Nagging, repetitive thoughts are the engine for music like Selena Gomez’s, “Back To You” and movies like Jason Segel’s Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once the pesky feelings start, they’re hard to stop, and suppressing them just exacerbates the problem.Instead of rejecting thoughts after they arrive, we can prevent them from getting there in the first place.Reactive control can be particularly problematic because thoughts are self-reinforcing. People can partially preempt this process if they want to ensure that this thought comes to mind as little as possible.

Unwelcome Thoughts

Although people could not avoid unwanted thoughts, they could ensure that thinking about an unwanted thought does not increase the probability of it coming to mind again. Fighting your mind’s natural associations could help you win a game of <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1111/taboo">Taboo</a> or prevent you from dwelling on a harsh breakup whenever you hear a crooning Taylor Swift song.some psychiatric diseases inhibit a person’s ability to control intrusive thoughts. The experiments and models could highlight the neural pathways that hinder thought control in clinically diagnosed patients.

Fighting With Repetitive, Destructive Thoughts

Scientist recently found that people can’t avoid unwanted thoughts, but they can limit how unrelenting they become.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mindfulness

Mindfulness

mentalhealth

Mental Health

Research Suggests How to Prevent Unwelcome Thoughts

Niche sites have significant earning potential. They can earn over $1,000 a month within the first 12 months and eventually replace your regular "9 to 5." But to reach that point, you need to know how to successfully get one off the ground using a step-by-step process.

Creating a niche site

Niche affiliate websites work by promoting someone else’s product through content and earning a commission from every sale the company makes. To do this, site owners produce articles and reviews, covering topics like what the product is, who needs the product and why, and how the product compares to other similar products. If someone makes a purchase, an affiliate commission is earned.

How niche affiliate sites work

It depends on three things:<ul><li>Choosing the right niche</li><li>Building the site right from the beginning</li><li>How much time and effort you put into the site to get it off the ground</li></ul> Choosing a niche with high-ticket items, laying the right foundations, and putting more effort into the amount of content you produce and links you build will make your site earn more quickly. Niche sites currently flip for around a 32X multiplier based on one month’s income, meaning if it earns $1,000 a month within 12 months, you can potentially flip that site for $32,000.

How much can you earn from a niche affiliate site

Choosing the right niche lays the foundation for everything else going forward. For example, the degree of difficulty to rank your site, the amount of money you can earn, etc. When you decide on a profitable niche, consider: <ol><li>Personal experience/interests</li><li>Choosing the right affiliate program(s)</li><li>Viability in the long term</li></ol>

Choosing the right niche

Too much experience in a niche can make you too personally invested. You may want to vet all the content in the finest detail or write all the content yourself. This makes it very hard to scale. Instead, choose a niche you find interesting but not too interesting. You should have enough interest to produce some of the content at first, but not enough to write everything in the long term.

Personal experience/interests

You may be tempted to jump into anything that is hot right now, but it is probably not going to give you enough scope in terms of keywords to scale your site. Focusing on seasonal niches, such as tennis, means your site will earn more at certain times and nothing at other times. If you want to build an affiliate site to act as your main source of income, you have to take these factors consideration.

Viability in the long term

When doing keyword research for niche affiliate sites, you’re mostly looking for three main types of keywords:<ul><li>General comparisons – Best wifi router, best protein powder</li><li>Branded comparisons – MacBook Air vs. MacBook Pro</li><li>Product reviews – MacBook Pro review</li></ul>These contain all the keyword types that people regularly search for and where you can plug products to earn affiliate commissions. <ul><li>Go to Ahrefs’ <a href="https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer">Keywords Explorer</a></li><li>Enter broad topics or brands related to your niche</li><li>Go to the Matching terms report</li><li>Filter for keywords containing a relevant modifier</li></ul>

Finding the right keywords

Pick a domain and build your site using WordPress, as it is customizable and free. <ul><li>Choose the right theme as it will form the foundation of your site. The theme should have its own built-in page builder functionality, such as Astra or AffiliateFish.</li><li>Consider conversions. Ensure your site has clear call-to-action (CTA) sections, such as clicking a link to your recommended retailer, downloading an ebook, or signing up for a mailing list.</li><li>Think about expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E‑A-T). Ensure that your website has a clear “about” page and author bios to establish authority.</li></ul>

Building your site

Content is vital to a niche affiliate site. This is where you will put all your affiliate links, which can earn you commissions. <ul><li>Ensure you write quality content that will engage your audience.</li><li>Write content for people, not search engines.</li></ul> This will help you build trust and a loyal readership because they love what you are doing.

Writing Content

Links building is getting other websites to link to pages on your own website. Links need to come from high-quality sources. Top link building choices for beginners are:<ul><li>Earned media. Use sites like Help A Reporter Out (HARO), Terkel, and Sourcebottle to build high-authority links and help to boost E-A-T.</li><li>Broken link building is an easy way to build links.</li><li>Guest blogging can help to build high-quality links to your website and help you improve E-A-T.</li></ul>

Building links

A niche site is any website that caters to a specific audience or topic. To create a profitable site, just follow six simple steps.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

business

Business

How to Create a Niche Site That Earns 4 Figures a Month in 6 Easy Steps

I study the forces that shape work and our attitudes toward it. There are three forces that have been in play since before the pandemic began that help explain why we’re seeing so much turbulence in the workforce now.
<ol>
<li>People are living longer.</li>
<li>They have two or three income families.</li>
<li>There is a shift in the employee's perception towards personal urgency, pushed by the pandemic.</li>
</ol>

Retaining And Recruiting Employees

The combined impact of these three forces is swinging the power pendulum toward employees — who don’t want to just work and then retire, who may start to reject really bad jobs, and who will be paying close attention to what other companies are beginning to offer their workforces.

The Impact

In the short term, many people are still deeply anxious about the health implications of going back to certain types of work. This extends to low-wage workers, who say their concerns about their mental and physical health are nearly as high as their concerns about covering monthly expenses.It seems to be as hard to predict the future today as it has been since the start of the pandemic. Still, there are three points that every executive should be considering now, as they think about recruiting and retaining employees:

The Employer Fights Back

Companies and leaders must soon realize that when people want more autonomy to live a multistage life, the organizational variable they most treasure is flexibility— flexibility about both where they work and when they work, flexibility to take time off to explore, flexibility to launch a small company or work for a not-for-profit.

Employees Want a Healthy, Future-Oriented Way of Working

By bad jobs are the jobs with long hours, low pay, no training, tough bosses, and poor prospects. When unemployment is high, many people have to take such jobs. 
But as the labor market tightens, people pay more attention to their ideas about what could be, alternative ways of working, and better jobs they could seek out.

Bad Jobs Are on Their Way Out

Right now, there is a huge swell of experimentation going on. 
Companies are designing talent practices that, for example, enable people to work from anywhere three months a year, or to seldom come into the office, or to bundle their working hours into just three days or string them out over seven.

Other Companies Will Change the Playing Field

Forces that have been in play since before the pandemic began can help explain today’s turbulence in the workforce.

career

Career

Why It’s So Hard to Keep and Recruit Employees Right Now | Lynda Gratton

What often happens is that the acquired entity’s culture lies dormant in the first few weeks of integration due to the immediate and urgent operational necessity of other practical tasks. This is where communication is key.
Of course, culture is a complex network of behaviours that communications alone cannot control; however, the way in which we execute communications can have a strong bearing on how well all stakeholders (like leaders and employees) approach the subsequent cultural integration.

Culture Transfer During Mergers And Acquisitions

It just takes one side conversation that inadvertently deviates from the planned strategy to start the relationship off on the wrong foot. Make sure the leadership team is clearly aligned. 
One-on-one discussions take place as part of deal negotiation, and these conversations can have far-ranging consequences if they do not align with the long-term approach. Comms leaders should take ownership of clearly communicating the short- and long-term plans for the acquired brand and manage that workstream closely.

Five Practical Tips For Communications Leaders: Establish An Official Comms Workstream

When it comes to M&A, the reality is that business isn’t just business. People enable a business to operate, and people have feelings and emotions, particularly about changes that are out of their control.
Communications managers should become change agents, and it is important that their approach is gently assertive from the outset of the process. If you plan to retire a brand that a founder has spent 15 years building, the approach and tone for communicating that change are crucial to avoid friction, and in the worst cases, resistance.

Become A Change Agent

Just as you would when marketing to a potential prospect, you should take a needs-based approach and communicate based on what they want to know — not what you want to tell them. Prepare to handle objections; it’s inevitable.
Often, you can’t answer questions around contracts, benefits and org structure immediately, yet you need to acknowledge the question is there and that you intend to answer it as soon as you’re able to. This gives employees confidence that you aren’t oblivious to their concerns and are considering people as part of the process.

Anticipate Questions

The most impactful and effective comms are those that take the most time and effort to deliver. Two-way and visual comms are key; employees are no different from consumers or clients. They want to engage with humans and to feel that the business understands them as individuals. 
For example, a live discussion with the CEOs of both the acquirer and acquiree at the time of the announcement can settle nerves. Remember, the announcement comes out of the blue for the majority of employees — so it’s important to add faces to the communications to make them feel less clinical and unsettling.

Make It Personal

A tried-and-tested execution plan for both internal and external comms is important, yet it’s equally important not to be rigid with that strategy and to adjust your comms plan according to the way in which employees are responding in real time. 
People are the most unpredictable part of the M&A process, and their importance in the success of any deal simply cannot be underestimated. If you get it wrong at the start, you can end up with little pockets of cultural dissen

First Impressions Count

Marketing and comms are becoming increasingly important when it comes to successful M&As.

communication

Communication

teamwork

Teamwork

Five Priorities For Communicating During Mergers And Acquisitions

Everyone has different triggers to cause a panic attack. Usually it is a stimulus in the environment like a sound that our brain has correlated to something traumatic. Sometimes, a panic attack can be triggered with just a small jolt of caffeine.Our amygdala sends a distress signal to the hypothalamus therefore forewarding this distress signal to out autonomic nervous system. These chemical messages engages our body and prepares it to take defensive action.

How Panic Attacks Begin

The symptoms of a panic attack varies from person to person but they include:<ul><li>pounding heart</li><li>shortness of breath</li><li>light-headedness</li><li>sweating</li><li>trembling</li><li>nausea</li><li>tingling or numbness of fingers and toes</li><li>an overwhelming sense of impending doom</li></ul>However, regardless of how scary this sounds panic attacks are not inherently dangerous. Panic attacks are just manifestations of our brain and body being our of sync, and it is a normal physiological fear response.

Your Body During A Panic Attack

Our amygdala has been known to be as the fear epicenter of our brain however other studies suggest that there is some other structure in the brain that is involved in this fear-making process. The insular cotex and a part of the brain stem called the nucleus of the solitary tract has been found as an area that generates fear impulses.

The Fear Epicenter

<ol><li>Find a quiet spot and determine the symptoms to confirm whether it is a panic attack or not.</li><li>Talk to yourself with what you're feeling. For example: "what my body is doing right now is designed to keep me safe." This invites the frontal cortex into the conversation which is responsible for conscious thought thus helping you underline that this experience is a physical process moving through you.</li><li>Breathe deeply and gradually, about 5-10 times a minute. This stimulates the vagus nerve which sends a signal to the brain that you are relaxing and to parts of the heart muscle stabilizing your pulse.</li></ol>

Dealing with Panic Attacks

Roughly one in three people will experience panic attacks at some point during their lives. But there is good news: They usually pass in 10 - 15 minutes, and you can use a few techniques to manage them, say experts Cindy Aaronson PhD and Justin Feinstein PhD.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

health

Health

exerciseandfitness

Exercise & Fitness

The science behind panic attacks — and what can you do to manage them

<ul><li>Math enables you to select the right machine learning algorithm. It gives insight into how the model works, including selecting the right model parameter and validation strategies.</li><li>Maths helps with creating the right confidence interval and uncertainty measurements with the model.</li><li>Maths is needed to understand aspects such as metrics, training time, model complexity, number of parameters, and number of features.</li><li>By knowing the machine learning model's math, you could develop a customised model.</li></ul>

Arguments for learning math for machine learning

Machine Learning is a tool that Data scientists use to obtain valuable patterns. Learning the math behind machine learning could give you an edge. These six math subjects are the foundation for machine learning. <ol><li>Linear Algebra</li><li>Analytic Geometry</li><li>Matrix Decomposition</li><li>Vector Calculus</li><li>Probability & Distributions</li><li>Optimisation</li></ol>

Math used in machine learning

Linear Algebra in machine learning is a systematic representation of data that computers can understand. <ul><li>It is the part of mathematics that uses vector space and matrices to represent linear equations.</li><li>Vectors are special objects that can be added together and multiplied by scalars to produce another object of the same kind.</li><li>A matrix can be thought of as a group of column vectors or row vectors.</li></ul>

Linear Algebra

Analytic geometry is concerned with defining and representing geometrical shapes numerically. It extracts numerical information from the shapes numerical definitions and representations. Important terms that will help you start learning this subject:<ul><li>Distance Function: It is a function that gives numerical information for the distance between the elements of a set.</li><li>Inner Product: This term introduces natural geometrical concepts, such as the length of a vector and the angle or distance between two vectors.</li></ul>

Analytic Geometry (Coordinate Geometry)

Matrix decomposition is about how to reduce a matrix into its constituent parts. It tries to simplify complex matrix operations on the decomposed matrix instead of the original matrix. There are many ways to decompose a matrix using a range of different techniques.

Matrix Decomposition

Calculus is concerned with a perpetual change that consists of functions and limits. Vector calculus involves the differentiation and integration of the vector fields. Useful terms:<ul><li>Derivative is a function of real numbers that measure the change of the function (output) value concerning a change in its argument (input value)</li><li>Differentiation is the action of calculating a derivative.</li><li>Gradient is another word for derivative and is used for functions with several inputs and one output.</li></ul>

Vector Calculus

Probability is the study of randomness. Probability distribution is a function that measures the probability of a specific outcome associated with the random variable. Probability theory and statistics are about different aspects of uncertainty.<ul><li>In statistics, we use probability to try and find the underlying process of something that has happened and strive to explain the observations.</li><li>Machine learning is similar to statistics. It makes a model that represents the process that generates the data.</li></ul>

Probability and Distribution

Training a machine learning model is about finding a good set of parameters. The best value is the minimum value. <ul><li>Global minima: The point where a function best values takes the minimum value. When the aim is to minimise the function and solve it using optimisation algorithms, the function could have a minimum value at various points. It is called local minima.</li><li>Unconstrained optimisation is where we see the minimum of a function.</li><li>Constrained optimisation introduces a set of constraints to limit possible value.</li></ul>

Optimisation

As a Data Scientist, machine learning is our arsenal to do our job. I am pretty sure in this modern times, everyone who is employed as a Data Scientist would use machine learning to analyze their…

problemsolving

Problem Solving

computerscience

Computer Science

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

6 Math Foundation to Start Learning Machine Learning

Most schools and colleges have gone completely digital with professors and teachers abandoning textbook assignments in favour of multimedia coursework and digital text.
However, studies show that reading several pages of text on printed paper is more effective than on the screen. Printed text reading improves the recall of minor details and also the understanding of the core content.

Reading Onscreen Vs On Printed Text

Reading on paper is better in terms of concentration and learning, as opposed to digital texts or TED talks. This is because people associate digital texts, podcasts and other multimedia courseware with casual social media, and apply less mental effort, as opposed to reading printed text. This phenomenon is known as the Shallowing Hypothesis.
While it seems that watching a Discovery Channel documentary or listening to a podcast is more engaging, the opposite is true in terms of content recall.

Read, Listen, Or Watch

Trying to learn using digital media(digital text, audio and video) isn’t very effective due to :
<ol>
<li>Diminished concentration levels.</li>
<li>A tendency towards distractions or multitasking.</li>
<li>An entertainment mindset.</li>
<li>A lack of review notes or annotations.</li>
<li>The inability to create a fixed reference point.</li>
</ol>

Video Is Entertainment

Compared with listening to a podcast or watching a video, we learn and remember more by reading an actual text. Furthermore, we retain this information even better if we haven't read it on a screen. Learn more about reading, listening, watching, and memory in this article.

Why do we remember more by reading in print vs. on a screen?

There is a difference between becoming an expert vs becoming reasonably good at something:  An expert means reaching the lop level in one's field. Being reasonably good at something means you have moved from 'grossly incompetent,' and can now handle that activity reasonably well. If your goal is to have a reasonable understanding of some field, you can achieve your learning goal in 20 hours.

Becoming Reasonably Good

<ul><li>Break the skill into various small parts, remembering that every big skill is a collection of many sub-skills.</li><li>Identify the essential sub-skills needed to give you the maximum advantage.</li><li>Practice the most important part that you have discovered, using the 80:20 principle in your learning.</li></ul>

Deconstruct the Skill

The Pareto principle states that 20% of your activities (even lesser) deliver 80% results (even more) in almost every area of your life.

80/20: Pareto's principle

You don't need to become an expert before you start to learn any sub-set of the major skill. You just need to learn enough, so you can self-correct when you make mistakes.

Learn Just Enough

Remove any obstacles that may distract you from practicing your sub-skill. Television is the biggest culprit, followed by smartphones.Learning something new will come with some frustration. That will be a time to safeguard yourself from any distractions so you remain focused on learning the skill.

Remove Barriers to Practice

It is not humanly possible to practice all in a twenty-hour stretch.A distributed practice learning method is achievable. It would roughly mean 45 minutes of practice for a period of thirty days in a row.For instance, writing every evening for 30 minutes can give you a reward of a 25 000-word book in a 5 - 6 week period.

Practice for 20 Hours

“The capacity to learn is a gift; the ability to learn is a skill; the willingness to learn is a choice”.

The major obstacle in learning anything new is not intellectual - it is emotional.The fear of sounding stupid stops us. In reality, you can learn anything if you wish to with a little daily practise over a repeated period of time.

Overcoming the barrier to learn

"Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can, there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did." In this world, where we hear about concepts like the 10,000 hour rule to become an expert in any skill, the promise of learning something new in under 24 Hours seems too unrealistic, rather crazy.

education

Learning & Education

Use This 4-Step Formula To Learn Anything In Under 24 Hours

The OODA Loop is a four-step method to swiftly make effective decisions in tough and high-stakes situations. It is created by military leaders and war strategists who work in extreme situations and routinely face drastic scenarios.
The OODA Loop stands for:
<ol>
<li>Observe</li>
<li>Orient</li>
<li>Decide</li>
<li>Act</li>
</ol>
It is called a loop as it is intended to be repeated until the conflict is taken care of.

The OODA Loop: A Military Mental Model

The first step is to observe the situation in a comprehensive and accurate manner, taking into account the visible information. A fighter pilot, for instance, can observe the following:
<ol>
<li>How is the situation immediately affecting me?</li>
<li>What is affecting my opponent?</li>
<li>What could affect me or my opponent later?</li>
<li>What predictions can be made here?</li>
</ol>
Similarly, a doctor meeting a patient for the first time has to observe and gather information, which apart from the visible symptoms, also means verbal cues, body language and diagnostic tests.

OODA Loop: Observe

Orientation is a basic step but is overlooked by many. We have to orient ourselves and recognize any barriers that might be an interference in the OODA loop.
Orientation takes an objective, unbiased look at the world, free from shortcuts and mental models that interfere with our thinking. Paying attention to our own assumptions and biases like old habits, ignoring new information, and even our own cultural traditions is recommended to orient ourselves towards reality.

OODA Loop: Orientation

Deductive Destruction is a way to orient yourself by paying attention to your own biases and assumptions, and replace them with objective, fundamental thought processes.
One has to pull things apart (dissection and analysis) and then put them back together (synthesis) in new ways so that new ideas and actions are revealed.

Orientation: Deductive Destruction

After the groundwork has been laid by the previous steps of observing and orienting, one has to decide, creating a decision field to spot any flaws and decoys. 
The first conclusion isn’t always right, and we cannot make the same decision frequently.

OODA Loop: Decide

Enacting decisions is different from the deciding part. One puts the decisions to test by taking action. 
The results indicate the quality of the decision and the OODA loop cycles back into a feedback loop, where successful decisions are repeated and bad ones are improvised.

OODA Loop: Act

<ol>
<li>Speed: Decisions and amendments are faster with the OODA loop. It is an essential mental toolbox and after practice, requires only a few seconds.</li>
<li>Being comfortable with uncertainty: Uncertainty is part of life, and many decisions are made with incomplete information and a certain amount of risk. A calculated decision based on a scientific mental model minimizes uncertainty or makes it irrelevant.</li>
<li>Unpredictability: People fail to see the logic of your decision if it is fast, and makes you appear unpredictable and formless, increasing your allure.</li>
</ol>

Key Benefits Of OODA Loop

“Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”

<ul>
<li>Gödel’s theorems: They indicate that any mental model that we try to work with will omit parts of information and we have to use Bayesian updating (Continuously update the confidence in your beliefs as you come across new information) to bring it in line with reality.</li>
<li>Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: One cannot fully know the position and the velocity of an object at the same time. We can either know its location or its speed.</li>
<li>Second Law of Thermodynamics: In any closed system, things move towards chaos and energy becomes disorganized (entropy).</li>
</ul>

Key Principles Of  OODA Loop

<ul>
<li>OODA Loop is a nimble technique in tune with the ever-changing environment around us and has to be applied in our daily decisions.</li>
<li>It is a formless technique that self-improvises and adapts to the real world.</li>
<li>We will start to make better decisions and increase our awareness, moving us towards our full potential.</li>
</ul>

Applying The OODA Loop

entertainment

Entertainment

The OODA Loop: How Fighter Pilots Make Fast and Accurate Decisions

In a comprehensive study, many people were asked about the time taken for them to make decisions regarding their life partner, their choice of beverage, and evaluation of various kinds of data. In all of the cases, there was a false belief in the individuals that they would utilize more information than what they eventually did.

Predictions Vs Reality

Humans falsely believe that we process information in an incremental, linear way. 
<ul>
<li>The Anchoring Effect suggests that the first pieces of information are weighted in a much heavier way than subsequent pieces.</li>
<li>The Empathy gap makes people fail to understand just how deep each separate piece of information is, viewing it just like a dry statistic.</li>
</ul>

The Various Kinds Of Bias While Deciding

Some on-the-spot gut instinct judgements are often remarkably accurate, and can also save time.
On the flip side, many judgements based on a simple observation snowball into a series of missteps due to the problem of self-fulfilling prophecy, where confirmation bias makes the person see the very thing that is already believed as true.

Blink-Of-An-Eye Decisions

Research has revealed that many of our choices are made on the spot - and that may not be such a bad thing.

Research Suggests How to Prevent Unwelcome Thoughts

How to Create a Niche Site That Earns 4 Figures a Month in 6 Easy Steps

Why It’s So Hard to Keep and Recruit Employees Right Now | Lynda Gratton

Five Priorities For Communicating During Mergers And Acquisitions

The science behind panic attacks — and what can you do to manage them

Cole Y.