How to be Happy. An excellent definition of happiness. First decide in which directions you want your life to go. Then happiness is the feeling you have when you are moving in those directions, making progress, moving in alignment with your goals. Thus happiness is not itself an end-state, nor is it achieved by hitting other end-states or goals. Instead it is part of the journey or progress of your life in the right direction.
How to increase confidence. Confidence is defined as feeling sure of yourself and your abilities to handle a situation:
How to deal with confrontation:
How to stop ruminating:
Parwy's Blog
Parwinder Sekhon
28 September 2022
22 September 2022
Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist - Jordan Peterson with Frans de Waal
An interesting podcast discussing how gender/sex differences affect humans with reference to what has been learned from primates and other animal species.
18 September 2022
16 September 2022
It's never to early to start
Many modern lifestyle diseases such as heart disease, diabetes or dementia, do not suddenly occur in old age. They are formed in your 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. It is only that the symptoms become significant in old age.
To help prevent them, you need to focus on good sleep, healthy eating (eating less processed food, eating more diverse food, drinking less alcohol...), regular exercise and participating in good social relationships throughout your adult life. What you do in your earlier life sows the seeds for your later life, so don't wait for tomorrow to make changes.
I am who I think you think I am
I heard a great quote today:
"I am not who I think I am. I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am." - Charles Cooley
Given our perception of someone else's perception may drive who you think you are, think hard about who you want to be, who you feel you are and how you are influenced by yourself and others. Your identity, or more specifically your perception of your identity, is a critical asset, so make sure you don't sleep-walk into who you think you are. Direct your thinking into what achieves the best outcome.
15 September 2022
The Liver King - The Diary of a CEO
Quite enjoyed listening to this podcast with The Liver King. Don't agree with everything said but lots of good points raised:
13 September 2022
05 September 2022
Huberman Lab podcasts related to sleep - Andrew Huberman
Sleep is absolutely critical to our health, far more than many realise. Here are a great set of podcasts to help understand sleep in more detail and figure out how to improve sleep:
Dr Matthew Walker on "The Science and Practise of Perfecting Your Sleep"
Andrew Huberman on "Sleep Toolkit: Tools For Optimizing Sleep & Sleep-Wake Timing"
04 September 2022
What Alcohol Does To Your Body, Brain & Health Podcast - Andrew Huberman
Sometimes ignorance is better than the devil you know. I wish I hadn't listened to Andrew Huberman's talk on the impact of alcohol, even for average alcohol consumption. Unfortunately I can't undo it now, for anyone else interested...
29 August 2022
Why You SHOULD Take Personal Responsibility Podcast - The Diary of a CEO with Matthew Hussey
A nice clip from The Diary of a CEO on personal responsibility, fault vs responsibility and transition:
Andrew Huberman's Huberman Lab Podcasts
A great set of podcasts on health, fitness and neuroscience:
The Man in the Arena
A great extract from Theodore Roosevelt's "Citizenship in a Republic" speech, labelled "The Man in the Arena" that focuses on action and being resilient to failure rather than just a commentator. Someone who is heavily involved in a situation that requires courage, skill, or tenacity, as opposed to someone sitting on the side-lines and watching, is often referred to as "the man in the arena":
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
24 October 2020
Seven tips for parenting teen boys: 'Nagging them is like shouting into a void'
Boys and men tend to find validation and self-worth when they succeed at something they think is worthwhile. This partially explains teen sensitivity to failing, losing or looking “like a loser” in front of their friends or others their own age. When testosterone is combined with a hunger to test oneself in a body driven by an immature brain, the result often involves poor choices and risky behaviour.
1. Don’t shame them
2. Let them know they’re not stupid, they’re just developing
3. Don’t forget the loving names and reminding that you love them
4. Nagging them is like shouting into a void
5. Make your home a safe place for friends
6. Marinate them in stories of good men
7. Love them as they are, not for what you think they should be
Every teen boy is yearning to be seen, really heard and loved as he is not as we think he should be. They are way more vulnerable than we have been conditioned to believe. We need to love and respect our sons, especially while they cannot love or respect themselves – yet.
15 March 2020
How to Help Your Kids Build Self-Esteem
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-help-your-kids-build-self-esteem-1841909386
Trying to help our kids build up their self-esteem by constantly heaping praise on them is not the way to go. What kids need, instead, is to learn how to develop their own competence. In fact, by over-praising kids, we’re doing more harm than good. “We’re lowering the bar for them,” Taylor says. “If you keep telling your child she is already doing a fantastic job, you’re saying she no longer needs to push herself. But confidence comes from doing, from trying and failing and trying again—from practice.”
Let them practice a lot
Help them assess their own performance
Remember that struggle is good
We know we’re supposed to praise effort over results or ability. (It’s the difference between “I saw how much you practiced your math problems this morning,” versus “I’m so proud that you aced that test!”). It can be hard to reel it in, though, when your child really does excel at something. But kids who become too focused on performance may begin to take fewer risks or hesitate to rise to new challenges, lest they not do as well as they’d like or as well as they think we’d expect them to.
18 October 2019
What is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written?
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-most-sophisticated-piece-of-software-ever-written-1
Buckle in.
The most sophisticated software in history was written by a team of people whose names we do not know.
It’s a computer worm. The worm was written, probably, between 2005 and 2010.
Because the worm is so complex and sophisticated, I can only give the most superficial outline of what it does.
This worm exists first on a USB drive. Someone could just find that USB drive lying around, or get it in the mail, and wonder what was on it. When that USB drive is inserted into a Windows PC, without the user knowing it, that worm will quietly run itself, and copy itself to that PC. It has at least three ways of trying to get itself to run. If one way doesn’t work, it tries another. At least two of these methods to launch itself were completely new then, and both of them used two independent, secret bugs in Windows that no one else knew about, until this worm came along.
Once the worm runs itself on a PC, it tries to get administrator access on that PC. It doesn’t mind if there’s antivirus software installed — the worm can sneak around most antivirus software. Then, based on the version of Windows it’s running on, the worm will try one of two previously unknown methods of getting that administrator access on that PC. Until this worm was released, no one knew about these secret bugs in Windows either.
At this point, the worm is now able to cover its tracks by getting underneath the operating system, so that no antivirus software can detect that it exists. It binds itself secretly to that PC, so that even if you look on the disk for where the worm should be, you will see nothing. This worm hides so well, that the worm ran around the Internet for over a year without any security company in the world recognizing that it even existed.
The software then checks to see if it can get on the Internet. If it can, it attempts to visit either http://www.mypremierfutbol.com or http://www.todaysfutbol.com . At the time, these servers were in Malaysia and Denmark. It opens an encrypted link and tells these servers that it has succeeded in owning a new PC. The worm then automatically updates itself with the newest version.
At this point, the worm makes copies of itself to any other USB sticks you happen to plug in. It does this by installing a carefully designed but fake disk driver. This driver was digitally signed by Realtek, which means that the authors of the worm were somehow able to break into the most secure location in a huge Taiwanese company, and steal the most secret key that this company owns, without Realtek finding out about it.
Later, whoever wrote that driver started signing it with secret keys from JMicron, another big Taiwanese company. Yet again, the authors had to figure out how to break into the most secure location in that company and steal the most secure key that that company owns, without JMicron finding out about it.
This worm we are talking about is sophisticated.
And it hasn’t even got started yet.
At this point, the worm makes use of two recently discovered Windows bugs. One bug relates to network printers, and the other relates to network files. The worm uses those bugs to install itself across the local network, onto all the other computers in the facility.
Now, the worm looks around for a very specific bit of control software, designed by Siemens for automating large industrial machinery. Once it finds it, it uses (you guessed it) yet another previously unknown bug for copying itself into the programmable logic of the industrial controller. Once the worm digs into this controller, it’s in there for good. No amount of replacing or disinfecting PCs can get rid of the worm now.
The worm checks for attached industrial electric motors from two specific companies. One of those companies is in Iran, and the other is in Finland. The specific motors it searches for are called variable-frequency drives. They’re used for running industrial centrifuges. You can purify many kinds of chemicals in centrifuges.
Such as uranium.
Now at this point, since the worm has complete control of the centrifuges, it can do anything it wants with them. The worm can shut them all down. The worm can destroy them all immediately — just spin them over maximum speed until they all shatter like bombs, killing anyone who happens to be standing near.
But no. This is a sophisticated worm. The worm has other plans.
Once it controls every centrifuge in your facility… the worm just goes to sleep.
Days pass. Or weeks. Or seconds.
When the worm decides the time is right, the worm quietly wakes itself up. The worm randomly picks a few of those centrifuges while they are purifying uranium. The worm locks them, so that if someone notices that something is wrong, a human can’t turn the centrifuges off.
And then, stealthily, the worm starts spinning those centrifuges… a little wrong. Not a crazy amount wrong, mind you. Just, y’know, a little too fast. Or a little too slow. Just a tiny bit out of safe parameters.
At the same time, it increases the gas pressure in those centrifuges. The gas in those centrifuges is called UF6. Pretty nasty stuff. The worm makes the pressure of that UF6, just a tiny bit out of safe parameters. Just enough that the UF6 gas in the centrifuges, has a small chance of turning into rock, while the centrifuge is spinning.
Centrifuges don’t like running too fast or too slow. And they don’t like rocks either.
The worm has one last trick up its sleeve. And it’s pure evil genius.
In addition to everything else it’s doing, the worm is now playing us back a 21-second data recording on our computer screens that it captured when the centrifuges were working normally.
The worm plays the recording over and over, in a loop.
As a result, all the centrifuge data on the computer screens looks completely fine, to us humans.
But it’s all just a fake recording, produced by the worm.
Now let’s imagine that you are responsible for purifying uranium using this huge industrial factory. And everything seems to be working okay. Maybe some of the motors sound a little off, but all the numbers on the computer show that the centrifuge motors are running exactly as designed.
Then the centrifuges start breaking. Randomly, one after another. Usually they die quietly. Rarely though, they make a scene when they die. And the uranium yield, it keeps plummeting. Uranium has to be pure. Your uranium is not pure enough to do anything useful.
What would you do, if you were running that uranium enrichment facility? You’d check everything over and over and over, not understanding why everything was off. You could replace every single PC in your facility if you wanted to.
But the centrifuges would go right on breaking. And you have no possible way of knowing why.
And on your watch, eventually, about 1000 centrifuges would fail or be taken offline. You’d go a little crazy, trying to figure out why nothing was working as designed.
That is exactly what happened.
You would never expect that all those problems were caused by a computer worm, the most devious and intelligent computer worm in history, written by some incredibly secret team with unlimited money and unlimited resources, designed with exactly one purpose in mind: to sneak past every known digital defence, and to destroy your country’s nuclear bomb program, all without getting caught.
To have one piece of software do any ONE of those things would be a small miracle. To have it do ALL of those things and many more, well…
… the Stuxnet worm would have to be the most sophisticated software ever written.
09 August 2019
How to Convince Yourself to Keep Going
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-convince-yourself-to-keep-going-1836858040
Any sport that’s physically tough is also mentally tough. Seven miles into your 10-mile long run, part of your brain will try to talk you into quitting. The only way to finish that run is to have a good answer for why and how to keep going. It’s the same when you need to add weight to the bar for your last set of heavy deadlifts, or keep pushing yourself to do the rest of the burpees in your Crossfit WOD. What we say to ourselves matters.
I realized years ago that I’m better at encouraging confidence in other people than at feeling confident myself. I remember one day I was struggling in a roller derby practice—I was a mid-level player trying to hang with an advanced team—and I remembered that I had given the exact pep talk I needed right then to a brand-new skater earlier that week. It went something like: nobody is expecting you to be the best player on the floor right now, we just need you to show that you’re not gonna give up trying to get better.
From then on, I started putting myself in the role of a coach when I talked to myself. “You need to do this,” I’d say, or “It’s okay that X is going wrong, that’s normal. Here’s how you deal with it.” If I had gotten good advice from somebody else, I’d replay in my head the scene where they told it to me.
So next time you’re struggling, talk to yourself the way you would talk to an imaginary athlete you’re coaching. And try some of the phrases from the study: You can do it. You’re determined. You can keep going. You can work through the pain. You will succeed.
17 May 2019
26 February 2019
29 December 2018
How to Argue Better With Your Partner
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-argue-better-with-your-partner-1831076056
Not in this article, but something I believe: try and slow down when you realise your discussion has become an argument. Decide on the objective or end state you want to achieve. If you are just being mean, do you really just want to be mean? Unlikely. So focus on what you need to say and do, to get the best outcome for both of you.
...
First and foremost, understand that when you’re in a fight, especially with someone you care about, your mind isn’t operating from the most rational place.
Your Memories Are Wrong
“When people fight over memory, they’re both likely wrong in some way,” says Tatkin. “Because of this, it’s usually better to just end the fight and make up, rather than trying to figure out who is correct.” ... if you’re arguing over something small, it may be that you are both remembering it differently
You’re Not Objective
So, trying to argue further about misconceptions during the fight will likely have bad results. Try to calm the situation down by offering love and understanding. When you’ve both cooled off, you can address what they think you were trying to say when you pursed your lips, or something.
You’re Not Being As Clear As Your Think. Be curious, not furious.
Many fights are a result of miscommunication. Much like your perception of someone can be affected by anger or stress, so can your perception of yourself. You think you’re communicating something extremely clearly, but that might not be true. The listener, who is also upset, may be making wild leaps or connections that aren’t there. What can you do? One way around this is to slow down. Check: ‘O.K., do you mean this? Is that what you’re trying to say when you use that word?
13 August 2018
10 January 2018
Have More Fun With Your Partner in the New Year
https://lifehacker.com/have-more-fun-with-your-partner-in-the-new-year-1821743176
The tips include everything from “get off your phones” to “listen more” to “find an older married couple to spend time with,” but my favorite is definitely “double down on your positive time together.” Examine your leisure time. Are you regularly doing something with your spare time, as a couple, that you both enjoy doing? It’s trickier for couples without a lot of overlapping interests.
The pursuit of leisure activities as a couple was less strongly associated with marital happiness than most people believe. The determining factor is that both partners must enjoy the activity. Now this may seem like a duh finding, of course both partners should enjoy the leisure activities, but consider how many couples you know where one partner is not all that psyched for football, contra-dancing, wine-tasting or NASCAR, but goes along anyway. It is no real boost to marital bliss, now or into the future, if a couple routinely engages in leisure activities that mostly only the husband enjoys. In other words, you actually can’t fake it till you make it.
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