession.
So when it comes to faith…
Well, let’s put it this way: my faith is in inquiry. I try to see as much of what’s there as I can, rather than seeing only part of what’s there in order to find confirmation of what I already think. That way of seeing — looking for confirmation — is far too common, especially when it comes to religious texts. It’s a search for certainty, and a flight from uncertainty. So if you are threatened by paradox, and if you do not have a feel for metaphor, and if uncertainty drives you crazy, then fundamentalism is for you. But then that, to me, is essentially anti-religious. Because as I see it, the essence of religious experience lies not in dogma but in poetry: in metaphor, in paradox, and yes, in uncertainty. That is, I think doubt is essential to faith. If you take a leap of faith, it really is a leap, a leap into the unknown. But if you’re absolutely certain about it, if you are convinced you are in possession of The Truth — the kind that inevitably comes with that capital “T” — then there’s no element of faith involved. You’ve simply closed your mind to thought. Real faith is admirable because there’s a humility, a vulnerability to it. In much the same way you place your faith in a person, you can never be absolutely sure. This is what we mean by trust, and it strikes me as wonderful. Where certainty terrifies me, uncertainty seems to me to touch the best of what is human in us.
Why did you set out to read the Koran in the first place?
It was an essential part of the research for the biography of Muhammad I’m now writing. In the past, I’d read the Koran several times the way I described early on in the talk, almost casually (though with cigarettes instead of popcorn). But last year it was a matter of integrity as a biographer that I read it as seriously as I could, because these are the words that we can be most sure Muhammad spoke. It’s a matter of faith whether you consider them directly the words of God or you think them inspired by the idea of God, but since most of them were written down while Muhammad was still alive or very shortly after his death, we can be reasonably sure he spoke them. All the other statements we have from him — in what’s known as the Hadith, or the reports on his words and practice — weren’t written down until later, anywhere up to three or four generations after his death, just as the words of Jesus in the Gospels weren’t written down until two or three generations after his death. So the Koran was, to my mind, the closest I could get to Muhammad. Lots of motives have since been ascribed to me, some wonderful and some not so wonderful, but my real motive was research: the attempt of a biographer to bridge fifteen centuries and come as close as I could to the man himself.
You spoke about the musicality of the Koran in your talk, and it seemed very similar to poetry’s most fundamental building blocks: rhythm, tone, and the intrinsic ambiguity of words. I was curious: what role does poetry play in your own life?
I once had an ongoing argument about poetry at Yaddo, the writers colony in Saratoga Springs, where four of us would go on these long walks — three poets and me, the non-fiction writer. And inevitably we’d get into these discussions of what constituted poetry. They tried to persuade me that if my prose were broken into lines, it would read as poetry, and I’d say “No, no, poetry’s on a different level altogether, it’s a different way of thinking.” But though I write prose, I can’t imagine living without poetry. Without T.S. Eliot, for instance, or the metaphysical poets. I like that word metaphysics: literally, beyond physics. Because it seems to me that there is no real sense of religious experience — of metaphysics — without poetry. That is, without metaphor. Religion at its best is metaphor. And this is why fundamentalism is not only so dangerous, but also so dull. It dulls the mind. It insists on the literal. It dumbs down the sense of the holy. All the great religious texts are poetic, which is why they resonate in the mind, why they’ve grasped the human imagination for so many centuries. They reverberate through our cultures. Think, for instance, of how William Tyndale’s version of the Bible, the King James, is part and parcel of western culture, of how many classic book and movie titles it’s provided, for a start. And yet line by line, it isn’t a great translation. The original Hebrew is limpidly simple and lucid, while the King James is almost archaically complex. But it has an enormous beauty and poetry of its own. Basically, Tyndale rewrote the Bible into his concept of what it should be, into a sixteenth-century European music and grandeur, and he did it so well that for most westerners, Tyndale’s bible is the Bible. The Koran hasn’t found its Tyndale, though A.J. Arberry made a valiant effort, so English-speakers don’t have a parallel sense of its poetry, which is one reason it’s so easy to misrepresent it. If you can’t feel the poetry — if you ignore the metaphors and are deaf to the music and the allusiveness (not elusiveness, allusiveness) — then you’re stuck with a ghastly, deadening literalism.
Why did you use the word “tourist” in your talk? The French word étranger comes to mind–a stranger, a not-belonger. Is that what you were referring to?
In a way, yes. My agnosticism turns out to be a very interesting perch from which to look at the volatile interplay of religion and politics, which has always fascinated me. It places me both inside and outside at the same time. And sometimes it places me in a profound existential dilemma. Right now, for instance, this agnostic Jew has just spent the last two weeks trying to fathom, in words, the pivotal gnostic moment of Islam, which is the night on Mt. Hira when Muhammad received the first Koranic revelation. This is one of history’s central mystical moments. It is beyond explanation, yet it has to be addressed. So I’ve been trying to put into words what I know cannot be put into words. I’ve been trying to understand what I know is beyond understanding. It’s almost an absurd thing to even try, and yet I feel I must in order to bring it over to non-Muslim western readers, who are of course whom I’m primarily writing for.
How did you come to speak Arabic?
I lived in Jerusalem for thirteen years, working as both a journalist and a psychologist, and in the late seventies, took off and wandered around the Sinai for a year. I love the high desert, and one of the many anomalies of my life is that I now live contentedly — to my astonishment — at sea level in rainy Seattle. I spent a lot of time with the Beduin in that year in the Sinai, and then got very involved in the issue of Beduin land rights in the Negev, so I picked up Arabic as I went along. I was never fully fluent in it, though, and it’s gone by now. You need to live inside a language to keep it alive in your head, and for the past thirty years I’ve lived in the United States — that is, inside English.
You noted in your talk that the Koran is only the Koran if it is in Arabic. Can you speak to that claim, and also to the idea that Arabic and the Koran are inextricably linked?
This is one of the tenets of Islam, and previously, I’d thought it was just that — an item of faith which there was no point trying to understand. But now I have a sense of why this is so. The Koran says again and again that it’s “a message from God in your own language, in pure Arabic,” and you get the very strong feeling while you read it that there was a thirst for it — that while God had spoken, as it were, to the Jews in Hebrew and to the Christians in Greek, now it was the turn of the Arabs, and that the Arabic of the Koran would be as central to the formation of Arab identity as the Hebrew of the Old Testament had been to the formation of Jewish identity. Here was God speaking directly to the people of Mecca and Medina, in a shared frame of reference, telling Muhammad what to say: “Tell them that…” “Remind them of this…” “Let them remember that…” The impact in creating a sense of collective Arab identity was immense.
Since 9/11, we hear the word “jihad” a lot. What is your impression of the idea of “jihad” from reading the Koran?
Generally, when the word “jihad” or some grammatical form of it is used, it’s in the sense of struggle — the struggle to come nearer to God. It’s an internal struggle: to be the best person you can be, the best Muslim you can be. Most of the time that any kind of warfare is involved, other words are used. But sometimes they get confused, and that should come as no surprise. The Koranic revelations were not instantaneous; they were spread out over a period of twenty-two years, and so they include contradictions. But how could that possibly be surprising to anyone who has ever read, say, the first two chapters of the Bible, which give mutually exclusive accounts of the creation of men and women? Either they were created together on the sixth day as in Chapter One of Genesis, or Eve was created out of Adam’s rib as in Chapter Two. So the Bible starts with a stunning contradiction. What I find especially interesting here is that the Koran is subjected to tests of consistency and morality that are rarely applied to either the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament. For instance, the violence in the Book of Deuteronomy is ignored by most devout Christians and Jews. They simply skip over the sections that call for annihilating whole peoples. If you want to analyze the Koran on the basis of the Geneva Convention, then the least you can do is analyze both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament in the same way. I guarantee you will be shocked. These are ancient texts. They are not twenty-first century models of peaceful coexistence. So there is a lack of context in the current political discussion of Islam, a lack of willingness to look at Jewish and Christian traditions in the same light. As a result, Islam is being singled out and demonized. The vast majority of Muslims worldwide do not support terrorism or radical fundamentalism, and see it as a distortion of Islam. Highly respected Islamic leaders have condemned terrorism again and again, calling it anti-Islamic, but their condemnations never make the news, precisely because they challenge accepted stereotypes. The power of stereotypes is that they’re easy. They require no thought. They’re kneejerk reactions. So there is the absurd assumption that over a billion Muslims worldwide endorsed a terrible act of terrorism committed by eighteen people on 9/11, even though those eighteen people were acting in clear violation of the faith they so vehemently declared. Yet when a fundamentalist Christian kills a doctor providing legal abortion, do we then say that Christianity endorses murder? When the Vatican protects pederasts, do we then say that Catholicism advocates child abuse? When Bible-spouting Jewish settlers in the West Bank shoot Palestinian farmers, do we then say that this is a principle of Judaism? So there are two possibilities here: either we stereotype equally — equal rights for stereotypes, you might say — or we do our best to abolish them. On all sides. And that starts with confronting the basic ignorance and laziness of thought behind them.
Many Americans–and many lawmakers I would argue–know very little about the culture of Islam. What are some of the largest misunderstandings about Islam that need light shed upon them?
First, the image of Islam as one huge monolith, which ignores the vast range of opinion and interpretation within Islam, and the opposition of the majority to the extremist minority. Second, the persistence of this meme that there’s a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and “the West,” an idea that doesn’t stand up to any kind of serious analysis. To start with, so many westerners are Muslim, and then, as Eliza Griswold showed in her recent book The Tenth Parallel, where Islam and Christianity really do clash is in neither the Middle East nor the West but in Africa — a clash that’s really about power and money, not faith, which is being manipulated for political and economic ends. Basically, there is no clash of religions in principle. We talk about the Judeo-Christian tradition, but it’d be more precise to call it the Judeo-Christo-Islamic tradition. The Koran emphasizes that it’s renewing the message of the Torah and the Gospels, rephrasing and reapplying it in a different cultural context. So instead of seeing Islam as something radically different from Judaism or Christianity, I think we need to be able to see it as most Muslims themselves conceive of it: as a continuation of Judaism and Christianity.
What would you say to someone who claims that at its very core, Islam is a religion of violence, vengeance and extremism?
The same thing that I’d say to anyone who says that about Judaism or Christianity. Look, it’s been argued by the “new atheists” that religion is evil because so much evil has been done in its name. But you could just as well argue that love is evil because so much evil is done in the name of love. It’s what you do in the name of religion that matters. Religion can always be manipulated. It can always be simplified to the point of travesty — made literal, deadened, fossilized, carved in stone, dehumanized. But it doesn’t have to be. Now I want to stress that what I’m going to say here is hugely simplistic, but perhaps one could say that there are two major ways to be religious. One of these is to expand the sense of self in awe, and wonder, and gratitude, and humility. The other is to close oneself in behind high walls of absolute certainty and righteousness. The one expands your sense of the world and other people. The other circumscribes it, using dogma to wall off the “believers,” whatever faith they profess, against the rest of the world. These are two rough trends of religious personality, and clearly, agnostic though I am, I’m with the former. The latter is so narrow-minded, so absolutist, that at its extreme, it can easily lose all sense of humanity. It’s a travesty of what both Jesus and Muhammad preached. In fact I can’t imagine that either man would be anything but utterly dismayed at some of what is being said and done in their names today. I can point to an enormous amount of good done in the name of religion — to liberation theology and the social justice movement, for instance — so I can’t explain violent fundamentalism by saying that religion is at fault, just as I can’t explain Samuel Johnson’s definition of patriotism as “the last refuge of scoundrels” by saying that nationalism is at fault. Though there again, I’m agnostic [laughs], and much prefer internationalism.
So can you imagine a path that will bring peace to the Middle East?
I can’t right now, but that just means I have a limited imagination. We can start, though, by getting rid of the image of doves fluttering all over the place and everybody falling onto each others’ shoulders and calling each other brother and sister. Peace is far more mundane than that. It’s the absence of war. It’s people not being killed. It’s the willingness to live and let live. And that will do just fine. There’s no love lost between Germany and England, but they’re at peace after two utterly devastating wars in the first half of the twentieth century. There’s even less love lost between Israel and Egypt, but their peace treaty has lasted thirty years, despite all provocation. It’s nobody’s ideal image of peace, but however uneasily, it’s lasted. So let’s think in terms of pragmatic, real-life peaceful relations, which once seemed as impossible for both England and Germany, and Egypt and Israel, as for Israel and Palestine right now. True, I can’t see how the Israel-Palestine conflict can be resolved, but here’s the thing: if I stop believing that it’s possible, then I help make it impossible. If I lose faith in the possibility of peace — and I use the word ‘faith’ advisedly — then basically I’m aiding and abetting the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict. I’m yielding to despair. And this I refuse to do. Almost a definition of despair is that you can’t imagine yourself into the future. It’s a lack of imagination. We have to be able to imagine a future, and work towards it.
Can you tell us a bit more about the book you’re writing now, the biography of Muhammad?
It’s always tricky to talk about a book while you’re still writing it, since it hasn’t taken full shape yet. But while there have been several excellent books about Jesus as a revolutionary thinker committed to social justice, there’ve been no such books about Muhammad, at least for the non-Muslim reader, and I think seeing him from this point of view is long overdue. Above all, I want to get a real feel for him as a person, and to emphasize the astonishing narrative arc of his life. I’m using the earliest biographical sources as well as modern scholarship, and combining them with an interdisciplinary approach — history, cultural anthropology, psychology, Middle East studies, and of course comparative religion — all of which I hope allow me to see him more fully, with a fresh eye, not as an iconic figure but as the complex man he really was.
– Q&A conducted and transcribed by Kevin St. John
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