<ul><li>Most big cities in the United States have a few of these Bitcoin machines</li><li>Identify yourself with a phone number and a Bitcoin wallet</li><li>You will be texted a code so you can move forward</li><li>Once you have put money into the machine, it will ask for the address of where you want it sent</li></ul>

How to Use a Bitcoin ATM

This is a way to get involved without having to risk identity theft by providing so much documentation to relatively new entities like Coinbase and BinanceThe Bitcoin ATM means you can put a little money in overtime, but stay away from identity risks exchanges representDo your own thorough research before making any investment decisions.

Why use one?

It is a legitimate question, Why use a Bitcoin ATM anyway? The fees seem higher than on the exchanges. One reason is privacy

Stashed ideas

Why Use a Bitcoin ATM?

<ul><li>Your DNA dictates what you were born to do. Follow your passion, don’t listen to what society has to say about success.</li><li>There is enough success out there and if you want it badly enough, you will get it.</li><li>When building your personal brand, focus on the quality of the relationships with your followers and not on their numbers.</li><li>Be authentic and produce quality content.</li></ul>

Success Is In Your DNA

“There is no excuse for anyone living in the United States or anywhere else right now to slog through his or her entire life working at jobs they hate, or even jobs they simply don’t love, in the name of a paycheck or a sense of responsibility.”

Gary Vaynerchuk

“Quality is a tremendous filter. Cream always rises, my friends, no matter how many cups of coffee you pour.”

<ul>
<li>Plan to develop and grow your own brand and business alongside your current job. This is how you will open opportunities in the digital economy.</li>
<li>As long as you are working for someone else, you will never be living entirely true to yourself and your passion.</li>
<li>To monetize your personal brand, you need two pillars: product, and content. Great content is what will attract people to your blog.</li>
</ul>

A Whole New World

Someone with less talent and poor content can beat you if they work harder than you. Before you invest in yourself, you have to invest in your long-term future.When building your personal brand, focus on creating communities by starting conversations. Once you have created your online brand, do some online advertising. You can also engage in affiliate marketing.

Keep It Real

<ol><li>Identify your passion</li><li>Make sure you can think of at least fifty awesome topics and posts.</li><li>Answer the following questions: Am I sure my passion is what I think it is? Can I talk about it better than anyone else?</li><li>Name your personal brand.</li><li>Buy your user name.</li><li>Choose your medium: video, audio, written word</li><li>Start a Website.</li><li>Hire a designer</li><li>Select all of the platforms to which you want to distribute your content.</li><li>Post your content.</li></ol>

Your Personal Brand: Starting Your Thing

<ol><li>Start creating community by leaving comments on other people’s blogs and forums.</li><li>Find more blogs that are relevant to your subject on Google</li><li>Join as many active fan pages and groups relating to your blog topic as possible.</li><li>Repeat steps 11 through 15.</li><li>When you feel your personal brand has gained sufficient attention and stickiness, start reaching out to advertisers and begin monetizing</li></ol>

Your Personal Brand: Small To Big

Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.

Crush It!

FIRE is a financial movement of extreme savings and investment that allows proponents to retire far earlier than traditional budgets and retirement plans would allow.<ul><li>By dedicating up to 70% of income to savings, followers of the FIRE movement may eventually be able to quit their jobs and live solely off small withdrawals from their portfolios decades before the conventional retirement age of 65.</li><li>To cover their living expenses after retiring at a young age, FIRE devotees make small withdrawals from their savings, typically around 3% to 4% yearly.</li></ul>

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)

Borne out of the 1992 best-selling book "Your Money or Your Life" by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, FIRE came to embody a core premise of the book: juxtaposing expenses and time spent at work against hours of your life. Every expense is compared to the time spent at work in order to earn the purchase.In more recent years, Millennials, in particular, have embraced the FIRE movement with the aim of retiring well before the traditional retirement age of 65.

How Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Started

<ul><li>Fat FIRE: an individual with a more traditional lifestyle who saves more than the average retirement investor</li><li>Lean FIRE: refers to stringent adherence to minimalist living and extreme savings, necessitating a far more restricted lifestyle.</li><li>Barista FIRE: refers to followers who have quit their traditional 9-to-5 job but still employ some form of part-time work to cover current expenses that would otherwise erode their retirement fund</li><li>Coast FIRE: also applies to followers with a part-time job, but these proponents do have enough saved to fund their retirement and current living expenses.</li></ul>

Variations on FIRE

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) is a movement that allows proponents to retire far earlier than the traditional retirement age.

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Definition

AI(Artificial Intelligence) has got a bad rep, mostly coming from movies(The Matrix, for instance) or news articles demonizing AI’s reach and scope, stoking fears ranging from privacy invasion to space wars.
AI, and technology itself, is a double-edged sword having the capacity to either overwhelm and overpower us or be a defence mechanism for the looming future threats, depending on how we use it.

The Fear Of AI

Self Improvement

An ocean of data is now managed by powerful technology that was unimaginable a couple of decades before. Visionary men coined 'tech' laws half a century ago that is relevant even now.<ul><li>Moore’s Law states that computing power, that is the number of transistor circuits in each computer ‘chip’, doubles every two years.</li><li>Nielsen's Law states that internet bandwidth increases by about 50 percent every year for high-end users.</li></ul>

The Laws Of Technology

Facial recognition, having gone mainstream due to iPhones, helps everyday life in numerous ways like unlocking phones or verifying purchases. Millions of facial images can be harnessed by powerful AI algorithms to locate a missing person or a criminal suspect in a few minutes.Just like any tool, facial recognition technology can be used for nefarious purposes, like tracking anyone easily.

AI: Facial Recognition Technology

AI(Artificial Intelligence) can learn from experience and by processing new data sets, unlike traditional computers who are not programmed to self-educate themselves. Modern AI can sift through vast amounts of data to pull out the exact search result, even express uncertainty or confusion, and filter out data that is too personal.AI can act as a ‘failsafe’ to counter common errors we make, and cancel out the ‘human’ factors affecting decision making like bias, lack of attention, fatigue or emotion.

AI: Advantages Galore

To make AI(Artificial Intelligence) work safely and securely, it should be assistive, and not act like a master. It should be helping us save time, effort, energy and resources, and not become an all-powerful entity like in many Sci-Fi movies.The right human guidance is needed to make AI act as a positive force on human progress.

Assisting Vs Decision Making

If it’s designed in a way that respects human decision-making, AI can actually be a force for privacy.


How to make sure that AI isn’t invasive and creepy

<ul><li>Introspection is simply looking in. Stopping there not only limits your perspective, but it can also diffuse it. It can lead some to pessimism, or even depression. </li><li>Reflection is looking in so you can look out with a broader, bigger and more accurate perspective. Without reflection, your life becomes happenstance—activity without insight.</li></ul>

Reflection and introspection

Authenticity is about getting closer to our true identity.The more authentic we become, the more we are authoring our lives, and not simply living someone else’s script. And the more authentic you become, the greater is your sense of well-being.

Authenticity 

“To be authentic is literally to be your own author, to discover your own native energies and desires, and then to find your own way of acting on them.”

Quote

<ul><li>What are the five non-negotiable values in my life?</li><li>What would I do if I were guaranteed success?</li><li>What are the experiences I want to have?</li><li>What is on my schedule that doesn’t need to be there?</li><li>What am I doing that I don’t enjoy, and what am I doing that I love?</li></ul>Powerful insights will be generated through this reflection, without any need for additional information.

5 reflective questions

The famous Irish poet Oscar Wilde once said, "The final mystery is oneself." But how do you unravel the mystery that is you? This can't happen without self-awareness, and self-awareness won't happen without reflection. But what does reflection really mean? Reflection is different from introspection. Introspection is simply looking in.

5 Reflective Questions to Discover Who You Are and What You Want

<ul><li>Your deliberate system is responsible for sophisticated functions such as reasoning, self-control, and forward-thinking. It excels in handling anything unfamiliar, complex, or abstract. But it has limited capacity and gets tired quickly. </li><li>Your automatic system lightens the load on your deliberate system by automating most of what you do and taking fast shortcuts that filter out “irrelevant” information and options. But it inevitably leaves you with blind spots. </li></ul>

The Two-System Brain

You’re constantly moving along a discover-defend axis in your daily life, as your brain scans for threats to defend against and rewards to seek out and discover.<ul><li>In defensive mode, you become less smart and flexible, as your brain devotes some of its scarce mental energy to respond to a potential “threat”.</li><li>In discovery mode, you’re motivating yourself with rewards: a social sense of belonging or recognition; a personal sense of autonomy, competence, or purpose; or informational rewards that come from learning or experiencing new things</li></ul>

The Discover-Defend Axis

<ul><li>The way you treat your body has a direct, immediate impact on your brain’s performance, affecting both its cognitive and emotional functions. </li><li>Your brain’s deliberate system performs far better when you’ve had enough sleep, some aerobic exercise, and a few moments of mindfulness. </li><li>Mimicking the physical actions associated with feeling happy, confident, and relaxed appears to tell your brain that you are in fact happy, confident, and relaxed, creating a selffulfilling loop.</li></ul>

The Mind-Body Loop

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

We can tweak our perceptions by being more deliberate in our perceptual filters.We can do this by looking at things from three angles:<ol><li>Aim. Think about your aim as you meet people and as you work on your activities. Ask yourself: “What really matters?”</li><li>Attitude. Take time to notice the concerns that are dominating your thoughts. Ask yourself: “Do they help me achieve my main goals?”</li><li>Attention. Given your priorities, ask yourself: “Where should I focus my attention?”</li></ol>

Your Priorities Determine Your Perceptions

There are two types of goals:<ol><li>Approach Goals: doing more of something good</li><li>Avoidance Goals: doing less of something bad</li></ol>Approach goals are better than avoidance goals as they encourage higher performance.

Approach Goals And Avoidance Goals

<ul><li>Make sure your goals are about doing desirable things, or doing more of them, rather than avoiding bad things happening. If they’re negative in tone, turn them around. </li><li>Find a personal why. Can you articulate why the goal matters to you or how it will benefit something you care about? </li><li>Break off bite-sized chunks. If the actions to take are unclear, break your goal down into smaller, bite-sized chunks. </li><li>Make a “when-then” plan. Define clear situational prompts (“when X happens, then I will do Y”).</li></ul>

Setting Great Goals

"The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing."

<ul><li>Group together similar tasks (e.g., email, calls, and reading), so you’re not constantly switching from one mental mode to another. </li><li>Decide on the best time of day to tackle each batch of tasks. Create longer blocks of uninterrupted time for your most important work. </li><li>Minimize interruptions, to help you focus your attention on the task at hand. Which alerts can you switch off? Can you use an app to block access to certain websites? </li><li>Plan small rewards for good behavior. </li></ul>

Single-Tasking

Your brain’s deliberate system needs regular breaks to keep it fully functional. When tired, we are more likely to make poorer decisions.Allow your brain a chance to step back and consolidate the experience. Plan for breaks between “zones” in your day. Refresh your mind after every ninety minutes.

Planning Deliberate Downtime

"In all the empirical studies on psychological well-being, one thing emerges as a reliable foundation for happiness: the quality of our relationships."

If you disagree on something:<ul><li>Articulate the other person’s perspective as if you truly believe it.</li><li>Identify what you both agree on.</li><li>Isolate the real disagreement; explore how you could both be right.</li><li>Decide what you can do based on what you agree on. </li></ul>

Resolving Tensions: Find Common Ground

People are often good but their circumstances can change how they come out.Get clear on the “true facts”: what you know for sure. Then assume that the other person has good intent, and imagine the circumstances that could be causing his or her behavior.

Assume “Good person, Bad Circumstances”

Use one or more of these three techniques next time you want to provide input or challenge someone’s ideas: <ul><li> “What I like(d) about that is…” and “What would make me like it even more is…” </li><li> “Yes, and…” (rather than “Yes, but…”). </li><li> “What would need to be true to make that work?”</li></ul>

Three Ways To Give Brain-Friendly Feedback

"The difficulty lies not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones."

Having an existing solution in mind makes it harder for us to see a radically different but better way to solve our problem.So if what we want is new thinking, we need to help our brains get out of a rut, to stimulate lots of new connections.

The Einstellung Effect

The brain’s deliberate system likes to take shortcuts. Take note of when that is happening. Signs of your brain taking shortcuts are statements like “It’s obviously right [or obviously wrong].” “I recently heard XYZ…therefore…” “Everyone agrees.” “I understand it—so I like it!” “Let’s just stick with what we know.” “There’s only one real option.”

Notice When Your Automatic System Is Talking

<ul><li>Think about something positive before getting into the tough stuff. </li><li>Break a complex task down into its constituent parts, step by step, to allow you to focus on one thing at a time and reduce the load on your brain. </li><li>Imagine parts of your problem as people.</li><li>Look after the smart basics. Surround yourself with cues that you associate with good thinking; don’t skimp on sleep; do some physical activity.</li></ul>

To Think As Clearly As Possible...

Getting a message through to other people can be hard because other people’s automatic system gets in the way.Provide a reward or a dose of intrigue as you communicate. The human brain craves new things.Experiment with different mediums for your information. Use visuals, charts, and everything else that you can think of to stimulate the mind. Present your information from a different vantage point.

Getting Through Filters

<ul><li>When you want people to do something for you, give them a brief reason. </li><li>Make it easier for people to choose by providing them with mental shortcuts. Ask yourself: “How can I make it easier for people to solve a particular problem?”</li><li>You can also nudge people by providing visual hints for the outcome that you want. To get people on board with what you want, paint a clear picture of the benefits.</li><li>Don’t assume that people will automatically understand the benefits. You can use social proof to show that what you are asking works for others too.</li><li>Let the others contribute to the success. Being part of something is motivating. Ask for their views and assign them tasks.</li></ul>

Making Things Happen

For a complete and happy day, you need to focus on your energy and reboot it when needed.Know thyself by identifying where the typical energy highs and lows occur. Plan for the triggers and events around the highs and lows.

Knowing How To Reboot Your Energy

In How to Have a Good Day, economist and former McKinsey partner Caroline Webb shows readers how to use recent findings from behavioral economics, psychology, and neuroscience to transform our approach to everyday working life. Advances in behavioral sciences are giving us an ever better understanding of how our brains work, why we make the choices we do, and what it takes for us to be at our best. But it has not always been easy to see how to apply these insights in the real world--until now. In How to Have a Good Day, Webb explains exactly how to apply this science to our daily tasks and routines. She translates three big scientific ideas into step-by-step guidance that shows us how to set better priorities, make our time go further, ace every interaction, be our smartest selves, strengthen our personal impact, be resilient to setbacks, and boost our energy and enjoyment. Through it all, Webb teaches us how to navigate the typical challenges of modern workplaces—from conflict with colleagues to dull meetings and overflowing inboxes—with skill and ease. Filled with stories of people who have used Webb’s insights to boost their job satisfaction and performance at work, How to Have a Good Day is the book so many people wanted when they finished Nudge, Blink and Thinking Fast and Slow and were looking for practical ways to apply this fascinating science to their own lives and careers. A remarkable and much-needed book, How to Have a Good Day gives us the tools we need to have a lifetime of good days.

How to Have a Good Day

Decide whether what you're trying to improve is mostly a habit or mostly a skill: if your main problem is with doing something you already know how to do, but doing it consistently, that’s probably a habit. If your main problem is not knowing how to do something well enough, that’s probably a skill.

Habits or Skills

Scott H Young

This process has 3 main parts: <ul><li>Define the habit you want to form clearly and consistently;</li><li>Condition it until it is relatively easy to maintain. </li><li>Maintain the habit by monitoring it. If you slip, push to reassert the habit quickly.</li></ul>

Improving a habit

Habits

The best strategy for getting better at skills is deliberate practice. A good way to work on this is to divide it into 3: <ul><li>Practice the skill. </li><li>Get timely feedback on how well you’re performing.</li><li>Focus on your weak points with selective drills and constrained practice.</li></ul>

Improving skills

How often do you catch yourself saying, "I wish I were better at _____." Maybe you want to be better at exercising regularly, your relationships or your work. Maybe you'd like to be more artistic, athletic or multilingual. Getting better at things requires work. It doesn't happen too often that you can immediately get better ...

A Simple Strategy for Getting Better at Things

Poetry has a reputation for needing special training to appreciate it. In the classroom, poems were often taught as if they were riddles. We were taught that poetry is inherently "difficult" and that it makes meaning by hiding meaning.
Real progress begins when we get literal with the words in the poem. Pick a word that you find interesting in the poem, and start to investigate that word.

Poetry begins with reading the words of the poems

Younger poets tend to try and demonstrate their ability by being deliberately obscure, but they unlearn this habit in time.
Good poets do not complicate their poetry. They make poetry feel the words mean what they usually do in everyday life and then move the words into a more activated realm. The placement of the word in the poem can make language come alive and shine forth.

Poetry makes language come alive

In school, the poet Matthew Zapruder writes, we are taught that poetry is inherently “difficult.” Focusing on one interesting word can change that.

Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think

<ul>
<li>Emerged as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution of Europe</li>
<li>It embraces the aesthetic of the new industrial Europe</li>
<li>It features naturalistics but stylized forms that were often mixed with arcs, parabolas, and semicircles</li>
<li>Fond of natural forms that have been overlooked such as insects, weeds, and mythical fairies.</li>
</ul>

Art Nouveau

<ul>
<li>Emerged as a reaction to WWI</li>
<li>Its name was derived from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Mondernes, that was held in France</li>
<li>It utilizes chrome, steel, and inlaid wood; when dabbled with natural materials it tends to be graphic or textural like zebra skin and jagged fern leaves</li>
<li>It features bold shapes such as broad curves, zigzags, and sunbursts.</li>
</ul>

Art Deco

The Quick Trick: It all comes down to "flowery" vs. "streamlined." Art Nouveau is the decorative one. Art Deco is sleeker.

What's the Difference Between Art Deco and Art Nouveau?

In the old TV show Happy Days, the main protagonist literary jumps the shark and goes into history as a metaphor for driving oneself towards irrelevance.
Many great companies which used to be cool, have now lost the plot, lost their magic, by resting on their laurels and due to a lack of constant innovation.

Don’t Jump The Shark

<ul>
<li>As we are generally in a state of rest, we need to fight our psychology and neurobiology to improve ourselves constantly and to be disruptive in our game.</li>
<li>Being iconic is to take the high point of today and make it the starting point of tomorrow.</li>
<li>Keep innovating, keep optimizing and don’t lose your game.</li>
</ul>

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Smoky Joe
@smokyjoe

Why Use a Bitcoin ATM?

Crush It!

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Definition

How to make sure that AI isn’t invasive and creepy

5 Reflective Questions to Discover Who You Are and What You Want

Bite-sized knowledgeto upgradeyour career

Smoky Joe@smokyjoe

Why Use a Bitcoin ATM?

Crush It!

Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE) Definition

How to make sure that AI isn’t invasive and creepy

5 Reflective Questions to Discover Who You Are and What You Want

Bite-sized knowledge
to upgrade
your career

Smoky Joe
@smokyjoe