There are some issues with the modern education system.It has some great aspects to it — everyone should be on a similar page in terms of how we operate as a society.But in terms of living as nature intended?It’s a horrible solution for helping people find, learn about, and make a career out of something they care about.The modern education system works against our psyche that is wired for survival.It pushes us to “learn,” memorize, and get trained into a job that has nothing to do with what we spent learning and memorizing.

Modern Education

mass education will never be able to keep up with the digital economy that continues to evolve at an exponential rate.Only those that know how to pursue their curiosity, learn fast, and become “tool-independent” will end up on top.By leaning into your nature — your survival-wired brain — you will begin to reap the benefits of doing so.

Mass Education In The Digital Age

Learning is how you become more aware, conscious, and skilled in the game of life.When you start playing a game for the first time, you learn and ask questions.Asking questions is how you determine if it is worth adopting this new activity into your life.You have routines, lifestyles, social events, habits, errands, and other things that could be impacted by playing this game on a consistent basis.If playing that specific game isn’t perceived as more “fun” or more “valuable” activity than the other games you are playing, why would you make it a constant in your life?

What Learning Ideally Is

Learning is how you uncover the depth that life has to offer.When you first start learning a game (or trying something new in life) you may not like it.It may not make sense to you just yet.You don’t see it as a game. You fixate your focus on the tip of the iceberg and assume that everything under the water serves no purpose.You aren’t giving yourself a chance to find your “why.”Do this enough and you won’t see past the tip of the iceberg of life itself. A shallow existence.You will find yourself ready to quit before you even leave the tutorial.

The Depth Of Life

Whenever I talk about “doing what you want” I always get the same responses.“You mean if I wanted to jump off a bridge I should???”“You mean if I want to be the next Hitler I should?”“You mean it’s okay if people are mass murderers?!?!” Have some common sense and think critically about what you are saying.This brings up the difference between conscious and unconscious living.If you were conscious of the widespread impact of what “becoming the next Hitler” would lead to, you wouldn’t want to do it.

Conscious Vs Unconscious Living

There are specific ways to manipulate your attention or frame your focus with the result of a more enhanced experience.Chemicals like dopamine, adrenaline, and norepinephrine squirt into your brain to reward your pursuits that stem from your nature.<ul><li>Developing your skill set</li><li>Mastering your craft</li><li>Pursuing your vision</li><li>Working towards your goals</li><li>Living by a code of values</li><li>Living in the moment</li></ul>

Live In Accordance With Nature

The only thing more painful than pursuing the highest version of yourself is not pursuing the highest version of yourself

When you pursue your curiosity, fulfill your basic needs, gain a degree of geographical freedom, and consistently make progress — you are psychologically rewarded.<ul><li>Busting out of the trenches of struggle.</li><li>Conquering the challenge.</li><li>Winning the battle in the ever-unfolding story of life.</li><li>Reaching the peak of the mountain.</li><li>Feeling the energy in the drop of a song.</li><li>It’s all the same.</li></ul>

It Feels Good To Do What You Want

The creation pyramid combines the spiritual, psychological, and philosophical teachings that I’ve found to cross over when it comes to life enjoyment. Not only occasionally, but on demand. That is, once you understand the parts of the system. The aspects of the game.All five “C’s” of enjoyment are both tools and tells.You can use and combine them to increase your enjoyment of day-to-day existence.Or you can become aware of them when you are doing things you genuinely enjoy.

The Five Cs Of Life Enjoyment

What do you feel pulled to do?When you feel the pull, what limiting beliefs arrive?From there, pause and question.Don’t let your monkey brain think that your survival is at stake.The death of a belief is not death itself — even when it feels eerily similar.Questioning is how you open up new mental pathways to explore.Questioning is how you expand your consciousness by diving down the rabbit hole of infinity.Questioning is how you dictate what you need to self-educate on next.

Life Enjoyment 5: Curiosity

The cause of most modern problems is clarity.Anxiety, uncertainty, fixed mindsets, closed-mindedness, and the rest are all due to a lack of clarity.Clarity comes down to structure, information, and surrender.Information is abundant and potentially overwhelming, yet necessary.Structuring that information (or ordering consciousness) is how you start to “outline the puzzle.”Surrender and rest usually piece everything together.

Clarity

What you want (goal)
How to get there (clarity)
Why you want to (intention)
When these 3 things fall into place, your choice to act becomes seamless.

In psychology, there is a phenomenon known as pattern recognition. There is also the “construct aware” stage of ego development along with systems thinking as a whole.Connection stems from the ability to zoom out, see the big picture, and recognize patterns, models, constructs, and connections.This is best illustrated as the “aha!” moment (or a series of these moments).Along with curiosity, connection raises dopamine in the brain.

Connection

Challenge is encoded in the system.Challenge is what kicks you into flow.Challenge is what eliminates boredom.We are so afraid as a society to take on new challenges because they threaten the comfort we’ve been conditioned into.If your work, life, or self isn’t challenging you on a consistent basis, your life won’t be interesting and you aren’t making much progress.The Solution:<ul><li>Set a challenging goal</li><li>Gain clarity by breaking it down into smaller goals</li><li>Act with intention by aligning all aspects of your life (mind, body, spirit, business) with those goals.</li></ul>

Challenge

Consciousness is about depth and appreciation. Love.For now, start seeing beyond the surface.Take on the challenge of becoming curious in understanding all of the connections that any given situation presents (so you can gain clarity).While most people perceive a motorcycle as a purposeless death machine — you can make the conscious choice to see beyond that and break out of your unconscious, conditioned emotional reactions to life.

Consciousness

When you find yourself in a bad mood, use the LE5 to your advantage:<ul><li>Question why you are in a bad mood (curiosity)</li><li>Set a goal to reverse the bad mood (challenge)</li><li>Reverse engineer it so you know what to learn (clarity)</li><li>As you learn, observe the excitement that fills your mind as you make new discoveries (excitement)</li><li>Remain conscious during this entire process.</li></ul>

Using The Five Cs Of Life Enjoyment 

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

Why You Can't Enjoy Life - Dan Koe

For all the triumphs of remote work, the social connection remains a pain point. One <a href="https://www.twingate.com/research/what-employees-miss/">survey</a> of 700 remote workers, who had previously worked in offices, found that social connection was the thing people missed most about offices, outranking office banter, a dedicated workspace, and face-to-face meetings. And yet, despite the obvious need, most companies haven’t figured out how best to broker connections in the virtual world.

Remote Work Is Not Like The Real Thing

Some companies are counting on the eventual return to offices to mend the social fabric of the workplace. Google and Facebook, which both <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/work-going-remote-why-big-tech-building/">expanded their real estate footprint</a> during the pandemic, have historically used their office space to create a sense of shared culture, and they will continue to do so. But many other companies have embraced remote work, allowing some or all of their employees to remain dispersed in the months to come.

Returning To A Physical Office

Isolated employees can be compared to gig workers, who may do the same tasks for different companies. People can still feel productive, even content, working by themselves. But when work feels transactional, it’s very easy to trade one laptop for another. It’s not surprising that turnover is so high.

The New Gig Work

At its essence, workplace culture is defined by shared norms and routines. Something as simple as providing free coffee can create an office routine for employees to meet each other or socialize. At their best, those small interactions open the door to friendships or collaboration. Even when they don’t, they give people a sense that they belong to a larger group.

The Old Workplace Culture

Remote work challenges these routines and office norms—when people come in when they leave, what they wear, and whom they interact with. The flexibility to work on your own time, and in sweatpants, if you choose, is one of the great advantages of remote work. But it can also leave employees feeling detached, and unsure when it’s appropriate to ping a coworker or how to start a conversation about something that’s not work-related.

Post-Pandemic Routines

Research on remote work is sparse, and the conclusions vary. Some studies find that workers are happier; others say workers experience more loneliness, irritability, worry, and guilt. Also, the recent research on remote work has taken place during the pandemic, making it difficult to separate whether people feel bad because of their work arrangement or because of the pandemic.One thing that is clear, though, is that remote workers do not tend to replace in-person interactions with virtual ones.

How Remote Work Works In The Long Run

Since remote work doesn’t seem to be going away, these problems will need to be solved, fast. Some companies trying their hand:Cleary: is a “digital lobby” where people can ask questions, post announcements, and congratulate each other on workplace wins.Tandem: encourages employees to share updates throughout the day so coworkers can see when they’re available for a chat.Donut: aims to create a human connection between people at work.

Companies On The Job

The price of this lost connection is more than just dissatisfied, disengaged, or departing employees. It can also cost companies the innovation that comes from people who know how to work together. Remote workers can be productive—even more so than when they work in offices. Productivity gains apply mainly to solo work, the kind that gig workers and freelancers do. Collaborative work, which is <a href="https://www.nielsen.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/04/how-collaboration-drives-innovation-success-march-2015.pdf">linked to innovation</a>, has not fared well.

The Price Of Lost Connections

Remote work: How It fares in the long run.

There are Zoom happy hours and digital water coolers, but employees feel disconnected, and work feels transactional.

remotework

Remote Work

corporateculture

Corporate Culture

teamwork

Teamwork

business

Business

It’s Tough to Build a Corporate Culture in a Remote-Work World

Ever since Google was born in 1998, the company has become one of the most valuable and successful companies in the tech world. But despite having a net worth of hundreds of billions and 15 years of history, the company still maintains a startup mentality. 
How does Google achieve that? By focusing on so-called smart-creatives. Smart-creatives are employees who possess a curious, ambitious personality and combine it with their tech know-how.

How Google Works

The technological advancement over the past few decades has brought a highly competitive market. Consumers became increasingly more demanding, as they could easily compare prices and quality (reviews) of products. So companies had to adjust and produce better products to stand out.
The second effect of the tech explosion is that companies could develop products very quickly and cost-effectively. Digital products scale incredibly well, which is why a tiny group of engineers can produce a product used by millions of people. It is also easy to outsource work.

The Two Effects Of The Tech Explosion

Successful companies need to rely on employees who can give them a competitive edge. These employees are called smart-creatives by Google. Smart-creatives combine ideas from different areas. They combine business and tech expertise in a creative way. They are competitive, curious and very ambitious. They are so passionate about their work that they will have no problem pulling all-nighters.
The hiring approach then is to bring in those types of engineers and give them as much freedom as possible. Letting their intrinsic motivation free flow. Smart-creatives are the essence of Google.

Smart Creatives

Hiring should be a top priority. So instead of relying on just a single opinion of a manager, as it is the case in most companies, you should create a committee to represent the company’s different viewpoints.Resumes aren’t the best way to find the most interesting and intelligent employees. Finding them requires imagination, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt asks himself before making any hiring decision: If he were stuck at an airport with the prospective employee, would they be able to hold an interesting conversation?

Hiring Smart Creatives

To attract smart and creative people, you have to create a company culture which attracts those types of employees. The culture should encourage interaction (as smart people love to talk to other smart people), freedom (smart-creatives don’t like to be in a rigid environment). Employees should be able to speak their mind and have freedom to make their own decisions. A good starting point to define the company culture is to create the guidelines and principles that attract smart-creatives.

Building A Creative, Free-Thinking Company-Culture

Enforcing innovation rarely works because external motivators are harmful to intrinsic motivation as described in Drive. How can a company then encourage innovation? You create the conditions for innovation to flourish.
So how can we create the right conditions for innovation? One simple rule is trying to shoot for bigger goals by “10xing” everything. For example, striving for a product which is 10 times better and has only 1/10 the cost of its current alternative.

Creating The Climate For Innovation

Google dedicates 10 percent of its budget to experiments. Employees have 20 percent free time to spend on whatever they like.Thanks to these measures innovation keeps moving. Gmail for example was a result of an employee’s 20-percent time.

Embrace Risk

Google learned from the book Where Good Ideas Come From that they come from collaborating environments. Innovative companies foster this type of rich environment by creating collaborative working environments and company-wide meetings.
Google has an Intranet system accessible to all employees called Moma, which stores every single product in development so that every employee knows what everyone else is working on(like Notion). This makes it easier for employees to collaborate and share knowledge, even across different departments.

Creating An Open Space To Facilitate Collaboration

The restless and ambitious nature of smart creatives will naturally lead them to create something of their own sooner or later or at least make a change and try something new, like going to another company. So how can you retain them? The answer is, by giving them what they most crave, intellectual challenges.
If you challenge a smart creative’s intellect, they will feel stimulated and more motivated, keeping them happy and away from the thoughts of leaving the company.

Retaining Good Employees

How to assure long-term success? Most CEOs would think that their company needs a business plan. But a rigid business plan in fact isn’t going to work well in most situations. A fixed plan doesn’t leave room for fine-tuning. And in the technology business, things change all the time. A company needs to be able to react quickly to adapt to new situations.

Leaving Some Room For Change

In a traditional company, management used to be hierarchical (vertical). That means that decisions are to be made from superiors and that they are not debated openly, employees have to shut up and follow orders from their superiors.
In smart, creative cultures, decision making is more horizontal and are debated openly. Management cannot just make up their minds about something expecting everyone to follow the orders. If employees don’t support the decision, they won’t follow it.

Discussions, Not Decisions

Chairman Eric Schmidt and executive advisor Jonathan Rosenberg pull back the curtain to reveal how the company created its unique culture of workplace innovation

Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary-and frequently contrarian-principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business. Today, Google is a global icon that regularly pushes the boundaries of innovation in a variety of fields. How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub "smart creatives." Covering topics including corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims ("Consensus requires dissension," "Exile knaves but fight for divas," "Think 10X, not 10%") with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history, many of which are shared here for the first time. In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. How Google Works explains how to do just that.

history

History

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

strategy

Strategy

books

Books

Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Seasoned Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg provide an insider's guide to Google, from its business history and disruptive corporate strategy to developing a new managment philosophy and creating a corporate culture where innovation and creativity thrive. Google Executive Chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google over a decade ago as proven technology executives. At the time, the company was already well-known for doing things differently, reflecting the visionary-and frequently contrarian-principles of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. If Eric and Jonathan were going to succeed, they realized they would have to relearn everything they thought they knew about management and business. Today, Google is a global icon that regularly pushes the boundaries of innovation in a variety of fields. How Google Works is an entertaining, page-turning primer containing lessons that Eric and Jonathan learned as they helped build the company. The authors explain how technology has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers, and that the only way to succeed in this ever-changing landscape is to create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom Eric and Jonathan dub "smart creatives." Covering topics including corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption, the authors illustrate management maxims ("Consensus requires dissension," "Exile knaves but fight for divas," "Think 10X, not 10%") with numerous insider anecdotes from Google's history, many of which are shared here for the first time. In an era when everything is speeding up, the best way for businesses to succeed is to attract smart-creative people and give them an environment where they can thrive at scale. How Google Works explains how to do just that.

Eric Schmidt

Jonathan Rosenberg

Gabriele Oettingen, an NYU psychologist, studied the curious mechanisms of wish fulfillment from inception to realization for over two decaades. It appears that the journey of wish fulfillment revolves four main protagonists: the dreamer, the dream, the fantasy, and the obstacle.

The Tale of Every Wish

With the study having thousands of participants, she discovered that there was a pattern that people typically follow:<ol><li>Indulging - People spend many hours fantasizing that they're fulfilling their dreams</li><li>Dwelling - People brood over the possible obstacles that are hindering them to pursue their dreams</li><li>Mental Contrasting - They fantasize their desired future but then explore the obstacles</li><li>Reverse Contrasting - They explore the obstacles first, then fantasize about the desired future</li></ol>

Self-regulatory cognitive wish-making pattern

In Oettingen's finding with her research, she was shocked when she found out that the very images that allowed us to virtually live through our heart's desire actually had hampering effects on our realizations. We then ask, "why would fantasizing about fulfilling a wish hinder the pursuit of the wish?" To which they reply, "that when we experience a mental attainment of our wish, in our mind's eye, we've already experienced the rewards of having achieve our dream which in turn makes people exert less energy and effort that's required to turn our wishes into reality."

Fantasies Are A Double-Edged Sword

By knowing the fact that fantasizing about our dreams have hampering effects, it can be offset by mental contrasting.  Mental contrasting gives us a healthy dose of reality even when we fantasize therefore giving us energy to pursue our dreams. When we identify the obstacles that stood in the way of our wishes, our desired future is slowly being established because we're binding goals, intentions, and making the appropriate plans to move past hurdles to pursue our wishes.

Mental Contrasting Helps Us Achieve Our Dreams

Gabriele Oettingen's research bore this wish-fulfilment strategy called Wish Outcome Obstacle Plan, WOOP for short. WOOP is a mental contrasting action where we place the four protagonists (the dreamer, the dream, the fantasy, and the obstacle) together in order to get to know one another before pursuing the journey. WOOP is a change agent that asks us: W: What is it you really wish for?O: What's the best possible outcome if it were to come true?O: What obstacle is standing in the way?P: What can you do to overcome this obstacle? Devise plans.

Wish-Fulfilment Strategy

Our wishes can offer extraordinary insights into ourselves.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

problemsolving

Problem Solving

On Making Wishes Come True

Spending time in nature makes us more creative. Looking at trees and leaves — instead of our electronic devices — reduces our anxiety, lowers our heart rates, soothes us, and allows our brains to make connections more easily.
Even walking in an urban green space for just 25 minutes can quiet our brains and help us switch into autopilot node. This state sparks our present awareness and fuels imagination.

Make disconnecting a priority

Meditation clears our minds of jumbled thoughts, and gives our brains the space to observe and reflect, improving task concentration and enhancing our ability to make smart decisions.This intentional practice can be as simple as closing your eyes and focusing on your breath.

Meditation puts the entire brain to work

Moving around has been linked to increased performance on creative tests. Exercising releases endorphins — chemicals our bodies produce to relieve stress and pain. When we are less stressed, our brains venture into more fruitful territory.

Get moving

mindfulness

Mindfulness

health

Health

meditation

Meditation

Train Your Brain to Be More Creative

Some behavioural traits generally have a positive connotation to them, but are self-sabotaging in the long run:
<ol>
<li>Thriving Under Pressure</li>
<li>Thoroughly Exploring Your Options</li>
<li>Being In Control</li>
<li>Striving For Excellence</li>
</ol>
These traits can set us up for success initially but have a downside to them.

Positive-Sounding Traits That Are Bad In The Long Run

Being able to work under pressure once in a while is a positive trait, but if it is an addiction to trigger focus, it can give rise to procrastination.
People create artificial pressure situations to add that spark of a time crunch but waiting to start your work just before the deadline is highly unproductive.

Thriving Under Pressure

Thinking everything to death before making decisions can be counterproductive, creating self-doubt.
If you keep researching every aspect and keep gathering every information to make that mythical perfect decision, you will never reach certainty.

Thoroughly Exploring Your Options

Always staying in control can turn one into a control freak. It can also make us fearful of situations when we cannot be in control. 
One can feel unprepared in certain situations and avoid them altogether. Always wanting to be in control can also create unnecessary anxiety.

Being In Control

<ul>
<li>Trying to do something perfectly is fine but always trying to be a perfectionist is a recipe for disaster.</li>
<li>Striving for perfection is an avoidable ‘impossible standard’ that makes one self-critical.</li>
<li>Failure to reach the impossible standard lowers one's self-worth.</li>
</ul>

Striving For Excellence

<ol><li>Monitor your behaviour and acknowledge your self-sabotaging behaviour.</li><li>Take action that is the opposite of what you intend to do while self-sabotaging yourself. Handle situations differently and observe the effect it has on you.</li><li>Acknowledge your accomplishments and build your self-esteem by writing down the things that make you special, and unique.</li><li>Focus on the positive and start a daily self-affirmation mantra to recite to yourself.</li></ol>

Steps To Take If You Are Self-Sabotaging

These behaviors can set you up for success, but when taken too far, they have a real downside.


mentalhealth

Mental Health

These 4 positive-sounding traits can actually sabotage your success

<ul>
<li>Stoicism is an ancient philosophy that has recently gone mainstream. It is a kind of premeditation that involves reframing our attitude towards external events.</li>
<li>Stoicism states that nothing is good or bad, valuable or miserable in itself, and it is our assumptions, beliefs and thought patterns that colour the world around us.</li>
<li>If we have control of our feelings, emotions and the mind in general, we would cease to be judgemental, happy or miserable.</li>
</ul>

Stoicism: A Primer

Stoicism is basically inner engineering, choosing our response and judgement towards external events that are not in our control.
It is the basis of modern psychological therapies like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy(CBT) and goes deep into how we behave towards unexpected and unforeseen blows of life.

Stoicism And Worrying

One of the fathers of the Stoicism philosophy, the Roman Statesman Seneca, suggested a Stoic technique called Premeditation.
The exercise involves imagining the worst-case scenario of your situation, like your partner leaving you, you catching a virus and dying, or your getting fired, or your house getting burned down. The next step is to rehearse how we will react to these misfortunes.
Casting oneself in dark, miserable, even desperate conditions and then seeing how we can endure them, creates an emotional protection shield around us.

The Premeditation Of Seneca

The Stoic practice of catastrophizing, that is manoeuvring the potential dangers and troubles we will experience during the day or the mean and rude people we will encounter, loads our brain with a kind of anti-anxiety potion, that helps us face the day with ease.
We prepare our worrying mind to face the day's problems and are mentally prepared to handle the unexpected.

Embrace Your Worrying Mind

Stoicism is the philosophy that nothing about the world is good or bad in itself, and that we have control over both our judgments and our reactions to things. Stoicism features in modern psychology as "cognitive behavioral therapy," which can help you overcome anxiety and worry.

philosophy

Philosophy

communication

Communication

Do you worry too much? Stoicism can help

In 1993, Newsweek ran an article affirming the scientific plausibility of Jurassic Park. They pointed out that two Berkeley scientists announced that they had cloned 40m-year-old bee DNA after finding the insect preserved in amber.
But to replicate a dinosaur genome, you would need billions of DNA building blocks. They could not harvest more than 250. Moreover, the amber-based experiments of the bee DNA finding were likely based on false results. Lastly, no one has ever found any dinosaur DNA since DNA degrades over time.

Plausibility of Jurassic Park

A controversial palaeontologist thinks we might have all the DNA necessary to recreate dinosaurs - in chickens.
Scientists managed to tweak poultry DNA to grow alligator-like teeth and a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak. The creatures would not be recreations of a once-extinct species but a human-engineered version of how they think dinosaurs have been.

Dinosaurs: Maybe life can find a way

Spielberg might have claimed the 90s classic ‘depends on credibility’ – but with no dinosaur DNA, get set for fewer ferocious beasts and more … chickens

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

Reality bites: Could Jurassic Park actually happen?

Anxiety is a normal experience, however, it is not recommended that we let ourselves be consumed by the fear it holds against us.
Being able to deconstruct anxiety will allow us to practice the principle of doing the opposite. With this, we will be able to reverse the responses we give out of habit in order for us to become free and live fulfilling lives.

Deconstructing Anxiety

Fear manipulates us through:
<ul>
<li>Impatience - Being fearful has made us into beings that want to have a solution for every single problem even though it isn't happening at the moment.</li>
<li>Future Orientation - Fear makes us internally experience something that isn't currently happening which fills us with adrenaline so that we'd be able to stave off the problem.</li>
<li>Time Distortion - Fear makes us feel like we're "stuck" and may never be able to get out of the situation.</li>
<li>Self-Generation - Fear demands us to keep on thinking.</li>
</ul>

How Fear Fear Manipulates

Being mindful about how fear manipulates our minds into overthinking certain situations is something we need to practice. Being able to see how manipulative fear is will allow us to loosen its grip on us. 
We can do so by allowing ourselves to take the time we need in order for the fear to pass and to recognize that the future isn't as frightening as it seems. Once the fear passes, we are able to stand up for ourselves and that fear is only distorting our perception.

Getting Away From Fear

Part 2: When we deconstruct the ways in which fear manipulates our perception, we begin to loosen its hold upon our perception. This is key to the discovery of freedom and fulfillment.

How Fear Distorts What We Know

It is a myth that experts commit fewer errors than beginners. The Dunning-Kruger Effect states that people who are bad at something are often unaware of the fact, and are overestimating their performance.
There is an advantage in having a beginner’s mindset even as our skills and knowledge develop, something that is not available even to the experts.

Keep Learning: Adult Beginners

Experts, who are skilled and are aware of their knowledge, tend to be more efficient in their handling of problems. 
However, the skills, knowledge and expertise often turn into a handicap, a blindspot that makes the expert commit errors in certain situations where a more agile, fresh and innovative solution is required.

The Curse Of The Experts

As we struggle in the settings of our laptop/phone/iPad, we see that children conquer these gadgets almost instantaneously. This is because everything is new for them, and they have a true beginner's mindset.
Children see the world with no burden of past experience, and less junk knowledge inside their heads, which are mostly restrictions. They are not worried about sounding foolish, so they ask questions that most of us wouldn’t.

Children: Natural Beginners

“Before you make your move, look at the position as if you were a beginner.”

Many adults make a mistake of letting their kids learn new things but not patronizing the learning mentality among themselves. They subtly give out a negative message to the kids: Learning is only for young people.
Adult Beginners, the people who are not young but are trying to learn something new, almost have a failed tone to it, like the person is already late. They become a ‘stereotype threat’ just by being adults and beginners.

Learning Is Not Only For The Young

There is a certain age in children, known as the sensitive period, where they are able to learn at an accelerated rate. The brain's neural systems are extremely responsive to change. That is why kids learn languages, music, chess or even coding as a ‘first language’. 
Kids are also having fewer responsibilities, are protected and supported, and their lives tend to be built around learning new things by default.

How Kids Learn: The Sensitive Period

<ul>
<li>We all have a linear, logical approach to learning something. We believe that learning something like singing or drawing, will help us be better singers or artists.</li>
<li>Learning has advantages that are less obvious to anyone. It is termed as an effective response to stress.</li>
<li>Learning something puts one in the zone where the body and mind are tuned to absorb more of the outside world.</li>
<li>Learning something new and challenging with other people improves our cognitive behaviour, providing us with skills far beyond what the subject of learning is.</li>
<li>Learners feel confident in areas unrelated to the main subject and experience internal growth, which makes the world outside a lot bigger and richer than before.</li>
</ul>

Learning Is Misunderstood

The long read: The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young