Upward Spiral

  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...

  Hey there! Have you ever gotten stopped in your tracks when trying to work on a project due to a huge chunk of clutter literally popping out of nowhere leaving you puzzled, wondering how could it happen? Certainly, everybody had that happen to them, and I am no exception. Finding oneself in a state of utter chaos, frantically trying to put all the essential pieces together - to resume one's optimal workflow -  is undoubtedly very uncomfortable and exhausting as hell.   To tackle this issue in particular, I devised a system that helps me cope with managing high amounts of uncertainty life can unload on any individual when he expects it the least. Upon finalising my system, I encountered an unforeseen issue: Its maintenance is tedious. This was a huge red flag. When the creator considers his own system tedious or hard to use, something has gone terribly wrong. To add an insult to injury, the practical part of it (the services I used) wasn't working smoothly at...

What will you be like in 10 years? Or me? Or the society? In this particular case, 10 years is just a pointless figure that I used so I can establish a common frame of reference (by adding a concrete value to that sentence) with anyone who might be reading this article. The main point of this article would be congruent with any value I put in there because it simply does not matter how long is the timespan is, what matters is what is supposed to happen when the time is up.   Through the evolutionary processes, people attained the ability to look into the future. As far as modern science is concerned, only humans have the cognitive capability to envision, predict and plan for the future. This extraordinary ability comes with a huge merit (you can avoid many potentially dangerous situations hence you can enhance your quality of life) but also a substantial demerit (you come to a harsh realization that one day your time will run out). Some people assume that you get to, in fac...

  This was last week before summer, which was  coincidentally the week where not a whole lot happened. I tried to be mindful of my obligations and *cough* habits and to be honest, it turned out fairly well. Until Friday I had my hands full with wrapping up all the obligations tied with my second year in college, so I didn't have spare time to read or improve in languages on daily bases. When the last exam was over, I took a three-day break while only doing necessary chores and daily *cough* habits  (I failed 31 of those F-ers this week as well - consistency is key right?).   Some "real" (productive) things I did this week are: writing an outline for my sci-fi book project researching (quite meekly) into the topic of psychometrics brainstorming some ideas I have for this summer so I can put out a decent article later today   Although I am only a novice writer, I enjoy writing fiction stories greatly (despite the fact that until now most of th...

    The hell is over! Time for the "real game" to start. Finally, after 2 weeks or so, I can catch a break. As per 31/05, I successfully finished all the assignments and passed each one of the finals I was obliged to attend. It's been a lengthy, uninspiring and tedious experience, so it goes without saying that I am incredibly grateful that it's over. I could go on and on about some of the shortcomings of traditional education (such as an unmotivating grading system, extreme emphasis on memorisation, almost no emphasis on the use of critical thinking etc...) but I'll leave that for another day.   By the term "real game" I meant the productivity plan that I set out for myself, so I do not falter and waste all the precious time at my disposal on low return activities (like I did last summer). I'll post an article that will cover my productivity plan in bigger detail on the 5th, and if everything goes well, I'll be able to attract some port...