Stop checking your f***ing phone!!!

I hope I'm not the only one who checks his phone every 5 minutes and gets
disappointed every time there's not something extremely interesting on it.
I'm trying to treat this `tiny steps' style..
and taking into account `you can't improve what you don't measure'

Like when I sit with a piece of paper working on something, I'll write the times
when I checked my phone : 14:56, 15:01
If I see there was a 5 minute gap I say -let's try to make the next one at least 6 minutes.
say it came out
   14:56,15:01,15:10..
now again I say, let's make the next gap at least 10 minutes..
A simple way to bring awareness to what you are actually doing in your actual life.

They met briefly,
and a spark exploded.
He wished to share every moment with her.
But darkness fell, and he was alone.
He cried, laughed, learned new things,
had adventures, disappointments,
wasted time in front of his TV..
He said to himself .. `well this is life'
.. `this is as good as it gets'
One day the curtains were lifted,
and the sun shone in,
 he discovered her still there in the same room
he spent all his life in.
She cried when he cried, laughed when he laughed,
they in fact did share every moment.

Wake up, your life has already started

Ohh.. you didn't hear the gun go off?
Well.. there's no option to restart, sorry.

Ohh.. you say you won't participate in the race
cause that's not fair and you don't have a chance to win?

Well.. that's your choice.. but just so you know, when
this life ends , another race starts and you will start at
at whatever position you finished this one.

If you start running now you could finish in place 1.5 billion out
of 7 billion.
If you keep sitting here or walking at the same pace you'll finish at place roughly
2.5 billion.

Ohh you're saying everybody should start at the same place each time?

Yeah.. well those are the rules. They call it Karma.

You don't like the rules? You demand to speak to whoever's in charge?

Well, you can only speak to him if you get first place in a race.

Across the distance of a thousand miles,
she whispered through the wind:
Let me experience love as magnificent as I know it can be.
Don't expect it to be safe and reassuring every moment,
or even once a year.
Trust that when you float in the middle of an ocean,
you will not drown.
Trust that if you do drown,
death will only take you to a place
where this love is stronger.

Tiny habits

I was having a day where I was zoning out infront of my computer,
watching various shows and movies.
During these days I typically think, well it doesn't seem realistic
that I would stop watching videos for an hour and do something productive,
so no sense in trying.
Inspired by how BJ Fogg talks about tiny habits,

I thought.. well what can I do that would be positive and fun?

I tried to follow Fogg's formula of trigger->desired-action->reward.

I decided, each time I come back to the couch after getting something to eat (trigger),

I'll pause the video for 5 seconds and do a mini-breath awareness meditation(desired action), and then say to myself `I'm awesome!' (reward)

Then I thought , well maybe each time I have the thought that I should stop watching this stuff

I'll do this 5 seconds pause and say `I'm awesome'.

I think I ended up doing 9-10 of these 5 seconds pauses during that evening.

I still wasted most of it.

I do think though that my mood the morning after was better than average after these zoning out days,

and I think it had to do with these 5 second mindfulness breaks

This company, that I saw as a sponsored link, is the wrong and terrible direction undergrad science and engineering education is going in.
It all sounds so nice - give the students a chance to get exactly the information they need so they won't be stuck on `nuances' and be able to get the core of the teaching.
But the CEO's story contradicts her message.
She was stuck on compiler nuances for hours as an undergrad cause she was shy and did not have a good platform to ask..
and where did that bring her?
Being homeless on the streets? hm..
not exactly.. she went on to do a Computer Science MsC, and work as an engineer at facebook and Oracle, and now she has her own software company.

Would the same have happened if she had not hacked her brain till 6am each day on silly compiler syntax bugs?

My conjecture is that any CS undergrad today, who will spend 10 hours a week trying to solve his problems with no facebook forums, or whatsapp groups will have a huge advantage over his/her peers

The human brain always chooses the least resistance\least effort path..
Like even saints download movies illegally these days,
practically noone is spending hours trying to solve math exercises by themselves
with a f***ng piece of paper.. and while shutting off their f***ng computer.
They are developing other skills, but fewer and fewer people are developing the depth of though that comes from spending 10 hours on trying to solve a math problem you don't have the first idea how to approach (and perhaps is even unsolvable cause your professor made a mistake in writing the question)

The shittiness of life

I'm kind of repeating myself,
but at moments I find this remarkable.
People use the claim that `Life is equally shitty no matter what you do'
as an excuse for their depression and laziness.
(These people include me once or twice a week)

But the remarkable thing is that it seems the shittiness of life, during a particular day,
is in direct almost linear correlation to what the positive and negative things you do
during that day  (well.. almost linear with a big multiplicative constant depending on previous karma from previous days and years and lives)

In a tangible sense,
if you spend 2 hours on facebook and youtube  before leaving the house.
You're day will be 10% more shitty,
than if you'd had spent 1 hour and 48 minutes doing that stuff,
6 minutes stretching and doing pushups, and 6 minutes writing a nice email to someone who
was waiting to hear from you.

The reduction in shittiness in the case you spent those whole two hours before leaving your house,
doing things like meditating, exercising, communicating with people (in a mindful way),
studying something new, installing your new shower head. (or at least wrecking your wall while trying)..
is almost enough to make someone optimistic about life..

of course, there are complications.. cause if you spent a whole 2 hours outside of the regular `hypnotized zombie' mode, in addition to the good feelings, uncomfortable repressed feelings from the past would start to arise.
In general this is also good, cause there's a chance there to process and dissolve them..
but yeah when going a little deeper it's no longer a smooth ride.