Activism can look big, like organising a march for racial justice or occupying a pump station to protest a pipeline. But the definition of activism is broader. Any time you do purposeful action with the hope of making the world better for other people, you're participating in activism. It could be speaking up for a teammate, donating your time to read with kids at a school, baking for a charity or using social media to inform.

Changing the world

Do away with your ideas of what activism or activists "should" look like or what causes you "should" care about. Understand the limitations of the space you have to give. For example, can you offer 20 hours of volunteer time a week? Does a recurring donation fit into your current budget?

Make a clearing

Once you've identified the space, evaluate what skills, gifts and interests you have to contribute. The "tinder" is the small bits of things you already love to do that you can use to grow a fire. Your love for baking cupcakes, your speed-reading skills, your eye for interior design can be used to hook into activism in a way that enriches you.

Gather your tinder

Think about the causes and beliefs that most light you up and move you to action. Identify the things that make you angry, break your heart or make you think something has to change. That is where you find your spark.

Find your spark

An important part of activism is finding ways to keep your passion ignited and avoiding burnout. We usually get into activism because we're angry, upset, or sad about something. Consider how you tend that soul fire. When is it time to take a break and let somebody else take over? You can maintain your fire by focusing on the longevity of the work, not the finish line. Your task is to take the baton from the people who came before and pass it along to the next people. You can do it by focusing on the progress instead of complete success.

Tend to the flames

Activism can look like big gestures of protest, but it can also look like baking cupcakes for a charity bake sale or reading at an after school program. These tips will help you find joy in activism while avoiding burnout.

Stashed ideas

How to find joy in activism : Life Kit

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Intelligence is often thought of in terms of logic, thinking, and information processing. </li><li class="ql-align-justify"> Intelligence is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal. It can help you get a career in almost any field and make it your specialty.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">Intelligence, in essence, is your ability to think logically, understand abstract concepts, and learn quickly.</li><li class="ql-align-justify">It’s also the ability to learn, unlearn and relearn when necessary. Highly intelligent people can learn quickly and retain information for a long time.</li></ul>

Defining Intelligence

<ul><li> The ability to learn and retain new information is the ultimate sign of high intelligence.</li><li>Peak intelligence occurs when a person’s mental abilities are at their highest, and they can produce the best results possible.</li><li>High intelligence is a skill, but it’s rare.</li><li>High intelligence makes you a better person because you will be able to see things from different perspectives and come up with more creative solutions to problems.</li></ul>

High Intelligence

Jeff Bezos says improve your ability to change your mind when you find better knowledge. Elon Musk says, “It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree.”According to Steve Jobs, A lot of [what it means to be smart] is the ability to zoom out, like you’re in a city and you could look at the whole thing from the 80th floor down at the city. And while other people are trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B reading these stupid little maps, you could just see it in front of you. You can see the whole thing.

Intelligence Defined By Great Business Leaders

The 80th-floor intelligence is like improving your “bird’s eye view” skills. First, you have to learn how to learn deeper and broader to accumulate experience and better knowledge.You can only make better connections if you already have the right knowledge. So to improve your intelligence, gather more insight from great sources, choose your knowledge sources wisely, learn from people more intelligent than you, and read books you are willing to reread repeatedly.

The Macro View

<ul><li>Improving your intelligence is about stacking experience and applying lessons from good sources. You can only zoom out if you know what you are looking at. It’s hard, but it’s worth it.</li><li>Openness to wide and deep experiences outside your comfort zone will change your life. It will also improve your thinking lens.</li><li>Intellectual curiosity is key to peak intelligence. It’s also one of the best predictors of success. Curiosity is at the core of scientific discoveries.</li></ul>

The Thinking Lens

To develop a complete mind: Study the science of art; Study the art of science. Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else

Your ability to spot better life and career patterns, make more brilliant connections and predict good outcomes depend on your ability to pause, zoom out and visualize the bigger picture.

Spotting The Patterns

Intelligence is often thought of in terms of logic, thinking, and information processing. It’s this logical and rational side of ourselves. However, intelligence isn’t just about having a logical…

The 80th-floor Genius: Steve Jobs’ Definition of High Intelligence

Business leaders can first harness their paranoia by constantly asking questions--both about your business and the market overall. Most markets are more dynamic than they've ever been, and change happens fast. If you're not asking questions, you're not intimately familiar with your market, and you're going to get passed by.

Question everything

Asking questions will likely prove that you don't have all of the answers--and that's okay. Even the most successful leaders embrace humility and acknowledge that they need a trusted team to figure out the best path forward.Practice the philosophy of "hire the best and trust them." We need to empower our domain experts to make decisions and sometimes "disagree and commit." Or more often, express our point of view and then defer to the domain expert or functional owner.  This takes humility.

Stay humble

It's easy to get caught up in your business's success. While there is a time and place to acknowledge and celebrate big wins and market leadership, complacency is a death knell in today's business reality. By harnessing paranoia, leaders can avoid finding finite satisfaction in today's victories and focus on maintaining a competitive edge for tomorrow.

Stay nimble and pivot

Complacency is a death knell. Stay focused to maintain your company's edge in the evolving business landscape.

How To Harness Paranoia To Avoid The 'Success Trap'

We can’t always follow the conventional norm and depend on historic data to tell us what’s next; innovative businesses should always consider taking calculated risks with their <a href="https://www.entrepreneur.com/topic/marketing-strategies">marketing strategies</a>.  Netflix released such a show because audiences are bored of the copy-paste-styled shows now available on all these streaming services. There was a gap in the market, almost a need for something odd and fresh like Squid Game. Regular content can get your business mediocre attention, but a strong concept that is intriguing and fresh can make you go viral, resulting in a lot of free marketing.

We don’t know what consumers really want until they show us

Serious brands that take an informal approach on the platform get a lot more praise and attention, resulting in higher free impressions. Consumers have evolved; they now want a brand they can relate to and feel a deeper connection with than just a traditional transactional relationship. The great advantage for Squid Game is that the only way to understand the jokes going viral is to watch the show because of how specific they are. This can work great for a marketing strategy. Make your campaign so unique and specific that you turn your audiences into advocates for the story.

When your brand has a viral TikTok trend, it’s bound for success

Word-of-mouth hyping up a TV show at such an accelerated pace is something we have never seen before. Netflix is now investing in some marketing for the series with pop-up displays, which are not really intended to bring more attention, but rather to complement the ongoing buzz happening worldwide.  We, humans, want to share something odd like this violent game of death it gives us pleasure of some sort and makes for a great conversation starter. In the case of Squid Game, the violence and gore that kept the script on a shelf for a decade actually contributed to its success.

Word-of-mouth is more successful than the largest paid ad campaigns

3 Marketing Lessons We Can Learn From Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’

Most job postings nowadays require skill sets related to problem-solving, making it a sought-after ability that job candidates love to put in their resumes. Finding solutions is where the big money is.
Yet we design our lives in a way that is counterintuitive to problem solving.
We are always in production mode, always working, available and doing something. Our mental resources are depleted most of the time, making us ineffective in solving problems.

Problem Solving: An In-Demand Skill

Humans have always leaned towards taking advice from their family, friends and colleagues to solve problems.Groups of people who are always communicating end up utilizing their collective knowledge and solve complex problems, while people who try to solve problems alone often invent original solutions never thought of before.The trick is to embrace the middle path and nurture one's own original ideas while also gathering with peers and look for solutions using collective learning.

Social Influence In Problem Solving

The always-on culture that instant communication has provided us is destructive to original thinking and diminishes our capacity to solve problems.A counterintuitive way to solve a problem is to set aside time when one is not dealing with the problem at all, but doing something completely different.

The Way To Solve Problems Is To Not Solve Them

<ul><li>When we set aside some time to not deal with our problem, it paradoxically improves our efforts.</li><li>This downtime makes our subconscious mind work invisibly towards a possible solution.</li><li>What we do in our downtime is completely up to us, but research shows that exercise, Yoga and trekking are great options.</li><li>It is imperative to sleep well and eat nutritious food to help untangle our minds and bring clarity.</li><li>Companies can help by setting aside time for employees to relax and do some office activities to help them unwind.</li></ul>

Mental Downtime For Awakening The Subconscious

<ul><li>Tuning out from problem-solving helps us solve the problem in a better way, as paradoxical as it sounds.</li><li>We can use this to our advantage by engaging in creative activities that stimulate our mind, like playing music, solving puzzles and indulging in other interdisciplinary skills.</li></ul>The best way to solve problems is to keep learning new things and performing creative activities.

Be A Lifelong Learner

Tips from neuroscience and psychology can make you an expert thinker.

Hack your brain for better problem solving

In 1976, Italian economist Carlo M Cipolla defined the laws as follows:
<ul>
<li>Everyone always underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.</li>
<li>The probability that a specific person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.</li>
<li>A stupid person causes losses to another person or group of persons, while he does not gain anything and perhaps incurs losses.</li>
<li>Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid people. They repeatedly forget that it is always a costly mistake when you deal with and/or associate with stupid people.</li>
</ul>

The basic laws of human stupidity

Countries moving forward will have a percentage of stupid people but have an unusually high fraction of intelligent people who overcompensate for the stupid people. Declining nations have many non-stupid people whose behaviour strengthens the destructive power of their stupid fellow citizens. 
Two unhelpful groups:
<ol>
<li>"Bandits" in positions of power that they use for their own gain.</li>
<li>Passive people out of power that sit do nothing as if they are helpless.</li>
</ol>

Countries on the rise vs those who are falling

Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals, it seems – this is one of the laws of human stupidity

Problem Solving

Improbable Research: the laws of human stupidity

A psychological study on joint decisions has an interesting observation about making asking someone out for dinner or any other plan.
If you are inviting someone, let them decide the place, but if you are asked by someone where you want to go for dinner, always state a clear choice.

Joint Decisions Psychology

People prefer to spend time with others who have a clear choice about what they like to do.
Most people don’t get this intuitively and think that if they are open to anything and are flexible, the other person would be pleased. According to new research on small joint decisions, the opposite is true.

Explaining The Joint Decision Psychology

Decision-making experts explain how to avoid arguments over where to get dinner together

Critical thinking is described as a mode of thinking where the thinker improves the quality of their thinking by skillfully analyzing, assessing, and reconstructing it.
Another definition describes critical thinking as a way to examine assumptions, discern hidden values, evaluate evidence, and judge conclusions.

Describing critical thinking

Critical thinking is a constant interaction with changing ideas and knowledge.
<ol>
<li>First, the thinker considers the background knowledge of the idea and the sense of identity.</li>
<li>Then the thinker can analyze it. The thinker has to see its parts, its form, its function, and its context.</li>
<li>Then comes evaluating it by bringing your unique thinking to it so you can point out flaws, underscore bias, and empathize merit. It means getting inside the mind of the author, or creator, and critique his work.</li>
</ol>

How to think critically

Critical thinking is coming to understand a complex thing worthy of study, bringing judgment upon it, and be willing to be judged in turn.
By analyzing and critiquing the work of others, especially experts, students combine their thoughts with them. In doing so, they learn by imitation and learn to act as pacesetters.

Learning by imitation

What does 'critical thinking' mean? It involves judgment and evaluation and analysis, but at its core there's something more important.

What It Means To Think Critically

Immersion is more effective and faster for learning a language than sitting in a class.
However, most people make some key mistakes when trying to learn a language while travelling.

Learning By Immersion

When you land in a country, you usually don't feel confident speaking, so you might decide to start in your native language until you get your bearings.
But you might meet peers and other people speaking in your native language, and if this bubble sticks, you can end up living in a country for decades without ever learning the local language.

Creating a Native Language Bubble

To learn the basics, find a tool that fulfils the two basic requirements for memorizing: repetition and recall.
<ul>
<li>You need to practice saying something more than once to master it, and then it is best to space those times out over days or weeks.</li>
<li>Recalling phrases is less common, but it is vital. Find phrases, and practice saying it correctly.</li>
</ul>
Starting phrases include: 
<ul>
<li>I would like...? </li>
<li>Where is ...? </li>
<li>How do you say ...? </li>
<li>What is that? </li>
<li>What is your name? </li>
<li>Where are you from? </li>
<li>What do you do for work?</li>
</ul>

Mastering Basic Phrases at Home First

Socialising is essential for immersion.
In European countries, a younger person can go to meetups through meetup.com. In Asia, it is best to hire a couple of private tutors around your age and tell them you're looking to make friends to learn the language. They will usually facilitate introductions.

Making Native-Language Friends

A tutor is a dedicated person who can answer questions, explain how the language works and be an opportunity to practice speaking while you're still trying to make friends.
<ul>
<li>Native people don't really have a high understanding of how their language works. They cannot explain the nuances of grammar or vocabulary. Professional teachers get this instruction and can often help.</li>
<li>If costs are too high, you can also settle for a dedicated language partner such as a fellow learner or native speaker.</li>
</ul>

Getting a Tutor

A strategic advantage is to work on pronunciation, as you want to convince people to speak with you in the language, instead of "helping you out" by speaking in your native tongue.
A simple way is to look at diagrams of tongue positions so you can mimic them when you're trying to speak. The goal is understandability so that native speakers don't struggle to understand the phrases you already know.

Learning Phonology Properly

If you want to learn a particular language, pick a place and stay put for a while. Then plan some travel after you've reached a moderate level of fluency.
Also, attempt to stop speaking your own language entirely during your trip. It will help avoid the temptation to fall into the bubble and will make practising much easier.

Moving Around Too Much

Want to Learn a Language on Your Next Trip? Avoid These Six Mistakes. | Scott H Young

When you have a task, the first thing you normally do is to start working on Step One. But there’s a step before Step One, and it’s more important: the step where you decide which task you should work on in the first place. 

Step Zero

Step Zero is obvious the same way your blind spot is obvious: always front and center, but never quite in focus.

Obvious but important

When you skip Step Zero, you end up on whatever default path is for people in your situation. You become a doctor because that’s what people in your family, ethnicity, or in-group do. You go to grad school because that’s what people with your academic background do. You are a follower, not having any space to decide what you really want to do.

Skipping Step Zero

<ul><li>The default option isn’t always the wrong one, but it’s always riskier than it looks.</li><li>The comfort zone of the default option is a dangerous situation and mindset to be in.</li></ul>

The comfort zone of Default Options

Successful people are unusually good at Step Zero, even though not many of them start out that way. We usually understand that we’re supposed to work hard to be successful. That makes sense: successful people work hard. But how did those successful people decide what they should be working on? That is never shown, and that is the Step Zero.

Successful people remember Step Zero

Someone once said that a thousand-mile journey begins with a single step. But in reality, a thousand-mile journey begins when you decide on where you’re going.

Before Step One there is Step Zero

I'm a physicist who works at a YC startup. The biggest mistake I've ever made is that I spent too much time as a physicist. The second biggest mistake I've ever made is that I spent too much time working on the wrong startup idea.

How to find joy in activism : Life Kit

The 80th-floor Genius: Steve Jobs’ Definition of High Intelligence

How To Harness Paranoia To Avoid The 'Success Trap'

3 Marketing Lessons We Can Learn From Netflix’s ‘Squid Game’

Hack your brain for better problem solving

Gunner J.