Life Advice from Brilliant Minds
In Yuval Noah Harari’s book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century he explores our increasing reliance on algorithms to make decisions for us.
Artificial Intelligence is being deployed in health care and warfare; it’s helping people make music and books; it’s scrutinizing your resume, judging your creditworthiness, and tweaking the photos you take on your phone. In short, it’s making decisions that affect your life whether you like it or not.
Understanding what triggers you emotionally and setting yourself up for a good day. By Madeline Johnson
Mondays can bring so much promise. Like a new year, Mondays can offer a clean slate. A fresh start. A chance to begin again as you plot and plan for a better, more productive week.
Setting out to have a good day, a good week or a good year begins with a conscious knowledge of one’s own feelings, motives, and desires. It starts with knowing who you are and how you will navigate your day to get where you want to go. You understand there will be inevitable distractions.
You need to know what sets you off. What disrupts your day. What makes you feel angry, needy, shutdown and frustrated. What triggers a bad mood for you. Anything that makes you experience a negative emotional response that could pull you off course.
Understanding how you react to people and situations throughout the day will help you identify patterns in your life and develop a better understanding of the events in your life that usually lead to a problem, similar to what Mei does at work. Mei is an artificial intelligence messaging assistant that warms of personality changes based on communication with co-workers.
Knowing What Set’s You Off
What triggers you? It’s important to identify when you feel the need to be accepted by others, understood, in control of the situation, paid attention to, at peace. Understand if it is important for you to have things in order, to feel safe and secure, to have a bit of fun during the day. Are you getting the respect you think you deserve? Do you feel like your talents are needed?
Do you always need to feel right? Are you comfortable? Calm? Do you feel as if your life is balanced? Are you spending too much time on work and not enough with your friends? Is your life way too predictable? Are you a bit bored with what you are doing?
Could you use a bit of challenge in your career? Your relationship? Are you feeling like you are liked, valued and being treated fairly by others?
Does everything feel a bit too chaotic around you? Like something could break, crack or fall apart at any minute?
Do you believe that others are ignoring you? Avoiding you? Do you feel included?
Make it your mission to understand how you operate.
If at any point during the day you feel out of sorts, off, emotionally frustrated, take a pause. Breathe deeply. Calm your mind. Don’t get so worked up.
Try sitting up straight and breathing deeply to the count of six. Breathe through your nose for six counts and out your mouth for six. Go slowly. Deep, deliberate inhalations and exhalations. This will calm you down.
Take a moment to understand what you need right now? Do you need to be patient? More tolerant? Less tolerant? Perhaps you need to explain yourself again? Let others know how you feel? Show some compassion? Walk away?
Before you take action, question your own thinking. Know if what you are thinking and feeling is actually true, or if it is a projection of what you negatively think is true.
What might trigger you?
Read more here
You’ll probably want to avoid them, but find out why they are behaving the way they are – and why you are reacting they way you do.
Realize everyone is trying to trigger you.
Advertisers and marketers bake emotional triggers into their brand messaging. They know how strong emotional triggers will motivate you to act from feelings like fear and desire. These emotions have effect on you, whether it’s feeling like your life is lacking excitement, adventure and love from an Instagram story to feeling like you are a lonely, loser and not enough from a YouTube ad. The messages are incessant. Turn them off.
Getting a leg up on emotional triggers. Face them . . .
Be strong.
8 Things Mentally Strong People Do Everyday
Technology to help you say no to distractions and to help you have a better day, all day.
Freedom app helps you protect your time, so you can focus on getting things done during the day.
One Big Thing ensures that you focus on your main priority, that one big thing, all day long.
Headspace is like a gym membership for your mind. 10 minutes of meditation a day to help burn off the busy in your brain.
This blog is about personal transformation and stretching our boundaries. It’s a diary of my own quest to become a more critical thinker and stronger and better version of myself. I want to become more useful and valuable to others. And if I am really open and honest, I also want to stay relevant.
Change- Stretching Our Boundaries
I have come to understand that change, transformation and growth is difficult. It’s painful and it’s challenging. Change is hard. Evolving is frustrating and uncomfortable.
I just started reading Kevin Kelly’s newest book “The Inevitable” Understanding the technological forces that will shape our future. If you are currently reading The Inevitable and want to discuss the book, leave a comment below.
Change is Inevitable
A quote from Kevin’s new book.
We are different from our animal ancestors in that we are not content to merely survive, but have been incredibly busy making up new itches that we have to scratch, creating new desires we’ve never had before. This discontent is the trigger for our ingenuity and growth. We cannot expand our self, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart.
Holes in our heart. Of yes. I agree with Kevin, the path to our “enlargement” is hard work. It’s not glamorous, exciting or even fun at times. But I believe it is necessary.
A world without discomfort is utopia. But it is also very stagnant.
Let’s read it together.
Thoughts today on creating awesome experiences. Memorable ones – like the time my husband and I took our four daughters on an 18-day bareboat charter around the British and US Virgin Islands. They were ages 8, 6 and the twins 4 years old. They were young and fun.
The Future of Travel
Just how close do you think virtual reality arm chair travel can get to replicating a real barefoot beach combing, dolphin swimming, colada sipping vacation for you?
Imagine all the travel pleasures without the annoying TSA security check points, baggage claim blunders and long exhausting lines.
While I still think there is plenty of reason to travel IRL (in real life), like new friends to make, dishes to try, terrain to hike and air to breathe, I can also imagine enhancing your weekends with even more jet-setting and globe hopping in the comfort of your own cozy family room.
A Virtual Bucket List
What an amazing gift a virtual reality vacation would be for my housebound mom and dad, who are too ill to travel, but can simulate the relaxation and adventure of a vacation while checking off cherished places on their bucket list.
I am fascinated by the future of virtual reality travel. Are you?
“By its very definition, virtual reality is a simulation of being somewhere different, and if you’re in need of an immediate break from your current reality, stepping into a virtual one in a matter of moments is the ultimate form of escapism.” – read more about Occulus Rift and how technology will take you anywhere with 360 degree video experiences here
The British Columbia tourism bureau filmed this virtual reality video to lure in vacationers –here
“To know the universe itself as a road, as many roads, as roads for traveling souls.” Rolf Potts, Author of Vagabonding.
Read: Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel
Growing in popularity, Instagram’s @We_have_to_stop is dedicated to capturing people on their phones and devices while in public.
A crowd-sourced account that documents the social isolation and bizarre relationships we have with our devices of delusion in a world of increasing chaos and confusion.
Photos of people around the world, taking selfies, posting updates, merging calls, drafting emails, filming injustices, snapping and filtering their every meal.
My Friend Gary calls this the severe maladaptive behavior of Generation K – as in Kardashians.
I wonder what it will take to wake the world up again to true human interaction, face-to-face communication and co-existence with compassion.
The Emotion & Motion Connection
I stay in youth-mode – powered with an ageless mind – armed with a liberated, open, playful, light-hearted and free-spirited attitude. In youth-mode, I am limitless.
Not exercising each day makes me feel lethargic and depressed. Over the past decade I have noticed that all forms of daily, disciplined movement – walking, biking, running, yoga, Pilates -helps to soften the rigid suit of armor I call my body. Tense from head to toe, my body takes in and holds all of my emotions – memorized in the tightening of each muscle. The connection between my emotions and motion is fascinating to me. Stretching releases the ache and tightness I feel in my neck as I release the “weight of the world” from my shoulders. Sit-ups strengthen my lower back so I feel strong and “supported” as I feel my “intuition” making better “gut reactions” from strengthening from my core. Squats help tone my legs and my knees and joints give me more balanced, confident “legs to stand on”.
Habits are Everything
We are an accumulation of everything we do daily. To see change in our lives we must change the way we go about our day. I use to wake up worried, now I turn the channel in my mind to gratitude – literally forcing my mind to think about what I truly appreciate in my life from the moment I open my eyes.
Eat More Salt to Curb Sugar Cravings and eating healthier on the go.
My next good habit will be switching my taste buds to healthier on-the-go eating – especially for days like today – when I have been on a golf cart buggy to the dock, boat to the mainland, taxi to the airport, plane to the States, and finally train to my car. I will shop, plan and make snacks to bring along – fresh vegetables, salads and home made health to eat along the way.
Elon Musk -Tesla, SpaceX and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
I just started reading the incredibly fascinating life of Elon Musk. creator of the Tesla and now working on a way to have us living in outer space.
Where Mark Zuckerberg wants us sharing baby photos, Musk wants to save the human race from self-imposed or accidental annihilation. He’s wired like a scientist and suffers mental anguish at the sight of a factual error.
Love this thought from Musk – “It seems like one should make the world a better place, because the inverse makes no sense.”
