Upward Spiral

   Okay, so this one is gonna be a shout out or summary rather than a full-fledged review of the book and its contents. The overarching message I want to get across is this:  If you enjoy self-help content I highly recommend you to read abridged version (or if you are ready for a ride, you can try your luck with a long version) of 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene.    Let me begin by briefly talking about the contents of the book, eventually getting to the bottom of why I think it's one of the best self-help books you can currently read.  The basic premise of the book is that everything in the world is predicated on power. The powerful ones have a higher chance of winning. Power means prestige, power enables one to cease the numerous benefits it brings and so on. To further elaborate and expand on this idea, the books contains 48 laws, principles or heuristics that enable ones that use them to obtain more power, retain the power for as lo...

Hi there!    As you might have noticed, this blog has been on a hiatus for about 4 months (the timestamp is somehow incorrect, I uploaded this article as of 20.12.2018) - the main reason is me being overwhelmed with my other projects, school and being subject to my own poor time management albeit I don't want to whine about it too much.   To be frank, even though I was rather busy, these last 4 months have been great. Besides school, I've been working on projects I truly enjoy (exercising regularly, viciously reading and focusing on my poor Japanese skills while developing an app that would help others like me), while also working on my mentality as a person.   Anyhow, intended to write an article many times on some occasions but I simply wasn't satisfied with it when I finished it, so I scraped it and tried again in a couple of weeks. But right now, with semester being almost over and Christmas just around the corner, I regained my spark and want to cont...

Hey, it's me!. In the following days, I plan to resume my standard blogging schedule of 1-2 posts per week containing books reviews and following up on my collecting information talk (I think that domain deserves far more attention than it's been getting in general). Anyhow, without further ado, let's jump right into it!   The first question that might come to mind of someone to whom Asian languages are not their area of expertise goes something like this: Is Japanese hard?    I'll briefly give my thoughts on this matter. In my opinion, Japanese is not just hard, it's very hard (for someone who writes in Latin). It takes a fair amount of tenacity for an individual to learn this language well. Fun fact: Ministry of foreign affairs of the US estimated that it takes 2250 hours to attain conversational proficiency in Japanese . They based it on an average time it takes a diplomat in training to do it, and I mind you, these are fairly intelligent people. ...

 This topic was on my mind for a while, so I decided I'll write down my thoughts on it because nowadays, gathering useful info is undoubtedly more relevant than ever before. Why is that so? I believe that it's because of this assumption. The amount of the total information available to an average person over the course of his life increased dramatically over the last 50 years.   This, innately, seems like a good thing but every coin has two sides to it. Yes, total information available increased which almost certainly means that the amount of useful information available increased. Fine, but what about the drawback? What drawback you might ask. There is nothing more infuriating than when you are trying to dig up some useful information regarding the topic of your choice but guess what, there is just too information . To get to the valuable information you need to first, in most cases, get through a pile of stinky, smelly garbage that offers no informative value whats...

  So, I've decided to try out a new style of content - "compact essays" (I will try to keep them in 1k - 1.5k words range) in which I'll succinctly express my opinion on one topic of my choice. I'll usually go with something along the lines of psychology, futurism or occasional conspiracies (stick to your guns they said xd). I don't really want to poke into fields I have very limited knowledge of because the article itself would be likely factually incorrect, draw an incorrect conclusion or commit various fallacies due to my inability to grasp the complexity of the topic I would be covering. In this pilot, I've chosen a topic I am a big fan of - AI -  to make it easier to successfully manoeuvre in this newly developed format. I reckon that the quality of this type of posts will slowly improve over-time as I gain a better understanding of how to lay out a convincing formal argument in an understandable form. Most of the info I'll be using as the s...

"Whoa, another Cal Newport book!", Or something along those lines, was my reaction when I got my hands on this piece of literature. The author himself says it's more like a manifesto than a book and he is sort of right. The book itself is about 230 pages long but contains a rather large font and a lot of spacing plus frequent repetition of the main concepts the author is presenting which resulted in me being able to read it from cover to cover in 2 days (most books usually take me 5-8 days to read). From an outsiders point of view, one could say that the book was not worth the money (its price was about 15 bucks) and I wouldn't blame him for that assertion because the length and outside appearance of the book is often correlated with an amount of information it provides (unless a 500-page book is a complete word salad, it will contain much more information than a 200 page one) however some books provide a lot of information and do not provide much valuable inform...

  It's been rather hard to catch a breath and write something elaborate in past couple days. Firstly, I had a fantastic opportunity to work as an intern in a facility specialized for treating patients with substance and behavioural addictions - this internship lasted from 25th to 29th June - and secondly, the very next day, I packed all my essentials and went for a 5-day hiking trip returning on the 4th July, finishing a book (So good they can't ignore you by Cal Newport) with which I was behind schedule due to me not having enough time/energy to dive into it each time I would return from the internship in the evening. In addition to that, I've also picked up the pace in regards to learning Japanese. At first, I was rather discouraged because I hit a wall - I got the basics down but making that transition into still basic, but much harder sections of the curriculum quickly turned into an arduous rote memorizing of kanji characters and grammar constructs hence I tempora...

  Fast forward 15 days, and here I am! With yet another book review. This week I'll be looking into the book named Habit written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg. I intended to write a proper review sometime last week, but for practical reasons, it didn't really work out as planned. I finished Behave by Robert Sapolsky about 9-10 days ago and when I sat down to write an outline for the book I was sort of puzzled. I started re-reading the contents of the book and about 2 hours in, I gave up and went on with my day without giving it further thought, setting all my plans and ideas aside. Why? The damn book was just too complex to simplify it into a standard blog post. In addition to that, I didn't feel like I had a firm grasp of the concepts presented in the book - it surely gave me a lot in terms information value, but reading about neuro-endocrinology in a language that is not your mother tongue is not an easy feat, so I decided to put the book away a...

  I've decided to change things up a little, and as a consequence of that, I am writing a brief status update to provide a little foreshadowing of what is to come. Over the last ~50 days of writing these articles, I think I've gained a bit of knowledge on how to be better at managing the formal side of the blog as well as its contents. Yesterday, when I was thinking about the future of this blog, I realised that there are some elements of the project that could be better. Starting next week, I've decided to tweak/enhance some elements of this blog. These tweaks basically boil down to three main points.   1. As of this week, I am discontinuing the weekly update series - when I looked back at all the weekly update posts, I quickly realised that these kinds of posts don't offer that much value to the reader or even to me. Not all weeks have a flashy ring to them - to be brusque about it, most of them consist of me slowly grinding at my tasks, sluggishly moving...