Hidden In Plain Sight by Jeffrey Archer was a great page turner. I loved the details, storytelling and subtle humor that’s he’s been able to pack into the book. I had the same experience of watching one of those British crime/thriller mini-series on Netflix. The action and story telling is just phenomenal. The details of things he describe and details he doesn’t are equally interesting and mesmerizing.
Easy and thrilling read.
The year 2020 was both slow and fast. Extremely slow considering COVID-19 pandemic and never ending stream of depressing news stories. Governments throughout the world are still ill-prepared to handle a pandemic at this scale. Healthcare industry is overwhelmed and is rushing to find a cure and all health workers are stretched beyond their human abilities to deal with ever increasing number of patients. At the same time, a large group of COVID deniers and anti-maskers trying to make things far worse in the name of civil liberties. Seeing a never ending stream of events made the year extremely slow.
Before COVID taking a leave was truly a relaxing experience. There was a stark difference between work and turn-your-phone-off-and-dissappear leave. Nowadays though I don’t feel that difference. Yes, I do take leave from time to time. Sick leave mostly. Luckily I don’t work on the weekends. Now I don’t feel a difference between a weekday and a weekend that was used to be there. Being concerned citizens we didn’t travel much during 2020. That was another major blow. Being in outdoors always make my mind free. Taking a long breath and exhaling. Cliche as it sounds, it brings a relaxing vibe to the whole body. Not being able to do more outdoor stuff sucks. And days were even longer.
At the same time though, when I look at the year, it’s has gone by extremely fast. I can tell you that it has been one of the fastest years of my life. May be it’s because Earth’s been spinning faster in 2020 than it did for 50 years. There has been some years that flew past albeit slower. Every such year when I look back there was this hollow emptiness. Sense that you didn’t do anything worthwhile or notable in that year. Not so in 2020 though. I don’t feel that emptiness. It was a full, eventful year.
A year, besides universal hatred among humanity, one of the thoughtful and healthy years. Being home. Being surrounded by loved ones. Doing tricep push-ups on dining chairs. Not too bad. Here’s to a healthier, stronger 2021! Be healthy, be strong!
I’ve always heard that little things are important in life. However, I haven’t really thought about it long and hard about how much it’s important. It was never a thing to be embrased. I was looking at it as a casual observer. Letting it go in from one year and get out from the other without making it part of my life. That is until I recently started doing couple of such things.
The habit of making the bed in the morning. Habit of blogging (hah!). Habit of some form of exercise.
Maybe some of those are not small. However, exercise can be a small task if you ask me. Not committing to long rigorous exercise but short bursts of 5 – 10 minute windows. Those I can manage as long as I’m not walking into a Zoom meeting right after. But can be doable. Trying to do those for at least 3 weeks to begin with is my goal. Get it to muscle memory. Make it part of the daily routine.
Isolation and the wild fires are not making it easy. Having to confine to a small space is damn difficult. Maybe this is just the start of much worse to come. I’m trying to do what I can to prepare for the worst. Mentally.
Ebook lending is still a very antiquated process. Only one person can borrow a book at a time! How come something digital have such a limitation? These days I mostly read on either the Kindle App or Libby. Looking at Libby’s explanation of this,
Publishers often require that each digital copy is only loaned to one person at a time (just like physical library books). This ensures that authors, narrators, and other creators are paid fairly for their work, even if it’s consumed digitally
Given that you can get a library card for free, this doesn’t make much sense to me.
There are several articles on the web explaining this publisher imposed restrictions. In my opinion, these publishers are trying to enforce artificial rules for a media that wants to be free. This is quite evident by looking at what happened to digital music. There have been many lawsuits trying to restrict piracy but there was a lot of privacy. In the digital music and video business piracy now is largly become an irrelevant and futile thing to follow.
I for one would gladly pay for Netflix, Amazon Music, Disney+ and Spotify to get access to a large collection of high quality media. Trying to search and download prirated music is cumbersome and a waste of time. There are better solutions available. Imagine if Netflix were something like the library system. You can borrow a movie one person at a time. I cannot imagine such a service become successful.
Book publishers have to reinvent themselves as other media companies have done. They have to make the consumption of books as easy as possible. Even with a subscription service, if borrowing a book is as painless as watching something on Netflix, then there’s a huge market for it. Right now they’re allowing book pirate sites to blossom. There are many sites that make pirating books very easy. Only way to battle this is to become better than pirates. Reinvent the business model to suit to changing times. Become agile and provide services that consumers flock in by the numbers. Not the other way around where it’s like deliberatly trying to push readers away from these digital libraries.
Something that’s always being lingering in my mind is how people grow, learn and living their lives in all different unique ways. All humans are pretty much the same. We have same sensory organs yet ways we think, talk and act is completely different and unique. Some people are great talkers, fitness freaks, writers, singers, doctors, drivers and so forth.
In life we seem to go through mostly a similar learning process for 10 – 13 years and then go about in our own different ways. People learn to master specific skills. Through that they acquire things necessary to live their lives – houses, cars, get married, have children. Collect large collection of material possesions that defines who they are in the society. What’s the difference between a homeless muscian with a violin and someone who performs solo violin shows around the world?
There seem to be the collective knowledge among us that if we have the will then we can master and become good and other than the thing we’re good at. A lot of people don’t take that plunge. Don’t have the dedication, effort and determination to push that door open. We’ve become so complacent about our lives and the way we live.
It’s time to break from this autoplay mode. This is how our mind is wired by default. We have to get out of this rut to be able to fight it. First part of the problem is undertanding that we’ve become victims of this herd mentality. How our parents and society scape us to fit into this artifical mold. Wrong assumption that this mold is the one true way to live our lives.
Breaking from this mold cannot be done by one person. It cannot be done by doing lectures or writing blogs. Much like this one. This has to be understood by each individuals and then themselves have to take action to break out from this. Time has come to collectively understand this and actively work to break free.
Plastic has dramatically reduced the value of currency. By plastic I’m referring to credit cards. I can’t remember the last time I carry cash to actually buy something. Those were the good old days.
I’m old enough to remember the days that we used to carry cash to buy anything and everything. Carrying cash has it’s own disadvantages. Specially if you’re trying to buy something expensive. It’s cumbersome to carry along large sums of money. It’s not everyday that you buy expensive stuff so those events are rare.
Big benefit to carrying cash is that the value and the buying power you feel is completely different. You’re less likely to impluse buy stuff. Specially if it’s slightly more expensive that day to day expenses. You wouldn’t carry loads of cash with you. Having just enough and a smaller buffer in case of emergency is more than enough. Then there were ATM cards. ATM cards had to be used through a bank ATM machine to get cash and that’s its only purpose. Get cash from the machine. You cannot use that to buy stuff from stores.
With popularity of credit cards there were many conveniences. You can carry a piece of plastic which is an open door to your bank. It’s a little like taking all your life’s savings to everywhere you go. Since it’s just a piece of plastic we loose that real touch and value we had with real money. Result of all this is that we’re now more prone to impulse buy and generally get more expensive things. Being a credit based system, you could even buy things you cannot afford and choose to pay later with 30 – 60 days. That in itself is a big BIG red flag. You are allowed to buy things you cannot afford.
This has caused many financial hardships to millions of people world wide.
In order to fight this and get in control we have to understand the basic economics of credit cards. Always be mindful about our financials. Don’t let it go out of hand.
That reminds me to apply to that American Airlines credit card. Seems like they have good benefits. Reminder I should add.
Vast majority of examples I read about or watch on the internet about highly successful and elite performers all have one thing in common. They’re deeply broken individuals at the core. By broken I mean there is something that’s significantly wrong or have been wrong weth these people. From the outset, they seem to be normal successful people. Internally though they seem to be battling with some serious daemons.
Some have successfully conquered and fought these daemons. Others are still seem to be fighting. Most common cause seem to be some form of addiction. Addiction to drugs and alchohol is very common. I think some elite athletes are addicted to pain. Or are they addicted to winning. Now that I think about it again, maybe it’s winning. For that one win they seem to be ready to go through a mountain of pain every time.
Why would someone do this? Is it because it’s the only thing they know how to do well? They’ve been doing it their whole life and comes naturally. So you do it again and again and again. More you do something better you will be at that thing. Does it change with time? Surely. If you’re addicted to ultra marathon running, a ballerina, soccer player etc.. there’s a biological clock that determines your ability to perform AND keep on winning.
To come to that level of performance, do you have to be a broken individual in the first place? What if there are no daemons? Can you still be good at that level? I don’t think so. The daemons are what gives that relentless drive. Mental strength that when the body gives up perform twice as hard. When the body gives up, transform to a complete beast.
I need to wake up some daemons. I’m searching in complete darkness to find at tail to shake things up. Maybe I don’t have to search for any daemons. Maybe be all I need is Habitca.
Managing high functioning individuals are no easy task. Lot of the time though, the individuals themselves doesn’t know about good ways of managing them. So from the individual (or employee’s) point of view, if I feel good then the manager’s decision is good. If I feel bad, then the manager is an asshole. From manager’s point of view, being honest, relevant and fair seems to be an impossible mountain to climb. At what point will I stop being the asshole manager and grow the feeling that I’m on their side?
I feel that there is a clear barrier. Anypoint in time, both the manager and the employee are on the same side. Trying to move the company forward. At other times they’re on completely different sides. Employee’s objective is to do good, get promoted, get raises and earn more money. Manager’s job is to evaluate team members and figure out wether that person is doing a satisfacory job, measure performance and ultimately decide to move with a promotion or not.
Can this entire process be 100% quantifiable? I think no. As final result of the evaluation, if you crunch some numbers and come up with a score, it’s not fair for the employee. Can everyone bring into a single scale? No but that’s what’s going to happen 95% of the time whether you like it or not. From manager’s point of view, this kind of normalization make it very easy to evaluate individuals. There will still be that subjective portion to fill to make the evaluation complete. Whatever that percentage maybe, justification has to be done to make it as fair as possible.
If you think it’s fair then you play along. If you think it’s not fair, you can either fight or suck it up and act as business as usual. Or you can find someplace else. Choices…
I’m in a constant state of flux when it comes to work computers. I cannot seem to decide a single platform to do my work. Currently I’m bounching between Windows 10, Mac and this thing called Linux. I have been using one system for couple of weeks and then bump into some quirks and immediately switch to the other one. Switch is underrated because I’m only using two computers and it means a clean format and reinstall. Maybe it’s a good idea to jot it down to understand why I am switching between systems.
Windows 10
This is the 100 pound gorilla in the room. Things I like about Windows 10,
Things I don’t like about Windows 10,
Mac
Mac is my work provided laptop. This computer is so old that I have a hardtime running most of work tools required to get my job done. Other than Chrome for email.
Things I like about Mac,
Things I don’t like about Mac
Linux
Things I like about Linux,
Things I don’t like about Linux
Time to reformat and intall Linux. Again.
Getting too attached to work is really not a good thing. It’s specially bad when things at work starting to intefere with personal life. Which I am guilty of. I feel like I need to get this off my chest so that I can think about it more and start finding a solution.
Getting too attached to work is a hard problem to solve during this work-from-home-COVID-lockdown-wild-fire era. There are multiple environment factors that prevents us being in outdoors. Being in outdoors is a surprisingly relaxing activity. Which I realized far too late in my life. Half of the time I’ve been in outdoors, I’ve spent getting drunk. Other half of the time is spent reaching to the BBQ and pouring myself another drink. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an alcoholic. I don’t have a drinking problem. I have answered it pretty early on.
A simple 15 minute outdoor walk will brighten my mood. Long inhales cycling slightly colder air through my lungs gives me inexplicable joy. That half a second of bliss rejuvenate my soul. Seeing flat lands for miles and miles gives that expansive space to life. I’m waiting to break free after trapped inside a cave with flashing RGB for most of my time during the day.
With multiple issues going on, I cannot get out.
This create a toxic attachment to work. The problem for me is that whatever happens workwise affect my non-work self. I feel my soul is drained bone dry. Why is that?
How can I not be attached to work? How can I keep work and personal life completely separate? How can I Build The Wall that separate these two?
One theory is to get work build a wall by themselves… Now only if I can figure out how.
My journal of thoughts 