PERSONAL SPECIAL.... Don’t Avoid Obstacles — Overcome Them

Don’t Avoid Obstacles — Overcome Them

Sometimes you have to let yourself celebrate your wins. You won’t always have good news and you need to learn how to embrace and enjoy these moments. You need to let yourself have some fun once in a while, or else you will burn out and lose all motivation.

Sometimes you have to switch your routines, even when they’re working for you. You might be going too easy on yourself. You have to reassess your challenges and make sure you’re continuously challenging yourself and pushing your boundaries. You have to make sure you’re not purposefully blinding yourself and impeding progress.

On the flip side, you might be going too hard on yourself. You might be pushing yourself to the brink of exhaustion. You might be miserable because you’re tyrannizing yourself over your schedule. You might need adjust if everyday feels like torture. You should be struggling, but not in constant pain.

I told myself that I would write and read every day. I often find myself making excuses.

“Sometimes it’s not possible.” I’d say.

Sometimes I’d lie to myself, procrastinate and never end up accomplishing my daily goals. Sometimes I won’t have an idea to write about and will end up pushing it until I have to publish something I am not proud of.

Creativity does not come by force. You can train yourself to produce and merge creative ideas constantly, but it cannot be coerced. The only thing you can do to influence creativity is to gain more experiences, observe the world around you and take in a variety of ideas.

Read more books. Watch more movies. Take a walk. Talk with people.

Sometimes, instead of trying to creating, you have to experience more. You need to put more ideas into your head.

You get out what you put in. These days, I haven’t been doing my due diligence in reading the books that have stacked up on my desk. I need to take more time to read. I need to take more time to digest the ideas and see what kind of interesting insights I can get out of them.

I feel like sometimes I should just spend a whole week focusing on the books, take some notes and come back with my observations. It is going to be harder to keep up a writing schedule, since I will no longer have the entire day to myself.

When problems arise and hinder my progress, I often find myself exactly where I started. I have no solution to deal with all the problems and happenings that occur in life. Every obstacle seems to affect me in a different way and threatens to crush my long-term goals. How do I deal with the numerous obstacles that will inevitably appear in my life?

The Obstacle Is The Way

But one thing that I have realized recently is the fact that the obstacle is the way. The quote is taken from Ryan Holiday’s book — The Obstacle Is The Way — which draws wisdom from stoicism, the philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience.

When you’re paving your way through life, you will be met with obstacles that block you from moving forward. We spend a lot of time in our lives because we believe that these obstacles should be avoided or worse, cause us to backtrack and take another direction.

When we face big problems in life, we often believe they are horrible and treat them as unfortunate events. But what if you were meant to overcome these obstacles? What if they are there for you to hurdle over?

What would happen if you learned how to overcome all obstacles? You would be unstoppable. Nothing would stop your way because you understand that these obstacles are not impediments. They are not roadblocks that are meant to be avoided — they are meant to be taken head on.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

— Marcus Aurelius

Life will throw things at you that will threaten to break you. It will take away the things and people you love. You will face misfortune, pain and suffering. You have no control or influence over what life can bring to the table.

The only thing you can control is your attitude and your behaviors.

If you control your attitude and your behaviors, you will overcome any obstacle in life. You will not be influenced by the troubles of life. You will treat every obstacle as something to be overcome. You will love the struggle, because you know you will learn and receive something valuable from the experience.

Even though I am starting a new chapter in my life, I will keep on chasing my dream to become a writer. I will keep writing, reading and learning everyday.

Sometimes I will fail. Sometimes I will win.

But one thing that will never change is my attitude. I will meet my failures with compassion and meet my wins with pride.

Every obstacle that appears in front of me will not be sidestepped. They will be overcome and destroyed.

How do you respond to the roadblocks in your path? Do you slink your head in defeat and walk back the way you came, or do you analyze the situation and plan out how to get around and solve the problem?

“There is always a countermove, always an escape or way through. No one said it would be easy and of course the stakes are high, but the path is there for those ready to take it.”

— Ryan Holiday

Holiday tells us that obstacles don’t inhibit success, they create success and that readers should see “through the negative, past its underside, and into its corollary: the positive.”

The decisions you make when faced with difficult obstacles will define you. So come face to face with each obstacle that you come across and do your best to overcome every single one of them.

William Cho

https://mystudentvoices.com/dont-avoid-obstacles-overcome-them-4c4382303c88

PRODUCTIVITY SPECIAL.... Procrastination Sucks — So Here’s The “Eat That Frog” Way to Powerful Productivity PART II

Procrastination Sucks — So Here’s The “Eat That Frog” Way to Powerful Productivity

PART II

Step 2 — Organize the Biggest Frogs Down to the Tiniest Tadpoles

Recognizing the difference between high-value and low-value activities is the core of Eat That Frog. It’s the core of most productivity advice.

If you learn only one thing from this post, I hope it’s the ability to separate true contribution and value from everything else that doesn’t really matter.

Do More of What’s Working

This advice is so important that I had to put it first, even though it’s not from Eat That Frog. It comes from a great post by Justin Jackson.

If something you’re doing is working, do more of it. Recognize when you have a hit on your hands.

If your side project is growing without much effort, keep working on it. Don’t start on some new brain fart of an idea.

If you’re doing something for your career that is getting recognized, like giving talks at conferences, do more of it.

If people love what you write, write more.

It’s rare to strike gold. So when you do, put more of your time and energy into mining that precious vein, and eliminate everything that doesn’t add to its success.

Organize Your List with the ABCDE Approach

If you haven’t struck gold yet, that’s OK.

There’s work to be done before opportunity can even show up. Your chances increase when you’re working on high impact activities, not low value nonsense.

We can give weight to each activity using the ABCDE method.

Think about how much each item moves you towards your goal. Think about the short-term and long-term consequences of doing or not doing each thing on your list.

A items — Things you must do, which will have a serious positive or negative consequence if you do or don’t do it. If you have multiple A items, rank them A-1, A-2, etc.

B items — Things you should do. Tadpoles that have minor consequences. Someone might be inconvenienced if you don’t do these things, but it’s not the end of the world. Never do a B task when an A task is left unfinished.

C items — Things that are nice to do but don’t have any real consequences when they’re done. These items can be chunked together and done all at once when you finish your A tasks. For example, replying to emails.

D items — Things to delegate so you can free up more time to do A tasks.

E items — Things to eliminate. Generally stuff you do out of habit, like checking social media or reading news headlines.

Let’s stick with the “Land your dream job” goal.

Applying to jobs by submitting your resume everywhere might seem like the obvious A activity, but there are bigger impact ways to achieve this goal.

Spend time researching the companies you would love to work for. Get to know everything about them, as if you already work there. Connect with people who do work there. Find the decision makers. Take a recruiter out to lunch. Spend time writing a thoughtful cover letter. Read great books on getting hired like “What Color is Your Parachute?” Spend lots of time thinking about how you can contribute and add value on day one.

Strive to be in the top 10% of candidates and stop doing what 90% of people do. Eliminate the shotgun strategy of blindly uploading your resume to any and every available job opening. Your chances are so much higher with an intentional, laser-focused approach.

Ask Yourself the Great Question

“What one skill, if I developed and did it in an excellent fashion, would have the greatest positive impact on my career?”

Look into yourself for the answer. Ask your boss this question. Ask your coworkers. Ask your friends and your family. Whatever the answer is, find out and then go to work to bring up your performance in this area.

— Eat That Frog p.45

The best way to figure out how you can add value, especially if you’re employed or doing work for somebody, is to ask. Have a conversation about it.

Step 3 — Choose Your Top 3 Frogs

If you did the exercises above, you should have a pretty big list of things to do.

Now accept that you’re never going to do it all. There’s never enough time and there never will be. But your goal is not to become the best “checker of lists.”

80% of your results will come from 20%, maybe less, of the items on your list. Out of all your frogs, which one (three at most) is going to have the biggest impact on your life?

Step 4 — Create Your Daily System

You don’t have control over a company hiring you. You don’t have control over getting a raise. You don’t have control over how the market responds to your startup or side project.

What you do have control over is how many big, ugly frogs you can eat in a day.

You have control of continuous elimination and delegation of things that don’t add value.

You have control of committing to your routine, day after day, to become a person of action.

We’re not trying to be busy for 18 hours a day here. We just want to commit those few precious hours, when our ability to concentrate and focus is highest, on our most important and difficult things.

For most people, it’s in morning before the distractions of the day claw at your time.

Learning to code is huge mountain to climb for beginners, especially if you have a limited amount of time. But when you break it down into actionable steps, you can form a daily system.

Two hours on instructor driven learning, like a Frontend Masters course or freeCodeCamp exercises.

Next hour learning tools and theory, like Github or JavaScript best practices.

Last hour is spent building stuff and writing code. One of the best ways as a beginner is to extend and build on the code examples you do in the courses from the first few hours.

As you get more experienced, the contents of each hour will change, but the system remains the same.

My Frog Eating System

My frog, as far as personal projects go, is writing on Medium and launching codetip.com.

I want to produce practical and useful content that you can implement to help your career. My fear is that I’ll spend days writing something that no one will read or care about.

So I procrastinate. That is, until I toughen up and eat the frog.

My best writing comes in the morning when I open my laptop and start writing. I block all my distracting websites, put my phone in another room, start a Pomodoro timer, then write.

I start writing even when I have nothing to say, or if my thoughts are all over the place. These don’t make for good articles. But I keep taking bites of this big, nasty frog until the good stuff gets teased out.

The most productive code I write at my job happens the same way.

I get into the office early, turn off the distractions, and start working on the hardest, most difficult thing on my list. This thing is important to the company and other stakeholders, like a new feature, performance optimization, or fixing a major defect. I add value by helping the people above me look good.

Most days, I only have the stomach to eat these frogs for a few hours before I get tired.

But in those few, highly-focused hours, I add more value in a day than I would in a week if I were jumping around between a bunch of unimportant things without any intention.

The rest of the day is spent on tadpoles like responding to Slack and emails, fixing minor bugs, and planning work for tomorrow. These activities have some impact and require some effort.

The things I absolutely avoid at work are mindless activities that have zero impact on my company or career, like browsing Hacker News, Reddit, or social media.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t succumb to these entertaining temptations at times. I just do everything in my power to start my day with my most difficult tasks and get as far along on those as I can.

The Biggest, Ugliest Frog in the World is Finishing

Creative people, especially the ones with an entrepreneurial trait, are notorious for starting projects and not finishing them. The next idea comes. It’s newer and shinier, so we chase that.

Our hard drives are a wasteland of ideas, articles, and half finished apps that seemed like good opportunities at the time. How’s that novel coming along, Brian?

When you don’t finish stuff, when you don’t release it out into the public, you’ll never reach the top 10% of anything. You might as well have not started in the first place.

I get that some ideas and projects are not worth finishing. I get that there’s an art of knowing when to quit. I get that there’s a obsession with struggling.

But I think most of the time we quit when we’re a few short feet from gold.

You have to finish because that’s the only way you’re going to get the feedback you need to decide if what you’re doing is adding value.

Don’t start learning Android development because learning JavaScript got too hard. Don’t dive into machine learning because Android development got too hard, and heck, that sounds like the hot new thing, so yeah, I’ll just do that!

Don’t give up on your side project because you couldn’t figure out how to join two database tables.

Don’t start writing the next article before you finish the last one. Don’t start the next project unless you finish the the one you’re working on now.

If this is you, then tomorrow’s frog is finishing. Not eight hours starting something new.

Commit to thirty minutes, or an hour, whatever you need to finish your frog.

Finish it, launch it, and walk away

Bar Franek  https://medium.freecodecamp.org/procrastination-sucks-so-heres-the-eat-that-frog-way-to-powerful-productivity-543b07ecf360

THINKING SPECIAL.... It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You Think

It’s Not What You Know, It’s How You Think

Late historians Will and Ariel Durant spent four decades of their lives studying, compiling, and writing the history of Western civilization. The product of their efforts, The Complete Story of Civilization, went on to span several million words across more than 8,800 pages divided into 11 books.

After finishing the last one, they took on an arguably more daunting task: to summarize all they had learned into 100 pages in The Lessons of History. It’s an incomplete and generalizing attempt, no doubt, but it is also one of the most densely packed sources of modern wisdom available to us.

There are many trends and patterns to be found in the past, and the Durants do a commendable job of highlighting them. The essence of their view, however, can be summarized by the following sentence from their short book:

“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”

The Durants believed that despite all that has and continues to change in our external environment, the real battle is still internal. Real change doesn’t happen until we face our minds and our thoughts.

There is a fair degree of nuance that needs to be accounted for with a statement like that, and it ties into larger questions of what progress is and how subjects relate to objects, but the fact that our thoughts — and their ability to change our minds — play a pivotal role in our experience of reality is self-evident in ways that are common sense. How we think affects everything from our ability to solve problems to how we understand meaning, value, and purpose. The Durants made it their life’s work to improve this ability in the average person by disseminating information — mostly history and philosophy.

But information alone doesn’t make our thinking better. We also have to understand and update the way our minds process this information.

Our Minds Get Stuck in Habit Loops

Based on popular psychology literature, some thinkers have codified the way we form habits into a simple loop: a trigger, a routine, and a reward. We see something in our environment that sets off the trigger; the trigger leads to a routine we’ve internalized based on our past interactions in such an environment; finally, a reward at the end reinforces said routine.

If you observe this in your daily life, you’ll see that it’s roughly right. Our brain is a pattern-seeking survival machine, and habits are how it ensures that we don’t have to think too hard about what to do when familiar situations arise, letting us conserve energy.

When it comes to the human mind, there are still no concrete theories of how thought emerges. We know, however, that thought plays a pivotal role in facilitating how we interact with the information that the Durants, for example, were trying to impart on us.

In the same way that we form habits of action relating to our environment, we also form habits of thought when it comes to how we think about the world. We are all born into a reality in which — at first, at least — we can’t even distinguish between our own separateness from the world. With time, however, we start to recognize patterns around us, and we internalize these patterns — like we do habits — so that we can reuse them in the future. Usually, if a pattern persists in our mental habits, it means that it is valuable in some sense. But this is only the case if we apply that pattern to the right information.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to change our minds about things is that our brains are stuck in these mental habit loops, which tend to look at information from a singular point of view. Our brains have learned something in one context, so they mistakenly apply it to others, mixing up the triggers that lead to routine thoughts.

We’re all capable of overpowering these habit loops, of course, but it’s very easy and productive to have them operating as the default mode. To think well, we must be aware of their limitations and to not let them restrict us.

Diversifying Thinking Patterns Changes Us

Each of us faces different challenges at different times in different ways based both on our biology and our unique cultural upbringing. No two people think exactly the same way because no two people have lived exactly the same life.

In fact, these different thinking patterns (mostly produced from our mental habit loops) are, in large part, what makes you, you and me, me. Our identities are borne from the convergence of these patterns. They create our subjective experience.

The Durants are getting at the idea that although we’ve seen so much external change throughout history, none of it truly makes a difference unless we calibrate our internal, subjective experience with that objective, external environment. Our subjective experience is limited, and using it — and the thinking patterns that create it — as a baseline for understanding the world is a limited way to go through life. It biases us in the wrong direction.

At its core, a thinking pattern is an implicit rule of thumb for the way we connect aspects of our reality. Given the complexity of this reality, the more diverse our trained thinking patterns are — and the better refined the associated triggers are — the more accurately we will be able to interact with information around us.

Because thinking patterns emerge from the mental habit loops we form as a response to experience, the only way to diversify them is to seek out new and conflicting encounters. We can do this through books, unfamiliar environments, or even hypothetical thought games.

Outside of extreme external circumstances, any time we’re struggling to solve a problem or lacking a sense of satisfaction and meaning, it’s due to the fact that our current thinking patterns are not adequately suited for the job. Instead, we have to remodel the form and shape of these patterns so they better fit the form and shape of the issue at hand.

How We Think Is What Matters

We’re born with a set of biological machinery, and some knowledge of how to use it, but in the beginning, we are still mostly unlearned.

As time goes on, however, we begin to make sense of our reality. We realize what kinds of food are good for us, we learn to avoid things that are painful, and we begin to get attached to those who can take care of us. With even more time, we develop fully concrete distinctions between the different objects around us and how we, as subjects, are to interact with them.

What keeps this process going is our pattern-seeking brain. It forms both habits of action and habits of thought that it embeds into our conscious and subconscious memories to reduce cognitive load.

One of the problems with this, however, is that it’s really easy for us to become stuck in mental habit loops that don’t accurately assess the situation at hand, leading to both problems of comprehension and satisfaction. To counteract this, we have to be intentional in diversifying our thinking patterns. We have to learn to recognize when we’re falling into a mismatched pattern of thought, and we have to then use that information to update how we make connections between the objects in our environment.

To say that all issues can be solved with a shift in thinking patterns ignores the larger picture, but there is a truth to what the Durants learned from history — how we think about what is happening around us is arguably more important than what is actually happening around us

ZAT RANA