Admitting to yourself that you are upset or in pain can make you feel exposed. You fear that acknowledging a bad feeling gives it more power. The pain might get worse. You might not be able to tolerate it.When you have negative emotions, your first response is usually to downplay them or to run away.There’s a scale that runs from one extreme, stubbornness, to the other extreme, paranoia. You don’t want to run to the doctor or stay in bed on the slightest ailment. But you also don’t want to pretend nothing is wrong when your headache lasts for years.

Pretending To Be Fine

Put it out in the open. By labelling what you’re going through, you will not only feel better about the situation, you’re more likely to find a solution. The last thing you want is to pretend you’re fine when you’re not. Some people are absolute masters in that. They convince everyone that everything is fine. But it’s not something to be proud of. It’s a dark art that can have serious negative consequences. Instead of keeping your ailments in the dark, bring them out to the light. They won’t survive for long there.

Acknowledge The Situation

<ul><li>When you are not energized, work less, or not at all.</li><li>Do great work when you feel good.</li><li>If others don't respect that, you don't want to work with them in the first place.</li><li>Don't put pressure on yourself.</li><li>Stick to your most important habits.</li><li>Humour is the best remedy for soothing emotional pain.</li><li>Ask for help when things are not okay.</li></ul>

Staying Consistent

I landed on a documentary about a guy who had a headache for years and never had a check-up. They found out later he had a brain tumor.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

mentalhealth

Mental Health

The Dark Art of Pretending You Are Fine - Darius Foroux

Our default understanding of the word ritual is misleading. Ritual is not about meticulously obeying stale old rules. Instead, Confucius taught life as a ritual, transforming everyday actions into sacred activities. Ritual governs our greetings and conversations. If you submit to ritual and practise it, then it can change your life for the better.

Ritual is not about stale traditionalism

Treat all contexts as sacred spaces with their own rhythms and patterns. For example, driving a car is not a time to check your phone. Hiking is not the time to scroll on your phone. When you start treating your contexts with the reverence they deserve and submit to their rituals, it becomes effortless to resist the pull of your phone.

Ritual is about reverence

Habits (good and bad) are effortless and cultivated through repetition. But habits are hard to change. A ritual is more like improvising music or an athletic performance. It means adjusting to different conditions. Confucian ritual is similarly flexible. It depends on the awareness of the relevant factors in a situation. For example, someone who submits to a ritual does not shake hands out of habit but because it is the proper thing to do in that context at that time.

Everything is ritual

<ul><li>Habits leave no room for asking questions. </li><li>Ritual governs all behaviour in all contexts. The right ritual in a situation is only possible when you learn to ask questions. You won't be able to live harmoniously if you do not understand why you should act in a certain way.</li></ul> Studying the classics is uniquely helpful with rituals.<ol><li>Classics contain time-tested life wisdom.</li><li>Sacred texts, folk tales and fairy tales, nursery rhymes and proverbs are woven into the fabric of our lives and the organisation of our communities.</li></ol>

Ritual differs from habit

"Fake it until you make it’ suggests that performing the right action will eventually lead to the right mindset or intentions. The underlying assumption is that the rightness of an action is separate from the character of the person doing it. How﻿ever, a ritual cannot be performed insincerely. A fake ritual is not a ritual at all, no matter how much it looks like one. For example, pretending to love another human won't work, because 'loving' means doing it for real. You may know when laughter is appropriate, but if you fake it, the ritual will fail.

You can’t fake it until you make it

For a life of harmonious ease, find the rhythm in the everyday: make your world your temple and submit to its sacred ritual

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

habits

Habits

How to set yourself free with ritual | Psyche Guides

We should all dump our obsession with bucket lists. Reverse bucket lists are where it's at.Bucket lists are filled with wants and dreams. When we get what we want or achieve our dreams, it's a nice feeling, at least for a while. Then we need something else.It all comes back to the "satisfaction formula": satisfaction = getting what you want. But you never really stop wanting things, and so, well, are you ever really satisfied?

Forget Those Bucket Lists

The real formula for satisfaction:Satisfaction = what you have/what you want. While we can, to some extent, increase our haves, our real control lies in our wants. If we whittle down the wants, our satisfaction increases. In others words, if we create reverse bucket lists -- lists of wants to do away with -- we'll find ourselves closer to satisfaction in the present.

The Real Satisfaction Formula

The Reverse Bucket List works like this:You want a bigger office -- but the price tag would require you to hold off on the rollout of new employee benefits or raises. Ask yourself: Do I NEED a new office? Or is it merely a want (reverse bucket list)? And if it's a want, how can I turn it instead into money, supplies, or support for my team (giving list)?

The Reverse Bucket List

Social scientist Arthur Brooks's theory of reverse bucket lists is a powerful way to remove too many 'wants' and enjoy our existing 'haves.'

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

Forget Bucket Lists. The Formula for Satisfaction Is Actually the Opposite, Says Harvard Professor

Research in behavioral science classifies the benefits of brainstorming in two ways:<ul><li>Synergy: Ideas shared by one person can energize, inspire, and trigger ideas in other people.</li><li>Social facilitation: Collaborating to reach a common goal can motivate everyone in the group.</li></ul>These benefits, however, also come with some downsides. A major one is production blocking, a term used to describe a situation when someone has an innovative idea that gets lost in the mix because the larger group is focused on a different topic.

The Problem with Traditional Brainstorming

<ul><li>Pick a shared collaboration tool that works for your team. Members should be able to sign in virtually.</li><li>Generate and organize ideas. Give all team members 10 to 15 minutes to add their ideas independently to your collaboration tool. If you are running the brainstorm asynchronously, ask team members to submit their ideas by an assigned deadline.</li><li> Evaluate. 10 minutes for an anonymous feedback session in which team members can comment on, rate, or vote for their favorite contribution. This may be done asynchronously as well.</li><li>Meet to discuss shortlisted ideas. </li></ul>

How to Run a Great (Virtual) Brainstorming Session

Not only is it more fun, it also produces more novel ideas.

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

problemsolving

Problem Solving

teamwork

Teamwork

Why Virtual Brainstorming is Better for Innovation

"Good ideas are hard to find. And even the best ideas face an uncertain path to real-world success. That's true whether you’re running a startup, teaching a class, or working inside a large organization."

Working in a sprint as a startup means shortcutting the endless debate cycle and compressing months of time into a single week. Instead of waiting to launch a minimal product to understand if an idea is any good, you get clear data from a realistic prototype.The superpower working in a sprint: it fast-forwards you into the future to see your finished product and customer reactions, before making any expensive commitments.

Working together in a sprint

<ul><li>On Monday, you’ll map out the problem and pick an important place to focus. </li><li>On Tuesday, you’ll sketch competing solutions on paper.</li><li>On Wednesday, you’ll make difficult decisions and turn your ideas into testable hypotheses.</li><li>On Thursday, you’ll hammer out a realistic prototype. </li><li>And on Friday, you’ll test it with real live humans.</li></ul>

Running your own sprint

Challenging situations where sprints can help: <ul><li>High stakes: you’re facing a big problem and the solution will require a lot of time and money. A sprint is your chance to check the navigation charts and steer in the right direction before going full steam ahead. </li><li>Not enough time: You’re up against a deadline. As the name suggests, a sprint is built for speed. </li><li>Just plain stuck: Some important projects are hard to start. Others lose momentum along the way. In these situations, a sprint can be a booster rocket: a fresh approach to problem-solving that helps you escape gravity’s clutches.</li></ul>

The bigger the challenge, the better the sprint

The surface is important. It’s where your product or service meets customers. Human beings are complex and fickle, so it’s impossible to predict how they’ll react to a brand-new solution. Get that surface right, and you can work backward to figure out the underlying systems or technology. Focusing on the surface allows you to move fast and answer big questions before you commit to execution, which is why any challenge, no matter how large, can benefit from a sprint.

Solve the surface first

A sprint resembles that perfectly orchestrated heist. You and your team put your talents, time, and energy to their best use, taking on an overwhelming challenge and using your wits (and a little trickery) to overcome every obstacle that crosses your path. To pull it off, you need the right team. You shouldn’t need a pickpocket, but you will need a leader and a set of diverse skills.

One of the best aspects of a sprint: It gives you an excuse to work the way you want to work, with a clear calendar and one important goal to address.There are no context switches between different projects, and no random interruptions.

Time and space

Even when the future seems obvious, it’s worth taking the time on Monday to make it specific and write it down. Consider these questions:If you could jump ahead to the end of your sprint, what questions would be answered? If you went six months or a year further into the future, what would have improved about your business as a result of this project?

Start at the end

We all want a flash of divine inspiration that changes the world—and impresses our teammates. But amazing ideas don’t happen like that: great innovation is built on existing ideas, repurposed with vision. In your sprint, follow this rule: remix and improve— but never blindly copy.

Remix and improve

Sketching is the fastest and easiest way to transform abstract ideas into concrete solutions. Once your ideas become concrete, they can be critically and fairly evaluated by the rest of the team—without any sales pitch. And, perhaps most important of all, sketching allows every person to develop those concrete ideas while working alone.Individuals working alone generate better solutions than groups brainstorming out loud. It allows for everyone to do research, find inspiration, think about the problem, and create unique ideas.

The power of sketching

Here are the five steps to go through in order to decide which solutions should be prototyped:<ul><li>Art museum: Put the solution sketches on the wall with masking tape. </li><li>Heat map: Look at all the solutions in silence, and use dot stickers to mark interesting parts. </li><li>Speed critique: Quickly discuss the highlights of each solution, and use sticky notes to capture big ideas. </li><li>Straw poll: Each person chooses one solution, and votes for it with a dot sticker. </li><li>Supervote: The Decider makes the final decision, with—you guessed it—more stickers.</li></ul>

The sticky decision

Prototyping is all about creating an illusion. To prototype your solution, you’ll need a temporary change of philosophy: from perfect to just enough, from long-term quality to temporary simulation. This is the “prototype mindset,” and it’s made up of four simple principles:<ol><li>You can prototype anything. </li><li>Prototypes are disposable: don’t prototype anything you aren’t willing to throw away. </li><li>Build just enough to learn, but not more: a prototype is meant to answer questions, so keep it focused. You don’t need a fully functional product.</li><li>The prototype must appear real: to get trustworthy results in your test, you can’t ask your customers to use their imaginations. You’ve got to show them something realistic. </li></ol>

The prototype mindset

When it’s time to showcase your prototype to customers, you’ll want them to react naturally and honestly to what they believe is a finished product or service. Such reactions are solid gold, but feedback is not. If the illusion of a real product is broken, customers switch into feedback mode. They’ll try to be helpful and think up suggestions instead of providing genuine reactions.In the real world, your product will stand alone—people will find it, evaluate it, and use it without you there to guide them. Give them nudges, but don’t tell them exactly what to do. Seeing where customers struggle and where they succeed is useful.

Gather customer reactions

From three design partners at Google Ventures, a unique five-day process--called the sprint--for solving tough problems using design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers.

productivity

Productivity

entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship

startup

Startups

books

Books

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Our sense of sight aids our memory using location, placement, direction and other visual and space elements, something known as Spatial memory.
We automatically start to build spatial memories from a very young age, recollecting the layouts of places and how they relate to the physical objects around them.

Memory And Location: The Method Of Loci

The wonders and capabilities of the brain are unlimited. Anything can be done with the right training and commitment. The brain is like a muscle, which grows almost infinitely when worked upon, at a cellular level.Our memory, trained well, can help us remember almost anything.

Unlimited Capabilities Of The Brain

Memory can be built and recalled easily by creating a physical visualization of objects and actions that we can easily remember.For example, we can vividly visualize a room(inside our mind), and mentally place objects in that room in different corners, like a cow to remember buying milk, or a car with the gas tank leaking to remember to fill it up.

Building A Memory Palace

<ul><li>To recall better, it helps to create vivid mental images spatially, emphasising the location and involving various senses. </li><li>This Memory Palace technique is scalable and helps us remember all kinds of information using visualization and imagination.</li></ul>The trick is to place different kinds of objects at different locations so that we can easily recall them using localization and direction.

Creating Vivid And Complex Mental Images

The trick to remember a string of numbers is to create visuals and stories in pairs of two.For example, the sequence 25784561 can be remembered as:25: A mother and daughter talking.78: A fat lady singing on the microphone45: A guy riding a truck.61: A girl standing at a train terminal.The visuals may not make any sense, but creating vivid stories and memorable imagery in our minds helps us recall any amount of numbers with ease.

How To Remember Numbers

The method of Loci works best when the information placed in the virtual space is unusual and strange. Weird imagery has a way to help to recall the specific information that we encode.Constructing a memory palace is fun and helps us remember stuff we cannot write down. It makes us realize the importance of being mindful and being attentive towards life.

Strange And Absurd Images

Before writing things down became an easy option, people trained themselves to recall information using mnemonic techniques. Building a memory palace is a proven ancient method anyone can use to achieve perfect recall.

health

Health

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

The Method of Loci: Build Your Memory Palace

"One skill you want to master in this day and age we live in, if you want to have an extraordinary life, is the ability to learn rapidly."

Mimic and get help from someone who’s already learned it to get tips and save time.In order to achieve mastery faster, our first step should be to consult the top players in the field and model the path they have already carved out for us.

Don't reinvent the wheel

...into its basic, fundamental components, to find the most important things to practice first. This shows that very few things actually make a difference in any aspect of our lives, including learning. Use the Pareto Principle: which describes a goal of generating 80 percent of results by putting in 20 percent of the effort.

Deconstruct the skill

Many of us aren’t able to dedicate the time it takes to learn a skill because of the countless new projects that come our way.Once you have deconstructed the subset skills that will give you the maximum amount of results, focus solely on improving those skills and avoid learning anything else until you’ve mastered them.

Stop multitasking

Expert-level performance is primarily the result of expert-level practice, not due to innate talent. Learning requires frequency and persistence in performing the same skill over and over again, until you can do it subconsciously, without having to think about it.

Repeat, repeat, repeat

The most effective learners actively seek feedback to enhance their performance. Feedback is necessary for a learner to confirm that s/he is on the right track.

Seek immediate feedback

Although it’s important to know when to quit, many potential winners don’t reach success because they quit before the dip. There’s a sense of euphoria we all experience when we begin something new.  Once the honeymoon phase fades away, we experience the “dip” and our progress begins to plateau or diminish. This is when most of us quit.

Go Long

If only. For many of us, there are more things we want to learn than we have time for. And as information becomes more readily accessible online, the number of things we want to learn has only increased. That means that the only variable we can actually control is the time we spend learning them.

education

Learning & Education

timemanagement

Time Management

The Ultimate Guide to Learning Anything Faster

"For those who know how to use technology wisely, it is the easiest time in history to teach yourself something new."

“Over the last twenty years, the amount of knowledge easily accessible from a quick online search has exploded…Yet despite this incredible advance, it is not as if the average person is thousands as times as smart as people were was a generation ago. Being able to look things up is certainly an advantage, but without a certain amount of knowledge inside your head, it doesn’t help you solve hard problems.”

It is a strategy for acquiring skills and knowledge. Ultralearning is a potent skill for dealing with a changing world. It has three main characteristics:
<ul>
<li>It is a strategy. A strategy is not the only solution to a given problem, but it may be a good one.</li>
<li>It's self-directed. It’s about how you make decisions about what to learn and why.</li>
<li>It's an intense process. Ultralearners always search for and take unusual steps to maximize their effectiveness in learning.</li>
</ul>

Ultralearning

<ul>
<li>Economics: Average is over. But even if the economic landscape is rapidly changing may, we can engineer our response to it by aggressively learning the hard skills we need to thrive.</li>
<li>Education: Ultralearning can fill some of those gaps when going back to school isn’t an affordable option.</li>
<li>Technology: The space of learning possibilities is immense, just waiting for ambitious autodidacts to come up with new ways to exploit it.</li>
</ul>

Why Investing In Mastering The Art Of Learning Hard

<ol>
<li>Meta-learning: Start by learning how to learn the subject or skill you want to tackle.</li>
<li>Focus: Carve out time in your day, and hack back distractions.</li>
<li>Directness: Practice the thing you want to learn. Learn by doing.</li>
<li>Drill the weakest points: Break down complex skills into small parts.</li>
<li>Retrieval: Testing isn’t simply a way of assessing knowledge but a way of creating it.</li>
<li>Feedback: Know how to use it without letting your ego get in the way. </li>
<li>Retention: Understand what you forget and why. Learn to remember things.</li>
<li>Intuition: Develop your intuition through play and exploration of concepts and skills. </li>
<li>Experimentation: Get outside your comfort zone by cultivating an experimental mindset.</li>
</ol>

9 Principles of Ultralearning

At some level there’s a craving that drives us to do something else, there’s an aversion to doing the task itself or both.
Much procrastination is unconscious. We’re procrastinating, but we don’t internalize it that way.

Why We Procrastinate

<ul>
<li>Your environment: be aware of what environment you work best in, and test it. Multitasking may feel like fun, but it’s unsuitable for ultralearning.</li>
<li>The task you’re trying to learn: certain activities, due to their nature, are harder to focus on than others.</li>
<li>Your mind: negative emotions, restlessness, and daydreaming can be some of the biggest obstacles to focus.</li>
</ul>

Learning: Common Sources Of Distraction

<ul>
<li>Outcome feedback: this tells you something about how well you’re doing overall but offers no ideas as to what you’re doing better or worse.</li>
<li>Informational feedback: this feedback tells you what you’re doing wrong, but it doesn’t necessarily tell you how to fix it.</li>
<li>Corrective feedback: the best kind of feedback to get is corrective feedback. This is the feedback that shows you not only what you’re doing wrong but how to fix it.</li>
</ul>

Three Types Of Feedback

“Knowledge expands, but so does ignorance, as with a greater understanding of a subject also comes a greater appreciation for all the questions that remain unanswered.”

Learn a new talent, stay relevant, reinvent yourself, and adapt to whatever the workplace throws your way. Ultralearning offers nine principles to master hard skills quickly. This is the essential guide to future-proof your career and maximize your competitive advantage through self-education. In these tumultuous times of economic and technological change, staying ahead depends on continual self-education—a lifelong mastery of fresh ideas, subjects, and skills. If you want to accomplish more and stand apart from everyone else, you need to become an ultralearner. The challenge of learning new skills is that you think you already know how best to learn, as you did as a student, so you rerun old routines and old ways of solving problems. To counter that, Ultralearning offers powerful strategies to break you out of those mental ruts and introduces new training methods to help you push through to higher levels of retention. Scott H. Young incorporates the latest research about the most effective learning methods and the stories of other ultralearners like himself—among them Benjamin Franklin, chess grandmaster Judit Polgár, and Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman, as well as a host of others, such as little-known modern polymath Nigel Richards, who won the French World Scrabble Championship—without knowing French. Young documents the methods he and others have used to acquire knowledge and shows that, far from being an obscure skill limited to aggressive autodidacts, ultralearning is a powerful tool anyone can use to improve their career, studies, and life. Ultralearning explores this fascinating subculture, shares a proven framework for a successful ultralearning project, and offers insights into how you can organize and exe - cute a plan to learn anything deeply and quickly, without teachers or budget-busting tuition costs. Whether the goal is to be fluent in a language (or ten languages), earn the equivalent of a college degree in a fraction of the time, or master multiple tools to build a product or business from the ground up, the principles in Ultralearning will guide you to success.

.. is when you trade your present happiness with a greater amount of happiness in the future.
<ul>
<li>Most religions discovered that it is a virtue to delay your pleasures, and saving up on resources. </li>
<li>Delayed gratification, or sacrificing today for a better tomorrow is one of the foundations of our civilization.</li>
<li>It works because the benefits of delaying, saving or not consuming something add up. </li>
<li>Eating healthy today, investing in the business for long-term gains. </li>
<li>For the young, studying right now (instead of a party) to have a better life in the future is delayed gratification.</li>
</ul>

Delayed Gratification

<ul>
<li>Many cultural systems in society keep us in check so that we don’t derail our lives. Schools and colleges, parental guidance and any community have rules and regulations in place that are based on delayed gratification.</li>
<li>Just like a child is not able to resist the temptation of eating a marshmallow, even if promised more marshmallows later, delayed gratification is something that is not easy to do for most of us, in a fundamental way. </li>
<li>Resisting the urge to eat the cake because you are on a diet, or denying yourself a new iPhone so that you can save up for a new house later is all part of the same game.</li>
</ul>

Delayed Gratification: The Most Important Trait

Delayed gratification at its core isn’t about self-control, but about managing our emotions.
If we look at credit card debt, consumer loans, the drug addiction epidemic, obesity levels, and problems with mental health, it is evident that delaying gratification is hard for most of us.

We Are Lousy In Delaying Gratification

<ol>
<li>Make things out of sight to avoid them. Example: Not being in the vicinity of junk food to avoid putting it in your mouth.</li>
<li>Grow up and find out what you are dealing with. Example: If you smoke, understand the health, social, financial and other costs associated with smoking.</li>
<li>Have time-bound, realistic goals to motivate yourself for the future. Be specific and committed.</li>
<li>Learn to identify and manage your emotions.</li>
<li>Be with the right people, those who move you towards your goal.</li>
</ol>

How To Delay Gratification: Five Rules

Nearly every culture around the world encourages sacrifice today for a better tomorrow. So why is delayed gratification so hard?

The Virtue of Delayed Gratification

It means looking at the world differently. Any successful person you see didn’t get there by doing the same old thing. They innovated. They adapted. They changed. Rather than thinking “Well, that’s just how it is,” you instead think “what can I do to make it better?”

The Experimental Mindset

<ul><li>Practice grayscale thinking. This means that the world isn’t just seen in black and white. It means opening your mind to the possibility that there could be more answers than just yes or no.</li><li>Overcome resistance to change by experimenting. We have a tendency to stick with what is familiar even if it really isn’t the best option.</li><li>Recognize that you always have more to learn. To have an experimental mindset, you must be willing to see what others are doing better. Take their insight and use it to create your own solutions. </li></ul>

Develop an Experimental Mindset

Opening your mind to the possibility that there could be more answers than just yes or no means you are able to see past the obvious right or wrong answers that have been used in the past—and see a third, fourth, fifth option.You don’t know yet if it will work. But in this way, obstacles become chances to experiment and try to find new solutions.

Thinking Beyond "Yes" And "No"

So, how do you go about developing a mindset that welcomes change and is excited to try new ideas? A mindset that looks at problems as a chance to innovate and find new solutions.

The Dark Art of Pretending You Are Fine - Darius Foroux

How to set yourself free with ritual | Psyche Guides

Forget Bucket Lists. The Formula for Satisfaction Is Actually the Opposite, Says Harvard Professor

Why Virtual Brainstorming is Better for Innovation

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Daniel S.